Snare in the Dark: A crime investigation set in the English countryside (Dan Mallett Investigations Book 3) Read online

  SNARE IN THE DARK

  Dan Mallett Investigations

  Book Three

  Roger Longrigg

  writing as

  Frank Parrish

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  ALSO BY ROGER LONGRIGG

  CHAPTER 1

  Slowly, slowly Dan Mallett raked up fallen ash leaves under the tree on Sir George Simpson’s lawn. The leaves had been brought down by the first frost of early October, and by a wet, wintry gale when the wind went round from northeast to southwest. The dead leaves were blackish, sodden, oddly greasy in texture. Even so, it was work that required very little physical effort, and no mental effort at all. It did not at all exhaust his body which, though small and light, had the hard whippiness of a plaited leather thong. He could be up most of the night, transacting his real business, without fatigue. It did not occupy his mind, which could busy itself with plans. Dan always had plenty of plans — too many plans, perhaps — mostly concerned with girls, young pheasants, and old silver.

  Dan could not imagine why the Simpsons paid him quite heavily to do something not unpleasant which they could have done themselves in a quarter of an hour, without so much as raising a sweat. The ways of the nobs continued to amaze him. The ways of almost everybody else, if it came to that. The rest of the world had an extraordinary preference for neat dark suits and little black shoes, and horrible jobs in offices, and what they called commuting. The rest of the world went to bed at night and got up in the morning, not apparently realising that the hours of darkness were the most interesting and the most enjoyable — and, if your training and talents lay in a certain direction, the most profitable.

  When he decided his time was up (his interior clock, usually reliable to a minute, ran a little fast at the Simpsons’) he went and stood by the back door. His old cap was in his hands, his smile was innocent and bashful. Lady Simpson counted out six pounds for him. She too smiled. There was something patronising, proprietary in her smile. She was like someone smiling at a mongrel puppy. Dan reacted to her smile with a flicker of tolerant contempt, but without resentment and with full understanding. He knew he looked more ludicrous than usual. He had tied pieces of binder twine round his old corduroy trousers, just below the knee, in the fashion of Victorian yokels. They were completely purposeless. He could have raked up the leaves in his best dark suit — in bedroom slippers. He tied the strings round his trousers to make himself even more of a bumpkin than usual, even more of a quaint survival. Though little over thirty years of age, his role among the local nobs was that of a gnome, a fossil, some Georgian or even medieval vestige left behind in this rural rock-pool by the ebbing tide of time. This was what people like the Simpsons really paid for. It was also protective colouring.

  “A-do thenks ye, ma’am,” said Dan, speaking as slow as he had raked the leaves, his tone deep and treacly, in the parody of antique rural Wessex which he always thought must be gross over-acting, but which doubled his income from the nobs.

  He wondered, with an inward giggle, if he should practise tugging his forelock. It was not something he had ever seen anybody do, but it seemed to fit the role he was playing.

  He bicycled slowly away towards the village of Medwell Fratrorum. As soon as he was out of sight of the Simpson’s house, he dismounted and removed the bits of string from his legs. It was one thing to get himself up like a clown at the Simpsons’, but there were girls in the village to whom he appeared somewhat differently.

  He went not directly homewards, to the cramped little cottage under the dripping edge of the Priory Woods, but towards Medwell Court. Major March’s preserves. The pheasant-shooting season would begin in a fortnight. Cobb Wood was crawling with fat birds, and also with guinea fowl and half-wild bantams, the covert’s watchdogs, and with Edgar Bland. You could hardly say, in the way of grammatical correctness, that a covert crawled with one aging gamekeeper, but that was the effect. He infested the place. There was war between him and Dan, of many years’ standing, known to everybody. Dan took particular pride in getting birds from under Edgar Bland’s nose, but it was rarely enough he was able to do so. Edgar Bland had sworn, publicly and often in the bar of the Chestnut Horse, that he’d get Dan, nail him good and proper, fix him once and for all.

