Blood on the Wood (29 page)

‘What's happened? Where's he gone?'

‘Away up the street. Is anything missing?'

It could have been any thief, not my man necessarily. While Mr Sutton was getting an oil lamp alight my heartbeat and breathing slowed down.

‘Not disturbed much anyway,' Mr Sutton said.

The workshop was much as I'd seen it a few hours before, the plate of congealed stew on the bench. A little painted chest stood in the corner, its lid open.

‘I never left it like that.' Mr Sutton went over to it. Then, ‘The money's gone.'

‘How much money?'

‘Fourteen pounds.'

A large sum, worth probably around two months' wages for him, but he sounded hurt and puzzled rather than angry.

‘Shall I run and get the policeman?' I said.

I'd no high hopes of Constable Johnson, but it was what you did when you were burgled, after all. Sutton shook his head, staring at the empty chest. I went over to look. It was neatly fitted out with a removable top tray, probably for sewing materials or a child's toy soldiers. He pointed to a little gap between the tray and the back of the chest.

‘We kept it there. Sometimes there'd be a delivery of wood, expensive wood like good walnut or mahogany, and the carrier would want paying for it. You'd have to know it was there.'

‘Who knew?'

‘Just the three of us. Mrs Venn, of course, because it was her money, me and…'

He couldn't say it.

‘Your wife? Janie?'

He nodded. His face was a painful mixture of hope and hurt. ‘But why would she do it? If she wanted money she could have every farthing in the place. Why would she sneak in and take it and not even talk to me?'

When I thought about it, the quickness of the figure flickering across the road, its quiet-footedness in the workshop, went with a woman more than a man. But I couldn't answer his question. He stopped by a workbench, staring down at it.

‘My knife's gone too, my favourite. You can see the gap where it was. She'd never have taken that from me, not of her own free will.'

A row of knives of various sizes, glinting frost sharp in the lamplight. He was right about the gap. He sat down heavily on a chest.

‘I'm going out to look for her,' he said and disappeared upstairs. I waited until he came down again, fully dressed, and got his boots on, then walked out with him.

‘At least let me tell the constable.'

‘Waste of time.'

The two of us walked around the village for another hour or more, around outbuildings, up and down lanes. After midnight he said, sounding more dead than alive, ‘What I think, he must have made her tell him about the money first before he killed them. I'll never see her again.'

I watched his dark shape fading back down the street, stumbling from tiredness. The village was quiet by then, the Crown long shut and all the lamps out. Under the stars it looked such a small huddle of life, the woods and fields round it steep and threatening in a way they weren't by day. I got myself upstairs and huddled shivering under blankets and eiderdown.

Chapter Eighteen

I
CAUGHT AN EARLY TRAIN IN
the morning a few stops along the line to Chipping Norton. It was Thursday, a misty start to the day, elm leaves turning yellow, bright flares of rosehips along the embankments. The two women in my compartment were talking about making chutney before frost got the green tomatoes. Chipping Norton was a neat and busy little station. Across some fields a big woollen mill built of yellow brick and looking more like a mansion than a factory billowed clouds of steam from its ornate chimney. I asked directions to the police station in London Road and when I got there found Timothy Galway waiting outside. He raised his bowler to me, looking serious.

‘What's happening?'

‘I'm sorry to tell you they've decided to charge Daniel. They're bringing him in front of the magistrates in about an hour for a remand in custody. We shall ask for bail, of course, but frankly I don't think we'll get it.'

It turned out that the magistrates' court was in the same building as the police station. Also in that same building, presumably, was some cell where Daniel was locked, all his bounding energy turned to a prisoner's passivity. Adam had gone to leave the gig at a stables, Galway told me. He and I wished each other luck without any conviction that we'd get it. I went inside, gave my name to the duty officer and asked to see Inspector Bull. After a long wait a constable escorted me to a cramped room at the end of a corridor.

