Rattle His Bones (22 page)

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Authors: Carola Dunn

BOOK: Rattle His Bones
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Passing the Pareiasaurus in its ghostly white shroud, Daisy once again entered the dinosaur gallery. The Diplodocus loomed creepily, its tail scarcely visible in the shadows eighty-five feet away. She wished she knew where the light switch was.
The tick-tock of her footsteps was the only, eerie sound. Then, from close behind her, came a creaking
cr-r-rack.
She started to turn.
The blow caught her on the side of the head. In an explosion of pain, she had time for one astonished thought:
Attacked by a dinosaur?
before she sank into darkness.
B
eneath a wide mackerel sky, Dartmoor was pink with heather, spotted here and there with the gold of late-blooming gorse, the emerald of bog grass. On either side of the narrow, hedgeless road, hillsides rolled up to the tors. It was not difficult to imagine long-gone giants heaping up those great piles of granite for purposes unknown and unknowable.
Tring was driving. He had to slow to a near stop now and then while sheep made up their tiny minds whether to vacate the roadway in favour of the noisy intruder. The wild ponies had no doubts. They scattered at the Austin's approach.
Declining in the west, the sun painted the striated clouds in tones of rose and primrose. It could do nothing to brighten the grimness of His Majesty's Prison at Princetown, a stark contrast to the smiling face of nature.
“Poor devils,” Alec observed.
“We put some of 'em there, Chief,” Tom protested, “and not without good reason. Better than the long jump.”
“I'm not so certain of that. Death can be a merciful release. Hanging is more of an offence against society than against the wretches we hang.”
Tom, who didn't consider hanging an offence against anything or anyone, maintained a stubborn silence.
“We teach by example that violence is an acceptable solution. It fails as a deterrent, because most murders are committed in a moment of unthinking passion or panic. Take the present case. Pettigrew, who was a large and intimidating man, made what was taken as a verbal threat, and very likely waved the flint weapon in a threatening manner. The murderer seized it from him. He probably lunged forward to grab it back.”
“And hey presto! He's dead,” said Tom. “But that's guessing, Chief, and any road, if you're right, Pettigrew's words were taken as a threat because our man had already committed a felony.”
Alec sighed.
In the warm twilight, they drove down off the moor into the little town of Tavistock. A Saturday evening queue was moving into the picture palace, and the sound of voices floated through the open doors of pubs. With a longing glance at the nearest of these, Tom stopped the Austin outside the police station.
The sergeant on duty was expecting them. “We've found him for you, zir,” he reported in a slow, soft West Country voice. “Waren't as easy as you might think, coming from the city. There's a Westcott village, zame name as your man, up north t'ard the Lyd valley, near Coryton, and a Rushbrook Farm not far off. We did think as that might be the one.”
“I take it, it wasn't,” said Alec patiently.
“Nay, zir, and we found four more. Rushbrook, zee, isn't an uncommon name for a farm in these parts, as could be from a hillside stream rushing down, or could be a meadowland stream wi' rushes growing.”
“And which is the one we want, Sergeant?”
“Oh, 'tis Jack Trevinnick's place, over towards Zydenham Damerel, down by the Tamar. Good, fertile zoil, and the rushes to harvest for baskets and the like. You've mayhap heard of our pannier market, here in Tavistock?”
Alec admitted he had not, nor of the October Goose Fair, though he vaguely recalled that Tavistock was Sir Francis Drake's birthplace. With weary courtesy he cut short the sergeant's discourse on the town's history as a mining centre since it became a stannary town in 1309.
“How do we get to Sydenham Damerel?” he enquired.
Tom wrote down the directions. Alec asked the local man to book them a couple of rooms for the night. Then he took the wheel, and they wound about the country lanes for six or seven miles, passing through several tiny hamlets. Sydenham Damerel was large enough to boast its own constable. Calling at his house for further directions to Rushbrook Farm, they learnt that ex-Constable Westcott had dropped in to introduce himself on arrival in Devon.
“And a good job too,” said Tom as they set out on the last leg of their journey, “or it might've taken 'em a week to ferret him out for us.”
