The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor (121 page)

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Authors: Laurie R. King

BOOK: The Mary Russell Series Books 1-4: The Beekeeper's Apprentice; A Monstrous Regiment of Women; A Letter of Mary; The Moor
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“‘Green Broom’ I collected from John Woodrich, in Thrushtleton,” he said, “and the tune your singers used for ‘Unquiet Grave’ was a melody I noted down for another song. Magnificent music, that. You like it?”
“It’s very … human,” I said after a minute.
“People now lack patience, have no taste for a song that is not finished in three minutes. Modern music puts me in mind of a man I knew in Cambridge who had a mechanism into which one could put musical notes. It would then combine them to render a so-called tune, although to my ear they more closely resembled random cacophonies. Whenever I have the misfortune to hear a modern piece of music, such as when my American daughter-in-law assaults the piano, I begin to suspect that his machine is being put to considerable use.”
I laughed politely, and then returned to a previous thought which still occupied me greatly.
“I thought it odd that although the moor dwellers seemed well acquainted with me and my mission, the villagers didn’t know me, not even in Postbridge, which is a tiny place. And I don’t believe anyone in Ketteridge’s establishment recognised what I was doing there, either.”
“The moor men keep themselves to themselves, and Ketteridge employs foreigners.”
“Foreigners?” I asked doubtfully. Other than Scheiman and the hidden chef, they all had sounded British.
“French, American, Scots, and even Londoners, even a Welshman, but not from here.”
“I see. How odd. That explains how, even though he lives on the edges of the moor, he’s apart from the moor life. Isolated from the Dartmoor … would it be too much of an exaggeration to call it an ‘organism’?” I asked. He did not answer, only smiled to himself, his eyes closed now. Very soon, he was asleep in his chair. I fed the fire to keep him warm, and crept stiffly upstairs to see if I could coax a hot bath from the pipes.
 
 
B
ARING-GOULD WAS AWAKE again when I came down an hour later, drawn by the smells of yeast bread and coffee and much restored by the plentiful hot soak. Mrs Elliott swept in and out of the kitchen doors with hot plates and cups and dainties to tempt her old charge’s failing palate. One of these was a small crystal bowl of wortleberry jam, a relative of the bilberry, but from a far richer branch of the family. I exclaimed my praise, and Baring-Gould told me about “gatherin’ hurts” on the moor, an annual holiday spree akin to that of London’s East End inhabitants who spilled out from the city every year to pick hops in the clean sun of Kent. I did have a question whose urgency had been growing over the last two days, but I waited politely for him to finish before I asked it.
“Do you know where Holmes is?”
“He is in London, of course.”
“Does that mean someone came up with the names of the two people who saw the coach from the top of Gibbet Hill?”
“How stupid of me, I was forgetting that you weren’t here. Yes, Mrs Elliott’s nephew found the farmhouse they stayed in, although as there was no guest register the finding of them won’t be easy. Still, Holmes seemed to think he could do it,” he said complacently.
“Did he say when he expected to be back?”
“I thought to see him yesterday evening. I imagine he will be on today’s train.”
“How long have you known Holmes?” I heard myself asking. I had not intended to ask it: If Holmes wanted me to know, he would tell me,
and it was possibly impolitic to let Baring-Gould know how little Holmes had mentioned him.
“Forever,” he said. “His forever, that is, not mine. I’m his godfather.”
I was completely staggered by this calm statement. By this time, of course, I knew something about Holmes’ people (I was, after all, his wife) but somehow other than Mycroft they had never seemed very real or three-dimensional. It was like meeting Queen Victoria’s wet nurse. One knew she must have had one, but her existence seemed rather unlikely.
“His godfather,” I repeated weakly.
“I haven’t done a terribly good job of it, have I?” He seemed amused at his failure, not troubled. I could think of no suitable response, so I remained silent. “Still, he seems to have turned out all right. Been a good husband to you, has he?” If I’d had trouble before finding an answer, now my mouth was hanging open. “He loves you, of course; that helps. Foolishly, perhaps, but men love like that, in flames compared to the warm steady love of women. I hope—”
I never found out what his hopes were, praise be to God. The ruckus outside must have been approaching for some time without us hearing—Baring-Gould because his hearing was so poor and me because of the astonishment pounding in my ears. The first intimation of a problem came with a huge crash in the kitchen and voices raised enough for even my host to stop what he was about to say and turn to the door.
