They Died in the Spring Read online

  THEY DIED IN THE SPRING

  Josephine Pullein-Thompson

  © Josephine Pullein-Thompson 1960

  Josephine Pullein-Thompson has asserted her rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1960 by Hammond.

  This edition published in 2017 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter One

  Above the hubbub, above the incoherent protests of the Reverend Frank Willis and the angry murmurs of the other parish councillors, boomed the voice of Colonel Barclay declaring the meeting closed. He stood, short and formidable, his hands resting on the table. The long, heavy slab of his face, with its insignificant nose and stubby white moustache, had flushed purple, but he was enjoying himself and the light of battle shone in his brown protruding eyes.

  “Coming, Aubrey?” he asked above the uproar and, without waiting for an answer, he turned and marched from the room.

  Aubrey Sinclair sat for a moment undecided. Then, scowling, he got to his feet, and, saying good night to Evelyn Yates and Eric Trent, who sat on either side of him, he followed his father-in-law from the room.

  Claud Barclay was struggling into his overcoat at the bottom of the pavilion steps and when Sinclair joined him he led the way across the corner of the cricket field, to where his car was parked in the cul-de-sac of Church Lane. His step was buoyant, and, as soon as they were out of earshot of the pavilion, he began to discuss the meeting, making no attempt to disguise the triumph in his voice.

  “Well, Aubrey, I think I showed them that I was master of the situation. That fellow Cole realized that there was nothing to be gained by being offensive. Poor old Butler got the wrong end of the stick as usual and Trent and the two women just bleated like a lot of sheep. As for Willis, I had no idea the fellow had so little self-control; really rather an embarrassing exhibition for a man of his cloth.”

  Sinclair opened the gate into the lane. “I don’t see that you could expect him to be pleased about it. The poor devil spends his life trying to instil the team spirit into the lads of the village and if you plough the field you’re going to bring his activities to an abrupt halt. Personally, I think the lads might just as well be learning the facts of life in the gorse bushes on Mullins Hill, which appears to be the alternative occupation on Saturday afternoons, but you can’t expect Willis to see it that way. Besides, I rather thought you shared his view of team games as a panacea.”

  Barclay looked sharply at his son-in-law. There was a sarcastic note in the boy’s voice he did not care about but, though the moonlight glinted on red hair and spectacles, Sinclair’s face was in shadow.

  “Now, look here, Aubrey, these people wanted a welfare state and, having got it, they can’t expect charity as well. I’m taxed practically out of existence to pay for their false teeth, the support of their aged and infirm and the education of their children and then they expect me to provide the village cricket field, just because my father did.” He laughed. “They’ve come to the wrong man.”

  “They were willing to pay rent,” Sinclair reminded him.

  “That’s not the point; it’s the principle of the thing,” answered the Colonel, squeezing into his car. “I shall start ploughing on Monday. Good night, Aubrey.”

  “Good night.” Colonel Barclay drove slowly along Church Lane and turned left on the road, for his house—The Paddocks—was a mile from the village of Winmore End on the road to Shepherd’s Hill.

  Sinclair stood abusing his father-in-law beneath his breath until the lights of the car had disappeared; then he turned and, kicking moodily at the gravelled surface of the lane, he walked up it towards the church. The lane ended at the lych-gate, but a narrow path led away to the left and, passing between the walls of the Old Rectory and its walled garden, in which the New Rectory had recently been built, brought him to the Green. A light shone from the kitchen window of the Old Forge, but the two cottages beyond were in darkness. It was bloody cold for April, thought Sinclair with an indignant shiver as, slamming the gate behind him, he went in.

  Veronica Sinclair, tall and slim like her mother, but with the Barclay small nose and brown eyes, was ironing. The ironing board, a rickety affair of which the legs had long ago collapsed, was propped across the table and an enormous pile of over-dry clothes was spilling from the table to the floor. “Hullo, darling. How did it go?” She looked up anxiously as her husband came in.

