THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (11)

11. The Daddy

“I’m nipping into town to see if there’s anything in the archive of old papers and such that they keep in the library to see if I can find out something interesting about Winifred’s cottage, as it’s my day off and Amy’s at work” Billy told Anthony when they passed each other in the street, Anthony on his way to call on Emma and Billy to the library in Brumpton.

“What do you expect to discover?” asked Anthony.

Billy shrugged his shoulders, “I can’t be sure I’ll find anything,” he replied, “especially about the war years because not much was published in case a snippet of it helped the Germans when they attacked our forces,” replied Billy, “but I’d like to look, anyway.”

“Damned wars!” hissed Anthony, who was beginning to become a pacifist. History at school had taught him that wars were only usually fought in the best interests of a minority, usually the well-heeled and more affluent members of society. He was convinced that rich old men sent healthy young men to die in battle when they wouldn’t go anywhere near danger themselves and he thought it grossly unfair. After all, he was young himself.

Billy nodded his head. “I know,” he agreed.

“Can I come with you?” asked Anthony, “when I’ve picked up Emma that is?”

“Of course! I’ll be in the reference section where there’s an archive of local newspapers. I’m hopeful that the Brumpton Echo published something that might help us understand about the place during those rather sad and chaotic years.”

“I won’t be long, then and ‘I’ll meet you there with Emma,” replied Anthony.

Emma was only too happy to accompany him to the library, though she was doubtful that they’d find much. When she was ready they set off. It was a lovely day, warm for the autumn, and he smiled at her. She was dressed in an attractive top and smart shorts.

“I’ve been on-line,” she said, “and I can’t find much about the old cottage. It’s as if it was never built, though it is mentioned in a reference in the 1940s to a fire in the woods caused by an aeroplane crashing into some trees. Apparently ti was quite a blaze and they were worried about the fire spreading and actually setting fire to Brumpton itself.”

“Maybe there’ll be more in the papers from those days,” said Anthony hopefully.

“We’ll see,” smiled Emma, and when she smiled like that he just wanted to hug her. But by then they were on the street and he guessed she wasn’t too keen on public displays of affection, not that he would mind.

They didn’t live far from the town centre of Brumpton where the library was situated. It was an elderly building, possibly even Victorian when there was a great deal of library building reflecting a surge in the need of the availability of books and knowledge for all.

There was a reference library at the far end of the main building, and after passing fiction, all arranged alphabetically, and a range of non-fiction aisles they reached the one reserved for archives. Everything about it told that the shelves had been there for a long time, the wood being sturdy but scored and scratched over time, and the marks filled in with decades of polish.

PC William Pierce, known to them as Billy because he was a near neighbour and not a deal older han them, was sitting at a microfiche machine and he was already looking excited.

“I’ve found quite a bit about the place,” he told them, “and from the look of it the cottage was already quite old when the first of these reports was written in 1943. They’re a bit vague, probably on account of them having anything an enemy might find useful edited out before they were printed. And, of course, it all goes back quite a long way and I guess some things might have been omitted when the microfiche file was created.”

“I understand that,” murmured Emma.

“Well, the first reference I’ve come on involves a fire in the woods near where the cottage is now. Maybe half a mile away, maybe a bit further, and from what I’ve read it was lucky the fire didn’t spread to Huckleberry cottage and burn it to the ground!. Apparently the blaze was so fierce there was a real fear of it spreading half way across the county so they worked at putting it out. There hadn’t been an air-raid recently in the Brumpton area, so they didn’t have bomb damage to fight as well. Fortunately the river isn’t so far away and as it was December there was an adequate supply of water!”

“Do they know what started the fire?” asked Anthony.

“It seems an aeroplane fell out of the skies,” Billy told them. “Look: I’ve just got to a later report about the aeroplane. Listen:” and he read from the newspaper report, “the machine was a German fighter aircraft and there was no sign of the pilot, so it is assumed that he must have bailed out in order to save his own life with no regard to those of anyone living below. There has been no sign of him since the crash, and an extensive search is under way as he is probably an enemy spy.”

“The inconsiderate devil, letting his crashing plane risk people who live in the woods!” muttered Anthony.

“Wouldn’t you try to save yourself if you were in that position?” asked Billy, “because I reckon I would.”

“Maybe,” conceded Anthony.

“I would,” grinned Emma, and Anthony gripped her hand ans squeezed it gently.

Meanwhile, at the nearby police station Inspector Greengage decided to interview Winifred Winterbotham again, this time with Sergeant Goodbody sitting in. He was convinced that she had done something for which the law could punish her, and a new skeleton had appeared in the garden as well as what Doctor Grimm had suggested might be other graves containing even older human remains. Greengage had opted to ignore those for the time being. If they were old as they looked they might contain bodies that had been dead for too long for him to be able to accuse Winifred Winterbotham of having anything to do with them, though if it turned out they were a last option then he might have them investigated. He had taken a great dislike to the dithery elderly lady he knew in his heart of hearts was almost certainly a vicious killer.

“So tell me, Miss Winterbotham, how do you like your cell?” he asked.

“Cell? What’s a cell?” she asked.

“Inspector, her vocabulary is limited, very limited,” whispered Sergeant Goodbody.

“Keep your nose out of my questions, Goodbody!” hissed the Inspector back to him. “The cell, woman, How do you like it, I asked.” he said fiercely to Winifred.

“I dunno,” she replied, “mother never mentioned a cell.”

“The room that you’re in downstairs at this police station?” he barked. “Where we put you when you’re not talking to me up here?” he told her as if he was suddenly talking to a toddler.

“Oh, my bedroom here? Nice. Comfy,” she replied, smiling, “no Gestapo hooligans near, to bully or hurt me.”

He shook his head. Either the woman was genuinely living in the past or she was the best actor he’d encountered in the best part of a lifetime of bullying suspects.

“Never mind,” he forced out, “tell me about the body buried in the garden at your cottage?”

“The body?” she queried, “in the garden?”

“Yes. Buried!” he sapped back at her.

“Oh, the man? The man in the garden beyond the back door?” she smiled.

“It was a man. The pathologist told me that.”

“Daddy. My daddy,” she smiled, and then a tear somehow found its way from her fantasy life to the real world, and rolled down her cheeks.

© Peter Rogerson 23.01.23

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (10)

10. The Two Lovers

“Are we really boyfriend and girlfriend, then?” asked Anthony of Emma, nervously. He knew that he really liked her, but he was afraid of liking a girl, bearing in mind what his parents liking each other as much as they obviously did had produced a king sized family and he was sure his mum was pregnant again. He’d done human reproduction in social sciences at school and he guessed that there was a real connection between the number of children in a family and the emotional attachment of their parents.

And he wasn’t too keen on being a member of a large family, with kids everywhere, siblings he knew that’s what they were, but there was always noise in the house, especially with babies crying at night. And another one (possibly) on the way now that little Suzie was beautifully becoming a toddler rather than a noisy baby.

“Do you look on me as your girlfriend, then?” she asked.

“You’re my friend and you’re a girl,” he replied hesitantly, “in fact, I think you’re lovely!”

“Have you any boys as friends, and do you think they’re lovely?” she asked.

He shuddered. “I’m not gay!” he almost shouted. That was a common protestation in the playground at school with boys teasing each other.

“Then you’re my boyfriend, and I give you full permission to be my girlfriend, and if you are I’ll see about going on the pill,” she said with a gentle smile.

“The pill?” he queried, “the teacher told us about it at school but to be honest I don’t understand it,” he confessed.

“It’s easy. It stops a girl ovulating, which means she can’t get pregnant if she finds herself going beyond the kissing stage with a boyfriend,” she said, “and you’re my boyfriend. You said so.”

He was beginning to feel embarrassed when Constable Pierce saw them from the other side of the road, not far from his own home.

“I say, you two, do you want to hear the latest about Huckleberry Cottage?” he called.

“Yes please,” they replied in unison. Hand in hand, they crossed the road to talk to him. He grinned at them. “We’re at the hand-holding stage, are we?” he teased.

