No Birds Sang

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘Thank you, Sally. I’ve got it now.’

  He took Sergeant Tabrett and bought him a memorable hotel lunch, spinning yarn after yarn about old cases, but steering resolutely away from this one. Throughout a sunny afternoon they ambled leisurely westwards, stopping occasionally to cast their eyes over an antique shop. They looked at village churches, Kenworthy gazing for long periods without comment at clerestories, rood-screens and, particularly, lists of vicars. He insisted on remaining at the wheel himself throughout the journey, driving with an almost maddening attention to the Highway Code, even along deserted by-roads, and sometimes not opening his mouth for an hour at a time.

  ‘You might be thinking, Sergeant Tabrett, that I am the most monumentally patient of men, but nothing could be further from the truth. This is all but killing me. But I’ve had some experience of calling on farmers. And it’s always a waste of time by daylight. They’re out piss-hooking about their fields all day, picking blackberries and shooting rats. Or else they’re off to some market, leaning over the rails for hours on end, gloating over the fleshless ribs of each other’s pigs. I prefer to catch them at home.’

  At first twilight he parked the car on the forecourt of an inn some twenty minutes’ walk from the Prudhoes’ octagonal stronghold.

  ‘How well do you know this case, Sergeant Tabrett?’

  ‘Tolerably well, I think, on paper.’

  ‘Well enough to think up some pertinent but innocuous questions to ask the Prudhoes?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Because that’s what I want you to do. Keep them talking interminably about this, that and the other, until I turn up. I don’t want them to be expecting me. I don’t want them to know that I’m even in the neighbourhood. Least of all do I want them to guess that I’m closeted with their farm bailiff. So, their movements, their alibis, their opinions of people, tales from the hoary past …’

  ‘Can do,’ Tabrett said. ‘I’ll hold the fort.’

  Kenworthy paused to refresh his memory of the one-inch map, then set off down a side-road: flowering brambles, jack-by-the-hedge, the shimmering white heads of wild parsley.

  He had done some pretty hefty thinking in the car; in the next few minutes he wanted to clear his mind again, to start again from scratch, to piece it all together from the initial evidence. Almost everything was clear to him now, except one crucial point: he was still uncertain who had killed Darkie Pascoe. And, how unprofessional could he be? He had to confess that the deed still mattered less to him than the history behind it.

  Robert Whittle had been watching television in a dimly lit room. He came to the door blinking, recognised Kenworthy, was surprised to see him, but not excessively so. Kenworthy had just caught sight of him that night he had called on the Prudhoes, had formed no firm impression: a middle-aged man, short, spare, nothing in his expression that was strikingly good or bad, strong or weak, friendly or ill-disposed.

  He led the way into a warm and well furnished farm living-room. His wife got up to leave them.

  ‘I’d rather you stayed,’ Kenworthy said. She was no Grace Pascoe, but her presence might add reality to some of the prospects that might be pending.

  The room was full of military souvenirs. Kenworthy had more than half expected it: Whittle had been an active-service sergeant. A Luger, the end of its barrel plugged solid with a metallic cement, Whittle was evidently a prudent man. S.S. daggers; a bayonet to fit a standard Lee Enfield rifle; a Home Guard pike from the days when they had drilled with pick-handles.

  Kenworthy unhooked a German stick-grenade from the wall, a thing rather like a policeman’s truncheon, with a cylindrical war-head at its business end. He practised a few wristy tennis-shots with it.

  ‘I take it that this thing is fool-proof immobilised?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Kenworthy looked round the collection with exaggerated concern. ‘Know what I’m looking for?’

  Whittle stood quite still, trying to look puzzled, not very successfully.

  ‘A Mills 36. I’m surprised that an ex-Commando sergeant doesn’t run to one of those.’

  Whittle’s wife moved in her chair.

  ‘I’ll tell you about that,’ Whittle said.

  ‘You’d better.’

  ‘I took it with me when I went up there. It was a shot in the dark, really. I didn’t know whether it would work or not. Delaying tactics, that was all. I certainly didn’t want to hurt anyone, it couldn’t have hurt anyone, could it?’