“I say, Mrs—” he started to call. With that the door burst open and what looked like half the population of Lew Down spilled into the room, all of them gabbling at once.
Baring-Gould rose majestically to his feet and glared at them all. “Stop this at once,” he thundered. Instant silence resulted. “Thomas, what is the meaning of this?”
The man automatically tugged off his cap, polite even in the extremity of his emotional upheaval. “A body, Rector,” the man stammered.
“There’s a dead man in the lake.”
16
The care for the tenants, the obligation of setting an
example of justice, integrity, kindliness, religious
observance, has been bred in him, and enforced by parental
warning through three centuries at the least, on his infant
mind. What is born in the bone comes out in the flesh.
—EARLY REMINISCENCES
I
T WAS FORTUNATE that I was already dressed and wearing my shoes, because a pair of bedroom slippers would surely have been torn to shreds, or left behind, long before I reached the quarry lake. I was out of my chair before Baring-Gould could articulate a response to the man’s statement, out of the front door without pausing to catch up a coat, across the drive, through the meadow, and on the edge of the watery chasm before anyone else had even emerged from the house on my trail.
I was not, however, before any others at the lake. Gathering a great breath, I cupped my hands and shouted at the full strength of my lungs, “Stop where you are! Don’t touch him!”
Even over the constant splash of the waterfall my unladylike bellow bounced off the stone walls with sufficient force to startle the would-be
rescuers. One of them slipped and fell backwards from the rowboat into the lake, which distracted the others long enough for me to race around the lake’s rim and plunge down the closer of the one-time quarry’s two access ramps, now a steep hillside heavily overgrown with fern and bramble, and slippery with fallen leaves. I caught my breath at the water’s edge and waited for the boat to reach the shore.
Two other men had been picking their way around the precipitous south wall of the lake, and now stood eyeing me disapprovingly.
“Please,” I called to them. “You must leave him there until the police have seen him. I know it doesn’t seem respectful of the dead. But it’s necessary, believe me. And try to walk back in the same place you went over.”
I suppose that had it been summer, I might not have been so quick to think of the possibility of what the police blotters call foul play. On a long summer’s night I could well imagine the lure this cool, slightly ominous spot might be for a group of young men on their way home from the pub. But in October, and with the awareness of wrongdoing on the moor, it was the first thing that came to mind, and I did not want heavy boots destroying any evidence we might unearth.
The five men gathered around me, one of them dripping wet, none of them showing much inclination to leave. I suggested mildly that the wet one might be better off dry, and thus rid myself of him and an escort, but the three remaining men, one of whom I had seen working around Lew House, planted themselves like trees and looked suspicious.
“Do you know who it is?” I asked them. They did not, only that it was a man, and he was not from around here, both of which facts I had already determined by a brief glance from the quarry rim. (That, and the sure knowledge that it was not Holmes. Not that for a moment I actually thought it was: My mad dash from the house was set off by professional concerns, not wifely imaginings. Truly.) The trousers on those reassuringly short legs had never belonged to a Devonshire working man. “Has anyone gone for the police and a doctor?”
“Don’t need doctor for that’n, missus.”
“A doctor needs to declare him dead. It’s a legal requirement. Did you send for them?”
“Mr Arundell went to fetch’n.” Baring-Gould’s curate lived in the house overlooking the lake.
“Good. Now, we can’t use the boat again in case there are fingerprints on it. Can we find another boat? I’d like to take a look at the body.”
They were shocked. “You baint wantin’ to be doing that, missus.”
“You’re quite right, I don’t particularly want to, but I think I ought to.”
“Thicky be Miz Holmes,” the familiar-looking man said to the other two in explanation, and that indeed seemed to explain and excuse all manner of misbehaviour, because they suddenly became cooperative, even eager.
