‘Bloody Gestapo!’ Henry Stobart was shouting.

  She bit her lip in dismay at this unseemly language. She had always thought of him as such a gentleman behind the iron mask of some terrible secret sorrow. Now the Superintendent was asking him about lights in the field where the poor young man had been found.

  ‘Do you ever take these long walks of yours at night, Mr Stobart?’

  ‘No business of yours if I do. A man’s free to walk, isn’t he?’

  ‘Suppose I were to suggest to you that shortly before midnight on July 31 last year, you were seen near that car dump?’

  There was a brief silence. Then Henry Stobart gave a hoarse laugh which had an oddly triumphant note.

  ‘Ask that crazy Pendine woman what else she’s seen round here. You’ll be entertained. Or did you get it from that little fool of a housekeeper at Moor View who’s got chronic verbal diarrhoea?’

  Tears ran silently down Nora Pearce’s burning cheeks. After a time it was borne in on her that Henry Stobart was signing some paper amid a good deal of abuse. Superintendent Pollard, unmoved as ever, was saying that it might be necessary to see him again. Then at last the gate clicked, and the car started up and drove slowly away. But she could not bring herself to move, and sat on in a kind of fatalistic stupor waiting to be discovered. After a timeless interval it happened. The shed door was flung wide open, and Henry Stobart loomed fantastically tall and gaunt against the light.

  ‘God in heaven!’ he shouted, in tones of exasperation and outrage.

  Tearstained and dishevelled, Nora Pearce got to her feet, suddenly invested with the dignity of faded gentility.

  ‘I came to warn you, Mr Stobart,’ she told him, ‘that I saw you coming down the lane late on the night the police were talking about. I — I happened to be looking out of the window. Please believe me when I say that I did not tell them. But the Superintendent is a very clever man, and I’m afraid he may come back and ask me more questions. This was the reason for my visit, which I realize is unwelcome. I came in here because I heard the police car. To wait until they went away.’

  She made to leave the shed, and he moved back to let her pass. As she went down the track, almost incapable of further thought, she heard the cottage door slam and a key turn. She walked on blindly, hardly noticing the empty police car outside the farm. Arriving at Moor View she stared up at the house, realizing that it no longer mattered to her if it were sold. Her secret, timid hope, cherished over the years, of one day bringing companionship and happiness to Henry Stobart had been brutally annihilated.

  She went automatically to her bedroom. Here she resorted to tried remedies for signs of grief which must be concealed from employers, bathing her face first in warm water, and then in cold, and dabbing lavender water on her aching forehead. Then she started downstairs to make herself a good hot cup of tea, but stopped abruptly as she recalled the nagging problem which had been eclipsed by the stresses of the past few hours.

  Pollard and Toye had driven from Henry Stobart’s cottage to the farm, and drawn up short of the gate. They sat piecing together the torn scraps of paper which they had collected from the track.

  ‘These bits are my card,’ Pollard said, pushing them aside. ‘Now, what else so enraged the chap that he tore it up and chucked it out, contravening anti-litter by-laws? It might just be worth finding out.’

  Carefully smoothing out the crumpled fragments they finally assembled a brief note in block capitals.

  I DON’T SUPPOSE YOU’RE TOO KEEN ON THE POLICE KNOWING THAT YOU WERE WALKING DOWN THE LANE JUST BEFORE MIDNIGHT ON JULY 31 LAST YEAR? it enquired.

  ‘Blimey,’ remarked Pollard, ‘I thought this sort of thing only happened in detective novels.’

  Without comment, but with a touch of complacency, Toye extracted the bottle of ‘Nature’s Stomach Soother’ from the dashboard and passed it over. Pollard whistled, and compared the block capitals and script through a pocket lens.

  ‘The inspired forethought of the fictional detective, too,’ he said. ‘Can anything really be wrong with your stomach, after the meals you’ve been getting through lately? No, I thought not. This effort’s an opening gambit, I suppose. There’s not much doubt that the same person’s written both. Look how the script curve keeps creeping into the block letters. Easy enough to establish Pendine as the writer, too. I’d like to whisk her off for questioning at Bridgeford, out of her spooky context, and get this Stobart business cleared up, but we’d better see the Bickleys, having made the date with them.’

  ‘Stobart would tie up with Miss Pearce’s diary better than Bickley, don’t you think, sir? No accounting for taste, I suppose.’

  ‘It’s a projection of her romantic fancy she’s been cherishing, not the real chap. Rather pathetic. Re Stobart, though, it’s one thing to prove that he was prowling about on a night when lights were seen in the car dump field, and quite another to link him up to the murder. A good deal depends on what the Yard unearths at Epsom. One thing’s certain: he didn’t show the faintest sign of being rattled just now. In fact, I thought he seemed remarkably confident.’

  They got out of the car and walked across the cobbled yard to the door, knocked and waited. Pollard looked with interest at the massive thickness of the granite walls, and the cross-passage running through to the garden behind the house. After a pause a woman’s quick light steps came from a room on the right, and Mrs Bickley appeared in a flowered apron.

  ‘You’re wanting my husband,’ she said hurriedly, as if to preclude further conversation. ‘If you’ll step inside and take a seat I’ll whistle ’im up from the fields.’

  ‘Just a minute, Mrs Bickley,’ Pollard called after her. She paused on her way to the garden door, and turned back with obvious unwillingness. ‘We’re asking every local resident this question,’ he told her. ‘Have you at any time seen anybody in the field where the old cars are who had no reason to be there, or any suspicious behaviour around here?’

  ‘No,’ she said, emphatically, ‘nobody and nothing, as I told the Inspector, Wednesday. You can’t see the cars from ’ere, nor from the lane. Not that I’ve time to go gaddin’ about, what with the meals and the washin’, not to mention the poultry an’ the bit o’ dairy work.’

  ‘I’m sure you haven’t,’ Pollard said tactfully. ‘You must be on the go from morning till night. And I expect you supply the local households with the sort of first-rate home-produced stuff we saw in your basket this morning?’

  ‘Not regular,’ she said hastily. ‘That was just a bite for Mrs Pendine, friendly-like. She’s put to it to make ends meet now her husband’s gone. Now I’ll call up Reg, if you’ll excuse me.’

  She vanished. Pollard and Toye went into the kitchen, a big, stone-flagged room with immense oak beams, black with age. It was spotless and comfortable, its modern equipment an indication of the farm’s prosperity. Pollard walked over to examine a splendid grandfather clock. In the distance came a prolonged blast on a referee’s whistle.

  ‘Perhaps the husband doesn’t know about grub going up to Pendine,’ Toye suggested. ‘Suppose she saw the dust-up with the youth and let Mrs B. know she had, and that it needn’t go any further if the larder was stocked up now and again?’

  Reappearing, Mrs Bickley announced that her husband was on his way.

  ‘Maybe you could all do with a cuppa,’ she added, and busied herself noisily with crockery.

  A heavy tread in the passage announced the arrival of Reg Bickley, who came in wiping the sweat from his face with a coloured handkerchief.

  ‘Afternoon,’ he said tersely. ‘Inspector was along Wednesday, an’ we told ’im what we know, which was nothin’ at all. I’m a busy man, I am.’

  ‘Anyone can see that from crossing your yard out there,’ Pollard replied, ‘and a first-rate farmer, too, from the look of the place. We won’t waste your time. Just a quick run-through of what happened last Tuesday, first.’

  ‘Reckon we may as well sit down,’ Bickley said, somewhat mollified. ‘Let’s ’ave a cuppa, Ruby.’

  ‘Just drawin’,’ she said, vigorously stirring the contents of the teapot.

  As Reg Bickley described how Derek Wainwright had rung him urgently after the discovery of the skeleton, Pollard studied his powerful build and aggressive jaw. A formidable chap, and quick on the draw, he thought, but if he was unlucky and hit that hooligan too hard, I don’t see him being subtle enough to cache the body in one of his own fields.

  Ruby Bickley interrupted the story of how a guard had been kept on the field, by whisking three enormous cups of strong tea on to the kitchen table.

  ‘Plenty more in the pot,’ she remarked, and retreated to an ironing board in the background.

  In reply to Pollard’s questions Bickley was emphatic that he had never seen anyone messing around in the car dump, and if he had they’d’ve been out of it on the toe of his boot in less than no time.

  ‘Mind you,’ he said, ‘it’s easy enough to come across the stream, summertime anyway. Some kids did, year or two back, and one of ’em cut ’is leg on a rusty bit of iron. Real nasty letter I got from ’is dad, sayin’ the cars was a public danger, an’ that ’e was consultin’ a solicitor. But it didn’t come to nothin’. Turned out the manager from the Galaxy Insurance over to Torcastle looked in that mornin’, come about extra cover when us put up the new sheds. So I showed’n the letter. Why, ’e says, dump’s on your land, innit? You come an’ take a look, I says. So us went up, an’ I showed’n the cars, an’ that the stream’s my lawful boundary. Don’t you answer that letter, Mr Bickley, ’e says. A try-on, that’s what ’tis. So I didn’t, an’ never ’eard no more of it.’

  Alternating swishes and thumps indicated that Ruby Bickley was ironing with energy. She made no attempt to join in the conversation, but Pollard got the impression that she was following it closely.

  ‘Have you ever thought of having the dump cleared up?’ he asked. ‘It must be annoying to have to take on a mess like that.’

  The question sent Reg Bickley off in full cry against scrap dealers who said it wasn’t worth their while to come out for what wasn’t a full load, and the iniquities of his drunken predecessor who had been responsible for the dump’s existence, and for Henry Stobart’s ownership of the cottage.

  ‘Yes, I should think you could do with a farm hand over there to help keep an eye on things,’ Pollard remarked casually. ‘Do you have much trouble with visitors doing damage and interfering with your animals? It seems a popular place for picnics round here.’

  There was silence, dominated by the remorseless ticking of the grandfather clock. Ruby Bickley suddenly burst into a spate of words. ‘Litter louts, that’s what they are. The nerve they’ve got parkin’ cars on our land this side o’ the stream and scatterin’ their nasty rubbish all over. Moves ’em off, I does. Private property, this is, I tells’n. Go up over an’ park on t’other side if park you must, an’ make the place filthy with the stuff you brings and won’t be bothered to take back. Moor’s free to all, but our land ain’t, I says.’

  A neat bridging operation, Pollard thought, watching her husband take a great gulp of tea and regain his equilibrium.

  ‘Broken glass is the worst,’ he declared. ‘Sets up the bottles they’ve brought their booze in, an’ chucks stones at ’em, some of ’em does. Why last summer I ’ad to call out the vet to one o’ the Galloways —’

  The raucous note of a telephone bell interrupted the narrative. Ruby Bickley streaked across the room and seized the receiver. She stood frowning as she listened. ‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘Twiggadon Farm. Name of Bickley. ’Oo? Yes, I’ll tell ’im… It’s for you,’ she told Pollard.

  Inspector Crake’s voice came quacking over the line in guarded sentences.

  ‘OK,’ Pollard said at last. ‘We’ll be along.’

  ‘Crake says some important information has come in,’ he told Toye when they reached the car. ‘He suggested we came back to Bridgeford.’

  ‘Not Epsom already about Stobart, sir?’

  ‘No. They’ve got on to the boy beaten up by Bickley. Indirectly that is. Apparently he turned up in the town about Easter last year, got a job of sorts and picked up with a youth of his own age and went to lodge with the family. Crake was much too correct to mention any names over the blower. The said youth owned a scooter, and has admitted letting the lodger have a go out here, in the course of which ponies were chased and Bickley suddenly appeared like an avenging angel.’

  ‘But where’s this chap now, sir? The pony chaser, I mean.’

  ‘This is it. He’d taken such a bashing that he had to lie up for a day or two, and passed the time by saying what he was going to do to Bickley when he’d recovered. Then one morning he took his belongings and slipped off without a word to anyone — or paying his landlady — and was never seen again. According to the owner of the scooter who came and gave the information, he was a small chap, about five foot four, with mousey sort of hair which he wore long.’

  SIX

  ‘Anything known about this chap who owned the scooter?’ Pollard asked Inspector Crake.

  ‘He was up in the juvenile court when he was ten for damage to an empty house. Apart from that he’s got a clean sheet. He’s called Trevor Cupple, aged twenty, an unskilled labourer in a building firm. Lives in a roughish part downtown, and went around with a rowdy teenage gang till recently, but seems to have steadied lately, according to our people. Not much in the top storey, I’d say. Shall I bring them along, sir?’

  ‘Them?’

  ‘He brought his bird. Or she brought him, more like. Pert little piece, but a lot more sense than him.’

  A few minutes later Pollard was studying the pair with interest. The girl, Moyra Fox, sat fashionably slanted, her head inclined at an angle. Her hair flowed over her shoulders, and her mini-shift was abbreviated to a degree which made Pollard hope she was wearing tights. Her sharp-featured little face was alert and slightly sardonic. It was clear that Trevor Cupple had been firmly annexed and re-orientated, probably without being conscious of his fate. He wore a bright orange shirt over scarlet jeans, but was clean in his person and only moderately long-haired.

  His expression was uneasy and defensive, his mouth slightly open.

  ‘Ran into ’im in the bar o’ the Red Lion,’ he told Pollard. ‘Us got talkin’ — y’know.’

  It emerged that the beaten-up boy’s name had been Steve Mullins, or so he had given out. He said he had thumbed lifts down from London, and thought he’d pick up a job for a week or two before moving on. Asked if he knew of a cheap bed which wasn’t lousy, Cupple, whose mother sometimes took in a lodger, had taken him home, and board and lodge terms had been agreed upon.

  Moyra Fox caught Pollard’s eye and gave a half-amused, half-contemptuous shrug. ‘Barmy,’ she remarked succinctly, indicating Cupple. ‘See where ’e’s landed ’imself.’

  Pollard pointed out that there was no proof whatever that the skeleton in the car was that of Steve Mullins, merely a remote possibility. By dint of skilled and patient questioning he succeeded in building up a fairly detailed description of Mullins, wishing heartily that Cupple’s acquaintance with the shrew-eyed Moyra Fox dated back to the previous summer. Asked to stand up, Cupple gave his own height as five foot ten, and after a prodigious mental effort opined that Mullins had come up to about the level of his nostrils.

  ‘Somewhere round five-four,’ Toye said, after measuring.

  Mullins had been small but the wiry sort. When Pollard enquired if he had ever mentioned breaking any bones in an accident, Cupple looked baffled, and shook his head. He hadn’t noticed anything about the lodger’s teeth, but Mullins had worn his hair longer than most. An enquiry about its colour led Cupple to gaze round the room, as if in search of inspiration.

  ‘Bit lighter’n ’ers,’ he said at last, with a jerk of his head in Moyra’s direction, at which she rolled her eyes at Pollard.

  A certain caginess came over the interview when the subject of the trip to Twiggadon with the scooter was introduced. It was quickly obvious that on the appearance of the irate farmer, Cupple had gone to ground to save his own skin, and was therefore unable to give much of a description of him, beyond the fact that he was a bruiser and had black hair. To cover his embarrassment he repeatedly asserted that if he’d any idea that Mullins would go after the geese, he’d never have let him have a go on the Honda. He, Trevor Cupple, didn’t hold with tormenting animals.

  ‘’E wouldn’t ’urt a fly, ’cept when ’e’s a bit boozed-up,’ contributed Moyra Fox, giving him a fond, if cynical glance.

  Mullins had been no match for his assailant, and had emerged with a black eye and split lip. When the two youths eventually got home Mrs Cupple administered first aid, and advised Mullins to lie up for a day or two to stop the neighbours talking. He fair raved against the farmer chap, and how he was going out there again to get his own back. Then, on the Monday, he’d cleared out while the house was empty, taking his bits of things, and leaving half a week owing.

  ‘Did he ever say anything about being on the run?’ asked Pollard.

  ‘Nix.’

  ‘Sticks out a mile!’ broke in Moyra Fox impatiently. ‘Nice thing, too. Jus’ see what ’appens if you brings chaps ’ome orf the street when us is married.’

  ‘Shan’t be bringing no one back then, ducks,’ he told her with an amorous wink.

  Attempts to fix the date of the Twiggadon expedition were unsuccessful. The best Cupple could do was that it had been summertime, and before the Bank Holiday. More likely a Saturday in June than in July, but he really couldn’t say, not all that time back. Surprisingly, however, he remembered the name of the man who had taken on Mullins to help with a milk round.

 

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