The Murder Book Page 13

  All in all, though he too would have words – only words – with Helen next time they met, he could not find it in his heart to blame her overmuch. He understood how she felt and what had drawn her there that day. They were putting everyone in a bad position, Ethan knew, and that could not go on, but his feelings for Helen were as lacking in control as were hers for him. Helen pulled him like a spring tide is pulled by the moon and he could not resist.

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Henry had arrived at court to be told that Symmonds had finally lodged a guilty plea and he was not required. He went into the central office and made his report then prepared to catch the train north once again. Symmonds’ sudden change of mind puzzled him and he requested permission to see the man.

  Symmonds was now in the condemned man’s cell. He looked up as Henry entered the cell but did not stand or even seem to react.

  ‘You remember me?’ Henry asked.

  ‘Of course I do.’

  ‘I’ve just returned to London – been called from a murder I’m investigating, expecting to have to give evidence against you in court, and now I find that you’ve changed your plea.’

  ‘If I’ve caused you inconvenience, then I’m sorry for it.’ Symmonds looked away from Henry. He’d been reading a newspaper, examining the racing pages, Henry noticed in some surprise. It seemed of more interest to Haydn Symmonds than his visitor.

  ‘What changed your mind?’ Henry asked him. ‘All the evidence was in place, witnesses and accomplices all testified to you being there and yet you continued to deny your guilt. So, I’m asking you, what changed your mind?’

  Haydn Symmonds looked up again but Henry could see the irritation in his eyes. Symmonds placed a finger on the newspaper as though to mark his place then finally awarded Henry his full attention.

  He sighed. ‘You reckon I’d have had my day in court and then be found guilty,’ he said.

  ‘I think there’s no doubt of that.’

  ‘So there’s your answer.’

  ‘No, that was true before and you were adamant you’d go through with it. That you would stick with your plea of innocence no matter what.’ Henry came closer, leaned on the table and glanced down at the newspaper Symmonds had been reading. ‘What changed your mind?’ he asked again.

  ‘The way you see it, I was going to hang anyway.’

  ‘I thought that was the most likely outcome.’

  ‘You see, I always knew that would come about. That they’d stretch my neck along with the others.’

  ‘The others. Your accomplices?’

  Haydn Symmonds nodded. ‘It’s all going to end up the same, ain’t it? All of us dead. Them pair, they figured they could sell me out and get off without it being a hanging matter, but I knew. I knew the truth of it, didn’t I?’

  Henry frowned. ‘You knew that turning king’s evidence wouldn’t be enough to save them. Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I mean. I was mad at them, see. They thought they could put all the blame on me and walk away. I weren’t having that. I might know I was guilty as hell but I weren’t going to say so, not to give them no satisfaction from it. Then I hear they’ve come to court and the judge put on his black cap and condemned them anyway.’

  ‘So I heard.’

  ‘So, nothing more to fight for, is there? I can’t win but neither can that pair of lying bastards.’

  ‘They didn’t lie, though, did they?’ Henry reminded him. ‘You were guilty.’

  Haydn Symmonds had lost interest now. His attention turned back to the racing form.

  Henry, understanding that he would receive no further enlightenment, left him to it.

  He took the opportunity of going home and packing fresh shirts and then made his way back to the station and caught the next train. Haydn Symmonds troubled him – not because he was about to hang but because he had provided Henry with no clear answers.

  Henry opened his book and uncapped his pen. So, he mused …

  What does cause a man to confess? For some it is the unbearable weight of guilt. They have committed an act they know to be unjust or barbaric and it is better to confess than try to live with the guilt.

  For others, a partial confession is as far as they might be prepared to go. They say ‘Officer, I stole this but not that. I did this but resisted that’ as though there are set boundaries to the guilt they are prepared to accept and that which they are not. As though this somehow impinges upon their very identity.

