Blood on the Wood (37 page)

‘I said you were on no account to try and do anything, just let me know if you found him.'

‘I did try, but you weren't there. So I rode back and found him where I'd left him, asleep under a tree. He jumped up and tried to run away, so I reached out and got my riding crop hooked over his collar, only he twisted and got away, crop and all.'

‘I found that crop.'

‘Oh good. Can you let me have it back? It belongs to the friend I'm staying with.'

‘I found it in the wagon where he was living. I thought he'd killed you. I nearly went mad worrying about you.'

‘Anyway, I wasn't going to give up. I borrowed my friend's horse again and came across him in broad daylight, running along a road. He looked pretty well done in. He tried to dive into a ditch when he saw me but we went after him and skittled him over and then these two policemen came along in a dogcart and said they were looking for him. They spooked the mare and she bolted, but she's probably home by now, so that's all right.'

‘Nothing's all right, nothing at all.'

She gave me a critical glance. ‘You do look a bit tucked up. What's wrong? Is it true he's killed another woman?'

‘Yes. Only he didn't kill the first one.'

‘Did you know her?'

‘Yes.'

There were things I didn't intend to explain to anybody, least of all Bobbie. Luckily, her butterfly mind didn't stay with any subject long enough to be curious. If her riding crop had held in Fardel's collar she might have been dead by now, or Carol Venn might have been alive and facing a murder charge on his evidence. Bobbie Fieldfare as an agent of the fates. I nudged her aside to make room on the step and sat down beside her, legs weak and shaky. Perhaps – against all previous evidence – she was thinking, because she went quiet for a while. Then:

‘There are police all over the place, aren't there?'

Two constables visible from where we were sitting, standing outside the Crown looking thirsty. Half the police in the county must have been drafted in to look for Fardel, when it was too late.

‘Yes, a lot of police.'

‘So I suppose that means we can't do it today. I'll go back to my friend's and meet you here tomorrow when it's getting dark and—'

‘What are you talking about?'

She looked at me, wide-eyed. ‘Bessie Broadbeam. I know we had some bad luck last time but…'

In terms that even Bobbie could understand I told her what I thought of her, of myself, of pictures and the love of money.

‘But if it's for the cause…'

‘The cause doesn't need her. We're better off without her. I hope I never set eyes on her again.'

Pure, simple causes were what I longed for, nothing to do with love or money or all the mixed motives in between. You never get them, of course.

‘It does seem a pity,' Bobbie said. Then, after another silence, ‘I'm pretty sure I broke his collarbone, but if they're going to hang him anyway, I don't suppose it matters.'

*   *   *

Luke Fardel was hanged at Oxford several months later for the murder of Carol Venn. He still had Sutton's knife in his pocket when the constables dragged him out of the ditch where Bobbie had toppled him, blood all over him, down to his underclothes. At the trial Fardel claimed that Mrs Venn had lured him to the pool and tried to attack him. The sheer unlikelihood of that made the jurors grin and murmur, particularly since the judge cut short various other mutterings from the dock against the late Mrs Venn. He said Fardel was doing himself no good by trying to blacken a lady's reputation. I think it was in his mind that the prisoner was claiming some unlikely romantic liaison with Mrs Venn. I didn't attend the trial but when I heard about that my conscience pricked me into going to Oxford and speaking to Fardel's barrister. Without telling him the whole story I said that there could even be some truth in what his client had claimed and it might be worth speaking to Mrs Venn's husband. The barrister was elderly and cynical from a career of representing hopeless cases.

‘Just suppose we were to take this seriously enough to subpoena the grieving widower for the defence and suggest that a frail and artistic young woman for some reason chose to make an assignation with a man like Fardel and attack him. Can you imagine the effect that would have on the jury? I appreciate your concern, Miss Bray, but I really think that would be all we needed to make quite certain of the black cap.'

