Maxim Jakubowski - The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

Suddenly he made a strange rasping noise and slumped to the ground, still clutching, at the moment of his death, the means of murder.

Dickens insisted that Elizabeth accompany him to Canute Villa the next morning. It was his impression that there was a faint touch of colour in the widow’s cheeks. Her voice sounded stronger and her carriage seemed more erect.

“I hear that Bowden has been released from custody,” she said. “I have already said to Alice that I am willing to take him back in service. I was distraught when my… my late husband gave him notice.”

Elizabeth shook her head. “Is there any doubt that this tramp whose body was found on the Moor is the murderer?”

“None.” Dickens held Clarissa’s gaze. “It has been a dreadful business. And yet – perhaps some good has come of it.”

Clarissa gave the slightest nod. There was a distant look in her eyes and Dickens was sure that she was thinking about the man who had loved her without acknowledgment, let alone hope, for so many years, and how he given her the most precious gift of all. Her freedom.

“How sad,” Elizabeth said, “that a man should become so depraved that he should commit a mortal crime for no rational cause.”

“Who knows what his reasons may have been, my dear Scheherezade?” Dickens said. “Clarissa has given him her forgiveness and so must we.”

Elizabeth nodded. “Poor man. To die, unloved.”

Dickens cast a glance at Clarissa and said, so softly that only she could hear, “Perhaps not unloved at the very end.”

It was thirty years and more ago. I remember it as the hottest of years. The valley was ripe with summer; rowan berries flamed in the hedges, heather set fire to the mountain-sides. In the overgrown hedges on either side of the lanes, rosehips flared, inviting the children to go picking. Six pence a pound you could earn from the firm that made rosehip syrup and there was eager competition to collect the most.

All the children picked rosehips except me. I stayed in, because mam told me it would do me good to get out, and because Janey was so good at picking. From my room upstairs, illicitly using our dead father’s binoculars, I could watch her striding across the fields, milk cans swinging; in front of her rabbits stiffened, then went bounding away.

Janey and me competed for who could annoy mam the most. We infuriated her by thwarting her prejudices; girls should look good, boys should be stoical. Janey hunted out odd socks and holed cardigans; I moaned and said the sun made me ill, or that my tummy felt queasy. Mam shouted, and the more she shouted, the more we taunted her. Janey was best and usually won, to my annoyance and her triumph. I felt she somehow had an unfair advantage, that she knew things I didn’t, and wasn’t letting on. I tried to get them out of her but couldn’t. Janey never told me anything she didn’t have to – we hated each other. But we hated mam more.

That was all right, because she hated us too. We reminded her too much of dad.

As Janey crossed the fields, she carried a huge walking stick. Fred Hudson, who saw her pass, said later he’d had a laugh – she was so small that when she went behind the hedge, all he could see was the top of the walking stick, bobbing up and down. Only when she reached the gap in the hedge could he see her properly – a skinny child, over-burdened with the stick and with milk cans heavy with rosehips.

Annie Graham saw her maybe half an hour later; Janey was scrambling across a wall, sending a scatter of stones down to the ground. Annie came straight down to mam’s to complain. “Bloody kids, breaking down the wall like that. What if the sheep get out? No sense, kids these days.” Mam set her lips hard and waited till Annie was gone before screaming at me and sending me to my room. I went, both exultant and angry. Exultant because we’d infuriated mam again, annoyed because it was Janey who’d done it not me.

Halfway through the afternoon, the vicar spotted Janey crossing the field at the foot of the long fell. He was using his binoculars because he thought he’d spotted a hawk and when he swung the glasses round, he caught Janey jumping from tuft to tuft over the boggy ground.

“Aye,” mam said. “And we all know what he was looking at, don’t we?”

I was only hazily aware of what was so important about Janey’s brown legs and the rucking up of her old skirt, but I knew mam was sneering at the vicar and I didn’t like that. He was a nice man, full of sweets and titbits of information. And I never believed anything mam said about people anyway, not after the fibs she’d told about dad. And when he wasn’t there to answer back too.

After the vicar saw Janey, she must have walked along the edge of the fell, working her way up the line of hedges near the old ruined farmhouse. Joe Edwards spotted her as he brought his sheep down from the fell; she was waiting to cross the track he was using. Both cans were full of rosehips by then; they looked heavy to Joe. “Need a cart to carry that lot,” he joked. Janey stared at him blankly, he said afterwards.

At teatime, mam looked out of the back door of the farmhouse, saw no sign of Janey, and swore. She slammed the teapot down on the table and starting buttering her bread with one of the ivory-handled knife-set that had been a wedding present. The two of us sat silently over bread and jam. I’d been asking the vicar about dad’s accident, but he wouldn’t say anything except it was “very sad”. Funny how everyone thinks that if they say nothing, children’ll think there’s nothing to say. I looked at mam, as her jaw worked over the bread. In a way I didn’t want to know what had happened to dad; imagining was better. And imagining how to get back at mam for the accident was even better.

Alice Robinson, driving carefully around the lanes on her way home, saw Janey just after teatime. Janey was hesitating by a milk stand, staring at the solitary battered milk churn on it. Alice stopped to have a word. “Been lucky, have you?” she asked, nodding at the two heavy cans Janey had set by the roadside while she rested. Janey nodded indifferently.

“Bring you in a tidy sum of pocket money,” Alice said.

Another nod. Alice waited a moment, could think of nothing more to say except to be careful Janey didn’t get run over, and drove on home.

I saw Alice ten minutes later as she drove into her garage; she called out to say how well Janey was doing. I went down to the milk churn and peered into it. The cans were sitting inside, brim-full of rosehips; Janey must have left them there for safe keeping so no other kid could pinch them. I wanted to tip out all the hips onto the ground and trample on them, because otherwise Janey would get loads of money for them, and I’d have none. But then she was going to really annoy mam if she didn’t come home before dark, so it was only fair she got some reward. Anyway I couldn’t reach far enough inside the churn to get the cans.

Janey didn’t come home. I kept making dark hints, like -she’d fallen down a rabbit hole, or twisted an ankle, or run away. All the worst things I knew how to imagine at the time. At midnight, Mam sent me to bed and called the police.

They found the rosehips in the milk churn – Alice told them about those – and pieced together Janey’s trip from the witnesses, then they sent out the dogs. The farmers turned out and stomped the fields in stolid silence, and police cars were parked at every farm-track. I stayed at home and asked innocent questions. Did they think Janey was hurt? Did they think she had run away because of that argument with mam? The policemen exchanged glances, took me into the kitchen and offered me chocolate cake to tell them all about it. I told them every story I could think of, all the times mam had slapped Janey or me, or shouted at us. All true, all innocuous – and all capable of misinterpretation.