A Dirty Death (19 page)

‘What’s the matter with you?’ he demanded. ‘Not ill, are you?’

‘Shut up,’ she told him.

He would not be deterred. ‘That’s nice. Aren’t you going to ask me about yesterday? It was great, actually, even though it rained a bit. We went on everything. It’s
huge
– the teachers kept getting lost. Thanks for forgetting to fetch me, by the 
way. I felt a right idiot with Nat and Ben staying to look after me, like a little kid.’

‘One of the teachers should have waited with you.’

‘That would have been even worse. I was safe enough – just pissed off.’

‘What makes you think you were safe? There are murderers about, you of all people should know that.’

He pushed his lower lip out at her mulishly. ‘I don’t want to know anything about all that. It does my head in.’ He half-turned away from her, hunching a shoulder defensively. ‘I can still smell myself, sometimes, the way I stunk after getting him out with Sam. And I didn’t even go right in, like Sam did. Even so, I got filthy. I’m going to throw those jeans away that I was wearing.’

‘Where are they?’

‘In a bucket outside. Mum chucked them in it on the day, and I don’t think anyone’s touched them since. They’re probably rotten by now, anyway.’

How many pairs of mucky legwear
were
there in the neighbourhood, Lilah wondered. Guy’s own twill trousers must have ended up in a bin at the hospital; nobody had offered to give them back. And Sam’s moleskins had disappeared with the last dustbin collection.

‘You have to listen to me, Roddy,’ she insisted. 
‘You can’t just run away from it.’ She bent towards him, wanting to penetrate the shell he’d developed around himself. As if connected to her by a rigid rod, he leant away, keeping the distance between them unchanged. He put up a hand, to brush her away. From the lump on his jaw, she could see he was clenching his teeth, perhaps trying not to cry.

‘Rod. Come on,’ she coaxed, as if he were the toddler she could still clearly recall. ‘There’s something else, as well. Something important. I don’t know whether Mum told you she’d had a letter from Daddy’s first wife – Barbara. She wants to go and see her. We’ve got half-brothers.’

‘We always knew that.’

‘Well, yes, but it never seemed real to me until now. It seemed a sort of dream, something that happened a hundred years ago.’

‘I wish I could go with her.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve always wanted to. I wanted to have brothers. If I can’t have Dad back again, a big brother would be the next best thing.’

‘She won’t see the brothers – just the mother. They’re grown up now, and living miles away from her. They’ve got wives and kids and houses.’

‘But maybe she’ll ask them to come and meet us. A family reunion! Hey, Li, that’d be cool, don’t you think?’ His mood was altogether changed, his eyes now bright and eager. Lilah was bemused. 

‘I don’t think you
can
go. You’re needed here. There’s too much work to do.’

‘Shit. Can’t we go when the hay’s finished? When’s Mum thinking of making this visit anyway?’

‘She didn’t say.’ She felt she was being unkind in not sharing Roddy’s excitement. But to her, if anything, the other family seemed more of a threat than a source of interest. The mysterious half-brothers might have been fun to meet ten years ago, but now she had no wish to get to know them. Life already felt unbearably fragile to her, and such an unpredictable element crashing in on her would not improve anything.

‘How did the milking go?’ she asked him. ‘Any problems?’

He shrugged. ‘Nothing much. Sam isn’t as tidy as Dad was. He leaves things in the wrong places. There’s always something we can’t find. It’s annoying.’

‘You haven’t been rude to him, have you?’

He gave her a withering look. ‘D’you think he’d notice if I was? After the way Dad was with him. He hardly takes any notice of me; you must know that.’

‘He’s got his own troubles.’

Roddy shrugged again, as if it was too much of a bother to think about, and returned to the matter uppermost in his mind. ‘I’m going to ask 
Mum about going with her. Where does this Barbara woman live?’

‘Nottingham, or somewhere near it.’

