Nocturnes

“Well?”

“There were only two sets of footprints: Mal Trevors’s and Fred Paxton’s. I tried to keep people away from the body, once I’d seen what had been done to it, so there wasn’t as much disturbance as you might think.”

“Perhaps he was attacked on the road,” said Stokes, “then attempted to escape across the fields and died on the fence when he could go no further.”

“Don’t think so,” said Waters. “There was no blood in the field between the road and the fence. I checked.”

Burke knelt and examined the ground at the base of the post. There was still a great deal of dried blood visible upon the blades of grass. If what Waters said was true, and even Burke was forced grudgingly to acknowledge a certain level of competence on the part of the village copper, then Waters had been attacked on this spot and had died here.

“Something must have been missed,” he said at last. “No disrespect to you, Constable, but whoever killed Trevors didn’t materialize out of thin air. We’ll go over the ground on either side of the fence, inch by inch. There has to be some trail.”

Waters nodded his assent, and the three men spread out from the death post, Burke moving toward the cemetery, Stokes toward the road, and Waters in the direction of a cottage some way distant, which was, he informed the detectives, the home of the Paxtons. The policemen searched for an hour, until the cold had burrowed into their hands and feet, yet found nothing. It seemed that Mal Trevors had been attacked, quite literally, from out of nowhere.

Burke finished his examination of the ground and sat upon the low cemetery wall, watching his fellow policemen as they moved across the field, Stokes bent over slightly, his hands in his pockets, Waters less careful, but still doing his best. In his heart, Burke knew that it was a futile yet necessary effort. To have made a proper search would have required more men, and men were scarce, but even then he remained unconvinced that anything would be found. Still, it made no sense to him that a big man like Trevors could be savagely murdered with no sign of a struggle.

He took a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped it over his face. He was sweating profusely, and starting to feel a little ill. It’s this place, he thought: it saps one’s energy. He recalled Dr. Allinson walking down the main street, virtually propped against his wife, and the earlier lassitude of Constable Waters, which seemed to have been arrested somewhat by the arrival of new blood in the form of the two London policemen. Underbury was a village emptied of its most virile men, all of whom were now fighting in foreign fields. Those that remained must have been aware of their status as flawed bodies, unsuited for combat or sacrifice, and that awareness hung like a miasma over their lives. Now Burke was feeling it too. If he stayed here too long, perhaps he also would end up like Allinson, exhausted after a few hours labor, for the doctor told him that he had retired to bed shortly after one in the morning. He had therefore rested for some six hours, but at breakfast Burke would have sworn that the man had not enjoyed proper sleep in many months.

Burke slipped down from his perch and went to rejoin his colleagues. As he did so, his foot struck stone. He stepped back, then knelt down and brushed the tips of his fingers along the ground. There was a slab there, almost entirely covered by long grass and weeds. The vegetation came away easily as Burke pulled at it, for some of it had merely fallen across the stone, or had been placed there to conceal it. There was no inscription upon it, but Burke knew its purpose. This was an old community, and he did not doubt that in times past the bodies of suicides, of unbaptized children, and of gallows fodder had been interred outside the walls of the cemetery. It was common practice, although it was rare to see a marker of any kind upon such graves.

Now, as he looked at the ground from this low angle, he could see two other similar raised slabs nearby. When he examined them, he discovered that the stone on one had been broken recently. Someone had taken a hammer and chisel to it, fragmenting the rock into a number of pieces and leaving a hole as big as Burke’s fist at the center. Burke leaned forward and slipped two fingers into the gap, expecting to touch earth below. Instead, there was only emptiness. He tried a similar experiment using his pen tied to a piece of thread from his coat, and again felt the instrument dangle in the space beneath the stone.

Curious, he thought.

He stood and saw Stokes and Waters watching him from the road. There was nothing more to be learned by the cemetery wall, so he joined them and made no argument when Waters suggested that now might be the time to talk to the Paxtons, and perhaps take some tea for their trouble.

“What kind of man was Trevors?” Burke asked Waters, as they made their way along the road.

The constable made a noise somewhere between a cough and a sigh.

“I didn’t care much for him myself,” he said. “He served time in a prison up north for assault, then came back down here when he was released and lived with his father until the old man died. After that, it was just him alone on that farm.”

“And the mother?”

“Died when Mal was a boy. Her husband used to beat her, but she never made a complaint. Constable Stewart, my predecessor, he tried talking to her, and to her husband, but nothing ever came of it. I reckon Mal picked up some of his old man’s bad habits, because he was jailed for beating up a, well, you’ll forgive me, sir, but a prostitute in Manchester. Near killed her, from what I hear. When he came back here, he took up with a woman named Elsie Warden, but she soon gave him a wide berth when he fell back into his old ways with her. There was an incident about a week ago, when he came to her house in the night and demanded to speak to her, but her father and younger brothers sent him on his way. They’d already given him a taste of his own medicine once, and he didn’t fancy another spoonful.”

Burke and Stokes exchanged a look.

“Could the Wardens be suspects?”

“They were all in the bar when Trevors left, and they were still there when Fred Paxton came back there with news of what he’d found. They never left. Even Elsie was with them. They’re in the clear, as far as this is concerned.”

Waters reached into his pocket, withdrew a folded sheet of paper, and handed it to Burke.

“Thought you might want this. It’s a list of all the people who were in the bar that night. A star marks the ones who were there from the time Trevors left until the time the Paxtons returned.”

Burke took the list and read it. One name caught his eye.

“Mrs. Allinson was there that night?”

“And her husband. Saturday night’s the big night in the village. Most people find their way to the i

Emily Allinson’s name was one of those marked with a star.

“And she never left,” he said, so quietly that nobody heard him utter the words.

The Paxtons, a young couple with no children, were both relative newcomers to the area. Fred was born about twenty miles west of Underbury, and after a period of city living decided that it was time to return to the countryside with his wife. The land at Underbury had cost them comparatively little, and they were now raising cattle and hoping for a good crop of vegetables to sell in the coming year. They fed the detectives bread and cheese, and brewed up a pot of tea large enough to sate a field of laborers.

“I remember I was walking along, my mind on getting home, and I just happened to look to my right,” said Fred Paxton. His left eye was yellowy white, with tendrils of red crisscrossing upon it. It brought back to Burke an image from his childhood: a visit to his uncle’s farm on the outskirts of the city, where his father had drunk milk fresh from the cow and the boy had seen blood in the creamy liquid.