The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits Volume 3 (The Mammoth Book Series)

by Mike Ashley

  “A witch may have many strange talents,” the judge insisted. “Let me repeat what should be obvious. None of this is evidence.”

  “I recognise the difficulties, my Lord, but . . .”

  “How can you expect me to halt the execution in such circumstances? So many of the points you draw upon in support of your argument bear more than a single interpretation. Is this a proper basis upon which to interfere with the punishment duly prescribed by law?”

  “I need time!” Richard hissed. “With time, there will be proof in abundance, of that my conviction is firm. But there is one other fact that supports my case for Martha’s defence. It derives from simple observation of the testimony in court and yet seems to me to be incontrovertible.”

  “Tell me,” the judge said softly. And in that instant, Richard knew that he had won.

  “So when my grandfather dies, I am unlikely to be rich.”

  Martha spoke in bewildered tones. So much had happened to her in so short a time that her bafflement was understandable. Initial digging on her land had yielded an extraordinary variety of finds: gold, coins, brooches and other jewellery. Yet there remained a question as to whether the goods constituted “treasure trove” and would in any event belong to the Crown rather than the owner of the land. This conundrum had taxed Carrington and his cronies; in their eyes, it underscored the need for secrecy about what the antiquary had discovered. Richard was in the course of preparing a legal case for title to the goods that might ultimately achieve an equitable division of the spoils. But much would depend upon the judgment of the coroner and Richard had ceased to believe that the law always delivered a verdict that was true and fair.

  He tightened the grip of his arm around Martha’s slender waist. They were lying together before the fire in the little cottage. From upstairs came the sound of Mungo Beeston’s stertorous breathing. A physician from Chester whom the lovers had engaged to care for the old man had advised them that Mungo’s life would draw at last to a close within the next few days. He was rarely conscious and remained ignorant of his granddaughter’s narrow escape from death by judicial decree.

  “Who knows? In any event, I can claim that I loved you when most certainly you had nothing.”

  She laughed. “Alone in my cell, I used to pray that you might use your good offices on my behalf. But as the fateful hour drew near, I lost all hope. When the gaoler told me that the judge had granted a stay of execution, I dropped at his feet in a faint. Even without being told, I knew you were the man who had saved me.”

  “Not just myself. His Lordship risked his reputation by asking the Magistrate to look into the matters I had raised. How fortunate that the girl Dorothy crumbled when he challenged her. For the sake of a bribe, she was willing to sacrifice your life. Once she confessed that Stubbings and Carrington had given her the bracelet and trained her in her testimony, the plot was laid bare for the world to see.”

  Martha shuddered. “So you were vindicated, my darling. But what made you certain of the truth?”

  “You will recall my telling you that I believe that a person cannot conceal his natural disposition if questioned with sufficient subtlety? Well, then, the answer is simple. When Carrington made the supposedly generous suggestion that your land should be sold to George, he revealed that he knew that Hugo Frandley had asked for your hand in marriage.”

  “Indeed.”

  “As Frandley gave his evidence, I studied him with care and formed the view that he was as vain as any man that I have ever met.”

  She nodded. “Your judgment is correct.”

  “In that event, I found it impossible to believe that he would have disclosed to his friends that a slip of a girl had rejected his proposal of marriage. Unless he had good reason for candour, that is. I believe that once he became aware of the existence of the Clough hoard, he was willing to suffer any indignity if he thought it guaranteed him both revenge for your slight and a share in Carrington’s booty.”

  Martha stared into the leaping flames. “How strange that all of them must now confront a far, far greater indignity.”

  Richard said nothing. Much as they deserved their fate, he could not help flinching as he contemplated what lay in store for the scoundrels who had so nearly murdered his beloved.

  Tomorrow they die.

  The Dutchman and the Wrongful Heir

  Maan Meyers

  One of those delightful moments, when you stumble across a book you did not hitherto know and discover it is a box of delights, happened when I found a copy of The Dutchman (1992) by Maan Meyers. It’s set in New Amsterdam in 1664 and features the investigations of the Dutch “schout” or sheriff, Pieter Tonneman, at the time of the British invasion. The book was the first of a series which traced the descendants of Tonneman in New Amsterdam/New-York through to the 1890s. I wanted to know more about Pieter Tonneman and so was delighted when the authors produced the new story set in New-York as it was then spelled, very soon after the British had taken control.

