The Black Country (15 page)

Hammersmith nodded glumly. “I’ll leave now,” he said.

“But you haven’t eaten yet,” Fiona said.

“I’m not hungry.”

Kingsley cleared his throat. “I know it’s no use to protest. But I strongly advise against any activity. One never knows about these provincial maladies. If something settles in your lungs . . .”

Hammersmith shook his head and waved a weak hand at the room, encompassing all of the people, as well as a fireplace and a low-hanging chandelier. “I tell you I’m fine. There’s nothing to be concerned about. Please, let’s stop discussing me as if I weren’t capable of managing my own affairs.”

Fiona gave him a pitying look, but said nothing. Day knew what she was thinking. Hammersmith was capable of a great many things, but managing his own affairs was not one of them.

“You’re anxious to work and we’ve interrupted,” Claire said. “I thought perhaps you had already solved the case and you’d be glad to see us if we stopped in.”

“We are glad to see you,” Day said. “And though we haven’t solved the case yet, we can see you to the depot.”

“We’ll leave immediately,” Claire said.

Day saw a flush of humiliation on her cheeks, and an inexpressible sadness took root in him. It had been six months since a murderer had paid Claire a visit while Day was out of the house working his very first case for the Murder Squad. The killer hadn’t harmed her, had meant the visit as a threat to the inspector, a warning to abandon the investigation. That man was behind bars now, but he had shown the Days just how easy it would be to hurt them. Claire was a strong woman, but Day understood why she was uncomfortable being left at home alone, pregnant and vulnerable.

“We can keep the train waiting for another few minutes, I think,” Day said.

Hammersmith grimaced, clearly anxious to get started, but he nodded. Neither of the policemen would feel at ease until the ladies were safely away, but neither of them wanted to see them go.

“It’s settled then,” Day said. “Sergeant, later this morning you’ll get an accounting from Virginia Price. I’m going to pay a call on the vicar and his wife. We’ll meet here directly after and arrange to explore the mines. I only wish we had more men, but perhaps by then Constable Grimes will have found some warm bodies. I don’t want to be out there fumbling about in the dark again.”

“Speaking of fumbling about blind,” Hammersmith said, “where is Mr Grimes this morning?”

C
onstable Harry Grimes had lived and worked in Blackhampton his entire life. Unlike most of the men in the village, who carried on their legacies down in the mines, his father had been a policeman, and Harry had followed in his footsteps. He knew every square inch of the village and the names of all the people who lived there. He knew their secrets and he kept them. He knew about the charms in Bennett Rose’s attic and he knew about the priest hole in Mr Brothwood’s church. There was no part of Blackhampton that he didn’t know intimately. But he had not spent a lot of time in the woods, and so now he was having trouble finding the spot he had visited the previous night with the policeman from London.

He had hoped to make a quick trip out, just to take another look at the place where they’d found the bloody dress, and to be back by breakfast. He had not slept well and had awoken with a sour taste in his mouth and the vestiges of a nightmare circling his consciousness. He had pulled on his trousers and hurried out the door, consumed by a single thought: If a bloody dress had been found just off the path in the woods, that very bend in the path might yield more clues if he returned in the daylight.

Assuming he could find the spot again.

He tromped along, swiping at the low-hanging branches over the path and muttering under his breath as the hems of his trousers brushed against the bracken, growing more waterlogged with every step. He had neglected to change into boots, and his finest black horsehide shoes were no doubt ruined. He stepped on a sharp stone and felt it through the sole of his right shoe. He stopped and leaned against a tree to take the weight off his right foot. He looked around him, trying to get his bearings. He knew that he and Hammersmith could not have penetrated too far into the woods in the dark. It occurred to him that he might have already passed the place where the dress was found. He frowned and bent his foot so he could see the bottom of his shoe, to see if the rock had made a hole in the leather. Glancing down, he saw broken branches and a long smooth smear across the ice by the side of the path.

He had found the right spot!

If he hadn’t stopped, he would have missed it, would have walked right past. He sent up a silent prayer, thanking whomever the patron saint of sharp stones might be. He pushed himself off the tree trunk and moved off the path, carefully examining the ground, forcing the stiff wiry branches of low-growing bushes aside. There was a shallow slope on the western side of the path, and he put his foot down too hard on a patch of ice, slipped and fell, and slid downhill on his bottom. He grabbed a fistful of thin spring grass and stopped himself, felt the cold through the seat of his trousers.

Hammersmith had spotted the white dress somewhere nearby. It was a slim hope that there might be more clues out here, but if there was anything at all to be found, Grimes wanted to be the one to bring it out of the woods. He wanted to show the men from Scotland Yard that Blackhampton was not so backward and inconsequential as they no doubt thought it was. And, moreover, that Grimes himself was a good policeman, every bit their equal. It was foolish pride, he knew, but good work was often the direct result of pride.

