14. THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

Inspector greengage has a one-sided debate with his wife and the two teenagers revisit Winifred

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

14. Out of Words

Inspector Greengage sat on his own in the incident room his head in his hands. Something was going wrong and he couldn’t for the life of him see what it was, and what dominated his mind was that he wasn’t so far from retiring himself, hadn’t reached the dizzy heights he’d hoped to once in his youth and he needed one triumphant arrest to seal whatever glory he might yet find in work.

He had Winifred Winterbotham in a cell and he had to let her go, should have sent her out already really but she hadn’t known so no trouble would come to him from it. That was his hope, anyway.

“Can I have a word with you, boss?” The question came at him on top of his self-doubt.

It was from that pretty young police woman, Constable Felicia Ruby. He had noticed her from time to time, in uniform, and he wondered just how special she’d look in plain clothes if she was offered a job in CID. Not that she’s had any experience, in detection, but he knew just how his own soul was lifted by the sight of a pretty smile, and she had one of those in spades. It might do him good, and he needed something to counter the rather dreary expression usually plastered on Deirdre’s face at home in the morning before he set off for work.

She didn’t lift his heart, but the young police constable did when he saw her. He’d married Deirdre almost thirty years earlier when she’d had the sprightly look and quick smile that he’d fallen for, and that long blonde hair that teased her shoulders as it hung down. He’d been obsessed by that hair. Deirdre, she’d been called, and they’d married, and it was then that she slowly morphed from Deirdre into dreary.

He blamed her parents. They had one foot in the church just about all the time, and she was becoming the same. Time passed, she’d gone on a few courses (residential, they’d been, and he sometimes wondered if she’d got up to something she shouldn’t have done with one of the young blokes because she came back pregnant, and he couldn’t remember doing anything remotely passionate with her for over a year. But she said he had, and that had to be that, though the dark tan of the baby’s face when it was born made him wonder again. But she said there was someone in her family tree who’d been black as the ace of spades maybe a century or two ago, and surely he knew that these things slowly passed through the gene pool until they were diluted, like baby Caesar.

He’d accepted her explanation, and it wasn’t until Caesar was ten or eleven that he’d started to wonder where he’d inherited his football skills from, because the boy had been a natural and he wasn’t. But there was no doubt, the teachers at his school said that the boy was a natural footballer, and what was possibly worse he had also inherited his mother’s brains and fondness for God, a deity who the Inspector had tried to accept into his world, but couldn’t find space for it anywhere.

All this sort of mushed in his head as he heard the young Constable ask him if she could have a word with him.

“Of course, Felicia. You don’t mind if I call you Felicia, do you? It is your name, after all.”

“That’s all right, boss.”

She’d caught him looking at her for fractionally longer than it was normal for a grumpy man of his age to look at a woman and suspected he might like looking at young women for more reasons than merely to see who they were. But not her, surely? She knew she had the sort of looks that young blokes almost fell over for, but he was old, wasn’t he? But she’d be on her guard, anyway, just in case. After all, the Inspector wasn’t the most pleasant of men.

“What is it then, Felicia?” he asked.

“It’s your suspect, sir. I’ve met people like her before, only one or two of them, and they’re sort of old and, how can I put it? Maybe going senile.”

“Oh, Felicia, she’s got you fooled then, has she? But I’m not easily taken in by that doddery act of hers. She’s got a secret, and she knows that I know what it is.”

“A secret, sir?”

He smiled proudly at her as if he had been privileged to peek beyond the world into a secret place where only he could see. “Her home, that broken down old cottage. It’s littered with bodies. Dead, murdered bodies.”

“Yes sir. I see, sir. The thing is, I don’t think she even knows what day it is.”

“It’s part of the act, Felicia. Tell me, how would you like to be in my team, in the CID?”

“I might… yes, sir, I’d love it!”

“I’m not promising anything, mind you, not at the moment. But we need the female input and you seem bright enough to have it in great dollops! Tell me, if I put you in plain clothes, what would you choose to wear?”