  “Ghastly,” he answered, pushing more clothes on to the floor as he cleared a space for himself to sit on the table. “Really your father is the absolute bottom. All this hokum he’s oozed for years about the benefits of compulsory games and now, the moment it suits him, he deprives the village of the lot. How many potatoes can you grow on a cricket pitch anyway? He makes out he’s hard up, but what he gets off one field won’t alter that. Besides, they offered him rent; they were perfectly reasonable; they offered to fence the field across and rent the half with the cricket pitch and the pavilion. But he wouldn’t even listen to them, he just blah-ed away about the principle of the thing. I don’t know what’s got into him, but I suppose when he’s antagonized the whole village and driven Frank Willis into a psychiatric ward he’ll be satisfied.”

  “You didn’t have a row with him, did you, darling?” Veronica asked anxiously.

  “No, I did not. I remembered that he got me my filthy job, that I don’t earn enough to buy a house and that he lets us have one for nothing.” Aubrey Sinclair was shouting. Veronica changed the subject. “Time to pot the babies,” she said, switching off the iron. “Hilda’s still out.”

  *

  The Reverend Frank Willis left the cricket pavilion a few minutes after Colonel Barclay and Aubrey Sinclair. He fled from the embarrassed commiseration of his supporters and the echoes of his own outburst. He had tried to be reasonable, to argue calmly and coherently, but it had been like beating one’s head against a brick wall. The Colonel had sat there, pompous and stupid, armoured with indifference, justifying his wrecker tactics with strings of clichés, and Willis had lost control of his temper. He had stuttered and stormed, he had shrieked incoherent abuse, he had almost wept. Now, as he re-lived the scene, he began to shake, repossessed by passion. He leant against the Rectory wall and passed a hand, sticky with sweat, across his twitching face. He couldn’t pray; he couldn’t think. He opened the door and went through to the garden. He observed with relief chinks of light from the bathroom window. Joan was in the bath; for heaven’s sake let her stay there for a while—he didn’t want her fighting this lost battle with her usual verbal violence. He wanted quiet, time to let the rawness of his emotions heal a little before Joan began to probe.

  “Is that you, Frank?” called a voice the moment he opened the front door, and Joan, her sharp nose red from the bath, her brown hair pinned beneath a net and her shabby dressing-gown clutched across her chest, appeared at the top of the stairs. “How did the meeting go?” she asked. “Did you tell old Barclay where he got off?”

  *

  On Saturday morning Aubrey Sinclair, seething against injustice, tore himself from his bed ten minutes earlier than usual and telephoned his brother-in-law before driving to Crossley to catch the London train.

  Paul Barclay was unhelpful. To Sinclair’s repeated requests that he should do something to stop Church Field being plough
ed, he replied that father had never been known to take his advice yet so he saw no point in offering it. He agreed that the number of potatoes grown on a cricket pitch would do nothing to restore the Barclay finances. He agreed, with a mildness that increased Sinclair’s anger, that the members of the Darby and Joan Club would never get across a hundred yards of plough to the pavilion. He agreed that the village children would be wandering on the main road, that the illegitimate birthrate would rise and that Frank Willis would end in a psychiatric ward. Then at last, worn down by Sinclair’s persistence, he agreed that if they got back from the hunter trials—and at this moment Jean was champing in the stable, waiting for him to couple the trailer so she could load the horse—that, if they got back from the hunter trials in time, he would go over to The Paddocks to see if he could make any impression. “But you know what Father’s like,” he added; “and I don’t have any say about what goes on at Home Farm since he retired.”

