Enter Pale Death

by Barbara Cleverly

“But this Goodfellow, or whoever he was …” Joe hesitated.

  “You can call him Goodfellow, right enough. I checked him out, years ago. That is his name. Robert Goodfellow, ex-army, a.k.a. Robin, Mischievous Sprite of the Forest.”

  “Well, our sprite describes graphically a very sure way of drowning someone. Holding the heels up forces the head down. It has the advantage of cutting off the screams as well as filling the lungs. He either did, in fact, as he says, see James Truelove holding her under or …”

  “She had a fear of water—I told you—she would never have gone in the moat, not even for a swimming lesson with the young master. He bloody did it himself! Tried to force himself on her, I expect. She wasn’t having any of his nonsense and threatened to tell me … He decided to silence her. Swine!”

  Hunnyton lanced the corpse with a steel glare. Delivering a second death. Joe thought that if anything of Goodfellow’s mischievous spirit was still hanging about the place, it would run screeching straight into the jaws of hell for shelter before meeting that implacable eye.

  Limited in his movements to the area of two pages of the Daily Mirror, Joe had to suppress his urge to clap a comforting hand on Hunnyton’s shoulder. “Well, you won’t have to swing for him, Adam, and I’m glad of that. Look, I think I know who might have something to tell us about the drowning. Someone who was close about at the time. Leave it to me. By the way, I’ve instructed Styles and Mrs. Bolton to keep the guests away from the wood, so you’ll get a clear run at this when the CID crew arrive. By the time they get here, the company at the Hall—and the whole village apparently—will be gathered to enjoy the jollifications on the front lawn.”

  “Ah. Yes. Of course. The Parade of Horses. Worth seeing, Joe, if you’ve got the time and stomach for it.”

  “It’s the parade of humans I wouldn’t miss for anything. I don’t forget I’m down here to tease out the puzzle of Lavinia’s death. About which Goodfellow is sinisterly silent. Don’t you think? He throws a distorted light on an ancient murder but drops not a hint of the recent one in his letter.”

  “Eager to get off and pack? Not the world’s most fluent writer—he wasn’t about to embark on a further chapter?”

  “Hard to believe he had nothing to say. If that chap had had mud to hand I don’t think he’d have hesitated to throw it.”

  “You’re right. There was a little something he was keeping in reserve. You’ll see! Extra blackmailing ammo? He’s skilled in the use of hanging threats over people. Not too much, not too little. Push a man just far enough and no further. The ones who get away with it, the ones who never turn up on our books are the clever ones, the ones who are so close to their victims they can judge their every reaction and have the restraint never to demand more than can be borne. Like the East African farmers who live on their beasts’ blood—always allow the victim to recover and thrive before you open up his vein again. In connection with which—you might like to cast an eye on Goodfellow’s outbuilding before you go.”

  “Outbuilding? He has a latrine somewhere about the place I suppose?”

  “Well he was only human. It’s carefully camouflaged and architect-designed in keeping with the main building. You’ll find it twenty yards northeast of the rear. Have a rummage around. Here, put these gloves on. Oh, and you may want to hold your sensitive nose.”

  A smaller, simpler version of the pine cabin stood, door closed, hidden from all eyes by a thick screen of hawthorn bushes and tangled ivy. A shed any man would have liked to install in his back garden, at first sight. Joe opened the door and entered gingerly. On the left was, indeed, an army-style latrine of the best continental porcelain. Scrupulously clean and scented with hanging bunches of lavender. A large enamel water jug stood by ready for service. On the right another door opened into an allotment holder’s heaven. A potting bench ran the length of the cabin, seed trays, used, cleaned and awaiting the next sowing stood in piles, gardening and woodworking tools were fixed on racks on the walls. An old, horsehair-stuffed armchair was still dented from Goodfellow’s last occupancy, a pile of Men Only and Liliput magazines lurked underneath.

  It was the range of wooden shelves with their pigeon-holed compartments that took Joe’s eye. The kind of fitting you could see in any pharmacy, it had probably been bought in at a farmers’ auction. Some of the compartments had a name inked in on their surface. Joe read names of herbs—hartshorne, white willow, marshmallow … One of them seized his attention. It had a piece of writing paper torn from a police notebook stuck on it with a piece of elastoplast. “Look in here, Sandilands! This drawer was slightly open when I entered. The only one.”