“It’s just that I want to make sure she’s safe on the road,” replied Anthony weakly.

“You mean I want to make sure you’re safe!” objected Emma, “Girls can manage roads quite safely, you know without the help of testosterone!”.

“That’s like me and Amy. We hold hands when we’re crossing the road,” grinned Billy.

They reached him, and Emma smiled at him “what’s the news then?” she asked.

“There was a suspicious looking hump in the back garden, the sort of hump that was exactly the right shape and size to be a grave,” he said, “and old Grimm had it dug up. There was another skeleton in it, dressed in very little that hadn’t rotted well away. He reckoned it much have been there at least as long as than Ada in the bedroom, maybe up to fifty years.”

“How gross,” murmured Emma.

“And the pathologist is pretty sure it was a man, middle aged maybe.”

“I thought the mother and daughter had lived there for ever on their own,” said Anthony, “two bedrooms, two occupants.”

“The older of the two, the skeleton of Ada, was in a double bed, wasn’t it? And double beds are usually bought for two people, usually married couples who like being close together when they sleep” suggested Billy. “Then there’s the contents of the wardrobe. Pushed almost out of sight and not many of them, but some male clothes.”

“So maybe Ada had a husband? After all, she did get a daughter!” suggested Emma, warming to the idea that the long loneliness that Winifred had suggested may not have been so single-sexed as all that.

“Men and women do need each other,” murmured Anthony “I’d say they do,” laughed Billy, “look at me and Amy. We’re getting married when we feel the time’s right, and I’ll make sure you two lovebirds are invited. But there’s more news about the clothes in the wardrobe. They’re all pretty old. Even those belonging to Ada, to be honest. There’s not much bought in the last thirty years, according to Felicia, you know, the woman constable who reckons to know a bit about fashion.”

“If they’re Ada’s that might be a clue as to how long ago she died,” suggested Emma’

“That’s what Felicia suggested. But there’s more, something intriguing. One of the male garments is a uniform. A pilot’s uniform, but not RAF or anything local. It is German and we reckon dates from the second world war. What do you make of that?”

“Spooky,” breathed Anthony, “food for thought.”

“A great deal of food for quite a lot of thought,” agreed Billy, “a great deal indeed.”

Meanwhile, at Brumpton police station Inspector Greengage was being given what was euphemistically called a bollocking by Superintendent Partridge who didn’t particularly like him anyway. Partridge considered that not only did Greengage have a silly name, one that didn’t fit in with his idea of a smooth and modern police force, but he had too much of a brittle way of talking to the public, be they merely reporting something that annoyed them or suspects in an incident.

“It’s not good enough, Greengage,” he said brusquely.”

“What isn’t, sir?” asked the Inspector, at a loss at to what he might have done to displease his Superintendent.

“This,” barked Partridge, and he switched the recording of Greengage’s interview with the Winterbotham woman at the point where his Inspector had decided to bully Winifred into confession.

“That’s standard procedure,” muttered the Inspector defensively, “I was bog sure she was guilty and I thought it might ease her conscience if she got it off her chest.”

“Then the way you shouted at one of our brightest and best constables, Felicity Denver,” sighed the Superintendent, “you made her look and feel stupid and you were the wrong one, not her!”

“She’s a woman and in my opinion women were never bred to be any good at police work,” Greengage decided to be brave enough to come out with, quite aware that it would sound ridiculous but saying it anyway.

“Then you’re offending my wife, and she’s a chief inspector in Marnford division, and if I tell her what your opinion is you’d better hope you never bump into her on a cold and draughty night or she’ll give your nether regions a lesson you won’t like. No sir, not like at all!”

Greengage decided that apology for everything under the sun was his best option if he wanted to cut the Superintendent’s chastising to a minimum, and it worked.

“By the way, Inspector, what do you make of the unlawful burial in the garden at Huckelberry Cottage?” asked the Superintendent.

“Unlawful burial, sir?” he asked, his stomach contracting when he realised that his own obsession with one suspect had left him to ignore fresh evidence as it came in.

“Wake up Greengage! It must be a good hour since Doctor Grimm discovered the body and I was expecting you to tell me who it is and how it got to be there!”

Inspector Greengage could have willingly watched the floor under his feet open and suck him down into a realm where there was no such thing as a sharp-tongued Superintendent or a nosy pathologist or even a wife.

“I’m on it, sir,” he squeaked, and made his way back to the Incident Room before the Superintendent could throw any more questions at him.

© Peter Rogerson 22.01.23

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (9)

9. The Bullet.

“I don’t use the sort of language I’d like to use when I think about him,” almost exploded Emma to Anthony when they were back on the street and on their way home.

“I’d say he was a bit of a swine,” agreed Anthony, “and I agree with you. He’s the sort of man who jumps to conclusions too easily.”

“As if old Winifred shot her mother!” exploded Emma, “when it looked like she didn’t even know she was dead!”

“Maybe she had her suspicions,” suggested Anthony nervously, “after all, that lousy inspector got one thing right: she did know how to pull the trigger on a gun!”

“But the way I saw it she had no idea what a gun is,” sighed Emma, “it was no more than a toy in her hands.”.

“Yet she almost shot one of us with it and if by accident the bullet had hurt or even killed you I’d willingly hang her from the nearest tree until she was as dead as that skeleton in the second bedroom.”

“Would you?” grinned Emma, “you are… I don’t know what to say… but you are!”

“What, I’m unspeakable?” he asked.

“Lovely,” she said, blushing, “if you’d do that for me, I mean.”

“This is getting embarrassing,” he whispered, “but you must know that I like you.”

“And I like you, quite a lot,” she smiled’

“Quite a lot,” he agreed.

“Amen,” she sighed, and she planet a tiny kiss on his cheek.

Then she became serious. “But the question Big Head Inspector left us with is where did she get the gun from? I mean, if I wanted a gun, which I don’t, but if I wanted one I wouldn’t have a clue where to get one from, not a real one anyway.”

He nodded. “I had a cap gun when I was a nipper, but no way could that do anything more scary than make a noise. And not a noise anything like a real gun makes.”

“She was always on about her mother and an enemy that scared the life out of her,” reminded Emma, “what about this for a theory? They found themselves cornered in their little cottage by a vicious Nazi and somehow they wheedled his gun from him. That might explain her fear of Nazis as well as the presence of a gun.”

“Could be” acknowledged Anthony, “except enemy soldiers were said to be really well trained and back then and it would be unlikely that the old woman, on her own, would have been able to put up a fight when she had a baby to look after. Because, if you think about it, our old lady, Winifred Winterbotham, would have been a tiny baby if a stormtrooper came this way.”

Meanwhile, back in the police station Winifred Winterbotham had been taken to the interview room and sat in a chair. When asked if she wanted the help of a solicitor she hadn’t the remotest idea what the question meant and moaned, shaking her head.

Inspector Greengage was quite happy that the old women meant that she didn’t want legal help, but PC Felicia Denver, fresh from the horrors of the cottage in the woods, was sitting next to the Inspector.

“A word, Inspector,” she asked.

“What is it, Constable?” he barked.

“I’m sorry, sir, but she didn’t mean she didn’t want a solicitor,” she said, “because she has no idea what a solicitor is.”

“Rubbish Constable!” snapped Inspector Greengage, “I Know that she knows perfectly well what a solicitor is because everyone knows. So stop interfering. You’re only here because you’re female and not because you know a murderer when you see one.”

“I know a pathetic old woman who’s lived on isolated life for seventy or more years and the only conversation she ever had over all that time was with a deceased mother,” said Felicity tactfully.

“Who she shot!” snapped Inspector Greengage, aware that this interruption to what he intended to be a triumphant questioning leading to a tearful confession was being recorded.

“Sir, we don’t know that,” sighed the Constable, nervously aware that she was being a tad too brave bearing in mind the reputation that Inspector Greengage had accumulated over a long career, and “we’re here to establish that,” she added.

“You will leave this room now, Constable!” he barked, “I am right and you are wrong and that’s the way it’s going to be!”