‘Alton Towers is quite near Nottingham. We could get there and back in a day quite easily.’

‘You’re not going, Rod. She won’t take you.’

‘Li, you’re in a real stress today, aren’t you?’

‘Don’t you think I have a
right
to be, with my father murdered by the farmhand and everyone acting as if that’s perfectly okay?’ Her voice rose and then cracked. She felt the previous evening’s hysteria hovering somewhere, waiting to pounce.

Roddy’s attention was finally held. All colour left his face. ‘What do you mean? Sam? Are you telling me it was
Sam
? That’s insane! The maddest thing I ever heard. He got Dad
out
, remember. You didn’t see him as I did. How upset he was.
Of course
he didn’t do it. I would bet anything – my life, even – that he had nothing to do with it.’

Lilah had realised, during the sleepless hours of the night, that Jonathan’s discovery of the mucky clothes cast no real suspicion on Sam. The only pointer to him was that he lived at Redstone and the hedge where the things had been buried was bordering Redstone land. She thought carefully. If Sam had drowned Guy an hour or so before Lilah found him, getting into the pit with him, he could have found time to strip off those clothes and change into the moleskins, before going back 
to his normal routine. That’s what Miranda and Jonathan assumed – but Lilah could think of several ill-fitting details: what about his hands, for instance? Not just his hands, but his
skin
would have been filthy and smelly.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to say that I thought it was him. When I found Dad, Sam was in the outside loo. He had his moleskins on. He didn’t smell at all – and looked perfectly clean. But, Rod, someone
did
get right into the pit with him. Remember those trails of muck at the side of the pit? Before you pulled him out? They must have been made by someone climbing out, covered in the stuff. Someone held him down until he drowned.’

‘It’d have to be somebody strong.’

Lilah nodded. ‘Mum’s pretty sure it was Sam.’

‘
No!
’ The cry echoed Lilah’s own reaction, the day before. With deliberate melodrama, Roddy dropped his head to the table and banged it three times against the wood. Lilah reached out and held him still.

‘Stop it, you fool. You’ll hurt yourself.’

He looked up, with a dull stare that disconcerted her even more than his anger had done. ‘Rod?’ she queried.

‘It’s a bad dream, Li, all of it. A very yucky dream. That’s the only possible explanation.’ Tears filled his eyes. ‘But Dad’s not coming back, 
is he? Why is it so difficult to believe that?’

She left a silence, waiting for him to get the weeping over with. Then she said, ‘So you definitely don’t think Sam could have done it? He couldn’t have forced Dad’s face into the slurry?’

‘Obviously he couldn’t,’ Roddy sniffed fiercely. ‘Could
you
? Could Mum? Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it any more.’ He got up from the table. ‘And you’d better get dressed. You’ll be needed.’

‘I’m going for a walk,’ Roddy announced, after supper. ‘I need to get outside.’

‘Can I come?’ Lilah said, almost without thinking. ‘We could go into the village and have a drink at the pub.’

Roddy and Miranda stared at her as if she had suggested an excursion to a strip club. The Beardons never frequented the local pub, which was unmodernised and unpretentious. Full of smoke and dark wood and elderly male villagers, it had never invited the attentions of tourists, women or children.

‘Why on earth would we want to do that?’ Roddy said.

Lilah blinked at her own madness. ‘For a 
change,’ she said, weakly. ‘Because it’s there, and a beer would be nice. It’s what people do.’

‘Guy would have had a fit if he’d heard you suggest it,’ said Miranda.

‘I don’t think he would,’ Lilah argued. ‘What’s to stop us? It’s only fifteen minutes’ walk away.’

Miranda widened her eyes and shrugged. ‘It’s fine by me,’ she said. ‘Don’t think I’m stopping you. It’s up to you what you do.’

‘Come on, Rod,’ Lilah was suddenly resolved. ‘Let’s give it a go.’

‘It’s Saturday, remember,’ he said, with growing reluctance. ‘Everyone from the village will be there. They’ll stare at us.’

