The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries Read online

  Hennessey laughed. “All right,” he said. “Sounds good to me.”

  The Post Office in Meltham was located next to a small, very small, mini market and a hardware shop. It was quiet inside the shop, which had a sense of timelessness, with old-fashioned posters which had never been taken down and which advertised products priced in Imperial, not decimal currency. A youthful, very youthful, looking post mistress emerged from the gloom of the back of the shop in response to the jangling door bell.

  “You’ll be the police,” she said pleasantly. “We thought you’d come. It’ll be about the bones.”

  “The bones?” Hennessey raised an eyebrow.

  “The bones that were found in the small wood yesterday by Mr Coleman. Mrs Innes ‘does’ for Coleman – he’s a bachelor, you see, and Mr Coleman told her what he’d found and she told me. So we thought you’d come.”

  The woman seemed to be in her mid-twenties and Hennessey thought that, in terms of attitude and temperament, she had the makings of an excellent village post mistress. He asked if she had lived in the village for long.

  “All my life,” she replied with pride. “My husband didn’t want to live here, but if he wanted me, he had to live in Meltham. He’s been here nearly five years now and is beginning to get accepted.”

  “Lucky he.”

  “Well, it means he gets a game of darts in the Beggar now. For the first few years he had to stand alone at the bar.”

  “The Beggar?”

  “The Fortunate Beggar.” The woman smiled. “It’s the pub, the only one in Meltham.”

  “I see. Well, you’re right, we are here about the bones. We believe the person who was buried to have been quite tall, probably walked with a limp and had a very bad drink problem. If he was local to this area and not brought here from afar, then someone might recognize him. Our mis per records haven’t shown anything.”

  “Mis per?”

  “Missing Persons.”

  “Oh . . . but yes, I have heard of him. He still gets mentioned from time to time . . . the limping landlord, he disappeared . . . but that was before I was born. I’m twenty-six now.”

  “No wonder he’s not in our records.” Hennessey turned to Yellich. “If he had lived, he’d be pushing eighty now.”

  “He had the Beggar,” the post mistress added. “Well, wait till I tell my mum. We took over the post office from her and dad when they retired. She’s at the coast now, Bridlington, in a home. Your best bet now would be to try at the Beggar.”

  “Only by reputation.” The landlord appeared to Hennessey and Yellich to be a man close to his retirement and who also subscribed to the Meltham culture of “strangers not welcome”. He avoided eye contact with the officers and seemed to begrudge having to give information. “I took over the pub from him when he disappeared. That’s thirty years now – thirty years last July, to be exact. He was not a happy man.”

  “No?”

  “His flat above the pub—” the landlord looked up at the low beams above his head “– above the bar here . . . it was like a tramp’s doss. The sheets on the bed hadn’t been changed for months, newspapers covered the floor, empty bottles everywhere . . . My wife insisted we fumigate it. We threw everything out, stripped it right back to the bare floorboards, then we set up a brazier in the main room.”

  “Took a risk.”

  “Not really. We mounted the brazier on a bed of bricks and burned wood and damp vegetation, left all the doors open, but shut all the windows except one. Filled the flat with smoke, and crawling things began to come out of cracks in the wall and from between the floorboards; they found the open window and didn’t return. Then we moved in. The lingering smell of wood smoke was better than the lingering smell of Reddick.”

  “A lonely man, then?”

  “Yes . . . Carl Reddick, the limping, lonely landlord. Never did like that name, Carl . . . too close to ‘cruel’, but in this case it was apt by all accounts. Cruel Carl Reddick, not the right sort of man to be in charge of a pub.”

  “Irresponsible, you mean? Let youths drink too much?”

  “No . . . not from what I heard. He was a soak himself, two bottles a day, and I don’t mean beer.”

  “I get the picture.”

  “Apparently, so my customers told me, he used to sit on the stool at the end of the bar and be rude to everybody and anybody, customers and staff alike . . . very personally offensive.”

  “They didn’t vote with their feet?”

