Cat Among the Herrings (13 page)

‘I guess that would alert a few more people to it.’

‘Don’t sound so disparaging. It gets better. When we were digging the second hole, we found a dead body. They won’t be drilling there any time soon.’

I was curious to see how the authorities had responded to Whitelace’s discovery at the Herring Field, so I strolled down there the following morning. Barry Whitelace was already there, clutching a thermos, a packet of sandwiches and a pair of binoculars.

A small blue and white tent had been erected in the field and there was a police car and an unmarked van parked beside the drilling equipment. There was little activity on display.

‘Somebody went in there half an hour ago,’ he said, pointing to the tent.

‘I’m surprised they haven’t closed the footpath,’ I said.

‘They can’t. Public right of way,’ he said, as if that was some sort of personal triumph.

‘I suppose the footpath is some way from the crime scene,’ I said. ‘They don’t need to close it off.’

‘I found the body,’ he said. ‘You’d think they’d consult me a bit more.’

‘I suppose they got you to give a statement?’

‘Told me I was trespassing. I told them, they were dead lucky I did. I offered to help dig up the whole thing, but they said I could leave it to them. Doesn’t look as if they are doing much.’

I nodded. Though I am a crime writer, I get to see very few real crime scenes. Sometimes there seems to be a lot going on, sometimes not much.

‘So what do you think you found?’

‘Bones. I think it was a femur we found first. I’d have dug up the whole thing there and then, but my friend said better not. So we phoned the police.’

‘Just bones? Not a very recent interment, then?’ I said.

‘Of course not,’ Whitelace said, slightly impatiently.

I’m not sure why I was disappointed. Even if it had proved to be recent, it wouldn’t really have helped with the mystery of Robin’s death. It is only in novels that the second body leads to a breakthrough – the killer has been forced to strike again and this time has given something away. Another body would have just been another body – scarcely even a coincidence since Robin had died some weeks before. And his death was still most likely to be an accident.

‘Sandwich?’ Whitelace asked, proffering the packet. ‘Jean makes them. Cheese and pickle.’

‘No thanks,’ I said. ‘Bit early for me.’

‘She’s probably only got a few weeks to live,’ he said, as if by way of inducement. ‘Cancer. Lung. She used to smoke forty a day. Gave up too late. Smoked a pipe myself. Never liked it much. Wasn’t difficult to stop.’

I realised that, though he had often mentioned his wife before, I’d never met her, never really thought to ask after
her other than in the polite, automatic way that one does. How’s Jean? Fine – she couldn’t make it tonight – feeling a bit tired.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I had no idea …’

‘A lot of people haven’t. She doesn’t like to make a fuss. Doesn’t like people knowing her business. Of course, the funeral will be a bit of giveaway in that respect.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated. ‘It must be tough for both of you.’

‘Oh, I’ll learn to make my own sandwiches,’ he said.

I looked at him for a moment. Was this gallows humour or would cheese and pickle sandwiches be his greatest regret?

‘We used to walk here,’ he added. ‘When we first moved down, we walked all round this bit of coast – up to Itchenor, over on the ferry when it was running, along the coast to Bosham, tea at a cafe, then back again. Out all day. Rain or shine. Or the Downs, over by Singleton – they’re nice too – but mainly here. Then, after she was diagnosed, the walks got shorter and shorter. This was the last bit she could do – I’d park the car at the end of the road and we’d just walk down to here and back. She loved … loves … this spot. She used to quote that Hopkins thing about wet and wilderness? You know it?’

‘Yes, I know it. What would the world be, once bereft of wet and wildness?’

‘Let them be left,’ continued Whitelace with feeling. ‘O let them be left, wildness and wet; long live the weeds and the wilderness yet. I always thought that, after she had gone, this was where I’d come to remember her. Her spot – you know what I mean? She wants her ashes scattered here. I won’t have them wreck it with a wind farm. I’ve
promised her that I won’t. Whatever I have to do. I’ll stop the bastards. Can I offer you some tea?’