  It was a point of pride with both of them, particularly since, a year before, Dan had played the trick on Edgar Bland, which the soberer part of his mind rather regretted. Edgar Bland had been persecuting him. He himself had, perhaps, been persecuting Edgar Bland. He had gone into Milchester on the bus, spent some money in a shop, and come back. He had left the bus in the late evening, crossed the fields, and busied himself with various small concerns. In the dawn he had allowed himself to be ambushed by Edgar Bland, in a ditch at the edge of a root field, and Edgar Bland had whooped and gloated when he found a brace of partridges in the poacher’s pocket of Dan’s coat.

  Dan was hailed, or hauled, to Medwell Court and before the awesome Major March, a new and false kind of country gentleman, but no less formidable for that. The police came. Dan throughout gently, persistently, proclaimed his innocence. He eventually produced the receipt from the poulterer in Milchester: two partridges, sold and bought with complete legality, publicly, in a crowded shop. The shopkeeper identified Dan and remembered his purchase, and Dan said mildly that he had, all along, been telling the exact truth, but nobody would listen, and Edgar Bland was reduced to purplish silence. Major March apologised to Dan as handsomely as his rather abrasive personality permitted. The police — who knew Dan very well as a suspect, though never, to their grief, as a convicted criminal — made a sort of apology. Edgar Bland made no apology, but was understood to mutter that he’d get his own back.

  Of course the story had wide currency in Medwell and the surrounding parishes. Local opinion was divided. Dan was generally liked, though nowhere trusted. Edgar Bland was generally trusted, though nowhere liked. The division was not so much between people as within people. Only Dan’s mother, perhaps, took a wholly single-minded view, owing to the bitterness of her disappointment at the life Dan had chosen, at the way he had betrayed her.

  Dan bicycled slowly along Poulter’s Lane towards Cobb Wood and Medwell Court. He went slowly because it was easier, because he was in no hurry, and because it let him see what was going on in his world. All sorts of grim and dreadful things, he knew, were going on in other worlds — the worlds of the men in neat dark suits, the worlds of trains and cameras — wars and pestilences, bombs and bankruptcies, the divorces of disc jockeys, all of which Dan regarded with a sort of baffled apathy. In his world, a flock of rooks was clamorously mobbing a sparrow hawk, which twisted and redoubled like a hare in front of lurchers until it took refuge in a tree, where the rooks could no longer dive-bomb it. Dan wondered why rooks should attack a predator that could surely never harm them: but he remembered seeing them mob a heron, and concluded that they acted like a kind of mindless rent-a-mob (an absurd phenomenon he had read about, confirming the wisdom of his decision to leave those outside worlds alone). A dunnock was in full song in a hedg
e, as indifferent to the hysterical rooks as Dan was to hysterical human mobs: sensible bird. Dan was particularly fond of its warm chestnut and slate grey, its sweet, unemphatic song, and its combination of shyness and friendliness. It was obliging of it, too, to sing in a chilly October as it sang in April.

  Cobb Wood. No sign of Edgar Bland, but pheasants in abundance. The young birds were long out of the incubators. They were in the preserves, being fattened and strengthened for the imminent drives. Like fox cubs in August, they were full grown but had attained nothing like their full strength. There would be no rocketing to treetop height on those young, stubby wings. That was why Major March and his fat friends liked them. And that, in turn, was why Dan felt no twinge of compunction about spoiling “sport.”

  A first-class shot hitting an old cock, high, at Christmas, in a strong wind, was something Dan could truly admire, though his own pheasant dinners came by different means — just as he truly admired the way Dr. Smith, in the village, cast a dry fly thirty yards against the wind, and made it land like thistledown on a sixpence, though when he grilled a trout for his breakfast, he had secured it by more ancient methods.

