The Wickenham Murders

by Amy Myers

  ‘You’ll find something,’ Peter said airily, ‘when you go to Wickenham.’

  When, she noted, not if. Wickenham was the next hurdle to face – and preferably without the shadow of Zac trotting along beside her. She needed objectivity. At the moment Peter was far more certain than she was that either the Proctor case or the skeleton merited a full investigation by Marsh & Daughter. So far all she’d discovered about Ada’s life was an obituary notice recording the death of Dr Edward Proctor of Wickenham in 1935, and some further ferreting by Peter on the Internet had produced the death of Winifred Proctor, presumably his wife, some ten years earlier. The presumption was therefore that, as well as helping in the surgery and perhaps in the dispensary, Ada had kept house for her father, an inevitable role common to so many women who had been left without potential mates after the appalling slaughter of World War I.

  Her face, photocopied from a newspaper report, and propped up above Peter’s computer, stared out at them with all the defiance and mystery that a cloche hat could provide.

  ‘Mask the hat and what do you see?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Someone who’d take a first at Oxford if she’d been born thirty years later,’ Georgia replied promptly. It was a face not unlike her own, at least in its length and relative thinness, though since Ada’s hair was straight and short, and her own longer hair was drawn back and held at the nape of her neck, it was hardly a true comparison.

  ‘Yes. Would you say she was passionate?’

  ‘Hard to tell.’ Georgia frowned. The grey fuzz of the photocopy from a bad original hid personality. ‘I would say yes, but that doesn’t necessarily mean sexually. Firm about what she believes in.’

  ‘It could be important, Georgia. Nothing we’ve read so far explains what she could have been doing in Crown Lea so late at night except meeting Davy Todd. Her father testified he’d seen her in the house at nine thirty when he retired for the night – don’t you love that phrase, Georgia, I think I’ll start using it – and she was killed between nine and eleven, a reasonably wide time span. Let’s assume it’s roughly accurate, especially since the body was found early next morning, not too long after the event. Had she been strangled where she was found? We don’t know. Not reported. Had she been dragged there? And most important, if it wasn’t Davy Todd whom she was meeting that night, who was it? She looks a sensible woman, which means whoever it was, she must have either wanted sex with him or thought it wasn’t on the agenda. And even Davy admits they had originally arranged to meet then.’

  ‘That brings us back to where we began. If she had developed a mad passion for their young gardener, she could have invented a more hospitable trysting place than a field in the middle of the night.’ It was checkmate again. Love in a muddy field at the end of October? Surely even if she really fancied Davy she could have found somewhere more comfortable.

  ‘His defence is that he was with his girlfriend Mary Elgin at her home until eleven thirty or so,’ Peter pointed out, ‘and she confirmed it on oath, although of course no one believed her. She said her father had come home and found them together, but he flatly denied it, so it was clear – to the jury anyway – that she was lying to protect him. There’s an interesting point, though. Two witnesses testified they saw Davy returning home in a dishevelled state, with blood on his face, and this was at about eleven forty-five, after the dance ended. That might have helped corroborate his story but, as Mary’s father denied it, it was assumed Davy had been busy murdering Ada and was coming home late. If we accept that Ada was indeed dead by eleven, what was Davy doing for those forty-five minutes?’

  ‘Panicking?’ Georgia offered.

  ‘Then why not run away, or go straight back home?’

  ‘Hoping to escape notice?’

  ‘Weak. And another thing, one witness, their maid, testified Ada had been excited that evening because she was meeting someone later. It was a big secret and her father was not to know. Would Ada have told anyone at all if it were Davy she was meeting? I doubt it. Certainly not their maid. On the other hand, another witness said Ada was a prim and proper woman who would never have gone out late with anybody she didn’t know and trust – and she trusted Davy Todd, according to her father’s evidence.’

  At that point the telephone interrupted them and Peter snatched it up irritably, then suddenly the voice changed to Peter Purr mode. ‘Good to hear from you, Mike.’

