The Echo of Crows, page 12
Jane thought maybe it should be in Eirion’s feature. Even though it was outside his paper’s circulation area, it certainly showed how barbaric some English people had been.
*
‘Stryd Crocbren,’ Eirion’s voice said ominously in the phone. ‘It means Gallows Street. Thing is, I thought there’d be similar names in parts of West Glam. But no. I checked it in two Welsh dictionaries and looked for other words.’
‘So crocbren means…?’
‘A structure to hang things from, like a gallows. The Welsh seem to have had the same execution devices in most places.’
Jane switched off the speaker, propped herself up on an elbow, held the phone to an ear. She didn’t want Mum to overhear what had become a grisly talking-point between her and Eirion since that sunny afternoon in the newly extended Appletree Close in Ledwardine.
‘Though, as it turns out,’ Eirion said, ‘there aren’t many obviously gallows-linked place names in Wales itself.’
Jane sniffed. ‘I can’t believe that, Irene. You’ve admitted to Wales being a nation of completely morbid bastards. They enjoy nothing more than a good funeral and a blow-out buffet afterwards. You’re not looking hard enough. What’s the Welsh for gibbet?’
‘I think it’s the same – crocbren. But it’s interesting that, in Herefordshire, all the well-known execution sites I could find are very close to the Welsh border – Longtown, Welsh Newton, Presteigne…’
‘Presteigne’s in Wales.’
‘Only by a few yards. I think it’s actually on the English side of Offa’s Dyke, the old border. And it’s got the best hanging story of them all. Or the worst, if you insist…’
‘I know, yeah,’ Jane said. ‘Mary Morgan, seventeen, hanged for killing the newborn baby she couldn’t support. The kind of so-called murder she wouldn’t even go to prison for these days. And there were all kinds of anomalies in that case. It was altogether shameful.’
‘A lot were,’ Eirion said. ‘But in those days… well, people kind of relished a hanging. The last one in Hereford was actually very early in the twentieth century – the very same century that sent a man to the moon.’ He laughed, sourly. ‘One small step… off the scaffold into thin air. Look, I’ve got to go. Story to write up.’
Jane’s thoughts wandered… imagining him covering executions, as he would once have had to do.
She could feel the village mushrooming around her, hearing Gallows Lane living up to its name, with the wind in the wooden hanging-frame and occasionally the sound of a convicted murderer, male or female: dead weight, swinging to and fro, his or her distended neck turning blue and pink.
Eirion’s voice pulled her back into the present. ‘You still there, Jane? I’ve got to go.’
‘Just a minute. Where are we going first, then?’
‘Well, Longtown seemed to’ve had more murders than anywhere else in your county, and there’s a place called Clod-something which has a notorious one going way, way back.’
‘I’ll look into it,’ Jane said, ending the call. She moved over to sit in front of the small bookcase, where she found a volume dealing with English murderers. She leaned back, with the book on her knees, momentarily closed her eyes and was immediately back in the field alongside Gallows Lane with Eirion, who was asking, Would you have watched? And then people from Appletree Close were gathering to watch her being hanged by Herefordshire Council.
Jane shuddered, convinced for a moment that she’d heard and felt the executioner’s rope around her neck sliding bumpily between the small, loose coils before coming to that thick, permanent, flesh-squeezing, bone-snapping stop. The rope stretching but not breaking, abrading flesh and severing veins. Feeling herself trembling on the rim of death, and unable to fight it. It wouldn’t take long and it was so close. Out here, it didn’t fade away like it did in the city, where generations of boots trampled it into the past. Out here, they were side by side with a history that went on invisibly trembling and judicial death was in many people’s memory, even though it had latterly been conducted behind prison doors.
And it should remain in the collective memory, not cosmetically erased. What next? War memorials?
23
Cried out
BLISS DROVE OFF swiftly after leaving Autumn at the hall door. Merrily offered her coffee and sympathy for Eddy’s demise and having become involved in the police investigation. Autumn, meanwhile, seemed reluctant to discuss her immediate predicament and focused on a safer topic in her comfort zone: had Merrily read the shepherd murder story…?
