Chapter 18
Alec had only once before ridden in a motor-cycle side-car.
Never again, he had vowed. The vehicle’s flimsiness reminded him of his wartime spotter ’plane, a fragile construct of balsa wood, piano wire and canvas.
But then he had soared through the air. The side-car was so close to the ground, every rut and pebble rattled one’s bones and seemed about to shake the whole thing to pieces.
Beyond the rain-streaked celluloid windows, hedges raced past in a green blur, inches from his nose, at what felt like ninety miles an hour.
He wondered at the intrepidity of regular passengers in such infernal contraptions, usually women and children!
Almost as distressing was the inferior position he found himself in vis-à-vis Tumbelow.
Rampant on his bellowing machine, the sergeant was king of the road while Alec crouched at his side, utterly at his mercy.
He flexed his cramped limbs, hoping to be able to extract himself with at least some remnant of dignity when they reached the Coleman farm.
He could have ridden pillion, but he suspected it was no more comfortable to the inexperienced rider. Besides, he had no overalls or dustcoat and to arrive dripping and mud-splashed was equally undignified.
At last the motor-cycle slowed. Alec breathed a sigh of relief—too
soon. A moment later he was sure his teeth were being shaken loose as the side-car’s single wheel lurched in and out of a series of potholes.
At the same time the windows were spattered with a substance the stench of which doomed any hope that it was good, clean mud.
The only mitigating factor was that it suggested they were approaching the farmyard.
With a final roar, the machine rolled to a halt. Tumbelow dismounted and came around to release Alec, who stood up, suppressing a groan as muscles and joints unkinked.
Ahead, the pot-holed lane ended in a wide, equally mucky yard delimited on two sides by gap-toothed drystone walls banked with nettles and on the third by a ramshackle open-fronted byre.
The motor-cycle had stopped beside a gate in a rotting wooden fence surrounding a vegetable plot where a flock of damp chickens scratched after grubs among the dripping cabbages and Brussels sprouts.
A fruit-laden plum tree badly in need of pruning sheltered a hen-coop badly in need of re-roofing.
Tumbelow opened the gate and Alec managed to step from the side-car to the crushed-shell path beyond without landing in the intervening puddle.
“Thank you, Sergeant. I want you in uniform.”
Stripping off his overalls, Tumbelow bundled them into the side-car, closed its top against the steady drizzle, and joined Alec. “The back door, I should think, sir. These back of beyond farms, they often don’t open the front door from one year to the next. Likely it’s barred and bolted.”
The stone house looked as if it had stood virtually unchanged for centuries. As they trudged along the path leading around the side, Alec noted peeling paint on the frames of the tiny windows, but to walls two feet thick, a few years, or decades, of neglect were of little account.
The back yard, surrounded by a barn and outbuildings in varying states of dilapidation, was largely given over to brambles, on which blackberries were beginning to ripen, and more stinging nettles. A
chained dog, staggering arthritically to its feet, barked half-heartedly at the two strangers. A man in a leather jerkin came to the open barn door, pitchfork in hand, and watched them in sullen silence.
Alec knocked on the back door.
The woman who opened the door, swathed in an apron both flowery and floury, was massive.
Greying braids circled her head above a face as round and red as the setting sun, marred by the dark cloud of a bruise on one cheek.
Her gaze passed indifferently over Alec, but the sight of Tumbelow’s uniform brought a look of mingled fear and relief.
“Olive … ?”
“We haven’t found your daughter, Mrs. Coleman. We’re just checking that she actually is missing, and—May we come in?”
With a helpless gesture of one flour-dusted arm, she moved aside.
Alec entered a large room, stone-flagged, apparently combining the functions of living and dining rooms and kitchen.
The cooking facilities were primitive, an open fireplace with hooks, racks, spits and a brick oven.
Around the fireplace, iron pots and pans hung on hooks.
A wooden settle on one side and a rocking chair on the other provided the only seating apart from unmatched chairs at the scrubbed white-wood table, on which were pastry makings.
Everything was spotless. The farmhouse was as clean and tidy inside as it was mucky outside.
“Aye, she ran off yest’day, wi’ her dad after her.” Moving like an automaton, Mrs. Coleman returned to her pastry. “He come back but I ha’n’t seen hide nor hair o’ my girl sin’.”
“Is Mr. Coleman at home?”
“Nay, he’s off about the farm. And it’s to be hoped he don’t come home afore you’re gone.
