What Dread Hand? (5 page)

I suppose it was when the old Gov’nor had his second stroke that I really made up my mind. I knew that the day he died, the farm would go to George, and me and Lil and the kids would be out on our ears. Not that George wasn’t quite good to Lil and the kids; it was me he resented and always had. He never would have it that I should have come back to the farm. ‘You shoved off to London,’ he said, that day I showed up again with Lil, ‘you was too good for the place then, you went off to make your fortune and left me and the Gov’nor to struggle along on our own. And now when I’ve worked and slaved and half killed meself,’ he says, ‘getting the place on its feet and making a go of it, back you come marching with your fancy girl and want to cut in.’

‘Well, all right, why not?’ I says. ‘Half of it’s mine anyway, or will be when the Gov’nor goes.’

‘Oh, no it won’t,’ says the old boy, who’s sitting by in his wheel-chair, listening in. ‘George is in the right of it, Charley,’ he says to me. ‘He hasn’t had much assistance from me,’ he says, ‘what with me health; and he’s the one that’s made the farm what it is today. And lock, stock and barrel, when I’m gone, it goes to George. You can stay here and muck in, Charley,’ he says, ‘as long as you pull your weight, such as it is, and Lord knows that isn’t much considering the size of you. But the day I die, the farm goes to George and after that it’s up to him.’

‘The day it’s up to me,’ says George, ‘is the day Charley leaves.’ And five years later, I knew that the day was near.

Well, I wrote the letter. It was a job but I wrote it. I got some fancy paper from Woolworth’s, like a woman might use, and I bought a bottle of cheap scent and ponged it up a bit and threw the bottle away, not taking any chances, and the notepaper too. And I practised and practised till I got a fist that mightn’t be like anybody else’s fist, but wasn’t like mine. And I wrote a letter breathing love and passion and referring back to a lot of goings-on and saying the lady’s wicked, jealous husband was beginning to suspect and I put a lot of tripe about I tremble for your life and stuff like that. I signed it ‘Baby’; that didn’t tie it down to any particular person and the idea was to get him along to Duck’s Copse and beat him up there, which I could easily do, me being twice the size of him; and leave the letter in his pocket like that murderer Hocker done with his pal. As I say, George was always a one after the Pennington girls—the police would go off after half a dozen jealous husbands in the neighbourhood and certainly would never dream of me murdering my own brother to inherit the farm when the old man wasn’t even dead yet.

And I wouldn’t go dropping no buttons about, neither, like Hocker done. That’s what copped
him.

But first I got busy and sort of planted the thing: Hocker never thought of that. I sent a telegram to George from Pennington, asking him to be at a certain crossroads at a certain time. He thought it was a bit funny but he went there from curiosity—and of course no one turned up. Then I rang up and put my handkerchief across the mouthpiece and asked him to meet me—no names, of course—at another place; and nobody was there, neither.

‘This is a rum go,’ he said. ‘What’s the game do you think?’

‘Jealous husband after you, I expect,’ I says, joshing him.

‘Don’t talk silly,’ he says.

‘Well, I don’t like it,’ I says. ‘It looks fishy to me: I should go to the police.’

But I had to try a couple of times more before he did. ‘I’ll go with you,’ I says. ‘I don’t like the look of things.’

‘You two are very full of brotherly love all of a sudden,’ says Lil.

‘About as full as Cain and Abel,’ says the old man, dribbling out of the corner of his mouth. You’d better look out, old geyser, I thought, or you’ll be for it next, when your precious George isn’t here no more to protect you. But as it happens, he’ll outlive the two of us.

The police didn’t think much of it. A farmer makes quite a few enemies—in our part of the world they do, anyway; and I put it into their heads again, joking like, about the jealous husband. I suppose they thought someone wanted to get him alone and fight it out over some deal in land or sheep, or some woman; and if two chaps like to have a scrap, well, it’s no concern of theirs. But I’d got it across to them that there was someone who was trying to arrange a meeting at some quiet place; and that he would probably go, wanting to know who on earth it could be. And after the lack of interest they’d shown, I knew he wouldn’t consult the police next time. That was all I wanted.

When the day came, I phoned him again from Pennington. He said he’d come right away. ‘And mind you’re there, this time,’ he said, ‘because I want to get this over once and for all, and if you don’t show up, it’ll be the last time I come.’

