Murder in the Afternoon (8 page)

‘All the same, we have to check. Is that Ethan’s suit on the back of the door?’

‘Yes. There’s nowt in the pockets. I checked.’

‘Do you mind if I do?’

She shrugged. ‘Look at whatever you like.’

I stepped out of the way while she stripped two sheets off the bed. With an armful of linen, she moved to the door. Catching my eye, she said defensively, ‘It’s a good windy day for drying. The world doesn’t stop turning.’

She tied the corners of the sheets to make a bundle and then flung the laundry down the stairs, walking down after it. I could hear her talking to the children.

I checked Ethan’s pockets. Nothing in the trouser pockets. In the top pocket of the jacket were a couple of matches; nothing in the outside pockets; in the inside jacket pocket my fingers touched something Mary Jane had missed. It was a crumpled piece of newspaper, very tiny, an advertisement. It read:

A well provided and pleasant lady seeks well provided amiable gentleman with a view to joining lives and fortunes.

Box No. 49

I smoothed out the creases. A check of the dressing table revealed nothing else of interest. I put the advertisement in my pocket and went downstairs.

Harriet had finished her porridge. Mary Jane took the dish, and looked at me. ‘You’ll have something to eat?’

It seemed rude to refuse.

I nodded.

‘You can have an egg if you prefer. Georgina Conroy from the farm brought us half a dozen this morning, and a loaf of bread.’

‘Porridge will be grand.’

A dollop of porridge fell into the fire and sizzled as she ladled a portion from the pan into Harriet’s dish and passed it to me.

Harriet thoughtfully found me a clean spoon.

The next ten minutes involved children finding shoes and coats. Harriet claimed a headache and a belly ache and said she felt too poorly for school.

‘Your headache will blow away as you walk along,’ Mary Jane pronounced.

‘What about my belly ache?’

‘Do you want Syrup of Figs?’

Harriet did not. The children left for school. Not until she had waved them off did Mary Jane ask, ‘What else did Sergeant Sharp say?’

‘He doesn’t believe Harriet’s story. He says you rowed with Ethan, that you were seen by the quarry in the afternoon, and that Ethan has left you.’

‘Who saw me?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes! Harriet said Miss Trimble came bearing down on you before you went into the station. It was her wasn’t it? Well, I wasn’t anywhere near the quarry. Not until after six when Harriet finally came back after chasing off to the farm and looking for help.’

‘You have a distinctive plaid cape.’

‘Oh, so I’m the only person in Yorkshire wears a tartan cape?’

‘Miss Trimble is sympathetic. She wants to help. She said to give you this.’ I put the missal on the table.

Mary Jane stared at the prayer book, and then turned away. ‘Let her keep it, swallow it page by page and choke on it for all I care.’

‘Well, whatever happened in the past, she wants to make it up. She’s concerned about you, and about the children. Though she doesn’t have a good word for Ethan.’

‘No, I don’t suppose she does. It’s Harriet she’s after.’ By the fireside was the set pot. Mary Jane lifted the lid and steam curled out. She lowered a sheet into the hot water, prodding it down as though trying to drown it. ‘She wants Harriet for her precious Girls’ Friendship Society. That’s what she gives to her girls when they marry, a white leather missal. Only she took mine back after Harriet was born. Now she’s changing her tune.’

I kept to myself the information that Harriet wanted to walk in the church Whitsun parade. But Mary Jane must know, especially since she was making a Whitsun dress for Harriet. I remembered that I used to like parades at her age, being part of something, that feeling of belonging.

Somehow I could not imagine Mary Jane wanting to march behind a banner. Now she stood at the sink, where she had propped the washboard, scrubbed at a bar of laundry soap, and at a stain on a sheet.

‘What made you join the Girls’ Friendship Society?’

A thin film of sweat shone on her brow. ‘They were putting on a play. I fancied a bit of singing and dancing, but it was all very dull. Miss Trimble made it hard for you to get out, once she had her hooks in you.’

