Blood on the Wood (28 page)

‘I understand, yes.' It was a relief in its way.

‘I'm afraid there's a possibility that they may charge you with concealing evidence.'

‘Yes.'

We'd all been guilty of that, though the Venns weren't rushing to admit it.

‘It will help Daniel, though, won't it?' Carol said.

‘We have to hope so.' Galway hesitated, looking more unhappy than was professionally necessary. ‘There are two drawbacks. As Miss Bray has pointed out, we don't know when Miss Smith was shot. The police have almost certainly got their own ideas on the subject, but at this stage they have no obligation to tell us. The second, well…' He paused. ‘The second is that they might not believe Miss Bray.'

If he was waiting for protests, he didn't get them. In the circumstances, I wouldn't have believed myself.

He went on, sounding apologetic. ‘The fact is, rightly or wrongly, Inspector Bull has already got it into his head that his job is deliberately being made difficult. Unfortunately, there's been a certain amount of gossip and press comment in London that has given the case more prominence than it had originally.'

‘Hawthorne,' Adam said, making it sound like a swear word.

‘Yes, it hasn't improved matters,' Galway said.

He'd have sounded even more depressed if he knew I was still concealing something – Felicia's collapse after the body was discovered; the scratches on her arms.

Feeling weary, I said I'd better go and see Inspector Bull and get it over. It was around four o'clock by then and I supposed I'd be able to catch a train to Chipping Norton. But Galway said the inspector had been called back to Oxford for the afternoon – probably to discuss the case with higher authority – and I should wait for his return in the morning rather than go through the whole thing with a constable. He and Adam would have to be in Chipping Norton early in case the police decided to charge Daniel, and I could travel with them. But he'd forgotten there was only room for two in the gig. In the end we setded that I'd go independendy by train. Carol came downstairs and walked with me to the front door.

‘How's Felicia?'

‘Drowsy. I hope she'll sleep.'

More of Uncle Olly's drops? If so, they couldn't keep her sedated for ever.

At the front door Carol said she'd walk with me along the drive because she needed some air.

‘Thank you for what you're doing,' she said.

‘I'm not sure I'm doing anything useful.'

‘Daniel thinks you are. He said…' She hesitated.

‘Said what?'

‘That he thought you might have been involved in something like this before. Was he right?'

‘Yes.' We took a few more steps. ‘As for being useful, I might be if I could find Fardel. You know, there's one problem with my theory that Mr Galway didn't point out.'

‘What?'

‘If he'd taken the trouble to follow Daniel and Daisy here to get his twenty pounds, you'd have expected him to approach Daniel as soon as he got the chance, even come to the house. Did Daniel say anything to you about that?'

‘Not a word.'

‘Or about seeing him?'

‘No. I'm sorry.'

‘Do you think if it had happened he might have kept it secret?'

‘Not from me. Daniel's brought his troubles to me since he was ten years old. I'm the problem solver.'

I thought suddenly:
Suppose Carol's in love with him
 … Then decided I was wrong and her tone was more like an elder sister's than a lover's. I changed the subject and said I'd been to see Mr Sutton in his workshop.

‘Oh, what a mess it all is. We told him Janie must have gone of her own accord or she wouldn't have taken the things for the baby – but to find out this way…'

‘Do you know why she went? He says everything was perfectly happy.'

‘What does anybody know about other people's marriages? They seemed happy enough, yes, but there were worries. I'm afraid I was part of that.'

‘How?'

‘I'd had to tell him I might not be able to go on financing the workshop beyond Christmas. I suppose it's no secret to anybody that we've had money problems since Philomena died and it was costing more money than I have. I was naive, I suppose. I thought if you loved what you were doing and made honest, beautiful things the money side of it would work itself out. But if it's love against money, money always seems to win, doesn't it?'

‘Mr Sutton says you went out for a walk with Janie the day before she disappeared. Did she say anything then that suggested she might go?'

She had to think about it.

‘That was the Sunday before…?'

‘Yes. The day after Daniel announced that he was engaged to Miss Smith.'

