Uncoffin'd Clay (Mrs. Bradley), page 3
We got out of the car to look at it, for there is magic in running water, and this little stream, bubbling, gurgling, and singing, was delightful. After a bit, I strolled back along its bank to look over at the mere. While I was standing there, Innes came up. He thought he had better get back to the car, he said, in case it had to be moved to let another vehicle pass, but Mary joined me on the broad grassy verge and we stood side by side looking over the water.
“Isn’t it beautiful here?” she said. “I’m glad we came.” By what seemed to be mutual reaction, we strolled on. Beyond the turn of the road which had brought us in view of the mere, a lane branched off, following the course of the brook, and led to some cottages, but where road and lane came together, some boys (presumably) had built a miniature clapper bridge across the stream.
We crossed it and found a well-trodden path which seemed to lead to the narrow end of the mere. We followed it and so found out that the woods I had supposed to be covering the further shore were on a long, narrow island, but to this there was no access except by wading.
“I should think the village kids have a wonderful time here,” I said. “Nothing beats grass and water and woods.” We turned and walked back towards the clapper bridge on our return to the car, but stopped to look at a half-submerged duck-punt which was lying in shallow water at the head of the mere.
The woodwork was rotting away and the boat was half-filled with a mixture of soil and leaf-mould in which some tufted sedge and young osiers were growing. Around the punt I could see the submerged stems and skeleton-like rigid, thin dark leaves of the water-crowsfoot, although so early in the year there were no flowers.
Mary joined me.
“I wonder whose punt it was, and how long it’s been there,” she said.
“Probably used at one time to cut waterweed,” I said. “It wouldn’t have been used for pleasure-boating in a place like this. Does the procession come along this road?”
“I don’t know. Anyway, this is one of the five parishes. I suppose they will stop at the church before going on to the trout farm and then they’ll finish up at Aries St. Peter. That will be the last stopping-place. There will be a church service there, followed by cider and something to eat at the vicarage, and then everybody who has seen the whole thing through to the end will meander home, I suppose.”
“Is the procession a time-honoured thing? Does it date back a long way?”
“Oh, no. I daresay there was something of the sort in the Middle Ages—you know, blessing the crops and so forth—but not on this sort of scale. The route will cover more than forty miles, I should think, by the time all the farms have been visited. This ‘five parishes’ business is quite an innovation. They did it last year, Martha Lorne tells me, but before that, if there ever had been a tradition of blessing the crops, it had fallen into limbo so far as Strode Hillary is concerned. After all, we aren’t a farming community in Strode Hillary. We’re professional or business people, for the most part, town-dwellers, anyway, by nature, whether retired or not. The nearest farm must be quite a way outside our town.”
I looked down again at the waterlogged punt and remarked that water-meadows were one of the features which would have to be part of heaven if I were to enjoy myself there.
“You’re sure you’re going there, then?” said Mary, laughing and taking my arm.
“I’ve never forgotten the spotted snakesheads—fritillaria meleagris to you—in the Iffley meadows when I was a child,” I said, “and the kingcups and yellow iris along the Stour and the Frome when I fished here in Dorset, and the ragged robin with its attendant swallow-tail butterflies on the Broads, and the purple loose-strife and meadowsweet and watermint by the Itchen.”
“So what plants are these growing in the punt? I had no idea you were a botanist,” said Mary.
“I’m not, but all fishermen notice water-plants and become, in spite of themselves, amateur naturalists. The plants in this conservancy of the punt, reading from left to right, are the tufted sedge, two up-and-coming osier willows, the bog-bean, whose roots were once used to make flour, the marsh cinquefoil (I think), the water bistort, and the arrowhead. The flowers of the arrowhead are unisexual, thus pre-dating modern trends by goodness knows how many centuries.”
“‘Oh, no man knows, Through what wild centuries roves back the rose,’” said Mary.
“Don’t steal Innes’s thunder,” I said. She released my arm and we stepped out briskly and joined him in the car.
