A Dirty Death (16 page)

The day of the inquest came after several days of comparative peace for the Beardons. The police had spent another morning questioning them about anybody they could think of who might have hated Guy enough to kill him, and they had made them repeat yet again every detail of what happened on the morning he died. Miranda then showed them Guy’s will, its bleakness mirrored in her face. ‘Does this surprise you?’ the policeman asked her.

‘A bit,’ she admitted. ‘I didn’t think he would be so generous to Sam. It makes it more difficult to know what to do next. I was hoping I’d be free just to sell up and move. Now it’s more complicated.’ 

The police warned all three Beardons, as well as Sam, that they would have to make detailed statements about how Guy was found, at the inquest. All four of them felt resigned about it by this time, regretting more the day lost from the farm work than the ordeal of speaking out in public. Even Sam, unaccustomed to making himself conspicuous, seemed relaxed as they piled into Guy’s big car, to arrive in style.

‘It feels very naughty of us to be driving this,’ said Miranda, wriggling about on the wide seat. ‘Guy would be furious.’

‘He let me drive it once,’ said Lilah. ‘On the long, straight bit into town. It felt so
smooth
.’

The car was a Jaguar, almost twenty years old, kept polished and pristine, the perfect foil for Guy’s character. He went to the races in it, and used it on the rare occasions when a long journey was called for. For short trips into town, he had used the smaller runabout, which Lilah regarded as mainly hers.

‘I bags the Jag as mine when I’m driving,’ said Roddy, from the back seat, next to Sam.

‘Sounds fair to me,’ laughed his mother. ‘Except it’ll cost about a thousand pounds to insure you for it.’

‘That’s okay. It’d cost that to get me another car, anyway.’

‘True.’ Miranda hummed a little as she manoeuvred 
the car out of the yard, pretending nonchalance. They all felt a shiver of concern at leaving the farm so unprotected. None of them could remember even an hour when there’d been nobody at all, not so much as a dog, to keep an eye out.

‘It shouldn’t take long,’ Miranda said, trying to reassure herself as well as the others. ‘We’ll be back soon after lunch.’

‘But everyone knows we’ll be away.’ Lilah gave a backward glance, wondering what could happen. The cows all massacred? The house burnt down? ‘We should have asked the police to watch it for us.’

‘Too late now.’ Miranda spoke impatiently, her habitual refusal to worry asserting itself. Lilah, for the first time, began to see her mother as seriously irresponsible.

As they drove through the village, Lilah spotted Sylvia standing outside the Post Office, and she called ‘Stop!’ so suddenly that Miranda overreacted and sent everyone lurching forward.

‘Bloody good brakes,’ she remarked, ruefully.

‘We can ask Sylvia to go and keep an eye on the farm,’ Lilah said, inspired. ‘She’d be glad to do that for us, wouldn’t she?’

‘We can ask.’ Miranda wound down the window, and waited for Sylvia to trot the few yards after them. ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘Lilah has a favour to beg of you.’ 

‘Mum!’ The girl was outraged. Sylvia’s head appeared through the window, eyeing the car appreciatively.

‘Didn’t recognise you in the limousine,’ she said. ‘Very grand.’

‘It’s the inquest,’ explained Roddy, in exasperation. ‘And we’ll be late at this rate.’

‘Look, love,’ Miranda smiled into her friend’s eyes, ‘would you be a real angel and go up to Redstone in about an hour’s time. Make sure all’s well. We’ve never left the place totally unguarded before. And, well, with all this …’ She gazed round the innocent-seeming village helplessly.
All this
seemed hard to define.

‘And get my head smashed in, you mean. Fine. Delighted to be of use to you. Lucky I’m so big and strong.’

Miranda raised her eyes skywards. ‘You don’t have to
do
anything. Just drive round the yard and out again. They call it showing a presence.’

‘Course I’ll do it. I’ll go every half hour until you’re back. Now scoot. And let’s hope it isn’t too gruelling for you.’