  Maan Meyers is the combined alias of husband-and-wife team Annette and Martin Meyers. Both have written books separately including the Olivia Brown stories by Annette set in 1920s Greenwich Village, one of which will be found in my Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits.

  Tuesday, 30 November. Dawn

  Even before dawn, the screech of the red-tailed hawks echoed through the village as the scavengers swooped low over the thick woods that covered the hills beyond the Wall. The noise was the sort that could raise the dead.

  It did not raise the dead, but it did set every four-footer barking, including the small, black and tan spaniel of Colonel Richard Nicholls, the Governor of His Majesty King Charles’s new English colony of New-York, who slept only fitfully when he was not on board his flagship, the thirty-six gun Guinea idling in the harbour.

  The hideous screeching came from beyond the Wall, and though the Governor used his glass, the sun was not yet high enough for him to see. He called for his aide to fetch the Dutchman, his Sheriff, Pieter Tonneman.

  On this sharply cold morning, it seemed almost as if the sun was loath to present herself, though the village, by habit and necessity, was beginning to stir.

  Pieter Tonneman had heard the screeching of the red-tailed hawks well before Nicholls’s aide thumped on his door. Now he could see them swooping low over the thick woods that covered the hills beyond the Wall.

  He reined in Venus as he approached the Broad Way Gate, one of the two official openings in the Wall, noting logs missing again from the top of the Wall. Stolen, he had no doubt, by Indians for firewood as winter approached.

  Sam Dolittle, the rheumy-eyed English soldier on sentry duty, was alone at the Gate. No sign of Pos. The Sheriff found his pipe, filled it, but made no attempt to light it even though Dolittle’s fire was close by. Pos, the old rascal, after a night of carousing, had failed to remember their morning appointment to inspect the woodland beyond the Wall for signs of hostile Indians.

  Tonneman, former Schout of New Amsterdam and current Sheriff of New-York, pointed his mare in the direction of the circling hawks. Thanks to the harsh wind from the north, he could smell the poisonous fumes from Keyser’s tannery – all tanneries having been banished from the town proper – wafting toward him.

  As he passed the van Cortlandt estate, which spread from the Broad Way all the way to the North River, he thought, van Cortlandt might be rich, but for all his riches he couldn’t escape the stench.

  The irony was van Cortlandt had built outside the Wall to get away from the stink and noise of the village.

  Tonneman called back to Dolittle. “Captain Pos was to meet me . . .”

  “Who?”

  The Sheriff didn’t know if Dolittle was deaf or simple or simply English. “Lodowyk Pos, my Deputy, was to meet me at the Gate. Tell him I’ve gone ahead. Tell him I said to follow.”

  The Broad Way travelled along the upward rise of the Island, from the Fort to the mostly uncharted wilderness – which remained so de
spite the Indian trails – continuing all the way to the high cliffs on the north end of the Island. Except for Shellpoint, the lake-sized freshwater pond that served as a basin collecting the waters flowing from the surrounding hills, these hills were steep, rock-covered, and densely wooded.

  Even so, the Island was full of sweetness, if one looked in the right places. The beautiful widow Racqel Mendoza was never far from Tonneman’s thoughts. He had found the bones of her missing husband not three months past. Nine more months till her mourning period was finished. She’d promised him.

  After they were married he would buy a patch of land, perhaps near the East River. That Racqel was a Jewess and he a Christian, was no trouble at all to Tonneman, but he knew it was for her.

  He pocketed his unlit pipe as he approached the forest. The eerie screeching of the hawks grew intense, bringing his mind back to practical matters. Venus let out a fearful whinny and pawed the ground, steam streaming from her nostrils. The hairs on the back of Tonneman’s neck bristled. At the edge of the wood, he dismounted and tethered the dun mare to a slender hickory.

  Brush crunching under his boots, the Sheriff made his way into the forest following the old Indian trail.