  ‘That’s what my colleagues and I said at the time, a gentlemanly gesture, one that happens to have wasted a lot of people’s time, though.’ He said this without recrimination, simply as a matter of fact.

  ‘I just wanted to discourage interest in the well. I’d no idea that you two were going to happen along. If it had only been Darkie and Milner, it would all have worked out, and no harm done.’

  ‘You didn’t think of retrieving the stuff from the well yourself?’

  ‘Too long a job and too risky.’

  ‘Were you acting under direct orders?’

  ‘No. My own initiative.’

  ‘I suppose a Commando sergeant often anticipated. You were pretty close to Major Prudhoe during the war, were you?’

  ‘Very.’ There was a wealth of loyalty in that single word. Kenworthy avoided exploring it. ‘I thought if I could only delay them, it might be ages before they could ever get into the village again. What I don’t understand is what Milner wants with the stuff.’

  ‘To protect Sally’s feelings,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘But surely she’s known about it all along?’

  ‘Known what, Mr Whittle?’

  ‘About her father, selling up and playing a two-faced game with the village. It doesn’t matter any more, does it? The older generation have nearly all passed on, and there’s no resentment amongst the younger set. No one wants to go back to Yarrow Cross. Why should they?’

  ‘That’s all, is it?’

  ‘What else could there be?’

  ‘Nothing but land speculation in this wad of documents?’

  ‘What else could there be?’ The repetition was surely a token of sincerity.

  ‘Didn’t they tell you, either?’

  ‘Tell me what? Who tell me?’

  ‘The Prudhoes.’

  ‘You’ve got me utterly befogged, Chief Superintendent.’

  Kenworthy had to decide whether he believed this or not; he did.

  ‘And while you’re here …’

  ‘I’d been hoping you’d start talking in that tone of voice,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘There’s something else that puzzles me, apart from the fact that Milner doesn’t seem a very likely murderer to me, especially not a knifer. And according to the newspapers, not that you can believe half you read in them, it was more or less in the old yard itself that the knifing took place.’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘Very shortly after Lights Out?’

  ‘Not long.’

  ‘I planted that grenade, and I moved off into cover. And I saw you deal with it. Gutsy, that was, if you don’t mind my saying so. I saw you pull out into the scrub. I heard the Last Post, and I must say I rather enjoyed that, it brought back a memory or two. And then I started moving out towards the perimeter. I’d like to have stayed to see what happened when Darkie and Milner arrived. You’ll understand that I have relatives all over this part of Norfolk, including a mechanic at Hedges’garage, so I’d an idea what their plans were. But I also knew a fresh intake had arrived at the camp, and I didn’t want to get mixed up unnecessarily in any target practice, I didn’t know what their time-table was. I got out of the wire about ten minutes after Lights Out. And that’s when Darkie Pascoe came charging past me in the dark. There was no mistaking that brute. And I’d seen a car, an Austin Cambridge, parked outside the perimeter, in one of the rides. I took it that it was one he’d borrowed for the evening, not necessarily with permission.’

  ‘Well?’
/>   ‘So how can he have been killed in the yard?’

  ‘Because it wasn’t Darkie that you saw,’ Kenworthy said.

  The truth dawned on Whittle. He had had a blind spot for this for days. ‘Tommy! I couldn’t swear to it, mind you. It was too dark to see his features.’

  ‘Did you hear him start the car?’

  ‘Not to be sure of it. It was then that the rumpus started: your people’s transport, army transport, I chose a different way out. I’d no wish to be mixed up in anything.’

  Kenworthy looked towards the Whittles’telephone. ‘Mind if I make a call?’

  ‘Not much use to you, I’m afraid. This is only an extension. It’s switched over to the house in the evening. I can only take incoming calls when the Prudhoes put them through.’

  Kenworthy looked pensive. ‘They always do seem to have had a thing about communications. The old man, anyway. He didn’t seem to want a public phone in the village, if I remember.’

  Whittle came somewhat unconvincingly to his defence.

