The Black Country

“Speaking of fumbling about blind,” Hammersmith said, “where is Mr Grimes this morning?”

25

Constable Harry Grimes had lived and worked in Blackhampton his entire life. Unlike most of the men in the village, who carried on their legacies down in the mines, his father had been a policeman, and Harry had followed in his footsteps. He knew every square inch of the village and the names of all the people who lived there. He knew their secrets and he kept them. He knew about the charms in Bennett Rose’s attic and he knew about the priest hole in Mr Brothwood’s church. There was no part of Blackhampton that he didn’t know intimately. But he had not spent a lot of time in the woods, and so now he was having trouble finding the spot he had visited the previous night with the policeman from London.

He had hoped to make a quick trip out, just to take another look at the place where they’d found the bloody dress, and to be back by breakfast. He had not slept well and had awoken with a sour taste in his mouth and the vestiges of a nightmare circling his consciousness. He had pulled on his trousers and hurried out the door, consumed by a single thought: If a bloody dress had been found just off the path in the woods, that very bend in the path might yield more clues if he returned in the daylight.

Assuming he could find the spot again.

He tromped along, swiping at the low-hanging branches over the path and muttering under his breath as the hems of his trousers brushed against the bracken, growing more waterlogged with every step. He had neglected to change into boots, and his finest black horsehide shoes were no doubt ruined. He stepped on a sharp stone and felt it through the sole of his right shoe. He stopped and leaned against a tree to take the weight off his right foot. He looked around him, trying to get his bearings. He knew that he and Hammersmith could not have penetrated too far into the woods in the dark. It occurred to him that he might have already passed the place where the dress was found. He frowned and bent his foot so he could see the bottom of his shoe, to see if the rock had made a hole in the leather. Glancing down, he saw broken branches and a long smooth smear across the ice by the side of the path.

He had found the right spot!

If he hadn’t stopped, he would have missed it, would have walked right past. He sent up a silent prayer, thanking whomever the patron saint of sharp stones might be. He pushed himself off the tree trunk and moved off the path, carefully examining the ground, forcing the stiff wiry branches of low-growing bushes aside. There was a shallow slope on the western side of the path, and he put his foot down too hard on a patch of ice, slipped and fell, and slid downhill on his bottom. He grabbed a fistful of thin spring grass and stopped himself, felt the cold through the seat of his trousers.

Hammersmith had spotted the white dress somewhere nearby. It was a slim hope that there might be more clues out here, but if there was anything at all to be found, Grimes wanted to be the one to bring it out of the woods. He wanted to show the men from Scotland Yard that Blackhampton was not so backward and inconsequential as they no doubt thought it was. And, moreover, that Grimes himself was a good policeman, every bit their equal. It was foolish pride, he knew, but good work was often the direct result of pride.

He stood and brushed snow off his trousers and looked around. The bushes Hammersmith had crawled under weren’t as impassable as they had seemed to be in the dark. In fact, just two feet to the right was a second, narrower trail that wound around the roots of the nearby trees and skirted the thorny shrubbery. He made his way over to it and followed it around, digging in his heels so as not to fall again. He stopped again a few feet farther along, where he judged the dress had been found. There were indentations in the mud, possibly made by Hammersmith’s elbows and knees. Low to the ground, a bit of pale lace was caught on a thorny twig. Grimes carefully pulled it off and stuck it in his pocket, mildly disappointed that there wasn’t more to find. Still, it was something.

He looked up through the branches, trying hopelessly to judge the time by the position of the invisible sun in the smooth grey sky. Were Day and Hammersmith awake yet? Was breakfast finished? The London police might be doing anything by now. Possibly questioning the villagers, narrowing down the options for further searching. That’s what Grimes would do in their place. He should be with them when they talked to his people.

He turned, headed back up the trail, and saw a flash of lavender in the trees above. He squinted. A pale purple ribbon was looped around a limb between him and the path ahead. He reached for it, but it was just out of reach.

This was a clue. Or it might be. Better than a scrap of lace, at least.

Excited, he braced a foot against the base of the trunk above the tree’s roots and lunged upward. His fingers brushed against the silky fabric. He jumped again. And again. But the tip of the ribbon darted away from him, anchored by the tree at its other end, dancing in the low steady breeze out of the north.

He wrapped his arms around the trunk and attempted to shimmy up it like he’d done on every tree in the village common when he was a child. He was bigger now, though, and older, his arms and legs less flexible. He grunted and inched his way higher a bit at a time. He didn’t try to hurry. He didn’t want to loosen the ribbon only to watch it flutter away on the breeze. He made his methodical way upward, bracing himself carefully with his back against the tree behind him, making sure he was stable before reaching out and untangling the ribbon from the branch. It came loose easily and he smiled, held it up to the light, and admired the way the sun shone through the thin material. There was a cluster of minute black dots along one edge of the ribbon. Blood? This was a good clue indeed. Inspector Day would be most impressed.

He looked down and began the short slide back to the ground. He heard a shrill whistling sound from somewhere nearby, but before he could raise his head to look for the source of the noise, a hole the size of a sixpence coin materialized above his left eye. Almost at the same instant, another, larger, hole appeared below his right ear and a.45 caliber bullet deposited a thimbleful of his brains in the bark of the tree beside him. He grunted once before dying.

Constable Grimes’s body tumbled four feet down the side of the tree and landed in a heap under the thorny bushes beside the trail. His dark blue uniform rendered him nearly invisible in the icy darkness of the thicket.

His lifeless fingers opened and the lavender ribbon floated away, curling in the breeze. It snagged for just a second on a thorn, but twisted loose. It drifted up through the trees and out of the woods and across the long barren fields toward the village.

26

Nine hundred yards away, the American lowered his Whitworth rifle.

The policeman was Calvin Campbell’s friend and that was the only reason he had died. The American had seen them together the night before and had decided to make the game more interesting by killing Campbell’s friends first. It seemed somehow fitting, given their history.

From his vantage point high up in a tree, he had tracked the policeman’s clumsy movements through the woods. The American had taken his time unsnapping his gun bag and quietly pulling out the rifle, all the while watching the policeman move closer. He had pulled out the Whitworth and flipped up the sight, carefully loaded the rifle with one of the unique hexagonal bullets the model was known for. The shape of the bullet was slim and elegant, and when it rocketed through the air, it whistled, giving a split-second warning to anyone within range. The American liked it that his rifle whistled. It made the game seem a little more fair somehow. He had rested the rifle’s thirty-three-inch barrel in a fork of the tree. There was a slight breeze, cold and from the north. He had adjusted for the wind and waited for the policeman to walk into range.

Then the policeman had climbed up a tree and made the job even easier.

Now the American flipped the sight back down and stowed the rifle back in his bag, snapped it shut, and slung it over his shoulder. He climbed easily back to the ground and made his way up the path, back toward the abandoned schoolhouse on the edge of the village.

Without realizing he was doing it, the American began to whistle through his teeth as he walked