Fear on the Phantom Special

by Edward Marston

  ‘How many of them do you already know?’ asked Lydia.

  ‘Only one of them – Mr Lawton, the baker.’

  ‘Then the other two are complete strangers.’

  ‘Yes, Lydia. Since I moved away, I haven’t met any new friends that Father has made.’

  ‘They’re hardly friends if they stole his medal.’

  ‘I fancy that we’re only looking for one thief.’

  Lydia stopped. ‘I’ve just thought of something,’ she said, worriedly. ‘What if he turns nasty?’

  ‘That’s very unlikely to happen.’

  ‘Robert once told me that thieves usually put up a fight and try to get away.’

  ‘But we’re not going to arrest anyone,’ said Madeleine. ‘We’re simply trying to find out who got into Father’s house.’

  ‘I still think that we should be careful. I know that we’re not there to accuse any of them, but they’re bound to wonder why we’re talking about what happened to that medal. If we do find the thief,’ said Lydia, ‘he might take offence.’

  ‘There’s no reason to do that. After all, the medal was returned intact to the house. As far as he’s concerned, the man who took it in the first place is in the clear.’

  ‘Then he doesn’t know Mr Andrews.’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Madeleine with a laugh. ‘Father won’t rest until he knows the truth. Even if it was a prank, he’ll want to find out who was behind it.’

  ‘And then …?’

  ‘He’ll demand retribution.’

  Having sent Leeming off on his mission, Colbeck had not been idle. He made a point of going to the bookshop. Norman Tiller gave him a guarded welcome.

  ‘You usually send the sergeant to interrogate me.’

  ‘He enjoys talking to you.’

  ‘Then where is he?’

  ‘He’s not in the best of health today,’ said Colbeck.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘As he left the hotel last night, he was attacked.’

  ‘Dear me!’ exclaimed Tiller. ‘That’s terrible news. Was he hurt? Did he have anything stolen? What exactly happened?’

  Colbeck gave him an abbreviated account of the incident, exaggerating Leeming’s injuries somewhat. As he talked, he watched Tiller carefully, looking for any hint that the bookseller might have been somehow party to the assault on Leeming. If Tiller had been involved in some way, however, he didn’t give himself away. His face remained a mask of concern.

  ‘Is he going to leave the hotel today?’ he asked.

  ‘I’ve advised him to stay indoors.’

  ‘Then I’ll make the time to pop in and see him.’

  ‘That’s not a good idea,’ said Colbeck, quickly. ‘He needs complete rest. I’d rather you let him get better in his own time.’

  ‘At least I can give him a book to read. If he’s stuck in a hotel room, he’s bound to get bored.’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons I came here. I’d like to buy a copy of your anthology.’

  ‘Oh, that’s very flattering but there are far better poets on my bookshelves. Compared to giants like them, I’m a pygmy.’

  ‘I’d still like to purchase a copy.’

  ‘Sergeant Leeming can have it as a free gift.’

  ‘Poets must eat and drink,’ said Colbeck. ‘Take the money and be glad that someone admires your work so much. As you know, the sergeant was very taken with your poem about Gregor Hayes.’

  Tiller smiled. ‘I’m not sure that he really understood it.’

  ‘It held his attention. That’s an achievement.’

  Going behind the counter, Tiller reached under it to get a copy of his anthology. He wrapped it in brown paper and tied up the parcel with string. Colbeck paid and took the book from him.

  ‘Since you don’t believe in ghosts,’ he said, ‘you may find some of my poems far-fetched. In fact, they’re quite the opposite. I simply write what I know to be true.’

  ‘Not everyone appreciates that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Cynics abound everywhere.’

  ‘When I mentioned the phantom fell runner to Sergeant Ainsley, he was rather contemptuous.’

  ‘That’s a common reaction of the ignorant.’

  ‘Why do you write poetry, Mr Tiller?’

  ‘Why do you work as a detective?’

  ‘I feel that it’s my duty to fight against crime,’ said Colbeck. ‘It’s less of a job than a mission.’