” She glanced apprehensively at Sergeant Tumbelow, who relaxed a bit and moved aside from the post he had taken up blocking the door.
“He’ll cut up rough, having the police in the house.
Ellen promised not to tell you yet, not till tomorrow if Olive’s still not come home. ”
“Ellen Hammett? It wasn’t Mrs. Hammett who came to us. But
we heard your daughter hadn’t been seen since yesterday afternoon, and in the circumstances we have to investigate. Oh, by the way, do you recognize this earring?”
She shook her head. “Nay, our Olive ha’n’t nothing gaudy like that.”
“All right. Tell us what happened yesterday.”
Gentle probing brought out much the same story that Daisy had reported hearing from Mrs. Hammett.
Mrs. Coleman wouldn’t by any means credit that Olive had done anything worse than “walk out” with George Enderby, “which is bad enow, him being a married man. They don’t seem to teach ’em right from wrong in the school, the way they did when I was a girl. ”
“But your husband believed … the worst, did he not?”
“I shouldn’t ‘a’ tole him what Ellen said,” she said wretchedly. “Ellen Hammett’s a busybody as always makes bad worse, but she were right about that. He’d ‘a’ half killed Olive if she hadn’t hopped it quick as winking.”
“You said he went after her. How long was he gone?”
“He di’n’t come back till after milking. I’d his tea ready for him.”
“Several hours, then. Did he say where he’d been? What he’d been doing?”
“Nay, Alfred never were much of a talker, but there’s allus plenty to do on the farm, Sunday or any other day.”
Much of it left undone! “He must have said something when your daughter didn’t come in to tea, surely?”
“I axed him where she’d went. He said he di’n’t know and di’n’t care, and she knowed what was coming to her if she showed her face.
I’m … I’m afeared he done her a mischief!
” Tears started rolling down the broad face.
She dropped her rolling-pin, sank onto the nearest chair and blotted her eyes with her apron.
“When he loses his temper, he don’t know his own strength.
” She raised her hand to her bruised cheek, now streaked with flour.
Alec put away the handkerchief he had started to pull out. He was pretty sure Olive had been the female with Enderby. A thorough
search of the area around their rendezvous had not discovered her, neither dead nor—almost worse—badly injured. “Assuming she outran him, where might she have taken refuge? With relatives? Friends?”
“She had friends at school, but I dunno their names. She never brung ’em home, as who can blame her.
Then there’s her aunts and uncles, my brothers and sisters, and Alfred’s sister.
” She gave names and addresses, which Tumbelow wrote down in his notebook, using a blunt pencil seemingly in need of frequent licking.
Most of her relatives resided on local farms, but one of her sisters had escaped as far as Exeter and a brother worked for James Hammett, transporting fish.
“Olive wouldn’t’a’ gone to him, though, acos Ellen’d’ve knowed about it, for sure. ”
“We’ll check them all,” Alec said reassuringly, “and find out from her teachers who are her particular friends. We’ll find her.”
“She won’t come home, not wi’ her dad angry as he is.”
“He must have been very angry with Enderby, too. What did he have to say about him?”
“Nothing afore he dashed off after Olive. He were in too much hurry to get after her. When he come home to his tea, he talked very bitter.”
“He made threats against him?”
“He talked wild about going over to the Schooner to have it out wi’ him, but where’s the use o’ that, I says.
” She touched her bruised cheek again. “Ellen tole me about Peter Anstruther going for him Sat’day night, and much good it did him.
Di’n’t seem like there was much Alfred could do, wi’out as good as shouting from the rooftops as our Olive’s a bad girl—though seeing summun tole Ellen, ’tis no secret.
But ’tain’t like it were a lad as can be made to wed her, is it? ”
“I’m afraid not. When did you hear that Enderby was dead?”
“One o’ the men heard it at the Green Garter in Malborough last night and tole us at milking time this morning.”
“Who was that? Where can I find him?”
Mrs. Coleman gave the farm-hand’s name but shrugged her
shoulders as to where he might be found.
She had nothing to do with the farm management and—as she announced with a proud look around the room—her husband had nothing to say within the house.
Alec asked for a photograph. The only one she had was of the whole Malborough village school. Olive was little more than a pale blur.
As Alec and Tumbelow took their leave, her mother returned to the pastry-making, saying, “You tell him it weren’t me as called you in, that’s all. Fit to bust, he’ll be.”