He stood and brushed snow off his trousers and looked around. The bushes Hammersmith had crawled under weren’t as impassable as they had seemed to be in the dark. In fact, just two feet to the right was a second, narrower trail that wound around the roots of the nearby trees and skirted the thorny shrubbery. He made his way over to it and followed it around, digging in his heels so as not to fall again. He stopped again a few feet farther along, where he judged the dress had been found. There were indentations in the mud, possibly made by Hammersmith’s elbows and knees. Low to the ground, a bit of pale lace was caught on a thorny twig. Grimes carefully pulled it off and stuck it in his pocket, mildly disappointed that there wasn’t more to find. Still, it was something.

He looked up through the branches, trying hopelessly to judge the time by the position of the invisible sun in the smooth grey sky. Were Day and Hammersmith awake yet? Was breakfast finished? The London police might be doing anything by now. Possibly questioning the villagers, narrowing down the options for further searching. That’s what Grimes would do in their place. He should be with them when they talked to his people.

He turned, headed back up the trail, and saw a flash of lavender in the trees above. He squinted. A pale purple ribbon was looped around a limb between him and the path ahead. He reached for it, but it was just out of reach.

This was a clue. Or it might be. Better than a scrap of lace, at least.

Excited, he braced a foot against the base of the trunk above the tree’s roots and lunged upward. His fingers brushed against the silky fabric. He jumped again. And again. But the tip of the ribbon darted away from him, anchored by the tree at its other end, dancing in the low steady breeze out of the north.

He wrapped his arms around the trunk and attempted to shimmy up it like he’d done on every tree in the village common when he was a child. He was bigger now, though, and older, his arms and legs less flexible. He grunted and inched his way higher a bit at a time. He didn’t try to hurry. He didn’t want to loosen the ribbon only to watch it flutter away on the breeze. He made his methodical way upward, bracing himself carefully with his back against the tree behind him, making sure he was stable before reaching out and untangling the ribbon from the branch. It came loose easily and he smiled, held it up to the light, and admired the way the sun shone through the thin material. There was a cluster of minute black dots along one edge of the ribbon. Blood? This was a good clue indeed. Inspector Day would be most impressed.

He looked down and began the short slide back to the ground. He heard a shrill whistling sound from somewhere nearby, but before he could raise his head to look for the source of the noise, a hole the size of a sixpence coin materialized above his left eye. Almost at the same instant, another, larger, hole appeared below his right ear and a .45 caliber bullet deposited a thimbleful of his brains in the bark of the tree beside him. He grunted once before dying.

Constable Grimes’s body tumbled four feet down the side of the tree and landed in a heap under the thorny bushes beside the trail. His dark blue uniform rendered him nearly invisible in the icy darkness of the thicket.

His lifeless fingers opened and the lavender ribbon floated away, curling in the breeze. It snagged for just a second on a thorn, but twisted loose. It drifted up through the trees and out of the woods and across the long barren fields toward the village.

N
ine hundred yards away, the American lowered his Whitworth rifle.

The policeman was Calvin Campbell’s friend and that was the only reason he had died. The American had seen them together the night before and had decided to make the game more interesting by killing Campbell’s friends first. It seemed somehow fitting, given their history.

From his vantage point high up in a tree, he had tracked the policeman’s clumsy movements through the woods. The American had taken his time unsnapping his gun bag and quietly pulling out the rifle, all the while watching the policeman move closer. He had pulled out the Whitworth and flipped up the sight, carefully loaded the rifle with one of the unique hexagonal bullets the model was known for. The shape of the bullet was slim and elegant, and when it rocketed through the air, it whistled, giving a split-second warning to anyone within range. The American liked it that his rifle whistled. It made the game seem a little more fair somehow. He had rested the rifle’s thirty-three-inch barrel in a fork of the tree. There was a slight breeze, cold and from the north. He had adjusted for the wind and waited for the policeman to walk into range.

Then the policeman had climbed up a tree and made the job even easier.

Now the American flipped the sight back down and stowed the rifle back in his bag, snapped it shut, and slung it over his shoulder. He climbed easily back to the ground and made his way up the path, back toward the abandoned schoolhouse on the edge of the village.

Without realizing he was doing it, the American began to whistle through his teeth as he walked along.

H
ow are you?” Claire said. “Really?”

“Happy to see you,” Day said.

The door to his room was open, and Day sat on the wooden chair next to it. Claire reclined on the bed. Her feet hurt, and Kingsley had advised her to lie down. Fiona Kingsley paced nervously in the hallway, just out of sight, but not out of earshot. She took her responsibilities as governess and watchdog seriously. Day longed for even a few minutes completely alone with his wife, but he was content enough to take what he could get.

“I shouldn’t have come,” Claire said. “I couldn’t stop myself from getting on the train, but feel silly about it now. I’m keeping you from your work.”

“I’m still happy to see you.”

Claire smiled.

“Is he behaving himself?” Day said. He regarded Claire’s swollen belly with a mixture of suspicion and anticipation.

“He?”

“I assume that’s a son.”

“Is that so?”