‘Let them,’ said his sister.

Within minutes they were on the road into the village, side by side, the sun setting over the treetops to their right.

‘You wanted to talk to me, I suppose,’ said Roddy, after a while. ‘You needn’t have gone to such extremes. Mum thinks you’re mad.’

‘I don’t care. We didn’t say everything this morning.’

Roddy’s pace slowed, as his mind began to work. ‘Li, am I a suspect? Does Den think
I
killed Dad?’

‘Of course not. Don’t be stupid.’

‘But I could be the one. If you’re saying it might be Sam, it could just as well be Mum or me – or even you.’ 

‘Or some passing tramp. That’s my favourite theory. Has been from the start.’

‘I can see why it would be.’

‘I still want to work out how exactly it was done. Whether someone could hold him down till he drowned, and then just climb out and walk away afterwards.’

Despite obvious squeamishness, Roddy gave it his consideration. ‘I suppose it wouldn’t be so difficult, if you were really determined.’

‘But surely he’d fight. There’d be wounds on him, and there weren’t any, apart from that bruise on his head.’

‘Not if he couldn’t get his footing. It was horribly slippery in there. Sam could hardly stay upright when we were fishing Dad out. We used the long hook, and a fork, because we didn’t want to get right into the middle. I pulled from the side, and Sam pushed him from the pit. We told all that to your policeman.’ The boy was entering into the ghoulish discussion with more interest now; in spite of his qualms, it was a relief to talk about it at last.

‘I’m glad I missed that. I was in the house with Mum. I think I must have missed quite a lot.’

‘But
you
found him. You’re the chief witness. We must have obliterated all the clues when we dragged him out.’

‘So – we’re going round in circles. Could it still 
have been Sam, or not? Never mind his character or motives – could he physically have managed it? And there’s one other thing. Sam’s got Daddy’s gun. Except he seems to have lost it, or hidden it.’ She told her brother how she’d discovered the gun was missing, and how apparently unconcerned Sam had been.

Roddy could make little of this information. ‘This is a very nasty conversation. I wish we could talk about something else.’

‘At least I can’t smell muck any more. Can you?’

‘No more than usual. I sometimes think I’ll be able to smell it for the rest of my life.’

Lilah relented. ‘All right, we won’t talk about it any more – but it’s not finished, you know. Not by a long way.’

‘It’s finished for me. Sam’s our
friend
. More than a friend. If he married Mum, we could carry on pretty much the same as before. Did you think of
that
?’

Now it was Lilah’s turn to be shocked. Her talk with Miranda came back to her – the hints of adultery and Miranda’s reluctance to cast Sam as a villain, even if he was technically guilty. The idea of her mother and Sam having an attachment was not totally new to her, but she had avoided facing it for most of her grown-up life. Her mind ran a review of all the instances when the two had 
been together – firstly over the past few weeks, and then back for as many years as she could remember. She came up with very little that would confirm the suggestion. Except—

There had been an afternoon when Guy was ploughing, and hadn’t been back for lunch. Lilah had come home early from school because snow was forecast, and the buses had been summoned to deliver the outlying pupils home before it could block the roads. She had gone straight to see the new lambs in the barn. Sam had been nowhere in sight, and a ewe was delivering unattended. She had shouted for him, and getting no response, had supervised the birth herself. Only later – perhaps fifteen minutes later – had he come sauntering into the barn, an odd look on his face.

‘Where have you been?’ she’d demanded. ‘I called and called.’

‘Oh, did you? I never heard you. I must have been too far away.’ She hadn’t noticed his evasiveness at the time, but something strange in his manner had made the incident memorable. It would have been the simplest thing in the world for him and Miranda to have spent an undisturbed hour in bed together, she now saw. Yet this thought was at least as hard to accept as was the one that Sam had killed her father. Now even she could see that here, as any detective would say, was a firm and obvious motive. 