Constable Felicia Denver couldn’t believe the attitude of her superior officer, but did as he said with the kind of expression on her face that illustrated her disbelief and that Inspector Greengage took as dumb insolence and decided to report it to the Superintendent as soon as he could. Whether Superintendent Partridge would take any real notice is a moot point: his entire attitude was based on a need to keep his seat at whatever cost to others and prevent any unnecessary boat-rocking.

There was to be good news for both the prisoner Winifred Winterbotham and Constable Denver so sooner had the latter cast a scowl back at her superior and stomped towards the Incident room.

“Felicia,” called a voice.

It was Doctor Henry Grimm, the pathologist, who was making his way to report a curious find to the Inspector. He knew tha Constable largely because, despite not being the most handsome man in the Universe, he thought of his admittedly dumpy self he as a desirable object so far as the female gender ought to be concerned, and had taken a liking to Felicia whenever their paths crossed, which wasn’t often enough for him.

“Sir?” she asked.

“Henry, as I keep telling you,” he childed, “like that king who lopped off the heads of an inordinate number of wives.”

“Sir?” she repeated.

“Any idea where Inspector Greengage might be hiding?” he asked.

“He’s in the interview room stitching up an old woman,” replied Felicia.

“Then what I have discovered might interest him and possibly her more,” grinned Dr. Grimm, “will you tell him, or shall I?”

“I’m not flavour of the month, so you choose, Henry,” she said.

“I’ll tell you first, and you can pass it on to him if it does you any good,” smiled the doctor, “you might choose to tell him that the bullet we found with the skeleton remains of Ada Winterbotham can’t have killed her because, and here’s the thing, it had never been fired! At a guess, and it’s only guesswork from now on because of the deterioration of the lady’s remains, probably because a loving daughter sat too close to her when they were debating the afterlife together, but the bullet I dug out of the shattered bones was just a harmless piece of metal. It had never been fired and therefore couldn’t have done her any harm.”

“I’ll tell him,” smiled Felicia, happy at the idea she might spoil the Inspector’s day.

“Enjoy!” winked the doctor, wondering if he should invite her for a drink and a cosy after work, and deciding to leave it for the time being. Let the girl have her moment first!

Felicia knocked the door to the Interview room and without waiting to be invited in she opened the door just as she heard the Inspector tell the unhappy woman sitting opposite him that he knew she had shot her mother, it was the worst thing a daughter could possibly do, worse even than swearing in church, and what’s more it carried a heavy jail sentence.

“Sir,” hissed Felicia.

“What now?” barked the Inspector darkly, hating the obvious good looks of the wretched constable.

“Doctor Grimm wanted me to tell you that the bullet in the skeletal remains of Ada Winterbotham has never been fired so it can’t have been the cause of her death.”

Inspector Greengage stared with disbelief at the Constable.

“Go away!” he barked, “and you never told me that!”

“Yes sir,” smiled Felicia, knowing he might not have wanted to hear it but his prisoner certainly had. She had noticed out of the corner of her eyes the little smile that appeared for a moment on the old woman’s face when she said it.

© Peter Rogerson 21.01.23

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (8)

8. You Wouldn’t Like It?

By the time that Emma and Anthony were actually in the police station, they were invited to wait for a senior policeman in an interview room, and everything seemed to be very serious and because of the sterile nature of the room, almost Dickensian, they felt uncomfortable. Neither of them had any idea how anything they’d seen could anyway help the police with their enquiries. And anyway, the gun didn’t really work, not ptoperly. did it?

They didn’t have long to wait before Inspector Greengage made his way in.

He was a serious man who had probably never told a joke to anyone, ever. His mouth told them that. It may have been because he was the senior investigating policeman and therefore had seen some dreadful things in his many years in the police force and, being close to retirement himself, had long since lost the optimism that had marked his youth. Now he sat opposite them at a table that bore signs of what must have been a century of wear, and tried to smile. But such facial aberrations were alien to him and the overall impression was a scowl.

“I am in charge of this case,” he said in a voice that was prone to squeaking.

Unsure as to what he really meant the two teenagers remained silent before Anthony braved the question that was on both of their minds.

“What case?” he asked.

That miserable distortion of his features in lieu of a smile once again, and, “the murder of an unknown person in Huckleberry Cottage in Brumpton Woods,” he replied with sufficient gravity to freeze their hearts.

After what seemed a dangerously long pause, Emma ventured, “I didn’t know that was what it was called.”

“It’s on the deeds,” Inspector Greengage told them.

“Oh,” muttered Emma, not really sure what he meant by deeds.

“The owner of the property, Miss Ada Winterbotham was murdered there and I wanted o ask you a couple of questions as you’re witnesses.”

“What? To a murder that might have happened ten years before we were born?” asked Anthony.

“That’s rather silly,” added Emma in support of the boy, “we can’t possibly have witnessed what happened, so how come we’re witnesses?”

“You didn’t,” confirmed Inspector Greengage unnecessarily, “it would take a very stupid person to suggest that you did.”

“But you called us witnesses,” protested Emma.

He nodded slowly. The logic of what she was saying made him take an instant dislike to the two of them, though to his mind in a year or two the boy might make a useful player for the Brumpton rugby club. In his mind if he called someone or something by a particular name, then that is what that person or thing was for perpetuity, so they were witnesses whether they liked it or not. It made life easier and he had long ago worked out that if you remove awkward unnecessary complexities from things those things immediately become considerably more simple. So these teenagers, to his mind, were witnesses even thought they couldn’t have witnessed events gthat occurred before their lifetimes, so witnesses they would remain.

“Do you think that Miss Winifred Winterbotham shot her mother dead?” he asked.

“No,” replied Emma, but Anthony gave the question a little more consideration.

“It’s possible. We didn’t see what happened. Our parents hadn’t yet mated,” he said, making use of a recent lesson at school in which human reproduction was the main topic, combined with advice as how to avoid it. This was a topic he planned to discuss with his parents who already had a large family and he rather suspected that his mother might be pregnant again if the rapid growth of her girth was anything to go by.

“Meaning?” asked Inspector Greengage of Anthony.

“The sperm hadn’t yet met the egg, so I hadn’t been conceived,” he said, thoughtfully, though Emma found it amusing and had to stop herself from giggling.

“Very erudite of you,” replied the Inspector who decided that if it was at all possible he’d fit this mouthy boy up for the murder and see how he liked the prospect of spending the better part of his life behind bars.

“We can’t possibly know anything,” Emma pointed out to him.

“But you were close friends with the younger lady, Winifred Winterbotham?” said the Inspector, as if it was a proven fact and almost suggesting that friendship per se must involve them in being part of physical deeds that occurred anywhen in the past.

“Not exactly friends,” said Emma, defensively, “we only saw her twice, once and then when we went with Constable Pierce the next day.”

“And what was the nature of that friendship?” he asked as if what Emma had said meant nothing.

“It was her telling us to leave her alone and then threatening us with a gun,” Anthony said.

“And telling us she was scared of Nazis,” added Emma.

“She seemed to think the second world war was still raging and that just about everyone was in cahoots with the enemy,” explained Anthony.

“Oh dear. That’s impossible,” announced Inspector Greengage, “there’s no way she lived almost eighty years without knowing that the war had ended. There’s radio and television… she must have seen or heard a lot about it. And when she went to school. Don’t they still teach modern history in schools any more?”

“There’s no radio or television in, what did you say it was called? Huckleberry Cottage? And she said she never went to school,” explained Emma with a trace of impatience in her voice, “it was as if she and her mother dropped out of all records years and years ago. Anyway, we’ve told you all we know.”

“Not quite, young lady, not quite indeed! I believe a weapon was discharged? One that sent a missile into the kitchen sink and shattered it? One that might have hurt or even killed anyone within range of it?”

“But she didn’t mean to!” protested Anthony, “she was always pulling that trigger and all it did was click. And then, that once, it went off with the loudest bang I’ve ever heard. But she didn’t know that would happen. She didn’t mean to fire it. You must have seen her and noticed what she’s like.”