  As Dan knew, from years of tactful inspection, Edgar Bland followed the old-fashioned method to get his poults fit for the gun. He got a lot of unthreshed wheat sheaves, cut by hand from the headlands. He tied each sheaf with a piece of twine not round the middle, like an old-fashioned reaper-and-binder, but round the top. Then he tied the top to a stake or the trunk of a small tree, and spread out the straws to make a sort of wigwam. The young pheasants hopped about on top of the sheaves pecking for the grain, and used the wigwams for shelter. Edgar Bland kept them in the covert with plenty of mixed corn and dried peas and tick beans. He whistled when he came out to feed them, and they came running to meet him, going along little tracks through the undergrowth. They always used the tracks. They never tried to plunge through brambles. They were as predictable as cows, and as tame as Dan’s own bantams.

  This was all perfectly sound — Edgar Bland had faults of character, but he knew about rearing pheasants. But he had inherited other time-honoured devices which Dan found difficult to forgive.

  He had let a lot of scruffy, half-bred bantams out into the wood, not to incubate anything, or do any good, or lay eggs, or look pretty, but to make an almighty commotion if anything disturbed them. Most of them spent most of their time not peacefully on the ground, like a Christian’s bantams, but halfway up trees. They were a pest.

  Worse, Edgar Bland had infected Cobb Wood with three dozen guinea fowl. They should have stayed on the ground too, but they didn’t. They went right to the top of the thorns and birches, bending the slender branches under their speckle-grey weight, and spent their whole time spying at the ground, as Dan had seen old women in Milchester glued for hours to cracks in their net curtains, hoping for a glimpse of something scandalous to get their names into the papers. The theory was that the guinea fowl squawked when they saw a fox or a cat, and all the pheasants took alarm and scrambled to safety. They also squawked when they saw Dan, and Edgar Bland took alarm.

  All this made the wood almost unapproachable by day. Dan could make himself practically invisible, but not to a bantam a yard above his head, or a guinea fowl six yards above it. The small hours, then, were the time to go after Major March’s pheasants, and the dawn was the time to collect them. But it was tricky. To be caught in the middle of the night, in the middle of the covert, in the middle of his snares, would be much, much worse than to be interrupted in a noontime ramble; and the birds didn’t come out to feed until they could see, and when they had light to see by, so did the gamekeeper.

  It all made life very difficult for a man whose mother had a finicky appetite, and could be tempted most with a bit of roast pheasant.

  Slowly, looking and listening, Dan bicycled on past Cobb Wood, wishing without rancour that Edgar Bland might be incapacitated with a stomach-ache or gout. He went on to Medwell Court, where his business lay. He kept out of sight of the big house and the gardens — in spite of Major March’s apology, the day of the brace of partridges, his face was not truly welcome there — propped his bicycle behind a beech hedge in the kitchen garden, and prowled under cover of fruit bushes to the old coach house.

  This was a sturdy and commodious building, converted not to garages — the Major’s cars were housed in the stables — but to a gigantic pigeon loft. Major March had a passion for fancy pigeons. He had bought the very best breeding stock, and bred a lot of prize-winners himself. His squabs sold to fanciers all over Europe and America, and the prices were as fancy as the pigeons.

  There were Turbits and Oriental Frills and Satinettes like Dan’s own Satinettes, but much better. And in charge of them all was Peggy Bowman, who was Major March’s secretary when he was there, and nanny to his pigeons when he wasn’t.

  Dan slipped in through the back door of the coach house. As he expected, he found Peggy topping up the feeding hoppers. She greeted him with delight; they kissed demurely, like old friends; he helped her fill the hoppers.

  She was a sturdy, fair girl, now about twenty-eight. Her father had run the garage in the village. She had done a secretarial course, and got a job with a solicitor in Milchester. That was when Dan was serving his sentence of penal servitude in the bank, driven there by his mother’s craving for respectability and respect. He had needed distraction. Peggy had distracted him. She had a gurgling laugh and a fine bouncing bosom. She had a great deal to recommend her, but she had one terrible failing. She had something Dan was supposed to have — was believed by the bank to have. She had ambition. She saw the Dan of those days — dapper in his dark suit, educated in voice, graceful in manner, quick with figures, trusted, a man with a great future — and she liked what she saw, partly for the right reasons but partly for very, very wrong ones.

