A Little Local Murder by Robert Barnard

Author:Robert Barnard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner

CHAPTER IX

PRIVATE AND PERSONAL

The rest of Wednesday, and most of Thursday morning as well, was devoted by Parrish to the securing of the mysterious correspondence which had apparently floated around Twytching for the past few weeks without anyone being willing to divulge to anyone else the fact of his having received one. This was a job Parrish felt he had to do for himself. Sergeant Feather’s more brutal and censorious approaches seemed more likely to scare people into silence than to encourage them into full co-operation. However, he let him loose on Mrs Buller’s Val, with strict instructions to be understanding and lovable. And – feeling much more guilty about this – he gave the vicar to Sergeant Underwood, on the grounds that he had had enough of religious dottiness to last him for several months. The rest of Amos Chipweather’s list of lucky recipients he took himself.

It was not quite as easy a job as he had hoped. The letters, whatever their qualities as literature, had certainly managed to scare their recipients to death. A hunted look came into their torpid rustic eyes at the most oblique reference to such a thing as an anonymous letter. Some even feigned ignorance of the term. The whole operation therefore involved a great deal of patient toing and froing, of letting assurances sink in gradually, of convincing people that others were in the same boat, and that much the safest course would be to hand the letters over at once in return for police protection. Oddly enough, the recipient he visited first was the hardest nut to crack. He had always thought of Mrs Leaze as an amiable old crook, as incapable of secrecy as your average Labour cabinet minister. But for once in her life she seemed to have been shocked into silence. Like most of the rest she denied vigorously for the whole of Parrish’s first visit that she had received any such letter:

‘If you believe that old scrounger Amos Chipweather, a dirty old rogue as reads people’s postcards and pinches kiddies’ postal orders at Christmas, then you want your ’ead reading,’ she said. ‘It’s a wonder to me why we should pay our rates to support a police force that can’t mind its own business better than that.’

On his second visit, fear had conquered shyness, and she admitted to having received such a letter a week or ten days before. No power on earth would make her show it to the Inspector, however. In fact, like every single one of the other recipients, she insisted that she had burnt it.

‘You know me, Inspector,’ she said. ‘I’m never one to gossip and pry into other people’s lives, and if all I ’ear is true some of ’em wouldn’t stand up to much prying, that’s sure as sure, and when you get some nasty-minded soul as ’as got so little to do that ’e can sit down and put together a letter like that, well, I feel like I feel when someone comes into my shop and wants to spread filthy tales about other people in this village.

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