The sheet joined the other laundry in the set pot.

‘Mary Jane, just come and sit down for a moment, and look at this.’

I showed her the cutting.

A well provided and pleasant lady seeks well provided amiable gentleman with a view to joining lives and fortunes.

Box No. 49

‘This was at the bottom of Ethan’s inside pocket. Does it mean anything to you?’

‘It does not.’ Mary Jane shook her head, and seemed genuinely surprised. She said almost cheerfully, ‘Do you think he’s run off to meet someone who’s well provided and pleasant?’

‘I don’t know. What do you think?’

‘If he has, she’ll send him back by the first post. But I wouldn’t set any great store by a newspaper cutting where Ethan’s concerned. There’s nowt that doesn’t take his fancy.’ She handed the cutting back to me. ‘He cuts out the most peculiar items.’ She said this as though speaking of an exotic animal brought from its far-flung country and missing its diet of wart-headed slugs. ‘Look among his books if you don’t believe me. Over here.’

By the side of the range, between the drawers and the cupboard was a space about nine inches high and eighteen inches deep. It was filled with books, shorter volumes upright, taller ones lying flat. There were volumes by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, William Morris, Bunyan, H G Wells and the English poets.

‘Pick up any one of them books and some cutting will fall out,’ Mary Jane said. ‘And there’s an orange box under the table, with more books. He’s a one-man lending library.’

A child’s scrapbook, lying on top of the books, was pasted with a dizzying range of snippets, and more loose cuttings, ready to be glued, covering topics such as birth control, over-population, Sitting Bull, under-population, Wild Bill Hickok, militarism, and South African gold mines.

‘A man with many interests.’ For the first time, I felt a real desire to meet this brother-in-law of mine, and a
sense of foreboding, the feeling that I never would.

Mary Jane went to the far side of the room and raised the lid on a blanket chest. ‘Look in here if you’ve a mind. This is all his trade union stuff and his politics.’ She lifted out folders and envelopes. ‘There’s all sorts here – minutes of meetings, letters, resolutions, and who knows what. He’s long stopped trying to interest me in it.’

I glanced at the material headed
Quarry Workers’ Union
. An envelope, filled with loose papers, included cuttings from the
Daily Herald
, one of which was a letter written by Ethan concerning the poor health of quarry workers and their dangerous conditions of work.

‘Did Ethan ever think of changing his line of work? Becoming something other than a mason?’

She smiled. ‘A politician, you mean, or a full-time union man?’

‘He seems to like paperwork.’

She laughed and the anxiety fled as her face lit up. ‘That’s just what I said to him. But he wasn’t always so entirely caught up with motions and resolutions. He’s never happier than when he’s helping out on the Conroys’ farm, on a Saturday afternoon or a Sunday, out in the fresh air. He used to want Austin to be a mason, but he seems to have changed his mind about that lately. He goes on something chronic about book learning. It hasn’t struck him yet that the book learner will be Harriet.’

As I skimmed items from the chest, it struck me as likely that there would be a police file on Ethan Armstrong and his activities. Not that my father mentioned that aspect of the constabulary’s work, but I was aware of it. Men considered radicals and potential revolutionaries had drawn a certain amount of official attention as early as 1911, and earlier still for all I knew.

I returned the manila folders and envelopes to the chest, and put the well provided woman cutting in my purse.

I glanced around the room. ‘Has Ethan taken anything? Something that you may not have noticed at the time? A bag or clothes or papers? Does he have a bank book?’

‘He went out in what he stood up in on Saturday morning.’

‘We saw Raymond in the quarry. He said that Ethan’s tools are gone. Doesn’t that mean something?’

‘It might mean someone’s pinched them.’

‘
Could
Ethan have gone off somewhere to find work?’

