26.THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

A Chapter by Peter Rogerson

Two conversations about a historical series of deaths,

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

26. A Different Bullet

“Ah, Constable Pierce,” called the Superintendent when he saw the young officer on his way out of the station, “have you got a moment?”

Billy’s heart sank. A word with the Superintendent was one thing but this wasn’t the Inspector who he could hopefully deflect without too much trouble and he was on a promise at home with the lovely Amy agreeing to pop in for tea and whatever else the evening might provide. And he needed a bath to wash the grime of the day off him, not that his day had been particularly dirty, but he knew what he felt that he needed.

“I’m on my way home, sir,” he replied, “and it’s important that I’m not late.”

“Ah, young fellow. Got a young fellow calling on you, game of rugby, maybe, white shorts and a lovely jersey?” asked the Superintendent in the sort of voice that got close to betraying his own inner thoughts.

“Nothing like that sir, and I hate rugby.” Billy put as much emphasis on the word hate as he dared, knowing that the chief policeman in Brumpton Station spent a great deal of time talking about the game.

“Never mind. Never mind. The thing Constable is, do you believe what the suspect said to the Inspector? That she was pregnant when she was only twelve?”

“Could have been. It does happen, but I reckon it was unlikely. I reckon she must have been much older. And that about shooting her dad and burying him. Herself, a kid couldn’t have done that, not on her own. Even a man would find it difficult. So she’d have had to be a pretty strong woman to manage that.”

“That’s exactly what I beiieve,” nodded Partridge. “It’s good to know there are at least a few brains in this station! So what are you up to, Constable, if you’re in such a hurry?

The Superintendent was sdetermined to pursue a personal conversation because he felt, well, frustrated would be the most accurate way of describing it. “A night out with the lads, eh? Down the local where the beer’s not so bad and the men like to gather, away from their wives? Man talk, eh? Soccer and horses and that kind of thing?”

“I don’t have anything to do with horses and I’m nott particularly fond of soccer, sir, and I’m having a night in with my girlfriend if you must know.”

“Ah, very healthy that. It’s getting cooler now as autumn progresses. The two of you, feet up in front of the fire, she in a tiny skirt and you in your best shorts?”

“Not at all, sir! I only wear shorts on hot days in the summer!”

“But in front of your homely fire… and I believe young ladies like to see a man’s legs if they’re healthy and young.”

“I must go, sir, or I’ll be late!”

“Then I’d better not hold you up any longer and I will take note of your opinion. The woman may have got her own age quite wrong. It would be an easy mistake to make if her memory is of it being suggested that she was twelve years old.”

“I guess we’ll never know, sir.”

“No. I shouldn’t think we will, and maybe if she was only a child it’s what has caused her disastrous life since then. A lesson to us all, Constable: we men must keep our wedding tackle away from innocent young girls until they, well, have rings on their fingers!””

“Yes sir,” agreed Billy, moving away and remembering that the ring on Amy’s finger had been put there by her late husband and not particularly caring. “Goodbye then, sir,” he called back.

“Meanwhile, Inspector Greengage was discussing very much the same topic with Magnus Swift and Herr Schmidt over coffee in his office. A great deal of coffee was consumed in there, almost as much as in the Superintendent’s more luxurious office.

“The woman’s age when he raped her,” started Herman, “do we believe that she was still a child?”

“It didn’t sound much like rape to me, she being in the driving seat,” suggested Magnus, “I know kids of that age can be promiscuous as their hormones start flooding in, especially if there’s something extra in it for them, but as far as I can tell from her rather rambling explanation, there wasn’t.”

“You think that maybe she was an adult?” asked Greengage.

“I guess we will never know,” sighed Magnus, “if only we had a Tardis!”

We see the good doctor Who in my country,” smiled Herman, thinking that the duty solicitor was hoping to catch him out with a British cultural reference.

“And as there is no such thing as a time machine it’s a waste of our time discussing an important issue as if the planet abounded in them,” snapped Greengage. “What we need is a little female input. I’lll see if Constable Denver is at a loose end.”

“Maybe that will help,” mused Herman, “back in Germany I believe that more good is done when a female is involved in decisions than when one is not, and we must remember how important our womenfolk are. My own wife, bless her memory, was my own inspiration, as was my dear mother.”

Greengage picked up his internal phone and requested the presence of Constable Denver, to his office tout de suite, as he put it.

And the young woman was on the premises, researching the possibility that linguistic differences might have led the poor old woman from the cottage to believe that she had been anything but twelve when she had been forced into a physical sexual relationship by the man she believed was her father. She was getting nowhere but knew she had a long way to go before she would shake her head and admit failure to the inspector.

“You called for me, sir?” she said as she sat in the chair opposite Greengage.

“We are having a brainstorming session,” he said, “trying to understand our suspect, I mean, Miss Winterbotham, bless her, from as many perspectives as possible. I am here as a sort of chairman, Herr Schmidt is attending to a German and hopefully more generally humanitarian perspective, and Mr Swift has his eye on legal implications. We thought a feminine view might be useful.”

“I see, sir,” she murmured, aware that her chair had been placed where it was as a shop window for her legs, bearing in mind where the inspector was sitting. She crossed them and tugged her skirt as close to her knees as she could get it without the movement b eing horribly obvious. The duty solicitor noted the movement, however, and smiled to himself whilst Greengage found himself feeling an increasingly grumpy wave of disappointment washing over him.

“Well, have you any special feminine insight, Constable?” he asked.

“As I see it, everything to do with her her age at the time she conceived what turned out to be a still born baby occurred around the time there was a lot of free love in the news,” she said, carefully hving just read abouut social attitudes in the nineteen sixties. “You know, hippies and so on.”

“Free love. I remember that,” smirked Greengage, “everyone was at it! Let me see when this might have been. If the Miss Winterbootham woman was born in, say, 1945 or two years after the German pilot crash-landed his plane, then she would have been twelve in the late fifties. That was before all that free love dominated the news.”

“You are off the subjecyt,” interrupted Herr Schmidt, frowning, “there was a morality in those days that made it highly unlikely that he would have ventured to impregnate the woman who was to be my sister’s mother so soon after meeting her.” Anyway, you are assuming that the freer attitudes to love and so on during the war precipitated a swift physical relationship.”

“It’s all guesswork,” snapped the duty solicitor, “and by law I must defend my client using facts and facts alone!”

“In my country we say something along the lines of tell me who you go with and I’ll tell you who you are…” muttered Herman, “and I must applaud you, Herr Swift!”

“Constable? Any comments?” asked Inspector Greengage, trying to get a glimpse up the attractive skirt sitting opposite him.

“Well,” she said, “we’ll never know the truth about her age and I sared say it no longer matters almost seventy years after the event. What we do know is that she had a still born baby after what she describes as games with the German airman who she calls daddy, then finds her mother up to the same games with him and either wittingly or unwittingly shoots both lovers with a single bullet that goes through the man and penetrates through her mother, and proceeds, somehow, no matter how weak or strong, young or old, she may be, to bury the man outside in the patch they call a garden, and props her mother up in the bed in imitation of life.”