  “The staff did. Nobody stayed very long, but the work round here can be hard to come by, so they were easily replaced. And the customers, where could they go? The next nearest pub is in Ossley St Mary, about two and a half miles away. That could be a pleasant walk on a summer’s evening if you are young and fit, but if you’re getting on in years, and if it’s a cold winter . . . well, it’s the Beggar or nothing. So Reddick had a captive audience and he knew it . . . so he was described as spending each evening sitting there and snarling at anything that moved, with a breath so hot it was said it could ignite paper . . . then he disappeared. Here one day, gone the next. Then me and Betty took over, cleaned the place up and it became a village pub again in the truest sense of the word. I like to hear the thud of darts and the rattle of dominoes and folk laughing as they relax at the end of their day.”

  “Any rumours about his disappearance?”

  The landlord smiled. “He got under the skin of a lot of people; a lot of people had cause to do him harm. I bet a lot of people dreamed of doing him in.” The landlord broke off the conversation to serve a pint of mild to an elderly man who shuffled up to the bar with an empty glass. The landlord put the man’s money in the till and returned to the officers. “So those were his bones they found in the small wood? It was all the talk in here last night.”

  “We believe they might be. Tell me, did anything happen over and above his abusive nature that might make someone want to murder him?”

  “Well . . .” The landlord pondered. “There was the death of the lad Burgess, so I heard tell. It wasn’t just that, but the attitude he was said to have taken to the incident . . . but I believe that was some years before he disappeared. Best person to talk to about that is the Reverend Price.”

  “Where do we find him?”

  “The next village, where the nearest pub is, Ossley St Mary. His parish covers three villages, this one, Ossley St Mary and Much Haddle on Ouse. His rectory is at Ossley St Mary, large house next to the church.”

  “The church moves you onwards and upwards or it leaves you alone, keeps you in one place. Me it kept in one place.” The Reverend Price sipped his tea. Hennessey saw him as being late middle aged, grey hair cut neat and short. A large poster showing York Minster hung on his study wall; outside his window rooks gathered in the leafless branches of an oak tree cawing loudly. “But yes, I remember Carl Reddick’s disappearance, remember it well. It was one of the first incidents in the parish of any note since my incumbency began. I’ve been a minister of this parish for thirty-three years now . . . and yes, I remember the sad death of young David Burgess. Now that was the first incident of any note since beginning my incumbency. Bad affair that. I met the Burgess family – good people, gentle-natured people, would have liked to have seen them become parishioners – but . . . well . . .”

  “What happened to David Burgess?” Hennessey put his cup of tea down. The tea had been served too cold to drink by the reverend’s wife who was carelessly dressed and who muttered to herself as if suffering from the onset of dementia.

  “He was knocked off his bike by Reddick, who was driving his car while well under the influence.”

  “I see.”

  “Killed outright, poor lad, just fifteen years old . . . his whole life ahead of him. Reddick was fined quite heavily, and banned from driving for life, but he escaped a gaol sentence. Probably fortunate in a way because one of my parishioners is a medical man and he told me that if people have a long term and excessive drink problem, they have to be
weaned off the stuff – a sudden and permanent withdrawal can be fatal – and Reddick, when I knew him, would demolish two bottles of scotch a day and would often make a start on a third. Mind you, I imagine the prisons could have given him medication to prevent death.”

  “They do,” said Hennessey. “Massive doses of vitamins and protein given in the form of injections.”

  “I see.”

  “But what was unacceptable was Reddick’s attitude to the accident. Sitting in the pub in Meltham, ‘The Fortunate Beggar’ – the name apparently refers to a piece of good fortune which befell a beggar in the middle ages – but he would sit in his pub boasting about how he’d got away with killing young Burgess, gloating at his ‘victory’ as he saw it.”

  “Not clever.”

