‘A great change had come over the girl – though not so strange to a woman of my experience. I never have trusted these puritanical types. They are worse than the others when they see their chances open. Nor am I impressed by some of these girls who look and behave like nonentities. They are sometimes the worst of the lot – when the common streak in them is aroused. Amy Harrington was sullen for days, after that first show-down, but then a change came over her. Common is the word I used just now, and common is the way she began to look. She became cheeky in the kitchen; she even cheeked Edwards. Even in front of other people, she was quite shameless in the way she looked at and approached the Captain. She said things to the other girls that came back to my ears: things that did not belong to her, that one could never have imagined on her lips when first she came here. Like, “I am seventeen and he is forty-five, but he’ll still have life left in him when he’s seventy.” And, apropos of nothing at all, “A wife can’t give evidence against her husband.”‘
Apropos of nothing at all? What of those locked galleries upstairs? Wasn’t Mrs Palfreyman forgetting her own loyalties, talking like this in front of a policeman?
‘I wondered, of course where she was getting her ideas from. She was saying things that were far too vulgar to have come from her novel-reading. Then it was Tom, the boot-boy, who told us that she had an ally: someone she was meeting, to whom she had no doubt sobbed her misery-story, and who was now encouraging her, teaching her – anything to create mischief—’
So; at last Brunt knew for certain what she had brought him out here to tell him.
‘She met him the first time by accident, but before long she was having regular assignations on that slag-heap with that dreadful man called Beresford.’
She leaned back and looked at him, preening herself with satisfaction that she had reached her shattering point. There were questions that Brunt wanted to ask her, but he would have liked time to marshal them. How many times had she handed in her notice? And how eagerly had Kingsey implored her to withdraw it? At what stage had the news been passed to Kingsey that Amy was meeting Beresford at Brindley’s, and hadn’t he taken any steps to prevent it? Surely Mrs Palfreyman would not have squandered such a chance to denigrate the girl? Above all else Brunt wanted to bombard her with questions which would help him to decide to what extent Kingsey had helped to shape the story she had told him, with its suspect cross-trails and possible false scents.
But before he could frame the first of these, a bell rang on a corner of Mrs Palfreyman’s wall. Brunt looked up and saw its coiled metal spring still oscillating.
‘Unusual. The Captain. Wants a hot lemon, perhaps. I won’t be long.’
While she was gone, Brunt began scanning the room, always in the hope that some commonplace object would have a larger tale to tell than appeared on the surface. But the housekeeper was soon back.
‘He knows you’re here. I told him you came of your own accord. Please don’t let me down. And he wants me to bring you downstairs. Something he wants us both to witness.’
Brunt followed her, and they found Kingsey standing by the kitchen door, which was already open to the night. He was in a sober dressing-gown in dark blue velvet and he nodded to Brunt as if he were neither surprised nor interested to see him on the premises. Outside, they heard the sibilance of iron-rimmed wheels on gravel. A mesh of shadows advanced and retreated as the yellow flicker of gig-lamps passed behind bushes. Then the vehicle came to a standstill in the kitchen yard.
A man handed a girl down from the step of the carriage. At once the coachman moved off towards the stables.
‘Fletcher?’ Brunt asked. Mrs Palfreyman nodded. Kingsey stood aside with elaborate courtesy to let the girl be ushered through the door. Fletcher raised his eyebrows in over-acted surprise at seeing his master there to welcome him. If Mrs Palfreyman had told the truth, Kingsey usually kept well out of the way on the arrival of a new girl.
She was a big girl, but not in the comfortable country fashion of Mildred. Nor had she any of the sensitivity that Brunt associated with Amy Harrington. She was not timorous, and looked round the kitchen with lively curiosity. Fletcher stepped forward to perform some sort of introduction, but Kingsey cut him short.
‘Where are you from, young lady?’
‘From Yardley Gobion, sir.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘In Northamptonshire.’
‘Take her back home again tomorrow.’
Brunt assumed that this was being enacted in front of him in order to prove to him that the old regime was over. Fletcher gave no indication that it mattered what instructions his master gave him, provided they were feasible and a just reward lay at the end of them. But to the girl, the dismissal came as a different matter.
‘Let me stay a week,’ she said. ‘You’ll change your mind.’ Brunt had already formed the impression that she was one of those who knew what it was all about.
‘You’re going back tomorrow.’
‘Captain Kingsey, I can’t possibly go back where I came from. Those people think I’ve run away with him.’
‘Then he can explain how they came to be mistaken. He is a master of diplomatic persuasion, is Fletcher.’
From which Fletcher did not dissent. He looked less young than when Brunt had first seen him at a distance and in gloomy light. The flesh of middle age was beginning to swell under his collar and strain at his waist-band.
‘Fletcher, I want to talk to you.’
No compromise from Brunt now; this was the tone that would be recognised in the coal-mining valleys. Fletcher looked at Kingsey – an appeal for protection; none was forthcoming. But Fletcher was not the man to fold up under the suggestion that he was defeated before anything had started.