  ‘Then we have something in common. We’re driven to follow a particular path in life. In my case, I have a passion for poetry. Ideas bubble inside me all the time and I’m compelled to express them in poetic form.’ He studied Colbeck for a few seconds. ‘Have you ever read Samson Agonistes?’

  ‘Yes, I have. I know most of Milton’s poems.’

  ‘He was blind when he wrote that particular one. Most people with that affliction would be forced to narrow their working lives, but he didn’t. He kept producing remarkable poems like Samson Agonistes.’

  ‘He was one blind man writing about another,’ said Colbeck, ‘but he was also using a Biblical story as a comment on the world around him. The restoration of the monarchy was anathema to Milton. He was a firm supporter of Oliver Cromwell, a natural rebel.’

  ‘All poets are rebels, Inspector. It’s what sets us apart.’

  ‘Who are the enemies you fight against?’

  ‘People who desecrate nature are my main targets, but there are several others. Read my poems and you’ll see what they are. I mean no disrespect to Sergeant Leeming,’ said Tiller, ‘but he can never get under the surface of a poem. You have the intelligence to do so. Now that you’ve bought my anthology,’ he went on, ‘please be kind enough to tell me the real reason that you came here.’

  Leeming had never expected it to be easy. When he’d been given his orders, he’d been told to dig in the area of the wood that had, supposedly, already been searched. Colbeck had been confident that the sergeant might unearth something close to the place where the horseshoe had been found. After a couple of hours of systematic digging, however, Leeming had started to lose heart. His hands were dirty, his shoulder hurting and, even on a cold day, he was now sweating. He sat on a fallen log to rest and to review the situation.

  During the years they’d been together, Colbeck had asked him to do a number of strange things and, though he usually grumbled, Leeming knew that the inspector’s decision was a sound one. That was no longer the case in this instance. To institute a proper search of the area, he needed a spade rather than a trowel and a week instead of a single day. He’d been given a Herculean task with insufficient means of completing it. When first put to him, Colbeck’s theory had a definite logic. Now that it had been put to the test, it had disintegrated. Leeming was tempted to abandon his work and make his way back to Kendal. Then he looked down at the horseshoe he’d brought with him. When Colbeck found it, it had been caked with mud. Now that it had been properly cleaned, it was gleaming.

  In other words, Leeming realised, it had not fallen from the hoof of a horse. It had never been used. Why had someone left a newly made horseshoe under the ground in Hither Wood? It was a question that sent him back to work on his knees again.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Calling at her house, Geoffrey Hedley was relieved to hear that Caroline Treadgold was at home. Though she consented to see him, it was apparent that she did so out of politeness rather than any desire for his company. He was there on sufferance. Hedley sat opposite her and searched for the right words to use in what was a delicate situation. She was impatient.

  ‘Don’t keep me waiting,’ she said, prompting him. ‘I can see from your face that you’ve haven’t brought good tidings, so why have you come here this morning?’

  ‘I came out of concern for you, Caroline.’

  She shrugged. ‘Am I in need of your concern?’

  ‘I believe so.’

  ‘Pray tell me why.’

  Hedley cleared his throat. ‘I received a s
ummons from Lord Culverhouse this morning,’ he said, plunging in. ‘Not to beat about the bush, he asked me to tell him all that I knew about you. That worried me.’

  ‘I can’t say that it worries me unduly.’

  ‘You don’t know him as well as I do, Caroline.’

  ‘I know his type,’ she said. ‘He’s the sort of man I’ve spent my life avoiding. Alex hinted more than once that his uncle’s pleasures were not confined to the marital bed. It was the reason he kept me well away from him.’

  ‘I felt that a warning was in order.’

  ‘That’s very touching, Geoffrey, and I’m grateful to you.’

  ‘If he should start to pester you—’

  ‘Then it would be down to me to deal with the problem,’ she said, pointedly. ‘I don’t need your help or anyone else’s.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Other women might be flattered by the attentions of a member of the aristocracy – no matter how old and grotesque he may be. I am frankly insulted.’ She rose to her feet. ‘Thank you again for coming here. I won’t detain you.’

