Blood on the Wood

by Gillian Linscott

  ‘And you think Carol guessed?’

  ‘Yes, but as long as she had the workshop, she wouldn’t care.’

  ‘So if it hadn’t been for Daisy you’d have married Daniel and gone on…?’

  Her mouth twisted in a bleak little smile. ‘That’s what’s ironic. I’d decided to end it. I knew what we’d been doing was wrong, but it would be even more wrong when I was married to Daniel. That’s what I was telling Adam in the barn when you overheard us.’

  ‘I told you, I wasn’t the one who overheard you.’

  But it made no difference. She went on pouring it out as if her survival depended on it.

  ‘Before Daniel went away, he said we should set a new date for the wedding when he got back. So I had to think what we were going to do. I met Adam in the barn and told him I’d made up my mind and it must stop. I’d marry Daniel and we’d be just sister and brother-in-law, no more than that. Only it wasn’t as calm as I’m making it sound. I was scared Daniel would find out. I told Adam it was his fault and we should never have done it. That wasn’t true. It was me just as much as him.’

  ‘Did Adam accept that it had to end?’

  ‘Yes. It was either that or I’d have to break the engagement with Daniel and go away and Adam and I would never see each other again. We couldn’t stand that. Anything was better than that.’

  ‘And then Daniel broke the engagement anyway.’

  ‘Yes. I was … frozen with fury.’

  ‘But he wasn’t the one you loved.’

  ‘But it meant I’d have to go away, never see Adam again. That’s why if I’d had the gun and her in front of me I might have done it.’

  ‘That night when we found her body – you had scratches all over your arms, leaves on your clothes.’

  ‘Of course I did. I’d been behind a hedge, looking for her. For Daisy.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘After it got dark. I went down to the camp to try to see her, just see her. I didn’t believe you when you said she wasn’t as pretty as me. I thought anybody who was hurting me so much must be amazing in some way – an angel or a devil. I thought she’d stand out from the others, and even by firelight I’d know her, or hear her playing her violin at least. But there was no firelight that night, no music. I couldn’t see anything, so I just came back.’

  I remembered the footsteps that had scared Bobbie and me, the person we’d taken for a maid coming home late.

  ‘Which way did you come in?’

  Our person had come by the back stairs.

  ‘Through … through the door to the studio.’

  She’d started trembling.

  ‘And went to bed?’

  ‘Yes. I was tired.’

  ‘You weren’t tired. When Carol and I found you in bed you were terrified, practically senseless with terror. And you say you came in through the studio?’

  She nodded.

  ‘You saw something, didn’t you? Somebody putting her in the cabinet?’

  Her eyes had gone wide and terrified.

  ‘No. Her foot, the foot sticking out.’

  ‘You couldn’t know it was hers.’

  ‘I knew it was dead, a woman dead. I’d wanted her dead. I’d told him I wished she was dead.’

  ‘Told who?’

  ‘Adam.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I ran back outside … to the terrace, I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t go through the studio again, so I went up the back stairs and…’ She mimed pulling covers over her head and stayed with her shoulders bent and eyes staring up at me, as if she really were looking out from under a blanket.

  ‘Why didn’t you raise the alarm? Why didn’t you tell somebody?’

  She didn’t answer, but the look in her eyes told me.

  ‘Because you guessed who she was and thought you knew who’d killed her.’

  ‘No!’

  But it wasn’t a denial, more an appeal to me not to say it.

  ‘So that’s the problem,’ I said. ‘Which brother you save and which you let go.’

  Probably Carol’s problem too. She was quite intelligent enough to have drawn her own conclusions. I thought of what she’d said to me the day before: What does anybody know about other people’s marriages? We’d been talking about the Suttons, but surely it was her own marriage she meant. If I was right, she had her own choice to make too and her heart might not go the same way as Felicia’s. The platform began to fill up with people. Felicia sat up and dried her eyes.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she asked.

  ‘If you take my advice, nothing for the moment.’

  A trail of smoke appeared from the Banbury direction. The rails started to vibrate. I helped her into the compartment and we sat together on the journey back with a little space between us. Felicia turned towards the glass and the window reflected her tear-smudged face over green fields and hedges. I thought Fardel could be out there somewhere and how much we all needed him. Long Lankin, come and save us.

  Chapter Twenty

  WHEN WE GOT BACK TO THE village Felicia said she felt well enough to walk home on her own. I was in no hurry to meet Adam Venn after what she’d told me, so I took her at her word and watched her out of sight along the road. She moved slowly and vaguely between the hedges thick with berries so that if you’d seen her without knowing you’d have thought she was any girl with any girl’s daydreams. That left me with most of the afternoon and evening. What I wanted to do with it was look for Fardel, but results hadn’t been encouraging so far.

  The thought of the woodworker’s wife Janie was nagging at me. Although I didn’t share Sutton’s idea that she was a victim of the man who’d killed Daisy there was a puzzle there and it might or might not have a connection with the black cabinet. After all, the cabinet was there when Daniel and I arrived and at first Janie had struck me as quite normal. A little shy and very wrapped up in the baby, but that was all. She’d become distressed as the conversation went on. While I was there, watching and listening, something had been said or done to scare her.