I accepted a small beaker of tasteless, lukewarm liquid and sipped it slowly.

‘I’m hoping it’s Bronze Age,’ he said, waving his hand towards the tent.

‘Is that likely?’

‘It has to be pre-Christian, doesn’t it? A burial here by the sea, miles from any church. A Bronze Age burial site could takes months to excavate, maybe years. There could be dozens of bodies over there. Generations burying their dead where the land meets the sea. There could be jewellery. Grave goods. The ground hasn’t been disturbed for hundreds of years – too poor to be worth ploughing, too wet to be worth trying to drain.’

I suspected that, like me, he would be disappointed when the identity of the bones was revealed. But he was as entitled to hope as I was. A man in white overalls appeared from inside the tent, glanced briefly over in our direction, then got into the driver’s seat of the van. George aimed his binoculars at him.

‘I can’t see what he’s doing,’ he said.

‘Tea break, probably,’ I said.

‘Tea break!’ said Whitelace, as if that summed up all that was wrong with the country. ‘Can I top you up?’

‘No, thanks. I’d better get back,’ I said, handing him my cup. ‘Thank Jean for the tea.’

He nodded glumly. ‘I’ll stay a bit longer,’ he said. ‘Jean was asleep when I left. She sleeps a lot at the moment. Says I disturb her if I fuss too much.’

I still have a contact in the police over on the other side of Sussex. Unusually (in my experience) for a policeman, he enjoys crime fiction. Some years before he’d given me a briefing on scene of crime operations. Then he’d been involved in a case concerning an old friend of mine. We still meet for drinks from time to time. I’ve dedicated a book to him. I gave him a call.

‘So, you want to know what they’ve found?’

‘If you can do it easily,’ I said.

‘Depends what they’ve come up with. I’ll phone a friend of mine in Chichester. I can say we want to rule it out of a missing persons enquiry. Actually I do have one of those and I ought to do that, anyway.’

He called back after only a few minutes.

‘Well, I don’t know if this helps you at all, but they reckon the body has been there about a hundred years. Not my missing person, anyway.’

‘Not Bronze Age?’

‘No chance at all.’

‘Could it be as early as the 1840s?’ I asked. Because I had wondered if there could be any connection with the Herring Field murder.

‘There’d be a bit of a margin of error – say fifty years either way, maximum. It might just about be late 1840s, but it’s not likely. I could get back to them and ask if the body could conceivably date back to then, but it would seem a bit weird in the context of my own enquiry into somebody who went missing last October. And while we do cold cases, going back to the nineteenth century is pushing it a bit. I’ve probably asked all the questions I can without making it look suspicious.’

‘OK. Thanks, Joe. We must meet for a drink soon. That pub near Worthing.’

‘Give me a call when you’re next over this way. Maybe you can do me a favour in return, though.’

‘If I can.’

‘You know the coast round your way?’

‘Reasonably well.’

‘Thought you might. Could I come and talk to you about something?’

Just for a second I hesitated. ‘Tomorrow?’ I suggested.

‘Two o’clock suit you?’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Back on the biscuits, then?’ asked Josie.

‘I don’t eat them,’ I said. ‘I’ve got somebody coming to see me this afternoon.’

‘Your lady friend back, is she?’

‘She’s not my lady friend,’ I said. ‘Or not in the sense that it’s usually used. Elsie just comes here to eat biscuits and to try to run my life.’

Josie nodded. She’d met Elsie, after all.

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘you haven’t heard anything about a ghost over at Greylands, have you?’

‘In the garden?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s all over the village,’ she said. ‘But it’s mainly the kids who seem to have heard about it.’

‘What – you mean it’s kids larking about, trying to scare Catarina?’

‘I don’t think so. Some of them seem properly scared themselves. Even the bigger ones. They’d know if it was just one of them making it up.’