  Stands of ancient trees, hickory, oak, tulip, so thick that even leafless as now, full sunlight could not pass, soon surrounded him. No sign of the Indian war party. The screeching gained in intensity as he left the path and with the aid of his sturdy cudgel, pushed through the undergrowth.

  Christ’s bloody fingers, if he couldn’t still smell the tannery stink. No, it was something worse. As he stood in the hollow of a rocky rise, the sense that he was not alone was so strong he caught himself glancing over his shoulder.

  Plash. A fat chunk of reeking offal spattered on his boot. Sweet Jesus, that’s what he’d been smelling. The second disgusting glob fell on his upturned face. “God’s blood,” he shouted, using his nose cloth to wipe the filth from his face.

  He could hardly see for the hawks pestering something in the thick old oak under which he stood. Raising his cudgel, he gave the trunk a mighty wallop and shouted again. The hawks screeched and departed, albeit reluctantly.

  Draped over the branch of the old oak was a scarecrow, a hat clamped on its head. But scarecrows don’t drop pieces of human flesh.

  His eyes darted left and right for tracks but there was no sign – but for the body – that anyone had been here.

  All woods have their own melody; on Manhattan Island the patterns went from frogs to wolves and all manner of birds and beasts. Now, except for the hawks and their ilk, that never moved south in winter as the songbirds did, the woods were oddly silent.

  The Dutchman moved out from under the body and hollered again to drive away the hawks, as they had begun stealing back to the child-small body draped over the limb.

  Children climbed trees, and though his daughter Anna and husband Johan Bikker, farming in New Haarlem, had produced a son not a month past, he knew little of children. Anna had been his and poor dead Maria’s only child who’d lived past infancy.

  Indians were tree climbers as well . . . Bears?

  Someone had climbed this tree, or had been put there – for whatever reason – and been taken for an enemy, or dinner.

  More slop dropped to the ground near him. Tonneman listened. Hearing nothing but the hawks, he leaned his cudgel against the trunk and climbed up the backside of the oak until he neared the carcass, which was about fifteen hands off the ground. He grabbed hold of another branch just above and pulled himself into a prone position so he could look down on the small body. The stink was ferocious.

  Again he went, listening, watching, noting that he was arse end to Shellpoint.

  The hawks circling overhead screeched at him. He’d come between them and their prey. The more aggressive swooped down trying to dislodge Tonneman, but he thrashed on his branch and yelled them off. They kept their distance for the while but continued circling.

  Extending his arm to grasp the hat of the creature beneath, he managed instead to knock it to the ground, revealing long, tangled yellow hair and confirming what instinct had told him: the body was a woman. Sacred heaven! He knew her. No breath-clouds came from her nose or mouth. Dead as a doornail, as the Johnnies liked to say.

  He tried to get ahold of her dangling arm and lost his balance, ended up swinging like a clown from the branch. There came a mighty creak. The branch cracked and bent downward. Seemingly, the tree cast him out, and he and the woman came down together.

  He was too old for climbing trees like a fool. That went through his mind as he fell, hoping he wasn’t going to land on the sharp rocks and break his bones and hers as well, though Gretchen Goderis no longer had need of hers.

  Instead, flailing, he landed flat bellied into the frigid pond with a splash the like of a water spout.

  When he came up for air, the Sheriff thought he heard eerie, harsh laughter. He dragged his sodden self onto the bank, shaking, wringing icy water from his clothing as best he could.

  The sun was bright in the wintry sky, but it gave no warmth, at least none that Tonneman could feel. A sharp wind ruffled the branches, chilling him to the bone. The laughter came again, mocking him, floating in the frigid air, around and above him, moving farther and farther away until the silence and the screeching took charge again. Shivering, he sniffed the air. There’d be snow by evening, and unless he got into dry clothes he’d become a human icicle.

  Tonneman found what the hawks had left of Gretchen Goderis not far from the oak, lying on her back as if sleeping in her own bed. The stiffness was just setting in on her, but he could see what he had to see, what he hadn’t seen when she was draped over the limb.