  Hedley was disappointed. Instead of being treated as a friend, he was being kept at arm’s length. All he could hope was that things would change in time.

  His conversation with the bookseller had left Colbeck with much to ponder. The man’s obsession with poetry was an unlikely motive for murder but it could not be ignored. Mocked in public, Norman Tiller had been the victim of Alexander Piper’s cruelty. If he’d decided to strike back at his tormentor, where better to wreak his revenge than on a railway, a symbol of all that Tiller hated? He’d see a poetic justice in that. Colbeck knew that the bookseller couldn’t act entirely on his own. Who had been recruited to help him? Walter Vine? Dr Dymock? Geoffrey Hedley? Or had one of those men persuaded Tiller to act in concert with him?

  While speculating on the possibilities, Colbeck had walked in the direction of the railway station. As soon as he arrived there, he went straight to the telegraph office in the conviction that that was where he might find the vital clue he still needed. For the first time since he’d been in the town, he felt an upsurge of optimism.

  Pride went before a fall. The two women were so confident in their ability to secure the desired result that they never even contemplated failure. It therefore came with a resounding jolt. Madeleine Colbeck and Lydia Quayle set off to find a thief as if it was a relatively straightforward assignment. They were soon deprived of that illusion. They first visited the shop run by Oswald Lawton, the baker, a pale-faced man of middle years.

  Since she’d met him before, Madeleine intended to question him by pretending to ask for his advice with regard to the theft. In the event, she didn’t even have the chance to speak. When he saw her entering the shop, Lawton broke off from stacking loaves of bread and turned on her.

  ‘I’ve heard about you,’ he snarled. ‘Henry Blacker, the locksmith, warned me that you might try to blame it on me instead. It’s about that blooming medal of your father’s, isn’t it? Well, I wish I’d never seen the damned thing. I certainly had no wish to steal it.’ He crossed to the door and opened it wide. ‘Good day to you, ladies,’ he said, brusquely. ‘Don’t come back.’

  They fared no better with the other two people on their list of suspects. One was an old man who couldn’t even remember seeing the medal, and the other quickly realised what Madeleine was trying to do. Instead of berating them, as the baker had done, he simply slammed the front door in their faces. It left them shaken and rueful.

  ‘He didn’t have to be that rude,’ said Lydia.

  ‘We deserved it,’ admitted Madeleine, ‘or, at least, I did. There was I, congratulating myself on how cleverly I’d handled the locksmith, when he wasn’t in the least deceived. Alan Hinton overestimated my talents, Lydia.’

  ‘I don’t agree. You had the right idea.’

  ‘Then why didn’t it work?’

  ‘We were unlucky, that’s all.’

  ‘We failed,’ said Madeleine, ‘and I’ll have to admit that to Father. He’ll say that we should have let him sort everything out on his own.’

  ‘It looks as if he’s run out of suspects.’

  ‘He’ll have to cast the net wider. Someone took that medal, and he’ll find out who it was even if it takes him the rest of his life. Father is like a dog with a bone.’

  ‘Do we go to the house and confess that we failed?’

  ‘I’ve got a better idea, Lydia.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We take a cab back home and have some tea and biscuits. I’m not facing Father’s anger on an empty stomach.’

  After an hour of unremitting work, Leeming stopped for another rest. As he mopped his brow with a handkerchief, he realised that this was his third visit to Hither Wood and the only one when he didn’t feel uneasy. Even when he’d been there in daylight with Colbeck he’d been troubled, sensing that the place was haunted, after all. On both previous occasions they’d been followed. This time he was aware of being entirely alone. There was no sense of threat. Birds were singing. Sunlight was slanting through the branches.