Years ago, on the Black Mountain above Longtown, there lived a hired shepherd, who managed a little farm for his master.
Merrily had read it twice: the longest and most detailed Black Mountain crow tale retold by Ella Mary Leather in her Folk-lore of Herefordshire. Another book had called it ‘a story of doubtful authenticity, although widely circulated as being true’.
Autumn had told her to read it if she wanted to know about crows.
But why would she need to, apart from Autumn’s appearance making her think of one?
With her coat folded on her knees, Autumn sat down close to the vicarage kitchen window. She had no overnight bag but Merrily guessed that Jane’s wardrobe could be raided, at least for some pyjamas, jeans and a sweater. Whether crow colours could be found would be more of a problem.
‘I realize I often resemble a crow. People say I’ve recently acquired a darker personality.’ Autumn pulled her own copy of Mrs Leather’s book from her shoulder bag. ‘Did you read the story?’
Merrily nodded. Mrs Leather had written that, in her time, there was ‘terrible jealousy and animosity’ between Black Mountain shepherds. And, in the story, the crows were the good guys. When the resentful brothers murdered and buried the young shepherd because he’d arrived in what they saw as their domain, it was the crows who cried out into the air about the crime.
‘The crows cried out for justice,’ Merrily said.
Autumn nodded. ‘And were overheard by neighbours, which was what finally got the brothers hanged.’
Merrily took her cue to put a question Frannie Bliss would have wanted her to ask.
‘Autumn,’ she said carefully, ‘did someone suggest that, a century or so ago, you would have been hanged… for shooting Eddy Davies?’
Autumn’s eyes narrowed. She unfolded her coat and slipped into it, as if she was starting to become a crow.
‘Someone told you that?’
‘Someone told me that you were wondering about it.’ Merrily took the chair next to Autumn’s.
‘I don’t remember shooting him and why would I? He was nothing but kind to me. I’ve never killed anything before. I can’t imagine ever doing anything violent. But what if I did under the influence of that drug? It wipes the memory.’
Autumn continued, dabbing her brimming eyes. ‘What if I did it and just don’t remember? That really frightens me.’
‘It would frighten anybody.’ Merrily reached for Autumn’s empty hand. ‘But, hey, please don’t get upset. Nobody now thinks you did it. We’re all trying to help and find out who did. And you might be able to help by maybe piecing together the bits you recall before and after the drug got into your system.
‘Let’s change the subject a bit for now. Roll back to when you came to see me and what that was for. And where the crows come into it.’
‘Crows…’ Autumn didn’t have to think too long about it, ‘…are everywhere in the Black Mountain area. They appear to know all its hiding places, all its secrets.’
‘I don’t think…’ Merrily paused, frowning, ‘that you totally believe that.’
‘Perhaps I do. Perhaps…’ Autumn was gradually drawing up the hood of her black and grey coat, hiding her hair, making herself more hooded-crowlike, ‘perhaps I’ve realized that by keeping out the everyday world, we let in secrets from the surrounding air and retain them. Are able to think about something and then slowly evaluate its veracity.’
It was coming up to five-thirty p.m. Merrily wondered which had darkened the most, the kitchen or the sky beyond the window. Had it become too late to visit the area they could be discussing?
Merrily had left her kitchen chair to switch a lamp on. She looked at the dark figure hunched close to the window, now giving a view of nothing but the night.
‘Is that why you’ve made yourself… should we say, an honorary crow?’
‘I…’ Autumn eased back her hood a little and smiled nervously, ‘…do seem to attract them. Since I was quite young, they’ve been flying down to me. Perching on my arm or my shoulder. It often seemed to happen if I had my hood up or I was wearing a black beret or a bobble-hat. As if they were welcoming me to their… their…’
‘Murder?’ Merrily asked.
Silence fell into the room.
‘Yes.’ Autumn’s smile was swiftly killed. ‘Murder is the correct collective noun. Crows are linked with murder. Whether they conceal it or reveal it. A murder of crows.’
