certainly wasn’t here, anyhow. And how would he know that John would want him to take it over? Besides, it’s not as if he wants it. He’s only come in as a favour to John.’
It seemed that nobody wanted the Hall, or the running of the estate. ‘Master Hugh was found in the woods,’ Mrs Handley ran on. ‘He had the gun in his hand which was later shown to be the murder weapon, and his father was dead at his feet.’
‘He pleaded not guilty, though,’ I said.
‘Well, wouldn’t you?’ said Mrs Handley.
Her line, then, was that she liked Master Hugh, but was in no doubt that he had done the killing. She might perhaps have approved of his having done it.
‘Happen the new man will give you the farm back?’ I said, and Mrs Handley gave me a very choice look at that, eyes fairly burning into me. At the end of the table, Mervyn had started scuffling with his dog Alfred. He didn’t want to hear any more about Master Hugh.
Mrs Handley shook her head once, saying, ‘That’s gone.’
‘The fellow that came upon him,’ I said, ‘Anderson, Constable for the Adenwolds. Where does he live?’
‘Retired to the city,’ she said.
‘Which city?’
‘York,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘Where do you think?’
It struck me again that she thought me an idiot.
‘Who’s the new copper?’
‘Don’t recall his name,’ she said. ‘We hardly ever set eyes on him. He lives out at East Adenwold.’
The fellow might as well have lived on the moon.
Mrs Handley had gone back to apple-peeling, and Mervyn was walking away up the dusty road with his dog and his gun. Watch out, rabbits, I thought. The wife rose from her seat to call out after him: ‘Bye, Mervyn!’
She missed our lad Harry, and she’d taken to Mervyn in his place.
She said, ‘I’m off up for a bath,’ and she went inside the inn.
She was in a strange mood — torn: half-friendly, half not; half wanting me to be investigating the Adenwold mysteries, half not. Above all, she was annoyed at the arrival of the Chief, for it reminded her that I was not the top man even in the York railway police.
Had the heat got to her? Not a bit of it. She was always agitated — feverish, so to say, even at the best of times. It was just womanliness and you couldn’t cure that with a cold bath.
A single breath of breeze shifted the wisteria growing on the inn front, like a summer sigh. The shadow of a branch waved over the table and became strange when it struck the aerated water. Mr Handley, standing in the pub doorway, boomed out something that might have been ‘You’ve had a long chat out here,’ followed by the question: ‘Don’t appeal?’ or ‘No appeal?’ and I somehow had the idea he was talking about the water. I was never a great one for water, aerated or otherwise, and I took this to be an invitation to take a pint, at which I said, ‘I’d quite fancy a glass of Smith’s, thanks,’ but no sooner had I said it than it occurred to me that he had meant Master Hugh had not appealed against the verdict of guilty and sentence of death.
I stepped through into the public bar after Mr Handley, and the place was empty except for the bloody bicyclist, reading a book. I nodded to him, and said, ‘I see your bike’s gone. Still jiggered, is it?’
‘Took it up to the blacksmith,’ he said, only half looking up from his book. ‘Chap called Ainsty, but he wasn’t about. He’s off fixing some motor, apparently.’
Well, here was more data for the wife, fascinated as she was by the movements of the bicyclist.
The bar smelt of wood and wisteria. All the windows were propped open. On one side they gave onto the golden cornfields and The Angel garden; to the other, they looked onto the trestle table, the dusty lane and the woods.
Mr Handley was at the barrel of Smith’s pouring me a pint, and one for himself. He boomed out a remark in his habitual blurred manner, and I could not understand. I asked him, as politely as I could, to repeat it, and it was hard to keep in countenance as he made the same baffling noise again. I looked over to the bicyclist for help, and sure enough he looked up from his book and reported with a sigh:
‘He says, “There are as many crimes committed high as low.”’
I nodded at Mr Handley, and said, ‘You’re right over that,’ although I was thinking of the constant succession of working men I’d given evidence against in the York police court. You hardly ever saw a toff before the magistrates.
‘Mr Handley,’ I said, ‘did Sir George Lambert have any military connection?’
Mr Handley shook his head as he raised his glass to his lips. He then touched the glass to his lips, and half the beer went down in an instant. I raised my own glass and tried the same, but I didn’t have the trick of it, and my glass went down by just two inches and I nearly choked. To cover up the embarrassment, I said, ‘Does the pub pay?’
Well, I had to listen very carefully, and say ‘Pardon’ a lot, but I got the gist. The pub did not pay. The village was in decline. The limestone quarry had been worked out, and farming had been in a bad way for years. His talk became a constant low moan on a theme of everything going to pot: the timber in the woods round about was not of the sort wanted by the modern house-builders, and the holiday trade was nothing to what it had been at the height of the cycling craze. Whole fleets of cyclists, it appeared, had once passed through the Adenwolds every week-end.
At this news, I looked across towards our own bicyclist, but he’d quit the room. Mr Handley talked on, and I pictured Lydia in the tin bath upstairs. I always liked to hang about when she took a bath, and if she didn’t tell me to clear off, that meant we would have a ride. Mr Handley was running on about how he was thinking of removing with his family to York. I asked him, ‘Where in York?’ and — not being very interested in the reply — revolved my own thoughts as he gave it.
What was the Chief up to at the Hall? Had John Lambert killed the Major, and did he mean to make a confession to it in order to save his brother? No. Couldn’t have, because he’d been in London at the time, and the court must have heard evidence to that effect.
What — if any — was the connection between the timetables for the military and the murder?
And the man Usher… If he meant to murder Lambert, why hadn’t he just gone ahead and done it directly? How did things stand between Usher and the new owner of the Hall?
Who had been the man in the dust-coat running away from the station?
And what was the bloody bicyclist up to?
I thought of Gifford, the man from Norwood. I took out my silver watch. It was ten after one; I was supposed to have seen him at the inn at one.
‘Gifford,’ I said, interrupting Mr Handley, ‘the commercial traveller… Have you seen him about?’
Mr Handley shrugged, muttered something like, ‘Not lately.’
I drained off my glass and — telling Handley that I was off to take a turn in the woods — I quit The Angel.
I didn’t mean to go into the woods, though. I meant to bang on the vicar’s door to ask questions as follows. One: why had he been staring at us in the graveyard? Two: why had he called Gifford back? Three: where did he suppose the man might be just at present? Bugger the Chief. He was an old man, shortly to be super-annuated. I would pursue that matter independently of him.
But I wasn’t long out of the front door of The Angel when, looking to my left as I walked towards the first green of Adenwold, I saw something wrong-coloured lodged in the greenery of the woods. I went in after it.
The road was lost to my sight within ten seconds as the barriers of green fell between it and me. I might just as well have jumped into a green sea. I twisted my way between the trees and holly bushes, brambles and ferns, all connected by spider webs of ivy and bindweed, and after half a minute of battling I came to the hat: a brown, high-crowned bowler. It hung on a brier bush in company with thousands of red berries glowing in the green darkness. No name was written in the crown, but it was Gifford’s, I was sure. I caught it up, and fought my way through to the wide clearing that lay beyond the brier bush.
This I took at first to be an expanse of flat moss, but a slip of my boot proved it to be a green and black pond over which a hundred insects swooped, the lot of them looking like man-made flying machines going through their paces. Why had Gifford, the man from the London suburbs who hated nature, entered this abandoned world?
I skirted the pond as he must have done after losing, or abandoning, his bowler, and pressed on, picking my