I biked slowly out to meet him, as if by chance, on the road beyond the copse. He told me he’d had another message. ‘I’ll come along with you,’ I said, turning back my bike.

‘I don’t want no protection,’ he said, a bit stiff.

‘Well, you’re going to get it,’ I said. ‘An undersized little rat like you,’ I says, codding him along a bit, ‘you’d never have a chance against them louts from Baker’s farm: and that’s what it is, I bet you, them boys of Baker’s, ganging up against you because of that argument with them last year, about the hay.’

‘I never thought of that,’ he says. ‘And there’s four of them. All right, come on.’

‘Not exactly falling over yourself with gratitude, are you?’ I says.

‘Well, considering it was you let me in for the trouble with Baker in the first place,’ he says… So that’s what thanks I get for going along with him to meet a bunch of roughs.

When we came to the copse, we got off and he propped his bike against the stile. ‘Wheel it in a bit further,’ I said, shoving mine ahead of me. ‘If they see it, they’ll bust it up for extra.’

So we wheeled the bikes in and I hid them, shoving them in among the brambles, in case anyone saw mine with his before I got away. ‘I’ll take this along with me,’ I said, fishing out a whacking great spanner from my tool kit. ‘It might come in handy.’

‘Oh, well, they’re only kids,’ he said. He always was soft.

Of course there was no one in the wood. ‘The whole thing’s a hoax,’ he said. ‘It’s the last time I’ll be such a fool as to come.’

And he bent down to get a drink from the little stream that runs down, cool and clear, between the trees.

So I let him have it with the spanner, like I planned, and washed my hands and the spanner in the stream, and it ran as cool after that, but not so clear. And I shoved the letter in his pocket and made sure I took the right bike, and pushed off home.

But it’s like I said—our police are wonderful. It took them about five minutes to discover what had been going on under my nose for years. Of course Lil vowed and swore she never wrote no letter about no jealous husband, but I guess they reckoned she’d say that anyway.

I suppose I’ve just got too decent a mind, that’s the truth, ever to have thought of it. I mean, my own brother and my wife! But there you are—in my innocence I make up this ‘jealous husband’ to murder my brother; and all the time I’m supposed to have been a jealous husband myself.

George and Lil! You wouldn’t believe it, would you?—the rotten things people do.

L
INDA HARTLEY WAS SKIPPING
with the Bindell twins, singing, to the well-known old tune, a verse of their own improvisation: a game at which Joy and Roy were, through long practice, past-masters.

‘One, two, three and four,’ chirped Joy,

‘Father locks the office door.

Five six, seven, eight—

He pretends he’s working late.’

She tripped over the rope and Roy leapt in.

‘Nine, ten, eleven, twelve—

He’s not working by himself!’

They all three stopped skipping and burst into giggles. Joy took the rope and skipped by herself, changing the theme.

‘Pig, dog, cat and cow

Mother knows and what a row!

Horse, goat, rat and boar—

I was listening at the door.’

Linda was not so accomplished as the twins at it but she took the rope and had a go herself.

‘Sun, moon, day and night

My parents also had a fight…’

But she gave up and resorted to prose. ‘My mother said my father had got to make
your
father make
your
mother get me into Hallfield.’ Hallfield was the posh girls’ school of Linda’s aspirations: Joy was going there in the summer term. Mrs. Bindell was on the Board of Governors and, since she disapproved of Linda and looked down upon her mother, only too likely to oppose her election.

‘Stove, grate, fire and hob,’ sang Linda, skipping again, ‘Your mother is an awful snob.’

‘Awful,’ agreed the twins, not singing. It must be ghastly for poor Linda, her father having married beneath him.

That Harold Hartley had married beneath him was acknowledged by one and all, not excluding Mrs. Hartley and himself. That he had had much the best of the bargain, occurred to none of them. Not that he was unkind to Louisa—not particularly; but he had always been a difficult, disagreeable man and of late had grown quite impossibly irritable—so ill-tempered and nervous and—suspicious; neurotic, Louisa supposed would be the word for it—he had even dug out an old war-time, smuggled-home revolver and kept it loaded in a drawer beside his bed. A nasty, black, ugly thing, she wouldn’t so much as touch it herself, but it seemed to give him confidence. She sometimes wondered whether he wasn’t the victim of some kind of mild blackmail—there was some oddly secretive visiting, now and then. Well, if that were so, she could only pray that it might continue—there seemed enough money to spare, and anything was worth paying that might prevent any smear of scandal from interrupting the triumphant progress through life of her darling Linda.