“Some vicious killers can put on quite an innocent face if they want to get away with murder,” growled the Inspector, “I’m not fooled by their antics. Playing the innocent doesn’t help them when they’re facing me, you can be quite sure of that.”

“I think that’s horrible,” murmured Emma.

“But it’s what keeps you safe on the streets, young lady! But I have one more question that you may be able to help me with. Assuming she shot her mother, years ago when she still knew what she was doing, where did she get the gun from?”

Meanwhile, at Huckelberry cottage Winifred Winterbotham was ringing her hands.

In her mind, things were coming to a fine pass, like it was predicted in the early years of her life when daddy had cuddled her and cradled her head and warned her about the enemy.

“Don’t fill the child’s head with silly stories!” Mother had said, quite severely seeing as Mother hardly ever spoke severely.

“She needs to be warned about the Nazis!” he had snapped, sharply for him because he, too, was hardly ever sharp.

“The Nazis?” Winifred had asked.

“The greatest evil on this world,” he had said, “they come along when you least expect them, and then… you wouldn’t like it, that you wouldn’t!”

Wouldn’t like what?

She had no idea. But she did remember the warning because it came from daddy and daddy was all-knowing.

© Peter Rogerson, 19.01.23

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (7)

7. Doctor Grimm Speaks Out.

While the two teenagers were accompanying Police Constable Pierce to the Brumpton Police Station where he thought they might be expected to make statements about the shooting in the cottage in the woods, the elderly Winifred Winterbotham collapsed in a sea of confusion.

It had been a long time since she had enjoyed any kind of grip on reality and now she watched as her world was slowly dismantled, yet at the back of her mind there was a secret that might be unearthed, one that she wanted to keep hidden forever. Several of the newly arrived on the scene female police officers tried to engage her in conversation, but they might as well have not been there for all the response she gave. She knew that it was possible for her to weaken, and then all her toxic memories would zoom to the surface and he biggest fear of them all was that the Nazis would get to know them.

Doctor Henry Grimm, besides being a plump and rather officious man who would have given anything to be six inches taller, was the Home Office pathologist working in Brumpton and surrounding district, and when he saw the last mortal remains of Ada Winterbotham he took a step back, and swallowed.

“The lady is deceased,” he proclaimed when he hd settled himself, “and had I come here twenty years ago I’d probably have said the same.”

Everyone present had known she had passed away some time ago, so his diagnosis wasn’t unexpected. What was more a subject for debate and the subject of a macabre sweepstake was how long ago she had slithered from the world of the living into the world of the dead, and the best Dr Grimm could come up with was his statement which included the term twenty years. A specialist in the subject of bones and how time weathered them would be needed to give a more precise date for her decease.

But Mr Grimm was nothing if he wasn’t thorough, and he described the woman’s remains in as great a detail as he could into a small recorder that he kept with him everywhere he went. And there was precious little to mention other than occasional references to skeletal remains. However, he intended to get to the bottom of what might have caused her death. The woman had clearly been ancient at the time of her decease, but he wanted to make an intelligent estimate as to when that might have been, and why it had happened, and to that end and much to his own surprise he found an unexpected clue.

“Ah-ha, what have we here?” he exclaimed, and one of the newly-arrived police women, being of an inquisitive nature, watched closely as he pointed to what he described as an impossible shattering of a bone that was almost out of sight under a mass of other parts of the skeleton.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Let us see,” he replied, and he carefully poked around until he found what he was looking for.

“Ah-ha!” he exclaimed for a second time, ”we have a cause of death, and it is so clear cut that there can be no dispute!” And he carefully picked up something that was almost buried within the skeleton, and held it aloft for all to see.

“A bullet!” he exclaimed with almost magisterial confidence, “nine millimetre by the look of it, and quite clearly been here since the poor soul was shot!”

He really should have examined it, more closely, but he didn’t. After all, he wasn’t an expert on armaments.

“Suicide?” asked the policewoman, warming to a story she would tell herself in the deliciousness of her bed when she was alone but didn’t want to be.

“Probably not,” suggested the pathologist, “because if it was suicide I would expect to be finding the weapon clutched in her bony fingers, and as you can see it isn’t there.”

“So murder?” she asked with eyes so wide open it was clear she was mentally incorporating the grisly scene into a nocturnal drama in which a variety of people she didn’t think much of perished, chief amongst them the Inspector who she caught peering at her legs and hoping to see up her skirt more often than could be accounted as normal behaviour for a senior police officer.

“Murder? I couldn’t possibly say,” replied Dr. Grimm, “and it is most unwise to speculate over such matters until we are absolutely certain,” and he gently tucked the deadly piece of metal into a small plastic bag, which he held out for his assistant to deal with.

The policewoman, who was young enough to still have a vigorous imagination, retreated and hissed to a second policewoman standing next to her new position, “murder! It must be murder! Else where is the gun?”

“But who would have done such a thing?” asked the other, less imaginative, officer.

“There’s the mad woman they’re taking to the station! It can only have been her!”

“Or maybe a thwarted lover intent on revenge for being let down at the moment of… of… something I don’t like to mention, which is why she’s in bed!”

“Don’t like to mention? Are you a prude, Felicia? You are, aren’t you? Don’t like to mention such things as a climax?”

“Really Ruby, you are rude!”

“It’s only nature, Felicia, everyone does it even if they’re not actually married!”

“Well, I’m not married and I don’t!”

The pathologist clapped his hands. He was going to make a verbal pronouncement at the end of his examination of the last remains of Ada Winterbotham.

“Please, officers,” he rumbled, “in the absence of a senior officer I’ll tell you all. This lady, defined to me as Ada Winterbotham, being of advanced years, possibly eighty or so, died as the result of being shot, possibly in the heart, by a nine millimetre or similar calibre gun. Otherwise her bones are in good order showing no sign of disease other than the gradual wear and tear of her age.”

“Was it murder?” asked Felicia.

Dr Grimm frowned at her. “I couldn’t possibly say,” he told her again, and he swept out of the room.

The skeletal remains of Ada were then very carefully collected together in preparation of being sent to the forensic lab where the good lady would be scrutinized yet again, this time to try and determine who might have shot her. But amongst the officers present the favourite culprit was her daughter because she was the only person who could have been in the room, and it was known that she owned a gun, and could use it.

Meanwhile, by the time that Emma and Andrew in the company of P.C. Pierce reached the police station in Brumpton after having stopped off at a cafe for refreshment on the way, the news of what the pathologist had found was in the air, at least in the air of the police station if not in the air elsewhere.

“So it was murder, was it,” murmured P.C Pierce, the tone of his voice indicating that he was happy to have found himself involved in a murder enquiry, because such things were few and far between in Brumpton. insisted Emma when the discussion turned to who

“But it can’t have been Winifred, who pulled the trigger, I know it can’t have been.”

“But she nearly shot me!” pointed out Andrew.

“Yes, dear, but she didn’t mean to,” murmured Emma, “and think about it: she didn’t even know her mother was dead and on top of that she didn’t know that the gun actually worked and probably even that it was a weapon!”

“She might be a good actress despite her appearance,” he suggested. “I mean, she fired a gun at me and a bullet was found lodged inside the remains of poor old Ada…”

“What do you mean, poor old? We didn’t know her and she might well have been a harridan full of evil and cruelty, one who really deserved to be put out of her misery!.”

“I don’t think so, dear,” insisted Emma.

But all Anthony could think was she called me dear…Twice!

© Peter Rogerson 18.01.23

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (6)

6. Back with Billy

Constable Pierce made his way to where Anthony and Emma were waiting patiently by a tree for permission to see Winifred. They had been ushered away from the cottage but even though she had discharged a gun in their direction which in itself was very frightening, they both felt a kind of responsibility for her. For starters, it is they who had involved the police in her, and it was plain to them that there was something really wrong with a woman living in the sort of conditions like she quite plainly did.