  *

  Old Fred Butler had made the Colonel’s designs on the church field known to everyone in the public bar of the Carpenter’s Arms on Friday night, and on Saturday the news travelled round the village. Doctor Felton telephoned the Rector to find out the facts and found himself promising Joan Willis that he would sign her petition and try to use any influence he had with the Colonel. The captain of the cricket team, a farmer named Crocker, composed a stiff letter of protest to the Colonel and another to the local paper. Old age pensioners and members of the Women’s Institute bemoaned the loss of their meeting place, and those customarily wise after the event announced that they had always said that it was madness to build a pavilion, which was also the village hall, on privately owned land.

  All morning the village discussed the Colonel’s behaviour and then, in the evening, when the men emerged from watching sport on their television screens, they began again and there were bitter words and raised voices in the cream-washed Carpenter’s Arms for the second night in succession.

  Colonel Claud Barclay strutted through his day’s routine apparently unperturbed. After tea he took his gun and, telling his wife that he was going to investigate a rumour that the rabbits were back, went out on foot towards the woods. At eight he failed to return for dinner. At eight-thirty Mary Barclay telephoned the Carpenter’s Arms and the Sinclairs, but no one had seen anything of the Colonel. At ten-thirty they began to search the woods and it was nearly midnight when Paul Barclay and Ken Mullins found him. He was lying on the grass track that ran through the larch plantation, sprawled face downwards on the frosty ground, puddled in blood.

  Chapter Two

  “I don’t believe it; they’ve made a mistake,” said Mary Barclay firmly.

  “Why on earth should anyone want to murder your father? Of course it was an accident; you told me yourself last night that he must have stumbled and—and the gun must have gone off.”

  “Look, Ma, I’m not a policeman or a doctor; last night I told you how things seemed to me, but apparently I was wrong. Inspector Miller says there’s no doubt Father was murdered.”

  Paul Barclay sounded tired and dispirited; he had just returned from Crossley police station where he had spent a long hour being convinced, very much against his will, that his father had not died accidentally. He had not loved, nor since he was in his teens, even liked his father, but the shock of his death had released a storm of conflicting emotions of which the strongest was panic; he could feel it now, as he had felt it at the police station, rising from the pit of his stomach; fighting to control it, he hastily withdrew his mind from the more ominous aspects of the situation. His mother was still talking “. . . obviously out for promotion,” she asserted in unequivocal tones, “and we’re the people who’ll suffer for it. If you had any sense, Paul, you’d have nipped it in the bud.”

  Rejecting an angry retort which had come unsought into his mind, Barclay looked across the room at her. What was she really thinking? he wondered; how did she really feel? Despite the fact that her beautiful white hair was ruffled and she had dressed carelessly in the oldest of everyday clothes, she managed to present an appearance of dignity and composure. But her face, with its fine bone structure, aquiline nose and resolute blue eyes, was grey with grief or shock or fatigue; vaguely, her son wondered which. He couldn’t believe that there was a shred of affection left between this proud, unbending woman and the lecherous old man his father had become. That, thought Paul gloomily, was why they had expected so much of him; but for a mother who desired a replica of her tall, dashing, blue-eyed elder brother killed in the first World War and a father whose sole criterion was success, he had proved a hopelessly inadequate only son.

  “Look, Ma,” he said, slumping into one of the only two comfortable chairs in the room, “the police haven’t just rushed into this off their own bat. Father’s body was examined by Scott, the police surgeon, and a pathologist called Hedley who works at the hospital, and in their opinion Father’s death wasn’t accidental. Consequently, the police are bound to investigate. Miller was very decent about it all, but of course it’s out of his hands now. He said that some detectives would be coming over from the county Police headquarters at Bretford and we could expect them this afternoon.”

  “And since when have doctors become incapable of error?” demanded Mary Barclay.

  *

  “And so it seemed like an accident?” said Detective-Inspector Sims, stumbling down the track to the larch plantation and trying to arrange his grey wool scarf more protectively around his thin neck and prominent Adam’s apple.