  In his book on criminal psychology, Dr Hans Gross, if I may paraphrase him, says that a confession is only of value if all evidentiary material, including possible motive, matches that which is confessed. The inner workings of the miscreant’s mind must tally with that of the external and objective evidence. In other words, the accused must accept the accusation, have acknowledged it on some internal level. What Gross calls the inner life of the accused must be brought into focus to match that of the external, objective life.

  I have spent many a long hour in the interrogation room striving to make that match with suspects who will argue that black is white and night is day and can be shown any measure of clock or sunlight and still be adamant that it is dark outside. And while they maintain that accord, that difference between the inner life and the external world, there is nothing to be done to shift them no matter what evidence there may be to the contrary.

  It takes time to find the chink through which the light can filter. To break through into the inner world and so have an impact upon it.

  I was not fully satisfied with the reasons Symmonds gave for a change of plea but I am curious as to what altered. Who found the key to Symmonds’ inner kingdom and how? Was it, as he said, that he waited for the others to be found guilty, that he needed the satisfaction of knowing that before he could admit to his own guilt?

  What will provide the key to the inner kingdom of whoever killed Mary Fields and her family? Will there be a confession or will the discovery come through some minor mistake; the button or the fibres or the candlestick, should we manage to find that?

  Perhaps we should be asking a different question. What, aside from financial gain, drove Mary Fields to sell herself when she had a husband and a child who loved her and whom, by all accounts, she loved too? Was it simply a need for money or was it something stronger, more personal? Some inner sense that the world owed her more or that life had cheated her in some way?

  That certainly does seem to have been true in Symmonds’ case. He was quite open about his motive when questioned. He wanted money and he wanted to prove that he could do something outside the mundane, the ordinary. He chose, unwisely and unskilfully, to rob a bank – alongside others who were equally unskilful and unwise.

  It occurs to me that that might have been his issue with acknowledging his guilt. That to do so would have tarred him with the same brush as his confederates. Symmonds wanted to be set apart, to be acknowledged as better than the ordinary.

  Did Mary Fields want the same acknowledgement?

  Did her killer?

  Did she do something, say something that made the man she was with afraid of exposure? Or was it simply that she let the wrong man into her home? A man who wished to kill and who thought that the likes of Mary Fields mattered less because of what she was?

  Closing his notebook, he prepared to re-read the letters George had given to him, setting aside the ones from Ruby and Mary and focusing on those sent by the now-deceased Walter.

  Walter Fields wrote with a flowing, confident and very neat hand, and Henry sensed a degree of intelligence there. He had spoken briefly with Walter’s boss at the Road Car company and the man had spoken highly of him. He worked hard, showed aptitude and was expected to move from general maintenance to fully fledged engineer given time, but the man knew nothing of Walter outside of work and he seemed to have had no close friends at the company.

  They had known nothing of Mary Fields beyond the fact that Walter had said he had relatives in Louth that he liked to v
isit regularly.

  Dear George, Walter wrote, I wish I could give you better news. Mary and Ruby are both well but she has not been behaving as she should. I’m sorry to say that your woman won’t be told, won’t be advised and says she will do as she wishes and that I am not her husband and therefore should not try to tell her what to do.

  I know that the neighbours are gossiping. I’m worried that she will be forced to move on again.

  This had been written, Henry noted, before they had moved to what would be their final home.

  I’ve tried to get names out of her but she won’t say and I’ve kept watch as best I can. There was one man that I know works at an estate agency near the market and another that I think manages a hotel. I think his name is Williams but she keeps telling me that she will do what she wants and that you don’t earn enough to keep her and Ruby. She says she loves you but that she can’t go on living hand to mouth like the rest of us do.

  She keeps saying she wants to go back home to Newark and be with her people and I think that might be for the best, George. Your woman isn’t going to change any time soon and at least there’d be other people to keep an eye on her there.

  She keeps asking me if I’ll look after Ruby because she’s been offered some hotel work somewhere but she won’t tell me where and I keep telling her how can I look after our Ruby when I have to work? I can hardly take her back to my lodging house, can I? And if I stay with her in your rooms how is that going to look to everyone?

