A Fatal Secret Read online

  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 pretty stable beneath her. At some point, she noted with relief, the old well had been safely covered by a lid of thick, roughly nailed-together wooden planks, shaped into a circle and then placed on top – probably to stop wildlife from falling inside.

  But as she looked down at it, she realised that it wasn’t fitting properly. Or, more likely, had it just eroded away at one edge? For as she looked more closely, she could see that there was now a small gap, perhaps a foot and a half wide, at one side.

  Feeling her heartbeat rise a notch, she walked around until she was level with the crescent-shaped gap and without taking the time to think about it, bent down and peered into the Stygian darkness inside.

  Instantly the smell of damp, stale water and algae assailed her nostrils. But the well was obviously deep, and she couldn’t really see to the bottom of its depths.

  ‘Eddie! Are you down there?’ she called.

  Silence.

  Trudy stood back. She would have to take a proper look, of course, so there was nothing for it but to pull the rest of the lid away – allowing more light to filter inside, giving her a better view. But she quickly found, much to her annoyance and chagrin, that tug and pull and heave as she might, she simply couldn’t shift it. It didn’t help that, over the years, the wood had warped and sunk into the outer rim of the well, making it hard to get a proper grip on it.

  Grimly, she realised she was going to have to get some help. Which would just give her colleagues something else to crow about! A poor little girlie who needed a big strong man to help her. She could already hear them sniggering. As if she hadn’t already been the butt of enough jokes all day, thanks to a grateful peer of the realm!

  Grunting and groaning, and almost wrenching her shoulder out of its socket, she finally admitted defeat and stood panting for a moment.

  Of course, it was unlikely that the boy had climbed through the gap and gone into the well. But you never knew. A boy eagerly on the hunt for chocolate might not have stopped to consider that the people in charge of hiding the Easter eggs might h
ave considered the inside of a disused well an unfit hiding place!

  So she took a breath then blew two long blasts on her whistle. It rent the quiet air, and sent a flock of peewits in the nearest field shooting up into the sky, giving their iconic call of alarm.

  After a minute had gone by, she repeated the process, and soon heard a voice hail her from the edge of the woods. Her heart fell when she recognised Rodney Broadstairs’ figure moving quickly down the hill towards her.

  It had to be him, didn’t it, Trudy thought mutinously. The golden, blue-eyed boy of the station. As she’d known he would, he started to grin at her the moment he saw her predicament. ‘Hello, what have you found then, gorgeous?’

  Trudy nodded at the well. ‘I can’t get the lid off – I think it’s stuck. But there’s a gap at the side, big enough for a boy to get through. It needs to be checked out,’ she said, feeling annoyed that she sounded as if she needed to justify herself to him.

  ‘Yeah, I suppose. Hey, you down there Eddie?’ he bellowed, leaning over and peering into the darkness. Trudy had already done the same, without any result. And once again, the silence remained stubbornly unbroken.

  ‘Right then – let’s get this lid off,’ Rodney said, rolling up his sleeves a little and taking an awkward grip on the edge nearest the middle of the well. Since he had a longer reach than she did, he did eventually manage to lift and drag the cover to one side, but Trudy wouldn’t have been human if she hadn’t smiled at how hard he found it. The language he used was colourful enough to make her mother blush.

  Sweating and red-faced, he finally let the heavy wooden circle fall onto the ground. And as one, Trudy and Broadstairs leaned over the edge of the circular red bricks and peered inside.

  Trudy hadn’t really expected to find the boy in there. So the sight of a dank circle of unbroken water didn’t surprise her. But then she saw what looked like hair, floating just below the top of the water surface. And below that, a slightly lighter shade of something submerged showed through under the dark, stagnant water.

  ‘Eddie was wearing a white shirt, wasn’t he?’ she heard Rodney say gruffly beside her. His voice was hoarse and dry, not at all like his usual, confident, cocky tone. And when she dragged her eyes away from the sight of that small patch of floating hair, she saw that he looked pale and slightly sick.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, her own voice wobbling precariously. Before they’d left, Sergeant O’Grady had given them a brief description of the boy, and what he’d last been seen wearing when he’d set off with his pals to hunt for the eggs.

  Forcing back the tears from her eyes, Trudy lifted her whistle to give three sharp, quick blows.

  As she did so, Rodney Broadstairs climbed onto the edge of the well and started to lower himself gingerly down. There would be a bit of a drop, even for him, for the well looked to be over six feet deep.

  She hoped he wouldn’t fall on top of the boy and wondered if she should stop him and tell him to wait for somebody to come, perhaps with a rope.

  But then she realised they simply couldn’t wait. There was just a chance that the boy might still be alive. But with his face fully submerged, and only his hair floating just below the surface, she knew how unlikely that was.

  And as she waited for her colleagues to come running, she couldn’t stop the tears from falling at last. Because she knew that the poor boy’s mother and father, waiting at home for news, would soon have their hearts broken forever.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Calling Probationary WPC Gertrude Loveday.’

  Trudy, hearing her hated first name called out loudly for all to hear, shot around and rushed forward to the usher, before he could call her for a second time.

  ‘Here, coming!’ she said breathlessly, hurrying towards the door being held open for her. She just had time to tug down her tunic top and make sure her cap was straight before entering the room.

