Johnny Swanson (26 page)

Johnny was flooded with joy. His earlier call to the operator hadn’t been ignored.

Mrs Langford kept her creepy calm. ‘Oh, Sergeant … and Constable … Thank goodness you are here,’ she said, trying to conceal her bewilderment at their arrival.

Bennett took charge. ‘This poor lady has been the victim of a savage assault,’ he said. ‘She was lucky I arrived.’

Then the door opened again and Johnny heard Olwen’s voice: ‘Johnny, are you in here? Mrs Langford? I’ve brought Professor Campbell.’

‘What the devil …?’ said the policeman as everyone else in the room gasped in unison.

Johnny was feeling exactly as he had back in Mr Bennett’s grand house, hidden under the big fur cloak. He could stay hidden and wait for a chance to run away, or he could show himself and intervene in the action. At Bennett’s, fear had got the better of him. Now he took courage. He uncurled himself and shuffled out from under the desk. Everyone was paralysed – looking the other way, towards the door. And Johnny found himself just as aghast as they were. For there, holding Olwen’s hand, was a six-foot-tall man with grotesquely rouged cheeks, wearing a multi-layered crinoline dress, hooped earrings and a fluffy blonde wig.

The senior policeman, with a deep Welsh voice, spoke for everyone. ‘Will somebody please tell me what on earth is going on?’

‘I
can explain!’ said Johnny, and everybody turned to face him.

‘Johnny!’ gasped Mrs Langford. ‘Where did you come from?’

‘I’ve been under the desk,’ said Johnny. ‘I heard everything. Officer, you must arrest that woman, and Mr Bennett too. They haven’t been telling you the truth.’

‘But Johnny,’ said Olwen, ‘you told me Mrs Langford was in danger. It looks as if you were right.’

‘No. I was wrong,’ he gabbled. ‘She killed Dr Howell. And Mr Bennett here, he killed Dr Langford.’

Bennett made a move for the door, but Professor Campbell opened his giant pantomime fan and blocked his path. ‘This is preposterous,’ said Bennett. ‘I don’t have to stay here and listen to the incoherent ramblings of a deranged child!’

‘I think you’d better stop where you are, sir,’ said
the sergeant calmly. I’m sure we can get this cleared up.’ He turned to Mrs Langford. ‘Madam, perhaps you can enlighten us?’

Mrs Langford took a handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed her eyes. ‘It’s as I said just now. Dr Howell attacked me, and Mr Bennett came to my rescue.’

‘No!’ cried Johnny. ‘It wasn’t like that. She killed Dr Howell, and she was going to kill me!’ He pointed at Bennett. ‘And he killed Dr Langford.’

‘No he didn’t,’ came a voice. ‘That’s not quite right.’ Everybody froze as Dr Howell’s body began to stir. He sat up and spoke. ‘It’s all right. I haven’t come back from the dead. I was only pretending. It seemed safer than letting myself be knocked about by those two thugs.’ Howell pulled himself to his feet and seized the jar of liquid from the desk, hurling its contents into Mrs Langford’s eyes. ‘Did you really think I would murder a child? Did you really believe this was poison? You sick, depraved woman. Officer, she’s your murderess!’

‘But you’re not dead,’ said the sergeant in confusion. ‘There is no victim.’

‘Yes there is,’ said Howell. ‘Not me, Officer, but Dr Giles Langford, this woman’s husband. She killed him. She’s admitted it to me a hundred times, threatening
to do the same to me unless I went along with her plans. And this man’ – he pointed at Bennett – ‘this man has forced me to hide her from the law.’

Johnny was stunned. Mrs Langford, a murderess? ‘But she’s an old lady,’ he cried. ‘Old ladies don’t kill people! She loved her husband. He loved her. She can’t have killed him.’

The sergeant interrupted. ‘And where is the body – this Dr Langford?’ he asked.

‘Buried. In Stambleton, before Christmas,’ said Howell.

‘And my mother is in prison, charged with the murder,’ said Johnny. ‘And she didn’t do it!’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Professor Campbell. ‘What has all this got to do with Craig-y-Nos?’

Dr Howell tried to explain. ‘It all started when I took on some … some unconventional work for Dr Langford …’ As the constable struggled to take notes, Howell told the story of how Langford had hoped to develop the BCG to do good, and how, in a panic on Remembrance Day, he himself had asked Langford to come to Wales to help him. ‘I wasn’t expecting Mrs Langford to come too,’ he explained. ‘I didn’t know that she and Bennett had a very different plan for the vaccine.’