‘Oh yes. You can imagine the atmosphere in the house. Towards the end of the afternoon I had to get away from it for a while so I went down to the village and called in on the workshop. I did notice Janie looked pale and strained so I suggested we should go out for a little walk while he kept an eye on the baby. We didn't talk much. I suppose I was too wrapped up in what was happening about Daniel to let her tell me her troubles.'

I said goodbye to Carol at the end of the drive and walked back down to the village.

Chapter Seventeen

I
'D LIKE TO HAVE AVOIDED HIGH
tea at Mrs Penny's because I knew she'd want to gossip, but there was nowhere else to eat in the village. I dealt with the usual cold beef and pickles and her questions as briskly as I could and escaped with about an hour of daylight left, taking hat, coat and bicycle lamp with me. If Fardel was out there somewhere, he moved by night. It had been well after dark when he tried to get into the Crown, probably after dark too when the postmistress's chicken was grabbed from its coop. The man had to eat and wanted to drink, so if I walked the lanes and footpaths at twilight and beyond, I'd have a chance of seeing him. No more than seeing him. I wasn't stupid enough to think of tackling him: if I could find where he slept and cooked his stolen meals, Inspector Bull would have to carry on from there.

I turned off the main street and walked up a steep lane beside the churchyard. Once past the church it became a narrower track with a small oak wood on the left. From higher up the lane there was a view of the village with lamplight already glowing from a few windows, the street deserted. To the west, low hills sloped away into the valley of the Evenlode and the sun was setting in ragged pink streaks against dark grey cloud. On the other side of the hedge was an orchard, old neglected trees that might once have belonged to a cottage that didn't exist any more. Still, one of them near the hedge had managed to produce an early crop of apples that glowed temptingly in the pink light. I stretched to pick one and started munching, looking out at the view. Something rustled behind the hedge. I jumped round, saw a pair of human eyes glinting at me and nearly choked. After the first shock I saw a man: small, shorter than I was, sixty or so and the front of his head where his cap was pushed back as bald and shiny as a hazelnut. Although I'd come out to find Fardel, I could almost have hugged the man for not being him.

‘I'm sorry. Are they your apples?'

Standing close up against the hedge, he had probably been watching me for some time. He was carrying a small oil lamp, the sort with a shutter that can be pushed round to hide the light.

‘Reckon you and me are at the same game, miss.'

He pushed through a gap in the hedge. There were wire loops and wooden pegs hanging from his belt. He was right: poachers, the pair of us.

‘Only I'm wasting my time,' he said. ‘Summat's got here before me.' I saw a snare in the hedge, between two hazel branches. The peg had been pulled out of the ground and bits of rabbit fur were scattered all round it. A late-working fly buzzed round fragments of bright pink flesh the same colour as the sunset.

‘A fox?' I said.

He shook his head, an odd look on his face like a man who both wanted to talk and didn't at the same time.

‘Foxes carry knives where you come from, miss?'

‘Knives?'

He picked up a fur-covered hind leg and stretched it out between his blood and earth-stained hands. ‘See that? Bin cut, it has.' And then, seeing I still didn't understand, ‘Reckon he cut it up and are it raw.'

‘Who?'

‘I don't know who, but he must have bin desperate hungry.'

Coincidence, of course, but the birds seemed to have stopped singing; the night had come suddenly.

‘Have you seen him?' I said. ‘Was he a dark-haired man with broad shoulders?'

‘Might have been Old Nick for all I know.'

‘But have you seen him?'

He shook his head. ‘Reckon I've seen his lair, though.'

‘Where?'

He pointed back down the lane towards the little oak wood. ‘Old quarry up at the top there. Somebody had a fire in it a day or two ago.'

