13. THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

two brief scenes, the biassed Inspector mincapable of seeing what's in front of him and the teenagers with each other and a 1934 half crown coin.

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

13. The Pathologist Intervenes

Inspector Greengage failed to see anything but an obstinate old woman when he interviewed Winifred Winterbotham, and he was interviewing her again in the presence of Constable Pierce (who he also disliked because of his boyish good looks) before he had to release her into the big wide world where he was sure she would kill as many people as she could if he didn’t stop her.

Some might have called it an obsession, but he didn’t.

The old hag ought to be behind bars for the duration. That as is certainty

“Tell me about your husband?” he asked as an opener, intended to come at her out of the blue..

“Husband? What’s that?” she asked. She’d never been married, but anyway her limited contact with spoken English had left her vocabulary sadly depleted.

“You know: your man, the one you slept with, the one whose bones have been dug up outside your cottage.”

“Daddy? My daddy?”

“It can’t have been. His bones have been estimated to have been in the ground for, let me see, a good fifty years or possibly longer. Let me see: how old are you?”

“I don’t know old. I just hate jack boots and Hitler, sod ‘im! Mother told me evil men, keep away from evil men,” she parroted, her words sounding exactly like a lesson long learned and never forgotten.

“I’m putting you at seventy, so you could easily have killed the poor man and put his bones in the garden. You hate men, you say, so I can just imagine you, a lithe and maybe even pretty (though that’s hard to bring to mind) young slip of a lass hating men and needing to get rid of one if he forced himself on you…”

“Not dig… not dig…” she almost wept.

The door of the Interview room was knocked and Constable Pierce went to see who it was and what was so important that it had to interrupt an interview.

It was doctor Grimm, who’d made his way from his mortuary with what he considered important information.

“You’d better hear this, sir,” said Billy after Doctor Grimm had whispered a few things to him.

“Not now!” barked Inspecor Greengage, “I’m about to charge this woman with murder and I want it to go smoothly!”

The pathologist heard that, maybe the whole of the personel within fifty yards did, and he walked into the interview room uninvited.

“I’d like to be there when a toddler dug a pit and dragged a body into it,” he said, “it would have been a fascinating observation.”.

“It was this woman!” snapped Greengage.

“Maybe it was, but she was a toddler whan those bones were sunk into the back garden. Maybe a bit older. She might conceivably have been as old as ten. But no older than that.”

“I won’t hear it!” snapped Greengage, “I know what happened! It’s as plain as the nose on your face!”

“We’ve done DNA,” added the pathologist, smiling wanly. “They make very interesting reading, do the DNA results.”

“Take them away!” snapped Inspector Greengage, though deep in his heart he could feel victory slipping away from him due to damned science and DNA.

“He was her father,” smirked Doctor Grimm. “The bones, that is, the skeleton, her father. Oh, and he originated in central Europe somewhere, Germany or Austria maybe.”

“Wasn’t there a war on? Is that why she killed him? Because he was an enemy who had forced his way onto her mother?” stuttered the Inspector, “that’s it! You’ve helped solve it, Henry!”

“You’re three sheets to the wind,” growled Doctor Grimm, “just you take a couple of minuts and think about it! And if you do I believe you’ll find that the unfortunate creature you’re bullying into a confession has done nothing whatsoever wrong unless her own personal suffering is something she’s guilty of!” And at that Doctor Grimm slammed the door and marched towards the Superintendent’s office. Someone ought to reign that inspector in, and the man in the smart suit in his warm and pleasantly fragranced office was the one paid to do it.

Meanwhile, it was after school on the next day for the teenagers, and they gathered excitedly in Enid’s much quieter home. She led him up to her room.

“You mind what you get up to up there,” warned her mother. Doris Scratchpole was a young and jolly mother, so any warning from her was less serious than it might have been if Mrs Bluesday across the road in Anthony’s home had made it because many pregnancies, including one on the way, had warned her what can happen to a lass if her guard’s been torn down by a pair of sensuous eyes, and her Anthony had inherited his eyes from his father.

“We’ll do nothing but talk, mum,” replied Enid wearily, “you can join us if you like!”

“I’ll leave you in peace, I was fifteen once,” she laughed, “can I put the kettle on for you?”

“Later, mum,” replied Enid, and she turned to Anthony. “See what she’s like! Thinks we’ll be up to no good as soon as her back’s turned.”

“My mum’s worse, and it can be quite noisy in our house,” grinned Anthony.

“Let me tell you what I found our at school,” began Enid, “I cornered Mr Gringlepuck at school…”

“Mr what?” laughed Anthony.

“I know it’s a strange name, but I know that he likes me, so it’s all right.”

“Anyone in trousers would be a fool if he didn’t like you,” commented Anthony

“You’re biassed, Ant, and I like it that way. Anyway I asked Mr Gee (that’s what we call him because his proper name is so daft) about our half crown and he told me that had he been a few years older he might have spent some. But he did know that there was an old-time British currency that included the crown, which was five shillings or a quarter of a pound, so a half crown was two shillings and sixpence, or an eighth of a pound. But it went at with decimalisation and some of them are getting rare and can be worth quite a bit.”

“They were still being made in the nineteen thirties,” reminded Anthony, “and they were withdrawn, what, forty or so years later? So how did ours get to a patch of earth where a German fighter plane crashed?”

“I told Mr Gee about that bare clearing in the woods and he said he’s heard of it and we’d actually be covering it in history some time soon. But apparently it was all one big mystery when it happened. There was no sign of the pilot in the plane and no obvious reason why it had crashed or even why it was where it was. A search for whoever had been piloting the plane didn’t find anything so it was put down as just one of those things, though people were ordered to keep an eye out for a German pilot with cuts and bruises!”

“So that doesn’t get us anywhere,” muttered Anthony.

“But Ant, don’t you see? There are two strange men in the woods near the cottage, a German pilot and also a man who was buried in its back garden a few years later. What if the two men were one and the same man? What if the bones belong to, what might it be, Miss Winterbotham’s father? You know what my mum was warning us about getting up to? Well, imagine it: the older lady, the bones propped up on the bed, might have been wooed and won by the German pilot, they might have had a baby girl, and we know her now as a feeble oldish women called Winifred!”

“That makes sense, love! Oh, I could kiss you for your brains!”

“Go on then, but be quick, mum might come up!”

Mum did come up. And she didn’t knock. And she opened the door just in time to see her daughter’s tongue vanishing into Anthony’s mouth.

“Oh dear,” she sighed.

The two separated and tried to look as though nothing had happened.

“It’s half crowns, mum,” mumbled Enid, “that Anthony detected in the clearing in the woods.”

“Really,” she said, “that didn’t look much like ancient coins to me! But be warned, don’t et your emotions carry you too far down the road to perdition!”

“No Mrs Scratchpole,” promised Anthony, hoping that it was a promise he could keep if he could discover where perdition might be.

© Peter Rogerson 25.01,23

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