  I walked on down the street to the workshop and looked in at the open door. A man and a lad were fitting a door to a sideboard, another lad carving a Tudor rose into a block of wood. When they turned to see who was at the door their faces were guarded, expecting trouble. I asked the man where Mr Sutton was and he nodded towards the darker area at the back of the workshop. I found him sorting out lengths of wood but he couldn’t have been able to see much of them in the shadows and he was moving like a man underwater.

  ‘Any news?’

  He shook his head. The hope that had flared up when he found the money missing had died away.

  ‘No. Janie wouldn’t creep in here and take the money and not even let me know she and the baby were alive. She hadn’t got it in her to be as cruel as that. No, Janie’s dead and all there is left for me to do is break the neck of the man who did it and save the hangman a job.’

  He turned his head away. From his voice I knew he was crying. Nothing I said or did could make things worse.

  ‘Carol said you were working in Swindon. Did you meet Janie there?’

  He nodded. It was in my mind that Swindon wasn’t so far from the Marlborough Downs.

  ‘Did her family come from round there?’

  ‘She was an orphan. She was all the family I wanted, so it didn’t matter.’

  Last night he’d hoped. Today she was in the past tense. I waited a while then said I must go and I hoped he’d let me know if anything happened.

  ‘You’ll hear about it when I find him,’ he said.

  * * *

  I went to the shop and bought a couple of wizened oranges that looked as if they’d been waiting since Christmas and a small bag of broken biscuits and had an early lunch sitting on a grassy bank by the road just outside the village. On the Saturday afternoon something had scared Janie Sutton, and yet she didn’t leave home until after midday on Monday. So either she’d been brooding about whatever it was
all Sunday, or something worse happened on Monday to make her leave. And on Monday, Daisy Smith died. Mr Sutton had convinced himself that his wife was dead but I doubted it. Somebody had been in the workshop last night and I still thought the person had moved more like a woman than a man. If so, Janie was not only alive but somewhere in the area. I’d been looking unsuccessfully for a man, but a young woman with a baby should be easier to find. Some time between midday and five o’clock on a Monday afternoon she’d dutifully left out her husband’s lunch, picked up some things for the baby and disappeared. Even ten days later, it shouldn’t be impossible to pick up the trail. Her husband had tried hard, but he was too desperate to think clearly. Even so, he’d done one very useful thing and that was to eliminate a large part of the village from the search.

  The workshop was at the far end of the village, with the railway halt about a mile away at the other end. To get to it, Janie would have to carry the baby past the shop and post office, the church, school, policeman’s cottage, public house and the front windows of a dozen or so Mrs Pennys and other gossips in broad daylight on a late summer afternoon. She’d struck me as a quiet little thing, so it was just on the bounds of possibility that nobody had noticed her – but allow for the baby and there was simply no possibility at all. Having a baby makes a woman public property, particularly as far as other women are concerned. Even if she’d wanted to, Janie simply wouldn’t have been allowed to walk that mile with a baby in her arms without somebody stopping her to tickle it under the chin, go goo-goo at it or ask if it had any teeth yet. But nobody had seen her, therefore Janie had not walked up the street to the railway halt. That meant she’d either cut across the fields – unlikely because she’d have to negotiate stiles and gates with baby, shawl and other paraphernalia – or walked out of the village in the other direction. If so, that would have taken her past where I was sitting now.

  I crumbled what was left of the biscuits for the birds, brushed crumbs off my skirt and started walking. I made myself walk more slowly than usual, as if weighed down by baby and belongings. It had looked quite a heavy baby. If it had been Janie who took the money, she must have found shelter for the baby and herself not far away. In the first mile, nothing. There were barns but they were stuffed with hay and close to farmyards, not the kind of place where anyone would hide. Buildings of any sort were few and far between and all of them neat and lived-in, no ruins. Once I looked over a wall and saw a mother and baby playing in a garden, but the woman was nothing like Janie. We spoke and she was friendly enough, but had no memory of a woman and baby passing a week ago last Monday.

  Another half an hour later I’d covered at least two miles and my confidence was beginning to wane. If Janie had found a hiding place that far out, had she left the baby on its own while she went to get money? Two miles out, two miles back and a robbery in between. Say two hours’ absence at least, at night, leaving a baby on its own in a barn or under a hedge? That was even less likely than setting out to commit the robbery with baby in arms. I was simply walking for the sake of it, not getting anywhere, but since the alternative was going back to the village and thinking about Adam and Felicia, I kept going.