‘Why would he do that on a Saturday, without breathing a word? It doesn’t make sense. The only money, apart from my housekeeping, belongs to the union. It’s in one of the tins on the stairs. He’s the treasurer and collects the dues. And before you ask, I’ve already looked. There’s not a penny missing.’

‘What else is on the stairs, in the biscuit tin that won’t close?’

‘Policies, marriage and birth certificates. Look if you like.’

She expected me not to, but I fetched a couple of tins and began to look through. ‘The police will do this, if they ever take Ethan’s disappearance seriously, and so I might as well do it now.’

‘Do as you like. I’m the one who asked you for help. But this one’s of no interest to you.’

She picked up an Oxo tin of recipes and returned it to the stairs. I glanced through the papers in the biscuit tin. ‘You have Ethan’s life insured.’

‘And he mine. But I wouldn’t do him in for it. A poor man who’s healthy is worth more alive than dead.’

She picked up a bucket from under the sink. ‘I need water from the well.’ She sighed. ‘When your new parents took you from our house in White Swan Yard, I cried. Perhaps I cried because they didn’t take me.’

The bucket clanked against the door as she went out. I returned the tin containing the policies to the stairs, and checked the Oxo tin. Under the recipes was a Yorkshire Penny Bank book, in Mary Jane’s maiden name: M J Whitaker. She had three hundred pounds in the account, which had been opened in 1911 with one hundred and fifty pounds. That was an enormous amount for a girl who worked in service. What’s more, she had never made a withdrawal. Her occasional deposits were never less than twenty pounds. Whatever Ethan had given her for housekeeping, or even if he had tipped up his wages, she would not have come up with such lump sums. 1911. Twelve years. I calculated that the date of the first deposit was a year before Mary Jane’s marriage. From what little I had gleaned so far about our shared history, a legacy seemed highly unlikely. The poor, not the rich, give up their children for adoption. I returned the bank book to its hiding place, below the recipes, and replaced the tin on the stairs. Mary Jane may indeed be my long-lost sister, but she didn’t know me at all.

Walking to Conroys’ Farm would give me time to think. Mary Jane gave me directions but would not come herself, saying she would stop where she was, in case of news.

The sun shining across a glorious expanse of meadow and flowers on the other side of the dry-stone wall made it hard to imagine Ethan had met some foul end. This beautiful place struck me as a perfect spot for children to grow up. Mary Jane kept her cottage spotlessly clean. She grumbled, but I could imagine why she might be loath to leave. I wondered just how much she was hiding from me, and why. God knows I’m a fine one to talk. I don’t go around advertising the fact that I’m having an affair with a man from Scotland Yard; that last year I came close to making a big mistake with a philandering psychiatrist; that I’ve made decisions that almost lost me my valuable assistant, and that I carry a secret that holds a man’s life in the balance. Not to mention that five years on from receiving the
missing presumed dead
telegram, I still expect Gerald to walk through the door.

Next week, I have arranged to make yet one more visit to Catterick Hospital. I am not so stupid as to imagine I
will find Gerald there. But there is always the faint possibility that he was overlooked in a small hospital, having lost his memory, or that he was found in France and brought home. So if Mary Jane has some secret bank account, that’s her affair. Or is it? Does the fact that she’s asked for help in discovering what happened to Ethan give me the right to pry into every corner of her life?

An old carthorse glanced at me before returning to the business of chomping grass and clover. A fingerpost pointed out the footpath to Little Applewick.

I followed a broad dirt track, leading to the river and the old stone bridge. Pausing to watch the fast-flowing water, I could feel myself back in a different age, when the bridge was first built, and the quarry an untouched hill. Something crashed into my legs, startling me out of my reverie.

It was a black and white dog, a sheepdog, a length of string tied to its neck. The dog wagged its tail, asking to have its head patted. I obliged. It waited with me, and we trotted across the bridge together.

At the railway line, the dog halted, and looked left and right, then up at me, as if to say, it’s safe to cross. In the distance, a train hooted its way from Horsforth Station.