Dying in the Wool (44 page)

Stoddard beamed at me. He switched on the electric lights.

I turned to thank the caretaker, but he was gone.

‘Here we are,’ Stoddard called. ‘An ideal opportunity. Told you I dabbled in photography myself at one time. What do you think to this?’

‘You’re taking photographs?’

‘Not I, my dear. This arrangement is for you. I hope my camera will suit.’

‘For me?’

‘Didn’t you say something last time you were here about the All British Photographic Competition, and that you didn’t imagine many entries would feature a mill? Well, I’m sure you’re right, and here’s your chance. “Mill at rest” you can call it. What do you make of the camera?’

It was was a Noiram reflex quarter plate. ‘Yes, I have used one of these.’

‘Good. Then you’ll be familiar with it.’

‘Yes. But, Mr Stoddard, I’m here for another reason. I’m not sure that either of us will want to be taking photographs when you hear what I have to say.’

‘You see we’ve a carton of yarn packages ready to hoist up. I told the men to leave it. Watch this – it’ll make a good picture – from an unusual angle, too.’

‘Mr Stoddard …’

His attention was on winching up the box from the ground. The chain clanked. The carton swayed for a moment. He nodded to me to capture the image. It would be simplest to do as he expected. I looked through the lens and caught the swaying great square parcel of yarns. He held it still, steadying the winch.

‘So that was an extra image you didn’t expect,’ Stoddard announced. ‘Now for the looms.’ He turned round the camera plate. ‘Oops! Shouldn’t have done that. You’ll need to enter it into the competition as all your own work and now you’ve had an assistant.’

Though the looms were silent, they still held the yarns and cloth that would be continued by the weavers in the morning. It gave them an odd look, still and peaceful. In spite of everything, I yearned to take that photograph. I moved the camera further up the room so as to see a line of looms. Doing so also put off the moment when I had to tell him why I had come. He was watching me take the photograph and had produced another camera, a fixed focus Brownie.

‘Your Brownie won’t give you a good indoor picture,’ I said.

‘Perhaps not. All the same, I would like a photograph of you. Stand by the door opening, where we brought the yarn through. Then you’ll have the light of the open door behind you.’

‘Very well.’

I walked slowly back up the room. ‘Mr Stoddard, I appreciate that you’ve taken this trouble for me, but I’ve
really come to say that Evelyn and Tabitha would like you to go over there as soon as you can.’

There. I’d said it. Let’s hope we could now stop this and I could go home for the weekend and leave the family to come to terms with the news of Joshua Braithwaite’s death.

He looked at me blankly.

‘Tabitha specially asked for you,’ I said. ‘I was talking to her by the bridge.’

‘And did she ask you to search my garage and my house?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw you go into the garage.’

‘I was just looking at your car.’

‘And Mrs Laycock tells me you went upstairs, into Catherine’s room.’

‘I thought there might be something for a headache.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why were you searching?’

‘I wasn’t searching. I’m curious.’

‘Yes. I’d noticed.’

‘Perhaps we should go to your office. We could talk there.’

Once we got out of here and onto the stairs, we would see the caretaker. I’d be able to leave without any further to-ing and fro-ing. He was beginning to make me feel uncomfortable.

‘Yes,’ he said, as if answering a question. ‘I’d like a photograph of you – framed just there in the doorway.’

He took my arm, so gently I thought for a moment he wanted to kiss me. He held me by the shoulders and looked down at me.

‘We liked each other I think.’

‘Yes.’

‘When you came here, trying to help Tabitha, you
impressed me. A beautiful woman, intelligent, honourable – out to seek the truth. But you went too far. All the same, I’d like your photograph. Will you stand in that doorway please?’

He encircled me with one arm so that I couldn’t move. I thought it best to stay calm, keep talking, bide my time.

‘I know it might not come out terribly well, not like yours. But there’s always time to take a photograph, if that’s your passion. That’s what it’s all about these days. Follow your passion. Never mind honour, duty, hard work, marriage vows. I know why you’re here. It was you went to see that woman, brought her to the funeral with Joshua’s bastard, breaking Evelyn’s heart all over again.’

‘Her heart was never broken. She threw herself at Dr Grainger the moment she saw him.’

His grip on me loosened. ‘That’s a monstrous lie. Evelyn is incapable of any deception or foulness.’

I backed away from him. ‘It was you, wasn’t it? You fought Joshua Braithwaite when he tried to leave that Saturday.’

‘I tried to knock some sense into him.’

‘And did trying to knock sense into him come easier after you’d doped him, like you did Kellett?’

‘No one will ever connect me to Kellett’s death. It’s absurd. Wilson will be hung for the sheep and the lamb.’

I was walking slowly, talking to him, walking backwards towards the door, ready to turn and run.

‘You pushed him in your sidecar after you’d beaten him up. You tried to take him home but he got out and ran for the beck. That’s why he was confused, not making sense when he was found. Because he was drugged and overpowered, but he still managed to get away from you.’

He started to laugh. ‘I wouldn’t have doped Joshua. Didn’t need to. The fool doped himself because of his toothache. He wouldn’t fight back, wouldn’t fight me. Just ran. Like a coward. Running away from his responsibilities.’

‘Or running towards them, towards Agnes and the child.’

I turned to run for the door. A sudden furious crash and bang of machinery startled me. He had flicked the looms into life. For a moment, I didn’t know where the noise came from. He was behind me, dragging me back towards the loading door in the wall, with its four-floor drop to the ground below.

In the noise I could barely hear what he said. This time he held me securely. I screamed, but no sound could be heard above the din of the machinery. Then his hand was over my mouth and with his other hand he quickly switched off the looms, but without my being able to break free.

