Chapter Twenty
Mrs Handley was peeling apples in the middle of the trestle table that stood before The Angel. There were a couple of documents in front of her. Mervyn sat at his end with his terrier but without his ferret. His gun was propped against the end of the table.
My silver watch said five to one. Perhaps Hugh Lambert would be taking his second-to-last dinner. It would be brought to him in the condemned cell, and he would eat observed by guards, who would then watch him walk it off in the exercise yard. Later they might watch him smoke a cigarette or even, since he was condemned, a cigar.
As I walked up, the wife came out of the inn, and sat down opposite to Mrs Handley. It seemed that they’d become fast friends in my absence. I didn’t much fancy telling the wife I’d been put off by the Chief.
‘What are these, Mrs Handley?’ the wife asked, indicating the papers, and looking sidelong at me as I stepped up to the table.
‘Oh, pictures of Master Hugh,’ she said, and I saw that she was once again a little teary. She passed two photographs across to the wife, and I stood at Lydia’s shoulder and looked at them. In the first, Master Hugh wore a harlequin outfit and held a frying pan as if it was a banjo. He was in a beautiful garden and he was smiling, but it was a quiet, secret sort of smile, not the jollity you might have expected given his rig-out.
In the next photograph he was more himself, or so I imagined. You’d still say he was smiling but if you looked carefully his mouth was turned down. He wore a dusty black suit. He was in the country-side somewhere — some wild-looking spot — and indicating an object on the ground amid a mass of ferns.
Mervyn had risen from his place at the end of the table, and joined us.
‘That’s him up at the ridge,’ he said.
‘It’s up above the old quarry,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘He’d take Mervyn and me up there.’
‘See brock,’ Mervyn put in.
‘To look at the badgers,’ said Mrs Handley, by way of explaining.
‘He knew just when they’d come out of their holes. He would say it was the last train — the last train of a day that did it. The badgers would listen for it going away, and then they knew it was safe to come out.’
‘Was that another of his jokes?’ I asked, and Mrs Handley frowned at me.
‘Certainly not,’ she said.
In that case, I wondered what the badgers did for an alarm clock on Sundays, when there was no evening train.
‘Just look at that suit,’ Mrs Handley said, gazing fondly at the photograph. ‘You’d never believe he’d been at Eton, would you?’
‘You might not,’ I said, ‘but then again, he doesn’t look like a murderer either.’
Mrs Handley kept silence. The matter was not to be spoken of.
She rose to her feet, asking, ‘Would you two like some food?’
The wife asked, ‘Oh, what do you have, Mrs Handley?’
‘Cheese, pickled walnuts and salad. That do you?’
‘It sounds just lovely,’ said the wife.
I knew that Lydia could not abide pickled anything, but when she was ‘out’ with me she was always extra- friendly to whoever else was around, so as to let me see what I was missing.
Mrs Handley collected up the two photographs and put them on top of the pile of papers; then she went inside The Angel.
Looking directly ahead, the wife asked me, ‘Did your Chief turn up, then?’
‘He did.’
‘And where is he?’
‘He’s gone to the Hall.’
‘So you’ve given the whole matter over to him?’
‘Isn’t that what you want?’ I said, ‘So that we can get on with our holiday?’
The wife made no answer, but just looked at me for a while before nodding towards the front of the pub, and saying, ‘The bicycle’s gone, you might care to notice.’
‘Isn’t it round the back?’
‘It is not,’ she said.
She’d been onto that bicyclist from the very beginning. But his behaviour — and that of every other train- arrival — was no longer any concern of mine. Let the Chief figure it all out.
Mervyn was saying from his end of the table: ‘Mam writes letters to him, you know.’
‘What’s that?’ I said.
‘Master Hugh,’ he said. ‘Mam’s been writing to him.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘And what does she put?’
‘She’ll generally just ask him: “Are you going on all right?”’
‘And what does he reply, Mervyn?’ asked the wife.
‘He’ll generally put: “All right just now. Thanks for asking.”’
‘But he’s about to be executed,’ I said.
‘That’s why he puts “all right just now ”,’ said Mervyn. ‘All right for the present.’
That doubtful look came over him again, as if he wondered whether he ought to have spoken out at all. Mrs Handley came out with the food, a jug of aerated water and two glasses on a tin tray.
‘Do you suppose they’ll pray over Master Hugh in the church tomorrow?’ Lydia asked.
‘Well, that’s not our church, so I wouldn’t know. We’re Catholic, and the nearest church for us is St Joseph’s, out at East Adenwold, which is a bit of a way.’
I had the idea that this was a highly convenient state of affairs as far as Mrs Handley was concerned.
‘… But I shouldn’t think so,’ she ran on. ‘Not if the vicar has anything to do with it.’
‘Did he not like Master Hugh?’ the wife asked.
‘He liked the Major,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘The two of them got on thoroughly, and he would always take his part in Sir George’s arguments with the boy. Ridley would ride out with Sir George every morning, hunt with him as well.’
‘What’s become of the hunt?’ I asked.
‘Stopped,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘It was the vicar himself led all the hounds down to the station, where they were packed into a van and taken to some chap in Lincolnshire.’
‘What did you think of him?’ I couldn’t resist asking. ‘The vicar, I mean?’
She folded her arms and eyed me.
‘He wouldn’t last long in a Catholic church, I’ll tell you that much.’
‘Why not?’ the wife cut in.
‘He’s hardly ever at home. He’s always running about the place.’
‘Doing what?’ asked the wife.
There was a beat of silence.
‘He has a lady at Barton-le-Street.’
‘A lady?’ said the wife.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Handley, ‘a woman. And she’s thought to be one of a few. “Live and enjoy” — that’s his motto.’
You’d take a ‘down’ train to get to Barton, and the vicar had done just that the night before. He’d returned this morning by an ‘up’. Was this fancy woman the explanation for his journey? It did not seem possible to pursue this subject with two women present, and so I fell silent.
‘The new tenant at the Hall…’ the wife began.
‘… Robert Chandler,’ Mrs Handley supplied.
‘Yes,’ said the wife. ‘Is he there at the moment?’
Mrs Handley nodded. ‘He’s been here all summer.’
‘Do you think he shot Sir George really?’ the wife asked, and she laughed after she’d said it, just as though it was a joke, which I didn’t think it had been.
‘I’m quite sure he didn’t,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘I believe he was out in India at the time of the shooting. He