  Protruding from her chest was an arrow. Iroquois from the look of it. Man Who Walks Like A Fox, whom the settlers called Foxman, was a Mohawk-Iroquois. Tonneman thought of the eerie laughter. Indians didn’t laugh like white men. The arrogant Man Who Walks Like A Fox would consider Tonneman falling out of a tree into the pond a big joke. It could be Foxman’s arrow.

  Tonneman bent closer to the body. Her garment, though worse for the wear and ill fitting, had been one of the late Widow van Lundt’s best. Her eyes were gone, of course, and parts of her face.

  “Jesus save us,” Tonneman muttered. So much for a goodly inheritance.

  Not even a fortnight past Gretchen Goderis, a maidservant, had been left the entire van Lundt estate by the widow van Lundt herself, having no blood heirs.

  In addition to Margarieta van Lundt’s trunk of gold guilders, which Tonneman had seen with his own eyes, there was the extensive property cheek by jowl to Stuyvesant’s Bouwerie and comparable to the former Dutch Governor’s estate.

  The Sheriff bent over the body. The arrow was missing a fletch.

  Perhaps it had been displaced when she fell from the tree, but he saw no sign of it. The hawks would not trouble the feathers, and the other feathers were unmarked. Without the missing feather to help guide it, the arrow would not have gone far. And certainly not steady to its mark. Foxman was too much of a warrior to fly a poorly made or even damaged arrow.

  Gretchen Goderis may have been felled by the arrow, but it was possible that no bow had dispatched it. Had the arrow, then, been used as a dagger? In that case she had been stabbed. And then, God help her, quick or dead, the killer had propped her in the tree, carrion for the hawks.

  Willem Stael, carrying the post from New-York through to New Haven in Connecticut, had brought warning from a courier that an Indian war party, or the Frenchies or renegade Dutch in Indian war garb, were harrying the settlers and burning farms in the countryside around New-York. Colonel Nicholls had alerted the settlers in the outlying farms and estates. All citizens were ordered into town until the area outside the Wall was deemed safe from incursion by Indians. The populace, never without complaint, was not pleased with this state of affairs, a virtual imprisonment. Just the day before Tonneman had warned Nicholls that the citizens were growing fractious.

  N
icholls had agreed to lift the curfew but only after Tonneman inspected the perimeter to be certain that no enemy lurked in the woods beyond the Wall. Tonneman could have told him there wouldn’t be. The Dutch settlers believed in live and let live, and the Frenchies had gone north with the Iroquois.

  Then the screeching of the red-tailed hawks had hastened Tonneman’s rounds. Another day and little would have been left of Gretchen Goderis.

  “Halloo, Tonneman!” The voice was unmistakable.

  “Here. The rise. Follow the hawks.”

  Pos, a short, muscular man with a fine black beard, crashed through the brush. His lope came to a halt when he spied the body on the ground. “Horse piss!” He called to Tonneman’s back, “Where are you going?”

  “Keep the hawks away,” Tonneman said. “And when we get back to town send someone to replace the missing logs on the Wall.” Cudgel in hand, he walked back to where he’d tethered Venus and rode the anxious mare to the Broad Way Gate.

  Dolittle was dozing, his wheel-lock at his feet.

  “Sentinel Dolittle!”

  “What? Sir?” Half asleep Dolittle leaped to attention, presenting his weapon backwards with the barrel facing him.

  Tonneman groaned. A lot of good this one did, but he had to admit, no worse than the Dutch. “Did you hear anything unusual before I arrived?”

  “Everything in this goddamn country is unusual. Tell me whose arse I have to kiss to get back to Bow Bells.”

  The Sheriff laughed. “I need a blanket or canvas.”

  Dolittle shuffled into the guard hut and came out with a mangy blanket roll. “What do you need it for?”

  With the laugh in his voice Tonneman said, “To wrap a bloody body in, of course.” He unrolled the rag of a blanket and threw it over his own coat, now, thanks to the chill wind, covered with a fine surface of ice that soon would be stiff as a board from his dunking.

  Already, the townspeople were coming from their homes and shops, moving toward the Gate, calling out to him. Beyond the Wall, the cries of the red tails reached a fevered pitch as, ignoring Pos, they swooped into the wood. All this and Tonneman caught a movement on the Broad Way Road from the direction of Keyser’s tannery.