  “Hardly. David Burgess’s parents didn’t ever go to the ‘Beggar’ again, but Meltham is a strange place; in terms of its character, it’s quite different from the other two villages in my parish. In effect, it’s populated by folk who belong to one of three families, with the odd incomer to make up the numbers. And the families seem to like and understand each other. It isn’t a feuding village, by any means. They may not send each other Christmas cards or even say ‘hello’ when they pass in the street, but they know who each other is and they look after each other. So Reddick’s insensitive boasts would have been heard by David Burgess’s relatives, his cousins, his aunts and uncles and also other folk who knew the Burgesses but were not related to them. Reddick’s trial was in January, almost a year after the accident itself, and he disappeared in the summer after the trial. Six months of drunken gloating and boasting . . . if what happened is as I think you may suspect what happened, then I have to say that it says much for the restraint of the people of Meltham.”

  “We’ll reserve our judgement on that one, Reverend Price. A murder is still a murder. Are David Burgess’s parents still alive?”

  “I think his mother is still with us. No longer at home, but in the care of the local authority in York.”

  It was a sudden reminder. On the return drive to York they were overtaken by a motorcyclist who was travelling at speed, angling at 45 degrees as he leaned into the bend which lay ahead of them. As always, Hennessey was then reminded of his elder brother, Graham, who had one such machine and who had driven away on it one evening. Later, his father had woken him up and had told him that Graham had ridden his bike to heaven “to save a place for us”. Hennessey had been eight years old at the time and all his life he’d felt a gap where his elder brother should have been. As a reaction to the loss, he never drove unless he had to and was convinced that the motor vehicle was the most dangerous machine ever invented, whether two wheels or four.

  Later that day, in the mid-evening, after he had exercised Oscar and had left sufficient food and water to see the brown mongrel comfortably through the night, he drove to Skelton with its quaint eleventh-century church and equally ancient yew tree. He parked his car by the kerb in front of an L-shaped half-timbered house. He walked up to the front door and tapped the brass knocker gently, twice, resisting the pause, then a third tap. That would be the policeman’s knock: tap, tap . . . tap. Not appropriate in this case.

  “Sorry I’m a little late,” he said when the door was opened by a smiling woman.

  “No matter.” Louise D’Acre hooked a slender finger round the knot of his tie and gently pulled him over the threshold. “The children are in bed. We can go straight up.”

  Thursday Morning

  “I thought you’d come. I heard about the bones, you see.” Mrs Burgess was frail, slight. “He’d be nearly fifty years old now, my David, had he lived. Possibly a professional. His father wanted him to be a lawyer – he had that sort of mind, you see – David, I mean. He could build a case for this or for that favour, or treat. So, you’ll be wanting to know what happened to Reddick?”

  “Yes.” Hennessey spoke softly. Yellich remained silent.

  “Well, Eddie – that was my husband – said we should move on with our lives and not let the tragedy destroy us, that would give Reddick a second victory . . . but we never went into his pub again.”

  “So I believe. The Reverend Price told us.”

  “Nice man. He buried both my son and my husband.” Mrs Burgess smiled, briefly. “Nice man.” Then she paused. Hennessey thought the heat in the nursing home to be turned up too high to be healthy. “But, you see, that’s sometimes the way of it . . . you are often more angry about an injustice done to a loved one than about an injustice done to yourself.”

  “I have experienced that feeling,” Hennessey said, thinking of his dear wife, who had died suddenly when she was just twenty-three years old.

  “Well, Reddick’s boasts and what he said about my David not being any good anyway . . .”

  “He said that?”

  “So I was told.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Eddie had two brothers, Ernest and Edwin: They never married. They kept pigs on a small holding, just outside Meltham. They, went to the Beggar one morning, just as Reddick was opening up for the day’s trade. They were gentlemen in every sense but they had had enough of Reddick by then, as many folk had. They bundled him into a van and drove him to the small holding. They didn’t mean to kill him. They wanted to sober him up – that was their intention, to keep him off the drink so he’d listen when they gave him a piece of their mind.”

  Hennessey groaned. He knew what was coming.

  “He had food and water and it was warm where they kept him, but one morning they found he’d died. Just went in his sleep, it seemed.”

