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  ‘Well, we was on the drom, on the road, long afore that.’

  Was he telling the truth? Would he admit what he’d seen to the Wentworths? ‘Will you swear to this?’

  And what good would it do, he thought in the same instant – the word of a Gypsy? Daniel Boswell could stand up in a court of law and swear with his hand on the Bible and wouldn’t necessarily be believed. Liars, thieves and vagabonds to a man, they were, to everyone. No doubt they had their own code of honour, but if so, it wasn’t one most people recognised. The Gypsy knew this as well as he did. He looked at Reardon steadily and said nothing.

  There was the possibility that he was lying, of course, but Reardon’s instinct told him that in this instance he was telling the truth – as far as it went. He had nothing to gain by lying. But although he’d denied knowing who the second individual speaking to Marianne had been, Reardon was certain he did know…and equally sure he would only get it out of him if he wished. He held out his hand to the boy. ‘Thank you for talking to me.’

  Daniel looked uncomfortable as he stood up, nodded, but did not take Reardon’s hand. Then he turned and melted into the bushes.

  It looked as though Steven Rafferty had been right. Greville Foley and Marianne had indeed said their goodbyes at the lakeside before he had rushed off to enlist. But who was the other person Daniel had seen? The Austrian, Rupert von Kessel? Neither Foley nor von Kessel was here to tell the tale. One was dead and the other…who knew what had happened to him?

  But…why should whatever had passed between Marianne and that other person, whoever it was the Gypsy claimed he had seen, have made her run headlong onto a jetty she knew to be unsafe, other than with the intention of throwing herself off it? Only the rotten boards under her running feet had saved her from suicide, technically speaking. Marianne Wentworth’s death had, in the strict sense of the word, been an accident. It was what her family wanted to hear. It was, however, only a half-truth, when there was still no explanation, as far as Reardon could see, as to why she might well have wanted to kill herself. Daniel Boswell had seen her and Greville Foley kissing. Had she thrown herself into the lake in despair at his decision to enlist? He shook his head. She may have seen herself as the heroine of a romantic story, as Mrs Rafferty had suggested, but modern young women were tougher than that.

  There was no excuse for him to stay here in Broughton Underhill any longer. With no evidence to the contrary, what he had feared had turned out to have no basis in fact. No one had been involved in Marianne Wentworth’s drowning except herself – or only insofar as they’d contributed to her state of mind. The outcome as far as he was concerned was unsatisfactory, there were still flaws. But he had pushed his self-appointed questioning here – and his luck with authority – to it limits and the best he could do was to leave it at that; let the Wentworths go on regarding it as an accident, if that was what they wished. They might even come to believe it in time.

  Part Two

  End of March 1919

  Chapter Nineteen

  The crow’s morning flight takes him towards the village again, away from Oaklands Park and across its lake. It is a sharp, bright, chancy morning, he has a strong wind behind him, and the sun is dancing on the water, except where the dense pines throw deep shadows across the far end. Nothing appears to be unusual, bar the activity going on at the point where the path from the big house joins the one from the village at the lakeside. There, a small crowd of men – policemen, and a doctor – is milling around a young woman lying on the bank. Pulled out of the water. Drowned. It appears that the lake has claimed another victim.

  But no, this woman hasn’t drowned, although she is very wet and is indubitably dead. Again, the body has been found by the gamekeeper, Ben Naylor, who is sitting miserably on an outcrop of rock near the edge of the lake, his head in his hands. Coincidence, or something more sinister?

  The crow flies on, neither knowing, nor caring.

  ‘Do we know who she is?’ Reardon asked.

  Ted Bracey mopped his brow and ran a finger round the inside of his tunic collar. His best uniform, donned in deference to the seriousness of the incident, seemed to have grown uncomfortably tight since he’d last worn it. More than that, he’d had to bicycle along here from the police house; exercise like that could kill a man of his age, on top of a heavy breakfast. ‘She’s Lady Sybil’s maid, Edith Huckaby. He’ll tell you about her,’ he added, with a jerk of his head and a sideways glance that fell just short of a meaningful wink towards Naylor.