‘I’ll talk to you, Brunt, when I have had something to eat.’
‘A man has been known to go three weeks without food,’ Brunt said.
And Kingsey did now come to his agent’s assistance – but only with a mild appeal to reason and good manners.
‘I am sure you will find Fletcher helpful, Sergeant. At least you can treat him as an honest man.’
‘Where can we go to talk?’
Kingsey showed them into a little ante-room used for maintenance of his collection: making frames and the paraphernalia of cataloguing.
‘An honest man?’ Brunt said. ‘That’s the best tale I’ve heard since a pit-head check-weighman told me he’d found a butty’s wallet in a tub-bottom. You certainly have an honest man’s way with young women’s hold-alls.’
‘I’ve never stolen a single item.’
‘That’s perhaps as well. If I could do you for a thimble, I would, Fletcher. But shall I tell you what I’d most like to get you for? I’d like to hang one round your neck for fiddling your own boss. It would appeal to me, that would.’
‘You’ve no chance of it,’ Fletcher said. His confidence was aggressive.
‘Anyway, the courts are not going to like your particular brand of procuring.’
‘All I’ve ever procured is slavies.’
It would need two girls corroborating each other in the witness-box to splinter that defence. And Fletcher felt safe enough on that score.
‘If one or two of them found the Captain was easy meat,’ he said, ‘that’s his affair and theirs.’
‘It’s Amy Harrington’s evidence that I would like to hear. But you know she’ll never be going into that kind of box, don’t you, Fletcher?’
‘Won’t she? I don’t know anything about it.’
‘Well, let’s have your account of her last morning here, shall we? That’s one of the times when I happen to know you haven’t got an alibi.’
‘No, I haven’t. I was here that day.’
‘And you knew she was planning to leave the place.’
‘I knew no such thing. I had very little to do with the girl. She was one of my mistakes. The Captain himself will tell you that.’
‘A bit too frank and decent for your tastes, wa
s she?’
This was a room in which Amy Harrington had done work for Kingsey. A pair of scissors and a pot of paste were neatly aligned on the table. Perhaps she had used them.
‘Listen, Sergeant Brunt, did you ever hear the one about fouling your own nest? What went on between Kingsey and the Harrington girl – or between Kingsey and any of his girls for that matter – was very strictly not my business. I’d have been a fool, wouldn’t I, even to look interested?’
‘But you’ll admit that you’d sleep easier at night with no chance of sentimental confessions from Amy in the offing.’
‘I’ll admit nothing of the kind.’
‘Then give me your account of her last few hours on the premises.’
Fletcher was a quick thinker. He was accustomed to living on his wits.
‘I don’t know anything. I only surmise.’
‘Surmise, then.’
‘Amy Harrington ought never to have strayed out of reach of her Sunday School. She brooded about things – hadn’t the guts to take them in her stride or the sense to leave them alone. But she thought she could manipulate Kingsey with Sunday School talk.’
‘And very nearly did, as far as I can see.’
‘She started doing better after Beresford had taken her in hand. You know Beresford?’
‘I’ve met him.’
‘A trouble-maker – and a dirty old man into the bargain. A slap-and-tickle merchant, who could talk Amy Harrington’s language when he wanted to. You might say that he started giving Amy lessons – lessons in how to get what she wanted.’
‘And what do you think Beresford stood to gain from that?’
‘Amusement. Titillation. The thought that he might be mixing a bottle for Kingsey. Beresford would ask no more than that.’
‘But if Amy thought she was making progress with the Captain, why did she leave the house with her bag packed?’
‘I don’t know. She was up one minute, down the next. She would put some construction on something someone had said, and it would knock the bottom out of her world.’
‘I’ve no doubt that you can conveniently account for every moment of your time on the morning in question?’
Brunt had decided to sit tight, for the time being, on what he had learned about Fletcher’s movements. Fletcher took refuge in an appealing line of near-honesty.
‘Unfortunately, I can’t. As far as I was concerned, it was a morning like any other. I don’t know precisely what the girl’s comings and goings were, so I can’t even tell lies to fit in with them.’
‘Go and get your supper,’ Brunt said. ‘I’ll know where to find you. And when you’re wandering about the country tomorrow, taking that lucky girl back where you found her, don’t go trying to merge into the green spaces. It would look bad.’
Chapter Sixteen
It was a busy day. This time Brunt really had sent Potter off to Derby, with a crowded agenda – on which one of the most urgent items was to be sure to be back tomorrow. And at least, on the Fly, he would be able to keep an eye on Fletcher and the girl he was taking back to Northampton.
Brunt called at the cottage, to see how things fared with Mildred. She and the old woman seemed to be treating themselves to a late and leisurely breakfast: boiled eggs – and there were a few pieces of china on the table that had a touch of real quality about them. But there was something in the atmosphere on which he could not quite put his finger. The deaf old woman did not want to catch his eye; perhaps there had been some difference of opinion between the two, and she did not want to talk about it in front of him. There was something nervy today, too, in the bearing of the girl from Bristol. She showed no pleasure at seeing Brunt, busied herself stacking breakfast things and contrived to keep her back largely turned to him.