It was all but dark when they pulled up in a cow-smelling farmyard, to be greeted by a volley of barks. On the doorstep of the whitewashed granite house, a plump woman appeared, silhouetted against the light within.
Hushing the two black and white dogs, she invited the policemen into a large, low-ceilinged kitchen, where hams and onions hung from the beams. An elaborately plaited corn-dolly, still green, was nailed up over the vast fireplace, and a kettle steamed on the hob.
“Fred's down the byre with my Jack and our Jed,” said Mrs. Trevinnick, waving them to a wooden settle by the fire,
and bustling about with teapot, kettle, and caddy. “They'll be up pretty quick now ‘tis dark. Fred'll be right glad to zee you. He do miss his p'lice friends, but I can tell you, it's done him a world o' good to retire and get away from the city.”
Alec made a noncommittal noise. Tom's eyes were fixed on the big white-wood table, where an enormous cake had joined teapot, best cups and saucers, jug of milk, and basin of sugar. They had stopped
very
briefly for lunch on the way.
“Well, stands to reason, doesn't it?” Mrs. Trevinnick chattered on. “'Tis not healthy living in a big town like that, all smoke and fog. And him on the beat all these years. Not that my Jack don't walk plenty, but country walking's not like pavements, is it? And even when they put Fred in that museum place, there was stairs up and stairs down and stairs all around. His knees hurt him zomething dreadful when he come, but they're a-getting better, bit by bit.”
“I'm glad to hear it,” said Alec truthfully, well aware that the lot of a lifelong beat copper was not easy.
“And his eyes! You wouldn't think of it, maybe, but I reckon ‘tis that 'lectric light doesn't do them any good. 'Tis not natural.” She glanced up at the pair of brightly polished brass lanterns, casting a gentle glow from their hooks on the central beam. “Give me paraffin any day, zays I to Jack, when he asks do I want the gas put in.”
She supplied them with tea and apple cake, Tom's huge wedge reflecting her view of the appetite appropriate to his size. The men came in shortly. Fred Westcott, a thickset, grizzled old fellow, was not noticeably pleased to see his fellow police officers.
“We're hoping you can help us, Mr. Westcott,” said Alec as the men exchanged mucky boots for carpet slippers and washed their hands. “If you would just think back to the beginning of July …”
“We'll go in the parlour, Betty,” Westcott interrupted grumpily, picking up a hand-lantern the men had brought in with them. “This way, sir, if you don't mind.”
Alec and Tom followed him to a small, bleak, excessively tidy room with cross-stitch samplers on the walls. The furniture was early Victorian, faded but otherwise like new. The vicar was probably the only person ever entertained there.
Tom took out his notebook as he and Alec sat down. Westcott stood before them, his hands clasped behind his back.
“I weren't asleep, sir,” he declared. “Jest resting me pins a minute. The knees ain't what they was, see, and me eyes gets that tired.”
“No one is accusing you of anything, man. You're not in the force any more. Sit down, for heaven's sake—or your knees' sake if you prefer—and tell me
when
you weren't asleep.”
“Thirteenth o' July, when he come down the stairs. Leastways, that's what I reckoned, then, or from Lower Mammals. By the Nesting Birds, I were, see, the wrong side for Minerlology.”
“
Who
came?” Alec demanded.
But Westcott had to tell his story his own way. “Never thought nothing of it, I didn't, not till it was in the papers how someone stole them jools. See, they knows in the village as I used to work in the museum, so when I went in with Betty Saturday to do her bit shopping, summun showed it me. And I started to wonder. I were on days for a couple of months before, see, so I knowed 'em all. What I arst myself was, what did a fossil man want with mammals, high or low, or botinny, come to that, at that time of night?”
“Good question. Which fossil man?”
“Or any time, come to that. It wasn't like he was fossil mammals, nor yet fossil plants, poor blighter.”
Witt exonerated? Alec wasn't sure whether the “poor blighter” was the thief, or merely old Dr. Bentworth.
Westcott enlightened him, on that question at least: “Still, we all come to that, lessn we're in the grave. Which is where they ought to leave them monsters, if you arst me. Stands to reason it'll turn a man's mind, messing about with them dinysores.”
