The Wrong Sort of Mud
The annual Cawsden Village Fête was, as it had always been, a thoroughly cheerful occasion. There were jam jars gleaming in rows on the produce table, a brass band playing slightly off-tempo in the bandstand, and a queue of patient children waiting to throw wet sponges at Councillor Briggs, who had volunteered for the purpose with suspicious enthusiasm.
Agnes Pollard, retired head librarian of thirty-one years, had stationed herself beside the tea urn with a cup of Darjeeling and the quiet, unhurried attention she applied to most things in life. She was seventy-three, compact in stature, and possessed of the sort of eyes that tended to catalogue details without making a show of it.
It was shortly after two o’clock that the trouble began.
Mrs Vivienne Hartley, who chaired the Parish Council and wore her authority like a second blouse, appeared at the entrance to the exhibition marquee looking rather pale. She pressed through the crowd and found Constable Norris beside the tombola.
“My brooch,” she said. “The Edwardian one — my grandmother’s. It was pinned to my lapel when I left the judging table. Now it is not.”
Constable Norris, who was a steady young man but perhaps not an inspired one, took out his notebook and began collecting statements in alphabetical order. He noted who had been near Vivienne during the afternoon, and these turned out to be: her assistant Patricia Fenn, a volunteer named Gordon Chalk, and a newcomer to the village called Rupert Dace, who had arrived in Cawsden six weeks ago and bought the old mill cottage.
Agnes set down her teacup and wandered, with no particular appearance of purpose, across the field.
The brooch was described as a spray of seed pearls set in silver, small enough to fit in a coat pocket, old enough to be irreplaceable. Vivienne was managing her distress with the rigid composure of someone who had chaired difficult meetings and was not about to be undone by emotion in public.
Agnes listened to everything and said very little. She watched Patricia Fenn wring her hands and explain she had been standing just to Mrs Hartley’s left all afternoon. She watched Gordon Chalk — a large, florid man who helped with marquee setup each year — demonstrate that his jacket pockets contained only a handkerchief and a butterscotch. And she watched Rupert Dace, who was lean and precise in his movements, answer Constable Norris’s questions with the polite cooperation of someone who had nothing to hide or was very good at appearing so.
What Agnes actually looked at, however, were their boots.
It had rained heavily on Thursday, two days before the fête. The field had been soft then, and though it had dried considerably on the surface, the ground remained treacherous in the lower corner near the old stile where a drainage ditch ran beneath the hedge. Agnes knew this because she walked her terrier along that path every morning, and she had worn her Wellington boots as recently as yesterday.
The mud near that ditch was a very particular shade — dark, almost bluish clay — quite unlike the paler, sandy soil of the main field.
Patricia Fenn was wearing canvas shoes, clean. Gordon Chalk wore rubber-soled boots, their tread caked in the sandy pale mud of the marquee and car park, nothing else. But Rupert Dace, who had told Constable Norris he had arrived on site at midday and spent the afternoon entirely in the exhibition area, had a thin crescent of that distinctive dark clay pressed into the welt of his left boot, just above the sole.
Agnes considered this for a moment. Then she took a gentle stroll to the lower corner of the field.
The stile was half-hidden by an overgrown hawthorn. On the far side of it lay the lane that ran behind the church — and beyond that, a ten-minute walk to the mill cottage. She examined the ground near the stile post, and there in the soft clay she found the clear impression of a boot heel, and beside it, something that caught the grey afternoon light.
A single seed pearl, dislodged and lost in flight.
Agnes picked it up carefully with her handkerchief, then walked back to find Constable Norris.
“I wonder,” she said mildly, “whether you might ask Mr Dace what time he went home for lunch.”
Norris looked puzzled. Agnes explained, in the patient and un-showy manner she had once used to guide confused sixth-formers through the reference section, about the mud and what it signified, and the stile and what lay beyond it, and the pearl.
The constable was not an unintelligent young man. He took her meaning.
When he spoke again to Rupert Dace, asking specifically whether he had stepped away from the fête grounds at any point, Dace hesitated for just a fraction of a second too long. He said he might have popped back to his car. His car, Norris had noted earlier, was parked in the upper field.
The upper field was in entirely the opposite direction from the stile.
A gentle but authoritative request to search the mill cottage — to which Dace, under the evident weight of certain inevitability, consented with a tight mouth — produced the brooch in a tin on the kitchen windowsill, still wrapped in the cloth Dace had presumably used to detach it from Mrs Hartley’s lapel during the close press of the judging table.
Later, over a restorative slice of lemon drizzle at the produce stall, Agnes was asked by Patricia Fenn what on earth had made her look at boots of all things.
“Libraries,” Agnes said, accepting a second slice with equanimity. “You learn very quickly that the most revealing thing about a person is not what they say, but where they’ve been.”
She finished her cake, dusted the crumbs from her fingers, and set off across the field to find her terrier, who had, by the look of things, discovered the drainage ditch entirely on his own initiative.
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