Constable Across the Moors by Nicholas Rhea Read Free Book Online

behaviour, and if he did it again, he’d be fined or sent to a detention centre of some kind.”
    “I don’t want to take him to court, a warning from you would be fine,” she said. “I know he’ll think I’m using a sledgehammer to crack a little nut, but he won’t stop when I ask him. I thought a word from you might help.”
    “I’ll speak to him. Will he be in now, at Atkinsons?”
    “He’ll be about the premises somewhere,” she acknowledged .
    I drained my coffee and stood up. “I’ll let you know how I get on – I’ll come straight back.”
    Before I left, I briefly admired her home. The kitchen was a real gem. The fireplace, for example, had an old stone surround with a black-leaded Yorkist range, complete with sliding hooks for pans, and a side oven. It was set in an inglenook and to the right was a wooden partition beyond which was a passage into a further series of rooms.
    “It’s a fascinating house,” I observed.
    “It’s an old cruck house,” she explained. “It used to be a longhouse, that’s a farm house where the family lived at one end and the cattle at the other. The living quarters were warmed by the animals as they wintered next door. The crucks are like tree trunks, and they support the building. It’s very old – I couldn’t hazard a date.”
    “Did you move out here?”
    “No,” she smiled. “It’s been in our family for generations. There’s always been a Hardwick here, as long as anybody knows.”
    I walked around the spacious kitchen, and expressed delight at the ancient woodwork, so crude but effective, and then I noticed the carved wooden post at the outer end of the partition. I ran my hands down it, fingering the delicate workmanship.
    “This is nice – what’s the carving?”
    “That’s a witch post,” she informed me. “Lots of houses had them installed.”
    “What’s it for?” I had never come across this type of thing before.
    “They were built into many houses in this area to protect the occupants against witches,” she smiled. “They date from the seventeenth century mostly, but I’ve never dated ours.”
    “Was witchcraft practised here?” I was intrigued by this decorative post.
    “A good number of old women were reputed to be witches,” she said. “They were supposed to make the milk go sour, or cause the fruit not to ripen – stuff like that. Nuisances more than anything. There wasn’t your dancing naked bits or rituals in lonely woods. They were just old ladies who terrified the superstitious locals and got blamed when things went wrong. Those posts protected the inhabitants against them.”
    After my obvious interest in her house, she showed me the rest of the layout of the fascinating building with its nooks and crannies, beamed bedroom ceilings, sandstone floors and rubble walls. It was a house of considerable age, albeit modernised to meet her modest needs.
    I left my motor cycle near her gate as I walked down the steep hill to Dell Farm. This was a neat homestead with freshly painted gates and a scrupulously tidy farmyard. I made for the house, although I could hear activity in one of the outbuildings, knocked on the door and waited. At my second knock, a woman’s voice shouted, “Come in, the door’s open.”
    I entered a spacious farm kitchen with hams hanging from the ceiling and the smell of new bread heavy in the air. An old lady sat in a chair beside a roaring log fire. I think I must have aroused her from her slumbers.
    “And who might you be?” she demanded, looking me up and down.
    “P.C. Rhea,” I said. “The policeman. From Aidensfield.”
    “You’re a bit off your area, aren’t you?” she quizzed me sharply, her keen grey eyes alert and bright. I reckoned she was well into her seventies, or even older.
    “Not any more. Now we’ve got motor cycles, we go further than we did on bikes. We share the area.”
    “You’ll have come for our Reg, have you? Summat to do with his guns, is it?”
    “Are you Mrs