  She was young. Mid twenties, perhaps. Slim and with a quantity of glossy black hair. Whether she had been pretty or not was open to question: being bludgeoned to death did not leave a corpse looking at its best. Her clothes were good. She was, in fact, extremely well dressed, in an elegant costume too fine, one would have thought, for a lady’s maid, or for rough walking through the woods, for that matter: a well-tailored, double-breasted coat and skirt, in a fine, fawn wool cloth, unsuitable shoes and a saucy hat – a taupe-coloured ruched velvet toque trimmed with a veil and a bunch of velvet Parma violets, which had presumably fallen off when she had been struck on the head, it lay wet and ruined next to the little fox fur the doctor had removed. A poor thing that looked, too, bedraggled with the heavy rain which had fallen during the night, and stiff with blood.

  It was a lovely, though lonely spot. Why had she come down here? Possibly twelve or fourteen hours or so since, according to the doctor, which made it roughly between seven and nine o’clock the previous night when she’d met her death. A cold, dark, and wet night it had been, too.

  ‘No umbrella?’ Reardon looked around but couldn’t see one.

  ‘Wouldn’t have been much use, in a wind like that. Got up summat desperate in the night, it did,’ Bracey replied. ‘Heard it did a lot of damage.’ There was plenty evidence of this in the debris of torn-off branches, leaves and twigs everywhere littering the ground. March was roaring itself out, the cold, still start to the month having given way to milder but rougher weather.

  The doctor gently unpinned and handed to Reardon the brooch which had fastened the high-boned collar at the neck of the victim’s blood-soaked georgette blouse, a gold heart shape with the letters MIZPAH set diagonally across it. Jewellery like that had been very popular during the war, the letters a Biblical reference which apparently signified: ‘May the Lord watch between thee and me when we are absent one from another.’ She wasn’t married, or at any rate wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. Perhaps the brooch had been a token given to her by a soldier sweetheart who had never returned.

  ‘Well, that’s it.’ The doctor gently straightened her clothes at last, making her decent again after satisfying himself that there were no obvious signs of sexual assault. Her underwear was fine white lawn, delicately trimmed with ecru lace. ‘No other injuries. It looks as though only one blow was sufficient to kill her, with some sort of heavy, blunt weapon, I should say.’ He pointed to the single wound on the temple, above the right ear, the skin and the skull beneath cracked like the shell of a boiled egg, with pieces of splintered bone protruding through the clotted blood and tissue. ‘She probably didn’t see it coming and fell to the ground immediately. There don’t seem to be any indications she tried to ward off the attack…You’ll need confirmation of all this, of course, it’s not my field of expertise.’ The doctor was the medical officer in charge of the convalescent soldiers at Oaklands Park, a Scot who’d introduced himself as Geddes.

  ‘The pathologist will examine her, naturally,’ Reardon replied. ‘We just required immediate certification of death, and since the local doctor’s away, and there was a hospital with doctors handy…You know how it is, red tape and all that.’ Even when the body lying between them was as unmistakably lifeless as this one was, officialdom demanded medical confirmation.

  The doctor nodded absently, looking down at the young woman. ‘Unlucky place, this…another life…God, what a hideous waste it all is.’ They fell momentarily silent. Doctor on the front
line, Reardon had thought straight away, as soon as they’d met; responding to an emergency without question. A quick, professional glance at his own face, a nod to one he recognised as a comrade, and then down to the business in hand. Without words, even without the evidence of Reardon’s scars, the two men had known that instant empathy which linked all those who had fought at the front, perhaps always would. They were both familiar with death in most of its forms, but Reardon knew what the doctor had meant: was any death less than hideous? Especially when it robbed a young person of all the life they had before them.

  ‘Well, then, Inspector,’ Geddes went on, standing up, the knees of his trousers wet through from kneeling on the drenched grass. ‘Now that I’ve certified she’s dead, poor woman, and if there’s nothing else I can do…?’

  ‘Thank you, doctor. Much obliged for your help.’