  He listened attentively, then purred his grateful thanks.

  ‘Was Mike growling, groaning or grinning?’ Georgia asked. DI Mike Gilroy’s grins were detectable over the phone, but they were rare, even though she suspected there were more on the inside than he let the outside world see. She wondered if his wife Helen saw a different Mike. On the few times she had met them together, there was no sign of it, but she sometimes played with a fantasy of Mike indulging in silly Christmas games with a paper hat on his head.

  ‘I can’t think why you have this notion that Mike thinks I’m a pain in the neck. He was delighted to contact Darenth Area for me.’

  ‘So what’s the news on the denehole skeleton?’

  ‘It was discovered when some kids were climbing down it. Strictly against orders of course. The denehole had collapsed, leaving part of the shaft intact but a bell-shaped hole at the foot. The skeleton was underneath a pile of debris that had collected over the years. The coroner’s asked for a forensic report, and the interim news is it’s that of an adult male aged roughly between thirty and forty; it had been there some time and had fractured bones consistent with a fall. You know, Georgia, I’m beginning to sniff that this skeleton is the path we should follow.’

  ‘Any clues on identification?’ She refused to share his excitement yet.

  ‘Few shreds of clothing, and a bag of other stuff to go through that might or might not be connected. Nothing exciting yet, but you can bet your bottom euro there will be. Let’s go for it, shall we, even if it’s nameless at present.’

  Just a body, Georgia thought. And now it’s been found, he’s unlikely even to be identified, whatever Peter so confidently predicted. Even if the lab could get a DNA profile from the bones, there’d probably be nothing to match it against on the National DNA Database. This perversely convinced her that Wickenham should be a Marsh project, even though the Ada Proctor trail was calling far more loudly to her than this unidentified skeleton. She knew it was the reason that drove Peter on too – and that therefore the die was cast.

  ‘Do you see another book in this,’ she asked bluntly, ‘or just an article?’ Peter had recently sent in their current script on a murder case from the 1940s, and he hated being without a project.

  ‘Of course. But Wickenham itself is summoning us, my darling,’ he said virtuously. ‘Something there needs laying to rest.’

  Chapter Two

  There was little sign that anything in Wickenham needed laying to rest. It had all the appearance of a thriving community, near enough to London for commuting but with no sense that the village emptied itself between rush hours. Georgia decided to stroll around the streets before checking in at the Green Man, where she had booked a room for the night. Even for a woman, a pub was a good place to stay, but first she needed to acclimatize herself to the feel of the village. First impressions might not be correct, but they could be invaluable for that very reason.

  Sniffing round villages was a whole branch of archaeology in itself. There was the physical archaeology: the old village was spread chiefly along one main street, with some splendid medieval and Tudor houses, with a green of rising ground at its heart. With golden leaves beginning to fall, and the gentle September sun, it was a peaceful sight, and not one that suggested hidden turmoil, either past or present. Statelier Georgian and Victorian buildings flanked the older buildings, and on the outskirts of the village came the twentieth century’s proud additions, spruced up by a council estate and smaller newer private estates. She had the impression that a lot more had been built since she and Peter had come here. Replacing Gre
en Belt country or not, the estates were a great deal neater and tidier than the usual sixties’ and seventies’ sprawl.

  The mental archaeology interested her even more. Today, most villages had layers within layers in their communities; the old villagers whose families had lived there for generation after generation, incomers who had lived in the village long enough to integrate fully, and incomers who had usually come more recently and who commuted and/or had no interest in the village as such. Old loyalties fought new blood, old ways met new attitudes and these would play their part if she and Peter had been right about Wickenham licking its wounds.

