Shadows & Lies Page 8

  “What was the woman doing up here in the first place?” Henry said brusquely, confirming Seton’s belief. “Getting herself killed, what’s more?”

  Detective Chief Inspector Crockett, from Scotland Yard, arrived at Wolverhampton High Level station the morning of the following day, which he considered nothing less than miraculous in the light of the short time he’d had to prepare himself. It had been an annoyance hard to swallow when the summons had come from Shropshire. He’d had to make hasty arrangements for someone else to take over the case he’d been engaged on for the last six weeks, and was just nearing completion, but he wasn’t anxious to displease the Assistant Commissioner, who had stressed the importance of an immediate response. Moreover, the Chief Constable in Shrewsbury had said he wanted the best man available, and Crockett couldn’t deny he was that man, and that his superiors had agreed enough with his estimation to send him.

  He had been advised to take a train to Wolverhampton, where someone would be waiting with some form of transport for the rest of the journey, rather than take the other line to Bridgnorth with the number of changes which would be necessary. Quicker this way, perhaps, he told himself, but hardly could it have been less unpleasant. For the last half hour or so, the train had been thundering through a dismal landscape of factories, filthy canals and chimney stacks belching forth black smoke. Out of the carriage windows for mile upon mile he’d been regaled with the spectacle of chain-making shops, foundries and heavy metal works wedged huggermugger in between narrow streets of terraced red brick houses. He’d caught glimpses of fiery infernos through the open doors of great sheds, peopled with teams of men sweating at the forges and furnaces. “Like the god Vulcan and his myrmidons,” had murmured the talkative old gentleman who was his companion in the compartment, to an uncomprehending Crockett: there was nothing godlike about the scene to him, as the train roared on and the clang of metal and the screech of grinding machinery sounded even above the noise of the carriage wheels. The roar of industry, the heart of England – ye Gods, no wonder they called it the Black Country!

  Never mind, he told himself, it should prove an incentive for him to crack the case as soon as possible so that he could get back to the Smoke – which he’d once believed to be the dirtiest place on God’s earth. And well it might be, but at least it was civilised.

  Inspector Daffyd Meredith was there on the platform to meet him. They exchanged a brief handshake on introducing themselves, but Crockett said nothing more, just gave Meredith a curt, unpromising nod. Meredith showed no indication that he’d expected anything else, and led the way out.

  As they emerged from the station, the London man coughed ostentatiously, looking around with unconcealed distaste at the pall of smoke and grime hanging over the town. He was somewhat mollified to see a gleaming motorcar waiting for them, impressed despite himself. Even the Metropolitan police were still making do with bicycles and public transport. He was beginning to feel quite affable by the time they were seated in the red leather interior behind the driver, with the hood thrown back to the bright sunny day and the town left behind.

  Meredith had decided that the journey from Wolverhampton to Belmonde would provide the opportunity, not only to give the London detective the facts of the situation, but also for them to get each other’s measure, and he was rather glad, in view of Chief Inspector Crockett’s demeanour so far, that he’d asked for a motor rather than a pony and trap – and that he’d chosen to meet the detective personally. His wife was always telling him not to judge a person’s character by their taste in clothes: she liked a man to be as smart and up-to-date as his circumstances would allow, whereas Meredith tended to feel that any red-blooded male who showed too much interest in how he dressed wasn’t to be trusted. He therefore held his peace for the time being and tried not to look too obviously sideways at Crockett.

  A bit of a dandy, this DCI had turned out to be – a check suit and a well-brushed brown bowler, grey suede spats and a silk handkerchief in his top pocket, at the moment being employed to flick away imaginary smuts from the pristine cuffs of his immaculate shirt and – God save us! – a pink carnation in his buttonhole. Meredith couldn’t resist an inward chuckle – he hoped that in the large travelling bag he’d offered to carry for the detective were a pair of stout boots, at least. Prancing about the woods at Belmonde wouldn’t do his spats or his shiny shoes much good. Some sort of waterproof could doubtless be found for him, if necessary, but a man’s boots needed to fit his own feet. He might have been surprised had he seen Crockett, who liked to think of himself as a master of disguise, dressed up when necessary with a beard and a spotted handkerchief around his neck, his hands filthy and thick grime under his nails.