  ‘He’s all right, old Prudhoe. Hasn’t moved with the world, that’s all. He did a lot for Yarrow Cross. But he hasn’t tried to lord the manor here. Things have changed too much; it would have been one long fight. He saw that coming. I think that’s why he was keen to get out of Norfolk.’

  ‘But it’s his son that you work for, isn’t it?’

  ‘One or the other of them. I’ve never had cause for complaint.’

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Kenworthy took his time across the fields, even stopping twice to consult a pocket compass: not strictly necessary, but a comfort. And a very satisfying ingredient in the image.

  In a paddock a horse came over to him, cantering spiritedly. Town-bred, he felt anything but sure of the creature’s intentions. But when it came closer than he cared for, he simply shouted. ‘Whoa!’ to it as he had seen countrymen do, and it stopped in its tracks, a mixture of habitual obedience and surprise, looking at him in the moon-light with uncertainty.

  Again, he was trying to work things out from the beginning, stopped to lean against a fence in the shadows for a few minutes, cudgelling his brain.

  But it was not exactly case-work that was troubling him now, not that part of it that was going to go forward on any file. He was working now on what he called Operation Loophole. It was gaps he was looking for, some damning inconsistency that he might have over-looked in his one-eyed reasoning.

  He could find none. He would have been happier if he could have sketched it all out on a sheet of paper, to be checked and better checked and then destroyed by fire. But there was neither the light for it nor the time. He had to be satisfied with fevered cogitation, like trying to play chess without a board. He had heard of that being done.

  And he could see nothing wrong in his scheme; no lurking uncover checks, no major piece suddenly won back by his opponent from the further edge of the board; no threat to his queen.

  He approached the Prudhoes’neo-gothic monstrosity from the rear, along concrete paved lanes between rows of sickly white sheds, a hum of heating and ventilator motors, a stink from an air-shaft of the foetid breath of animals.

  Mervyn Prudhoe let him in, limping across the chilly hall, the handle of his stick held outwards away from him. He went back to his chair, he and his father as before on either side of the great fireplace, from which issued only the heat from a single-bar electric fire. Sergeant Tabrett was sitting between them. Mervyn Prudhoe was drinking whisky, his father again a glass of white wine. Tabrett had cautiously declined refreshment; he volunteered to change his mind when Kenworthy showed no inhibition about what he was offered.

  It was evident that Tabrett had succeeded in keeping his end up. An open notebook lay on his knee, a ballpoint in his hand, a page almost filled with neat, close-packed handwriting, interspersed with a ration of his own personal shorthand symbols.

  Kenworthy carried his glass to the telephone. ‘Mind if I use this?’

  ‘Is it confidential?’

  ‘No. I’d like the pair of you to hear this.’

  He reached Derek at home. ‘All yours from now on, Chief Inspector Stammers. I doubt whether I shall even be needed to give evidence.

  ‘Get on to Tommy Pascoe. There is evidence available. We do know that Tommy drove his brother out to the village in a car he’d borrowed illicitly from Threeways. We do know now, at least I do, that Robert Whittle saw a figure haring away from the murder-spot towards that car. It must have been Tommy, because we do know that Darkie was otherwise engaged.

  ‘And incidentally, I haven’t checked this out yet but it can be done, you’ll find that in that dash he ran pretty close to where the sheath was found.

  ‘We could wish for better evidence. But I don’t think we shall find it. It was a gloomy night, the area was a wide one, and people were not stopping to check their watches every five minutes.

  ‘But I’m quite sure that Tommy himself will be able to fill in quite a lot of the missing detail for you. You’ll have to jog his memory a little, won’t you? Tell him it wouldn’t have happened if Sammy had been there to stop him. Ask him what came over him when Darkie called him Lard-head. A good garagehand, Tommy, but not a wholly reliable member of society. He takes things too much to heart, too impulsive.’

  Kenworthy paused deliberately to look round the room. It was difficult to be sure that the old man was following any of this at all. Mervyn was studying Kenworthy with an inscrutable stillness in his eyes, a stillness of concentration. Tabrett was trying to look neutrally intelligent.