“Look you two,” said the Constable, his expression serious, “I’ve had the scare of my life and I’d not be doing my duty if I didn’t suggest to you that if you hang around here you might see somerhing you’d spend the rest of your lives wishing you hadn’t seen.”

“What sort of something?” asked Emma, reluctant to be moved on.

The policeman shuddered. “Her mother’s bones,” he said, “sitting up in bed as if she was alive, motionless, but dead as a dodo and the most gross imitation of life I could ever imagine. And we’ll be taking Winifred away too. There’s no way she can be left in that cottage, getting more and more confused as the days pass, and increasingly trapped in a world that’s about as real as Frankenstein’s castle!”

“So her mother’s really dead?” asked Anthony.

“Like she must have been, for twenty years or more or that,” muttered the constable.

It was then that Sergeant Goodbody approached them and indicated that he wanted to talk privately to the constable.

“It was you who discovered the remains?” he asked.

Billy Pierce nodded. “Pretty scary,” he admitted.

“I tell you what, constable, there’s enough of us here, and a couple of policewomen on the way to help with the old bird who isn’t dead. Would you like to return to the station and make your statement? And go with these two young ‘uns, get them out of the way before old Grimm gets here? You know what he’s like, a stickler for doing the job right. You did walk here, with them I suppose?”

Billy grinned at the sergeant. “They sort of latched on to me,” he admitted. “It was them who alerted us to the Miss Winterbotham who isn’t dead.”

“You take ‘em, then, son, and watch out for traffic. Not much of a road, this, but there’s still wheels to come along it.”

“Right, sarge,” responded a grateful constable, and he turned to Emma and Anthony. “Come on, you two, we’ll go back together and if the Inspector wants you can make a statement regarding what’s been going on here. There’ll be an enquiry about the gunshot I wouldn’t be surprised, and there was only me and you as witnesses.”

“If we have to,” muttered Anthony with assumed reluctance because, in truth, he really wanted to get as far from the cottage in the woods as he could but didn’t want to give the impression of being at all wimpy. The talk of old bones had reminded him that he might have the odd bit of school homework outstanding at home – nothing to do with bones but more inviting than fleshless human remains..

Emma took him by one hand like she never usually did, and squeezed his fingers. “We better had,” she said, “I just remembered: I forgot to feed the goldfish before we came out, and I’d be heartbroken if it starved to death.”

“That decides it then,” sighed a relieved Anthony, “come on then!”

“I’ll come with you, if you don’t mind,” the constable told them, “I’ve got to get to the station and report back. It’s all paper work these days, and the Superintendent’s a stickler for it being done perfectly. Once upon a time we could have grabbed hold of villains and sorted them out with our truncheons, but these days we have to use paper!”

“I suppose it’s a bit kinder if you’ve got it all wrong and the criminal isn’t a criminal at all,” suggested Emma.

“You’ve got a point there, I suppose,” he grinned, “and you never told me how old you are?” added when the cottage lay behind them, “I might need to mention it in my report.”

“How old do you think we are?” grinned Emma.

Billy suspected a trap, but he could deal with it. “I’d have put you down as young adults,” he suggested, “but I guess you’re younger than that seeing as you’re still at school.”

“Fifteen,” Anthony said, “we’re both fifteen, and almost sixteen if it makes us seem more observant being a year older, not that it makes any difference to what we saw if we’re witnesses. Young eyes are just as good as old ones.”

“Often better,” agreed Billy. “Now let’s watch out, looks like the pathologist’s on his way and he often thinks he’s at Brands Hatch on race day!”

The car with a dumpy pathologist behind the wheel was going so slowly that it was almost stationary and Billy waved him past them. “Not far now, Henry,” he shouted, and the pathologist waved back.

“I wouldn’t fancy his job,” Billy told the two teenagers as they continued through the woods, “slicing up bodies all day long, poking his fingers into the nastiest corners on Earth.”

“Ugh!” shuddered Emma.

“It has to be done, though,” sighed Billy, “if someone dies and we don’t know why then we must try to find out or someone might get away with murder, and if someone murders once and gets away with it, who’s to say he won’t do it again and again until it’s me or you that he does away with?”

“But there can’t be much if the old lady’s mother is no more than dusty old bones like you said,” Anthony suggested, “I mean, how can he tell what caused a skeleton to die?”

“Smashed bones, maybe,” replied the Constable thoughtfully, “and if there’s a bullet that might indicate what sort of gun fired it.”

“But the body will still be dead,” sighed Emma.

“True enough, but hey! You’re too young to be worried about life and death like that!” exclaimed the constable, and he added “and come to think of it, so am I.”

“Are you married with kids?” asked Anthony.

He shook his head. “Not yet,” he said, and grinned at them. “Later this year, I hope. There’s Amy, and she’s the prettiest lass on Earth.” He blanced at Emma, “Maybe present company excepted,” he added.

“That must be Amy Cinders from down the road from us,” smiled Andrew “and she is a good looker. Everyone says so. Pity about her husband, dying like he did, he didn’t seem to be much older than me.”

“He was twenty-something, and my best friend,” agreed Billy. “But even though he was young he was struck by cancer, poor devil. He’d not been married to Amy for long, and I hated myself for starting to look at Amy when he was so ill. But she’s not only a good looker, she’s a nice woman too, and she did love him, right to his dying breath when he was on his way out.”

They were approaching the end of the unmade track and about to put their feet onto a proper road.

“Do you want to to come to the station with me, or is there something else you plan doing?” asked Billy, replacing his helmet, which he’d been carrying under one arm.

“We’ll come, better now when our memories are fresh” shivered Emma, “then we’ll go home. You’re staying for lunch Anthony with me, aren’t you? Mum’s done stew, or so she said.”

“Will it be all right if I come, then?” he asked awkwardly.

“Of course, silly. You’re my boyfriend, aren’t you?”

“Am I?

She looked him in the eye. “You’d better be,” and she smiled suddenly, “so come on let’s go with Billy, do our civic duty and go home for some of mum’s extra special stew sooner than soon.”

Meanwhile, in his office Inspector Greengage was working out his own particular theory. It was how he worked, totting up evidence and coming to a conclusion that he would be loath to change even when the evidence did. Often it worked, but sometimes it didn’t, abs it was then that he looked like a mindless fool and spent as long as it took to get over it.

And this time, presented with reports of a skeleton propped up in a dusty old bed in a cottage with a living and breathing occupant, he decided that murder had been done and that occupant must have committed the crime. If, he reasoned, she hadn’t called for help while the dead body putrified and filled the place with an unwholesome stench, there must be something wrong, she must have a guilty secret she didn’t want anyone to discover. Or why did she tolerate it?

She must be the killer!

So he wrote his carefully caluculated conclusions on a report and handed it to the Superintendent’s secretary.

“Make sure he sees this as soon as,” he told her, “it’s important.”

“He’s out at the moment but he’ll get it when he comes back. It shouldn’t be long because he’s got his eyes on a pair of trousers that much prefer skirts!”

And she laughed at her joke as he walked off, happy that he was getting something right even before it had been seen as wrong.

© Peter Rogerson 17.01.23

05. THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

5. The Mother

It all seemed so unnecessary.

There was an unhappy old woman living somewhere as far from the real world as a person might get and Emma thought the fact that she and Anthony were in her garden was considerably less important than that woman’s needs. But apparently she was wrong because the newly arrived policemen, an armed response to Constable Billy Pierce’s request and protected by flak jackets and armed with an arsenal of hardware seemed to want to urge the two of them as far from the cottage as they could.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, “there’s nothing happening here. Brumpton’s that way,” and he pointed through the woods back the way they had come.

“This is a public path,” insisted Emma, “and she’s our friend,” she added as a sort of lie that lacked conviction

“There’s an armed woman in there, and bullets could fly anywhere,” urged one of the officers, Sergeant Goodbody, a younger man she might have thought attractive under different circumstances.

“Come on love, let’s let them scare the living daylights out of the poor old soul,” said Anthony sarcastically but knowing the armed officers would get their own way sooner rather than later anyway no matter what they said.