“You feel free to use thicky boat, missus. Baint nobuddy else as used’n in weeks. He were dry as an ole bone.”
“Well, in that case, good. Now, if you, Mr … ?”
We paused for introductions: Andrew Budd was the young gardener, Albert Budd his older cousin, and Davey Pearce the third and eldest, an uncle of some sort. We shook hands gravely, and resumed.
“If Mr Andrew Budd would come and handle the boat for me, and you, Mr Budd the elder, would take up a position on the top of this ramp and stop anyone from coming down, perhaps, Mr Pearce, you could make your way around to the top of the other ramp and stop anyone from interfering on that side. And if you see any footprints, any hoof or tyre marks, any scuffs, give them wide berth. Yes? Good.”
It was bitter cold out on the slate-coloured water of the submerged quarry. A layer of mist clung low to the surface of the lake, causing my inadequate clothes to go clammy against my skin, while over our heads the half-bare trees rose up in watchful disapproval, the flares of intense yellow from their remaining leaves the only colours in this tight closed-in little universe. Budd rowed the short distance over to where the body floated, facedown in the water. A hat, sodden but not yet completely
waterlogged, had lodged against a submerged branch ten feet away, and as soon as I saw the thin hair floating like pond weed around the head, I knew who this had been.
My thoughts were echoed in an imperious shout that would have had me in the water beside the corpse had it not been for the strong arm of Andrew Budd.
“Who is it?” The call came from high above, and I turned carefully and saw, to my amazement, Baring-Gould with half a dozen others, perched on the rim looking down. There was a chair in back of him, I saw; he had travelled here by the simple expedient of having himself carried, seat and all, in a makeshift litter.
“It’s Randolph Pethering,” I called back, and began to shiver. Budd saw it, and began to take off his coat, but I waved him away. “Keep it on, I’ll just get it wet. Can you get us a bit closer, please?” We eased up until the prow was touching the antiquarian’s sleeve. He was only resting among the floating twigs and leaves against the bank, not lying up on it, and looked to be settling down into the water. Having said we must wait for the police officials to supervise the removal of the body, I was hesitant to interfere, but at the same time I did not wish them to be forced to drag this pit for a sunken corpse, and after all, it was highly unlikely that the constables in charge of recovering the body would pay the slightest attention to the niceties of investigation, anyway. I took a deep breath, gritted my teeth against the reaction of my ribs, and reached down my right hand to take hold of the back of Pethering’s jacket. Budd made an inarticulate protest.
“I have to do this,” I told him. “He’s about to sink in the water. Back us away from the bank a little, please.”
When the body was free from the rocks, I rolled him over, taking care not to add any scrapes or marks to those he might already possess, and taking care too not to let go of him lest he disappear into the depths. As I moved him, however, I noted that this did not actually seem an immediate likelihood, which was in itself interesting. Furthermore, his face when it came up to the surface was dark with livor mortis
where the blood had slowly settled after death. Pethering had not died in the water, and he had not died in the last few hours.
One side of the thin, pale hair was clotted with a brown bloodstain, and the heels of his sturdy walking boots were heavily scuffed and thick with mud. However, while I was hanging over the edge of the skiff and the body was floating alongside, I could not learn a great deal more. It would have to wait for a methodical examination on dry land, preferably by someone else.
“Can you reach his hat?” I asked Budd, and as I waited for him to manoeuvre to where he could bring the sodden thing onboard, I studied my surroundings. The two steep, overgrown access ramps, on the west and the southeast walls; the stream that Baring-Gould had diverted to fill his father’s quarry splashing in from the north, pushing this body down to the south wall along with the other debris; a sad little boathouse, once cheerful; autumnal trees drooping over the water and depositing their leaves; and a crowd now of at least twenty men, women, and children watching with interest this underdressed woman with a corpse on the other end of her arm.