I paid her and set off to walk back home. Of course there
was no such thing as a ghost. So, somebody was making it up. The only question was who? And why, of course. That was a question too.

‘Drugs?’ I said.

Joe took a bite on a chocolate digestive and chewed a bit before replying. Maybe it was a trick they taught them in the police for ratcheting up the tension. ‘We caught a couple of drug smugglers this week. They’re minor players – that’s all we normally catch, of course, but they’ve given us a picture of how they operate. A fishing boat comes over from France and stations itself just off the coast somewhere. Small boats come out and meet it and the goods are transferred. They’re then landed by people who know the coast well. They mentioned Chichester Harbour – but I don’t think they actually know anything about the guys who pick the stuff up. There are plenty of sailing boats round here, I suppose?’

‘Hundreds.’

‘So, if you share it out a bit – several small boats all heading for different bits of coast – most of it will probably make it to shore, even if the coastguards are watching. They can’t check everyone.’

‘You’ve caught some, then?’

‘One. Local sailor from Worthing, who was a bit careless when trying to sell his share of the goods in a pub near the seafront. That’s how we got onto the fishing boat. Who would I need to talk to round here to see if anyone was landing stuff on this stretch of coast?’

‘Anything sailing in Chichester Harbour has to have an annual licence. The harbour authority could tell you who
owned boats, I guess. The secretaries of the local sailing clubs would be another source of information. But if they knew anything was going on, they’d have contacted you already.’

‘If they knew what to watch for,’ he said. ‘Where would you land stuff round here?’

‘In the winter, East Head can be fairly deserted. But you’d probably be better off keeping any packets in the boat, bringing the boat ashore on a trailer, then hitching it up to the car and taking it all home. Unload round the back of the garage and you’re good to go back for the next lot.’

‘You have a devious mind, Ethelred.’

‘I’m a crime writer. It’s like being a criminal but not so profitable.’

‘Maybe we could go for a walk round East Head later?’

‘Yes, of course.’

But Joe made no attempt to move. He took another digestive.

‘Do you know anyone called Robin Pagham?’ he said.

‘He was a friend,’ I said. ‘He died a few weeks ago. He drowned in a sailing accident. But you probably know that.’

‘Yes,’ said Joe. ‘Sorry. I should have thought you’d know him well. Was he a good friend?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well, fairly good. I can’t say I approved of everything he did. If you’ve checked your records you’ll have noticed he used to beat his girlfriends. You suspect him of drug smuggling?’

‘It’s possible. It’s likely, in fact.’

‘So, you were hoping I’d shop some of my friends to you?’

‘I didn’t know he was a friend, Ethelred. I just hoped you might have heard of him. Anyway, you expect me to use my police colleagues to provide you with information about a body we’ve dug up – out of idle curiosity, I assume? Chasing smugglers is at least my job.’

‘I’m researching a murder that took place there in the 1840s. The body is relevant to that. So, it’s my job too.’

‘Ah, hence the interest in the exact date. Well, I do have a little more for you on that. 1874 as near as makes no difference.’

‘That’s pretty accurate for radio-carbon dating, or whatever they’re using. And pretty quick.’

‘It’s based on the contents of his purse. Three golden guineas and about four shillings in small change, with coins dating from 1805 to 1874 – they included six 1874 pennies, discoloured from the burial but showing no signs of normal wear. Straight from the bank. From which we can draw two conclusions.’

‘He died in 1874 or shortly after?’

‘Precisely. And he probably had a bank account. So, not a farm labourer.’

‘A farm labourer wouldn’t have had the three guineas either.’

‘True.’

‘That’s interesting,’ I said.

‘Even though it’s thirty years too late for your murder?’

‘It may not be too late,’ I said. ‘In another sense, it may be spot on.’

‘Well, there you are then,’ said Joe. ‘I’ve done you a good turn, after all. So, in return, tell me about Robin Pagham.’