“You know it makes sense,” grunted the young policeman, and to Emma, “What are you doing tonight, love?”

“My maths homework,” she replied, which intentionally suggested she was still a schoolgirl.

“Oh,” he replied, had the grace to blush as he wondered how come a kid still at school could look so fabulous, and moved away from her. “Come on, back you go,” he grunted as he did so.

“He fancied you!” exclaimed Anthony, grinning.

“So do you,” smiled Emma.

“I’m going to have to work things out,” he replied, “now let me see…” and he pulled her to him and planted his biggest kiss yet firmly and wetly onto her waiting mouth. The important thing was she kissed him back and the whole process took a great deal longer than a moment.

Meanwhile, inside the cottage in the woods Constable Pierce was trying to battle through whatever mental shield Winifred Winterbotham had erected in order to keep a safe distance from the real world.

“You need to come to the station so that we can look after your interests for you,” he told her, gently.

“I can hear the jack boots coming this way, cruel men with death in their hearts if I so much as breathe out of place, like mother told me they would… one day, she said, mark my words, one day… she knew all about the cruel men and the way they like to rape us virgins. Mother was a virgin, so she knows all about it, the harsh tread of jack boots on the path to her door…”

“Times have changed, Winifred,” he tried to tell her, “there’s a sun in the sky now, and it shines down on our children, makes them smile, makes them run and play and… and… and eat ice cream!” He had run out of all the tokens of childhood that he could bring to mind but he had wanted to harken back to the joyous years of his own childhood in the hope they resonated with something in her memory banks.

“Where’s me gun! I need to shoot you! I need you to be dead, like all the other grey men who have come to torment me over the years. And they have, you know, evil creatures with only one thought in their minds, and that is to take me to the land they hail from across the seas, and their heartless master…”

“That master you refer to, you do know that he’s dead, don’t you? Took his own life rather than face recriminations for the things he’d done?” he asked her, quietly, needing to break through her mental wall that was a mixture of confusion and half understood rumour forced into her mind by an equally confused mother.

It was then that he was joined by two armed officers. Having secured the area and wrapped a tape round the cottage and gardens as if that tape would make everything safe and secure, and holding guns ready to shoot anything that they thought was immediately threatening, they tramped into the room. And Winifred saw them.

What they meant to her is anyone’s guess, but in truth they were two slightly over-the-top young figures in flak jackets and helmets, but to Winifed they were anything but that. No sooner had she seen them than her muddled mind created a threat beyond threats and she squawked in a hideous painful voice “they’ve come for me, they’ve come, the Nazi fiends from Adolf Hitler! Mother, you warned me, now help me, save me, from what they intend to do to me with their foul bodies! Help me, mother! Save me!”

And she leapt as swiftly to her feet as her feeble body could manage and almost toppled over at the effort involved.

“What’s going on?” asked one of the newcomer policemen, “and who is that?”

Constable Pierce could see that everything had gone too far. The old woman, now unarmed, was no threat to anyone and in her obvious departure from sanity she was merely pathetic. But in a way he could understand what she thought she was seeing.

“Might be better if you went back into the garden,” he hissed at the armed response, “she’s the gunwoman, and she dropped her gun ages ago. But also she’s a poor old soul, all muddled up and goodness knows where she thinks you’ve come from!”

“Christ!” hissed one of the two whilst the other, seeing the sense in what Pierce was saying, backed out.

“C’mon, Goodbody,” he whispered, “we’re not here to terrorise an old woman.”

Goodbody nodded, and the two armed officers backed slowly backed out of the room. But their temporary presence had flipped a switch in Winifred’s mind and all she could see was a dark hollow in the air where, in her mind, they still stood, dark and menacing and ready to kill her, or even worse than that.

She turned, and had her legs been younger she would have fled with theatrical angst, but she was beyond that. She half-staggered, and almost tripped out of the room, going through a door that she needed to open with quite a nudge as she did so.

Constable Pierce followed her, hoping there was a chair in there for the old dear to sit in so that he could calm her down again.

But there was no chair.

His heart froze when he saw the bed and he almost shouted out when he took in the sight of Ada Winterbotham, Winifred’s mother, propped up in that bed against two dusty pillows.

He could tell at once, from the grey of what must have once been skin and was now almost translucent leather stretched over the skull of an a truly ancient woman, one who had silken hair still forming an intricate halo where her daughter had combed it time after time after time over more years than he could begin to fathom.

“Help me, mother, help me! They’ve come to get us!” screeched Winifred.

But her mother simply seemed to slightly nod that grotesque head, and maybe it was the light seeping between her curtains from outside, but she seemed to smile.

“For Heaven’s sake,” croaked Officer Pierce, and he staggered against the door behind him.

© Peter Rogerson 16.01.23

04, THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS

4. The Blues and Twos

Constable Pierce dropped to the ground and pushed himself to one side so that he was almost under the small kitchen table and knee-deep in all manner of fetid foreign materiel, mostly ancient food dropped carelessly goodness knows when and growing unpleasant smelling hair of its own.

“Crikey!” screamed Emma, and with unbelievable gallantry Anthony grabbed hold of her and pulled her down to the ground just outside the lop-sided back door.

“Please be okay, love?” he gasped into her ear.

“You called me love,” she whispered when the last echo of the explosion had withdrawn to silence and the only sound was the elderly woman wimpering.

“Did I?” he asked, still trembling, and then he mastered himself and produced an exaggerated wink. “I don’t know why I should have said that,” he added, “but I guess I must have meant it.”

Meanwhile, the elderly Winifred Winterbotham had thrown the gun onto the floor, and retreated through the nearest door into what, when the constable followed her, he judged to be a living room of sorts, untidy and with mostly grubby clothing scattered all over it, mainly on the floor where it must have been trodden on more times than enough to spoil it. There were the remnants of a three-piece suite in there too, the settee with springs clearly visible sticking through its worn fabric. There was nothing in the way of what you might normally expect to find in a modern living room, no radio or television, though in one corner was the dusty and tarnished horn of an ancient gramophone, its winding handle like a shadow from a forgotten past.

She backed further into it and collapsed into one of the two tatty armchairs before reaching to the mantelpiece and grabbing a wooden crucifix, which she held before herself like a defensive shield.

“We are not coming!” she squawked, “mother and I are staying here, this is our home, we love it here, under the protective shadow of the trees, so take your jack boots away and give us peace in our old age!”

“Nobody wants to take you anywhere, Miss Winterbotham,” Constable Pierce tried to assure her, “this is your home and if you’re happy and feel safe here, nobody wants to take you anywhere. But I must have a word with your mother…”

As he said the word mother he was certain that something was wrong because the woman in front of him and cowering in a tatty armchair was surely too old herself to be sharing the house with a lmother who was still very much in the land of the living.

“You two young ‘uns keep well away!” he ordered when he detected a shuffling as Anthony helped Emma to her feet. He suspected that he might be on the verge of discovering the fact that if the woman’s mother was somewhere in the cottage he’d probably find her in a wooden box

He waved a hand in the direction of Winifred in her chair where she had adopted an attitude that involved visible shaking and audible moaning.

“Now this isn’t anything,” he said as soothingly as he could, and he pulled his police radio from his pocket, “but I reckon we need some sort of back-up here, don’t you?”

But Winifred had escaped from the present and was occupying a very different space and time in which she was with her mother and listening to what that parent said, and echoing those words in an eerie almost audibe hiss.

“They’ll take you to the chancellor who’ll have your bosoms cut off and fed to his gorillas,” she hissed, “we all know what evils await you if you let that servant of the devil use magic and talk to the necromancer!”

But the constable paid scant attention to her jabbering as he contacted the police station. “We’ve got a problem,” he said, “the old woman had a real weapon, which she discharged. Nobody was hurt but her kitchen sink’s got a bloody great hole in it! The woman, a Miss Winifred Winterbotham in her seventies by the look of it speaks as if her own mother was still alive and kicking somewhere in the building, which is on the brink of falling down, if you were to ask me. In my opinion Miss Winterbotham needs to be assessed because, if you’ll excuse the term, she gives every impression of being three sheets to the wind!”