  It was three days since the death of little Eddie Proctor, and the inquest had been opened first thing that morning.

  In a row of benches to one side, the public had filled the seats to overflowing, and in the front row, she recognised many of the immediate Proctor family.

  She’d gone with the local police constable that awful day to break the news of Eddie’s death to the boy’s mother and the rest of his family, and had comforted the poor woman as best she’d could. Now she gave a brief sympathetic nod to Doreen Proctor, a small brunette woman whose brown eyes looked enormous in her pale face.

  Forcing herself to keep her mind on the job, she turned her attention to the coroner, Dr Clement Ryder.

  Her friend and mentor nodded at her politely but with no signs of open recognition, and looked so much his usual calm and authoritative self, that Trudy felt herself relax.

  He also didn’t look the least bit ill, she noticed with a distinct sense of relief. It had been some time since she’d last seen him, and she must have been subconsciously dreading doing so, in case she saw any worrying signs of something being wrong with him.

  ‘WPC Loveday, I understand you were the one to find the boy’s body?’ Clement began professionally.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ she said.

  ‘If you will be so kind then as to tell the jury in your own words what happened on the afternoon of Sunday, 2nd of April?’

  Trudy turned to face the jury and gave a succinct, accurate report of what had occurred that afternoon. When she was finished, she cleared her throat and glanced questioningly at the coroner, but he had no questions for her. Her account had been full enough that there was nothing that needed clarifying or pursuing.

  *

  Outside the court, Trudy trudged back a shade despondently to the station. Tomorrow was the day she was to be lauded in front of the press and the city’s top dignitaries as the heroine of the hour, but never had she felt less like celebrating anything.

  *

  After Trudy’s departure, Clement called the medical witnesses, who testified that the boy had died of a broken neck, and not due to drowning at all. As Clement had expected, this caused a bit of a sensation in the court.

  It was soon explained that the well, being over eight feet deep, also narrowed slightly towards the bottom, so if the boy had been leaning over and had lost his balance, the chances were fairly good that he would have pitched down head first. And the water, which had turned out to be only about two feet deep wouldn’t have been enough to have broken his fall much.

  Even so, as he listened to the evidence, Clement wasn’t totally convinced by this explanation. The lad would only have needed to twist a little to either one side or the other to land on a shoulder. And wouldn’t it have been an instinctive thing for him to do so? Wordlessly, he made a brief note on his court papers.

  And there was another thing he’d noticed in the preliminary reports that had caught his analytical eye. So after the medical man had finished his piece, he cleared his throat, indicating he had further questions.

  ‘I take it the deceased’s hands were examined?’ he asked quietly.

  The police surgeon confirmed that they had been.

  ‘And did he have any detritus from the sides of the well under his fingernails, indicating that he had tried to scrabble at the sides of the well as he fell? Brick dust, green algae, mould, anything of that kind?’ he’d pressed.

  The medical man admitted that they’d found no such evidence, but then gave the opinion that that need not be significant. It was quite possible that the boy had been too surprised, and the fall too brief, for him to have had time to try to catch hold of some sort of support to help break his fall.

  Clement dismissed the doctor with a courteous nod, but was frowning slightly as he made more notes.

  When it was the turn of the boy’s family to give evidence, emotions ran high, as they were bound to. But especially so when the boy’s mother tearfully insisted that her son was a good lad, and would never have disobeyed the Easter egg hunt organiser’s admonitions to stay within the walled garden where all
the eggs had been hidden.

  Since nothing of further significance was brought to light after all the other witnesses had been called, it surprised no one when an obviously upset and moved jury returned a verdict of accidental death.

  All that was left for Clement to do was to censure the organisers of the hunt for not checking the grounds beforehand and spotting the potential perils of the inadequately covered well. No doubt, he added heavily, the de Laceys, owners of Briar’s Hall, would be quick to have a new cover made for the well. Or they might even consider filling it in altogether, which meant, at least, that a similar tragedy would be averted in the future.

  But for the weary, distraught parents, what could any of that matter now?

  Chapter 4

  Trudy Loveday took a deep, calming breath as she paused outside the main entrance to the swanky Randolph Hotel.

  Behind her on Beaumont Street was the magnificent edifice of the Ashmolean Museum, whilst off to her left was the oft-photographed Martyrs’ Memorial. But for all the times she’d passed by this famous building, she’d never imagined she’d ever set foot inside it.

  Beside her, she could feel her mother almost vibrating with similar excitement. Like her daughter, Barbara Loveday couldn’t really believe that they were about to be treated to lunch by an actual Earl. Well, not the Earl himself, naturally, but his secretary.

  Barbara’s husband Frank, however, was displaying emotion of a far different kind – that of distinct unease. Not for the first time, his hand crept up to his collar (which clearly felt too tight) to check his tie was straight. It was an article of clothing he only ever wore to weddings, funerals and christenings, and he eyed the passing people warily, as if expecting them to be pointing at him or smiling behind their hands.

  But the only people taking notice of him were the members of the local press, who’d been invited by the city of Oxford’s top brass to take photographs of the occasion and then interview the heroine of the hour for their various local newspapers.