  But as their journey proceeded, Meredith saw that Crockett might do, after all, for within a mile or so of the big town, the scenery had improved, and with it his temper. As they bowled along from Staffordshire and into Shropshire, through villages and leafy lanes, with wooded hills rising in the distance, Crockett almost visibly thawed. He began to speak of the case, and to ask for the facts.

  “So she was from London, then, the victim?”

  “Well,” Meredith replied in his considering way, “we know she came on the train from London. But whether she lived there, of course, is a different matter.” He went on to say that, unlike Crockett himself, she had chosen to arrive at Bridgnorth. Passengers arriving there with a London ticket were few and far between, and a woman answering her description had been remembered by the ticket collector. She’d made enquiries as to what means she should employ to get to Belmonde village, and had been directed towards the local carrier, who was picking up deliveries of goods which had been brought in the guard’s van of the very same train she had arrived on. The carrier, Timothy Childe, had been spoken to and said he’d dropped her off at the gates of the Abbey. He also said she’d had some sort of fancy way of talking when she asked him for the ride – London or some such, he couldn’t rightly say- at any rate it wasn’t Welsh, that being the only foreign accent he’d have recognised. By that criterion, both detectives were ‘foreigners’.

  Apparently, Childe had claimed he and his passenger had no more conversation after that; Constable Simmonds had added that this was very likely the truth. Unless he’d completely broken with the tradition of a lifetime, Childe would have been, if not actually drunk, at least well away by that time in the afternoon. His horse knew its own way home, and he usually slept with the reins slack in his hands, in the way of carters the world over. He’d reckoned the lady had paid him a shilling, but couldn’ t recall whether she’d taken it from a purse or handbag, or simply from her pocket. She certainly didn’t have any baskets or bundles with her. “So, she’s a complete mystery,” finished Meredith.

  “I suppose you know,” said Crockett, after a pause, “that Mr Montague Chetwynd, MP is the brother of your Sir Henry Chetwynd?”

  Meredith inclined his head. “That’s so. And he was staying at Belmonde last night.”

  “Was he, by Jupiter?”

  Crockett said no more, for they were now approaching Bridgnorth, which looked worth more than a second glance. He’d felt a great pity as he’d passed through the Black Country for all the people who were forced by circumstances to live there, and was pleasantly surprised to find something far different here. The picturesque little town rose high above the Severn on sandstone cliffs, tier upon tier, so steeply that access to the High Town, Meredith informed him, was only by way of a punishingly steep and tortuous road, or by several equally demanding sets of steps which had been carved over the years into the soft red sandstone – or nowadays by the new cliff railway, of which the inhabitants were very proud. “Won’t need to bother about that, though, Mr Crockett, you’ll be served very well at the Falcon in the Low Town where we’ve put you up.”

  Crockett nodded and instantly resumed the conversation where he’d left off, before they should be interrupted by arrival at the inn, where they must stop to leave his bag. “You’l
l be aware also, I suppose, that Mr Montague Chetwynd is one of those in the Houses of Parliament who is strong against these viragos who are clamouring for the vote?”

  “Thinking of that speech of his in the Commons last month?”

  Meredith’s response showed that he’d got there before him; he wasn’t such a bumpkin as he’d at first seemed to Crockett, misled by his slow speech and deliberate responses, and accustomed as he was to the Cockney sharpness of his underlings, and the general pace of things at Scotland Yard. “Yes. We have been wondering if the victim might have been one of them …had she known he was to be there.” He added drily, “Up to all sorts of mischief, these women in London, we hear – though of course, we’re not of enough importance here to attract that sort of attention.”

