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  Contents

  John Buxton Hilton

  For Elizabeth Adams

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  John Buxton Hilton

  No Birds Sang

  John Buxton Hilton

  John Buxton Hilton was born in 1921 in Buxton, Derbyshire. After his war service in the army he became an Inspector of schools, before retiring in 1970 to take up full-time writing.

  He wrote two books on language teaching as well as being a prolific crime writer – his works include the Superintendent Simon Kenworthy series and the Inspector Thomas Brunt series, as well as the Inspector Mosley series under the pseudonym John Greenwood.

  For

  Elizabeth Adams

  Chapter One

  A livid slash in the bole of a twisted hawthorn where a recent bullet had torn away a triangle of bark; a signboard leaning on its side against a heap of crumbling bricks, sun-bleached and weather-cracked—the home-spun grace of a forelock-touching Edwardian tradesman: Wm Penny, Supplier of Cattle Feeds and Farm Machinery; a roof gaping open, rafterless and futile, against a concavity of empty sky.

  Lance-corporal Taffy Davies squeezed the trigger and the Bren fired one round and stopped. He eased forward the barrel and called to Number Two to regulate the gas. Nine Platoon slithered forward on grass wet from a May shower. Rifle bullets cracked overhead like a cliché lick of whip-cord. From behind the gorse D Company put down their first smoke, twenty yards to windward of the target.

  Number Two dropped his hand and fell back with parade ground self-consciousness. Davies fired a service-burst into the soft earth of a molehill. Then he saw the civilian’s face, the panic gesture of an arm waving a white handkerchief in the gap that had once been a window. The smoke from the mortar bomb drifted across his field of vision and a second one came down with an earthy puff between the first burst and the corner of the cottage.

  ‘Corp! There’s somebody in there!’

  The smoke was thickening now, both bombs belching orgiastically. From a flank an automatic rifle opened up, emptied half a magazine into the heart of their objective.

  ‘Cease fire! Cease fire! There’s a civvy in there!’

  But some man at the extreme end of the section—Willoughby or Swann—had not heard, was just beginning to enjoy himself, was pumping single rifle shots willy-nilly into the smoke. Davies jumped to his feet.

  ‘Cease fire, there!’

  And from the rabbit hollow that was Platoon H.Q., Lieutenant Franklin was shouting in exasperated incomprehension.

  ‘What the hell do you think you’re on, Corporal? Get down man, get down! You’re in Twelve Platoon’s cross-fire. Christ!’

  Chapter Two

  Derek Stammers lit a cheroot at the wheel and in the passenger-seat Kenworthy flexed his legs, eased his bottom and let the feeling of relaxation travel up his spine. Holidaying on another man’s patch—he’d fought shy of it for years, and here it was, apparently working. Along the dead straight by-road the panorama of the trees was like an impressionist’s palette, every gold, green and mother-earth brown in the pigment-box. And everything fresh, everything youthful. Ten minutes ago, it had rained; now the rogue cloud had passed elsewhere. Spring sunshine flooded the acres of wayside dandelion, hedge-parsley and ragged robin.

  ‘And you get paid for this kind of motoring.’

  ‘There are worse bailiwicks,’ Stammers said. ‘Yours, for example.’

  ‘If you can call mine a manor.’

  Then Stammers cocked up his eye quizzically at his mirror. An ambulance overtook them, blue lamp flashing, siren hysterical; seconds later an Allegro patrol-car, two tones of blue, doing at least ninety.

  ‘Any policeman, of course, with a real taste for the charnel-house, gets into “Traffic”. If it’s along this stretch, Simon, I’d better stop and look. But I doubt if it’ll be my pigeon.’

  Three minutes later, they saw that it wasn’t “Traffic”. The ambulance was parked on the verge at the entrance to a forest ride; the panda car was behind it and there was a miscellany of military vehicles, a barbed wire barrier, a red range-flag and a guard-room compound.

  ‘Trouble—for the army. But I’d better get myself informed.’

  Derek got out, was about to slam the door, then looked back.

  ‘Come if you want to, Simon, of course—’

  Kenworthy smiled, lazy and affable.

  ‘All yours, Derek.’

  He lowered the window, looked idly out to where the ambulance drivers were off-loading a stretcher—and within five minutes was actually dozing. Once or twice within the next quarter of an hour he opened his eyes and was casually aware that something was happening: Red Caps arriving in a jeep, a tailor’s dummy brigadier in a staff-car. The stretcher was put back empty into the ambulance and another one carried with reverence into the W. D. blood-wagon. The body’s face was covered by the blanket. Kenworthy closed his eyes again. Derek was obviously going to be some little time. The ladies were waiting to be picked up for a hotel lunch; but policemen’s wives were used to being patient. At least, Elspeth was. No doubt Derek had Diana equally well trained.

  Then Derek came back through the trees, talking to a lieutenant-colonel and a captain.

  ‘Simon—I promise I’m not dragging you into anything—but I’d like you to see this.’

