Left alone Toye thought long and hard about the departure of Steve Mullins and the motive behind it. Whether he’d returned to Twiggadon or not, he’d probably have been quite keen to cover his tracks, and the best place for this was a large town. He might have been making his way back to London, but was this very likely, since by his own account he’d only recently left it? Mightn’t he have branched off from the London road and headed towards Wintlebury? Just the sort of place where you could vanish without trace, and pick up a job of sorts, too.

  The more he considered it, the more tenable the Wintlebury theory became. Anyway, if Pollard hadn’t returned by five he’d start off, and look in at some of the nearer pubs.

  The enquiries took longer that Toye had expected. The first likely pub he came to had recently changed hands, and the former landlord, one Sam Jeffreys, was now living in Bridgeford. This involved doubling back again, and tracking him down in a small bungalow on the far side of the town. Both he and his wife were flattered by the visit of a Scotland Yard detective, and anxious to be helpful, but had no recollection whatever of a youth like Steve Mullins coming in with a black eye over twelve months ago. Mr Jeffreys pointed out the all too obvious truth that youths of that sort who’d been in a dust-up weren’t all that out of the ordinary these days, and you couldn’t hardly be expected to call to mind every chap coming into your bar, could you?

  Toye agreed, thanked them both, and set off once again on the road leading out of the town.

  At his next port of call the landlord was keenly interested and inclined to be garrulous. Some elderly regulars were already installed, and he suggested asking them if they remembered a lad like the one the sergeant was asking after. A lively but time-consuming discussion developed, but it produced nothing of value. Refusing a drink, Toye pushed on once more.

  The Cross Keys at Kennaford, the next village, had expanded into a modern road house. A number of cars were already parked outside, business was brisk and Toye’s visit unpopular. He was obliged to exert his official authority to get co-operation from the landlord.

  ‘This isn’t a one-eyed village inn,’ the latter said aggressively. ‘How the hell d’you think we can remember who came in on July 30 last year? Why, chaps are coming and going all the bloody time in the summer when the visitors are around.’

  Toye, imperturbable, stood his ground. He declined to leave until he had satisfied himself that none of the bar or cafe staff had any recollection of a youth resembling his description of Steve Mullins. On coming out of the Cross Keys he paused, crossed it methodically off his list, and after looking at his watch went into a telephone kiosk and rang the police station at Bridgeford.

  He was told that Superintendent Pollard had just come in…

  ‘Hullo! Crake tells me you’re doing a pub crawl,’ came Pollard’s voice a few moments later. ‘Nice work if you can get it. Are you on the point of solving the case, by any chance? No? Well, I should think you’d better come back here, and I’ll report on the meagre results of my own day.’

  EIGHT

  ‘Superintendent Pollard’s on the line to Scotland Yard,’ the duty sergeant told Toye, as the latter came into Bridgeford police station. ‘Call came through five minutes ago.’

  Toye waited and speculated. They could hardly have got on to much yet. Come to that, Stobart had been living on his own down at Twiggadon for the past fifteen years, so there couldn’t possibly be any personal link with the dead youth going all that way back — he’d only have been a small kid. Still, by unearthing Stobart’s past some indirect connection might be brought to light.

  His musings were interrupted by the return of Pollard, with some sheets of shorthand notes in his hand.

  ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘That was Evers, with what they’ve managed to dig up so far. It was a bit slow at first, because it turned out that Stobart didn’t live in Epsom after all, although he employed a removal firm from there. He lived in Sallowbourne. Know it? It’s one of those ghastly outer suburban no-man’s-lands, with all the roads exactly alike. The gist of what they’ve discovered is that Stobart came out of the army at the end of the war, and went back to his old job — or got a new one — in London, commuting from Sallowbourne, where he somehow managed to get a small house. About 1950 his wife left him, taking the child, a boy of about six. Nothing’s known of where they went, or where they are now. Stobart presumably gave up his job, sold up the house and went off, too. They’re getting on to the removal firm tomorrow, if it still exists. Sallowbourne’s one of those places with a high turnover of population, and so far no one has been found who remembers the Stobarts at all clearly. Of course there was a tremendous lot of coming and going in the post-war period. But it’s interesting about the boy, isn’t it?’