  The drawer must have been airtight. The smell of the contents would have been held in check. Joe decided to leave a detailed inspection of the scrapings of black residue to Hunnyton’s forensic boys and merely noted that essence of something deeply unpleasant lurked within. It brought instantly to mind the smell of the offering Lady Truelove had been trying to make to Lucifer. He slammed it shut. Lavinia had sent her maid with Goodfellow’s hand-written prescription for spices to the chemist but the second formula, the one she had used along with the toad’s bone with such disastrous consequences, had come straight from this workshop.

  Joe put his head round the door. “Got the message! How are you doing, mate?”

  Hunnyton sighed and looked down at his notebook. “It’s hopeless! Joe—can I be frank?” He looked up at Joe with a wry smile. “If you were the officer in charge of this bloody case you’d have to arrest yourself! I think you know what I’m saying.”

  Joe stepped inside and kicked the door shut. He ignored the newspaper doormat and went to stand directly in front of Hunnyton, challenging him, eye to eye.

  “No. I don’t. I think you’d better elucidate for me, Superintendent.”

  Hunnyton swallowed and turned away, unable to withstand the challenge of his superior officer’s response. “Oh, come on, Joe. You must see it!”

  CHAPTER 20

  Hunnyton waved his notebook under Joe’s nose as though it had suddenly caught fire and he was about to get his fingers burned. “Every word of my notes reflects procedure done by the book. You can read it for yourself and tell me what conclusion any sane man would come to. Any judge, any jury. Any Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner. Why don’t you give it a go?”

  The true enormity of the embarrassed half-accusation hit Joe and, for a moment, sent his mind reeling.

  Gathering himself, he began to speak slowly and carefully. “No trace of an interloper, as far as it goes, but you have a considerable amount of evidence of my passage through. I have a firm alibi for the seven o’clock shot but, as you say, death did indeed not occur until after that time. A mischief-maker—no, let’s say simply a scrupulous reader of the notes—might conclude that the second shot it was that did for him. Seven forty. The pathologist may well conclude that later time to be the actual time of death. I couldn’t fault him. Though I would expect the usual umbrella statement of ‘at a time between six and nine.’ I claim to have been the target of that shot myself but where’s the evidence of that? It went skying into the trees. I take off back to the Hall where I am observed to arrive by one or two witnesses, covered in blood and hurrying to change my clothes. Suitably clad for church, I return to the scene of the crime an hour later to check on the progress of the detective I have myself alerted. How am I doing?”

  Hunnyton nodded. He had the grace, Joe noted, to look rather sickened by the interview.

  “I have the skill, the ruthlessness and the opportunity. I deny none of that. But motive, Superintendent? Why the hell should I put my neck on the line for a man unknown to me before yesterday? For that villain? Why would I want him dead?” Suddenly understanding, Joe pointed to his face and laughed. “A log-chucking contest in the woods goes badly for me and I decide to wreak revenge? I so envy his carefree bucolic existence I decide to challenge him for the priesthood? Oh, come on!”

  “No, it’s not that, sir. What sort of a
plodding idiot do you take me for?” Gravely, Hunnyton took Goodfellow’s letter from his pocketbook and handed it to Joe. “The victim names you, sir.”

  “What are you talking about?” Joe looked again at the folded note addressed to “Sandilands.”

  Reciting from memory of the text, Hunnyton said quietly, “Your Lord and Master, he says—Truelove we’re assuming—got his London lawyer to evict me … Even sent one of his tame police bully-boys to make sure I go quietly. At least I merited an Assistant Commissioner from the Yard!” Not exactly quietly perhaps. His final departure was accompanied by the blast of a shotgun heard for miles around.”

  “Truelove’s tame police bully-boy?” Joe’s anger was rising. “Is that how you would characterise me?”