*   *   *

He merged back into the hedge and I followed the track back down to the coppice. Dusk was thick under the trees, the ground matted with brambles. I scrambled over the fence and went uphill, dry branches cracking underfoot, leaves swishing. If he were in there he'd hear me from half a mile away. After a while the ground levelled to a quarry floor with a rock face looming over it, about thirty feet high. It was only a small quarry, probably the source of stone for a cottage long ago. I hadn't used the cycle lamp until then because there wasn't much in the battery but I switched it on and found I was standing in a circle of grey ash. Bronze chicken feathers were scattered round, a clenched claw, bones. For one evening at any rate he hadn't eaten his stolen meat raw. But if it had been his lair, it looked abandoned now. The ashes were cold, several days old and a few dry leaves had shifted over them. Oak leaves. Shrivelled brown oak leaves.

I suddenly felt shivery and wondered why. Of course there were dead oak leaves, this was a whole coppice of them. But I was seeing other leaves in my mind – dead leaves clinging to thick woollen stockings and red hair, the memory of them bringing back the metallic smell of blood so that I felt sick with it. The leaves on Daisy's body had been dead oak leaves, like these. Why not? I tried to talk sense to myself, stop the shivering. After all, I'd already guessed that her body had been lying outside somewhere before it was put in the cabinet, possibly in the Venns' garden. Only there weren't any oak trees in or near the garden. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was. Yews, elms, hazels, but no oaks. Anyway it wasn't the sort of garden where leaves were raked in tidy piles. The leaves that had fallen last autumn would have been smothered by now in a summer's unchecked growth. It was only in woodlands that they'd still be thick on the ground. So Daisy's body had at some time been in this wood, or in a wood like it. From here to the Venns' house would be a good mile across country. Surely Felicia couldn't have carried her body all that way. It would have taken a strong man. And if Daisy had been shot in the garden, as I'd thought, why move her body at all? The logic must be that Daisy was shot here in this place, or a place like it, and Fardel had been here.

*   *   *

I switched off the lamp and got myself out of the coppice. For the next few hours as the stars came out I covered miles of track and footpath, just able to see dark shapes of hedges or individual trees for guidance. The aim was to draw a rough circle round the village, assuming that Fardel would stay within walking distance of it. Every now and then I'd stop for some time and listen, but the countryside is a noisy place at night with sheep fidgeting behind hedges, badgers crashing and snuffling in the undergrowth, dogs barking from farms. Fardel could have been a dozen steps behind me and I might not have known it. I remembered a line from the song.
Said my lord to my lady, as he mounted his horse: Beware of Long Lankin that lives in the moss.
I wished my mind didn't keep going back to it. Being nervous makes you tired, and by the time the church clock struck ten I'd had enough. I crossed a couple of fields, scrambled over a gate and got back to the road. The nearest buildings were the forge on one side of the road and the furniture workshop, both in darkness. I was looking towards the forge when I saw from the corner of my eye a flicker of movement across the road, towards the workshop. When I turned, whatever it was had gone. It had been too big for a dog or fox, too quick-moving for a lost cow. A human being, crossing the road. The hunting instinct stirred again. It had come and gone so quickly that it didn't seem likely to be up to anything good. The workshop yard, crowded with piles of maturing timber, might look like a good hiding place, even somewhere to sleep for a man without a roof over his head.

Quietly I stepped off the road and into the yard, holding my breath, telling myself that at least Mr Sutton was within yelling distance if things went wrong. Total quiet and almost total dark. The man might have been crouching within arm's reach of me, or away over the yard wall in a dark mass of bushes on the far side. If so, he'd moved remarkably quickly and quietly for a broad-shouldered drunkard. I waited, beginning to think I must be wrong about seeing a person at all. Then I heard a sound, not from where I expected it, but from inside the workshop. Footsteps, like somebody moving on tiptoe. The workshop door was on the far side of the building from me. I started moving towards it, then tripped over a wigwam of small planks. They fell with a noise like twenty school desk tops clattering and I went sprawling. As I fell, I heard the door on the other side slamming open, footsteps running up the street. A window opened overhead. Mr Sutton's voice: ‘What's going on?'

I reintroduced myself from my supine position among the planks. ‘Somebody's just been in your workshop,' I said.

By the time I'd picked myself up and got round to the door he was down in the workshop in trousers and jacket, shirtless underneath it.