  ‘You mean that he’d be about twenty now, sir?’

  ‘Yes. Youths of about twenty are getting a bit thick on the ground. There’s our skeleton, to start with. Then there’s Steve Mullins, and now a possible young Stobart.’

  ‘Funny if all three of them were really one and the same,’ remarked Toye with interest.

  ‘You sound like the Athanasian Creed. Not meaning to be blasphemous,’ Pollard added hurriedly, remembering that Toye was a sidesman at his parish church. ‘Have you had anything to eat on your pub safari, by the way?’

  On hearing that Toye had not, he sent him off to get a meal and settled down to type out the report which he had just received over the telephone. On re-reading it he decided that it did not amount to very much. It was, of course, useful to have got a lead of a sort on what had precipitated Stobart into his hermit existence at Twiggadon, but was this very likely to be relevant to the case? Unless the man was a maniac as distinct from an eccentric, was it imaginable that he would have murdered his own son if the latter had turned up at the cottage? In spite of the fact that Stobart was popularly believed to have no visitors in the usual sense of the word, had the two been in touch? Suppose Steve Mullins was really young Stobart, and had been killed in a second dust-up with Bickley? Fantastic coincidences did happen…

  Firmly putting aside further speculation on this score, Pollard filled in time until Toye came back by amending the case summary which they had drawn up. He added a note on Derek Wainwright, to the effect that he had admitted a visit to Twiggadon on July 31 of the previous year, given a credible reason for it, and produced an unshakable alibi for the whole of the following night. In default of any known link between him and a youth of about twenty, there was no reasonable ground for considering him as a suspect in the case.

  Anyway, Pollard thought, it’s been a worthwhile bit of thinning out, even if it’s taken the best part of a day. Now for Bickley and Stobart. Not forgetting, of course, that there’s no proof that the whole job wasn’t done by a complete outsider, and we haven’t even got started yet.

  This idea was so discouraging that he decided to give himself a bracer by ringing Jane…

  ‘Not much traffic, but what there is is a bit impeding, all the same,’ he told her in their private code. ‘I did manage to cover a bit of ground today, though… No, I don’t see any prospect of getting back at the moment… Tell me what you’ve been doing all day. Not hanging curtains, have you?’

  ‘Hanging curtains?’ Jane Pollard sounded mystified. ‘What on earth made you think of that? I got the last lot up days ago.’

  ‘Good,’ he said, half-ashamed of himself. ‘I don’t think expectant Mums ought to shin up step-ladders on their own.’

  Jane hooted derisively.

  ‘Have you been chatting to the local Sairey Gamp?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, not exactly. All right — laugh! There go the blasted pips again.’

  ‘On the whole,’ Pollard said, after he and Toye had pooled their day’s findings and discussed them at length, ‘I’m inclined to think it’s odds on that the skeleton is Mullins. After all, the physical resemblances are quite marked, and Mrs Stentiford’s remark about the nice set of teeth took them a good step further. If it is Mullins, Bickley seems more likely to be involved than Stobart, as things stand at present. It all underlines the fact that we can’t try hard enough to pick up Mullins’s trail, and we’ve far more chance of doing it in this part of the world than anywhere else. One of the few things we do know for certain is that the chap was around here right up to the time he disappeared. I’ll see Puckeridge first thing tomorrow, and discuss getting out a description, and the possibility of his men making enquiries in the villages. I’m sure your pub idea is worth following up, but we can’t spare the time to work on it ourselves. We can soon weigh in if someone thinks he’s got a lead.’

  Toye agreed. ‘Did Evers say what other lines they were working on, sir?’