Merrily sat down again and steadied herself on the chair arms.
‘I wonder who first decided to use that word for a gathering of them. Yes, they’re big but not harmful.’
‘And I wonder how long ago that was,’ Autumn said softly, as though the question had never occurred to her before.
Suddenly, questions were coming at Merrily from different directions but all pointing to the same places: villages around the crest of Herefordshire, the Black Mountains, which, over millennia, must have witnessed deadly cross-border skirmishes and many more personal killings than most areas.
24
Supernatural cellar
WHEN HAD THE crow story taken place? Years ago was all it said in the book. There would have been a particular year, surely, as this story was solid enough to culminate in an execution.
Merrily wondered how closely Mrs Leather had observed the Black Mountains’ most familiar scavengers and if the story contained a warning. The fact that none of the people had been named suggested it might be apocryphal. But why would Mrs Leather have made it up? She’d written that she had her own sheep which she said had responded to her whistle.
When they’d first met, Autumn had suggested there was something in the Black Mountains that Merrily should know about. Since when, a murder had happened and many other questions had arisen. It was time to find some answers.
‘Autumn, why were you happy to be arrested?’
‘Not…’ Autumn shook her head. ‘Not happy. Just… relieved that I wouldn’t be spending that night alone in the cottage.’
‘And the cottage is the reason you wanted to see me?’
‘Yes, but I certainly wasn’t going to tell the police about any of it, although that first night… at your church… I was going to tell you some of it.’
‘Yeah, go on.’
‘I went to the cottage again and… Let me go back to what I was going to ask you. As diocesan exorcist, you do accept that ghosts exist… from your own experience?’
Merrily said nothing immediately. She didn’t know what to tell her.
‘My personal experience is, you’d have to say, limited,’ she said at last. ‘But do I accept their existence? Yes. I’ve heard too many convincing accounts to reject any of them out of hand. Plus a few of my own encounters which defied any rational explanation.
‘What still puzzles me is that you didn’t once object to being arrested on a possible charge of murder?’
A slight shake of the head.
‘You actually wanted to be taken in?’
No reply. Autumn’s face was shining faintly in the lamplight.
‘I…’ Autumn didn’t look at her ‘…like I said, I just didn’t want to feel the night in the cottage, which was the old farm dairy.’
Feel the night. Merrily pondered the unusual phrase.
‘Autumn, I’ll put this directly. Was that because… because you didn’t think you’d be alone there? You haven’t told me of any particular problems you were having.’
‘Essentially,’ Autumn said, ‘the building appears not to have been a dwelling since Ann Jones was poisoned in there.’
‘What?’
‘Ann Jones.’
‘You’re… saying someone was poisoned there?’
‘By her husband,’ Autumn said. ‘William. He’d found a new woman and decided that his wife would have to die to clear the way for them. So he put arsenic into some broth he gave to her.’
‘Arsenic?’
‘Yes. It was found in her stomach,’ Autumn said, ‘and she died in agony, so that he could be with his young mistress, Susannah Rugg, from Monmouth. It was possibly Longtown’s most famous comparatively recent murder. You haven’t heard of it?’
Merrily shook her head. ‘If he wanted a different woman, why couldn’t he have just… left his wife?’
‘This was in 1790 – and they had two children,’ Autumn said. ‘Susannah was a… a working girl. And I don’t mean a washerwoman. He’d left Ann for her once but then returned under the guise of a reconciliation but that’s all it probably was, a guise.’
‘How do you know the Joneses lived in The Old Dairy?’ Merrily asked. ‘Presumably this was before it was a dairy.’
‘I think I said earlier. It was a tourist. A lot of them seem to know about the murders that took place locally. And there were a few very unpleasant ones. Not least this, which somehow remains…’
‘Were you told that you were moving into a house with such a tragic past?’
‘No, no. I don’t think the locals knew. It was a dairy probably for two centuries and more after that. I don’t think for a minute that Eddy knew. Perhaps having it renovated stirred something up. Don’t they say that interfering with an old building can bring out bad history?’