  “Not me, sir. Those are the dead man’s words. I’ve only observed you doing Sir James’s shopping for him. A judge might want to enquire into any previous association you might have had with the gentleman. He might go so far as to check the log book of your encounters at Scotland Yard. How many was it? Two? In the days before the murder … Oh, dear. Your secretary was present at the time? No? Pity …”

  Joe’s mouth was too dry to form the words to express his thoughts even if his shocked brain had been able to come up with some. He maintained his rigid stance, unable to contemplate the alternative of knocking Hunnyton to the ground.

  “Sir! Sir! Calm down!” Hunnyton urged, sensing a coming explosion. “Always better to look the truth in the face, I reckon. We’re professionals. We know how this works. We’ve both seen things turn very nasty in court. Some young terrier of a prosecuting council trying to make his name is all it takes. The Press love a touch of hubris as much as they hate Scotland Yard. A combination will have them salivating into their mild and bitters. A top man, war hero and one-time debs’ delight being hanged by the rope he’s knotted himself—they’d love it! There’s a way through. Clear and obvious as a turnpike. Just slip that letter I’ve given you in your pocket and bugger off. I never saw it. Leave me to finish here.”

  He fixed Joe at last with unclouded eyes. Angry eyes. “Listen! This piece of shit flushed himself out of our lives. Not right that he should take anybody down the pan with him. Not anybody! I won’t allow it. Got that? I’m telling you formally, Assistant Commissioner, that I’m scaling down the inquiry. I’ll turn the men round sharpish when they get here. A few photos and signed statements from the lads—I’m not risking any charge of collusion—should do it.”

  He drew himself up, every inch the officer reporting to his superior. “False alarm, sir. Sorry you’ve been bothered. This is a suicide we’re looking at. No one else is being sought in connection with the death.”

  Joe took his leave of Hunnyton, murmuring the official formulae. He even caught himself muttering, “Carry on, Superintendent.”

  He’d wondered if he’d recognise the moment. Here it was: the moment when, charmed, distracted and trusting, he’d feel the saddle slap down across his back.

  Still stunned and abstracted, his mind whirling, he answered the question Hunnyton fired at him as he left the room: “Where am I going? Oh, not far.” And, with a last rebellious kick of the heels: “I think it’s time to hear from Phoebe herself.”

  HE REACHED THE grave as the church clock struck half past nine. His witness was already there in the remotest corner of the deserted churchyard, head down, occupied in tending the simple grave.

  Joe came up and knelt down alongside. “White roses were her favourite flower, I take it?”

  “Anything white, she loved. Summertime’s easy but it’s a bit difficult in the winter to come up with something. I usually manage with snowberries and ivy until the snowdrops come out and then there’s the paper-white narcissi. It’s a lonely site they found for her. I wouldn’t like her to think she’d been forgotten.”

  She didn’t seem in the slightest way put out to see him there. “She was murdered, little Phoebe. I suppose you’ve worked that out.”

  “I have and I know the name of the killer, Mrs. Bolton. I’m equally sure that you also know and have known for years. The puzzle for me is why you’ve chosen to keep silent and let a great injustice fester.”

  She looked down at the grave in shame and anger, words failing her. This was not the accusation she had been prepared for.

  “Nothing to say? Why don’t you give me Phoebe’s own words, Mrs. B.? It’s time we heard from her. Can you remember the last thing she confided to you?”

  “She wasn’t in her right mind. Mad with the worry. I’d guessed her condition. She was directly in my charge. There wasn’t much about Phoebe I didn’t know. Even so—I hadn’t realised who’d got her into trouble. It could have been any of the footmen—they’re always first on the suspect list—but for me: I’d feared the ghastly Goodfellow, so firmly under Sir Sidney’s protection. It was unreasonable that. The old master just brushed any complaints aside. I think he probably put up with it because Goodfellow had something on him—something he’d done in his army years that he wouldn’t have wanted mistress Cecily to hear about.

  “Goodfellow was always too interested in the maids. They had to walk miles to get around him. He was always tracking them about the place, leering out from the shrubbery. Phoebe was the one who really caught his eye. Pretty as a picture but soft and unresisting. She would never have given him a kick in the privates as the other maids did. As I directed them to do.