‘Why do you think he has anything to do with it?’

‘One of the men we caught … he mentioned somebody called Robin, who had a boat out this way. So we did a search of the police database. Lo and behold it came up with Robin Pagham, with a record for the possession of drugs and assault, living right out here on the coast. We had a note that he was a keen sailor too – actually we checked his Wikipedia entry. He was apparently an actor once. We showed our man Robin’s mugshot and he agreed it was the bloke he’d seen. So that was a bit of a result.’

‘Robin took drugs,’ I said. ‘You know that. I never heard that he smuggled them.’

‘Since he’s dead, we may never know everything he got up to,’ said Joe. He paused as if about to ask me another question. Then he said: ‘Well, enough about that. As you say, Pagham was a friend of yours. Do you still fancy a walk?’

After Joe had left I arranged two meetings. Then I packed
Curious Tales of Old Sussex
in my bag and set off.

‘Robin would not smuggle drugs,’ said Catarina. ‘This I know for sure.’

‘But think,’ I said. ‘Wouldn’t it explain his death? If he had some sort of argument with the smugglers out at sea? I mean, it didn’t make sense that he died in reasonably calm weather and it didn’t make sense that somebody in the village killed him. But once you get in with drug dealers, it’s another ball game, as they say. And the stranger who visited him – couldn’t he be from the gang?’

‘So, who is Old Man Robin talks about?’

‘I don’t know – the head of the gang?’

‘And why money when he dies? Gang boss may cheat you all the time, but can’t pay when dead.’

‘OK, I’m not saying the drug business explains everything. But the police are convinced Robin was involved in shipping drugs into the country. They asked me about it.’

‘What you say them?’ Any mention of officialdom
provoked immediate and unqualified suspicion in Catarina.

‘I couldn’t tell them anything because I don’t know anything.’

‘They ask where he lives?’

‘No, but I guess they would have that information … you mean there are still drugs in the house?’

‘Robin not smuggle drugs.’

‘OK. My advice to you, Catarina, is that there should not be drugs in the house when the police come.’

‘They will find nothing.’

I nodded. My point wasn’t that the police should find nothing but that there should be nothing to find. But even if the police did search and find drugs, it was unlikely that Catarina would be blamed. Robin had form, as you might say, and until probate had been granted, it was still his house. ‘You know, I assume, that the police found a body in the Herring Field – it’s been there a hundred years or so, though. No connection with Robin’s death. But Robin was going to put a wind farm there.’

‘Is not Robin’s land. Is Colonel Gittings’. That man Witless …’

‘Whitelace?’

‘Him. He ask me if I make wind farm on it. I say, not mine.’

‘But Robin was going to buy it?’

‘He not tell me.’

‘Fair enough. Have you heard, by the way, the rumours about ghosts in your garden?’

‘Who says there are?’

‘Everyone, it would seem. The local kids are terrified to come anywhere near here.’

‘They are stupid. Superstitious peasants. They believe anything.’

‘So, you’ve seen no ghosts?’

‘There is no such thing as ghost. Just Mafia and tax collectors.’

‘I suppose so,’ I said.

My second meeting was at a cafe in Chichester. I had been sitting quietly for ten minutes while Tom read and reread
The Murderer and the Devil.

‘So, what do you make of it?’ I asked.

‘Sounds like our family, all right,’ said Tom. He pulled a face. ‘Judging from the story here, it would seem to have been pretty well known that George was the murderer and that Lancelot Pagham was innocent.’

‘In other words, what you’ve always thought too. But I’m not sure that means everyone knew then. Sabine Barclay-Wood lived not far away. He might have known and talked to Perceval Pagham. Perceval might have given him the true story – or spun the good reverend a yarn. But the detail of the empty coffin is intriguing. I’m not saying that one of your ancestors was taken away by the devil but, since almost everything else seems to be true, I do wonder if the bit about the empty grave isn’t based on some rumour that was going round at the time.’

