As we approached, the wife looked at the front of the inn and, giving a sort of gasp, said ‘wisteria’. She was trying to get a plant of that name to grow over the front of our terraced house at Thorpe-on-Ouse, outside York, but it would not take. This one had taken all right. Its black branches and purple flowers quite covered the windows on the upper left-hand side so that The Angel seemed to have a patched eye.
Touching my hat, I gave the three good evening, at which the man and the boy stirred a little, but only the woman went so far as to return the greeting.
‘Do you have rooms?’ I asked her, but my question was answered by the words painted in large black letters half under the wisteria: ‘The Angel Inn – Beers and Wines – Rooms for Travellers.’
‘Yes, dear,’ said the woman, shading her eyes against the low sun.
‘Do you have a room for two for tonight?’ put in the wife.
‘We do, love,’ said the woman – and yet she made no move.
‘Looks like most of the village has gone to Scarborough,’ I said.
‘Most has,’ she said.
Lydia was looking down at the ferret or polecat.
‘He’s very pretty,’ she said.
‘Don’t stroke ’im whatever yer do,’ said the lad.
Lydia stepped back.
I introduced myself to the woman – though not as a policeman. It would pay dividends, I had decided, to observe this village as an ordinary tripper.
One magpie sat on the roof of The Angel. It was black and white, like the inn, and looked made of leftovers from it.
Why did I think Lambert was innocent? Because he had fed the bird outside the police office. And I was in good company: the governor of Wandsworth gaol had thought the same.
The woman was at last rising, giving her name as ‘Mrs Handley’ and wiping her hands on her pinafore.
Lydia, still looking at the polecat, was saying to the boy:
‘He’d have my finger off, I suppose.’
‘He wouldn’t have your finger off,’ said the boy, evidently thinking hard. ‘It’d be left on …’
‘Would you like to follow me up?’ the woman was saying.
‘… Only it’d be danglin’,’ the boy ran on.
The lad was also rising to his feet. Where his mother was tawny, he was a brighter brown. He seemed smallish for his age, but he had a great wave of black hair, which must have been oiled naturally, for he was not the sort of boy to be brilliantined. The kid reminded me of one of the over-thatched cottages. He wore a suit of rough purplish corduroy, and balanced what seemed like a very small cap on top of his great quantity of hair.
The sign above the front door read: ‘Mr P. Handley, licensed retailer of foreign wines, spirituous liquor, ales, porters and tobacco’. We stepped beneath it into the hot dimness of the inn’s tiny hallway. There was a door on either side. One said ‘Saloon’, the other ‘Public’.
‘Lovely wisteria,’ Lydia said, as we climbed the stairs.
The landlady smiled but it was the lad who answered.
‘Threatens to ’ave the ’ole front down, that does,’ he called up the staircase.
The lad, who’d seemed stand-offish at first, was now eager to be included in the conversation; he was certainly the brightest spark we’d struck so far in Adenwold. He carried my bag – he’d insisted on doing so, while his mother carried Lydia’s. The landlord himself had remained at the table outside with his ale.
The staircase walls were decorated with wallpaper – white with red roses – and this continued along the narrow landing and into the room we now entered, so that the whole of the interior of The Angel seemed to have a bad case of measles.
The room was small and buckled, with a single tab rug on a polished wooden floor. Beside the high bed stood a rickety washstand, a dresser, a cane chair and a small wardrobe. I whisked off my top-coat, and put my warrant card in the top left drawer of the dresser. There was one picture on the wall, showing two fish facing different directions, each marked ‘Pearch’ – the old-fashioned spelling. Between them were drawings of four hooks, and these were marked ‘Lob worm’, ‘Minnow’, ‘Brandling’ and ‘Marsh Worm’. The room was clean and light – this even though we were, so to say, inside the wisteria, for its purple flowers fluttered at the window.
Lydia complimented the woman on the prettiness of the room, and I gave the boy a penny for carting my bag up the stairs. I asked his name, and he answered, ‘Mervyn.’
‘Who’s the fellow on the bicycle?’ I enquired.
‘Him?’ he said. ‘He’s a bicyclist.’
I could see that he knew his answer to have been a little lacking, but before he could make any further remark his mother had bundled him out of the room. She turned about in the doorway, saying, ‘There’s a cold supper laid on in the saloon from just after nine. Yorkshire ham and salad – will that do you?’