A Death to Record (14 page)

‘Next week, same time. Okay?’

She didn’t wait to hear whether or not it was okay. Standing up, she ushered the woman out of the room and down the corridor. Leaving her at the top of the stairs, Claudia dived into the office
for a word with Janice on reception before there could be any more discussion.

‘Phew!’ she sighed, as they heard the front door bang shut. ‘I’m getting too old for this job.’

‘Rubbish,’ laughed Janice. ‘You’re the best of the whole lot, and you know it.’

It was plain that Janice had heard nothing about the Dunsworthy happenings. It was worth the thirty-five mile journey to North Devon just to be amongst people who knew virtually nothing about her home area. But it had a price, too. She felt isolated, anxious about her son.

Anxious
… What an inadequate word to describe what was going on inside her. When that tall young police sergeant had appeared with Gordon last night, she had at first suspected nothing of what was about to happen. She had been almost criminally slow to understand; to grasp the full implications of what was happening before her very eyes. She had even gone to bed while the high-powered searchlights were still playing on the yard, men in protective suits crawling through the muck looking for evidence that she fervently hoped they wouldn’t find. What, after all, could there be, after a hundred cows had trampled over the spot? Some blood – just enough to show where Sean had been attacked – and very little else. But she’d been pathetically pleased with her hint to Lilah that a
bit of accidental damage to the police tape might not come amiss.

Lilah had understood immediately, and cooperated magnificently, as Claudia had noticed on her way out that morning. But now it didn’t seem such a clever idea, after all. Forensic evidence these days could be found on the point of a pin, on the merest wisp of fluff from a pocket, couldn’t it? All Lilah had done was to antagonise the police, in all probability.

It was time to go home. She and Mary shared a car, carefully planning their journeys to make this possible. Mary would be waiting at her school to be collected. There was something both irritating and comforting about having to pick up a grown daughter from school and take her home. It was as if nothing had changed in the last twenty years or more. They would usually chat amicably in the car, telling stories of their day. This afternoon, of course, they would have only one topic to talk about.

Lilah drove back to Redstone at half past two, leaving Gordon to get on with the afternoon milking. Ted Speedwell followed his usual routine, moving the big lightweight gates behind the assembled cows, to channel them back into their cubicles after they’d been milked. It was his only contribution – and he made sure he was out
of the way before the actual milking started.

Den’s car was in the yard, as Lilah reversed hers out of the parking area beside the house. The sight of it mangled her emotions even further; her entire body felt stuffed with marshmallow. Her hands shook on the steering wheel. How long would the police hang about, asking the same questions, searching over and over for some speck of evidence that would incriminate Gordon?

She tried to think intelligently. There must be the seeds of a plan somewhere, if only she could find them and set them germinating. On the assumption that Gordon was innocent, the obvious task was to identify who else might possibly be the killer. Ted Speedwell? Why not?

She tried to think of anything incriminating in Ted’s behaviour or conversation in the brief exchange she’d had with him that morning. He hadn’t seemed sorry about Sean’s death. He’d been more upset at the disappearance of his fork – which, according to the official receipt left by the police in Gordon’s office, had been taken for forensic examination. ‘That fork’s the only thing that gets up the silage proper,’ he’d complained. ‘’Twill be a mess, trying to use that darned pitchfork instead.’

If it was Ted’s fork that had been used to kill Sean – wasn’t that in itself suspicious? Not really, she had to admit. He habitually left it
lying around where anyone could pick it up. And the image of the peaceable, ageing tractor driver committing such a sudden act of violence was an unconvincing one. Even if she could find a way of shifting police attention to Ted, she knew she wouldn’t be able to make a plausible case for the prosecution. Not even to save Gordon. There must be someone else …

There was. The milk recorder, Deirdre Watson, who’d known Sean and his unsavoury ways from years of milking alongside him. She’d been there when Sean died; she’d more or less shared in the discovery of the body. She’d seemed uncannily calm; she’d returned to the farm that morning, when most people would be far too traumatised to contemplate such a thing. Lilah thought hard, and productively. Yes, there might well be something there that she could work with.