  “How long was that after they had abducted him?”

  “I think it was about three days.”

  “Do you know how they disposed of the body?”

  “I don’t. But they butchered their own meat. They would have known how to butcher a human body.”

  “Are Ernest and Edwin still alive?”

  “No . . . both gone before now. They kept what they did from Eddie, then Ernest went. Edwin knew he was dying and so he came to see me and told me what they had done. There’s just me left now.”

  He wasn’t angry. Hennessey walked into Easingwold, had a pint of mild at the Dove Inn and walked home. It had all happened thirty years ago, all players, save one, deceased. It was an incident which had happened in a strange, inward looking village once upon a time. And what had happened to Reddick didn’t make him angry, unlawful as it may have been. It was a cloudless sky and he glanced up at the Great Bear and followed the pointers to the North Star. Then he noticed for the first time that one of the seven stars of the Great Bear had begun to flicker. It was dying, and he was witness to the ending of a celestial age.

  THAT’S THE WAY HE DID IT

  Amy Myers

  “Why won’t you play the Maplechurch pitch, omi?” This time Toby Wellaway decided he was going to get an answer out of his father. He had a right – he was as much part of the family Punch and Judy show as his dad, especially since he’d been saddled with the name of the Buffer, the show’s traditional Toby dog. If a pitch was going to be rejected, he wanted to know why.

  Sam Wellaway sighed. “Omi, I’ve been thinking. It’s about time I taught you the squeaker, and handed the show over to you. You’ve bottled for me long enough and I’m sixty now. The jokes don’t come so easy as they used to. Time to step aside, and see the world with her in the kitchen. Your mother could do with a change without old Punch tagging along.”

  He’d be Professor Toby Wellaway! His son grinned in pleasure. Dad step aside? Dad to teach him that most precious of trade secrets, how to master the swazzle in his mouth to produce Punch’s voice? He’d never thought to see the day. “I’ll let you bottle for me any time you like, Dad.”

  “Maybe, but not on the Maplechurch pitch, eh?”

  “Because of what happened? That pop star’s death?”

  “Disappearance,” Sam reminded him.

  “I wasn’t even born then. Sixty-seven, wasn’t i
t? ‘Course, she’s dead. Fay Darling would never have given up singing, nor her partner neither.” Toby pressed his luck. “You were there, omi, tell me about it.”

  Sam reflected. The past was the past, and he was more interested in the present. Old Punch had been his life for over fifty years, man and boy. They’d been good times; they’d used live dogs as the Buffer then, not stuffed ones. That wouldn’t pass unchallenged nowadays, but he still remembered his first Toby. How he’d loved that dog. He’d changed the show to keep up to date, but the heart of it still remained: Joey the clown, the Crocodile, the old Mr Punch, his wife Judy, and sometimes still the hangman. He’d introduced new puppets though, TV characters or other famous figures, kept up with the times by using modern catch phrases, gearing the performance according to the pitch. Like Maplechurch. He’d played that for six successive years at the annual charity fête, when the grounds of the Manor were thrown open. He had become quite chummy with the pop singer Fay Darling, who lived there with her husband Peter Browning, a brute of a man, jealous and greedy. Some said he had reason enough. Fay was one half of the famous duo Darling Dan, and it was rumoured she was madly in love with her partner, Dan Smith, who had moved with his wife into a house directly opposite the Manor, across the Thames which flowed between their two gardens.

  “Tell me what happened, omi,” Toby pressed him. “There’s no reason I can’t play the Maplechurch pitch, is there, even if you don’t want to?”

  Sam deliberated, then made up his mind. “Mozzy,” he called to his wife. Punch language came naturally to him, about to retire or not. “What did you do with the Darling Dan puppets?”

  Ada Wellaway placidly strolled in from the kitchen, holding a potato in one hand and a peeler in the other. “Up in the attic where they belong, love, having a barney with all your other has-beens. And if you want them you can get ’em yourself,” she added amiably. “Ada may mean the happy one, but don’t push it, mate.”