‘Can we go and see the waggle-taggle gypsies?’
‘Raggle-taggle. And don’t call them that. They’re Mr and Mrs Goram to you.’ Her eyes, blue as sapphires, challenged his in the rear-view mirror. ‘Yes, we can,’ he said, after a moment. ‘They’re leaving soon, and I want to talk to Mr Goram before they go.’
‘What about?’
‘Never you mind.’
The dirt road to the farm sparkled with muddy puddles. The land on which it lay, overlooked by Upton Hanger, was little more than a mile from the Maddens’ house and less than three miles from Highfield itself. They had bought it from Lord Stratton, a local landowner, soon after their marriage, when Madden had quit his job at Scotland Yard to return to the life he had known as a boy.
Although the rain of the previous day had fallen heavily here, too, he was relieved to see no sign of damage to the lines of late tomatoes flanking the roadway. When he and Helen had acquired the property wheat had been its principal crop. Since then cheap grain from Canada and Australia had driven down prices and like many farmers in the area Madden was devoting more land each year to growing vegetables and fruit, which found a ready market.
As he drove past the brick-built, shingled farmhouse, May Burrows waved to them from the kitchen doorway. She had been May Birney when he first came to Highfield; her father owned the village store. Later, she had married George Burrows, a worker on the Stratton estate, and they had moved into the house which came with the farm, a primitive structure when the Maddens had bought it, but now, with the addition of two new rooms and the installation of indoor plumbing, a comfortable house for a young couple.
Madden had made George his farm manager, though not without a qualm. There had never been any thought that he and Helen might move from the house where they lived: a handsome, half-timbered dwelling, it had been in her family for three generations. But living away from his land, leaving it each evening in the hands of another man, made him feel at times like a gentleman farmer, and he was in the habit of assuaging these periodic bouts of guilt by engaging in the hardest manual work he could find – ditching and hedging, scything grass and baling hay – returning home on those evenings with blistered hands and aching muscles, exhausted but happy, to the raised eyebrows of his wife.
‘Mr Madden, sir! I was hoping to see you today.’
Joe Goram called out from the steps of one of his caravans as Madden rode into the encampment. A burly, dark-haired man with unshaven cheeks, his face bore a scowl that seemed permanently fixed until he caught sight of Lucy, who was wearing a blue dress with a ribbon in her hair, riding perched on the saddle in front of her father. The gypsies’ camp lay at the bottom of the farm beside the stream that ran along the foot of Upton Hanger. Madden had parked his car at the stable yard and ridden down.
‘Good morning to you, young missy.’ Waving to her, he came down the steps. His broad grin showed he had several teeth missing.
‘Hullo, Mr Goram.’ She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘May I see the puppies, please?’
‘Of course, m’dear. They’re tied up over there, behind the caravan.’
The little girl slid to the ground and ran off.
‘Don’t offer her one, Joe, I beg you,’ Madden said hastily. ‘We’ve two dogs at home, and one of them’s just had puppies herself.’
Dismounting, he shook hands with the gypsy and passed him the reins of the old mare he used for getting about the farm and which Goram inspected with his usual disparaging eye. He’d several times offered to replace it with a better animal from his own string, but Madden, no horseman, had suggested instead that he look out for a suitable mount for Lucy at some unspecified date in the future.
‘And don’t mention the pony, either. Please. We’ll talk about that next time you’re here.’
Goram didn’t hide his disappointment. ‘There’s no harm in spoiling them while they’re young,’ he ventured.
Since this was an argument Madden used himself on occasion, and one on which Helen poured particular scorn, he thought it best not to respond.
Instead, he gazed about him, taking note of the signs of bustle and activity in the encampment. The various members of Joe Goram’s family – his wife and two sons, his daughter and son-in-law – were all busy collecting and stowing items in the trio of caravans that were parked at the edge of the clearing in the shade of a beech tree. One young grandson, eyes fixed to the ground, was quartering the area, picking up bits of paper and other rubbish and depositing them in a sack.
‘You were hoping to see me, you said?’
‘Yes, Mr Madden, sir. We’ll be pulling out first thing tomorrow and I wanted to thank you again for letting us stay.’
The gypsies had first appeared four summers before. Joe Goram had presented himself to Madden, greasy cap in hand, and asked for permission to park his caravans on a patch of tree-shaded land by the stream and to graze his horses in the lower paddock, which he must have seen was empty. Over strong objections from George Burrows – gypsies had a well-deserved reputation for being light-fingered, he’d argued, it was asking for trouble to allow them on your land – Madden had agreed to let them remain. In spite of his policeman’s conditioning, he clung to the belief he’d grown up with: that people, by and large, behaved according to how they were treated.
In the course of the next few days two bridles and a set of stirrups had vanished from the stables and George had found one of his scythes missing. At the end of the week they had miraculously reappeared in the places where they had been before, and Joe Goram had dragged his elder son, Sam, by the collar into the yard and made him apologize to Madden in front of Burrows and the other two farmhands. Sam, sporting a black eye and a loose tooth, had sworn it would never happen again.
The family had returned every year since, accepting the hospitality that was offered and in return mending pots and pans, sharpening knives and doing other odd jobs about the farm. Madden had grown used to seeing the smoke from their fires drifting up through the screen of oak and beech and to catching the scent of strange spices and aromas wafting his way from their blackened cooking pots.
‘There’s something you ought to know, Joe. A young girl was murdered over at Brookham yesterday.’
‘I heard about it, sir. Mr Burrows told us this morning. Poor lass
…’ The gypsy watched Madden’s face closely.
‘The police will be questioning people in the area. Tramps in particular, but travellers, too. You may be stopped on the road.’
Joe nodded. His face was impassive.
‘I understand you were at the farm all day yesterday?’
‘That’s right, Mr Madden. I took my boys up to say goodbye to Mrs Burrows. She gave us a cup of tea.’
‘Good. I’m glad. You’ll have no trouble with the police, then. But if you do, refer them to us. To Mr Burrows or myself.’
‘Thank you, sir. I’ll do that if I may.’ Joe Goram twisted his cap in his fingers. He could think of no way to repay this man who had shown him such special favour. Who shook hands with him when they met.
‘There’s something else, Joe…’ Frowning, Madden watched as one of Goram’s sons dismantled a clothes line, thrusting the poles into a rack beneath a caravan. ‘Have you ever come across a man called Beezy? He’s a tramp, a friend of Topper’s?’
Goram shook his head. ‘I’ve not heard the name, sir. Beezy, you say?’
‘It’s a nickname, I expect. He was in the Brookham area yesterday, near where the child’s body was found.’
‘Are the police looking for him, then?’ Goram’s face was expressionless.
‘Yes, they are. They think he might have done it.’ Madden paused, considering how to frame his next remark. ‘You might hear of his whereabouts,’ he suggested.
The gypsy’s swarthy features darkened still further. He stared down at his feet. Madden studied him in silence. He had more than an inkling of what was going on in the other man’s mind.