She knew how Den’s mind worked – how he tried to see the best in people, and fought against the temptation to jump to conclusions. Her attack on him that morning hadn’t been very fair, she now admitted to herself. However furious she might be that he was involved in the murder investigation, she couldn’t seriously accuse him of letting prejudice affect his judgement. He’d told Danny Hemsley the full story – and if Danny was keeping him on the case, it could only be that
everything would be squeaky-clean, every step of the way.

Even now, when his personal feelings were so intimately involved, Lilah believed he’d go carefully and take heed of anything that might implicate another suspect. She knew a great deal about the realities of police work, too: the odd mixture of insane levels of thoroughness on the one hand, and a tendency to a profound intellectual laziness on the other. Combined with an inability to get to grips with anyone not fitting one of their stereotypes, this left them vulnerable to manipulation. Or so she hoped.

Motive
– that was where the focus of attention would be from here on. They had their murder weapon; they knew, more or less, who had had the opportunity to attack Sean at that particular time. What they didn’t know was
why
. And the power of that question never relaxed its hold.

‘What on earth’s going on?’ her mother demanded when she got home. ‘Everyone’s talking about your Gordon being arrested for murder. Is this to do with that phone call you got last night from Claudia?’

Lilah nodded. ‘She asked me not to say anything to you. They haven’t actually arrested Gordon, though. They took him for questioning and kept him all night, but he’s home again now. Of course, without Sean, he’s got to do all the milking.’

‘So it is Sean that’s been killed?’

‘That’s right.’

Miranda sat down heavily. ‘Shit, Li. Not again. How the hell do you manage it?’

Lilah gave a bitter laugh. ‘At least I know the ropes by now. Serves me right for taking up with a policeman.’

‘Except I thought you’d dumped the policeman precisely because you didn’t want any more to do with death and drama and all that stuff.’

‘Can’t escape my fate, apparently.’

‘So did Gordon kill the man? Why would he do that?’

‘Of course he didn’t!’ Lilah flashed back hotly. ‘There’s absolutely no evidence against him.’

‘Den’s not on the case, is he?’

Lilah nodded ruefully. ‘Main investigating officer.’

Miranda blew out her cheeks with surprise. ‘No prizes for guessing who he’d like to pin it on. Fancy letting
him
take it on!’

‘I don’t think there’s anyone else,’ Lilah realised. ‘They’ve had some budget cuts this winter, and Phil’s smashed leg won’t have mended yet.’

‘Poor old Den,’ murmured Miranda. ‘But it doesn’t seem fair.’ She sighed, drifting off the subject, as she often did. ‘But jealous souls will not be answer’d so.’

‘What?’ Lilah wanted to shake her impossible mother, who never seemed to offer the sort of support and advice she wanted.

‘It’s
Othello
.’

‘It’s always
Othello
. Your English teacher has a lot to answer for.’

‘Den likes it, as well. Remember? We used to quote bits at each other. All those lovely lines. “She will sing the savageness out of a bear”.’ She drew breath to throw other random quotes at her daughter, but Lilah interrupted.

‘That’s enough Shakespeare,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

‘Sean O’Farrell’s the badger baiting bloke, isn’t he?’ Miranda spoke casually, her back to Lilah as she started to remove shopping from a carrier bag.

‘
What?
’

‘I don’t know who told me. Hetty or Sylvia, or someone. I imagine he goes in for lamping them, too. But I suppose that’s not exciting enough for his sort. I remember – it was Hetty. She was in the Post Office, muttering about it. Somebody saw Sean with a shovel late one night, and said something to somebody else – I don’t know – it’s all nods and winks round here. But O’Farrell’s name is always the first anyone thinks of. Or Fred Page, of course. Because he’s got that dog.’

‘I haven’t heard a word about any of this.’

‘Well, people don’t talk in front of you, do they? At least not when you were engaged to Den.’

‘But surely nobody approves of badger baiting?’ There were times when Lilah felt disablingly young, with the world still hopelessly difficult to comprehend.

Miranda sighed, evidently feeling something similar about her daughter. ‘It’s not a matter of approval. They know it goes on. And it’s their own sons and brothers doing it. And they’re all convinced that badgers spread TB. They don’t want the stigma of a police prosecution, do they?’