  I’m sorry, George but I don’t want to look like one of Mary’s men. I’m sorry to have to be so blunt about it but once someone gets a reputation it rubs off all over the place and I have to tell you that I’m worried for our little Ruby. Mary don’t seem to understand or she don’t want to.

  I got in the habit of just popping in when she’s got one of them with her, to make sure she’s all right. George, I hate to do this. I go in and I stand there just listening and making sure that she’s all right but I hate it, George, and I’m telling you now: you come home and take care of your Mary and Ruby and find some work somewhere else, even if that means going down south, because you can’t expect me to keep doing this no more.

  Henry folded the letter. The others were in a similar vein though some also talked about other, neutral events, such as a film he had seen or a girl he had chatted to at Hubbard’s Hills when he’d walked out there one Sunday.

  It was, Henry thought, a strange and unbearable responsibility for a nineteen-year-old boy to have been given. It did explain how he came to be in the house that night, though.

  Henry put the letters back into his pocket, found his cigarette case and lit a cigarette. He stroked the initials crudely engraved upon the case. The A and the G. He had been nineteen when he’d died too. In a fox hole, drowning in his own blood.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  July had started hot and dry. The parched land sizzled beneath a heat haze and Dar predicted an early harvest.

  ‘Though,’ he warned, ‘we’d best be quick about it when the time comes. Once the heat breaks the rains will come hard.’

  Squinting up at a pale blue sky, the sun a vicious ball of yellow fire that scorched his skin and dried the moisture from his mouth and eyes, Ethan found that hard to believe. But Dar’s record was impeccable.

  ‘You told the boss?’

  Dar nodded slowly. ‘I told him and he wanted me to pass summat on to you.’

  Ethan’s belly knotted. ‘What?’ he asked warily.

  ‘Nothing bad, boy. He wanted you to know he’ll take you on proper like after the harvest and there’s a little place out Towes way he thought you and the lass might want. I know the place he means. Just the one room down and the same up, but it’s got a bit of good land to the side of it and it’ll start you off better than you’ve either of you the right to hope.’

  ‘He’s offering that?’ Ethan was astonished.

  ‘He’s offering and I’ve accepted for you. Tell the lass when you see her if her mam hasn’t told her first. Like I say, it’s over towards Towes, a good walk from anywhere, but it’s still Hanson’s ground. He’s looking to expand his stock, make better use of some land he’s bought out that way and he likes the way you have with the beasts.’

  ‘He said that?’

  ‘Don’t let it go to your head, lad,’ Dar warned. Then he nodded and Ethan saw the gleam of pride in his eyes. ‘He said that,’ Dar conceded, ‘so I got to thinking.’

  He paused and Ethan waited. He sensed something important was about to happen. More important even than the news his dad had just imparted. They kept pace with one another, father and son, tramping the hard baked and heavily rutted way up to Hanson’s farm. Finally Dar paused beneath the tree where Ethan and Frank had fought on that rainy evening.

  ‘Your mam and me, we got nothing much to give as a wedding gift,’ he said. ‘Your mam and Helen’s have got their heads together and there’ll be a few bits of stuff to set you up and Hanson’s putting some sticks of furniture in the place, just to get you going. So I thought it was time you had this.’

  Dar reached into the pack he’d been carrying and took out a faded green book.

  Ethan recognized it at once.

  ‘No, Dar. No. I couldn’t be taking that.’

  ‘I want you to, boy.’ Dar flicked through the yellowed pages. ‘Look, lad, I’ve written me own notes and observations on the spare pages and in the margins. It’s a good book and my dad gave it to me way back like. Time now to pass it on.’