‘Oh, God,’ she groaned to Roddy. ‘This is too much. You’re right – let’s just concentrate on keeping the farm going. That’s all I can cope with.’

They sat self-consciously in the pub, surrounded by smoke and the disbelieving glances of the regulars. It was made worse by the presence of Hetty Taplow behind the bar; she nodded to them in a parody of politeness which did nothing to conceal her astonishment at seeing them there.

Roddy drank Coke, feeling young and completely out of place. Lilah ordered a pint of scrumpy, in an attempt to fit in. It came on draught, cloudy, the palest beige colour, like dilute urine, and tasted sharply acidic. She forced half the glass down, and then stopped, convinced that she’d be sick if she had another drop. Glumly, she watched the men ranged along the bar. She and Roddy were silent, unable to think of anything innocuous to say. Any words they uttered would be clearly heard by everyone present.

They knew the men by name, in most cases. Middle-aged workers for local businesses, and a solitary farmer, they were rough in every respect. Their language was full of expletives, their skin reddened with drink or weather. Most of them coughed and one or two spat. They talked loudly about the Lottery, their cars, the weather. They 
laughed exaggeratedly, which Lilah suspected was for her and Roddy’s benefit.

‘You two waiting for someone?’ Hetty called, eventually.

‘Oh, no,’ Lilah returned, trying to sound blithe. ‘We just thought it would be nice to get out for a bit.’

‘Nothing better to do on a Saturday, then?’ one of the drinkers chimed in, giving her a suggestive grin. ‘No boyfriends?’

She forced a smile, and shook her head.

‘That’s a shame. First time I ever saw any of your family down here, and that’s a fact.’ As one, they all turned the full beam of their attention on the brother and sister, no longer feeling any need to be surreptitious about it.

‘There’s a first time for everything,’ Roddy retorted, his tone defensive and loud.

‘First time for getting your dad bumped off, and no mistake,’ muttered Pat Brown, a slightly younger drinker. Everyone heard him.

Lilah took a deep breath. She knew now why she’d decided to come here: it was to test the mood of the village concerning the fate that had befallen Guy. Would they be treated as outcasts, or be given sympathy and support? Always balanced on the edge of the community, regarded as aloof and somehow peculiar, she understood that there had been scant grounds 
to hope that the latter response would prevail.

‘That might be so,’ she answered, her voice bell-like in its clarity. ‘We miss him very much. He was our father, after all.’ The final words quavered a little as emotion overcame her.

‘Course he was, love,’ placated Hetty. ‘You’re bound to miss him. Whatever others might have thought of him, you would have seen his best side. That’s the thing with girls and their dads, isn’t it.’

Lilah searched for hidden meaning, narrowing her eyes. But the words were simply true, and she decided to take them at face value. ‘Well, yes, I think that’s right,’ she said, very solemnly. ‘It’s kind of you to say that.’

Hetty was clearly encouraged. ‘And what about poor old Isaac Grimsdale? You reckon ’twas same person done both killings?’

‘You tell us, Hetty,’ suggested Pat Brown. ‘Tell’un your notions on that subject, why don’t ’ee?’

Hetty chewed her lip doubtfully and shot sideways glances at Lilah and Roddy. ‘Go on,’ said Lilah. ‘It’s all right. We’d be interested to hear what you think.’

‘I’m not saying as this is gospel true. ’Tis gossip brings things together. It came to my mind what I was thinking, now who could have killed old Isaac?’ 

‘They wanted to kill Amos as well,’ Lilah pointed out. ‘It wasn’t just Isaac.’

‘That’s right!’ Hetty was triumphant. ‘And it came to my mind, that time, eight, ten years back, when Mrs Westerby’s young’un had that accident.’

‘You mean Sylvia’s little girl? Ruth? That was when we’d only just moved here.’

Hetty nodded her agreement. ‘Amos had got that new tractor from the money your Dad gived’e for the land. ’Tis the point, see. The ambulance couldn’t get past that bugger of a tractor; got caught in a line of grockles, an’ by the time it reached the house, the kiddie had bled to death. ’Tis my belief that woman never forgave they Grimsdales. That’s all I be saying, mind. Your ma must remember it. She was a godsend to poor Mrs Westerby, cheering her up when the worst of it was done with.’

‘Have you told the police about this?’

Hetty shook her head. ‘Clean forgot about it till a day or so ago,’ she said.

The exchange stopped as abruptly as it had begun. Roddy pushed his glass to the middle of the stained table and met her eye. ‘Ready?’ he asked. She glanced down at the abandoned cider and nodded. Together they stood up, smiled vaguely at the grouped men, and left. Outside, it was still not dark, though almost ten. 

‘That was
awful
,’ said Roddy.

‘It was interesting, though,’ she assured him. ‘We have some idea what they think of us now.’

‘Do we?’

‘Well, they obviously don’t like us much. They resent all the trouble we’ve brought to their peaceful little village.’

‘Well, we knew that anyway.’

‘Mmm. But they’re scared of us as well. That never occurred to me before.’

‘You’re barking, Li. Mad as – a mad thing.’

She slapped his arm, with a little laugh, and said no more. It was eerie, walking along the narrow lane in semi-darkness. Only a few days earlier she’d cheerfully crossed twilit fields after the Mabberley barbecue, but now it felt as if there were shadowy things waiting behind the hedges, evil people intent on harm. With Roddy beside her, she felt relatively safe, but nothing would have persuaded her to go out alone at night now. What precisely had changed her? she wondered. The encounter with the love-making couple? All the talk of murder? Den’s warnings? Or did she truly believe that Sam had killed her father, and might therefore have some strange, twisted reason for killing her as well?

Miranda was waiting for them, curious as to what the pub had been like.

‘It was dire, Mum,’ Roddy burst out. ‘They 
just stared at us for a long time, and nobody said anything. Then they were patronising, and sort of nasty. Not really rude or anything. But it was like being in a foreign country, being stared at by a lot of hostile locals. Hetty was the only one who tried to be nice.’

‘Hetty! Good God, I forgot she works there on Saturdays. She must have been surprised to see you.’

‘She was,’ Lilah confirmed. ‘You know she’s got some theory about Sylvia hating the Grimms? She says their tractor got in the way of the ambulance when Sylvia’s little Ruth died and she blames them. Sounds a bit far-fetched to me. Sylvia always seems so rational.’

Miranda went pale and put a hand to her cheek. ‘What a thing to bring up after all this time. It was such a horrible injury – there was nothing the ambulance people could have done. The child’s leg was sheered almost off. The artery was completely severed. Such a stupid thing to happen – no wonder Guy was always on at you two to be careful. Farms are lethal places.’

‘What did happen, exactly? You never did tell me properly.’

‘I thought it would give you nightmares. Ruth was climbing on an old grasscutter, and slipped onto one of the blades. Her brother tried to get her out, and just made it worse by turning the 
blade and twisting her leg somehow, so she was really jammed. He was dreadfully upset, poor kid. And then Humphrey left them, soon after. An avalanche of disaster. That’s the way it seems to go – fate suddenly notices a normal, happy family and decides to torment them for a bit.’

‘According to Hetty, you were a good Samaritan where Sylvia was concerned.’

‘I did my best. Isn’t that what friends are for? She’s being just as good to me now.’

They went to bed within minutes of each other, each making sure the doors were locked firmly and the landing light left switched on. Miranda had replaced the bulb without any prompting, the morning after the Mabberley barbecue, and without discussion, all three had been careful to leave it burning every night since then.

Lilah slept well, despite a lingering acid in her stomach from the scrumpy. So when it came, the appalling shock of a gun being fired just outside her window sent her heart thudding with a violence that paralysed her.