  So Kenworthy got out of the car, with no very strong feelings either way. He wasn’t going to let himself get tied up—certainly he wasn’t—but if Derek had something that he thought was curious, it was only polite to show an interest: like listening last night to the L.P.’s of the Welsh male voice choirs. The trouble about the brothers-in-law was that over the twenty-five years they had been acquainted, they had carefully avoided getting to know each other. Kenworthy was aware that he had a national reputation and suspected that Derek, in common with most of the senior men in provincial forces, was unimpressed. Derek, on the other hand, was known to be a bloody good country D. C.I.—and probably thought the world ended there.

  They walked together between the trees, came to another barrier, another red flag, an armed sentry standing self-consciously regimental.

  ‘A battle range, field training with live ammunition …’

  Kenworthy nodded vaguely. He was partially awake now, had almost involuntarily switched on his familiar, professional alertness, had started to look at passing faces and their expressions, had begun again, as on any working day in his
life, the eternal vigilance for significant discrepancies. It had not come his way to have much to do with soldiers since 1946. These men looked young, self-satisfied, perhaps a shade more intelligent than he remembered the army, the N.C.O.s confident, the C.O. impatient.

  ‘A man’s been killed. It’s bad for these others to be kept hanging about.’

  They were a training battalion, practising platoon-in-the-attack. There was a metallic tang of cordite, alien to the spring morning. The mortar smoke had dissipated in wisps across the scrubland. A platoon was halted along the edge of a nursery pine plantation. The colonel played hell with a sergeant who had neglected to post a superfluous look-out, forgetting the rules of the war-game in the face of death itself.

  ‘Give us twenty minutes,’ Derek said. ‘I want to look over the spot before you plaster it with H.E.’

  ‘Waste of your time, Chief Inspector. The man’s a simple trespasser.’

  ‘A trespasser—but not so simple. This is the third time.’

  The colonel conferred with his adjutant, then nodded his agreement. A Field Security Sergeant stepped forward from the band of satellites.

  ‘May I come, too, please?’

  ‘Of course. But I’ll tell you now, you’ll find nothing you won’t write off.’

  ‘All the same, sir.’

  ‘I said of course, didn’t I? Obviously you’ve never come across Milner.’

  ‘No, sir.’

  ‘How long have you been covering this district?’

  ‘Six months.’

  ‘And there’s nothing about Milner on your files?’

  ‘I don’t know the files by heart, sir.’

  Derek made no further comment. They set out through knee-deep vegetation: the yellow straggling weeds favoured by the sandy soil, the wiry brush of heather against their trousers. The gashed hawthorn stretched branches heavy with blossom, spreading like an arm towards the leeward south-west.

  ‘Six square miles of it, give or take a rood or two. Requisitioned by the War Office in 1941, to teach the infantry what they ought to have been learning in the 1930s. Two villages involved—well, a village and a hamlet—Yarrow Cross and Pegg’s Corner, in that order. The population was compulsorily rehoused, mostly in nearby town estates, but some went further afield. Smallholders were compensated: I don’t know how well. Everybody took it that the area would be decontrolled as soon as the war was over but, as you can see, the M. of D. have held on. There’s been a bit of fuss, sporadically, but it’s mostly died down now. Nobody seems to care—except Milner. Now and then a picnic party strays accidentally, and has to be turned back by the standing patrol. There’s a lot of unexploded ammo about—they say. Local poachers take their chances as they come, probably with the patrol’s connivance. Once a year the barriers are lifted, and there’s a day’s free access to the church, between taped lanes. They have a service; I don’t know who comes. Milner doesn’t; he’s not interested when he’s allowed to be.’

  They came to the first pile of overgrown rubble that marked the village’s extremity. Self-sown saplings apparently found sustenance in the cracks between stones. A gorse-bush had taken root high on a remnant of wall.

  ‘There’s a caretaker skeleton unit always here. They put a few stones back in the intervals between assault courses—just to make sure there’s something left to aim at.’

  ‘And your man Milner used to live here?’

  ‘Never in his life. Never within two hundred miles. He’s never had any connection with the place that we’ve been able to unearth. But he keeps coming. That’s why I thought he might interest you.’

  Kenworthy did not ask questions. He would show the required interest, but he proposed to let the whole thing ride over him. He found the heath more than merely pleasant. It was the sort of place he thought he could revel in—for an hour or two: the hum of insects, an ecstatic lark, the forty shades of green. He vaguely liked the sort of speculation that was set up by a deserted village, the corner shop, the wreck of a vicarage. But he had no difficulty in allowing himself to be unaffected by recent sudden death. That was the point of a holiday: to be outside things.

  The patch where the lance-corporal had died had been roped off with improvised stakes. There was a massive and glaring crimson stain on the bank. Blood had splashed grass and trees yards away from where the N.C.O. had spun round and fallen. His section had been marched back fifty yards and were sitting about, smoking cigarettes and talking unnaturally loudly. Most of them had not encountered death before.