‘I’ve heard that,’ Merrily said. ‘So what happened to Jones?’
‘Jones and Susannah,’ she said, ‘were hanged.’
‘Both of them?’
‘Side by side. Susannah was only seventeen or eighteen. They hanged in adjacent nooses opposite the old gaol in Hereford. It was perhaps the city’s last public execution and it drew a big audience.’
Merrily didn’t react.
Autumn’s voice was dry. With both hands, she covered her mouth and nose, breathing through her fingers before continuing.
‘There was some sympathy for Susannah,’ she said. ‘She wasn’t involved in actually administering the arsenic but she was with him at the apothecary’s when he bought it. And she didn’t resist her own execution either. She’d probably had a pretty awful life and wasn’t resentful about losing it.
‘Are you afraid of ghosts?’ Autumn suddenly changed focus.
Merrily left a longish silence. ‘Most, no, but there are a few that test your mettle,’ she said. ‘Although I realize that most of them come out of what you might call the supernatural cellar.’
‘You mean a lower form of life?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ Merrily replied. ‘Burglars are often the lowest form of criminal, but one might be carrying a knife or something, and a middle of the night confrontation is best avoided.’ She sat up stiffly.
Autumn said, ‘Susannah was so young and described as beautiful and… harmless, I suppose. In the late eighteenth century, a teenage girl rescued from the dirty streets in whatever circumstances would have aroused pity.’
‘That’s really not so very long ago,’ Merrily said. ‘I shouldn’t imagine the city looked so very different. Many of the same buildings, essentially the same streets.’
‘And murder,’ Autumn said, ‘like crows, sometimes stays in the air.’
‘And you feel it’s still there in the cottage. One night in there was enough?’ Merrily paused. ‘Do you feel up to telling me what you saw, what you felt, because I need to go up there and—’
Autumn cut her short. ‘Not on your own?’
‘Well, maybe I’ll have another priest with me, but if you can give me an idea of what to expect…’
Autumn bent forward and the hood followed. ‘Well, it’s hard to describe feelings and atmosphere. Er… at night, there’s a feeling like you shouldn’t enter and, when you do, that you must not look in a certain place. I couldn’t. I tried to make myself, but I just couldn’t. I felt like a coward. Or maybe just crazy. I did make myself take one fleeting glance and I can’t get it out of my brain. It’s taken me over and I feel sort of ashamed. There’s good-hearted Eddy lying dead and all I can seem to think about is that place. I feel haunted. Whatever you experience will help me face up to it. To know if I did or didn’t imagine it would bring some sort of peace.’ Autumn stemmed the flow of tears with the tissue.
‘Look,’ Merrily said comfortingly, ‘we’ll start things tonight. I’ll get my daughter, Jane, to settle you into your bedroom and show you around while I ring a colleague.’
*
‘It’s thee, lass. Summat wrong?’ Huw’s voice was balm to Merrily’s telephone-pressed ear.
‘Yes,’ she said, ‘and it’s more urgent than your concern at Clodock, if you’ve got five minutes.’
Merrily poured out the whole story of the killing of Eddy Davies and the tragic recent history of Autumn Wise, as well as the Jones murder at The Old Dairy. When she’d finished, Huw, who had listened without interrupting, left a considered pause. ‘You’re reet, lass. This is more urgent. What we need to ponder first, though, is why her, why this place and why now?’
‘You’re right on that point. I haven’t had time to think too far into it. The place question answers itself, I think, since that’s where Ann Jones met her awful end. The matter of “now” is probably because the dairy is a home again and has a resident witness to the past trying to replay itself. And as for “why Autumn”, well, I just can’t imagine. Maybe because she’s so perceptive… and she’s vulnerable, losing her parents and then her friend…’
‘Aye, it’s certainly a sorry saga,’ Huw said. ‘And it does reinforce my impression there’s a pressing need for us in that area. A lot of things coming together. What were you thinking to do?’
