By the Pricking of My Thumbs - Agatha Christie [40]
‘And then there were others. Not for a month or two sometimes. And then there’d be another one. Not more than a couple of miles from here, one was; almost in the village, though.’
‘Didn’t the police–didn’t anyone know who’d done it?’
‘They tried hard enough,’ said Mrs Copleigh. ‘Detained a man quite soon, they did. Someone from t’other side of Market Basing. Said he was helping them in their inquiries. You know what that always means. They think they’ve got him. They pulled in first one and then another but always after twenty-four hours or so they had to let him go again. Found out he couldn’t have done it or wasn’t in these parts or somebody gave him an alibi.’
‘You don’t know, Liz,’ said Mr Copleigh. ‘They may have known quite well who done it. I’d say they did. That’s often the way of it, or so I’ve heard. The police know who it is but they can’t get the evidence.’
‘That’s wives, that is,’ said Mrs Copleigh, ‘wives or mothers or fathers even. Even the police can’t do much no matter what they may think. A mother says “my boy was here that night at dinner” or his young lady says she went to the pictures with him that night, and he was with her the whole time, or a father says that he and his son were out in the far field together doing something–well, you can’t do anything against it. They may think the father or the mother or his sweetheart’s lying, but unless someone else come along and say they saw the boy or the man or whatever it is in some other place, there’s not much they can do. It was a terrible time. Right het up we all were round here. When we heard another child was missing we’d make parties up.’
‘Aye, that’s right,’ said Mr Copleigh.
‘When they’d got together they’d go out and they’d search. Sometimes they found her at once and sometimes they wouldn’t find her for weeks. Sometimes she was quite near her home in a place you’d have thought we must have looked at already. Maniac, I suppose it must have been. It’s awful,’ said Mrs Copleigh in a righteous tone, ‘it’s awful, that there should be men like that. They ought to be shot. They ought to be strangled themselves. And I’d do it to them for one, if anyone would let me. Any man who kills children and assaults them. What’s the good putting them in loony bins and treating them with all the home comforts and living soft. And then sooner or later they let ’em out again, say they’re cured and send them home. That happened somewhere in Norfolk. My sister lives there and she told me about it. He went back home and two days later he’d done in someone else. Crazy they are, these doctors, some of them, saying these men are cured when they are not.’
‘And you’ve no idea down here who it might have been?’ said Tuppence. ‘Do you think really it was a stranger?’
‘Might have been a stranger to us. But it must have been someone living within–oh! I’d say a range of twenty miles around. It mightn’t have been here in this village.’
‘You always thought it was, Liz.’
‘You get het up,’ said Mrs Copleigh. ‘You think it’s sure to be here in your own neighbourhood because you’re afraid, I suppose. I used to look at people. So did you, George. You’d say to yourself I wonder if it could be that chap, he’s seemed a bit queer lately. That sort of thing.’
‘I don’t suppose really he looked queer at all,’ said Tuppence. ‘He probably looked just like everyone else.’
‘Yes, it could be you’ve got something there. I’ve heard it said that you wouldn’t know, and whoever it was had never seemed mad at all, but other people say there’s always a terrible glare in their eyes.’
‘Jeffreys, he was the sergeant of police here then,’ said Mr Copleigh, ‘he always used to say he had a good idea but there was nothing doing.’
‘They never caught the man?’
‘No. Over six months it was, nearly a year.