  Derek led into the ruin at which the section had been firing. Once a cottage, two up and two down, its ground-plan was piled deep in the debris of its roof-timbers. The door was off its hinges and a surprising number of trainees had found time to carve their initials, their home-towns and their football teams in woodwork and stone. Within the last hour a bullet had ricocheted from the window-sill: the single round before Lance-corporal Davies’s stoppage.

  The room in which he had spotted the intruder was choked with rubbish and rubble: plaster, rotting beam-ends. Weeds were in command everywhere.

  ‘We’ll find nothing. But at least we can say we looked.’

  Stammers picked up a cigarette end.

  ‘Woodbine. One of Milner’s economies. He’s never smoked anything else. A very careful man, Milner.’

  They picked their way through nettle-beds and over garden fences to a metalled road that had been the nuclear village street. Now, mangled by generations of tracked vehicles, there seemed almost as much random plant life amongst the broken asphalt as there was out in the eroding heathland. Buildings had stood up unevenly to the years of assault. Here and there a gable-end was discernible; in places a cluster of pantiles still sagged against an irrational remnant of roof-beam. Other habitations were no more than heaps of rubble, each in its own overgrown crater.

  Derek knew them all.

  ‘John and Wilfred Whittle—flint-knappers.’

  ‘What’s a flint-knapper?’

  ‘Ancient trade, goes back before the Iron Age. Arrowheads, tools and, later, stones for building. I did hear that there are one or two still at it in Brandon. Apparently in some parts of Africa they still need chippings to fire their muskets. But I don’t know what’s happened to the Whittle family. I’ve lost touch. Where Milner was snooping was the Carvers’cottage. Over there the Parsons’. The big house was the Prudhoes’.’

  They crossed the road, and Derek pointed to a Hanoverian facade, the ground-floor windows boarded up, part of the roof gone, and most of the ridge-tiles missing. It was set in parkland that had reverted to a reminder of savannah.

  ‘Gentlemen farmers. Bought a place in Wiltshire on the proceeds of compulsory purchase. Probably the only ones in the village who made anything on the deal. God, I owe something to Milner, Simon. I never set foot in this place while a soul lived here; but there was a time when I knew its ins and outs as well as if I’d lived here half my life. That’s what the Milner file did for me. Let’s go and talk to him. The very sight of him makes me feel sick.’

  They trudged out to the rear of the Field H.Q., where the two uniformed constables from the patrol car were guarding their prisoner, unnecessarily supported by two private soldiers with fixed bayonets.

  ‘You’ve done it this time, Milner.’

  He was a man in his early fifties, fresh faced, cleanly shaven, extremely neatly dressed, though more nearly in the fashions of his own youth than following the trends of the century. His sports jacket, in fact, seemed to be new; the crease in his trousers was razor-edged, and except for a patch of scuffing against the stone, his brown shoes looked as if he polished them endlessly. He was wearing a stylish dark green felt hat, beneath which the trim of a fortnightly hair-cut was apparent. But someone had stuck a patch of plaster across his right cheek-bone, and there was a streak of grime across his forehead.

  ‘You hurt, Milner?’

  Milner did not raise his eyes. There was an old-fashioned discipline in his dress and deportm
ent, and this seemed to go for his sense of shame, too.

  ‘I said, are you hurt?’

  ‘Just grazed. A chip of stone flew off the sill.’

  ‘You stupid bastard.’

  Milner did not defend himself.

  ‘A man stood up to save your life and he’s dead, Milner.’

  Milner was like a domesticated animal, offering no excuses for a familiar offence.

  ‘What can you expect me to say about it, officer?’

  ‘He was a married man, Milner, with a child of two and another on the way.’

  ‘I shall send them every penny I’ve got—even if I have to sell my own bed. And I know that won’t do more than scratch the surface.’

  He spoke with a perceptibly north country accent, but not aggressively so: a soft, Lancashire burr; he gave the impression that his voice was mild by nature, perhaps even musical to listen to, when he was not under stress.

  ‘Something like this was bound to happen sooner or later, Milner. I warned you last time. I only wish it was you they’d carted off …’

  ‘So do I. Do you think I’ll ever get a night’s sleep again?’

  ‘Not on the sort of bed I’m going to try to fix for you. Because if there’s a stretch to be got for you for this, Milner, I’m going to see you get it. And I doubt whether you’ll find a solicitor with the nerve to ask for mitigation.’

  ‘I shan’t ask for any.’

  Derek Stammers looked at Milner rancorously. Kenworthy knew the feeling. He’d let himself get personally involved in cases of his own in his time.

  And Milner muttered something that neither of them caught.

  ‘Say again, Milner.’

  ‘I said, it doesn’t matter now.’

  ‘It matters to me—and you’ll be lucky if it’s left in my hands. And I don’t care whether it is or it isn’t, Milner. I’m going to get the truth out of you if I have to forget myself in the process.’

  Stammers was letting his anger get out of control. Kenworthy felt both for and against him. A copper ought to know when it was a brick wall his head was bouncing off. And any real villain would be delighted to see the law succumbing to its own weaknesses.