“You register with a farmer, one who knows you, usually at the end of pickin’ the year before. My family’s been goin’ down ’oppin’ since before my grandfather was a boy. The farmer knows which families ’e wants back, the good workers. Then, in spring or thereabouts, you get your brown envelope, with a letter telling you to come on such and such a date for the ’oppin’ and that you’ll get your hut to live in. So when you get on the train, with all your family and everything from yer sheets down to the tin kettle, you know you’ve got work and a roof over yer ’ead.”
Maisie was silent for a moment. “Do you know anyone going to”—she paused to consult her notes—”Dickon’s Farm on the Sandermere Estate? Couldn’t you sort of swap with another family?”
Billy shook his head. “No, I don’t know anyone goin’ to Dickon’s Farm, not off the top of me noddle.” He paused, rubbing his chin. “But you know what I’ll do, I’ll ’ave a word with a few blokes I know, see if it can be done. It ain’t normal, though. The farmers don’t like messin’ about with their allocations.”
“Good man.” Maisie smiled and reached for a file. “Look at this, just like the number twelve bus—none for ages, then three, one after the other. It never rains but it pours, and about time too!”
“More work comin’ in?”
“Yes. I came back to the office yesterday evening and there were two postcards and a telegram, all with jobs for us. I’ve set appointments with the new clients already. There’s nothing huge, but it’s a good sign and means that, along with my private clients, the business will go along nicely for us, probably right up to Christmas.”
“You were worried there for a bit, weren’t you, Miss?”
Maisie nodded. “Yes, just a bit.” She flipped open the Compton file again. “Billy, I’m anxious to have my planning for this case settled, so here’s what I’d like you to do today—after you’ve completed the notes on the Jacobsen case so I can send our report and issue an invoice. I want you to find out if you can get onto the Sandermere estate as soon as you can.” She paused. “I won’t have this case eat into your holiday time, and I’ll obviously pay you for the work you do while you’re down there, so keep a good record of your hours. I just want you to give me initial impressions, based on James Compton’s concerns. Then I really want an in for myself—you might find me picking hops with the Beales, if I have to.”
Billy laughed. “Miss, I can’t get over it—you a Londoner and never been down to Kent pickin’ ’ops.”
Once Maisie might have nipped such informality in the bud and not encouraged frivolous repartee on a working morning, but since she had known Billy, they had seen much together—not least during their first brief meeting, when he was brought into the casualty clearing station in France where she was working as a nurse in 1916. Her first love, a young army doctor, Simon Lynch, had saved Billy’s life, and the man who was now her assistant had never forgotten either of them. Billy’s life intersected with Maisie’s again when she rented an office on Warren Street where he was caretaker—he had recognized her immediately. After he’d helped her on a significant case, she asked him to become her assistant, a role he gratefully accepted. Now there was an ease in their relationship, though the occasional joke on Billy’s part never slipped into overfamiliarity.
“No, I never went down ’oppin’, Billy, though my father picked hops when he was a boy. Of course, I’ve seen them growing, seen the men out stringing for the bines to grow up and the women banding-in and training the shoots along the strings in late spring. But I know nothing about the actual business of hop-picking.” She paused, remembering. “Instead, we used to spend a week in the summer with my mother’s parents, when they lived near Marlow. Granddad was a lockkeeper. He’d been a lighterman on the Thames for years, but my grandmother yearned to be out of the city, and because they both wanted to be near the water he went to work on the waterways eventually—you couldn’t keep him away from that river, even when he should have been retired.”
“And your grannie? A Londoner, was she?”
Maisie shook her head. “Oh, no, she was a different kettle of fish altogether.” She changed the subject, taking up a sheet of paper. “Now then, after a bit of a lull, thank heavens we’ve some real work to do.”
BILLY AND HIS family left London at the weekend, on one of the trains known as a Hoppers’ Special. He had managed to effect an exchange of farm employment with another man and his family and, following a swift back-and-forth of postcards and telegrams between the men and the farmers concerned, the Beales were now ensconced in a one-room hopper hut on Dickon’s Farm. For her part, Maisie turned to assessing the case in greater detail.
James Compton’s notes included a map of the estate, a significant acreage set amid the swath of land known as the Weald of Kent. Heronsdene neighbored the estate at its southern edge, where the village met the perimeter of Dickon’s Farm, which Tom Dickon had inherited from his father, and his father before him. And so it went, down through the centuries. Thanks to long leases that were all but untouchable, the farmer considered the land his own, to be kept in the family.
The brickworks was to the east of Dickon’s Farm and, as James had said, was doing well. More information on Alfred Sandermere was included, together with a photograph. Not very flattering, thought Maisie, as she sized up a man of perhaps thirty or thirty-one. He seemed quite ordinary, though she did not care for his eyes, which were narrowed, bridged by thin eyebrows and swept-back hair with an overabundance of oil—the photograph revealed an unfortunate shine indicating as much. His lips drew back across his teeth as he smiled for the camera, and Maisie noticed that he held a half-smoked cigar in his hand. Nothing unusual there. However, she thought it unseemly, and there was something about his slouch that suggested arrogance and cynicism. She knew she would have to meet Sandermere at some point and did not look forward to making his acquaintance.
A list of crimes committed in the area during the past three years seemed somewhat long, especially those against the estate’s property. Broken windows at the brickworks, theft of tools, a fire in the stables—fortunately neither horses nor grooms were lost. Maisie noticed that a number of the incidents occurred in mid-September of each year, at the time when villagers were outnumbered by Londoners and, of course, a smaller number of gypsies. Mind you, that didn’t mean a thing. As James himself had noted, visitors were often a convenient scapegoat for locals with crime in mind.
A shorter note pointed to small fires that occurred in the village itself, again during September. There was no indication either of complaints by the villagers or of the source of such events. Billy had commented on the fires, saying, “Perhaps it’s all a coincidence, Miss,” to which they had then said, in unison, “Coincidence is a messenger sent by truth.”
The words of Maisie’s mentor and former employer, the noted psychologist, philosopher and expert in forensic science, Dr. Maurice Blanche, were quoted time and time again, though a serious rent in the fabric of the relationship between Maisie and her teacher was far from healed, despite their occasional brief conversations. It was just one year earlier, in France, that Maisie had come to understand the depth of Maurice’s covert activities during the war. She took his secretiveness, along with his seeming interference in a case, to be evidence of a lack of trust toward her, and a fierce row had taken place. Maisie had suffered a breakdown of sorts during her visit to France, a deep malaise brought on by unacknowledged shell shock. Though the chasm between Maurice and Maisie had caused her to become more independent of him, fashioning the business as she would have it rather than as she inherited it, there were times when she missed his counsel. But the events of last year remained unresolved.