  “But her last words to me? Full of sorrow. She talked of Adam. ‘He’s never going to come for me, is he, Enid? I’m going to throw myself off the roof and then he’ll be sorry.’

  “I told her to hold on—Adam would be down from Cambridge any minute. He’d sort things out for her. He was a good lad, Adam, and he’d understand if anyone did. Only eighteen at the time but a big husky lad with a good head on him and a sense of … would ‘righteousness’ sound old-fashioned? He’d take whoever had wronged her and beat him to a pulp.”

  “She wasn’t reassured?”

  “No. I’d said the wrong thing, judging by her outburst. ‘No, he mustn’t! He couldn’t! We’d all of us suffer for it!’ She was genuinely aghast.”

  “That’s when the penny dropped?”

  “Yes. The only man who could make the whole staff suffer was: the master.”

  “Sir Sidney up to his old tricks?”

  “With his wife pregnant again, we wouldn’t have been surprised. I charged Phoebe with my suspicions. She denied it with such amazement and horror I could only believe she was telling the truth.”

  “Tinkle, tinkle went the second penny?” Joe suggested.

  Enid Bolton nodded. “James! He was such a lad! Firing off his pop gun and mooching about the place looking unhappy. All long limbs and spots. But then I thought: he’s actually nearly the same age as Phoebe. I asked her.”

  “And she admitted it?”

  “Yes. She hadn’t feared him or what he was capable of, you see. She did out his room in the morning, turned down his sheets at night … and there was I, juggling the duties, carefully distancing her from his father’s lair! She went out into the woods with him on her afternoon off, helping him with his traps. Playtime, I’m sure she thought was what was going on. She liked company her own age who could make her laugh. And James Truelove has always been able to make a girl laugh. His little sisters adored him—still do. I think Phoebe was genuinely fond of him. That’s always been his gift. From the day he was born, he’s expected to be loved.”

  “They were probably observed by Goodfellow, the resident snake-in-the-grass.”

  “Another opportunity for blackmail and extortion. Unto the next generation.”

  Joe asked the next question with care: “Do you think James Truelove drowned her in the moat?”

  “No. I believe she was killed. Deliberately held under. But not by James. I don’t make this assertion on a basis of character. I was the one who laid out her body, you see, sir.” The calm features seemed suddenly to crumple in sorrow. “She had no one else. Drunke
n mother, father left home years before. She looked on me as family—her auntie perhaps. I wasn’t going to leave her to the ministrations of frightful old Bella in the village with her dirty fingernails.”

  “No police to take charge?”

  “Not in those days. A quick resolution was all everybody wanted. Sir Sidney made all the arrangements. Even the Chief Constable did as he was told by Sir Sidney.”

  “What did you notice about the state of the body?”

  “That she was about three months pregnant and just beginning to show. It was the ankles that told me what I wanted to know. There was a circlet of bruises where no bruising should have been. He’d grabbed her by the ankles and yanked them upwards, pushing her face under the water.”

  “He?”

  “Goodfellow, of course. He had the gall to say he’d found her body. They tell me it’s often the one who discovers the crime who did it. But you will know better than I. One of the footmen was crossing the drawbridge at the time he raised the alarm. Albert could swim and he leapt in and helped Goodfellow pull her out.”

  “Either one of them could have tugged her by the ankles to draw her to the side?”

  “I checked. I asked the footman to show me exactly how they’d handled the body. No one touched her ankles. Albert confided that he could have sworn that Goodfellow was already wet before he jumped in.”

  Joe let out a sound like a kettle coming to the boil. “Sheeesh! Even Inspector Lestrade would have sorted this one out in ten minutes! If he’d been alerted!” He calmed himself to ask, “Did you find anything unusual when you tidied out her room?”

  “You assume—rightly—that I took responsibility for doing that myself. Yes, I did. I found a ten-pound money order in her drawer. Six months’ wages! Only one way she could have come by such a sum, and one purpose. I worked it out. I said nothing. Just gave it to the Reverend Easterby for the church orphanage.”

  “Which brings me back to my original question, Mrs. Bolton. Saying nothing?”