  ‘Stobart’s war record, his job, Somerset House to find out if the wife and boy are still alive — always assuming they stayed in the country — and any local gossip in Sallowbourne. It’ll take a bit of time. Meanwhile, we’re to let them have all particulars for an Identikit of Mullins. Another thing I want to do is to get Sybil Pendine to confirm that she saw Stobart in the lane that night. We’ll confront her with the note, and go on to the evidence of her dabs if she digs her toes in. Then there’s the important point about whether she’s blackmailing the Bickleys, and if she is, on what score. It’s just possible that we might get an admission out of her which would justify charging Bickley with murder — or anyway manslaughter, and the concealment of the body. But I’m not counting on it at all. I think it’s more likely she saw Mullins being beaten up, or is cashing in on something which happened in the pre-Mullins era.’

  ‘Are you going to tackle the Bickleys themselves tomorrow, sir?’

  ‘It depends a lot on what we can get out of the Pendine. Anyway, we’ll go out to Twiggadon as soon as I’ve seen the Super about the Mullins enquiries in the villages. He’ll hate our guts, won’t he, diverting his chaps from the summer visitors? Still, he gets things done.’

  The following morning was wet and dismal. Far more cars were coming into Bridgeford than were leaving it, and Pollard and Toye noticed the high proportion of local number plates and women drivers.

  ‘Here come Crake’s Monday shoppers,’ Pollard remarked. ‘The return flow would be in full swing by eleven-thirty, wouldn’t you say, if they’re going to be home in time to get the lunch?’

  ‘That would be about it,’ Toye agreed. ‘Funny how Monday washday’s gone out. It’s the machines. You just chuck the stuff in anytime you feel like it.’

  Pollard’s thought reverted to Sybil Pendine. It was ridiculous to let her get under his skin, not to say deplorable for a Superintendent of the CID, whose job it was to carry out impartial investigations. Undeniably she’d got unusual powers — well, all right. As that old hulk Haycraft had said, there’d always been people like that…

  He decided that a debunking line might cut out the ‘wise woman’ patter, and make it possible to get at some actual facts. Watchers Way looked more down-at-heel than ever under a smudgy grey sky. The front door stood open. As Pollard knocked he was greeted by a sour pungent smell of a culinary kind.

  ‘Superintendent Pollard, Mrs Pendine,’ he called. ‘May we come in?’

  Sybil Pendine was sitting at a table strewn with litter, in the midst of which she was inscribing labels for her herbal preparations in her neat, clear script. She barely glanced up.

  ‘You’re wasting your time,’ she remarked, in a voice devoid of interest.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Pollard replied, taking up a label bearing the legend HEDGEROW HAIR RESTORER. He scrutinized it carefully, and then took from his briefcase a thin piece of cardboard on which the reassembled fragments of the note found outside Henry Stobart’s gate had been pasted. After comparing the two he held out the note to her.

  ‘Look at this, please, Mrs Pendine,’ he said. ‘You admit having written it, I imagine?’

  She did not make any denial or show surprise, taking refuge in a show of contempt.

  ‘A scruffy sort of job, yours,’ she commented, ‘grubbing after people’s letters and piecing them together.’

  ‘So you know that Mr Stobart tore it up and threw it out?’ Pollard sat down, indicating another chair to Toye. ‘Perhaps you followed up the note with a personal call? It was just the opening gambit in a blackmailing game, wasn’t it?’

  ‘You can’t prove a thing,’ Sybil Pendine said coolly, taking up another label, and beginning to write. ‘It could just as well be a friendly warning.’

  ‘Unless Mr Stobart makes a complaint to the police, you probably won’t hear any more of this matter,’ Pollard agreed. He slightly stressed the penultimate word, and thought he detected a slight sign of uneasiness. ‘But your hold over the Bickleys is another matter,’ he said, with an abrupt change of tone. ‘It was equally unfortunate for Bickley that you happened to see him, wasn’t it?’

  For the first time she seemed to him to react with complete spontaneity, looking up with an astonished expression.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she said categorically. ‘I didn’t see anyone that night but Henry Stobart.’

  ‘I’m not referring to that night,’ Pollard cut in quickly, and saw her bite her lip. ‘I’m talking about the occasion when you saw Bickley assault a youth who was chasing his ponies on a scooter. A violent assault, wasn’t it? Quite a useful handle where Bickley was concerned. Not good enough for exacting big sums as the price of silence, but payment in kind can be very useful, can’t it? Having one’s larder stocked up is quite a thing these days, isn’t it?’