So that was that. Even if I'd wanted to do more – and he had killed her, after all – nobody signed clemency petitions for the likes of Luke Fardel. The murder of Daisy Smith remains on police files officially unsolved. Inspector Bull knows, but perhaps there was pressure from higher up to have him moved on to other things back at Oxford headquarters. Harry Hawthorne wrote another trenchant paragraph about it in the
Wrecker,
then, like the rest of the world, moved on to other things.

*   *   *

As for our Odalisque, I had to see her again whether I wanted to or not. The lawyers went to work on the tangles of the Venn estate and Philomena's various trusts. Adam Venn somehow avoided prosecution and bankruptcy, the house was sold and, on a grey January day, the genuine version of the picture came up for auction at Christie's at last. As far as Emmeline was concerned, she was still my responsibility and I had to be there. It may have been in her mind that Oliver Venn would even at this point manage some last-minute substitution, though he was comfortably tucked up by then as a permanent resident in a private hotel in Torquay. There was drizzle in the air, the umbrella stands at Christie's were crammed with damp black umbrellas, the hush of the crowded auction room disturbed by sniffs and muffled coughs. And yet, when the two white-gloved porters carried her in and settled her lovingly on the easel, it was like the sun coming out. The coughs stopped and a little sigh of pleasure fluttered round the room. She sprawled on her cushions, pink and peachy, and the lazy mocking look in her eyes, challenging anybody to put a price on her, did half the auctioneer's work for him. I can't pretend I followed the bidding because after a little hanging back it went so fast, but I did catch the resentful whisper of ‘Americans' from a man behind me and the stir of excitement in the room. She was knocked down in the end for a very satisfactory sum of guineas.

As the porters took her off the easel to begin her long journey across the Atlantic there was a moment when her eyes seemed to be looking straight into mine, laughing. I thought how she, Bobbie and I had shuffled along the dark corridor, crammed into the broom cupboard among the mops and bedpans. I'd taken her to places where she wouldn't have wanted to go and she'd certainly done the same for me. She looked better on it than I did. I waved her goodbye and went back to Clement's Inn trying to be as pleased as everybody else would about the money.

*   *   *

Walter Sutton didn't have to go back to Swindon and the railway carriages after all. Some other lover of craftsmanship appreciated his work so much that he set up a new studio for him near Chipping Campden. He and Janie had another baby and last I heard were prospering. And Daniel and Felicia got married. He teaches music at a girls' school in London and in their spare time they run folk-dancing classes for children in the London docks. I happened to drop in on one of them recently and saw him leading the dancing with almost as much bounce as ever and her playing the piano, children's voices chanting
Here we come up the green grass, This fine day.
Not much green grass in the docklands. No place for a girl playing her violin in the firelight, insubstantial as a flame. But then those were wild times and she belonged in a different song.

Also by Gillian Linscott

A HEALTHY BODY

MURDER MAKES TRACKS

KNIGHTFALL

A WHIFF OF SULPHUR

UNKNOWN HAND

MURDER, I PRESUME

 

And featuring Nell Bray

 

SISTER BENEATH THE SHEET

HANGING ON THE WIRE

STAGE FRIGHT

WIDOW'S PEAK

CROWN WITNESS

DEAD MAN'S MUSIC

DANCE ON BLOOD

ABSENT FRIENDS

THE PERFECT DAUGHTER

DEAD MAN RIDING

BLOOD ON THE WOOD
. Copyright © 2003 by Gillian Linscott. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

www.minotaurbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Linscott, Gillian.

   Blood on the wood / Gillian Linscott.—1st St. Martin's Minotaur ed.

            p.  cm.

   ISBN 0-312-33148-7

   EAN 978-0312-33148-1

   1.  Bray, Nell (Fictitious character)—Fiction.   2.  Women detectives—England—Fiction.   3.  Painting—Forgeries—Fiction.   4.  Suffragists—Fiction.   5.  England—Fiction.   I.  Title.

PR6062.I54B57 2004

823'.914—dc22

2003069721

First published in Great Britain by Virago

First St. Martin's Minotaur Edition: May 2004

eISBN 9781466826410

First eBook edition: August 2012