“Steadman!” breathed Tom.
“Dinosaurs?” Alec said sharply. “It was the dinosaur curator you saw wandering about on the first floor, late at night, on July thirteenth?”
“Aye, sir. I didn't see his face plain, mind, but he's the only one tall and skinny like that, see, and I knowed his voice, too. It were Mr. Steadman all right. I'd swear to it.”
“You may have to. Please describe exactly what you did, where you were, what was said if anything.”
Fortunately, once it was a matter of making a straightforward report, Westcott recalled his police training. Worry over his minor dereliction of duty had obviously impressed the incident on his memory, as well as stopping him wondering at the time what Steadman had been doing. The report was soon done.
Alec stood up. “We'll get a statement typed up tonight and bring it out for you to sign tomorrow. Thank you, Mr. Westcott. Allow me to wish you a happy retirement.”
Mrs. Trevinnick, impressed by the speed with which Tom had devoured his piece of cake, and convinced that wholesome food was unobtainable in London, had packed a basket of provisions for them. She refused payment, even for the basket, which she had made herself. Alec managed to press
five bob on Jack Trevinnick, who pulled on his boots to light them out to the Austin.
Tom delved in, by feel, as they drove out of the farmyard. “Aha, a great slab of cake,” he said with satisfaction. D'you mind a bit broken off, Chief?”
“Not at all. Hold on while I get my gloves off. Oh, right or left?” queried Alec, coming to a fork in the lane.
“Hold on, I'll have to find that bit of paper and my electric torch. Should've brought young Ernie with us. He'd know.”
“There would be less cake for you.”
“True! Just as well we left him behind. It's almost worth coming all this way for, even if we hadn't got the answer out of Westcott. Left here, Chief, and … uh … right at the next crossroads.”
“But we have no proof, you know, Tom, not even that Steadman's the thief, let alone that he's the murderer. Remember Mummery and the crocodiles. Steadman
might
have been studying parallels between dinosaurs and mammals. He could claim to have been comparing their necks with giraffe necks, say.”
“The giraffes are on the other side,” Tom pointed out.
“That was just an example.” Alec racked his brains. “If you're going to be fussy, something to do with rhinos, perhaps, or hippos. They're all built like tanks. And Steadman is noted for working late.”
“Now we know where to look,” said Tom, confidently though muffled by a mouthful of cake, “we'll find evidence, sure enough, or confront him and get a confession. Steadman won't hold out.”
 
With Westcott's signed statement, they left for London early on Sunday morning. Today, ominous clouds hung low over
the moor, so Alec took the main road via Okehampton. They kept ahead of the rain all the way however, and even came out into sunshine as they crossed Bagshot Heath.
But from Hounslow Heath, they could see ahead a sepia mass of fog crouched over the city like a hungry octopus, sending out tentacles to draw the suburbs within its grasp. Alec groaned.
“Maybe Mrs. Trevinnick wasn't as far out as all that,” said Tom, a sad admission from a born Londoner.
The premature dusk closed down on them. Soot-spattered windscreen open, they crept through the empty streets to Westminster. At New Scotland Yard, a message awaited them.
“Just come in a couple of minutes ago, Gov'nor,” said the duty officer. “D. I. Wotherspoon went home. I was going to ring him up.”
Alec scanned it. “Great Scott! Telephone Chelsea and tell them I want a dozen constables sent to the Natural History Museum at once. Come along, Tom.”
Without protest, if wearily, Tom came. Not until the Austin was crawling up Birdcage Walk through the thickening murk did he venture to ask, “What's up, Chief?”
“Steadman entered the museum at five to six. On a Sunday evening, Tom! I knew the jewels were still there, hidden lord knows where. Damn this fog. Can you stick your head out of the window that side and tell me if I'm going to hit the kerb?”
Driving as fast as he dared, Alec reached the rear of the museum at last. Two plainclothesmen were on duty there at all times, well concealed among the pillars of the arcade. A third, who had been following Steadman, lurked nearby. They converged on Alec.

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