  Derek was talking. Kenworthy pictured him, scribbling furiously, racing to check his notes.

  ‘Motive? Yes, Derek, it would be handy to have a motive, wouldn’t it? Though I can’t help thinking that when you start talking about motives and Tommy Pascoe in the same breath, you’re moving about in strange country. I never think much of motives as evidence in a murder trial, though they can be fairly useful while we’re still feeling our way.

  ‘If I were you I would, again, ask Tommy. I don’t think he’ll be very coherent about it, but he may well say something that’s significant to you and me. The trouble with Tommy is that he probably won’t know his own motive, and if he does try to give you reasons, they’ll likely be all the wrong ones.

  ‘If you ask me, it all goes back to the very earliest days when the other two weren’t big enough to hit Darkie back. There were seeds of hatred sown then. They flourished under his facility for involving them in his crack-brained schemes, especially when he landed them inside. And it didn’t help that the old woman had a soft spot for Darkie, even when he was a mile out in the wrong. Then there was this break-in at the Prudhoes, and all this business of those papers in the well, none of which Tommy can have understood with any clarity.

  ‘But certain things must have impinged, even on Tommy’s consciousness: that the papers were important; that they held the key to a lot of money; that they meant an awful lot to Emma Pascoe; and that Darkie had done her out of them. And here was Darkie selling them out to this weird character from the R.A.F, at God knows what knock-down price. And what was Tommy’s share going to be? That’s one of the things you can ask him; I think he’ll prove irritable on the point. And I think it was at that last moment, when he really did see that Darkie was giving away the spot to Milner, that Tommy rushed in with his knife.

  ‘But ask him. He’ll tell you.’

  Kenworthy looked round the faces of the others with provocative satisfaction: Tabrett, silently agreeing with the thesis he had just heard advanced; Mervyn Prudhoe, thinking about it still, not wholly convinced, but finding no obvious flaw; the old man, to all intents and purposes indifferent.

  ‘Oh, yes, the papers,’ Kenworthy turned his face in again to the phone, as if the papers had quite slipped his mind. ‘Bit of an anti-climax there, I’m afraid, Derek. A perfectly legal, but undoubtedly unpopular piece of land-conveyancing, together with some notes about the preliminary negotiations. And, incidentally, Sa
lly’s father was involved. It’s understandable if Darkie put too high a price on the information. I’m a little surprised how easily he took Milner in, but we do know how credulous Milner is, don’t we? Emma Pascoe made a bad mistake. She felt sure that the trading value of those documents would appreciate when the more virile elements from the village came back from the forces. Instead of which, the affair had become a dead duck. And, in any case, Darkie had gone solo with the evidence.

  ‘No, I don’t think the papers matter much. If they do come up in court, it will be as a red herring. Oh, yes, I agree, it would be as well to be ready with an account of them. The Prudhoes’solicitor must have copies. Yes. Yes, Derek, that’s all. Love to Elspeth and Di.’

  He put down the phone, came back only part of the way towards the others, took-up an instinctive up-stage position. ‘Satisfied?’ he asked Mervyn Prudhoe.

  ‘Satisfied? Why should I be satisfied? You mean that it’s all over now?’

  ‘Bar the paperwork.’

  ‘You’re relying on a confession that you haven’t yet got.’

  ‘We shall get it. As for these famous papers, Prudhoe, I suppose, in fact, that it’s the original your solicitors have got. It was very imprudent of your father to have kept copies in the house. Especially alongside certain other records.’

  He did not propose to take the Prudhoes stage by stage through his reasoning. And young Tabrett could make what the hell he liked of it.

  There had been elements all along that had stuck in Kenworthy’s memory, though Elspeth had been told the answer before he had seen their full significance: Sally’s mother, a solitary, with a strange air of distinction; a man of Mervyn Prudhoe’s gallantry, apparently afraid to stand up to his father; the unexplained fact of Sally’s father’s freehold enclave in the heart of Prudhoe territory; and Emma Pascoe’s parrot dictum, Twice in a life-time. He simply had not seen at the time that she was not talking about herself.