‘Well, if Sean O’Farrell was involved in it, he
deserved
to be killed. He should have been ripped to pieces, like one of the poor badgers.’

‘I don’t suppose he was murdered for being into badger baiting,’ Miranda smiled. ‘Even the keenest animal rights activist isn’t likely to have gone that far.’

‘Hmmm,’ said Lilah, narrowing her eyes, and suddenly feeling quite a lot better. ‘I wonder.’

Den had as unpleasant a time observing the afternoon milking as he’d expected. Gordon ignored him completely, having asked the detective to stand on the steps leading out of the sunken area, and to be as quiet as he could. ‘They’ve had enough upset for one week,’ he said.
‘Christ knows what sort of a job Lilah made of them this morning.’

Den clenched his fist, conscious of an urge to thrust it violently towards the mouth of this man who could utter her name so naturally. There was no sign in the man’s eyes that he knew how Den was feeling – which, oddly, made it easier to relax and concentrate on the matter in hand, after the first awkward minutes.

He acknowledged with a stab of surprise that he had never once helped Lilah with the milking at Redstone, so he had never before witnessed the routine. In spite of himself he was absorbed by it.

It was less cold than he expected. The cows themselves provided a barrier between the parlour and the wintry gusts from the gathering yard. At first, he breathed shallow, cautious breaths, afraid of the olfactory onslaught. But as his nostrils detected no more than a sweetish whiff of what he supposed was silage on the animals’ breath, he relaxed. Even the smell of a fresh deposit of dung close by, from a cow on its way out of the parlour, was not nearly as obnoxious as he’d expected. As the minutes dragged by, he found his thoughts wandering to the cows themselves.

The way they were positioned for milking, the only part visible was the backside and udder, except for the first one in each row. Without exception, each time a new row arrived the first
cow noticed Den, paused, and turned a watchful eye on him, before slotting herself into her stall and setting about eating the cattle cake provided. The others followed suit, reassured by their leader’s behaviour.

Den found himself involuntarily identifying with the creatures and their routine. It was clear that some were much more resigned to the process than others. Some hung back, and seemed to have a tension about them as the cluster was applied to the heavy udder.

There was an unmistakable sympathy between Hillcock and his beasts. The farmer moved amongst them easily, responding to interruptions or delays with equanimity. There was a sense of a shared goal between the man and the cows: they all wanted the milk taken from the udders. The patient, unemotional face of the front cow was always the same. Having finished the food in the hopper, she would simply stand there, moving minutely in time to the sucking rhythm of the milking machine, in no hurry for it to finish, perhaps permitting the illusion that her own calf was sucking the milk, perhaps not caring what it was that eased the tightness of her udder.

For the first time in his life, Den wondered how it was to be a cow on a modern dairy farm. He tried to persuade himself that there were worse existences – that they were mostly healthy
and free from pain. But he couldn’t ignore the obscenely huge udders on some of them, the swellings on the joints of their back legs. And he couldn’t forget the carnage of the BSE experience, with death coming to whole herds
en masse
, a waste beyond calculation, mostly conducted in too much of a hurry to care about precision in handling the stun gun. He had no illusions about the certain fate of every one of these cows. Almost none of them would die a death free from fear and horror. Those who did would drop down dead in the yard from some injury or illness that would almost certainly involve a degree of suffering.

His head hurt with the brutal knowledge of what was done every day to livestock such as these. They were living, breathing, feeling beings, and he was suddenly not at all sure it was right to drink their milk or eat their bodies.

He watched Gordon reach out to pick a piece of straw from the flank of a cow. It was lightly attached by a bit of dry manure, so he had to pull it slightly. The cow’s hide rippled with the sensation, which could hardly have been more than the briefest tug on a few hairs. Hardly more than a fly walking on her. The obvious sensitivity made Den’s own skin quiver in sympathy.

The moment passed and he hardened his resolve. Where would it lead if he allowed himself to start empathising with farm animals? Donkeys
in Greece, dogs in China, bulls in Spain and live exports all across the world – wherever there were animals, they were exploited. It was the way things were – and it was definitely not part of his job to start letting it get to him.