  Reverently, Ethan took the little book into his hands and stared down at it, feeling as though he’d been handed some holy relic. Apart from the family Bible, in which were recorded the births and deaths and marriages of generations of his kin, and the Book of Common Prayer that his mother took to church, this was the only book they owned. ‘Clater’s Farrier,’ he read. He turned the pages, gazing, as though for the first time, at the pages dedicated to the care of horses and the tricks of the dealers and the home remedies and cures for all manner of ailments, both in man and beast and at the little notes, written in Dar’s tight, clear hand.

  ‘Oh, Dar.’ He felt tears pricking at his lids and blinked them away. More came and he wiped the back of his hand across his eyes, not caring now if his father saw.

  ‘I’ll cherish it,’ he said. ‘Always, Dar.’

  His father nodded and turned back on to the path. Ethan buried the precious book deep in his own pack and followed on, then falling into step beside him. Nothing more was said on the way but Ethan’s heart sang. He had the woman he loved promised to him. He had a place for them to live and work at a time when employment was scarce as gold. More than that, it was as though his dad had finally acknowledged that he was a man. An almost equal, or at least someone with the potential to become so.

  Ethan looked up, rejoicing at the light blue sky, and thought of Helen Lee.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The previous summer, Ted had persuaded his father to buy a car. Elijah Hanson had been reluctant at first but Ted had convinced him of the time it would save and Robert, for once in agreement with his brother, voiced the belief that it could only add to his father’s status as landowner.

  Between them, they had persuaded Elijah to purchase an Austin seven. In blue.

  Most of its life was spent in the end stables, the block no longer used for the draft horses Elijah now housed at the Glebe farm. It was covered with a tarpaulin, polished weekly whether it had been used or not, and Ted took it out for a spin twice a month or so.

  It had proved its usefulness, Elijah admitted. Faster than a horse and a lot dryer though the winter ice had proved too much for its hard tyres and they’d been just as trapped when the snow fell as they ever had with simple horsepower.

  That July day, though, when Ethan and his father arrived at the farm, they were surprised to see the car out in the yard and Ted tinkering with something under the bonnet.

  ‘You off somewhere?’ Ethan asked him casually. No one stood on ceremony with
Ted Hanson. Ethan respected him, certainly, but it was still hard to separate the boy he’d gone to school with and the boss’s son.

  Ted grinned. ‘Off to Louth,’ he said. ‘So is dad and so’s Dar, once he’s finished breakfast.’

  ‘I am?’ Dar eyed the vehicle with suspicion. ‘In that?’

  Ted laughed. ‘You trust yourself to old Herbert and the carrier’s cart,’ he said. ‘I’m a far better driver. I promise you that.’

  ‘Only when I’ve no option and I don’t doubt you’re a better driver. Herbert don’t take a lot of beating.’

  Ethan laughed. Herbert Deal had been one of the first in the district to motorize, trading his carrier’s cart for something resembling a bus. It transported, as the cart had done, people and goods, letters and parcels. Even the odd cage of chickens. Herbert drove the vehicle like he’d driven his horses. Badly.

  ‘What’s at Louth today?’ Ethan asked.

  ‘Dad’s had word of a mare he might buy. Wants Dar to give it the once-over. She’s in foal, apparently, but there’s been a difference of opinion as to when she’s likely to drop. The vetinry’s inspected her and says one thing; seller insists another so …’

  Ethan nodded. Dar would adjudicate and Dar would, like as not, be right though, Ethan knew, he’d manage to be right in such a way as to put no one’s nose out of joint. Dar was expert in such diplomacy.

  ‘Is the mare for Miss Elizabeth?’ Ethan asked. ‘She’s outgrowing her pony.’

  ‘Elizabeth is growing like a weed,’ Ted agreed about his sister. ‘And she’s a good horsewoman. Dad reckons she’ll soon be ready for something a bit more demanding. By the time the foal’s weaned Elizabeth will have got to know the dam and hopefully they’ll make a good pair.’ He slammed down the bonnet of the car with a satisfied nod. ‘All set. Best get yourselves fed; boss is eager to be off.’