  Crockett saw that Meredith’s tongue was firmly in his cheek, and warmed further to him. He appreciated a man with a sense of irony. And he had to allow that it was, so far, the only explanation which seemed to fit: that the victim could be one of these so called suffragettes, who would go to any length to publicise their cause; who actually seemed to relish imprisonment. Crockett sighed. He definitely did not want this case to have anything to do with these pesky females, who unfortunately included in their number a certain young lady who had declined as yet to become Mrs Crockett in favour of casting in her lot with them, and for whom he had a very soft spot. In his opinion the Prime Minister, Mr Asquith, had got it right when he refused to listen to them. But even if this woman had been a suffragette, the most rabid anti-franchiser could scarcely have thought that grounds enough to kill her?

  Come to that, it didn’t sound, from what Meredith had told him, as though Jordan, the gamekeeper, the one who claimed he’d found her and was therefore the prime suspect, had a motive, either. Or indeed anyone else who had been at Belmonde that night, though he would reserve judgement on that point until he’d interviewed all of them himself.

  “The question is, of course, if she was a suffragette and came here with some deliberately evil intention, would she have been alone?” asked Meredith.

  “That’s unusual, I’ll admit, they normally work in pairs at least, but perhaps she was just spying out the lie of the land.” Or just out to perpetrate one of their usual tricks: throwing through a window a brick wrapped in a paper with ‘Votes for Women!’ written on it? “They’re up to anything, you know.” His sigh was fetched up from the bottom of his heart. Only a couple of weeks ago, his Agnes had been involved with heckling ministers arriving for a meeting at Westminster, and been dragged away by the heels, taken to Bow Street and had been lucky to be charged only with breaching the peace. Sweet Agnes – who until now had spent her life peaceably looking after her father – Agnes, with her peaches and cream complexion, her lovely golden hair, and the lightest hand with a sponge-cake than anyone else he knew. It was unbelievable, the people this dratted cause was drawing in. “Who ever would have dreamt these ideas have been going on for years at the back of so many decent women’s minds?” he asked with another deep sigh.

  “Don’t know about that,” said Meredith. “Put there, more like. By that Mrs Pankhurst and her brood. Nothing they’re not up to.” Mrs Pankhurt’s daughter Christabel had actually had the effrontery to subpoena Lloyd George – the Chancellor of the Exchequer, no less – the Welsh Wizard, on some trumped up charge. That had really shocked Meredith. What was the world coming to? But he was for some reason unhappy with the suffragette theory about this murder, and he went on to explain why. Those clothes of hers, for one thing, had shown that the victim was unlikely to have been a woman of means – unless she’d been down on her luck — which in itself went against her being a suffragette, who were invariably ladies, recruited from the upper or middle classes. The rest, though perhaps more in need of suffrage, were normally too busy looking after their families or earning a living to have the time or the means to indulge themselves in such a way.

  Meredith, working as a quiet country policeman, hadn’t come across much in the way of murder during his career, but when he had, the explanation for it had usually been much simpler – a fit of jealous rage by a husband, drunkenness, a fight gone wrong. In this case, the motive might just turn out to be the simple theft of the victim’s handbag. Maybe. The larger question of why she’d been killed and dumped in the stream remained.

  “So she never reached the house, if that was her purpose,” he said, “and if young Mr Chetwynd is to be believed, she was last seen at just before half past three – and found dead at ten o’clock the next morning. The doctor wouldn’t commit himself to saying anything any more than that she had been dead for probably fifteen to eighteen hours, according to the state of rigor the body was in.”

  “Then it’s the hours between three-thirty and about seven o’clock we’re concerned with. Narrows the possibilities.”

  “Probably nearer three-thirty than seven, unless she was wandering around the woods in the rain for three or four hours. The servants say no one called at the house all day.”

  “Hmm. I’d like to go and see them all at the big house for myself, before I do anything else. Just a matter of satisfying myself,” Crockett added pacifically. “Tell me what’s been done so far.”