Here he goes, she thought. Men always like to perve at a woman’s choice when it comes to clothing, don’t they? What we choose to wear says something about us, I suppose. Especially some older men with a harridan at home. I’ve heard all about Mrs Greengage, a lay preacher at the Methodist church, full of fear and trembling and only occasional forgiveness. I wonder if she’s waiting for this Inspector to forgive her for that lad of theirs? Caesar, they call him, and he’s not got a drop of genuine Greengage blood in his veins, I’m sure of that!

But she’d better reply.

“A skirt, sir, and maybe a nice blouse. I’ve got a range of plain but smart blouses.”

he looked at her and noted the pertness of her bosom under her uniform shirt, and nodded.

“And skirt? What is your preferred style, Felicia?”

“Something around the knees, sir? Maybe tartan? Tartan, they say, goes well with my skin tones.”

“That would be nice, dear. I’m supposed to have some Scottish blood in me, so we’d go well together out on a case. Lovely.”

So not African blood then, you old perve, she thought, but I’d better not wear my favourite short ones if I’m anywhere near him…

Meanwhile, out in the real world school was over for the day, the weather was still balmy though it had rained yesterday later on, and Anthony and Enid decided to go for a walk through the woods to see if anything else had happened in the region of the old cottage. Anthony didn’t take his metal detector this time because it needed new batteries after he’d gone over Enid’s small front garden yesterday, and he managed to find three ring pulls from drinks cans, a few nails and a pound coin.

“You lucky thing!” he grinned as he gave her the coin, “now you’re rich as Croesus!”

“And who might that be?” she asked.

“Oh, a rich old King in mythology,” grinned Anthony, “and I reckon he had a darned sight more than a pound, but hey! We can’t all be millionaires, can we?”

“I wouldn’t want that much money,” Enid told him quite seriously, “I wouldn’t know what to do with it, especially when there are so many poor and homeless people everywhere.”

Anthony particularly loved Enid when she said things like that. She had a social conscience that he shared.

It was still daylight when they set off and they were both surprised to see that Huckelberry cottage was occupied again. The back door (someone had clearly been along to fix the hinge, the one that had been dangerous so far as they could remember,) and Winifred was standing in the open doorway, staring at the line of trees and the sky above them as if she had returned from a dark place and was back in the light.

She saw them when they paused at her gate, and actually smiled at them.

“Nazis don’t do owt to me,” she said, “damned jack boots! But I’se back here and I’se happy!”

“Can we ask you a question, Winifred?” asked Enid.

“Nasty Nazi asked me questions. About bones in the garden, and I said nowt ‘cause I know nowt”

“Where do you get your food from?” asked Enid. It had puzzled her since they had first come upon Winifred. A person needs to eat and she didn’t seem to have either an income or a source of food. Enid reasoned that if the woman went shopping she’d surely need a purse with money in it. After all, she thought, food costs money and this sad old woman didn’t seem to have any.

“Shop,” grinned Winifred, “I go shop. Take this.”

She reached behind the door and picked up a wicker basket. “Go shop by th’ river an’ lady puts stuff in basket. Like this.” And she showed them what looked like a tin of soup, though it was badly dented. “I open tin and eat,” she said proudly, “make food hot in oven.” She indicated the side oven next to an old wood-burning stove. “Got everything I need. Though Nazis gave me food I spat it out!”

“Winifred,” said Anthony gently, “they weren’t German from nearly a hundred years ago. They were policemen, British policemen.”

“Get you off!” she squawked for no apparent reason, suddenly losing her patience with them.

What they didn’t realise and maybe should have was she had just about exhausted her vocabulary and found it very awkward trying to keep up a conversation when she didn’t have many words in her head.

“Come on, Enid,” murmured Anthony, “lert’s go back home. I’ve something I want to show you on my computer.”

Enid nodded and turned to Winifred Winterbotham. “We’ll go then,” she said, and smiled, “and come back another day, maybe, to say hello?”

It was a question, but the elderly woman chose not to answer it. She’d run out of words for the moment, and that made her feel alone and unwanted again.

© Peter Rogerson, 25.01.23