‘Well, Miss Bray?' The inspector was on his own. He looked tired and harassed. The masthead of the
Wrecker
was poking out from a pile of papers on his desk.

‘There's something I want to add to my statement. It's about the revolver.'

If that surprised him, he gave no sign of it. I told him about hearing the shot and finding Felicia in the summerhouse with the gun, including my belief that she'd been trying to kill herself. All I left out was the presence of Bobbie.

‘Why didn't you tell us this at once?'

‘Attempted suicide is a crime.'

‘Murder's a worse one. You do agree with that, I suppose.'

‘Of course.'

‘So what made you change your mind, Miss Bray? What made you decide to take us into your confidence now?'

‘I suppose I've had a chance to think about it. People are naturally shocked when something like that happens.'

‘People may be, but when we first spoke to you, you seemed pretty cool. I seem to remember you even raised the question of rigor mortis. Why was that?'

‘Because I'd noticed most of her body was stiff when we took her out of the cabinet.'

‘Yes. So you were already calculating, weren't you? I wonder why. Did you come to any conclusions?'

‘I'm no expert.'

‘But…?'

‘I'd guess she'd already been dead at least six hours then, probably more. And there's something else. I've remembered that there were some dead oak leaves on her clothes when we took her out of the cabinet. Only a few of them. They might have fallen off by the time you saw her.'

‘Quite a lot of things might have happened before we saw her. What significance am I supposed to find in dead oak leaves?'

‘There are none anywhere near the Venns' garden. I think she might have been shot some distance away.'

‘And put in the chest where you say you found her?'

‘Where I did find her, yes. I don't know why, but I think that's what happened.'

His expression gave me no idea whether my guess was right.

‘I dare say you know now that your friend Daniel Venn has admitted to walking around all afternoon with a revolver in his pocket.'

‘He's not my friend particularly. Two weeks ago I hadn't even met him.'

‘Answer my question.'

‘I wasn't aware you'd asked one.'

‘Are you aware that he says he had the revolver in his pocket all afternoon? Yes or no.'

‘Yes.'

‘So once he's arrested and charged you suddenly decide it might be useful to spread a little confusion about when he did or didn't have his hands on the gun and when and where Miss Smith might have been shot.'

‘Since I don't know when or where she was shot, how could I know if it was useful?'

‘You've been trying to guess, though. You've been thinking about all this?'

‘Yes, of course I've been thinking about it.'

I think he was one of those people who use anger like a good rider uses his horse's energy, reining it in then letting it go when it suits him. It suited him now.

‘Well, I've been thinking about it too. It's what I'm paid to do, and I'm paid to do it on behalf of everybody. I do mean everybody. Not just people who happen to have money or powerful friends or nice table manners, or young women who've been to college and think that means they can pick or choose what laws it suits them to obey, or artistic young men who think they've got a licence to do what they like provided you can paint it or sing it or write poetry about it. I can assure you that I'm sick and fed up with the whole pack of you, and if I had my way you'd be standing down there in the dock alongside young Mr Venn for conspiracy to obstruct the course of justice.'

He paused for breath. There wasn't a thing I could say in reply because I agreed with every word. He took a deep breath.

‘You realise you're going to have to make a second statement about this?'

‘Yes.'

‘And you understand that you might be facing a charge of withholding evidence?'

‘Yes.'

‘Are there any more things that you happened to be too shocked to tell me at the time?'

‘There is something else, but I couldn't tell you before because it only happened over the last two nights.'

I told him my theory about Fardel, starting without much confidence that he'd take it seriously, ending with none at all. He asked much the same questions as Galway, then a few more of his own.

‘Even if it were Miss Smith's uncle, are you suggesting he's connected in some way with her murder?'

‘I'm suggesting it's worth looking at, especially if it's the same man who was at the barn late on the Monday night.'

‘So a woman who's already admitted to committing two offences is trying to teach me how to do my duty?'