“Mike has been giving me a botany lesson,” she said; and then, irrelevantly: “I wonder who lives in those houses overlooking the far end of the lake? They don’t look like villagers’ cottages, do they?” (There were three of them about fifty yards further on.)
“Probably bought up and done up by retired Londoners,” said Innes. “It goes on all the time and there’s a lot of feeling about it in some quarters. People cruise around in their cars, find a remote spot with a view, especially if there’s a stream front or back of the property or it’s near the sea or a lake, and snap it up, no matter how decrepit it is. Then they spend a lot of money on repairs and decoration and other amenities—not worrying if there’s cesspool drainage and no damp-course—and settle down to live happily ever after. In these days of motor cars it doesn’t matter how far you have to go to find a house and then do the kind of shopping to which you’ve become accustomed. Those would be the sort of people who would live in these three houses.”
“One of them is up for sale,” said Mary. “How about it, Mike?”
“Yes, if I didn’t have to live in London,” I said. The drive home was along narrow lanes, sometimes between high banks which, after the manner of railway cuttings, hid everything but themselves from view, sometimes through woods where the trees arched into a tunnel over the road, sometimes into open country with a view over miles of hills, valleys, and sky. I thought nostalgically of that mere-side house for sale and sighed.
We were invited to have drinks that evening with Martha Lorne. I had gathered already that she was one of those women who seem to collect all the local news by telepathy, but perhaps it came to her via the Women’s Institute, of which, it appeared, she was a prominent member. This time she was primed with information of an unusual and startling kind.
“Somebody has taken a pot-shot at the sheikh,” she said, “and from behind his own trees, too.”
“Thus adding insult to injury,” said Innes. “Was he injured?”
“No. He was with Mr. Winters and the shot went through Winters’s hat.”
“What was Winters doing at Bourne Farley?” asked Mary.
“The sheikh wants to buy Long Fallow to round out his stud farm,” Martha replied.
“But Long Fallow belongs to Farmer Breedy, I thought.”
“I know. The sheikh wants Winters to negotiate with Breedy, I suppose,” said Martha. “If anybody can push the deal through, Winters can, and then Mr. Okeford will see to the conveyancing, or whatever solicitors do.”
“It will need more than a smart negotiator to talk Amos Breedy into selling,” said Innes. “He’s a tough customer, I hear.”
“Oh, well, I don’t know about that. Money talks, and the sheikh can afford to buy anything he wants, however fancy the price,” argued the hostess.
“What do you know about Farmer Breedy?” Mary asked her husband.
“Nothing much,” Innes answered, “but a couple of chaps were talking in the shop when I went in to pay for the papers on Saturday morning, and the story came up then about the sheikh wanting to buy Long Fallow. These fellows were saying that the town and country planning lot would never let the sale go through. Long Fallow is agricultural land. It will never be leased merely as extra ground on which to exercise horses.”
“Perhaps Winters will plead that the sheikh wants to put it under oats to feed the horses,” said Martha. “Did you find Aries St. Peter and Lower Gushbrook quite easily?”
It was such an obvious change of subject that I was somewhat surprised.
“Thanks to your briefing of Mary, who insisted, most sensibly, upon taking the wheel, yes, we did,” I said. “Are you joining the procession on Sunday, Mrs. Lorne?”
“I don’t know yet. It all depends upon whether I get a lift. It is visiting a number of farms and there will be hymns and prayers and blessings at each one. I hate repetition. It’s so boring, so perhaps I won’t bother.”
“Then you have no use for the repetitive seasons of the year, the accidents we call birth and death, the recurrence of the festivals of Christmas and Easter, your birthday and your annual summer holiday and the punctual payment of pensions and dividends,” said Innes ironically. It was the first indication I had had that he disliked her. She laughed the recital off.
“Oh, that’s different,” she said. “Did you hear about the row at the W.I. meeting?”
“No,” said Mary, as nobody else appeared to be prepared to answer. “What was it about?”