  Soon afterwards I came to a T-junction, no signposts and no particular reason to choose left or right. When I climbed on top of a stile I saw that the road on the left went over a humpbacked bridge across a railway line. I’d forgotten to bring the map with me and tried to remember it. This couldn’t be the local Chipping Norton line because that was behind me, so it must be the main Great Western from Cheltenham to Oxford, with Chipping Norton Junction up the line to the north. Where there are bridges over railways there are often halts as well, where expresses stop sometimes, unpredictably. I walked down to the line and found there was a halt, much like the one back at the village – an empty wooden platform, a bicycle, a corrugated iron shelter with a pagoda-shaped roof, its paint faded from the summer sun. If I’d walked this far carrying a heavy baby I’d have been tired and thirsty. I sat down in the shelter, wondering what I’d do next. A place this small had no railway staff or station-master’s house but there were three terraced brick cottages on the other side of the line, probably workmen’s cottages when the line was built. I went over the bridge and found a grey-haired woman in one of the small front gardens, picking runner beans. We said good afternoon to each other and she told me there’d be a down-train towards Oxford in forty minutes and it would have to stop because it was putting off a parcel for one of her neighbours.

  ‘Did you happen to see a young woman with a baby sometime in the afternoon on Monday week?’

  Instant concern. ‘Oh the poor girl. Did she get home all right?’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘To Swindon. The poor thing didn’t know where she was – half fainting from tiredness and the baby crying because it was hungry. I let her into my front room so she could feed it decently and got her some tea. I said wouldn’t her husband and family be worrying about her and she said she’d been staying with friends and had lost her way and had to get home to Swindon.’

  ‘Lost her way?’

  ‘Well, I thought that was strange. How do you lose your way to the back end of nowhere like here, with a baby? She seemed quite respectable, so I thought she and her husband had quarrelled and she’d tried to run away and thought better of it. So I said he’d be glad to have her back and if the train stopped we’d get her on it to Oxford, then she could change for Swindon and be back home by the time the baby needed feeding again.’

  ‘And the train stopped?’

  ‘Yes, it stopped. I knew the guard so I had a quick word with him and said to keep an eye on her and make sure she got on the Swindon train. You know her, then?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And did she get home all right?’

  She was sensing something wrong.

  ‘I’m sorry, she didn’t. Her home’s in this part of the world. Swindon’s where she used to live.’

  She put down the colander full of beans in the middle of a flowerbed.

  ‘Oh dear, did I do wrong?

  ‘Nothing but kindness. It isn’t your fault. Did she say anything else about where she was going?’

  She hadn’t. The woman invited me to drink tea in the same little parlour where Janie had waited. Sitting there among the plush and best china I decided I couldn’t go back to Janie’s husband with this half-news.

  ‘Will it be the same guard on the train today?’

  She had to think, but only for a moment. Her mind was probably as well stocked with timetables and staff rotas as any foreman’s.

  ‘Thursday. Yes, it should be Mr Wills.’

  The train arrived on time. The woman came to the platform with me and had a word with the guard while he was unloading the parcel for her neighbour. When the train started I bought my ticket to Swindon and asked for all the details he could remember about the young woman and baby.

  ‘She got on and bought her ticket just like you have, miss. She was worried whether she’d have enough money for it but she did. The baby was crying and she said it was frightened because it had never been in a train before. I don’t think she’d been in trains much either because she was so worried about how she’d know the right train for Swindon.’

  ‘Do you know if she found it?’

  ‘Yes I do, miss, because I leave this train at Oxford. I told her when the connection was and saw her to the waiting room on the right platform myself. Couldn’t go wrong.’

  So at Oxford I did exactly what Janie had done and waited for the Swindon connection. When the train arrived I got on it. It was evening by then, quite crowded and no point in asking if anybody had seen a woman and baby ten days ago. Swindon’s a big and busy station, full of steam and clanging and hot metal smells from the railway works alongside. The other passengers who got out hurried away along the platform but I lingered, wondering how it would look to an unhappy and tired young woman with a baby and not much money. Terrifying, was the answer. In Janie’s place, I
’d have sat down on a bench and cried. There was no need to go that far in putting myself into her shoes, but at least it gave me an idea of what to do next. I found my way to the stationmaster’s office and said I wanted to see him. After a short wait in an outer office I got not the man himself but somebody who was probably a senior clerk. He had the resigned air of a man used to dealing with complaints from the travelling public. My question made him blink.

  ‘A young woman with a baby, sitting on a bench and crying? I’m sure if it were drawn to our attention we should act with proper humanity.’

  ‘Yes, but how exactly?’

  ‘That would depend on the circumstances. If, for instance, the lady was distressed because she’d missed her train, we’d calm her and ascertain the time of the next one.’

  ‘But if she’d just arrived and didn’t know where to go?’

  ‘In that case, we should probably enquire in what part of the town her friends or relatives lived and show her to an omnibus stop or cab rank as appropriate.’

  ‘And if she had no friends or relatives?’

  His look and tone turned a shade colder. ‘Are we talking about a vagrant, madam?’

  ‘We’re talking about a distressed young mother without relatives or money. If one of your staff had found her, would there be a record of it?’

  ‘What date did you say?’

  ‘Monday 26 August, about this time of day.’

  He went away, came back shaking his head. ‘We have no record of any such event, madam.’

  ‘Supposing she had asked somebody for help, what do you think he’d have advised?’