Of course, two such disparate women could not be expected to live contentedly together for long. It was an arrangement that could not be allowed to continue indefinitely.
‘Sergeant Brunt, can’t you talk them into taking me back at the Rake? I’m getting bored stiff here.’
Brunt left the cottage and went on to the Beresfords. Now that the massive sewing operation was over – presumably the effigies were finished – the house presented a changed appearance: warm and clean, though no home that contained so much could ever be tidy. Even more unconsidered trifles from the railway were now visible, including a cast-iron notice-board from the verges of the Cromford and High Peak, notifying trespassers of the maximum penalties – and apparently now used for drawing up the fire.
Dora, the scowling Amazon, was at home, but her sister was not in evidence. Laid out on a sheet of newspaper on the living-room table, the big woman had two stiffened rats, a dead weasel, a mole and a very sorry-looking crow.
‘For the gallows – next Tuesday night.’
She was tying pieces of cord round the animals’necks.
‘My sister and I are what you might call the stage-managers. This is how the Turks set things up for the landlord and his friends.’
‘I know.’
She held up a cord in her fingers, balanced the rat’s hind-legs on the edge of the table, then set it suddenly swinging into space.
‘Why – Mr William Palmer! Fancy meeting you here on this bright morning. Whoops! Died like a gentleman!’
Now it was the weasel’s turn.
‘Ah! Mr William Burke. Now just you do as I say, sir, and I promise you I shan’t hurt you. Now – toes to the line – and woof!’
She picked up the crow.
‘Piper’s Fold is going to enjoy this, isn’t it?’ Brunt asked.
‘My sister and I have got all the women together, and we’ve started already to collect brush-wood and timber. It’s going to be the best fire people have ever seen on these hills.’
‘I don’t think the Turks actually did light a fire under their exhibits, did they?’
‘Ah, but you can always improve on the past. We’re not bound by anybody’s rules but our own.’
‘And do you think it’s going to do anyone an ounce of good?’
‘It’s going to do us good.’
‘Your husband really does feel strongly about this man Kingsey, doesn’t he?’
‘And about the Rector. But especially about Kingsey. Sitting there, Sunday after Sunday, with all the back pews packed solid with his whores: a Christian gentleman, the Rector calls him, and can’t give us the time of day, just because my sister and I both choose to live with Beresford. Anyway, one of those girls is safe, Sergeant Brunt, I’ll give you credit for that. My sister and I, you know, we wanted Beresford to bring the other one to come and live here.’
‘Amy Harrington?’
‘Beresford used to talk to her when he was out on the hills taking the air. She told him just a few of the things that were going on at the Hall. Yet the saddest thing of all was that the girl was blinded by the Captain. He’d got her in the state where she didn’t know her own mind.’
‘So who killed her?’ Brunt asked sharply.
‘Killed her? You do know she’s dead, do you?’
‘What do you think?’
Dora Beresford began tying the vermin on to the longer cord by which they were to be hung round the pyre.
‘What do I think? Well, I’ll begin by saying that I hope you’re wrong. But I’m afraid you’re not. If she’d ever left this village, someone would have seen her.’
‘Then who do you think did it?’
She began ticking off names against the tips of her fingers.
‘It could have been the Captain because he didn’t want her back in the wide world, telling people at large the sort of thing she had been telling Beresford. Then there’s that pimp of his. He must know he’ll do time if the facts ever come to light. Then there’s his brothel-keeper.’
Dora Beresford glowered at Brunt, as if challenging him to deny the allegation. He held his peace.
‘Now just you suppose, Sergeant Brunt, that the Harrington girl really had managed to hook her fairy prince. Wh
at would the blessed Mrs Palfreyman’s position have been then, do you think? Don’t you think that Fletcher and Mrs Palfreyman might have worked something out between them?’
‘How well do you know either of them?’
‘I’ve seen them both, haven’t I? Does a woman need more?’
‘A judge and jury might.’
It was amazing, really, that an inhabitant of Piper’s Fold should be lined up even momentarily with the law. But then, as far as the village was concerned, the Hall was a different world: perhaps over there they deserved the law.
‘Piper’s Fold is satisfied,’ Dora Beresford said.
‘Piper’s Fold is too easily satisfied. It’s a pity you can’t all co-operate and help me to build up a proper case.’
‘Cases are your affair – and ours is ours.’
‘What a useless attitude. Still, as long as you limit yourselves to lighting fires in open spaces, I suppose all you should hear from me is a sigh of relief. But put me right on one score, Mrs Beresford – which of you two is it that’s married to Thos?’
‘Both of us, Sergeant. That was the agreement.’
‘I know, but—’
‘And properly. Done in a church.’
‘If you go on talking in public like that, Mrs Beresford, you’ll find yourself in unnecessary trouble one of these days.’
‘There was nothing unlawful about it.’
He pondered it as he made his way from the cottage. It was a wonder that the garden did not contain a weighing-machine and a penny-in-the-slot affair for selling chocolate.
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