The ramp I had come down, in the south wall, had shown no drag marks; but then again, its top was very near the drive to the curate’s house. The western ramp, on the other hand, though actually closer to the house, was more sheltered, and I thought it likely he had been placed in the lake from that ramp. One man could not have tipped him over the edge without a great deal more damage to the body than there seemed to be. Two adults might have swung Pethering and thrown him over, and if so, the launching site would have been precisely where Baring-Gould and the others were standing. I sighed. Little point to objecting, I supposed, but still: “Rector, could you have those people move around to the other side? There could be footprints right there.”
One of the women at his side leant over to repeat my message in his ear, and in seconds the assembly was tiptoeing away from the gathering place, lifting their skirts and eyeing the ground as if it were about to bite them. Baring-Gould resumed his chair and he, too, migrated around the
rim, where he was joined by the pink-cheeked, helmeted forces of law and order in the person of the local police constable. The voice of legal authority came, inevitably:
“Here, what are you doing down there?”
I left Baring-Gould to explain and to assert his own, considerably more ancient form of authority over the upstart with his shiny buttons and his shallow roots in the last century. I huddled in the boat, holding on to Pethering’s coat with my now-numb fingers (his collar would have been easier, but I recoiled from brushing his cold flesh any more than I had to) and watching the glowering, gesticulating constable, and I decided that there was no point in maintaining an exactness in the investigative process. I was satisfied that Pethering had not been placed where he was found, and as I could not let go of him until he was unable to sink or to float off, it was high time to hand him over to properly constituted authority. “Thank you, Mr Budd. Back to the ramp, I think. Try not to hit him with your oar.”
It was clumsy work, and after I tried, and failed, to keep Pethering out of the oar’s way, Budd turned the boat and sculled it backwards with short, choppy strokes. At the ramp I let the constable drag the body up onto the shore, leaving it half in the water. Now that he had possession of the thing, he looked down at it in growing consternation, and did not notice at first when I got back into the boat. When the corner of his eye caught the movement of Budd pushing off, he protested loudly, more loudly than strictly necessary.
I tried to reassure him. “I’m not going anywhere, Constable. I’ll be right back.” To Budd I said, “Take me over to the other side, please. I’d like to have a look at it before half the parish tramps it down.”
The PC did not like this at all, and raised his voice to order us to return. I can’t think he imagined we had anything to do with the death, but for a man more accustomed to drunken farmhands and petty breakins than dead bodies, and faced with a pair in a boat who delivered a body and now proposed to row away, all he could do was to grasp hard onto the essentials—and we were as essential a thing as he could find.
Seeing us making our way to the only other exit from this pit, he turned on his heels and churned up the hillside and around the rim. I saw him flitting behind the half-bare trees, and my heart sank at what those furious boots would do to any marks on the ramp.
Davey Pearce was still at the top of his ramp, holding back his crowd of two very small children and studying all the activity with great interest. “Try to stop him from coming down the ramp,” I called to him without much hope, and indeed, when the constable appeared at Pearce’s side, he did not look open to reason. He pushed Pearce to one side and started down towards us.
However, I had reckoned without Baring-Gould. His old voice rang out with the authority of six centuries of landholders, John Gold the Crusader ordering his troops into battle with the Saracen. “Pearce, hold him there.”
And Pearce, who was old enough to have the traditional ways built into his very bones, reached out through the thin veneer of governmental authority and laid a meaty hand on the constable, and he held him there. He sat on him, actually, with the beatific smile of licensed insurrection on his face.
Before I could climb out of the boat, Budd tapped me on the arm and held out his wool coat. I looked at the heavy pullover he still wore, and took the coat.
The sloping hillside before me must have been hellish for hauling up slabs of stone but it was no great obstacle for a strong person carrying the inert body of a small man across his shoulders, which is what the killer had done until he slipped on some wet leaves about halfway down. After that, he had dragged Pethering, which accounted for the marks I had seen on the backs of the antiquarian’s waterlogged boots. At the edge of the water he had fumbled and splashed and no doubt got himself wet from the knees down, working to push the body out into the lake, before climbing back up to the rim (each step slipping slightly as his wet shoes hit the damp leaves) and making his way off.
Before I went to investigate his destination, though, I returned to
the place where he had fallen, studying it with great care from all angles until I could visualise the man’s movements precisely.

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