Never thought he’d call my bluff but he has. Even sent one of his tame police bully-boys to make sure I go quietly. At least I merited an ‘Assistant Commissioner’ from the Yard! PC Plod from the village wouldn’t have cut it. Well sod you both!
I bet he’s told you nothing. Eh? Aren’t I right? Well it’s time someone blew the whistle before he ruins many more lives. Read on, copper, if you want to know the truth about Truelove.
1908 it was when I did him the service. One of the maids—Phoebe her name was—got pregnant. Not surprised—she was a lovely lass but she was just a kid. They both were. He must have got her into trouble when he was home from school at Easter. Always wanted too much, too early, James Truelove.
By the summer holidays she was desperate. Told no one but him. Wanted to know what he was going to do about it. The usual. He didn’t want his old man to find out or his ma who was in the last month of confinement herself. But more than anything he was afeared that Hunnybun might get to hear and then the wrath of God would have descended on him. No one else to talk to, so he turned to me. Man of the world. A Londoner. He thought I’d know what to do.
He wasn’t wrong. I knew a place in Ipswich where they’d fix it—for a sum. It’ll cost you, I says. How much? he wants to know. I’ve spent my month’s allowance. Pinch something then I says. House is full of stuff. Silver, gold necklace. He comes up with 2 little paintings. Silly sod! Not so easy to shift as something you can melt down, easy to trace as a signature! I managed. But I had to go up to London to do it. I even conned a receipt of sorts out of the bloke—he was a cousin of mine and owed me one. Here attached for your perusal. Wouldn’t stand up two minutes in a court of law but a copper like you can read between the lines. And Alf who signed it has previous. Got sent down for five in the Pen in 1912 for fencing stolen goods so that’s corroboration as you’d say. Check it—it’s your job. Twenty quid wasn’t near the value but then. It was enough to do the job and pay me for my troubles.
Something went wrong for him. Church-going girl, she must have refused to go through with it. She certainly never went near Ipswich. Next thing she’s floating in the pondweed and who was the unlucky bloke who found her? Yours truly. Killed herself? Course she did! And that’s the story I put out. But I told Truelove it would look really bad for him if I were to tell anyone what had really happened. Wasn’t that the young master I’d glimpsed larking about with a young girl in the moat an hour before? Teaching her to swim? Two kids having a splash about? Oh, yer! Holding her up by the heels was a funny way of going about it. I only had to take my tale to Hunnybun and James would have been mincemeat. Adam H. is just like his real dad. A ba-lamb until he’s riled and then you notice the size of his fists. I’ve seen the old man lay about him … but never mind … those Boers asked for it, whatever they say.
When James found himself a rich woman I asked for more. He wouldn’t have wanted the lovely Lavinia to know what was in his past. He coughed up, good as gold. Her gold I suppose when you come to think of it! She never knew where half of it went, silly cow!
I’ve had a good innings and my bank book at the Co-op will keep my sister and me comfortable. It’s no life out here for a 50-year-old with arthritis anyhow. I’ve had enough. I should have shopped him to his wife and scarpered when I had the chance. She was round here every month leaving bribes to Diana. Desperate to present the Trueloves with an heir. Why, she kept asking, why am I being punished? Should have spoken out. Told her it was a judgement not on her but on her husband that he has no son and heir. He has no trouble deflowering virginal maids and getting them up the duff. It’s the Goddess’s revenge for Phoebe.
But you’ll do, copper. Tell whoever you want. Shout it from the housetops. James Truelove who thinks he can be the next prime minister is a debaucher of young girls, a thief and a murderer. That’s what you have to tell the world.
THE VENOM REEKING up from the page was almost tangible. Joe could hardly bear to hold the paper in his trembling hands. “No, you swine,” he muttered to himself, “if I shout anything, I shall announce to the world that the human scum who went by the name of Virbio was a Peeping Tom, a liar, a parasitic leach, a blackmailer and snake in the grass. And then I shall get seriously disrespectful!”
Joe had never had so little evidence on which to base an accusation, nor yet such certainty that his suspicions were justified. He turned an angry face to the cottage. “And if someone hadn’t already pulled that trigger and rid the world of a pullulating ulcer, I’d have done the job myself.”
HE STOOD, GATHERED himself, and set off at a brisk trot back to the Hall. He’d covered twenty yards when the shot rang out.
High and wide to the right, it cracked past his head sending him crashing to his knees. He rolled over twice into the deep shadow of an oak tree, coming to rest, breathless and alarmed, behind the four foot thick barrier of its trunk.
Who the hell?
NOT VIRBIO’S GUN. The first barrel of someone else’s. A poacher? One of his fellow guests revelling in early morning country pursuits? A resentful villager putting the wind up one of the Toffs up at the Hall? Probably their weekend sport. The comforting answers flooded in, the brain attempting to neutralise the unacceptable messages being sent by his senses. Joe rejected each one. Out there within easy range for any reasonable shooter was a man with a gun and a second shot up the spout. The gun was trained on him.
Or was it?
The bullet had smacked into the tree ahead of him, some twelve feet from the ground, he thought. He noted the place. The broad-leaved lime had stopped the bullet with all the solidity of its fine-grained wood. He didn’t want to imagine what it would have done to the soft spot between his shoulder blades. Bad aim or warning shot? Joe waited, listening. No sound. Flat to the ground, he risked an eye around the trunk. No movement. He rolled over and checked the other side. All clear. Silently he wriggled to his feet and picked up a stout twig. Plastering his front to the rough bark, he took off his cap and speared it on the end of the twig. Crouched, he held it up beyond the tree at head level and waited for the explosion. A crude trick, but it had worked with helmets on bayonets in the trenches. A keyed-up man with his finger on the trigger—even an experienced soldier—would instinctively blast away at the sudden appearance of exactly what he was looking for in the place he was expecting it.
No result. Joe performed the same manoeuvre on the other side in case the shooter was moving around in an arc. His cap remained intact. Feeling embarrassingly like a boy scout on a wide day out in the woods with the troop, he next hurled the stick into a thicket behind and to one side of the tree. It landed with a satisfying crunch and a movement of the bushes. Joe was pleased with the result but the gunman wasn’t falling for that either.
Joe began to breathe more steadily. Common sense was telling him that if the gunman genuinely wanted him dead, then dead he would be by now. Unarmed as he was, there was only one thing he could do.
Cap firmly back in place, imaginary swagger stick tucked under his right arm, left arm swinging with military precision, Joe marched out from his shelter. Whistling “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” he presented a ram-rod straight back to the enemy.
THE MARCH BECAME a trot as he stayed on his feet and the trot a fast zigzagging dash when he emerged from the cover of the trees and headed across the seemingly endless open stretch of mown meadow grass in front of the Hall.