Dodd was looking at Carey with peculiar directness. Go on, thought Dodd, tell me you’ve never at least toyed with the notion of shooting Sir Henry Widdrington, tell me you haven’t.
Carey’s voice did trail off and he looked at the floor. Up again. ‘It’s a crime,’ he said more quietly. ‘It has to be a crime. If it wasn’t, none of us could sleep easy in our beds.’
‘Depends how ye treat yer wife, though, sir,’ said Dodd with all the smugness of the happily married. ‘And what her lover thinks of it and what kind of a man he is.’
Carey studiously ignored the personal implications of all this.
‘You think Andy Nixon’s capable of slitting Atkinson’s throat?’
‘Oh ay, sir. Andy Nixon wouldnae do the job he does if he couldnae use a blade.’
‘And Mrs Atkinson? Do you think she knew?’
Dodd shrugged. ‘I dinna ken sir.’
‘Well, let’s go and find out.’
‘We need a warrant, sir...’
‘I’ll get the bloody warrant,’ Carey growled. ‘Fetch the men.’
Kate Atkinson was just about to lock up her house for the night when there came an almighty hammering on her door. She opened it and was faced with a waking nightmare: the tall Deputy Warden with a piece of paper in his hand that gave him the right to search her house, and behind him six men to do it. At the tail of them all was Janet Armstrong’s bad-tempered husband looking very uneasy.
They tramped their muddy boots up the stairs and into her bedroom; she hadn’t been sleeping on her marriage bed, but on the truckle bed beside it, as she told them. Two of them went out into the back yard and started gingerly raking through her midden heap. She didn’t go with them but sat on the window seat in the downstairs living room and looked at her clenched fists. When little Mary started to wail because she was frightened by the high comb of the Deputy’s helmet, she did nothing because there was really nothing comforting she could say to her. Occasionally wisps of thought would gust through her mind. I should have gone to Lowther. I should never have told Andy. What can I say?
‘Mrs Atkinson,’ came a powerful voice from upstairs. ‘Will you come here, please?’
She went and found the Deputy Warden and Henry Dodd staring at the mattress of her marriage bed. They had stripped the clean sheet off it and turned it up the other way again. The Deputy reached down a long glittering hand, prodded the large brown stain. It was still a little sticky, and he sniffed his fingers.
‘Where are the other sheets to this bed?’ he demanded.
‘Downstairs, in the yard,’ she said. ‘Hanging out to dry.’
‘And the blankets?’
‘The same.’
‘The hangings?’
‘Ay.’
‘Did all the blood come off?’
She looked down at her apron, which was greasy, and twisted her hands together.
‘This is blood. You won’t tell me, I hope, that you’ve been killing a chicken in your marriage bed?’
If he was making a joke, she didn’t find it funny.
‘Mrs Atkinson, look at me.’ The Deputy’s voice had an impersonal sound: not angry at all, which surprised her for Lowther would have been bellowing at her by now. She looked at him and oh, the bonny blue eyes he had; it was hard to concentrate, the way they looked into you.
‘Mrs Atkinson, did you murder your husband?’
At least she could answer that question honestly and yet she didn’t. She said nothing.
‘Do you know who did?’
She shook her head.
The blue eyes narrowed; a little surprise, a lot of cynicism, more contempt.
‘I think you do know.’
‘I dinna, sir.’
Janet Armstrong’s husband was staring at her in plain astonishment. Also suspicion. She must seem like every married man’s nightmare, she supposed, as they were hers.
‘I think either you or your lover Andy Nixon slit your husband’s throat. You and he then conspired to dump the body in an alley and lay the blame on me, for whatever reason, though heaven knows I’ve done nothing against you that I know of.’ The Deputy’s voice was heavy with authority.
Yes, that was the sin of it, to lay the blame on an innocent man. But Pennycook had said somebody had to be blamed, and it might as well be the upstart southerner who was interfering with business and had no kin around Carlisle to back him up.
‘We... er...’ She stopped speaking. How could she possibly explain? She didn’t even know for certain that Andy Nixon hadn’t done it. And she had helped to dump the body. Which made her guilty of something, she supposed. She couldn’t speak for the number of things she needed to say.
‘You know what happens if ye refuse to plead, Kate,’ said Dodd anxiously. ‘Ye must answer.’
At least she was able to speak to him, if not to the terrifying Deputy. ‘Ay,’ she whispered. ‘Pressing to death. Well, I didna kill my husband and nor did I plot with anybody to kill him. I dinna ken how he came to be dead. So now.’ There, it was done. When they found her guilty, she would burn.
Carey took a deep breath. ‘I’m afraid I must arrest you, Mrs Atkinson, for the crime of petty treason.’ he said formally. ‘Come with us.’