Linda was their ‘only’: a horrid child, really, but to the loving and simple heart of her mother, the very pink of perfection both in brains and in beauty. For Linda alone did she resent the social rebuffs of snobby little Sanstone—led by Mrs. Bindell, the solicitor’s wife. Why Mrs. Bindell should be so positively inimical towards her, she never could quite understand; that she resented the bosom-friendship of the twins with Linda was evident. To effect a separation, Louisa strongly suspected, she would certainly oppose Linda’s entry to the new school. However, Harold must cope with that; Harold saw a good deal of Mr. Bindell over these property deals of his, and he would fix it…

But alas!—in grey December, Harold, in Louisa’s own phrase, took ill and was about to die.

She sat with Mrs. Bindell in ‘the lounge’ while Mr. Bindell went up to the sickroom. ‘Though it’s not much use him going, Mrs. Bindell. It’s days since poor Harold could speak a word, not to be understood; nor hold a pencil to write, or even make signs.’

‘It is usual to call and enquire,’ said Mrs. Bindell loftily, putting common little Mrs. Hartley in her place.

But Louisa, it seemed, had been right after all. Harold had been unable to say a word to Mr. Bindell. ‘But he does seem to be trying to ask me something, Mrs. Hartley. Something he wants me to find for him or something like that. Do you know what it could be?’

‘No, I don’t,’ said Louisa. ‘We know about his will and all that. Something to do with the office, perhaps?’

‘I’ll go along there,’ suggested Mr. Bindell, ‘and get them to let me look around.’

But according to the office underlings, nothing was found that could account for Mr. Hartley’s anxieties; and when she herself tried to question him, he rolled his head on the pillow and his look said as plainly as it had many times said during their life together, ‘Mind your own business, Louisa, and leave me alone.’ And the days passed away and so at last did Harold; and at the Sanstone Crematorium, ashes to ashes returned, and that was the end of
him.

Mr. Bindell waited a decent interval—a fortnight, he evidently considered sufficient—and then called upon the widow, this time without his lady. Linda had gone to the cinema with the twins. ‘So may I take it, Mrs. Hartley, that we are alone in the house?’

‘Well, yes,’ said Louisa startled. Was Mr. Bindell going to leap upon her with improper proposals, now that Harold was out of the way? She had always thought he had a nasty look.

But Mr. Bindell did not leap. Instead, he reached into his brief case and brought out a large envelope. ‘You remember that your husband was trying to tell me something before he died?—trying to ask me to find something for him.’

‘Yes, I remember,’ said Louisa. ‘Did you find it? What was it?’

Mr. Bindell selected from the envelope a single item—a photograph on glossy art paper. He allowed Louisa one brief sight of it and then returned it to its envelope. ‘A collection of pornography,’ he said; and added: ‘The most lurid I’ve ever seen.’

Louisa thought, from her one glimpse, that this could hardly but be so.
‘Harold
had this filth?’

‘In the private drawer of his safe at the office. Of course when I saw what it was, I concealed it from his staff.’ He snapped an elastic band round the envelope. ‘No wonder he didn’t want it found.’

‘No wonder,’ agreed Louisa, and thought of the gossip, spreading out and out in widening circles of ever more unsavoury scandal: nasty, dirty, salacious scandal, touched with that odd malice that, in so many quarters, Harold had seemed to attract. ‘Well, thank goodness, Mr. Bindell, that it was you who found it. And thank you very much for bringing it to me.’ Privately she thought that he might just as well have thrown the whole lot on the fire and not disturbed her in her widowhood; but he wanted thanks and appreciation, no doubt.

Mr. Bindell however wanted more than that and made very little bones about it. ‘Money is tight these days, Mrs. Hartley. My wife likes to keep up a—a good establishment; and we have two children yet to educate. I know Hartley left you pretty well off, and you’ve only the one girl.’

She sat with her hands in her lap, very still. She had been right, then, about there being a blackmailer. Only—Mr. Bindell! Mr. Bindell, the upright, respectable solicitor; and Mrs. Bindell, giving herself such airs…! She said at last: ‘How can you prove positively that they’re his? They might be anyone’s: you might even have—have got them for this very purpose.’