  While working so conscientiously with the trowel, he’d forgotten about the pain in his bruised shoulder. It now returned to remind him that it had not gone away. As he massaged the shoulder gently, he thought about the assault. The intention, he believed, had been to render him incapable of taking part in the investigation. That meant a broken arm or leg or facial injuries so serious that he’d be swathed in bandages. He might even have been blinded. If his attacker had been too forceful with the cosh, Leeming might never have recovered consciousness. He could imagine the destructive effect on his family if he returned home in a coffin or, at the very least, disabled for life. Having faced danger on a daily basis during his time in the police force, he’d come to scorn it. On the previous day, he’d been jerked out of his complacence. He was human, after all. He could be badly hurt. Valour had to be tempered with discretion.

  Serious injury was a disturbing possibility and the fear of it banished the ache in his shoulder. The only way that he could confront his attacker was to solve the crime that they’d been hired to investigate. It was the spur he needed to get him back to work. Snatching up the trowel, he got back down on his knees again and began digging away with a new zest.

  Robert Colbeck had also received a stimulus that put fresh energy into him. The visit to the telegraph office had been a revelation. It had helped him to answer a question that had been buzzing away incessantly at the back of his mind. In search of additional answers, he walked to Geoffrey Hedley’s office and was pleased to find that he was not in consultation with a client. The lawyer pressed for details of the latest developments and was told enough to convince him that progress was being made. He was astonished to hear of the assault on Leeming and hoped that the sergeant would soon recover.

  ‘I’d be grateful if you could pass the information on to Lord Culverhouse,’ said Colbeck. ‘He hauled me over the coals yesterday, accusing me of getting hopelessly distracted.’

  ‘He’s not renowned for his patience, Inspector.’

  ‘How well do you know him?’

  ‘Reasonably well,’ said Hedley, ‘and I often heard Alex talking about his uncle, of course.’

  ‘I spoke to Sergeant Ainsley earlier on and asked him about a rumour concerning the late blacksmith and one of the maidservants at Culverhouse Court.’

  ‘He’ll have denied that Hayes was in any way involved. Ainsley and the blacksmith were as close as brothers.’

  ‘He pointed the finger at someone else.’

  ‘Who was it?’

  ‘Lord Culverhouse himself.’

  ‘That’s an absurd suggestion,’ snapped Hedley.

  ‘Ainsley didn’t think so. He argued that it had to be someone with easy access to the girl. Hayes didn’t have any means of getting close to her. The master of the house did.’

  ‘So did the entire male staff at Culverhouse Court.’

  ‘None of them
was sacked as a result of the scandal.’

  ‘Ainsley is just trying to cover for his friend. Everyone knows what Hayes was like. His antics were common gossip in the taverns. No woman was safe when he was nearby.’

  ‘Did that include Ainsley’s wife?’

  ‘No, of course it didn’t.’

  ‘He must have known her well. If he was the sergeant’s closest friend, he’d have been to the house many times.’

  ‘I’m sure that he did but he had the sense not to bother Mrs Ainsley. If he’d done that, he’d have lost the friendship of the one man in the town who really liked him.’

  ‘Hayes obviously had a talent for upsetting husbands,’ said Colbeck. ‘I’m told that Dr Dymock was one of them.’

  Hedley frowned. ‘Why are you bothering with irrelevant gossip?’

  ‘It may have a bearing on the case.’

  ‘I thought you were looking for the person who abducted and probably killed Alex Piper.’

  ‘It’s not impossible that it was Cecil Dymock. You were the person who whispered that name in our ears, Mr Hedley.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘Have you ever seen his wife?’

  ‘Yes, I have. Dymock used to be my doctor. When he and Alex fell out, I moved to someone else.’

  ‘What sort of woman is Mrs Dymock?’

  ‘She’s lively, intelligent and very attractive.’

  ‘Did your friend never take an interest in her?’

  ‘She was married, Inspector.’

  ‘That didn’t deter the blacksmith.’

  ‘When it came to women, Alex had high standards.’

  ‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ said Colbeck. ‘I’ve also observed that you acted as an intermediary between him and both Miss Treadgold and Miss Haslam. Why wasn’t he able to take care of his private life on his own?’