Chapter 18 #2
The sergeant was disappointed. “It don’t sound like Coleman did Enderby in. He was threatening revenge after he died.”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. I doubt if Mrs. Coleman is capable of making that up, but until I’ve spoken to her husband, I can’t begin to judge whether he might have deliberately deceived her. We’ll see if that fellow is still in the barn. With luck he’ll be able to tell us where his master is.”
The man in the barn, apathetically forking hay from a waggon into the loft, turned out to be the one who had patronized the Green Garter last night. Alec asked how Coleman had received the news that George Enderby was dead.
“Eh?”
“Was he surprised? Pleased? Shocked? Angry? Upset?”
“Uh. Un just give a grunt. Mr. Coleman bain’t much for talk lessn he be mad. Which he be, often as not.”
“Do you know where we can find him?”
“Nay, un bain’t much for talk. Mought be down Lugg’s Bottom way. One o’ the heifers broke through the hedge down thataway.”
Alec requested directions to Lugg’s Bottom.
The man came out of the barn to point out the way, gesturing with his pitchfork.
Since their route started out around a field of mangel-wurzels and continued across a meadow grazed by bullocks, Tumbelow was reluctantly forced to leave his motor-bike behind.
Alec applauded his own forethought in having changed into boots before embarking upon this expedition, however inappropriate with his light grey tweed suit.
At least the rain had stopped, though dark clouds overhead threatened more to come.
Turning the corner of a hedge, they met Coleman trudging up from Lugg’s Bottom, a black-and-white dog at his heels. Though he was not a large man, far less hefty than his wife if as tall, his sinewy strength was unmistakable, and on his shoulder he carried a murderous-looking billhook.
His truculent scowl on seeing Alec added to the impression of an ugly customer. When he stopped, the dog crouched at his heels, fixing Alec with an unnervingly unblinking stare. Glad he had brought the sergeant with him, Alec was about to speak when the farmer caught sight of Tumbelow.
“Bluebottles!” he snarled. “What the bloody hell d’ye think you be about, a-trespassing on my land?”
“Mr. Coleman? I’m Detective Chief Inspector Fletcher. I have a few questions to put to you.”
“I got better things to do wi’ my time nor gabbing wi’ a pair o’ blasted bluebottles.
I s’pose the wife’s been nattering to her cousin about our girl running off.
Might as well tell all the world. Well, if so be you find Olive, you can tell the little slut from me as her dad’ll leather her proper when she come home! ”
“You aren’t worried about her?”
“Nay, the devil takes care o’ his own. Took care o’ George Enderby, all right!” Coleman grinned evilly. “Di’n’t need to raise a finger to the bastard, did I?”
“I s’pose you’re going to claim the sight o’ that ugly mug o’ yours coming after him scared him into jumping!” Tumbelow exclaimed.
“That will do, Sergeant.” Alec frowned him down, but he was quite glad of the outburst when it provoked an unguarded answer to the question he’d otherwise have had to pose.
“He never seen it, did he, seeing I never seen him!” said Coleman ferociously. “Mayhap the perlice ha’n’t nothing better to do of a Sunday afternoon than chase around the cliffs after a wench as’ll
come home when she’s hungry. Us farmers as works for our livings ha’n’t no time for such gallivanting.”
“But Miss Coleman hasn’t come home.”
“Seemingly she bain’t hungry enow yet.”
“How far did you chase her?”
“’Bout as fur as my bull chased a nosy gov’mint inspector as come poking around my dairy last year.”
“Not far, then,” Alec guessed with assumed indifference, hoping Tumbelow was not too obviously scanning the horizon for the bull. “What did you do after that?”
“Went to bring the cows in for milking, di’n’t I, seeing my cowman wants his Sundays off nowadays and there’s no other help to be got for love nor money, thanks to the bloody gov’mint’s bloody war.
A fine mess they made o’ the world, if you ask me.
They takes your money and what do you get?
A lot o’ dead soldiers, and a lot o’ live bluebottles buzzing around where they bain’t wanted! ”
At a twitch of Coleman’s finger, the dog began to rise slowly from its crouch, hackles bristling, a low rumble starting in its throat. Alec hurriedly decided he had enough information to begin checking the farmer’s movements the previous day.
“Thank you for your time, Mr. Coleman,” he said. “I must ask you to let the police know at once if your daughter returns home, and we will inform you if we find her. I should add that it was not Mrs. Coleman’s cousin who reported her absence to us, so you have no bone to pick with either lady.”