  “Well, yes, sir, at the time it did,” answered Police-Constable Random apologetically. “Mr. Barclay thought so too. A great hole the Colonel had in him; you could see he had been hit at very close range and there was the gun on the ground beside him. We checked that it had been fired and then we took it there’d been an accident and, when we thought it over, it seemed he must have stumbled over one of the ruts in the track and the gun gone off and got him in the stomach.”

  “Yes, I see. Well, it’s all very unfortunate,” said Sims reproachfully. “Your right course would have been to send for the police surgeon before moving the body and then he would have been responsible for any decision.”

  “Yes, sir,” Random answered meekly. “This is the spot where we found him.”

  Sims looked about him fretfully. “Yes, it’s all most unfortunate,” he said. “Now, if I had been permitted to make a study of the body in situ and to see the terrain before the search party had trampled all over the place, things would have been a great deal easier. As it is, I understand that even the gun was handled.”

  Oh, for goodness’ sake stop going on at the boy, you moaning Willie, thought Inspector Miller. We all know he made a mistake, but what’s done’s done. He sighed heavily, and his round red face puckered with misery; he liked a peaceful life, a nice orderly plod through the day’s routine. His hunting instincts were more than satisfied by the weekly bag of erring motorists—the woman who couldn’t read the unilateral parking signs, the drivers of purchase-tax free vans who exceeded the statutory thirty miles per hour, the strangers who missed the “One Way Only” notices which decked most of Crossley’s ancient narrow streets. Miller didn’t want this murder, with its attendant rash of plain-clothes boys from Divisional HQ, and even less did he want the exhausting presence of Mr. Dobson, the chief constable, in his division.

  They spent a wearing and unfruitful hour in the larch plantation, and then, having explained that if the Barclays were not at The Paddocks they would be found at Stones Farm, Shepherd’s Hill, Inspector Miller announced that he and Random must return to their usual duties and left the detectives to their interviews.

  The Paddocks, an ugly house—pebble-dashed, tile-hung, gabled and dormered—had been built by Claud Barclay’s father. In those days it had seemed a small house and easily run, but to Mary Barclay it had become a huge and intractable white elephant. Assisted intermittently by a succession of farm labourers’ wives, she had fought a rearguard
action since 1939 until lately, when she had had to admit defeat. First the attics had been given over to dust and spiders, then the back stairs and the billiard room. Paul’s and Veronica’s rooms had been shut up when they married, and then the guest rooms one by one. The dining-room had become too expensive to heat, and the Barclays had descended to feeding in a small room off the kitchen, originally designed as a servants’ hall.

  The house stood, cold and sombre-looking, in its neglected garden, ringed by encroaching weeds and trees. To Sims, shivering on the doorstep as he waited for someone to answer his ring, it compared very unfavourably with his police flat in Bretford.

  Paul Barclay opened the door and waited a little uncertainly for the detectives to speak. His weather-tanned face was tired and haggard and he wore an old suit of grey tweed with a black tie.

  “Mr. Paul Barclay?” asked Sims. “I am Detective-Inspector Sims from Bretford and this is Detective-Sergeant Finch.” “Oh, come in. Inspector Miller told us to expect you, but you were lucky to catch us here. I’ve only brought my mother over for a few minutes to feed the cats and so on, and then we’re going back to Shepherd’s Hill.” Talking, Barclay led the way to the drawing-room. It was a long room, shabby, cold and overfull of occasional tables and straight-backed chairs, apparently collected without regard to period, type or harmony. “Do sit down,” said Barclay, switching on the electric fire with his foot.

  Without his hat and scarf, Sims was revealed as a man of about forty-five. His plentiful hair, iron grey and wiry, rose to a crest above his high, narrow forehead, elongating the already long and craggy face; his hollow cheeks were grey with cold and his eyes were watering from the east wind. Paul Barclay said, “I’m sorry it’s so cold in here, but the rest of the house is just as bad. We’ve let the boiler out; I only hope we don’t get a burst pipe.” Then he added, “I suppose it’s too early to ask if you’ve confirmed the doctors’ views that my father was murdered?”