“What else could it be?”

“Oh, I don’t know. It seems to me there might be another possibility, but it escapes me.”

“You may want to consult with Dr Kingsley about that. You have some strange ideas.”

“You know, now I’m going to make sure this is a little girl.”

Day grinned at her and looked down at his folded hands, beyond them at the toes of his shiny shoes. He genuinely didn’t care whether the baby was a boy or a girl. The possibilities were equally terrifying.

Claire put a hand on her husband’s chest, reading his mood, but misunderstanding its cause. “You’ll find that lost little boy,” she said. “And his parents. I know you will.”

Day tried a smile. “I appreciate your faith, but I’m not so sure.”

“I am. I’m certain they’re somewhere warm and safe, waiting to be found.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Oh,” Claire said. “I made something for you.” She maneuvered through the pregnant woman version of jumping out of bed: swinging her feet around and placing them solidly on the floor, jacking herself upright, and pushing off the wall behind her. Day stood and took her elbow, helped her to her feet. He was amazed by how ready she was to bring another Day into the world. At any moment, their tiny family would be increased by half again.

Or, according to the sobering statistics that Kingsley had privately shared with him, there was a very good chance that Claire, or the baby, or both, would die in childbirth and Day would become a family of one. He shuddered and smiled at his wife and blinked hard, forcing the thought to disappear. Only it didn’t completely go away. It never did. It had lived with him for six months.

Claire crossed the room, heavy and graceless and, Day thought, breathtakingly beautiful. She fetched her bag from the floor of the wardrobe where he had placed it and rummaged through it.

“Aha!” she said. She unraveled from the top of the bag what appeared to be a long skein of the winter sky, grey and bristling. She took the ashen coil and looped it around his neck. He immediately began to itch and resisted the urge to scratch himself. “It’s a muffler,” she said. “I made it for you myself. Do you like it?”

He gripped the end of it and hauled it up to his face. It was really nothing more than a tube of some low-grade yarn, rough and charmless. Claire was still learning to be a homemaker after a lifetime of privilege, and Day was overwhelmed that she had tried so hard to make something for him, even something as wretched as this shapeless grey thing that was now making his neck itch so badly that it burned.

He wrapped his arms as tightly around her as he dared, as tightly as her belly would allow him, and spoke into her hair, smelling of lavender and apples, sweat and Blackhampton ashes. “I love it so much.”

The baby bird, invisible in its box on the vanity, woke up and chirped, and a deep voice floated in from the hallway: “I hear a bird.”

Day let go of Claire and took a step back. He looked at the door, but didn’t see the owner of the voice.

“Henry?” Day said.

Henry Mayhew peered into the room, a floating head, the rest of him out of sight behind the doorjamb. “The doctor sent me, only I didn’t want to bother you.”

“It’s all right, Henry. Come in.”

The bashful giant shuffled into the room. “The boy with the broken leg said the next train’s coming and the doctor says you have to get on it and go to Manchester, Mrs Claire.”

“Broken leg?” Claire said. “I don’t think Freddy’s leg is broken, Henry. I think he was born that way.”

Day stole an anxious look at Claire’s middle, as if he might be able to see inside and make sure their unborn baby was whole and healthy. “How much time do we have, Henry?”

“No time, Mr Day.”

“Then we’d best get you on your way, my dear,” Day said.

The bird peeped again, and Henry went to the vanity and stared down into the straw-filled box. “It’s little,” he said.

“It’s a baby,” Day said. “I found him in the woods last night and I haven’t decided what to do with him yet. He’s an agreeable chap, but he demands a lot of me.”

“You should show him to Dr Kingsley right away,” Henry said. “He could help.”

“You’re probably right. I haven’t had a chance.”

“Do you want me to do it?”

“If you’d like.”

Henry nodded, taking the new responsibility seriously. He lifted the box and whispered an answering chirp at the little bird.

“Actually, Henry,” Day said, “if it wouldn’t be too much to ask, could you watch him for me?”

“Oh, not me, sir. I’m not good at things.”

“I think that’s a marvelous idea,” Claire said.

“I’m quite busy here,” Day said. “You’d be doing me a tremendous favor.”

“I’ll try.” Henry looked frightened. “Is he hungry maybe?”

“Oh, Henry, he’s always hungry.”

“I’ll get him food.”

“He likes bread crumbs soaked in warm milk.”

Henry’s frightened expression was replaced by one of sheer panic, and Day laughed despite himself.

“I believe Mr Rose has a good supply of those things.”

“Oh, good,” Henry said. “Because I don’t have them.”

“Go ask him. We’ll be right down.”

Henry nodded and rushed out of the room. They listened to him clattering along the hall and down the stairs. Day picked up Claire’s bag, and his smile wavered as he motioned her toward the open door. She touched his cheek as she passed him. Fiona was still waiting in the hall and took Claire’s elbow to help her down the stairs. Day took another look at his room, now lifeless and empty.

He blew out the lantern and followed his wife and never returned to that room.