A Fatal Secret. Faith Martin

if she was going to be truly honest with herself, that was what really worried her. It wasn’t so much whether or not her chickens might come home to roost and one day blight her career. After all, nobody had seen her take the letter or even suspected its existence. No, she felt safe enough from the prospect of having to face any disciplinary proceedings.

      But her suspicion that what the letter had alleged might just be true wouldn’t go away.

      Because, for as long as she’d known him, she’d noticed a few odd things about her friend. The way Dr Ryder’s hands would tremble every now and then. She’d tried to put that down to age – after all, old men sometimes did have the shakes, right?

      Then there was the way he would sometimes stumble slightly, as though he’d tripped over an obstacle that wasn’t there. Again, she’d put that down to him shuffling his feet. She’d noticed that sometimes he didn’t pick his feet up properly – ironically a failing that her father had often scolded her for as a child!

      Of course, she’d half-suspected that he might drink a little more than he probably should, which would account for most of the things she’d noticed. A colleague had once told her that secret tipplers often kept popping breath mints to disguise the smell of booze on their breath, and it was true that, just lately, the coroner had started chewing on strong mints.

      But what if he didn’t have a fondness for too much drink after all? What if the trembling hands and unsteady gait meant something else? Because if he really was ill…

      Yet the only way she could know that for sure would be to ask him about it. It sounded simple enough, but Trudy had a feeling that it was going to be nothing of the kind. The coroner was a private and sometimes intimidating man, and she doubted he would take kindly to her dabbling in what he was certain to feel was none of her business.

      But that was a problem for another day. Right now, Trudy thought anxiously, they had a missing child to find.

       Chapter 2

      It was apparent from the moment they arrived at Briar’s Hall, and reported to the officer in charge, that the boy had not yet been found.

      The village Bobby wasn’t quite as old as Walter, and introduced himself as Constable Watkins.

      ‘Right. At the moment, we’re concentrating on the area around the lake, for obvious reasons,’ Watkins began grimly. ‘You two men make your way to the south side.’ He pointed across a small paddock. ‘You’ll see where the others are. Follow the path, but don’t bother searching the reeds where someone’s already left markers. Here…’ He handed Rodney and Walter a bunch of small wooden sticks, with red and white tapes dangling loosely from their ends. ‘Stick them in the ground at more or less twenty-yard intervals.’

      Trudy glanced around, trying to get the lie of the land. They’d travelled through the length of the small village, which now sat in a shallow valley to the east of her. They were at the bottom of a slight rise, and surrounded on three sides by woodland. Presumably, the rise and the trees were keeping Briar’s Hall itself from view.

      ‘You, WPC…?’

      ‘Probationary WPC Loveday, sir,’ Trudy said smartly, earning her a sharp, beady-eyed look.

      ‘Oh yes? You’re the one who’s got herself in some bigwig’s good books eh?’

      Trudy flushed painfully. ‘I didn’t do anything that anyone else wouldn’t do, sir,’ she began defensively, wondering how long she’d be forced to eat humble pie with her fellow officers. ‘It was the Earl who insisted on all this fuss.’

      The now infamous letter of thanks, due to be doled out to her by the Earl’s secretary during the upcoming bash, would no doubt be instantly snaffled by her mother. Much to her daughter’s horror, Barbara Loveday had insisted that she was going to get it framed so that it could hang in pride of place over the front-room mantelpiece. Next thing she knew, her father would be charging the neighbours sixpence to come and admire it!

      ‘Huh. Well, I suppose he would, considering it was his son’s neck you saved,’ Watkins conceded, obviously willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. ‘All right, you can take the far edge of those woods.’ He pointed directly north and behind him. ‘I haven’t allocated anyone there yet. You’ll see the woods there come almost right up to the outer walls of the gardens of the Hall in places. But there’s a bit of an orchard area between, where formal gardens meet the farmland. Take these with you’ – he handed her a pile of the sticks – ‘and place them wherever you search. You’ve got your whistle?’ he asked abruptly.

      Trudy obviously had, and lifted it from where it was hanging around her neck.

      ‘All right then. If you find the boy, give three short blasts. If you find anything you think needs further investigation and you need help, give two long blasts. Clear?’

      ‘Yes, sir,’ Trudy said smartly, and set off briskly with her pile of markers.

      It was a cool but pleasant day, with the April sun playing tag with the clouds. She walked through the woods, as instructed. They felt, as most woods do, slightly damp. She kept walking uphill and through growing clumps of wild garlic and jack-by-the-hedge, carefully avoiding the freshly growing and vicious stinging nettles, until she came to the edge of the treeline.

      There, below her, as she had suspected, was Briar’s Hall. She set off towards it quickly, aware of movement all around her. In one field off to her left, she could see several of her colleagues checking out a hay barn. Below, two more volunteers (villagers she presumed, as they weren’t in uniform) were tracking the line of a hawthorn hedge that separated two fields, which were both already showing green with barley shoots. If the boy had fallen in the ditch that usually accompanied a hedge, he would soon be found.

      She barely paused to assess this however, instead marching quickly downhill, where she spotted the acreage of smaller, bent fruit trees that Constable Watkins had allocated her.

      She could see it was surrounded by an old and mostly broken-down dry-stone wall, which would present no barrier to inquisitive children, and the ground between the trees was high with thistles, sedge grass, dock and various other weeds. No doubt, in the autumn, the estate manager let pigs from the farm estates in here to graze on the fallen or rotten fruit. As it was, she could see she had her work cut out for her avoiding the thistles – although in a few weeks’ time they’d be even higher than they already were.

      With a sigh for her stockings, which she knew stood no chance of surviving this search unladdered, she set off carefully to place the first stick.

      ‘Eddie! Eddie Proctor? Can you hear me?’ she called, but after the first, initial moment of hope, which insisted there had to be a chance that a high, fluting child’s voice might answer, there was only silence.

      Grimly, Trudy began to circumnavigate the orchard, hoping against hope that they would not find the boy’s drowned body in the lake.

      *

      It was nearly five o’clock when Trudy’s ever-decreasing circle of investigations had brought her almost to the middle of the orchard. Despite the cool April clouds, she was feeling warm in her uniform after so much walking and swishing of the sticks, hoping to catch a glimpse of a sleeping child in the grass.

      She spotted a low, round circular wall of red bricks in some surprise, then, after a moment’s thought, realised that it could only be an old well. Indeed, the T-shaped thick wooden bracket that would have covered the top of the circle, and from which a bucket would have dangled, allowing water to be drawn, was still lying in the grass beside one edge of it. Over the years, it had been almost covered by a vicious-looking wild bramble and a particularly dense patch of dock, and she surmised that the big house probably hadn’t had need of the water supply since before the war.

      She sat down gingerly on the outer wall to take a breather, glad to feel that the old red bricks still felt