‘But why would they do that? And there’s no evidence other than this story …’

‘There’s another detail that you don’t know. That body they found the other day at the Herring Field – it dates from around 1874 or 1875. George died in 1875.’

‘So you think the body is George’s?’

‘I think it’s possible that something terrible may have happened in 1875 – something that caused the family to have George buried in unconsecrated ground by the harbour rather than in the churchyard – taken by the devil, if you like – then they went through a mock funeral afterwards for the sake of decency. And the burial was in some haste if they left three pounds four shillings in his pockets.’

‘But no more than possible. We really can’t be certain the body is George’s.’

‘No, we can’t. It’s a strange coincidence, of course – it’s the right date and it’s on his land and it sort of all fits in with the
Murderer and the Devil
story. But you’re absolutely right – beyond that, it’s just my speculation. I’ve no doubt that DNA testing could be arranged if you were curious enough.’

‘It can’t really be that important,’ said Tom uncertainly. ‘I mean, it has no bearing on anything now.’

‘True,’ I said. ‘It was all a long time ago.’

Afterwards, I went to the library. I couldn’t help feeling that if there was anything suspicious about George’s death, it might come out in the obituary – not that he’d been carted off by the devil, clearly, but perhaps a suggestion that it had been sudden and unexpected. Since I knew the date he died, it was not too difficult to find.

A list of other mourners followed – men and women with surnames that can still be found on the gravestones in the churchyard. Nothing much to go on there – certainly not some sudden and unforeseen event like a house call from Satan. But there was something odd all the same – it was George’s second son, Albert, who had led the mourners, not his first son, John. Thinking about it, I had already made a record somewhere that John had died soon after his father. I checked my notebook – yes, he’d died in 1876. I called up that volume as well.

The ‘long and painful illness’ would explain why he was not at his father’s funeral. That would also mean that, throughout 1875 and maybe for longer, both father and eldest son were in effect invalids, leaving Albert to run the
farm. But there was no clue as to why this should have necessitated a burial in a marshy field near the cold, grey waters of Chichester Harbour.

George’s obituary suggested, moreover, that he was, to the very last, well respected in the village, where he sat on the council and performed some unspecified duties at the church – a churchwarden, perhaps. If he were a known murderer, or even suspected of being one, it is unlikely that these things would have been the case. A fortiori if he was believed to be in league with the devil.

The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that the final part of the
Murderer and the Devil
story was simply made up. And why not? Plenty of writers take some factual event and then embroider it a little. In this case the author had taken a little-known rumour about John Gittings’ murder and added a neat gothic twist at the end.

I googled Sabine Barclay-Wood.

There was a copy of
Happy Recollections of a Sussex Clergyman
in the library, though it took some time to locate it. It had been privately printed and was in the form of a diary, which Barclay-Wood must have maintained over a number of years (or invented – I was beginning to doubt him as a reliable source). It was chatty and anecdotal. He sounded like the sort of person who, once they had buttonholed you, would be difficult to shake off. I finally found what I was looking for in an entry nominally attributed to 3 February 1902.

So there was the reference to the Herring Field again as a burden to the family that owned it. I flicked through the volume to the end, but I could find no more on the murder, other than a brief note for June 1904 that his book of Sussex Tales had been published and that he hoped it would be well reviewed and that sales would be brisk. He never mentioned it again.

It had been a long day, but I felt I had to phone Barry Whitelace to let him know that the body, whoever it was and however it got there, was not Bronze Age. He seemed a little distracted.

‘Thanks, Ethelred,’ he said.

‘I thought you’d like to know,’ I added. ‘I suppose it’s stopped the investigations for the wind farm for a bit.’

‘It wasn’t for a wind farm,’ he said. ‘It was for fracking. Test drill hole.’

‘Derek Gittings was contemplating fracking?’

‘Apparently. Or some company was willing to pay him to be allowed to test there.’