Murder in the Mill-Race: A Devon Mystery (British Library Crime Classics) by E.C.R. Lorac

Author:E.C.R. Lorac [Lorac, E.C.R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime, Westcountry, moor, classic, detective, 1940s, traditional, countryside, holiday
Publisher: British Library Publishing
Published: 2019-04-25T05:00:00+00:00

3

“I’ll lay any money Nurse Barrow has been ‘inside’,” said Reeves reflectively, as the two men left the house and went through the gate in the clipped yew hedge which divided the Gramarye drive from the park.

Macdonald nodded. “I’m with you. We’ll have to get on to Records. It’s curious how it came out: she made a perfectly spontaneous anecdotal statement: ‘You’re on trial, Hannah.’ That remark had become a joke and she repeated it without thinking and then suddenly became aware of the form of words she’d used.”

“I know. I saw her eyes contract and her jaw tighten as you repeated her words,” said Reeves.

“It’d have been so much in character,” said Macdonald slowly. “Monica Emily Torrington liked to have people about her whom she’d got a hold over. It’s quite possible she got Hannah Barrow through one of the Prisoners’ Aid Societies. Got her, kept her and dominated her. I can well believe that if Hannah Barrow showed any signs of rebelliousness when she first came here, the Warden would just say, ‘You’re on trial, Hannah,’ and the double-edged words became a sort of joke as the years went on. I wonder what she was tried for.”

“For her life,” said Reeves. “It’s over twenty years ago, and when you repeated ‘on trial’ she was shaken to her boots, poor old trout. A little thing like a sentence for petty larceny never kept its terror for twenty years.”

“I think you’re right there, Reeves. I may query your navigation occasionally, but when it comes to a judgment of that kind, you’re more often right than any magistrate I ever met.”

“Old lags,” said Reeves meditatively. “I’ll go out of my way to talk to ’em whenever I get the chance. And I’ve sometimes felt I’d turn the job in. These high hats talk a lot of hot air about reform. The system does something to ’em, but it doesn’t reform them. It drives the devil which possesses them under cover, deep down, and clamps it down with fear.”

Macdonald stopped and stared at the other. “So you feel like that about it?”

“Yes, chief. So do you. That old trout’s worked her fingers to the bone for over twenty years. I wish one of these social welfare dames had fitted a pedometer to Hannah Barrow’s flat feet and noted how many miles a day she walked in that penitentiary she’s so proud of. Twenty years—and at the end of it the sight of you and me, making her remember, turned her stomach. Oh, I know someone’s got to do our job and it’s a good job by and large, but I often feel we’ve slipped up somewhere when I see the mixture of cunning and fear on an old lag’s face.”

“Cunning and fear,” said Macdonald reflectively. “How much fear was there and what was she afraid of, past or present?”

Reeves stopped by a trail of wild roses, stared at them as though fascinated, and then took out his knife, snipped a flower off and put it in his button hole.

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