I handed the letter back to Mrs Handley, and she was on the edge of tears.
‘The drawings are at the framers in Malton,’ she said. ‘I’m going to put them up in place of the fish pictures.’
(You’d have thought wall space came at a premium in The Angel, whereas in fact the fish pictures were the only ones in the place.)
‘We saw Mervyn in the woods just now,’ I said. ‘He was burning bird bones: a kestrel and a moorhen.’
The wife was frowning at me, but I’d checked Mrs Handley’s tears at any rate.
‘The kestrel attacked the moorhen, and they came down together,’ she said. ‘It happened out at the back here. Our Mervyn came racing in to tell me while I was talking to Master Hugh. We all went out to see, and Hugh looked down at these two birds and he said something like “That’s father and I”. Mervyn heard it quite distinctly, and when the police were first here asking all their questions I was daft enough to let on. Well, they had Mervyn in — took me and him by train to York, and asked us that many questions. The boy was in tears from the moment we left to the moment we came back — I’ve never seen him in such a state.’
‘He told us he’d never travelled by train,’ I said.
‘He never has since,’ said Mrs Handley. ‘Put him off for life, that trip did.’
‘That’s why you never went to Scarborough,’ said the wife, and Mrs Handley said, ‘Yes. It was a consideration.’
‘Was his statement put in?’ I said. ‘Was he called as a witness?’
Mrs Handley shook her head. ‘It never came to that,’ she said.
I noticed there was a small glass of wine on the bar in front of her. I had never seen her drink before.
‘Mrs Handley,’ I asked her, ‘do you really think that Master Hugh is a murderer?’
She just drained her glass, and said, ‘Do you want some dinner?’
We went over to a table and ate some cheese and cold meats while crowded in by the cricketers. At one point, they were so arranged that I saw a clear channel through them, and station master Hardy was at the end of it, sitting at a table in the ‘public’. He looked red-faced, perhaps on account of his suit, which looked very constricting. Every so often, one of the strapping cricketers would go over and place an empty pint glass on his table, and each time I glimpsed Hardy there were more and more glasses containing sticky dregs under his nose. It wasn’t so much that the cricketers were not mannerly, or that they were drunk, it was just that they didn’t seem to notice him at all.
When Mrs Handley came to collect the plates, I asked whether Mr Gifford had pitched up.
‘Now, where he’s gone I don’t know,’ she said, with a distracted look.
Well, I would not tell her what little I knew on that score. But I did let on that John Lambert had gone missing from the Hall. (It couldn’t hurt to mention it; the fact would soon be common knowledge with all those coppers in the district looking for him.)
Then the wife said, ‘Where’s our bicyclist, Mrs Handley?’
‘I’ve no idea, I’m sure,’ she said.
‘Has he booked out?’ asked the wife.
‘He has not.’
‘When was he due to book out?’
‘No date’s been given. He’s paid for yesterday and he’s paid for today, and he can keep doing that as long as he likes as far as I’m concerned. His bicycle’s gone, though, you might have noticed.’
‘But it’s punctured,’ said the wife.
‘Well,’ said Mrs Handley, ‘I saw him pushing it off into Clover Wood not one hour since.’
Chapter Twenty-Eight
We stood outside the front of The Angel looking at the soft greyness of the sky, the great trees bright green against it. The rainbow was half there and half not, like the memory of a dream, and seeming to carry the message: this is not what you’d call the perfect summer’s day but it’s beautiful in its way, you know.
Two chimes floated up from the village.
‘Hugh Lambert has eighteen hours left alive,’ I said.
‘And what about your investigation?’ asked the wife.
‘In the first place…’ I said.
‘I think time’s too short for “in the first place”,’ said the wife.
‘… You don’t think Hugh Lambert murdered his father,’ I said, ‘and nor do I.’
‘Mervyn’s the key to it, wouldn’t you say?’ asked the wife — and it wasn’t quite like her to be asking questions in this way. As a rule she didn’t give tuppence what I thought. Instead, she was giving me a chance to say what she herself couldn’t.
Just then, the blurred voice of Mr Handley came from behind us.
‘Where is that boy?’ he said. ‘He’s late for his bloody dinner.’
He held a pewter of ale in his hand, and because of this and the natural impairment of his speech, it was impossible to know how worried he might be. I turned to him and said, ‘We’ll keep our eyes skinned.’
He turned and went back inside his pub. We watched him do it, and the wife said, ‘I do wonder about that bicyclist, you know.’
He’d always been a special study of the wife’s, and this was down to the shocking business of seeing him stab his own tyre. All bicyclists were martyrs to rough roads: their machines were too flimsy and were forever getting crocked, and the bicyclists were forever moaning about it. To see the damage self-inflicted put the whole thing on its head.
‘Clover Wood is that way,’ I said, pointing directly over-opposite.
This time, I found a track rather than crashing on through the undergrowth, and I led the wife along it. Wherever the path divided, we took the wider route, but these would become narrow after a while, and we’d end in a jam of trees and thorn bushes. We pressed on through narrow gaps until we did at last strike another good-sized track. It was lined with tall everlastings of a very dark green, and by rights ought to have led to a blank-faced tomb or cemetery. In fact it led to a perfectly round clearing: a Piccadilly Circus of the woods with a fallen log in its centre, two people sitting on the log and two bicycles on the ground hard by. I knew that one bicycle would be punctured, the other not. We were about fifty yards short of the couple, who were the bicyclist from The Angel and a young woman I’d never set eyes on before. Their voices carried along the track, and I motioned the wife into a gap between two of the everlastings. I stepped in after her, and watched the couple.