A crackling voice assured him that back up was on the way and ordered him to do or say nothing that might exacerbate the situation and to do what he could to reduce any danger from the weapon.

He replied that he would, and slid the radio back in his pocket. Miss Winterbotham was still conversing with her mother, and he approached her. Seeing him apparently threatening her she let out an almighty howl and launched herself at him as if making a last ditch attempt at freedom.

“Now there’s no need for that,” he said, trying to sound as calm as he could.

But the old woman wasn’t satisfied that anything short of neutralising what she saw as a threat would do, and despite being unsteady on her feet she grabbed hold of a grubby, tangled skein of wool with knitting needles attached, pulled one of them free from what must have been the beginnings of a garment years ago and had probably remained untouched since then, and plunged it towards him.

“What the!” he roared, “you bloody wait for the meat wagon to come for you!” he shouted as the blunt and dirty needle tried to penetrate his skin through his jacket.

Outside, the two teenagers heard what sounded very much like a cry for help.

“What the…?” muttered Emma.

“Are you all right, officer?” called Anthony.

“The witch has attacked me with a blunt knitting needle,” replied the constable, “and it bloody hurts!”

“Wait here,” Anthony almost ordered Emma, and he made for the door.

“I’m no weeping willow!” snapped Emma, and she followed him.

Inside the cottage they were met with a police constable trying to extricate himself from the whirling action of an old woman lunging towards him armed with the knitting needle and quite cleary out of her mind.

“Stop!” commanded Anthony as loud as he could, and there was a surprising amount of authority in his teenage voice that the woman paused in her attack on the policeman.

“They’ll lock you up and throw away the key!” added Emma.

It wasn’t so much the verbal threat but the presence of three people all threatening her, as she saw it, that made Winifred fall slowly and dramatically onto her knees.

“Take me to your master then,” she managed to croak out, “I know what they do to women like me. Mother told me, and mother knows everything, I’ll be flogged and raped, no doubt…” It was at that point that a police car could be heard bouncing down the unmade road from Brumpton, its siren and blue lights flashing though there was little chance of it moving towards them much faster than walking pace.

“Outside!” insisted the constable, “she might have other tricks up her sleeve!”

Itt didn’t look as if the fragile old woman had ever had much in the way if tricks up any sleeve, but the two youngsters retreated anyway. The blues and twos from the crawling police car flashing on the trees of Brumpton Woods were a promise that all would be well soon enough.

“Thank goodness,” whispered Emma. And she smiled almost teasingly at Anthony, “and you did call me love…” she said quietly.

© Peter Rogerson 15.01.23

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (3)

3. The Shattered Sink

PC Billy Pierce was feeling quite annoyed when he looked back and saw the two teenagers walking on the unmade path through Brumpton Woods, determinedly walking close enough behind him to actually be just about in touch with him. He was sort of friendly with them as young neighbours, after all they weren’t a great deal younger than him, but this was police business and he just had to keep personal friendships separate from work.

“Excuse me,” he called to them when it was clear they were following him, “but if you’re shadowing me, you shouldn’t. I’m on police business.”

That was a mistake, he realised, because the moment that he called out to them the two moved closer to him and were by his side within the shortest of moments.

“We were worried about the old lady,” the girl he knew as Emma Scratchpole told him, “she looked sort of old and lonely to us, and that isn’t right. Nobody should have to live in such a tumbledown place, too, especially if they’re old. Old people need warmth and safety and stuff like that/”

“And she had a gun,” added Anthony, “one that didn’t work, but it might have and then I’d have been killed and there’d be a lot more coppers in the woods today if it had.”

“And Undertakers,” grunted Billy.

“So we want to find out all about her if we can, and maybe help her if that’s what she wants.” suggested Emma, “make her life better, if you see what I mean”.

“Well, I can’t stop you because as far as I know this is a public right of way, but I warn you: don’t interfere with me once we get to Miss Winterbotham’s cottage.”

“Of course we won’t. We wouldn’t dream of it, would we Emma,” declared Anthony, crossing his fingers and hoping the constable didn’t notice.

“It just seems so unfair that an old lady should be on her own with a collection of odd ideas in her head that make no sense,” Emma told the constable, “like we’re going to report her to some awful commandant who never existed. I mean, one that never existed here and yet even so has the sort of power to make her as scared as she is!”

“According to the records, or what skimpy records we have, there are two of them living there,” Billy told them, “Winifred Winterbotham and her mother Ada. Ada must be one hell of an age because there’s no record of a death or a funeral.”

“We didn’t see anyone else yesterday,” said Anthony thoughtfully, “though I seem to remember that she mentioned her mother as someone who warned her about something or other that we didn’t understand.”

“That’s right,” agreed Emma, “I thought at the time it was odd her having a mother if she was still alive.”

“Well,” said Constable Pierce, “I’ve checked the records and there’s mention of an older lady than the one you saw, the mother, that you just mentioned, it might have been, and she was born over a century ago. So if she’s still alive she must have a collection of magic pills that keep a soul going well beyond the normal lifespan of a human being, and I could do with a handful of those!”

“Or she died, and nobody was told,”suggested Anthony, “but I thought all deaths had to be registered and a coroner told all about them and named put in a register.”.

“That’s what should happen, so the purpose for me coming this way is to make sure that the records are put right,” said the policeman, “and watch out … we’re nearly there.”

And so they were. The cottage looked just as drab as it had the last time they’d been that way, and the only difference was the back door being open at an odd angle, as if it had finally collapsed on its rusty old hinges. There was an almost deserted look about the place, green moss darkening the slate roof and an air of desolation in every corner.

“Summat’s wrong!” hissed Anthony, “the door wasn’t quite like that, was it Emma!”

She shook her heard. “I don’t like it,” she whispered, “I hope ntohing dreadful’s happened to the poor old soul.”

“You kids! I told you to get lost!” squawked the familiar voice of the elderly woman who had been far from pleasant to them last time they’d been to her cottage. So nothing dreadful has happened to her, thought a relieved Emma.

The untidy woman who lived there had made her way from inside the building to be standing just outside the almost collapsed door, and she was still holding what looked like a gun in one hand. She raised it threateningly, pointing it in their general direction.

“What’s wrong with your door?” asked Anthony. Nervously eyeing the weapon in her hand.

“Get orf, I tell you!” she shrieked, enraged by their very presence, “or I’ll, what did mother tell me to say, or I’ll fill you full of lead!”

“Now then, misses, we can’t be talking to kids like that!” intervened Constable Pierce, “carry on like that and I’ll have to take you in!”

“And who are you in your Nazi uniform?” shrieked Mrs Winterbotham, shaking with a strange and violent rage so that the direction her gun pointed was just about anywhere and had it gone off it might well have discharged into the tree tops and disturbed a blackbird on her nest.

“I’m the local constable, as you’d know if you looked at my uniform, and I order you to put that gun down!” he replied. Billy was a kindly man, but he sounded more authoritarian than the two teenagers had heard him sound before.

“So that’s what you want, is it?” she squawked, “forcing me out of my own country without a means of defending mesen? Mother warned me, she did, Nazi storm troopers ready to turn my flesh inside out with their sharp knives. I think she said knives. An ‘ rapin’, if I knew proper what rapin’ meant.”

Billy shook his head sadly. “Nothing of the sort, madam,” he began , but she cut in somewhat rudely,

“Don’t you madam me, you jack-booted terrorist!” she shrieked. The blackbird in the tree opposite her cottage took flight at the sound as her voice rose an octave.

He shook his head again. “Our records show there are two ladies living here,” he said, consulting a paper he pulled from a pocket on his uniform, “and I needed to make sure that’s quite right. Both of the surname Winterbotham, an Ada and a Winifred I just want to make sure we’ve got everything right.”

