The Neat-herd, originally a straggle of low narrow cottages which had been knocked through to form a drinking area like a railway carriage without compartments, lay down a muddy lane. The lane petered out in marshy ground, adorned with the carcasses of carts and ploughshares rusting under nettles. To the rear of the public house was another dilapidated building, of wood not stone, perhaps a barn at one time.
Having safely within one basket so many bad apples (as Inspector Foster described The Nethers and its clientele) was convenient for the Salisbury police, who went to the public house in search of information or occasionally to lay hands on a convenient rogue.
At about the time that Tom Ansell was being greeted on the stairs in The Side of Beef, a police constable was leaving The Nethers. It was the same constable whom Tom had glimpsed that morning standing outside the Anstruthers’ house in the cathedral close. Constable Matthew Chesney did not visit the public house in uniform. That would have been a provocation too far unless he was going to arrest someone, and then he wouldn’t have gone alone. Instead he disguised himself in a working man’s garb which fooled nobody. Constable Chesney knew that the disguise fooled nobody, since the male and female customers — the females especially — tended to greet him with mock salutes or pretend-expressions of terror and alarm when he walked through the door.
However, Constable Chesney’s appearance at The Nethers in the guise of an artisan had this advantage: the drinkers and the landlord (a fellow called Jerry Reynolds) were aware that any visit like this was harmless. He wasn’t after anybody, he was merely in quest of a bit of knowledge. And so they permitted him a few questions and even threw him a titbit from time to time. The quid pro quo for this was that Chesney and Inspector Foster left the occupants of The Nethers alone, unless they were really compelled to make an arrest in the place.
Chesney was departing The Nethers this evening in a dissatisfied frame of mind. He’d been detailed by his Inspector to see what the word was in the lower quarters of the town about the thefts from the houses in the close. The word from the Nethers drinkers was: nothing. Oh, Chesney’s informants had heard that a couple of the fine drums near the cathedral had been turned over and that items, piddling items, had been snaffled. Jelly moulds, toasting forks and the like. ‘Honest, Matt,’ said one of the drinkers who made a point of being over-familiar with Constable Chesney when he was out of uniform, ‘this will make our business a laughing stock. To break a drum and come off with swag like that’ll do us no good at all, Matt.’
Chesney heard two or three other comments to this effect. Whoever was going to the trouble of breaking into the houses of the well-to-do folk should take a pride in their work, for gawd’s sake, and do some proper thieving. But there was a lack of hard information, a lack of any information at all, and Constable Matthew Chesney was going to have to report to his Inspector that he had got nowhere.
The constable steered himself out of the front door of The Nethers. The cold evening air hit him full in the face, after the fuggy warmth and smell of the pub. He might have had a bit more to drink than he intended in his quest for information, and The Nethers was the third public house he had visited. Of course, you had to buy drinks for people while you were pumping them, and those people made sure they drank quick and provided their information (which they usually didn’t have much of) slow. And then you had to show you had a head for drink yourself, since no one was going to give out information to a peeler who looked as though he was about to sign the pledge. In theory, Chesney disapproved of drinking, certainly drinking to excess, and as a God-fearing man he had sometimes felt like quoting to the habitués of The Nethers that verse from Proverbs about the glutton and the drunkard coming to poverty. Strangely, Constable Matthew Chesney only felt like doing this when he was himself a little the worse for wear.
The policeman went round to the side of The Nethers and unbuttoned himself to take a piss against the wall. He looked up to see the stars wheeling over the gabled end of the pub. He looked sideways in the direction of the other, barn-like edifice set further back from the lane. Gleams of light were visible through cracks and holes in the planking. There was the occasional yap of a dog and a shout or cheer from inside, which competed with the noise from the pub. Aha, thought Chesney, I know what’s going on in there. It’s none of my business, though.
As he was turning back towards the track which would lead to the town, he almost collided with someone. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. The figure — it was a man — said nothing but brushed past Chesney, heading towards the wooden building. If the light had been better or Chesney less in-ebriated, the constable might have recognized the figure. But he didn’t. Instead he staggered on his way towards the lights of the town.
The figure, however, did recognize Chesney although it took him a moment. He stopped to grin in the dark at the sozzled man’s back before resuming his progress. As he drew closer to the barn, he heard a single shout which was echoed straightaway by other answering shouts. To an outsider the shouts would have been indecipherable or meaningless, for they sounded like ‘Blow on ’em! Blow on ’em!’, but the man was familiar with the words and quickened his step so as to be in time for the kill.
There was a person lounging by a small side door to the building. ‘Evening, Jack,’ said the man. The other might have been a block of wood for all the response he made but he let the man pass through the door unhindered. The interior of the barn was illuminated with a mixture of oil lamps and candles — the latter very dangerous in the event of an accidental spill although no one had given much thought to that — hanging from beams or fixed into niches and crevices in the walls. The flaring lights cast a golden glow over the proceedings, which was further softened by tobacco smoke. This, and the hush which had suddenly fallen, might have suggested a tranquil scene. All the man could see at first was an arc of backs in the centre of the beaten-earth floor and, through the huddled shoulders, glimpses of fixed countenances on the other side, seemingly looking down at the floor. There were other observers too, standing on a couple of broken-down carts and a discarded table, with the younger and more agile ones even sitting astride the rickety rafters.
Their entire attention was concentrated on an area not much more than six feet in diameter at the centre of the barn. Here was a circular wall of stout wooden boards, rising to a little below chest height. The wood had at one time been painted white but it was now stained and flaking. The interior was well illuminated by a cluster of oil lamps hanging from a beam overhead.
Inside the ring a small dog, a terrier, was busy disposing of a pack of rats. The rats were running around the pit, some trying to get away from the terrier by squeezing into the gaps between the boards, others massing together in a kind of defensive heap against attack. But the lad who was standing in the pit, and who acted like a boxer’s second in relation to the dog, prevented the rats clinging together for long either by giving them a flick with a dirty handkerchief or by puffing out his cheeks and blowing at the pile — as the shouts of ‘Blow on ’em!’ from the group of watchers had instructed him to do. This threw the animals into confusion, causing the the heap to collapse and giving the dog the chance to snap at one, then another, then a third, each time twisting his little body about, until he managed to seize a rat in his mouth and break its neck. Then the boy would shout at the dog: ‘Drop it! Drop it!’ and the terrier went searching for a new victim.
The man who’d just entered the barn jumped on to the back of one of the dilapidated carts, which stood at a little distance from the wooden ring or pit. He was nimble and reached it in a single leap. The cart swayed under his weight and the handful of other men already standing there shifted slightly to make space for him. Not one of them shifted his gaze from the pit, however.