  At that moment a constable came to tell them that the ambulance had arrived and was parked as near to the lakeside as they could get it. Hats and helmets were removed, Naylor rose from his seat on the rock, and they all stood silently until the body was placed on a stretcher, carried up the slope and away. Reardon replaced his hat, Geddes picked up the bag he’d brought with him and held out his hand. Reardon shook it and watched him go, with interest, wondering how he could have known about that other death at the lake.

  He put into an envelope the brooch and a pretty little red-stoned ring he’d taken from the victim’s finger after her soft, grey suede gloves had been removed, and looked for the sergeant, but he was busy directing the search of the area in the hope of finding the weapon, which could have been anything at this juncture – a heavy piece of broken branch, of which there were plenty lying around, a rock, even – though recognising either would be a hopeless task. Anything bloodstained would have been washed clean by the torrents of rain that had come down during the night. Reardon beckoned a young constable and passed him the envelope. ‘Effects of the deceased. Give this to Sergeant Wheelan when he has a minute, will you, Spooner? We need to get them valued.’ The ‘gold’ of the brooch was almost certainly pinchbeck, and maybe the red stone was just glass, but he didn’t think so. He turned once more to PC Bracey.

  ‘What about the gamekeeper?’

  ‘Ben Naylor? Lives in that cottage up there.’ He pointed to a building just beyond the fork of the path. Bracey was readier with his answers than he had been on their first encounter, now that Reardon was here officially. ‘Keeper at Oaklands, man and boy, his father afore him. He’s not a bad sort, on the whole. Bit of a sobersides, keeps hisself to hisself, and walks five miles to Lower Broughton every Sunday to the Methodies, and five back. Mind you…’ Again that same knowing glance, another shrug.

  ‘Wait for me, will you?’ Reardon left Bracey and walked over to the gamekeeper, who had resumed his position on the rock, still holding his cap between his hands, staring at the ground. His dog was sitting in uneasy obedience by his side, a black and white collie bitch with yellow eyes which had slid back and forth all the time from the body while it was fifteen yards away and who was still making low, whimpering noises from the back of her throat.

  ‘Mr Naylor.’

  ‘Yes?’ Naylor sat up. He was older than Reardon expected. Older than Edith Huckaby by perhaps twenty years or more, but big and strongly built, with a head of springing curls flecked with grey. Grey-faced too, now, under his outdoor tan, unsmiling. As he would be, in view of what he’d discovered. A potent reminder of that other morning, when he and his dog had set out on their routine inspection walk of the grounds, the dog had sniffed around, plunged into the lake and commenced tugging at the body of Marianne Wentworth, caught under the wreckage of the jetty by her skirts. Reardon hadn’t met Naylor before. It hadn’t been down to him to interview him at the time of Marianne’s death and he hadn’t got around to speaking with him before he’d left Broughton Underhill, a couple of weeks ago.

  The last thing he had expected was to be back in the village so soon after leaving it, as he’d thought, for good. It was uncanny, the way this case had come up, just after he had started back with the police. Edith Huckaby. The young woman who had shared Marianne Wenthworth’s passion for books. He experienced the same, almost superstitious tingle down his spine as he had when the first news of this case had broken.

  He had, contrary to his expectations, been welcomed back into his old division at Dudley, if not with open arms, then at least with an encouraging acceptance. Never having actually resigned from the police when he joined the army, it turned out that they were prepared to let him take up again as inspector – acting inspector – until (or if ever) the rank he had previously been recommended for, unknown as it had been to him at the time, should be confirmed. He could not quite believe his luck, but he was after all experienced, and his records, both with the police and the army, were excellent, they said. He knew a more likely reason was that they were still seriously short-handed, as they had been throughout the war, and with the same unrest over poor pay conditions that was fermenting in the police all over the country, the prospects of finding men – or at any rate, the right kind of men – to fill the spaces left vacant by those trained officers who had given their lives in the service of their country were not good. His old superior, Superintendent Gifford, had of course retired – without too many tears being shed by anyone – and the man who had replaced him was new to Reardon, but below him was a man called Kelly, whom he liked and respected, and who had been promoted to chief inspector.