  He immediately appreciated the difficulties Meredith had outlined when it came to interviewing the Chetwynd family. It wasn’ t only that they were local gentry, though this did make things delicate. No treading on toes, here, or the Chief Constable could descend like a ton of bricks on the Assistant Commissioner in London, with a consequent domino effect, ending up with Crockett at the bottom of the pile. No, it was more a matter of the Chetwynds themselves, who presented what appeared to be an unassailable front and made it clear they didn’t see what they had to do with the matter.

  He was given a small room in which to do his interviews with the servants, but afterwards, when he asked to speak to Lady Chetwynd, was summoned into her presence. Whether this was a policy of intimidation or not, Crockett wasn’t sure, but to a certain extent, it succeeded, despite his own opinion that he was well able to be at ease anywhere, and with anyone.

  For one thing, it was not only Lady Chetwynd herself, smiling and gracious, but somehow aloof, beautifully dressed in a high-necked blouse of violet colour, her dark hair puffed out in a fashionably wide style, but also the pastel-coloured room which put him at a disadvantage. Opulently luxurious, feminine, smelling of flowers. Even in his best suit and his spats, with his patent leather shoes gleaming and fresh pomade on his hair, he felt as out of place as a Pearly King at a funeral, as gauche as he had when he’d done his first interview as a young constable. Moreover, the room was too hot. He had to resist the urge to run a finger inside his collar.

  For another, Lady Chetwynd sat at the piano all the time, with the chair he had been offered some distance away and at right angles to it. The lid of the piano was up and the fingertips of one hand rested on the framework of the keyboard, while the other hand remained in her lap. The position gave him the disconcerting impression she was only waiting for him to leave before she could carry on playing – or that, indeed, she might start at any moment. It was difficult for him to determine her expression except when she chose to turn her head to face him. A charming profile, but profiles didn’t give much away. Not that Adele Chetwynd had anything to conceal, or so it appeared. She had been a little ill lately, she confessed, and had spent most of the previous day in her room. Later, she had been with the family at tea and, except when she was changing for dinner, in their company for the rest of the evening, she told him in a very English drawl which yet had a faint overtone that told him she might have come from across the Atlantic.

  “It’s all too simply dreadful, of course, though what in the world all this has to do with any of us, I simply cannot imagine. I realise we’re obliged to answer your questions, and if it leads to finding who killed this woman, I for one am only too pleased to do so …but what do you suppose this woman could have been doing, wandering around our woods?”

>   She sounded very relaxed, but he noticed the quick rise and fall of her breast, the way her breath caught a little as she spoke, making him wonder if she had difficulty with her breathing. Just at that moment, the door was opened and Lady Emily stood in the aperture. Her daughter-in-law started, and her hand moved in an involuntary gesture on the keys, striking a discordant note.

  “My dear Adèle – you’re a bundle of nerves. Have they told you the police are here?”

  Lady Chetwynd smiled, her composure quite restored. “Bellemère, this is Inspector Crockett, of Scotland Yard. My husband’s mother, Lady Emily Chetwynd.”

  Chief Inspector, thought Crockett, rising to his feet. He didn’ t correct the mistake.

  The dowager was what he thought of as a grand old dame. Her be-ringed hands rested on the silver knob of an ebony cane, but she had the upright posture all Victorian young ladies learned in the schoolroom to see them through life, and an imperious lift of the head. “What’s all this nonsense about Tom Jordan?” she asked, eyeing Crockett, choosing an upright chair for herself and motioning him peremptorily to resume his seat.

  “I wish we could say it was nonsense, but we don’t know yet.”

  Unexpectedly, she smiled. She had been a beauty, in her day, he saw, and then thought, she still is. Her eyes were perhaps a little faded, a forget-me-not blue rather than the sapphire they had probably once been. Her face was wrinkled, but that slightly crooked smile was irresistible, the sort that may have once driven many a rejected young man into contemplating suicide. Crockett was under her spell in less than a couple of minutes.

  She said forthrightly, “Tom Jordan’s a hothead, always was, but if you imagine he would strangle anyone with a silk scarf, you’re wrong. I doubt whether he’s ever seen a Liberty scarf in his life.”