  The Green Man pub was in the centre of the village. There was at least one other pub in Wickenham, the Red Dragon, not to mention the former manor house, Wickenham Manor, now a posh ‘country’ hotel. Opposite the pub was the Green, around which were grouped some fine Tudor brick cottages and one or two shops such as Todds’ butcher’s shop. On the flatter part of the Green cricket had once been played, according to her guidebook. It was not large enough for a modern pitch, however, and the game had gravitated further up the road to a field next to the football pitch, both belonging to the Wickenham Manor estate. She knew this since a poster on the village notice board on the pub wall had announced the formation of a group to protest against the sale of these fields. Judging by the passion such matters aroused in their own village, Haden Shaw, she guessed this would be a hotly fought issue, so perhaps Wickenham’s peaceful appearance was indeed only superficial.

  The Green was obviously now for show and for dogs. Not that any dogs’ mess would be tolerated on this spick and span grass. This seemed a village that prided itself on its appearance. If there was an underclass, she decided, it was being kept firmly in its place or perhaps it only roamed at night. Staying in the pub, she would surely find out as she began the slow process of skimming away appearance layer by layer until she felt she could sense the soul of the village. Wickenham is a pleasant place to live, haven’t we done well, was the message it was successfully putting over, whether consciously or not.

  On impulse, she decided to walk further along the road from the pub to the end of the Green, for it was there that she remembered visiting that cream-tea place. Was the rather crabby owner still churning out yesterday’s stale walnut layer cake in her beautiful garden? Funny she should suddenly remember that garden. Perhaps it had stuck in her mind because she recalled thinking that so much love had gone into tending it that there was clearly none left over for the owner’s teashop work.

  At first she walked right by the cottage, not recognizing it, and it was only when she saw the baker’s shop beyond it and remembered the teashop’s precise location that she returned to it. There were no teas offered here now. Perhaps new bylaws had put paid to it, but more likely it had been the owner’s age. This was a smart private house now, with fancy new shutters and leaded panes. Clematis was being carefully trained to begin a steady climb upwards. A brightly painted cartwheel adorned one wall, and the cottage flowers and roses that had filled the original garden had given way to one bullied into shape with bedding plants. Roses there were, but they were modern hybrid roses, which any self-respecting bee would ignore. This was not the cottage garden she remembered.

  O crabby old lady, why do you suppose

  You mistreated your cakes and loved only your rose?

  Careful, Georgia, she warned herself. She was here to do a job, not to compose doggerel on bygone teashops. It was time she began her research routine. She had a set plan for this now. She would check in to a pub late morning, and immediately come down for a preliminary skirmish with the owner or manager or barman, then stay on for a bar lunch to absorb local colour.

  The Green Man, although an old building, had obviously undergone a lot of transformation over the years. It had travelled along the path of practical comfort too far for the clock to be turned back, as fashions changed, to quaint beams and nookery. Nevertheless it had a pleasant atmosphere, and she felt encouraged that it might still be the meeting point for all layers of the community.

  ‘What you here for then? Holiday?’ The man behind the bar produced her half of shandy with as much aplomb as if it were the finest claret of his cellar.

  He was the owner, rather than manager, she guessed from his relaxed ‘I’m a welcoming barman’ attitude.

  ‘Work, I’m afraid.’

  He couldn’t be more than forty, Georgia estimated. Much too young to know anything about Ada Proctor.

  ‘What work’s there in Wickenham on a Wednesday?’

  ‘I do research for writers.’ She knew from experience the word ‘journalist’ couldn’t be relied on to help her. Some would reward it with an instant glint, seeing publicity and money in the offing; others shied away. ‘Research for writers’ distanced it nicely. Few would know what it involved, and indeed she had no clear definition herself. She thought at first he wouldn’t pick up on this, but at last he did.

  ‘Research, eh?’

  ‘Into Wickenham’s history.’

  ‘Oh. Bet you didn’t know the Mighty Mynn played his first single-wicket cricket match here?’

  She didn’t and he hadn’t, unless Harrietsham was a false claimant.

  ‘How interesting,’ she rewarded him. ‘Do you play?’

  ‘Me? Nah. You have to have lived here for fifty years to get on the team. I’ve only clocked up ten.’