  Chief Inspector Kelly was a big, untidy man of Irish descent, with a roughly hewn face and a pugnacious chin. Permanently overworked during the war, the heavy responsibilities he’d taken on had grizzled the wiry dark hair at his temples and added lines to his already craggy face, making him seem older than he was. ‘You didn’t enlist with the RMP, Reardon,’ he had said. ‘Why not?’

  Reardon shrugged. He had never been sorry that he hadn’t volunteered to join the military police. Doing so might have saved him from the front line, but general keeping-of-the-peace duties or controlling ambulance convoys hadn’t seemed very heroic, nor would he have had any stomach for rounding up the drunk-and-disorderlies, men who, after all, only sought a few hours’ alcoholic oblivion from the nightmare of the trenches; still less for patrolling the lines to catch deserters, often terrified young lads of no more than fifteen or sixteen, who’d lied about their age to get into the army and ended up crying their eyes out and wishing with all their hearts they’d never left their mothers, poor little devils.

  ‘Wasn’t sure I’d ever return to the police, sir.’

  ‘It might have been better for your prospects if you had served with the Redcaps. Still, it might be overlooked…’ Kelly smiled slightly. It was not the first broad hint he’d dropped, and it reinforced what Henry Paskin had said. Reardon grinned sardonically. Don’t count chickens, Reardon, the mills of the police, like those of God, grind slow. What was of more immediate satisfaction to him was the fact that he had not been returned to the uniformed branch, as he had feared, but reinstated as a plain-clothes detective once more.

  Meanwhile, he suspected they hadn’t quite worked out what to do with him yet, and that was why, when this case had been reported, Kelly had decided to send him here.

  ‘Broughton Underhill, where’s that? Aside from being at the back of nowhere? Weren’t you on that case there with old Paskin at the beginning of the war – the one where the girl was found drowned?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘Right, then. Since you’re no stranger to the place, you might as well get yourself over there and start on the spade work. I’m due in court for most of today, and maybe tomorrow as well.’ He jabbed his pencil into the blotter on his desk several times, then he said, ‘Look here, I’m going to go out on a limb with this, Reardon, and assign this case to you. I’ll still be in overall charge, but I’m snowed under at the moment – fact is, my family hardly remembers they have a husband and father – so it’s up to you, as long as you keep
me informed. It’s not far to come back now and again on that motorbike of yours, though you’d better find yourself some lodging there till the business is finished.’ He added that he would spare as many constables as he could to get the enquiry under way, after which Reardon and a sergeant would be on their own, with any assistance they could manage to get from Bracey. ‘I’m sending Sergeant Wheelan with you.’

  That was a bonus, a gesture from Kelly that Reardon really appreciated. He knew Wheelan well – or Wheely, as he was known to all. He was another, like himself, who’d worked with Paskin, and had an accent nearly, if not quite, as thick. A patient, middle-aged man with a wealth of constabulary experience and local knowledge behind him, comfortable with his rank as a sergeant and unambitious to go further, he was as solid as the Rock of Gibraltar, and almost as big. Next to Wheelan and his experience, Reardon knew he was still a babe in arms. Although he might be regarded as having the imagination, far-sightedness and ambition the sergeant lacked, Wheelan had a comfortableness and a sturdy common sense that was equal to any amount of what Paskin had called ‘fancy ideas’. He was already supervising a detailed and well-organised search of the area. Reardon left him to it and walked towards Naylor.

  It still tugged at his conscience, the ‘coincidence’ of another dead woman being found here. Could he afford to disregard the implications of this body being found, just after he had started up enquiries again about the death of the first? He wasn’t sure how that made him feel about himself, but he knew that he must not let past events, his own feelings about the Marianne Wentworth affair, cloud his judgement. Yet…if it was true that the past always had a bearing on the present, could Edith Huckaby, who had known Marianne, have been murdered because she was somehow connected with her death? He reined in his imagination. There was some way to go yet before that could be assumed. However important Marianne’s drowning had become to him, in some undefined and unasked-for way, it was the present case which mattered. Who had killed Edith Huckaby, and why?