I dug in my heels but he had me in an iron grasp, like a clamp around my arms and chest. I tried kicking and caught his shin. His grip tightened.

‘Your sympathies are in the wrong place, Mrs Shackleton. Kellett was the worst kind of blackmailer. Got his wife to do it for him. It’s cost me a guinea a week for years.’

I bit his hand.

He twisted my arm. ‘I hate hurting a woman, especially a good-looking one, but you’re going to die as you step back to get a perfect photograph of mill machinery. I will be so distraught, and your fingerprint will be on the camera trigger.’

I tried to fix myself to the ground, and to kick out, but one movement outdid the other. He was too strong. We edged back towards the loading door. ‘Trace all this evil back to Braithwaite. He corrupted. He called himself a teetotaller, but he supped with the devil.’

Teetering on the edge, swaying back and forth in a monstrous embrace, I could feel the icy cold on my back. For an absurd moment, I wondered would there be more snow.

‘It could have been different, Kate, so different. Of course there never could have been anything between you and me. We’re from different worlds. But even this death, you could have stood in the doorway and I could have said,
Step back, step back,
and taken your picture and one step back and you would have known nothing, except the fall
.
And I would have had a photograph to cherish forever.’

In a rush of air I was falling. I had expected him to go on talking and for my life not to end. In the seconds before I was pushed, a dog barked, and the sound of footsteps echoed in my imagination.

I grabbed the beam that jutted from the wall. Next to me the chain pulley swung back and forth in a thump thump rhythm, hitting me on the side of my body as I hung there, feeling my tendons would break, not able to get a proper purchase on the rough wooden beam that tore at my hands each time I tried to take a stronger hold.

Stoddard was leaning down, cursing me now, prising my fingers, trying to make me lose my grip. I didn’t look up or down, just hung on for dear life, not knowing whether a scream or a cry found its way from my dry throat. My fingers ached to be free of the beam, and then they stopped hurting.

That pain changed shape. Stoddard had stopped prising my fingers.

Charlie leaned out where Stoddard had been. He barked, just once, then backed away. I heard a cry – the cry of a man being mauled by a dog.

Sykes leaned down towards me. ‘If I stretch out my arm, can you take hold?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Hold on!’ The second voice was Constable Mitchell’s.

My arms stopped aching as I willed myself not to think of them, only hang on. Hang on.

Sykes reached down. I grabbed his hand.

‘Come on, Katie lass, you can do it.’

As he pulled me up, I was able to push myself with the other hand by the beam. Then my head was level with the floor and somehow I was dragged inside. Sykes was saying something, his arm round my shoulder.

Stoddard, handcuffed, lay by the silent looms, the dog standing over him, looking at his throat with great interest.

‘Hey up, lad.’ Mitchell spoke to the dog with an uncertain tone that set Charlie growling.

‘Charlie!’ I called him and he came to me, a great long stream of saliva dripping from the side of his mouth. ‘Good dog, Charlie.’ He had probably saved my life.

When the dog left Stoddard’s side, Mitchell pulled Stoddard to his feet.

‘Let’s be having you, sir.’

I averted my eyes as Mitchell escorted Stoddard from the end loom towards the door. Suddenly, he pulled from Mitchell’s grasp, propelling himself towards me with a snarl. ‘Stupid girl! I was trying to save her, Mitchell!’

As he lunged at me, trying once again to push me to my death, I stepped aside and stuck out my foot. It was a reflex action, like some child in a playground who seizes the moment when her bullying enemy comes skipping by. Charlie made a grab for the seat of Stoddard’s pants, and in that moment he fell, through the loading door that he had meant to be my last exit from the world.

With a strangled cry, he dropped. I heard him crunch on the ground below.

Broken ends are removed. Knots are pulled through to the back of the fabric and any missing threads sewn in.

Why? That question woke me in the night. The thought of Stoddard’s almost jovial attempt to murder me felt like something from a nightmare. Tiny details loomed into view – a smile, a gesture, the sound of his drawn breath.

Stoddard did not die. He lay on the ground, writhing in agony. With that awful clarity that comes when you think your mind must have stopped working, I remembered. ‘There’s morphia in the washstand in his wife’s room.’ I turned to Constable Mitchell. ‘It’s what he used to drug Kellett’s snack. For pity’s sake, give Stoddard some now.’

It was a long way for the ambulance and police car to come from Keighley to collect Stoddard and take him into custody.

Sykes insisted on driving me home, steadily keeping to ten miles an hour, watching the road ahead with a fixed stare as if he thought it would make some sudden and unexpected demand.

Once home, he asked for tweezers and painstakingly removed splinters from my hands. Each splinter he placed carefully onto a white linen serviette and tied with a ribbon, as evidence.

After the desplintering, Mrs Sugden drew a bath for me. I lay there as the water grew tepid.

Why? Stoddard had said himself that no one would link him to Kellett’s death. I could have proved nothing.

It was over. With Joshua Braithwaite now known to have died in the Low Moor explosion, my task was complete. So why did Stoddard try to kill me? My eyes pricked with tears at the injustice. What had I ever done but try to find the truth? Self-pity sent me to sleep. I woke knowing there was something I’d missed, but what?

During the night I woke every hour from confused dreams, falling dreams, murderous dreams. Gregory Grainger would say write them down, analyse them. It did not take a razor sharp analysis to make something – or nothing – of dreams that replayed fear. Braithwaite appeared, scraps of ragged hospital blue uniform stuck to charred flesh. A bruised and battered spectre, Braithwaite shook his head. His skull grinned, blood dripping from his gums in place of the missing tooth.

Mrs Sugden stood over me with a tray of tea, a boiled egg and bread soldiers.

‘Best not stir today.’ She set down the tray.