  ‘I’m looking into a murder that took place here in 1929.’ This must be safe enough. There would be few toes to tread on here.

  ‘Too early for me. We’ve had a few more since then, I reckon.’

  ‘The skeleton in the denehole, you mean? Does the village think that’s murder? Seems more like accident.’

  ‘Don’t know nothing about that.’

  Georgia was afraid she’d gone a step too far, and he would clam up, but he didn’t. He went on to talk of a pub fight five years earlier, not at the Green Man of course, he hastened to assure her, and a carpenter who went mad and slaughtered his family eight or nine years back. Neither could have been the reason that Peter’s nose had twitched, since they were both after the time of their first visit. Her own nose, she realized, had failed to come to life as yet. Was Ada Proctor a good line of inquiry or not? So far she hadn’t a clue. There had, after all, been two other murders to which she’d found passing references in the local press. A girl in her twenties had been found dead on the outskirts of the village in the late 1950s, and a local farmer had been shot by a neighbour in the 1970s in a love triangle. She concluded that Ada Proctor had at least to be eliminated as the cause of Wickenham’s ‘unfinished business’ before she began on anyone else, including the skeleton. She now felt a personal involvement with that face, and would not let it down without good reason.

  The bar was beginning to fill up with lunchtime regulars, so she took her jacket potato into a corner, together with another shandy, and prepared to look like part of the woodwork.

  Drinkers’ body language could tell you a lot about a village. The sideways lounger with the elbow on the bar, the drinkers who squarely faced the bar, both elbows firmly on it, the mates’ circle, taking up mid-floor position, the regular on the regular’s stool, and the passers-through and pensioners who humbly retreated to the tables. There were few of the first sort here today, since they tended to be the commuters or the weekend visitors, but the others were well represented.

  The telephone directory had revealed no Elgins but plenty of Todds living in the area, including the butcher. However it was a common name and, though she had patiently tried each one, all of them had denied any connection with Davy Todd. Nevertheless, bearing in mind that the murder was well over seventy years earlier, and memories could be short as well as long where murder was concerned, she had not yet given up hope. She had timed this visit to Wickenham carefully, for the local paper had announced a display of old postcards in the village hall this week, organized by a Mr Jim Hardbent. This was her afternoon assignment, and one of which she had high
hopes.

  The village hall was tucked behind the Green on a new road in a large site of its own, complete with car park. A modern building, it had Lottery money written all over it. The exhibition was in a side room and, since the whole hall had an empty feel to it, she was relieved to find that there was a solitary man sitting at a table.

  She decided to ‘do’ the exhibition first, marvelling that one village could produce so many different postcards, and thanking her lucky stars that the majority of these stemmed from the heyday of the village postcard, the early twentieth century. She took her time, trying to gain atmosphere as well as information and to build up some idea of what the village must have looked like in Ada Proctor’s time. That done, she approached the ‘curator’.

  ‘Would you be Mr Hardbent?’ she asked. She could hardly believe her luck, if so. No young collector, but a tanned and bearded middle-aged to elderly man who had probably lived here all his life and would know the background to each and every one of these postcards.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘Is there one of the old doctor’s house, pre-Second World War?’ she asked. ‘I’m interested in the Ada Proctor murder.’

  ‘Are you now?’ He eyed her carefully. Bluff countryman he might look, but his eyes were sharp. ‘Now what would your interest in that be?’

  ‘Davy Todd,’ she replied promptly.

  He nodded. ‘And why’s that?’

  At least he had heard of him. One up for Davy. ‘I investigate old murder cases.’

  ‘Funny job for a woman. What’s the point of it? Gruesome, I call that.’

  ‘If you were the victim’s family you might not want to feel your loved one had just disappeared into anonymity. And if the murderer’s family felt an injustice had been done they too might welcome an investigation.’ She felt she’d put this unusually awkwardly and received her just deserts.

  ‘Let ’em rest in peace, say I.’