  Angry at having slipped up, and harassed by his staccato questions she attempted an inept defence.

  ‘I never told him I’d seen him hit the boy. I’ve never said a word to him about it, so you can’t prove it — he didn’t notice I was up on Buttertwist. The little beast deserved all he got, anyway.’

  ‘That’s beside the point, Mrs Pendine. You may not have approached Mr Bickley personally, but you let his wife know what you’d seen, didn’t you? Just mentioned it to her, and left it at that. No unpleasantness. Much wiser than confronting Mr Bickley himself. He could be quite a tough customer, don’t you think? You knew that it would be quite easy for her to slip up here now and again with a few things off the farm.’

  ‘They’ve been giving me that sort of thing for years,’ she retorted with a return of confidence. ‘You can ask them. And well they might, too. I’ve saved them hundreds of pounds by my warnings.’

  ‘What do you mean, your warnings?’ Pollard asked, deliberately provocative.

  ‘What’s the use of telling you? You wouldn’t believe me. People like you think you know everything.’

  ‘If I did, I should hardly be spending my time questioning you, should I?’

  He watched her calculate swiftly, and assume a withdrawn expression, her strange dead eyes becoming remote as she stared at him. When she spoke her voice seemed to come from a distance, and was oddly compelling. He wondered if she had some natural hypnotic gift, and had studied ventriloquism as a useful asset.

  ‘I knew the great cold in the Now, long before it struck … I felt its cruel burning … its whiteness blinded me. And the water comes … so stealthy under the doors … long curving fingers clawing its way into the house under the doors.’

  ‘There’s no point in turning on your professional techniques for our benefit,’ Pollard said loudly and brutally. ‘I’m quite prepared to accept that you have some extrasensory powers, and may be able to issue long-term weather forecasts through them. If people find them useful and like to show their appreciation, that’s quite in order. But, let me warn you: from now on the local police are going to take a keen interest in all your activities. You may think it’s as well to discontinue some of them.’

  Sybil Pendine seemed sunk in a sullen lethargy, and did not answer him, so he went on.

  ‘My main purpose in coming here this morning is to ask you to sign a statement of what you saw taking place on the night of July 31 last year. We have brought with us a summary of what you told us last time. Are you prepared to read it over, and sign it if you find it correct? I may say that we already have a witness of Mr Stobart’s presence in the lane at midnight.’

  ‘That holier-than-thou little bitch Nora Pearce, I suppose? She’d enjoy being in with the police.’

  The remark struck Pollard as strange as well as vindictive.

  ‘We’re here to ask questions, Mrs Pendine, not to answer them,’ he told her.

  ‘Oh, call it a day; can’t you?’ she said impatiently, ‘I’ll sign the thing if it’s what I told you before.’

  ‘Later on we may ask you for a statement about the encounter between Mr Bickley and the youth. Can you remember the date when it took place?’

  ‘No, I can’t, but you can look it up for yourself if you want to. It was on the day before the Dincombe disaster: a Saturday afternoon during the awful rain and the floods. There was a let-up for an hour or two, and I’d gone down to see if the bridge had held.’

  Pollard watched her reading through the typed statement with an air of shrewd attention. Finally she signed her name carefully. It struck him as pathetic that in spite of her unkempt appearance and scruffy surroundings she took pleasure in her good handwriting.

  ‘Why don’t you try to find more selling outlets for some of your herbal preparations?’ he asked on a sudden impulse. ‘There might be a shop in Bridgeford glad to sell them on a commission basis.’

  A flicker of ironic amusement passed over her face.

  ‘I might try,’ she replied. ‘As you say, some of them.’

  As she handed him back the statement she looked at him squarely.

  ‘That youth wasn’t killed by Reg Bickley, if that’s what you’re thinking. I saw him get up afterwards and go off with another one who’d been hiding behind a rock.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Pollard. ‘That’s useful confirmation of a piece of information which we’ve already been given.’

  Sybil Pendine made no move as he rose to leave, but went on staring at him.

 

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