Mrs Langford interrupted. ‘I had to come. I knew that if my husband was near a sanatorium he wouldn’t be able to stop himself wandering around, chatting to people and hinting at what he was doing. I had to make sure he stayed in Howell’s cottage. I knew he couldn’t keep a secret. He’d even told that boy!’

Professor Campbell was struggling to keep up. ‘You mean to say you’ve been cultivating a vaccine here? In our laboratory?’

‘That’s right,’ said Howell. ‘But at first my involvement was purely scientific. I was never happy about the idea of selling it.’

‘So why didn’t you tell someone what Bennett and Mrs Langford were planning?’ asked the professor.

‘I was scared,’ said Howell, hanging his head. ‘I’m ashamed to admit it, sir, but I was frightened. At first it was bad enough that I might ruin my career, but by the time I found out they wanted to sell the vaccine I knew that Mrs Langford had already killed once, and that Bennett had looked on while she did it. And I was right to be careful. Look what they tried to do to me when I finally crossed them!’

The sergeant, overwhelmed by the welter of information, opened his mouth to ask a question, but Johnny got in first.

‘But why was Dr Langford murdered?’ he said. ‘You said he knew nothing of what his wife was up to.’

‘Nothing until that final night,’ said Howell, ‘when I thought he was safely back in Stambleton. We’d finished here. The first batch of vaccine was a success, and I was sure I could carry on without Dr Langford’s help. When Bennett came to collect him and his wife from my cottage to drive them home, I thought he was acting as a generous friend, not as a conspirator. They all left in good spirits.’

The policeman tried to intervene again, but Mrs Langford turned on Bennett. ‘And you couldn’t resist it, could you, you fool? Everything would have been all right. We were safely home. Giles would never have suspected a thing. But you had to boast about the money. You had to go and break his heart.’

‘But you’re the one who broke his head!’

The two policemen held Bennett and Mrs Langford back as they flew at each other.

‘You know how angry he was,’ Mrs Langford yelled at Bennett. ‘You saw the fury in his eyes when you told him what we’d planned.’

Bennett sneered, ‘Don’t try to make it sound as if you were defending yourself.’ He turned to the sergeant. ‘She was frantic. First she flung an ashtray at him, and
when that missed and went through the window, she bashed his head against the mantelpiece.’

‘Don’t you understand?’ said Mrs Langford. ‘He had to die. I couldn’t live with him knowing that I was selling his dream.’

Howell spoke up. ‘Listen to her. She’s speaking as if she were doing her victim a favour – killing him to protect him from the knowledge of how she was funding their old age. Don’t you see? She’s lost her mind. She’d rather her husband died than that he knew she’d let him down. She killed the person she loved most in the world to shield herself from his disapproval.’

All eyes were on Mrs Langford. She was shaking and staring ahead blankly, as if re-playing the murder scene in her mind. ‘There was so much blood,’ she said, rubbing her hands on her skirt.

Bennett shouted at her again. ‘But you didn’t do anything to save him, did you? You were more interested in saving yourself. What’s it going to sound like in court when I tell them you were on your knees mopping the floor before your husband was even dead?’

‘My mother’s apron!’ said Johnny as the constable closed his notebook, defeated by the rush of
revelations. ‘You used my mother’s apron, didn’t you? That’s why the police suspected her in the first place.’

Mrs Langford snapped into defiance. ‘What about you, Bennett? You can’t pin it all on me. You made me write that letter, remember? And you showed it to the police, to make out that I was in France. How are you going to explain that? Or why you drove me back down here and forced Howell to give me shelter? I’m not a fool. I know you didn’t do that for my sake. You wanted me here to make sure Howell kept producing the vaccine. And you hid me from the police because I might have told them you were involved – not just in selling illegal medicine, but in the murder too. Well, you can’t get out of it now. I’m going to tell them everything. You’re up to your neck in all this, and if I swing for it, so will you.’

‘My crimes are going to look pretty pathetic alongside yours,’ sniffed Bennett. ‘You’ve killed your husband, you tried to kill Howell, and you wanted to kill the boy …’

Johnny joined in: ‘And you would have killed my mother! She still might be hanged because of your lies. Oh, Mrs Langford! Mum and I thought you were our friend. We’ve never done anything to harm you. I even wanted to rescue you when I thought you were
imprisoned here by Dr Howell. But you’re the jailer. You knew they’d arrested my mother. You knew she was innocent and you did nothing to help her.’