The Coroner was a small man with a curious pied moustache, giving him the look of some bristly hedgerow animal. He seemed not to enjoy his work. He listened with visible scorn to evidence from police, family and expert medical witnesses 
and frequently shook his head in exasperation. His summarising, when it came, was brief but passionate.

‘This case,’ he snapped, ‘is a perfect example of the folly of assuming that a death is accidental, and failing to make adequate investigations at the scene at the earliest opportunity. Although no evidence has been found of any direct connection with the violent killing of Mr Isaac Grimsdale on the neighbouring farm, it has to be taken as strongly suggestive of a double killing. We do at least have irrefutable evidence for that death being a case for criminal investigation, and the police are actively pursuing a murder inquiry into that death.

‘It is not, however, part of my brief to go into that. Mr Beardon’s unfortunate decease is perhaps due in part to the accessibility of the lethal slurry pit, built in defiance of planning regulations which have been formulated solely for the purpose of avoiding just such a tragedy. If Mr Beardon had consulted the Planning Officer – as he was statutorily obliged to do, I might add – he would very possibly still be with us today. It would be pure supposition on my part, at this juncture, but the strong probability seems to me to be that this was an opportunist killing, probably by an intruder, who simply pushed the unfortunate man into the pit, and held him down until he drowned. 

‘But I must emphasise that there is no evidence so far discovered to indicate precisely what did happen. We have heard that there were no unusual sounds, the body showed no signs of a struggle, and aside from the single bruise on Mr Beardon’s head which appears to predate the morning of his death, he was completely unharmed. We have heard the singularly distasteful details of what happens to a person having the misfortune to fall into a slurry pit such as this one. Despite the relatively shallow depth, and the common expectation that it would be a simple matter merely to stand up and wade out, the consistency of the material renders this almost impossible. It has a similar effect to quicksand, and we must allow for the possibility that this was in fact an accidental death – that Mr Beardon was unfortunate enough to slip over the edge of the pit, land face down, and despite considerable struggle, never to have succeeded in regaining his balance. We have had it amply demonstrated to us how this might happen, given the inevitable horror and panic that would accompany such a calamity. In the light of everything I have heard here today, I must record an open verdict and offer my most sincere condolences to the grieving family. Perhaps I need hardly add that there must be no further usage of the slurry pit as it now exists. Neither can I allow this opportunity to
pass without giving the strongest possible warning to any other farmers …’ here he raised his head and cast a sweeping glance around the crowded room ‘… of the
serious folly
of neglecting to respect the safety rules for such pits.’ With a sigh and a businesslike stacking of the papers in front of him, he added, ‘Thank you, everyone. This case is now concluded.’

Miranda and Lilah sat still for a moment, hardly aware that they had clasped each other’s hands for the summing up. Hearing it stated so baldly that Guy had very probably been unlawfully killed was a greater shock than they had expected.

Clumsily the people in the room got to their feet to leave. They exchanged muttered remarks, almost afraid to shatter the funereal silence – remarks born of a frustration that there were no clear answers to the mystery of how Guy had died, combined with resignation to the fact that finally the fun seemed to be over. A few people looked furtively at the Beardons; if anyone in the neighbourhood was destined to die violently, then Guy Beardon was the man. This was said with all the certainty of hindsight. Suspicious glances were thrown at Sam, who had been subtly but steadily chosen by the whole community as the most obvious candidate for Guy’s murderer. Stories of his public humiliations, his relationship with Miranda, were whispered. If it had been Sam, 
then good luck to him, appeared to be the general feeling. A conspiracy of approval was almost tangible.

Lilah didn’t know what to say to her mother. Miranda had not referred to the likely outcome of the inquest beforehand, and seemed disinclined to comment on it now. Her face betrayed no emotion, until Sam caught her up outside and said resentfully, ‘Bit much, telling a man off after he’s dead.’ It took both women a moment to realise what he meant, then Lilah gave a short laugh.