“Guide dogs for the blind. Mrs. Cassett proposed that the dog which was allotted to poor Miss Crippins, who passed away last week, should be mated and the puppies trained to take the mother dog’s place.”
“Not a bad idea,” said Innes. “Given five pups and Mendel’s theory, two will be useful, two impossible to train, and one very dangerous.”
“That isn’t Mendel’s theory,” said Mary.
“I know. It ought to be six pups, not five. Think of the young lady called Starkey.”
“Why should I?” asked Mrs. Lorne. “I’ve never heard of her.”
“She had an affair with a darkie,” said Innes. “Fear of the Race Relations people warns me to say no more.”
“Oh, it’s a limerick!” said Martha. “One evening we’ll have a limericks versus limericks competition at the W.I., the most outrageous to win the jackpot.”
I laughed.
“Your evening would be as blue as the booze-up after the last match of a season of Coarse Rugby, Mrs. Lorne,” I said. “I wouldn’t risk it, if I were you.”
“No, indeed,” said Innes. “Limericks, Martha, are like the poet’s story of Deirdre. They are for men and, after them, their sons and their sons’ sons. A good dirty limerick is wasted on women.”
“Oh, you and your quotations!” she said. “Don’t you ever say anything unless it’s in inverted commas?”
“Who’s half-quoting now?” retorted Innes. “But I can cap it. ‘Sometimes I say good-bye.’ It’s time we went home.”
“Where does my half-quotation come from? I don’t recognise it,” she said, looking pleased with herself nevertheless.
“A.A. Milne, Act One, Make-Believe. The princess says, ‘Don’t you ever say anything except good morning?’”
“Oh, I’m a princess, am I?”
“All women are princesses,” said Innes, making her a polite but ironical bow.
“Why don’t you like Mrs. Lorne?” I asked, as we walked home. Martha’s house was in a side street by the little river which flowed past her front garden just before it veered away from the town. As the evening was fine, we had not bothered to get the car out.
“I’ve a feeling she’s a bit of a snooper. She told us that she has keys to most of the houses around here so that she can get in and feed their pets and generally keep an eye on things when people are on holiday, but I wouldn’t let Mary give her ours. I’ve a feeling that, in spite of her helpfulness and general appearance of goodwill, she’s a very dangerous person and doesn’t even know that she is,” he answered. “I don’t suppose the poison ivy knows that it’s poisonous, but the fact remains. We didn’t really need her help when we moved in, but she’s as clever as the tradespeople in spotting newcomers and calling on them. I have a suspicion that Martha Lorne is going to cause a lot of trouble some day.”
“Because she collects information and then gossips about it?”
“I don’t know. Still, so far as Mary and I are concerned, there’s no information to be collected in the sense that gossip could harm us.”
“Of course it couldn’t,” said Mary. “All the same, I wish we could rid ourselves of Martha. Our other friends don’t like her—”
“I don’t like her,” said Innes.
“But, after all, she’s a widow and one doesn’t want to be unkind.”
“You’re too thoughtful about other people,” I said. “All the same, from my own point of view, I’m very glad you are.”
“Oh, you’re different,” she said. “We love you, Mike.”
“Speak for yourself—or, rather, don’t,” said Innes, “unless you want to put an end to a feast of brotherly love.”
He spoke lightly, but I knew we were on slightly unsafe ground, so I returned to the subject of Mrs. Lorne.
“Why don’t you and your friends like Martha?” I asked.
“She isn’t our sort, that’s all. But, as Mary indicated, she’s the sort of clinging burr that it’s very difficult to remove. She cottoned on to us almost as soon as we moved in and we don’t know how to dislodge her.”
Innes and I helped with the dinner when we got home and at eleven o’clock we sent Mary to bed while we did the washing-up.
“Talking of Martha Lorne,” said Innes.
“Yes?”
