A Javelin for Jonah

“Ma Yale might have had a go,” he said. “She’s tough enough. She’s used to javelins, too.”

“Nobody else?”

“Shouldn’t think so. Girls don’t go in for pig-sticking.”

“But Miss Yale had no particular quarrel with Mr. Jones, had she?”

“She’s like an old hen with her chicks where our girls are concerned. If she thought Jonah was fooling about with any one of them…”

“But was he?”

“Hard to say. I reckon, though, he had found other fish to fry.”

“You refer to the episode of the maidservant Bertha, no doubt.”

“Besides, our girls were dead scared of him,” Richard continued, ignoring the deplorable episode of Bertha. “Nothing puts young females off like a chap who’s had one too many. Old Jonah’s favourite hymn was, ‘When we gather at the fountain,’ and he did the fountain a bit of no good, I can tell you, once he got into the Bricklayers’ Arms.”

“So I have been informed. By the way, I believe the word is ‘river’, not ‘fountain’.”

“Tell you something else,” said Richard, ignoring this, and seeming to have shed his churlishness. “Old Jonah used to make himself a pain in the neck to Lesley. Always pestering her.”

“She is a very beautiful young woman, of course.”

“So Jimmy thinks,” said Richard. “You ought to tell that lad the facts of life, you know. Lesley isn’t the sort his mamma would want in the family if she knew as much about Lesley as we do.”

“Am I expected to listen to scandal, Mr. Richard?”

“Suit yourself. I like old Jimmy boy and I wouldn’t want to see him come a mucker. What’s he going to do when he leaves here?”

“Sooner or later he hopes to enter the diplomatic service.”

“He’s going to get me into the police. Did you know? He’s brought my boxing on, too. I wouldn’t mind being the police heavy-weight champion. Might box for England. He thinks I could make it if I sweated. But you tip him off about Lesley. Tell him she was sacked from her last job, never mind why.”

“How do you come to know anything about it?”

“Kirk told me. That rat knows something about every member of this staff, and that goes for Gassie as well. Makes a hobby of collecting the dirt.”

“I am glad we have come back to Mr. Kirk. When did you see him last?”

“I can’t remember. All I know is that he didn’t sleep in our hut last night. He’s in billets with me, you see, so, of course, one noticed.”

“Did anyone else remark on it?”

“Only to wonder—joking, you know—whether he’d pulled off his bet.”

“What bet would that be?”

“Oh, that, before he left, he’d sleep with one of the wenches.”

“One of the women students?”

“That’s right. But I knew better. Apart from the fact that the house is locked up well and truly every night, Ma Yale is always on the qui vive. Besides, those terriers of Celia’s live in the house and they’d yap the place down if anybody tried to break in.”

“Yes, I see. Mr. Kirk struck me as a singularly unprepossessing young man.”

“He was a heel. I felt bound to stick up for him when Jimmy kicked him, but I soon learnt where I got off.”

“You say that mysterious parcels came for Mr. Kirk, but not from his home. What was in them?”

“Booze. Jonah used to get it for him and smuggle it in.”

“Yes, it had to be either alcohol or drugs,” said Dame Beatrice. “Where did the money come from?”

“Kirk’s mother, I believe. He said he wouldn’t stay here otherwise, I reckon, and his stepfather didn’t want him at home.”

“Surely Mr. Medlar had no inkling of what was going on?”

“Don’t know. He wouldn’t have done anything about it, even if he had been wise to it. We all knew that Jonah had him under his thumb. I’ll tell you another thing, too. If Gassie did for Jonah, he might have done for Kirkie. Put that on your needles and knit it.”

“I have already done so, Mr. Richard, but I decided that I had dropped a stitch.”

“How do you mean?”

“Ah, that is my affair. Do you care for chocolate, by the way? I have a large slab here for which I have no personal use. I buy it for Mrs Gavin, but I can get some more next time I go into the village?”

“Oh, well, thanks! What’s this? Bribery?”

“Rather let us call it a reward for virtue. And there is nothing more you can tell me?”

“In return for the chocolate?”