‘Dad would have liked it, don’t you think?’

‘Can’t see how you make that out,’ grumbled Sam. ‘It’s like saying it’s all his own fault. Makes me mad, that. Typical of those bloody stuffed shirts in offices.’

‘You can see his point, Sam,’ said Miranda, her voice oddly harsh. ‘To them, Guy was a pig-headed fool who got what he deserved.’

‘Mum!’ protested Lilah. ‘That’s not very nice. How can anyone deserve to die like that? I still can’t bear to think about it.’

‘That’s another thing,’ put in Sam. ‘Going into such detail with you two listening. It’s not decent, if you ask me. After all, he was your dad – and husband.’ The afterthought came with a glance at Miranda which Lilah found peculiar. Sam went on with his complaint, ‘It made me feel sick, anyway.’ 

‘I didn’t really mind that,’ said Lilah thoughtfully. ‘I was impressed in a way that they did go into such detail and let us stay to hear it. It meant we were being taken seriously, somehow. Did you feel that, Mum?’

‘I didn’t
feel
anything. It’s all
feelings
with people these days. I just kept thinking, over and over, how arrogant he’d always been about everything. Always overriding everybody, thinking he knew better. Always ordering people about, getting everything his own way. I was wondering what his last thoughts might have been. Do you think he might have acknowledged, at that very last moment, that he was partly to blame? Would that even have occurred to him, do you think?’

‘Stop it, Mum. Don’t be so callous. You can’t say it’s a person’s own fault if they’re
murdered
.’ Even now, she could not persuade herself absolutely that this was the case. She continued to cling to the picture of an accidental fall, as definitely preferable. But too many facts pointed to the theory of a deliberate killing, and she spoke at least partly to try to convince herself.

Miranda was in pugnacious mode. ‘You can. Of course you can.’ She seemed about to say more, but after a glance at Sam, she fell silent. He seemed oblivious to what she was thinking, staring round at the dwindling crowd of people walking back to their cars or heading off to the 
shops. It was impossible to read his thoughts. But Sam wasn’t stupid, that much was sure.

Lilah jigged impatiently. ‘Come on, we’d better get back. I’m hungry, and Sylvia might be worrying. And Chastity might be calving by now. She’s due today. It’s her first time; she might need help.’

‘Chastity!’ hooted Miranda, an increasingly angry look in her eyes. ‘That’s another thing – those stupid names he chose for the cows. What did he think everyone thought of him, calling a cow Chastity, of all things?’

Not to mention Hildegarde, Chionia, Undine, Theodora and Weatherproof
, thought Lilah, a touch of sympathetic hysteria rising within her. Yet, where Miranda deplored the eccentric choices of names for the new calves, Lilah thought it was glorious.

‘Let’s get fish and chips,’ said Roddy. ‘I’m starving.’

‘And eat them in Dad’s car!’ Lilah was horrified, but the others voted her down. They seemed to think something had been resolved, that there was cause for relief and forgetting. That even if Guy had been pushed head first into slurry and held there till he stopped breathing, it mattered less, now that the inquest was over.

They met Sylvia coming out of their lane, and awkwardly pulled up to speak to her. ‘Open 
verdict,’ said Miranda, before her friend could ask.

‘As expected,’ nodded Sylvia.

‘Now we just get on with our lives, I suppose.’ The bitterness in Miranda’s tone was deepening. ‘With the stigma of an unresolved death hanging over us for ever.’

‘Bit different from how it goes in the films,’ Sylvia agreed. ‘Anyway, all’s been quiet here. Though old Amos seems to be hanging about – must be lonely, poor old fella. Everyone seems to have forgotten about him. And there must be grockles in Mabberley’s woods. I could hear voices from up there. Picnic season, I guess.’

‘Sounds busier around here than usual,’ Miranda remarked. ‘Positively crowded.’

‘You’re not as isolated as you think. That should be comforting for you.’