“You know what my job was, Mike.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Well, although I was a journalist, not a vet, I had quite a lot to do with animals. They can’t talk in our language, but they have a marvellous talent for communicating their emotions and their needs.”
“One communicated with me, I remember, by biting a chunk out of my trousers,” I said, recalling a catch-as-catch-can session with a friend’s half-grown but only half-trained and extremely boisterous Alsatian.
“I’m serious, Mike. I developed an extra sense which men (I exclude women) don’t normally possess. I can smell evil, just as I’m convinced that animals can smell the abattoir long before they get to it.”
I became uneasy. Although our surname, Lockerbie, comes from a place in the Lowlands, Innes and I have Highland blood, and I did not like his air of prophecy. Mary came down in her dressing-gown just as Innes dropped a plate.
“I knew we ought to have left the washing-up until the morning,” she said. “What are you two hatching?”
“Gunpowder Plot,” I said.
“Do you really think somebody shot at old Bluebeard?” she asked. Innes answered, as he stooped to pick up the pieces of the plate he had dropped,
“No, I think the shot was meant for Winters. Nobody who shot at the sheikh could possibly miss. There’s so much of him. Pity the marksman didn’t aim a bit lower. Winters is a nasty job of work. The world would be cleaner without him.”
“But who fired the shot?” I enquired.
“I wouldn’t put it past Breedy,” said Innes. “I wonder when it happened?”
“Not longer ago than this morning, otherwise Martha would have told us before,” said Mary. “It certainly hadn’t happened when I asked her for directions to Lower Gushbrook. She would have been bound to mention it.”
“What about this chap Winters?” I enquired.
“Aged about forty-five and definitely a bad egg. Call him the local con-man and you wouldn’t be far wrong,” said Innes. “He doesn’t belong in these parts. Hiding from his London creditors, I wouldn’t wonder.”
CHAPTER 3
CRIME WAVE
On the following morning the post brought an urgent plea to Innes to contribute a leading article to his old journal. The editor was ill and the sub-editor felt that Innes was the best man to come to the aid of the party. I knew that Innes’s leading articles, always thoughtful and informative and spiced with wit, had been a main feature of the journal, so when, apologetically, he said he was afraid he would have to spend the morning working, I said that I quite understood and would leave him to it. I lifted an eyebrow as I looked at Mary, but she shook her head.
“Sorry, Mike, but I’ll be needed to look up his references, I expect. Mrs. Platt will be in to do up the place and I’ll tell her to cook you some lunch, so you won’t go hungry. We shan’t bother, except for having a snack.”
“I’ll take a walk and get lunch out,” I said. The idea of spending the morning with Mrs. Platt and a vacuum cleaner, the noise of which I find almost intolerable, and of having her cook for me alone (a matter I felt sure a sensitive charwoman would regard as victimisation or, in her parlance, a put-upon) had so little appeal that my reaction was automatic.
Mary looked relieved, I thought, so, apart from my own feelings, apparently I had taken a popular decision. As soon as breakfast was over and the washing-up left for Mrs. Platt to deal with, Innes and Mary went upstairs to the library, and I picked up my ashplant and walked downhill towards the centre of the town.
When I reached the market place I turned down Church Lane, but soon after I had passed the church the road mounted, so instead of climbing the hill I turned on to a footpath which went alongside the little river.
The morning, chilly at that time of year, was fine. I soon began to enjoy my walk—I have always, even when my wife was alive, been fond of my own company and glad to indulge my own thoughts without the necessity of sharing them or of having them interrupted. The little river, which ran fairly swiftly here, for it was still close to its parent source in the hills, was company enough, and the kind of company which suited me best when I was out in the country.
I met nobody until I came to an unfenced bridge not more than three planks wide, which spanned the river and appeared to offer access to some woods on the other side. Standing in the middle of the bridge and looking down at the water was a swarthy young man wearing good tweeds and a bright yellow polo-necked sweater.
As I could see that there was no room to pass him on the bridge, I said, as a hint to him to move onwards or to come off the bridge on my side:
