Dead Man Riding (32 page)

‘Want some?' said Meredith, starting to walk towards him.

‘We can't just go up and ask.'

‘Why not?'

I hung back and let him do the talking. I didn't hear what he said but the man laughed and Meredith laughed too and beckoned to me. By the time I got there the man had disappeared inside his hut.

‘He says we're welcome but he's got no cups and saucers for a lady.'

‘I'd drink it out of a bucket if necessary. What were you laughing at?'

‘He asked if we were waiting to be ferried over the Solway. He thought we might be eloping to Gretna Green.'

For a mad moment I looked out to sea and wished we were.

‘Like the ballad,' I said.
‘A chieftain to the Highlands bound cries “Boatman, do not tarry!”'

‘Don't know that one.'

‘It doesn't end happily.
“The waters wild went o'er his child and he was left lamenting.”'

The man came out of the hut grinning, a steaming mug in each hand. The tea was as dark as teak and tasted of tar and fish but I drank half the mugful in a few unladylike gulps. Meredith had moved over to the bucket.

‘Good catch?'

‘Good enough, sir.'

I looked and saw a forest of open claws sticking out of the bubbling water. The man was boiling crabs.

‘About done they are, sir. Would you and the lady like one?'

Meredith said yes please, so the man speared a specimen the size of a dinner plate out of the bucket and cracked open body and claws with a few deft hammer blows. Meredith and I sat on the slipway outside the hut and shared the sweet warm meat with the man's black and white cat winding itself in and out between us, cadging scraps. By the time we'd finished there were a few more people walking by the harbour, a church bell was ringing a monotonous summoning note and there was a feeling of the town waking up. Meredith felt in his pocket and passed the man some coins while I fed the last of the crab to the cat.

‘Do you happen to know where Mr Morrisey lives?'

‘Joshua Morrisey? Along there in King Street, sir. But you wouldn't want to call on him this time of a Sunday morning.'

‘Wouldn't we?'

Flat out drunk, I wondered. It was clear from the way the man was looking at us that Joshua Morrisey had a local reputation.

‘No sir. He'll be getting ready for chapel.'

Meredith raised his eyebrows and I tried not to laugh. So he was probably a hypocrite too, our Mr Morrisey.

‘The methodist chapel, that is. Service starts ten o'clock. If you go there, you can't miss Joshua Morrisey.'

So we walked around the harbour and along the seafront and just before ten o'clock found our way to the methodist chapel. The entrance to it was crowded with men, women and children in their Sunday best. I went up to a friendly looking woman and asked if she could kindly point out Mr Morrisey. She gave me an odd look. ‘He'll be inside already.' So there was nothing for it but to go in and find a space at the end of a pew near the back. I was conscious that we were getting some stares from the congregation, probably because our dress wasn't up to standard. At least I was wearing a hat but we were both gloveless and our boots and hiking tweeds made us look like country bumpkins.

It was some time since I'd been inside a church and I resigned myself to a long dull service but was pleasantly surprised. The congregation sang the hymns tunefully and with an enthusiasm that seemed fit to blast them through the chapel walls and out to sea. The sermon – on the parable of the workers in the vineyard – was given by a lay preacher with a round suntanned face. He spoke with a Cumberland accent and with unusual sense and practicality about men's and women's work in the world. Still, I have to admit my attention wandered because I was looking round the congregation, as unobtrusively as I could, trying to spot a likely candidate for Mr Morrisey. The favourite was a wizened-looking man in his forties or fifties with sparse grey hair sitting at the end of a pew two rows in front of us. He was on his own, fidgeted a lot and had a shifty air. A plump man sitting near the door with a boil on the back of his neck and his collar coming loose from its stud was another possibility.

The sermon ended, we knelt for prayers, stood for a final rousing hymn, and then everybody started filing slowly out into the sunlight. I worried that Mr Morrisey might have escaped by the time we got out and tried to keep the wizened man in sight. On the street outside the preacher was surrounded by people who wanted to talk to him. There was a plump smiling woman with three children standing beside him. I touched the arm of a woman at the back of the group.

‘Excuse me, I wonder if you could point out Mr Joshua Morrisey.'

She stared at me as if I were crazy. ‘That's Mr Morrisey.'

She was indicating with her head not the wizened man or the man with the boil but the lay preacher.

‘Mr Morrisey, skipper of the
Eastern Light?'

‘That's his boat, yes.'

Most of the hope went out of me then. Still, we pressed on. Meredith and I waited until most of the group round the preacher had melted away, then went up and introduced ourselves to him.

‘I think you know an acquaintance of mine,' I said. ‘Arthur Mawbray.'

A look of concern came over his face. ‘Young Arthur, yes. I hope there's nothing wrong with him.'

‘No. But did he happen to come and see you last night?'

He was honestly puzzled. Much though I'd have liked to interpret his expression in any other way, there was no getting away from it.

‘No, but I wasn't expecting him. He knows we never take the boat out on a Saturday night.'

‘Do you happen to remember if he was out with you on Thursday the week before last?'

He pushed his glasses up on his forehead. ‘I'm nearly sure he was, but may I ask why you want to know?'

‘Something happened that night, near where his father lives. Arthur Mawbray says it was nothing to do with him because he was out fishing with you.'

‘I don't want to seem at all rude, but may I ask why you're concerned with it?'

‘The thing that happened involved a friend of mine.'

‘And it's a case of give a dog a bad name, I suppose. I'm not blaming you and I know there's a wild side to young Mawbray, but I can only speak as I find. He works hard on the boat, he's never been anything other than polite and honest with me and the other fishermen like him.'

I thought it was just as well that gossip about young Mawbray and Dulcie hadn't travelled as far as the coast.

‘And you're almost sure he was out with you that night?'

‘If you'd care to walk home with us, we can make quite sure. We live just along the street here.'

We fell into a procession, Joshua Morrisey and his wife first, then Meredith and me, then the children. Our progress was slow because we kept meeting people who wanted to talk to the preacher but at last we got as far as the front parlour of his little house. It was a neat and comfortable room, with a potted fern on a bamboo table, shelves of books with the emphasis on travel and missionaries, two chintz armchairs facing an empty fireplace with a pink paper fan in it. There were framed religious texts on the walls but at least they were of the more cheerful kind. He invited us to sit down and his wife brought in tea and home-made biscuits.

‘Now, if you'll excuse me for a moment, I'll fetch something that will answer your question.'

When we were left alone Meredith grinned at me and said, ‘Not what we expected.'

At least he said ‘we', not triumphing that I was wrong. I was grateful to him as well for leaving the questioning to me. Joshua Morrisey came back into the room with a long black-covered book under his arm.

‘The
Eastern Light
's log and account book. I write it up every time we're out.'

He moved the fern aside and opened it on the bamboo table. We stood, looking over his shoulder. ‘That's the night you're interested in, isn't it? You can see Arthur Mawbray was there. We went out on the night tide and came back in the next morning. There's the weight of fish we caught in that column, total value of the catch and Arthur's share of it. Does that answer your question?'

I said it did and thanked him. We finished our tea, thanked him again and he shook hands with us on the front step.

‘Please give my regards to Arthur if you see him. There's a lot of good in that young man.'

Meredith and I walked slowly down the street to the station.

‘Do we ask ourselves if he's a good or bad liar, Nell?'

‘He's not a liar at all. You're as sure of that as I am. Would a man with family, prosperity and public respect risk it all through telling lies for a young man like Mawbray?'

‘Some people might, but Mr Morrisey didn't strike me as one of them.'

The heavy feeling that had come over me when I realised who Mr Morrisey was had spread to everything, draining the colour out of the sky. He sensed it.

‘I'm sorry you were wrong, Nell. It seemed a reasonable theory.'

I felt sorry too, but it was something worse than hurt pride.

*   *   *

There were other people in our train compartment going back so we didn't have a chance to talk until we were walking uphill from our local station to Studholme Hall. There was a smell of grass baking in the heat and a thundery feel to the air. By then I'd done a lot of thinking.

‘Dulcie could still have done it, even if young Mawbray wasn't there to help her.'

From the look on his face, he felt as weary of it all as I did. His voice was tired too.

‘On her own?'

‘No, she'd have needed help. She might have persuaded Robin, especially if she knew about his hundred pounds in the will and had told him.'

‘You really believe that?'

‘No, I don't. I think he respected the Old Man too much, loved him even. I could imagine Robin helping him commit suicide if that was what he wanted, but not help kill him.'

‘Imagining is not proof. Still, I agree with you for what that's worth.'

‘When I guessed about her and Mawbray, it seemed such a neat motive – killing the Old Man before he found out the child wasn't his. But it's quite the reverse. They needed him to be alive when it was born.'

‘This business of acknowledging it?'

‘Yes. They'd managed to convince themselves that once he'd taken it in his arms, he'd accepted it as his. The odd thing is, I don't think they were far wrong. When the child was born I think he would have acknowledged it – if only to annoy the gossips in town. After all, he had a great admiration for … for fertility.' (I felt myself blushing but pressed on.) ‘And he'd like to think of himself as a father, at his age.'

I had a mental picture of them going in procession through the town, Dulcie pushing a perambulator, the Old Man riding in front of her on Sid, then Robin with all the mares in tow. I laughed and so did he, though neither of us very heartily.

‘You're right about the admiration for fertility. It was the core of him.' It occurred to me then that practically all Meredith had been doing on our walk so far was to echo what I was saying and agree. This was so uncharacteristic that it scared me.

‘You haven't told me yet how stupid I've been.'

‘That's the last thing I'm thinking.'

‘I have been though. I was so determined it should be Arthur Mawbray I practically conjured him up from nothing.' From a few fish scales on a cuff, a glimpse of pale hair in the dark. ‘Then when I did conjure him up, he wouldn't oblige me by being a murderer.'

‘What about his father?'

‘That won't work either, will it? The main motive for killing the Old Man would have been avenging his son. I think Major Mawbray had at least a suspicion all along that the prodigal was still alive. That was why he didn't press the police to arrest the Old Man.'

We were near the turning that led to Major Mawbray's house. In half an hour or so we'd be back with the others. Goodness knows what they'd make of our crack-of-dawn departure together but I was past caring about that now.

‘So,' he said, ‘where does that leave us?'

‘With a resumed inquest in less than forty-eight hours' time and Nathan living as an outlaw on the fells.'

‘Um, Nathan.'

‘Midge is quite convinced that he's taken himself out of the way because he knows something that would convict Dulcie. She thinks he'll come back once there's a verdict of suicide.'

‘You didn't tell her your theory about the practical joke that went wrong?'

‘No, I couldn't. I'm pretty sure she's in love with him.'

‘Another one!' His sigh was exasperated, almost explosive. I couldn't take it as a compliment.

‘Yes, another poor fool. And it is only another theory, after all. You remember how we discussed it when we were walking up to the waterfall?'

He nodded. It was difficult to think about the waterfall and everything that happened there and keep my voice level, but I tried hard. I remembered what he'd said in the train on our journey from Oxford about love being an illness, a madness.

‘I should have asked you a question then, shouldn't I? After all, the four of you slept in the same barn. Nathan would have had to be gone quite a long time.'

‘And your question?'

‘You know very well. Was Nathan away for long enough to have tied the Old Man on the horse?'

‘To the best of my knowledge, no.' But it had taken him some time to answer, several steps.

‘Why was that so difficult?'

‘We were all waking and sleeping. We'd go out at various times to … answer calls of nature.'

‘Alan went out for longer than that, didn't he? To meet Imogen.'

That was hardly a secret after all. He nodded.