‘Depends who it is,’ said Sam, something vigorous in his tone making them all turn to look at him. Miranda shrugged slightly.

‘Well, thanks a million, Sylv. Come and see me tomorrow, and I’ll give you a sandwich for your reward.’

‘Right. Don’t work too hard.’ And she walked off.

‘This car stinks of fish and chips,’ remarked Roddy, with something like satisfaction, as they climbed out of it. ‘Wouldn’t Dad be furious!’

Lilah looked slowly at the faces of the three 
people she knew best in the world, and tears burst from her without warning. Sobs came explosively, choking her. The need for her father, his wit and his love, his strong arm and listening ear gripped her with a great violence. Nobody else would do. Nobody else understood her as he had done, and here they were laughing at him, angry with him. She felt herself drowning in loss and pain, flooded by her own tears, flooded with the whole terrible business.

Hating her family and their casual cruelty, she ran headlong into the barn and threw herself down on a pile of loose hay.

It took Lilah the rest of the day to recover. Miranda eventually forced her into the house, and sat her in Guy’s armchair in the sitting room, bringing her cups of tea, and making forlorn efforts to comfort her.

‘It’s all been too much for you,’ she said. ‘I should have realised. But, darling, please try to stop crying. You’ll make yourself ill.’

Tears ran like a leaking tap, until her eyes were almost closed and her lips swollen in sympathy. When she went to the bathroom for a pee and glanced in the mirror, she hardly knew herself. She tried, experimentally, to make herself stop crying, by gritting her teeth, forcing her jaw muscles to bulge with the effort. It worked for a few minutes, 
but then an image of Guy came back into her mind, and it all started again.

Roddy ignored her. When they sat down together for the evening meal, he gave one alarmed glance at her face, and kept his head down for the rest of the meal, eating quickly and then escaping to his room as soon as he could. Sam, who now ate all his meals with the family, where before he had sometimes fended for himself in his own room, tried to convey his understanding, making clumsy remarks about the farm and Chastity’s imminent delivery.

Forcing herself, she went out with Sam that evening, to help him decide whether the heifer was safe to leave for the night. They watched her quietly, as she took herself apart from the other animals, and stood patiently, head down, sides heaving from time to time.

‘She’s all right,’ Sam pronounced, and Lilah agreed with him. By morning, there’d be a new little Jersey. With luck it would be female, and could take up residence in the area prepared for it in the barn. If luck went against them, the little bull would be despatched at a tender age, to become Pedigree Chum or Kit-e-Kat.

They walked back to the house, companionably silent. ‘Longest day soon,’ Sam commented, echoing Guy’s acute awareness of the unfolding seasons. ‘Best time of the year.’ 

‘The long evenings are nice. I can’t even imagine winter, with it getting dark at half past three.’ She was speaking on auto-pilot, her head muffled with the aftermath of so much crying. Sam was an easy comrade, equally willing to talk or be silent. It was impossible to associate him with Guy’s death, to cast him as the instigator of her misery and loneliness. She simply could not accept the general view that Sam had killed Guy. She
knew
Sam; she had seen his face when he first saw Guy in the slurry. Unless she was altogether useless at understanding people, then Sam had had nothing to do with it.

‘Night night,’ they said to each other, briefly, unemotionally, at the door to Sam’s room. Early as it was, Lilah went up to bed as soon as she got indoors. Her bed had become a haven: a refuge from the relentless events threatening her peace. It had become a habit now to pull the covers over her head, curling an arm in front of her face to make an air pocket, so she could breathe. Her nose was still sore and tender from all the weeping. She felt ill and sorry for herself.

But her last thought before falling asleep was of Chastity’s calf, and the way nothing could stop the force of nature, that there was always birth to balance death. And in her dreams it was springtime.

Next day, the subdued, careful atmosphere persisted. ‘Doubt there’ll be any more police visits,’ said Sam, in the middle of the morning.

