Mrs. Allinson leaned forward slightly.
“I suspect,” she said, “that there is no ‘right’ woman for you. I’m not entirely sure that you like women, Inspector. I don’t mean in the physical sense,” she added quickly, “for I am sure that you have appetites like most men have. Rather, I mean that you don’t like them as beings. You perhaps distrust them, maybe even despise them. You don’t understand them, and that makes you fear them. Their appetites, their emotions, the workings of their bodies and their minds, all are alien to you, and you are afraid of them for that reason, just as the men of Underbury were afraid of the women whom they named ‘witches’ and hanged amid the winter snow.”
“I’m not afraid of women, Mrs. Allinson,” said Burke, a little more defensively than he had intended.
She smiled before she spoke again, and Burke was reminded of the faint smile on the face of Mrs. Paxton as she reassured her husband earlier that day. He heard the sound of footsteps approaching the house, their rhythm slightly distorted, and knew that Dr. Allinson had returned, yet he found himself staring only at Mrs. Allinson, caught in the depths of those green eyes.
“Really, Inspector, I don’t know if that’s true,” she said, apparently untroubled by any offense that she might be causing him. “In fact, I don’t believe that’s true at all.”
Dr. Allinson joined them and, after a suitable period had elapsed, his wife announced that she was retiring for the evening.
“I know I’ll be seeing you again, Inspector,” she said, as she left them. “I look forward to it.”
Burke spent another hour with Allinson, learning little that was new but content to bounce theories back and forth with someone whose knowledge of physiology was so intimate. Allinson offered to take him back to the village, but Burke declined, consenting only to a little brandy to warm him on the journey.
Burke almost instantly regretted taking the brandy once he set out for the village, for while it was undoubtedly warming, it clouded his head, and the cold was doing little to sober him. Twice he almost slipped before he had even made it to the road, and once upon it he kept to the center, fearing for his safety if he drew too close to the ditch. He had been walking for only a few minutes when he heard movement in the bushes to his right. He stopped and listened, but the presence in the undergrowth had also paused. Burke, like Stokes, was every inch the city dweller, and supposed that there must be a great many nocturnal animals in these parts, yet whatever was on the other side of the bushes was quite large. Perhaps it was a badger, he thought, or a fox. He moved on, the lamp raised, and felt something brush past his coat. He turned suddenly, and caught a flash of black as the creature entered the bushes to his left. It had crossed the road behind his back, so close to him that it had touched him as it went.
Burke reached behind himself and brushed at his coat. His fingers came back coated with something dark and flaking, like pieces of charred paper. He brought them closer to the lamplight and examined them, lifting them to his nose to sniff them as he did so.
They smelled of burning right enough, he thought, but not of paper. Burke recalled an incident, some years earlier, when he had been forced to enter a house about to be engulfed by fire in an effort to extract any survivors before the building collapsed. He found only one, a woman, and her body was already badly burned when he discovered her. She expired upon the road outside, but Burke remembered the way that fragments of her skin adhered to his hands, and the smell of her had never left him. It was why he rarely ate pork, for the smell of roasting pig was too close to that of human meat burning. That was the smell that now lay upon his fingers.
He brushed it away on his coat as best he could and continued toward the village, faster now, his footsteps slapping upon the road as he ran, and all the time he was conscious of being followed from the undergrowth, until at last he came to the margins of Underbury itself and the creature stopped before the first house. Burke was breathing heavily as he scanned the blackness in the bushes. He thought for an instant that he saw a darker shape within it, a figure within the shadows, but it was gone almost as soon as he registered it. Still, its shape stayed with him, and he saw it in his dreams that night: the shape of its hips, the swelling of its breasts.
It was the figure of a woman.
The next morning, Stokes and Burke, accompanied by Waters, drove across the village to the farmhouse occupied by Elsie Warden and her family. Burke was quiet on the journey. He did not speak of what had occurred the night before on the road back to the village, but he had slept badly and the stink of charred meat seemed to cling to his pillow. Once he awoke to the sound of tapping at his window, but when he went to check upon it, all was still and silent outside, yet he could have sworn, for a moment, that the smell of roasted fats was stronger by the sill. He dreamed of Mrs. Paxton, watching him through the glass with her breasts exposed, but in his dream her face was replaced by that of Mrs. Allinson, and the green of her eyes had turned to the black of cinders.
Elsie Warden’s brothers, too young to enlist, were out in the fields, and her father off on some business of his own in a neighboring town, so only Elsie and her mother were in the kitchen when the policemen arrived. They were offered tea, but they declined.
In truth, Burke was not entirely certain why they had come, except that there had clearly been bad blood between the Warden family and the late Mal Trevors. Mrs. Warden remained sullen and unresponsive in the face of their questions, and Burke saw her glance occasionally through the window that looked out over the family’s fields, hoping to catch sight of her sons returning from their labors. Elsie Warden was more forthcoming, and Burke was a little surprised at the level of assurance exhibited by a young woman brought up in a household largely composed of menfolk.
“We were all in the pub that evening,” she told Burke. “Me, my mum and dad, and my brothers. All of us. That’s the way around here. Saturday nights are special.”
“But you knew Mal Trevors?”
“He tried to court me,” she said. Her eyes dared Burke to dispute any man’s reasons for pursuing her. The detective was not about to argue with her. Elsie Warden had lush dark hair, fine features, and a body that Sergeant Stokes was doing his very utmost not to notice.
“And how did you respond to his advances?”
Elsie Warden pursed her lips coyly.
“Whatever do you mean by that?” she asked.
Burke felt himself redden. Stokes appeared to be suddenly afflicted by a fit of coughing.
“I meant-” Burke began, wondering what exactly he had meant, when Stokes came to the rescue.
“I think what the inspector means, miss, is did you like Mal Trevors, or was he barking up the wrong tree, so to speak?”
“Aaah,” said Elsie, as if she were only now beginning to understand the direction the conversation was taking. “I liked him well enough, to begin.”
“She always was attracted to bad sorts,” said her mother, speaking a full sentence for the first time since they had arrived.
She kept her head down as she spoke, and did not look at her daughter. Burke wondered if the old woman was scared of her. Elsie Warden seemed to radiate life and energy, and it was clear that she had the capacity to arouse strong feelings in men. There was something fascinating about her, especially seeing her seated next to the worn-out figure of her mother in the gloomy kitchen.
“Was Mal Trevors a bad sort?” asked Burke.
Elsie tried the coy look again, but it faltered a little on this occasion.
“I think you know what Mal Trevors was,” she said.
“Did he hurt you?”
“He tried.”
“What happened?”
“I struck him, and I ran.”
“And then?”
“He came looking for me.”