“Lads! Lads! Get back ’ere!” Hutchins commanded. The dogs ran to heel as the man wiped his hands on a handkerchief pulled from his pocket. He took his tweed jacket from where it had been hung on a fence post and collected his shepherd’s crook, which was leaning in the same place. He walked toward Maisie.
“Hello—Mr. Hutchins? Good morning—my name is Maisie Dobbs. I wonder if you could spare me a little of your time.” Maisie held out her hand.
“Depends upon what you’ll be wanting with that precious time of mine. We’ve got to get up to the big field presently—so the lads and I shall be tapping our feet to be off before you know it. Eh, lads?” He passed the crook into his left hand, with which he also held the jacket, and accepted Maisie’s hand. “My, that’s a strong shake you’ve got there, young lady. Can’t abide a wet fish in my fingers, no I can’t—can I, boys?” He looked down at the dogs, then back to Maisie. “And I like to see a person come to a farm with good solid footwear. Not like some of them land girls I’ve heard are turning up without even a pair of good boots. Now then, Miss whatever-your-name-was—state your business, because I’ve got to get about mine.”
Maisie smiled. “Mr. Hutchins, I want to talk to you about Joe Coombes—I’m a friend of his parents, and I am also an investigator, so I’m trying to help get some questions answered for them, about his passing. Can you help me?”
The man’s ready smile evaporated. He looked down at his feet. The older of the two dogs whimpered. “You’d best come in then,” said Hutchins, pointing to the farmhouse with his shepherd’s crook.
Maisie declined the offer of tea, and Hutchins joined her at the kitchen table, where he had drawn back a chair for her when they entered. The kitchen was neat, as if everything was in its designated place. The pine table was scrubbed and clean. The red-tiled floor smelled of disinfectant.
“You keep a comfortable farmhouse, Mr. Hutchins,” said Maisie. “I live in the midst of several farms, and I know a good farmer when I see one.”
“Farm has to run like a ship—otherwise you never know what might end up overboard in a storm.” He rapped the knuckles of his right hand on the table. “Right then, miss—let’s get down to it. What do you want to know about Joe?”
“I’d heard that you’d befriended him, and that he had visited you here at the farm.”
“That’s true,” said Hutchins. “Took to my young pup there, and started asking me about him, and about how I train them for sheep. I don’t only have my own two, but that one’s mother, and I sell the pups when she has them. I breed a good sheepdog, and there’s farmers who know it. The bitch whelped again just afore Joe died. I let him have first pick.”
“Really? Joe?” said Maisie.
“Don’t look so surprised! He might have been a London boy, but he soon had the country in him. Loved it here, he did. And he came over to the farm many an evening, and would sit here talking to me, asking me questions. Came out with me to watch the dogs working. He asked me for one and I told him—put one of them dogs in London and you’ll have a lunatic on your hands. Fifty mile a day that dog can do—easy. Been bred for a job, not to sit in front of a fire. Mind you, mine always like the fire of a winter’s evening, I must say. My late wife said I was a soft touch with the dogs. But they work for it, and they’re good ’uns. Joe said he wouldn’t want a dog in London, that he wanted to work for me here on the farm. Said he’d had enough of it all, London, the painting, and going round the country to these airfields.”
Maisie leaned forward, resting her elbows on the table, and drawing closer to Hutchins. “I am not shocked, Mr. Hutchins, but perhaps a little taken aback. I’d heard that Joe missed home, and that he wanted to finish with the job.”
“Right enough he did. He’d had enough of all of them. But he didn’t want to go home, and that’s a fact.”
Maisie looked down at her hands. She was in no hurry to continue, and felt that Hutchins was waiting for her to say something. And she suspected he was waiting for her to ask the right question—a question that he could answer without feeling as if he had revealed a confidence.
“Was Joe troubled, would you say?” Maisie looked up into the farmer’s eyes.
“He was.”
“And what was he troubled about?”
“I don’t know, though I tried to find out.”
“And how did you do that—how did you try to find out?”
“We’d go out to the fields, check the sheep of an evening after he’d finished at one of them airfields, and then we’d come down to the house for a cup of tea and perhaps a bite to eat. Sometimes he’d stay and sometimes he had to get back to the other lads, or to have the dinner his landlady had put out for him. He’d sit there, right where you are now, and we’d talk, and as time went on, it was always as if he wanted to tell me something, but just couldn’t get the words out.”
“Do you think he was in trouble?” asked Maisie.
Hutchins shook his head. “I know what a lad looks like when he’s in trouble, when he’s been up to something, and that wasn’t the look he had. No, it wasn’t that kind of trouble. But it was close—it was as if he was trying not to get into trouble.”
“Do you think someone was making him do something he didn’t want to do?”
“Well, his father was for a start.”
Maisie frowned, and was about to speak when Hutchins continued.
“Far as I can make out, Joe wanted to ask for his cards from this Yates business and get another job—he wanted to come to work on the farm. But he said his father had put his foot down, that he said that if he gave up working for Yates, then he might as well never come home again. He told Joe you don’t give up a chance of a craftsman job, an apprenticeship that could lead to something. I remember him sitting there, and saying, ‘I don’t want to go where this job is leading though. I want to stay on your farm.’ He was only a boy.” He sighed. “I can see his father’s point, but Joe told me his father had just brushed it off when he told him about the headaches. Not sure I would have done that—but I don’t know. Not my place to comment upon how another man raises his son. But I know this—they’re soon gone, especially if there’s a war on.”
Maisie nodded. “Do you think Joe was scared of anything?”
Hutchins met her eyes once again. “I do, Miss Dobbs. Yes, I do. Only I don’t know what it was. He wouldn’t tell me. I said to him, one evening, out there with the dogs, I said, ‘Come on, lad, a problem shared is a problem halved. Tell me what’s bothering you, and it might not seem so bad—like putting on the light in a dark room.’”
Maisie smiled. “A very dear friend of mine once said the same thing—about putting on the light in a dark room. He told me that when we keep secrets they grow inside us, and we can’t see the truth of them anymore.”
“That’s about the measure of it,” said Hutchins. “What Joe couldn’t tell me could have been a small thing, or it might have been something much bigger than he could manage. But he was scared—and he seemed fearful of what might befall me if I knew what it was.”
“Did he say as much?” asked Maisie.
“Just that it was best if I didn’t know. That’s words of a fair size for a young man.”
“Yes, you’re right.”
Phineas Hutchins broke the silence that followed.
“Now, Miss Dobbs, you can answer a question for me. You’ve been looking a bit surprised ever since we met. First out there in the courtyard, and now in here. You keep looking around my kitchen, as if there’s something you find curious about me and my house.”