As if waiting for a cue, they heard a car coming down the lane, the moment he’d spoken. ‘It’s Den!’ cried Lilah, instantly recognising the car when it appeared. She was surprised at her own sudden enthusiasm.

‘Speak of the devil,’ muttered Sam, shaking his head. ‘Should know better by this time.’

Once again the tall policeman unfolded himself from his car, standing over Lilah like a protective tree. She wanted to cling to him, weep on him, tell him everything in her unhappy heart.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’

‘I thought, after yesterday—’ he began, examining her face. ‘You look a bit …’

‘Ravaged,’ she supplied. ‘Yes, I know.’

‘That wasn’t the word I would have used. Have you got time for a little chat?’

‘Not really. There’s a new calf. A little heifer. And we’re starting the hay today. Terribly late, and the forecast isn’t very good.’ She spoke distractedly, desperate to leave it all and drive off with Den to a place where she had nothing at all to do.

He looked round, first at the buildings surrounding the yard, then up at the Grimms’ house. From this distance, with a little imagination, 
it resembled a fairy castle on a hill, rather than a neglected, old stone farmhouse. ‘I forgot you were so close to them,’ he remarked. ‘Practically next door.’

‘We
are
next door. They’re our closest neighbours. But we’ve never had much to do with them. We should be seeing to poor old Amos, I know. It’s just – it’s always so
busy
.’ She looked at him helplessly, thinking of Miranda messing about in the house, with time enough to make all kinds of difference to the workload if only she’d put in the effort.

‘Come and see the calf,’ she invited, suddenly. ‘She’s in the barn. That’s her mother you can hear, up in the top field.’ The low, repetitive bawling was a distant throb of distress which Lilah had never grown used to, even though it happened every time a cow gave birth. Sometimes, at night, it was unbearable, the bereft mother calling and calling for her baby, the embodiment of despair. Sometimes it seemed to Lilah that in her short life she had been party to a fathomless ocean of pain and misery, that all this suffering was there inside her, barely suppressed by her flippant ways and habitual optimism. And sometimes she couldn’t stop herself imagining every hurt and cruelty; every experimental laboratory; every horse used in war; every animal ill-used in the service of man; every creature sent terrified to the abattoir. All of 
it added up to an entire universe of horrifying anguish, and she had to breathe slow and deep to be able to carry on. At those times, she would seek out the company of Martha Cattermole, who believed passionately in animal rights. Martha shared the pain, while managing to make it bearable. ‘It does more harm to the humans than it does to the animals,’ she insisted. ‘When we stop being cruel, then all kinds of wonders will be possible.’ Lilah struggled mightily to understand and agree.

‘Poor thing,’ Den remarked now, and she could feel that he meant it.

He followed her, good-natured and patient, into the barn. The little fawn calf lay in a bed of straw, huge, liquid eyes turned towards the visitors, the bewilderment of its situation clear to see.

‘I’m calling her Endurance, for obvious reasons,’ said Lilah.

‘She’s sweet,’ he said. ‘I hope she’ll be a good omen. Life going on, and that sort of thing.’

She gazed at the calf, thinking about the phrase he’d used. She’d heard it before and yet it was as if it actually
meant
something for the first time. Life
did
go on, like a ribbon unrolling from some immense cosmic spool, whatever else might happen.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life goes on.’ She was astonished at how much better she felt. 

The policeman moved away from the barn, after a few moments. ‘You’re too busy, then, for a talk?’ he said.

‘It depends. I don’t like to leave everything to Sam. I could if it was important, but the work just mounts up. What’s it about?’

‘Just to keep you up to date, really. Amos described a chap who sounded like some sort of tramp or gypsy. He could be living rough round here somewhere. It would make sense to be careful.’

‘I’m still not scared,’ she told him.

‘Okay. That’s up to you. But I should also ask you again, whether you’ve heard anybody mention a stranger about the place. Anything at all peculiar. It’s easy to overlook things, so I’d like you to have a really good think. We’re desperate for some leads on this.’