‘I'm assuming you wouldn't want to see a man convicted of murder if there's any doubt about it.'

‘Oh, I'm sure you'll make sure there's plenty of doubt about it. There are probably things you're still hiding.'

Which was quite true. If I kept trying to stand on the high moral ground, there'd be a landslide. I tried to sound properly humble. ‘At least would you agree that it's worth trying to find the man?'

‘Perhaps, if I had a dozen spare constables to go round half of Oxfordshire looking for a badly shaven, dark-haired, broad-shouldered tramp who whistles folk-songs.'

There was a knock on the door and a voice from the corridor.

‘Magistrates are here, sir.'

He stood up and picked up his cap from the top of a filing cabinet.

‘I shouldn't be long, Miss Bray. We'll take your latest statement when I get back.'

He went, shutting the door firmly behind him. He didn't lock it, but he might as well have done. Unless I wanted trouble, I should stay where I was. So I stayed and heard doors opening and closing along the corridor, footsteps on stairs and the occasional male voice giving sharp orders to go there, do that. The whole building seemed to be in a state of excitement. It isn't every day a police court in a small country town sees a man remanded on a murder charge. Somewhere one or two floors below where I was sitting Daniel would be brought up from a cell, taken to the dock. Three magistrates more used to dealing with pub brawls and rural theft would decide that he should be kept in custody until such time as the case could be heard at the assizes. Daniel Venn would leave the dock not belonging to himself or his family any more but to the law. And his story would be the property of the public. On the whole, I was glad not to be there to see it.

The window of my room looked down on a side street. No sign of excitement there at any rate, just a two-wheeled dogcart with a boy on foot beside it and a bay horse eating from a nosebag, a mongrel sniffing in the gutter, a man in a panama hat pushing a bicycle. But when I opened the window and leaned out I could hear vehicles coming and going from the front of the building, wheels, a horse whinnying, even the cough and splutter of a motor car.

Half an hour passed. In that time the mongrel had a fight with a whippet, the man wheeling the bicycle stopped and held a long conversation with another man carrying a new zinc bucket, the horse went on eating and pigeons scuffled in the dust for the few bits of grain that dropped from the nosebag. Then a groom came running down the street, gave a coin to the boy, whipped off the nosebag and drove the dogcart away to the front of the building. Magistrate going home, I thought, job done. There were a lot of footsteps in the corridor, people coming up stairs, but it was another twenty minutes before the inspector came back. He had a constable with him, not the same one as before.

‘Right, Miss Bray, your new statement. Start it by saying you are now making an additional statement to the one of Tuesday 27 August.'

It took an age. I don't know whether he'd deliberately chosen the slowest-writing constable available, but I wouldn't have put it past him. At last we finished it. I read, signed, then felt entitled to ask a question.

‘Was Mr Venn remanded?'

He nodded.

‘Am I free to go now?'

Another nod, but he stayed sitting at the table.

‘I had a talk with Mr Daniel Venn before he was taken back to his cell. I put it to him that in the light of new information, we had reason to believe that his story about taking his aunt's gun to shoot squirrels was a fabrication and there was another reason for having it in his possession.'

A heavy pause. I thought Daniel would have guessed where the new information came from and probably wouldn't be pleased about it but he'd have to get used to other people making decisions for him.

‘He totally and utterly denies it,' the inspector said.

I thought: He's still trying to protect her.

He picked up my statement from the table and handed it to the constable as if it needed disinfecting. ‘File that with the other one, please.' Then, to me, ‘So one of you must be lying. Are you going to tell me which?'

I said I had nothing to add to my statement. It was all I could say.

‘Well, I look forward to meeting you again, Miss Bray, when you've decided what else to tell us. Good morning.'

*   *   *

I got myself downstairs and out. If there had been a crowd at the front of the building it had gone by now and there was no sign of Adam or Galway. I was desperate to talk to them and started walking fast towards the station.