“What you want to know for?” she demanded, “is it what Hitler ordered, eh? Ha, that caught you, didn’t it? I know all about Hitler, I do. Mother told me when she could still talk properly. Ruler of the world ahe said he was, an’ even Brumpton an’ all the places around, said mother, and we’re to keep to oursens.”

Constable Pierce could barely believe his ears when it seemed that this old woman’s mother still apparently lived in this cottage and her word ruled the roost..

“Er,” he began, and then went on decisively, “I need to ask Ada Winterbotham one or two things seeing as she’s what would seem to be the senior lady ere.”

“Well you can’t, you bully boy! She ain’t talkin’ to no-one. She told me that way back afore she lost her voice, an’ she ain’t talked to no one since.”

“But I’ve been advised to check her out. That’s all. Have a tiny word with her and then go back to the station.”

“Well you ain’t!” the crone, shaking with the sort of rage that efied common sense to those listening as her voice exploded.

But the policeman had a job to do, and the more he took in the old woman holding what he saw as a toy pistol the more he knew that something was clearly wrong. So he pushed the gate open and walked towards her.

She pointed the apparently toy pistol towards him and he saw her finger pumping away at a trigger that refused to do more than click barely audibly until, as if in dreadful resignation, the weapon suddenly and unexpectedly discharged with a deafening explosion.

A bullet crashed into the old stone sink which had been filled with washing water and a handful of clothes she must have been washing by hand. The water chose to pour out through a hole that hadn’t been there before, and Winifred Winterbotham dropped the offensive weapon onto the floor at her feet and screamed loud and long and painfully, her eyes moist with tears and madness.

© Peter Rogerson 13.01.23

“

THE COTTAGE IN THE WOODS (2)

2. PC William Pierce

Emma and Anthony took a great deal less time walking back to their corner of Brumpton than they had when sauntering through the woods earlier when they’d been exploring, and as they hurried along they had plenty to think about. An almost derelict cottage, an old woman, and a gun… It was that gun that had made their hearts pause and shudder.

“That was scary,” gasped Emma.

“When she pointed that gun at us!” agreed Anthony, “I thought she was crazy and out for murder!”.

“I think something ought to be done about her! You can’t allow scruffy old women the right to threaten kids like us with a gun even if one of our feet did go near her garden!”

“We’re not kids any more,” suggested Anthony, “we stopped being kids when we had that kiss earlier. It was too grown up to be a game between two kids! Ut that doesn’t change things: we don’t deserve to be threatened like that. It’s not as if we were up to something wrong.”

“I’m sorry,” whispered Emma, “but I’ve sort of wanted to kiss you for ages, before any other lass caught you in her net and slobbered all over you!”

“What for? We’re friends and sometimes friends sort of kiss. And I don’t know any other girls. Not properly, though there’s a few in my class at school who I sort of think are okay, but they’re not like you, they’re normal…”

“And I’m abnormal? Ant, what are you saying? And that was a sort of kiss? That wasn’t sort of at all, but let‘s talk about it later. I reckon the police ought to be told about the woman. It was what looked like a real gun that she pointed at us, and we weren’t even in her garden, if you can call it a garden!”

“I know, and thank goodness it only clicked… and she is an old woman who seems to think the war we did in history is still raging and that we’ve lost the battle and even joined the other side… I can’t get my head round that. It doesn’t make any sense. I mean, how can someone live a whole life until they’re old and still think her country’s got an army and is fighting another country!”

“I don’t get it either. Do you reckon she’s old enough to have been alive back then?” asked Emma, “I mean, my mum and dad weren’t. Granddad might have been, but he’s dead now.”

“I’ve got a grandma who remembers the end of the second world war,” murmured Anthony, “but she looks a bit old. What do you reckon about the bitch with a gun?”

“I dunno. I find it hard working out how old someone is. Last week Mr Psalmer asked me how old I thought a visitor to school might be before he went to see him and I thought about it and then said approaching middle age because I wasn’t sure. He told me later that he was almost thirty and that means he’s still young!”

“Well, I reckon she’s between fifty and seventy, which isn’t really old even though her face is all wrinkles, which means she can’t have been alive when the war ended in 1945. But she’s probably had a hard life, living in that derelict cottage all on her own. That might even make a young lass like me look like a wizened old creature!””

“The war ended nearly eighty years ago and even if she’d been a baby when that war ended she’d probably be dead by now,” suggested Anthony.

“Look: there’s constable Pierce chatting to someone on the corner. Let’s ask him what he knows about our old woman,” said Emma, “even if it seems a bit like grassing her up, she shouldn’t have pointed a gun at us even if it didn’t work and so she deserves to be grassed up!”

There was a time not so long ago when the local policeman was a common enough sight on the estate, but financial constraints had made Constable Billy Pierce’s appearance on the streets where the two teenagers lived into a rarity, though as he lived just round the corner from the two families and liked to chat to his neighbours when he was off duty under the guise of keeping a weather eye on things he had got to know most of them rather well, and rumour had it, Mrs Cinders, a very pretty young widow whose husband, never a strong looking fellow, had surrendered to Covid soon after they married, better than most.

“Come on, then,” urged Anthony, and the two of them hurried towards where he was deep in conversation with a middle aged man standing in his own garden and leaning on a spade.

“I’ll keep an eye open then, Bert,” he mumbled to the gardener, and turned away to see the two teenagers approaching him. “Did you two want something?” he asked.

“There’s an old woman with a gun down there in the woods,” burst out Emma

“And she shot at us,” added Anthony, “or she would have shot at us but her gun just went click as if it was broken.”

“Where might this be, then?” asked Billy, frowning. He knew Anthony and Emma well enough to be aware that they wouldn’t deliberately create a problem where one didn’t exist.

“Down through the woods,” Emma told him. “We were walking along minding our own business when we saw an old broken down building, like a cottage or something really old like that.”

“And she came out, mouthing at us and making out we were enemies. She sounded like she didn’t know the old war was over!”

“What war might that be?” asked the constable, I donlt know any war!”.

“The one we did at school in history, against the Germans,” said Emma, frowning, “she seemed to think we are agents or spies or something on the look out for someone she called the commandant and that if we told him anything she’d be in trouble.”

“Ah,” grinned Constable Billy Pierce, “then it must have been old Ma Winterbotham you bumped into. I can see why you were scared, though truth to tell I reckon that gun of hers is just a toy she was given as a nipper. At least, I hope that’s what it is! She was born in that old cottage and I’ll bet a pound to a penny that she dies in it when her time’s up! Her ma was just the same, like as two peas in a pod they say, though she was before my time.

“What about her dad?” asked Anthony, “she must have had one of those or my biology teacher has got it all wrong”

“And that can’t have happened!” laughed Billy

“It’s not right she should be like that,” suggested Emma, “I mean, her home looks none too safe. I’ll bet its roof leaks when it’s raining, and she’s nowhere near the shops except for the Islandwood centre if she flies over the trees, so what does she get to eat?”

“That’ll be her worry, not yours, though I’d love to see her flying on na broomstick to the shops!” advised the policeman with a broad grin. “Look, I’ll tell you what, I’ll take a nosey down there next time I’ve got an hour spare, when I’m off duty. I’ll check on her, make sure she’s okay and, who knows, might be able to help the old dear a bit. As you say, it’s no way for a lady to live, on her own and with a brain tuned into the age before she was even born”

“Do you want us to show you the way?” asked Emma.

“Now there’s no need for that! I’ve been down her way before a time or two, but truth to tell it’s been a year or three since! Now I’ll be off, if you don’t mind.” He turned to the man still leaning on his spade. “Say, Bert, what do you know about old Ma Winterbotham? You know, the old lass who lives down the road through the woods?”

“Her?” he replied, “the old biddy, mad as a hatter? Is she still alive, then?”

“I’ll check tomorrow,” nodded Billy, “it seems as she is and might be a bit on the lonely side, down in the woods miles from anyone, and nowt in her pantry…”

“It’s down to her, I guess,” muttered Bert, and he wandered back into his home, “sometimes I wouldn’t mind being on my own when her indoors is on the warpath!” he added

© Peter Rogerson 07.01.23