She frowned and tried to think. Her head felt thick and slow. ‘Nothing comes to mind,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe this man’s still hanging round here, anyway. Surely he’d get as far away as possible?’

‘He might. But that’s assuming it was just a random bit of violence, for no reason. With your dad in the picture, that isn’t very easy to credit. Wouldn’t you agree with that?’

She nodded reluctantly, kicking at a stone, sending it clattering across the yard.

He smiled down at her. ‘No more police talk. Let’s hope you can get some peace from here 
on.’ He paused, eyes on hers. ‘Hey, guess who I saw just now, out in the road.’ He was suddenly boyish, no longer the policeman.

‘No idea.’

‘Elvira Winnicombe! Remember her on the school bus? How we used to tease her. Awful, really, but she was always so gullible. I knew she lived around here, and I’ve been trying to catch up with her mother, but somehow I never expected to see her again.’

Lilah tried unsuccessfully to share his nostalgia. She managed a smile and a nod. ‘Nothing’s changed, really. Elvira goes to a day centre now, most of the time. She seems to be getting a bit more independent lately. Everyone keeps an eye out for her. Funny you’ve not seen her since school.’

‘I’m not out this way very often. It took me right back, seeing her again. They should never have sent her on the same bus as us; we made her life a misery, poor girl.’

‘I didn’t. I just kept quiet. I was scared she’d tell her mother, and Phoebe’s always been terribly fierce where Elvira is concerned. Besides, I wouldn’t dare provoke Elvira – I was two years younger than her.’

‘Still are, I should think,’ he joked.

‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Now I’m about a thousand years older than she’ll ever be.’

He took her between his big hands, holding 
her around the upper arms, and gave her a gentle shake. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘I promise. Just take care. Don’t go wandering over the fields by yourself without telling someone where you’re going, how long you’ll be. Take your brother with you, if you can. If it was just your dad’s death, I wouldn’t be so worried, but somebody treated the Grimsdales to a very savage attack. We can’t just ignore that. We’re going to be making an inch-by-inch search, starting from the far side of Mabberley’s and working all the way down to your outbuildings. It’ll take a while, but it has to be done. And if there’s anything to find, we’ll turn it up, sooner or later.’

He was sounding like a policeman again, and Lilah sighed. ‘So there’ll be lots of kind policemen to keep an eye on us, will there?’ she said sarcastically.

‘For a few days, yes.’

‘But this is highly likely to scare the man away, surely, if he hasn’t left the area already? He isn’t going to sit under a tree and wait for you to find him.’

‘That’s probably true. Except we’ve got almost nothing to connect anybody with Isaac’s killing. Unless we find the murder weapon with fingerprints on it – which would be a miracle – our only hope is discovering some kind of motive. Even then, there’d not be much of a case.’ 

‘It’s hopeless, then, basically? Didn’t you find anything useful in the Grimms’ house? Footprints, or hairs, or something?’

Den shook his head, and laughed. ‘Have you ever
seen
that house? It’s knee deep in hairs, from the cats. And nobody’s cleaned the floors for about six years. Plus you, Sam, Amos and all the ambulance men and our chaps tramping in and out. Yes, it’s fairly hopeless. But we have to look as if we’re doing something. And we don’t want any more deaths. Above all, we don’t want that. So watch it, okay?’

She nodded. Every time she managed to push away fear, someone reminded her of her vulnerability.

‘And Lilah,’ he added, dropping his hands, but looking intently into her eyes. She felt again the urge to lean on him, and shelter against him.

‘What?’ she whispered.

‘Can we go out somewhere together, do you think? I mean, as old friends, nothing to do with police business. A film or something?’

A sweetness filled her. A surge of joy, spiced with excitement: the timeless response to a romantic proposition. Nothing anybody in the world could have said to her could have been more agreeable.

‘Oh, yes,’ she smiled. ‘Oh yes, that would be lovely.’