  Dan’s father had died of the effects of spending all night in a wet ditch while gamekeepers thudded round his head. Dan inherited some dogs, some nets and snares, and an ancestral yearning to get back where he belonged. He got back, to his mother’s bitter and undiminishing disappointment. He lost Peggy. That was in the nick of time. If she’d had him, his mother and she between them would have kept him in the bank. She married George Bowman, then an articled clerk in her solicitor’s office. It worked moderately well, as far as Dan knew. Now she worked part-time for Major March.

  Dan prided himself on many things, and one of them was that he stayed friendly with his girls. He had had an awful lot of girls, so he had kept an awful lot of friends. It was something their husbands so little understood that it was best kept from them. George Bowman would not have understood the friendship between Dan and Peggy, although really it was scarcely more than friendship, coloured by cheerful memories, and sometimes mutually helpful. Peggy was not bitter, as his mother was bitter, about the dreadful choice he had made. That was odd, because his mother had wanted his conventional success not for herself but for him, while Peggy had wanted it not for him but for herself.

  Anyway, they were friends, and one result was that Dan fed his own pigeons free, and another was that he sometimes knew Edgar Bland’s movements.

  “What have you come for today, you awful little man?” she said affectionately, in her not-quite-posh secretary’s voice.

  “Running a bit low on Cinquatina maize,” said Dan apologetically.

  Lady Simpson would not have recognised his voice. With Peggy, he was back in the bank, even though she was mucking out a pigeon loft and he was borrowing a bag of maize.

  “Edgar Bland’s going away tonight,” said Peggy.

  “That’s worth ten bags of maize.”

  “I thought it might be. You’re a disgrace to the neighbourhood.”

  “Paternity,” said Dan. “Can’t escape my destiny. Where’s the old basket off to?”

  “Where he’s been going once a month since April. A nursing home near Quimbury. He goes and visits an old, old man.”

  “Gum,” said Dan. “Edgar
Bland bringing comfort and solace. I can’t picture it.”

  “It’s somebody he used to work for when he was a boy.”

  “Ah, then he’s hoping for something in the will.”

  “Yes,” said Peggy.

  “He’s been away once a month since April,” said Dan, “and I didn’t know about it?”

  “He’s only been away in the daytime. This time he’s going in the evening. So he’s staying with his married daughter. She lives in Quimbury. I know all this because I had to get him leave from Major March.”

  “A keeper away for the night at this time of year — I should think so. Dreadful to think of those woods unguarded. It’s funny, though, an evening visit to an old man in a nursing home. I thought they had them tucked up and dreaming by about six, so the nurses can go off to bingo.”

  “Yes. But that’s the appointment they made. Or maybe he made it as an excuse to stay with his daughter. You’re the last person who’s supposed to know about it.”

  “I’m the only person who’s going to know about it. Thank you very much, love. Anything I can do for you, as you know —”

  “Go back to the bank, kill George, and marry me.”

  Dan laughed, kissed her, and went stealthily back to his bicycle.

  Peggy’s own laugh died as she watched him go, moving as always with a sort of elegance. His face stayed in her mind, as she absentmindedly watched the pigeons feeding. It was in such profound contrast to the faces of the two other principal men in her life — wedge-shaped, broad-browed, gentle, deeply tanned but quite unlined, with those astonishing cornflower-blue eyes which had once made her knees tremble, and that slow, sweet, sexy smile which could probably still make her knees tremble, if she let it. His was not the appeal of a movie star or beefcake idol. It was more subtle and more compelling. Peggy told herself so, in good solemn words she had got from a paperback novel.