Edward Marston - Inspector Colbeck's Casebook

‘The King’s Arms might not want me but there are plenty of other arms in this town that have welcomed me.’

‘Please keep your voice down.’

‘Then stop bellowing at me!’

Colbeck and Leeming came swiftly into the hallway to part the combatants. The inspector introduced himself and Leeming to the visitor then assured the manager that — since she might provide evidence vital to their investigation — Maggie Hobday should be permitted to stay for a while.

‘I take full responsibility for the lady’s presence,’ he said, suavely. ‘Her stay here will not be of long duration.’

After giving his reluctant agreement, the manager withdrew sulkily. Colbeck invited Maggie into the lounge where she sat down opposite the detectives.

‘You’ve made our job much easier,’ said Leeming. ‘We were told that you were the person trapped inside that burning carriage. The stationmaster was adamant that it had to be you.’

‘Len Hipwell should have known better,’ she said.

‘You were seen in the area.’

‘This is where I work, Sergeant. I’m bound to be noticed from time to time.’

‘What do you know about Joan Metcalf?’

‘Oh,’ said Maggie, face clouding. ‘Everyone knows Joan’s story. Whenever I think of her, I want to cry with pity. At the same time,’ she continued, adopting a sharper tone, ‘that sort of thing would never happen to me. If I lost a husband, I wouldn’t spend the rest of my life weeping over him. I’d find another.’ She grinned. ‘I’ve found quite a few in my time. They just happen to be married to someone else.’ She suddenly reeled from the shock of realisation. ‘Are you telling me that …?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ said Colbeck. ‘The victim, in all likelihood, was Mrs Metcalf.’

‘How could anyone want to hurt her, Inspector? Joan was as harmless as a fly. Only a monster would set fire to someone like her.’

‘I suspect that mistaken identity may have been involved, Miss Hobday.’ He tried to be diplomatic. ‘I understand that, in the course of your visits here, you may have made one or two enemies in this town.’

She cackled. ‘Well, I’m never going to be popular with women, am I?’

‘Have you received threats?’ asked Leeming.

‘I get those wherever I go, Sergeant,’ she said with a shrug. ‘Ravenglass is no worse than anywhere else.’

‘It looks as if it could be. The person who burnt that carriage to the ground might have thought that you were inside it.’

‘Then he deserves to hang as high as you can string him up!’ she declared.

‘We need your help to find the killer,’ said Colbeck.

‘What can I do?’

‘For a start, you can tell us who made those threats against you. We are not ruling out the possibility that another woman is the culprit. Thinking it was you in that carriage, the killer first cut Mrs Metcalf’s throat.’

Maggie’s hand went to her own throat. ‘Thank goodness I wasn’t here!’

‘Can you think of anyone who hated you enough to do that?’

‘No,’ she said, unsettled by the news. ‘When people make threats, they very rarely carry them out. They just want to scare me away.’

‘There must be someone you can suggest,’ said Leeming.

Maggie Hobday brooded in silence for a couple of minutes. Having met hostility wherever she went, it was difficult to disentangle one battery of threats from another. She eventually spoke.

‘There is someone in particular,’ she said.

‘Go on.’

‘He called me a witch. He said that I cast spells and ought to be driven away. He said that witchcraft were evil, Inspector, and he meant it.’

‘We know what they used to do to witches,’ said Colbeck with a meaningful glance at Leeming. ‘They burnt them at the stake.’

When he heard the news that Maggie Hobday had been seen in the town, Ned Wyatt was in the act of shaving a customer. His hand jerked involuntarily and he sliced open the man’s cheek. Mouthing apologies and thrusting a towel at him, the barber went quickly into the storeroom and locked the door behind him. With his back against it, he considered the implications of what he’d just heard. The woman whose throat he’d cut in the darkness was not the witch he had detested for so long, after all. He had instead murdered an innocuous creature who roamed the coast in the futile hope of seeing her dead husband. Wyatt felt utterly mortified. Driven by blind hatred, he’d killed someone he actually liked. It was a terrifying revelation and he knew at once that he could never live with the horror of what he’d done.

The razor was still in his hand. He put it to his throat and, with full force, he inflicted a deep, deadly, searing slit. When the detectives found him, the barber of Ravenglass was beyond help.

By the time that Colbeck and Leeming finally left Cumberland, the burnt-out carriage had been cleared away from the siding and the sleepy little town had, to some extent, been cleansed of its hideous crime. The barber’s suicide was both a confession of guilt and a self-administered punishment. Inquests would be held into both unnatural deaths but the detectives were spared the ordeal of a long murder trial. Anxious to see his wife and family again, Leeming had been disturbed by facts that had emerged about Ned Wyatt.

‘Could he really hate Maggie Hobday that much?’ he asked.

‘As the father of two sons, you should be able to answer that question. If you felt that David or Albert had been abused in some way, wouldn’t you have the urge to strike back at the abuser?’

‘Well, yes — but I wouldn’t go to those lengths.’

‘When the barber’s wife died,’ said Colbeck, ‘she left the upbringing of their only child to him. It appears that Wyatt worshipped his son and did everything that was expected of a father. They lived together contentedly. And then …’

‘Maggie Hobday came on the scene.’

‘She wasn’t entirely to blame, Victor. It was the lad’s friends who put him up to it. They got him drunk, clubbed together then handed him over to a prostitute. He was barely seventeen. I doubt if he even knew what was happening.’

‘I can see why the barber was furious.’

‘He was a strict Methodist and one of the tenets of Methodism is the avoidance of evil. Maggie Hobday embodied evil to him. She cast a spell on his son and led him astray. The lad couldn’t cope with the shame of it all,’ said Colbeck. ‘That’s why he took his own life, it seems. You can see why anger festered inside Wyatt. When he heard the rumour that Maggie was in that carriage, his lust for revenge took over.’

‘It was pointless, sir. Killing her wouldn’t bring his son back.’

‘He felt that he’d rid the world of a witch. That was his justification.’

‘Religion can affect people in strange ways, sir.’

‘His mind was warped by what happened to his son.’

‘I condemn what he did,’ said Leeming, ‘but as a father, I’m bound to feel some pity for him. It’s made me resolve to bring my boys up properly.’

‘You have nothing to reproach yourself with, Victor. They’re good lads.’

‘It’s a valuable lesson for me to take away from Ravenglass. A father can never relax his vigilance.’

‘Perhaps there’s a second lesson to take away,’ suggested Colbeck, looking at the sergeant’s hair with frank amusement. ‘Choose your barber with the utmost care.’

Though her career as an artist had reached a point where she derived an income from it, Madeleine Colbeck never forgot the debt she owed to the two most important people in her life. Her father, Caleb Andrews, had spent the best part of fifty years as a railwayman and brought her up to appreciate the engineering skills involved in steam locomotion. Whenever she tried to put a locomotive on paper or canvas, he was always ready to give advice and — in many cases — criticism. But it was her husband, Robert, who first realised that she had a flair for painting and who encouraged her to develop her gifts to the full. He urged her to attend art classes and to master the necessary techniques. It served to give her confidence a tremendous boost. Madeleine loved to spend her days working in her studio on her latest project. But there would soon be a pleasing break in her routine.