He and the sergeant beat a retreat with more haste than dignity.
Tumbelow nobly let Alec lead the way, in spite of which the sergeant arrived back at the farmyard with both his ankles and the seat of his trousers intact.
Either the farmer or his dog had more sense than to implement the threat of violence against the police.
Whether he had been equally restrained—or unsuccessful—with regard to his daughter and her seducer was another matter.
Alec could only hope his parting words would save Mrs. Coleman from further bruising. He rather doubted it. He decided to have a
word with Puckle on the subject when he got back to Westcombe, though it was no business of Scotland Yard’s and police intervention was in any case unlikely to do any good.
The woman would never press assault charges against her husband.
If he were fined, the financial loss would be equally hers; if he were imprisoned, how was she to run the farm without him?
“Back to HQ, sir?” asked Tumbelow, following Alec around the house.
“No, to the byre, or cow shed, or whatever it is. I want a word with the cowman if he’s about.”
The milking shed was unoccupied, but through a door at the back they entered the dairy.
Though the interior was cleaner than the dilapidated exterior of the building had led Alec to expect, he suspected it might not have satisfied the unfortunate government inspector.
An elderly dairy-maid, her grey hair tucked up under a scarlet kerchief, was scrubbing out a butter-churn.
Alec introduced himself and the sergeant. “Milking time’s over, is it?” he asked.
“Nay. They be just a-coming up.”
“Same time every day?”
“Aye. Cows be creeturs o’ habit.”
“Even on a Sunday, eh?”
She looked at him with scorn. “Don’t make no odds what day o’ the week. You try telling a cow ’tis the Sabbath! When her udder’s full, she wants milking.”
“And you work every day?”
“That I do. Not like some. There’s three o’ the beasties won’t let another pair o’ hands touch ‘em but mine, and what the master’ll do when I’m too old for milking, I’m sure I don’t know.
The young girls don’t stay down on the farm these days.
Ifn they doesn’t wed, they runs off to town for a job as gives ’em Sundays off. ”
“So this time yesterday, the herd came in for milking?”
“That they did, wi’ the master driving ’em acos that sluggard Barney Ridd’s done took into his noddle to lie abed Sundays like a townsman.”
Alec glanced at his wrist-watch. Nearly five. He looked around the dairy. Among the milk cans, milking pails, churn, butter-moulds and other equipment less identifiable to a townsman, he saw no clock. “How do you know it was the usual time?”
The old woman’s scorn redoubled. “Acos cows that’s kept waiting past their time do be fair betwattled,” she said, “and yest’day they wasn’t. And now I hears ’em coming and I’ve me work to do.” She took two pails from the shelf and stumped out to the milking shed.
The two policemen went after her. The yard was now full of lowing cattle, black and white, red, yellowish, every hue of the bovine spectrum. The last of the herd of a score or so were just emerging from the lane.
“My bike!” moaned Tumbelow, as a passing cow nuzzled the handlebars.
The yokel trudging in the rear gave her a whack on the rump with his stick and she ambled onward. The two dogs at his heels seemed to have little to do, the cows being eager for the relief of emptying swollen udders. As the first couple reached the shed, they headed for their accustomed places.
Hurrying out before they were boxed in, Alec and the sergeant picked their way around the side of the yard.
“Mr. Ridd,” said Alec, when they were close enough to the cowman to be heard over the mooing, “I’d like a word with you.”
“Ar?”
Barney Ridd was no more curious than the dairy-maid about why the police were interested in the habits of cows.
He was as convinced as she had been that his charges had been milked at the usual time the previous day, though for a different reason: If they had been early, then they would have been desperate for relief this morning, which they were not.
“This dang Summer Time the dang gov’mint invented” meant that milking time was now five o’clock morning and afternoon in the summer months, the cows being unwilling to obey the clock.
“How long does it take to bring them from the pasture?”
Ridd shrugged. “’Pends which field they’m in and how fast they feels like walking.”
“Yesterday?”
“Didn’t ought to’ve took more nor half an hour. Less, most like. ’Sides, the master sets the dogs after ’em if they slows down.”
If Coleman had been a couple of miles away at three, pushing Enderby off the cliff, he had had plenty of time to get to the meadow where the cows had been grazing and bring them up to the milking shed by five.