Andrew Taylor - Bleeding Heart Square

Narton coughed, hackingly, continuously. He took a cigarette from a packet and tapped it on the table. ‘If Ingleby-Lewis would talk, he could tell us a thing or two, I’m sure of that. But he won’t talk to me, of course. He knows who I am.’

‘You’ve met him?’

‘In the course of the investigation. He knows I’m a police officer and that I was concerned in the Penhow case. But who knows? Maybe he said something to his daughter. Maybe, if you and her get talking, you could slip in a question here or there, see if she knows anything about Morthams Farm or Miss Penhow.’

‘I don’t know. It seems a bit unsporting.’

Narton lit the cigarette and tossed the dead match into the ashtray. ‘Murder isn’t a sport, Mr Wentwood. It’s a matter of life or death. You do understand that, don’t you?’

Rory said nothing.

‘Anyway, can’t stay here chatting.’ Narton pushed back his chair and stood up. ‘Thank you for what you’re doing, Mr Wentwood. It’s not gone unnoticed by the powers that be.’

‘There’s the small matter of my expenses,’ Rory said, his uneasiness finding another outlet. ‘The train fare today, mainly. I don’t know whether you’d run to lunch as well.’

‘Keep a record, Mr Wentwood, and give me a list with receipts. It will be easier if I put in a single claim for you at the end of all this. But your money is as safe as houses, you can be sure of that. One advantage of dealing with the police.’

‘I don’t want to carry on with this.’

Narton wrapped his muffler carefully round his neck. ‘Let’s have a chat in a day or two. I need to see one or two people, think about one or two things. Believe me, Mr Wentwood, if I can find an alternative I will.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Now you can oblige me by keeping your eyes open. And don’t do anything foolish. Serridge is dangerous. I don’t want another death on my conscience.’

‘What do you mean? Who’s died already?’

Narton looked blankly at him. Then his lips turned down at the corners. ‘Why, Miss Penhow, of course. You surely don’t believe the poor lady can still be alive?’

He turned up the collar of his overcoat and pulled his hat down low so all that was visible of his face were his eyes and the bridge of his nose. He stubbed out the half-smoked cigarette and slipped out of the pub.

Rory stared at the broken cigarette in the ashtray, along with the other butts. He had watched how Narton smoked. The man either smoked his cigarettes until the ends grew so hot he could no longer hold them or kept what was left unsmoked for later.

So something had rattled him. There had been a false note in what he had been saying. Where, exactly? What if Narton hadn’t meant Miss Penhow’s death but someone else’s? Who else had died?

Herbert Narton knew he had taken a terrible risk in encouraging young Wentwood to go to Rawling. True, the scheme had worked after a fashion, but there was no saying that it would not eventually backfire. Nor had the results been what he had hoped for. Still, Wentwood was living at Bleeding Heart Square and there was always the chance of progress in that direction.

At Liverpool Street he caught the train. He tried to doze during the journey. He knew he should eat but he found the consumption of food more and more of an effort. He seemed to be living on air. Perhaps because of that he felt literally less heavy and less substantial than usual, as though he were fading away. All that was left of substance was the hard, irreducible core of his anger. Anger? Not quite the right word. Sorrow was almost as good. Fear was somewhere in the mixture, and even a form of love. But none of the words fitted, and none of them ever would.

Nobody noticed him leaving the train at Mavering. It was a small station and the evening rush was long since over. Only one man was on duty and he was dealing with Hinks from the sorting office at the mail van. He walked down to the church and took the field path to Rawling. It was a clear night, and the moon was up, though slipping in and out of clouds. He had a torch in his pocket but did not use it. He had walked this way so often he could have followed the path blindfolded. When he came to the fork, he took the left-hand path. This was narrower than the one on the right that led to Rawling Hall before it reached the village. He walked more slowly, more cautiously. The going was muddier underfoot. The world seemed darker too, as though this tiny part of Essex had less light in it than the rest.

He came at last to where there was a gap in the hedgerow and he could look up the slope of the meadow to the house itself, with the huddle of farm buildings on the right. There was the soft glow of lamplight in two of the first-floor windows. Morthams Farm. He imagined he was an owl flying over Morthams towards Rawling, and his eyes scoured the fields between the farm and the village until they found the tiled roof of the little barn.

Scratch the itch .

Narton wondered why he had bothered to come. He scraped his nails into the soft skin of the underside of his wrist until he broke through to the flesh beneath — until, yet again, he made himself bleed. He scratched harder still and moaned with the pain. As he scratched, he allowed his eyes to sweep from side to side across the meadow. The grass was the darkest of greys.

Better now. He licked the blood, warm and salty. The moisture cooled on his skin.

It was all still there, he thought, beneath the field dappled with moonlight and shadows. Everything that had happened, layer upon layer, because nothing ever really went away. Bleeding Heart Square was full of layers too, layers of blood, and so was the barn. Especially the barn.

The meadow was full of shifting shapes. One of the shapes resolved itself into a girl wobbling on a bicycle as she followed the slope of the field towards the farmhouse. He heard her laughter, high and excited, and knew that her attention was not on him or the field or even the bicycle but on another shadow beside her.

‘I’m a bloody fool to stand here,’ Narton said aloud. All those layers of blood, you can never wash them away .

His ears were unnaturally sharp. He heard the chink of harness from the farm buildings. A dog began to bark, though whether in the house or the yard he couldn’t tell. The barn would be empty, though.

Empty of the living. Crowded with the dead .

At that moment an idea drifted into his mind, settled in the silt at the bottom, sprouted, put out roots and flowered. All that in an instant. Sometimes, he thought, all a man has is his folly. No wonder he clings to it.

Lydia cooked Welsh rarebit for supper, following the detailed instructions Mrs Renton had provided. She had bought a bottle of pale ale to add to the cheese topping as it melted in the saucepan but Captain Ingleby-Lewis chanced to find it before she could use it. She cleared two thirds of the great scarred dining table and served the meal on matching plates, one slightly chipped.

It was the first time that she and her father had eaten in a relatively formal way and in the soft light this end of the room looked almost like a normal room in a normal house. Her father complimented her on the rarebit. Though he had been drinking beer steadily since lunchtime, he appeared to have reached an equilibrium that left him, at least for the time being, amiable and reasonably alert.

‘Well, this is cosy, eh?’ he said, lining up fork and knife exactly at half past six on his plate. ‘You’re full of unexpected talents, my dear.’

‘Thank you.’

‘How did you get on at that lawyer fellow’s?’

‘It’s rather boring work.’

‘I can’t imagine how those chaps manage it. Sitting in an office all day and shuffling bits of paper around. It’d drive me mad.’ He stroked his moustache approvingly. ‘Fact is, God didn’t create me to be a desk wallah.’