The sergeant unfastened the handcuffs from his belt and nodded to his constable to do the same.

‘I’m not sure I’m following all this, Officer,’ said Professor Campbell, flapping his fan. ‘It seems I have been sorely deceived by Dr Howell and Mrs Morgan – or should I call her Mrs Langford? I thought they were among the most diligent members of my staff! No doubt there are some arrests to be made here.’

Howell sat down on the edge of the desk, put his hands, with their well-bitten fingernails, over his face, and cried. ‘I’m sorry,’ he sobbed. ‘I don’t know how I got caught up in all this.’ Johnny wondered how he could ever have believed that Howell was the murderer, and that Mrs Langford had been scared of him.

The sergeant at last got a chance to speak. ‘I think I had better call Stambleton and see what they want me to do with the prisoners.’

Johnny picked up the dangling receiver. He heard a high-pitched ‘Hello?’ The operator was still on the line. She had been listening in to everything. Her garbled version of events would be all round the district by morning.

F
ar away from the mayhem at Craig-y-Nos, Hutch was sitting in an armchair reading (or rather dozing with a book on his lap and his glasses sliding down his nose) when he heard the doorbell. It was ringing hard and repeatedly. It must be the policeman, back with his warrant. Hutch had been in the chair for so long that his bad leg was stiff, and it took him a while to get down the stairs and into the shop. He turned on the light, hoping it would signal that he was on his way, but the bell kept going, nagging him to answer the door.

Hutch opened up. It wasn’t the policeman. It was the reporter, as impatient as ever. ‘I thought you were out,’ he said.

‘I was asleep,’ Hutch said crossly. ‘I’d nodded off. I’m allowed to do that in my own home, aren’t I?’

‘What about the boy? Couldn’t he answer the door?’

Hutch said nothing.

The reporter continued: ‘The boy. Johnny Swanson. He is here, isn’t he? Very brave of you to take him in. And just as well, as it’s turned out. I’ve had a look at his house. Every window smashed now. And rude words on the door.’

Hutch was still not fully awake, but he was uneasy. The boy. He hadn’t heard anything from Johnny. Did that mean he was all right, or in trouble? Could the phone have been ringing while he was sleeping upstairs? All the fuss about the policeman’s attack on Post Office protocol had distracted Hutch from thinking about Johnny. And now he realized that he had no idea exactly where the child was. It was nearly ten o’clock. There was only one more train due in to Stambleton. He hoped Johnny would be on it.

The reporter asked again, interrupting Hutch’s thoughts, ‘Mr Hutchinson? The boy, Mr Hutchinson? Is he well?’

‘Well? Yes … he’s well. Just not here tonight. I’m all alone. Is that all you wanted to know?’ Hutch tried to usher the reporter back towards the door.

‘Oh no,’ said the reporter. ‘I didn’t come about Johnny at all. Like you, I don’t like being up so late, especially for work, but they’ve sent me to check on
a story. Trouble is, this one involves the paper itself, and we never like that sort of news to go public. The police have been round at the office, asking about bogus adverts that we’ve printed in our paper, tricking people into parting with money. Apparently it involves a post office box here. Have the police been to see you too?’

‘Yes, they have. But I couldn’t help them. I can’t go giving out people’s personal details just because some policeman decides he wants them. I told him to go off and get a warrant.’

‘And did he?’

‘I don’t know. He hasn’t come back yet.’

‘Well, we’d better wait for him together. Then maybe we can clear all this up tonight.’

Hutch didn’t want to take the reporter up to his flat. He hated the idea of the man mooching about among his things and looking for signs of Johnny. So he gave him the chair he kept for old ladies to sit on while they were doing their shopping, and dragged out the high stool from behind the post office counter for himself. He perched on it uncomfortably, but he preferred to be higher up than his unexpected guest. Their conversation was fitful. Both of them were getting more and more annoyed.

The reporter turned to the subject of the trial. ‘So whatever happens, you will accept the verdict?’ he asked.

‘I don’t think I’ll face a problem there. Mrs Swanson will be found not guilty, I’m sure.’

‘And that’s the reason you’ve taken her son under your roof?’

‘That, and the fact that the poor boy has no one else in the world.’

‘You don’t see it as a conflict with your responsibilities as a postmaster?’

Hutch corrected him: ‘Sub-postmaster.’

‘Oh,
sub
-postmaster. Of course. No doubt standards are somewhat lower for a
sub
-postmaster.’