Beneath the Soil (3 page)

Yet why was Eileen Caseley dressed so smartly this Saturday afternoon on the farm? And where
had
Philip Caseley been when he fired that gun?

Nick got to his feet. ‘You've been really hospitable, considering we just walked in on you off the street. But we ought to let you get back to whatever you were doing when we turned up. So it's back down the track and turn left?'

‘You'll see it. There's not many footpaths through those woods.'

She did not try to detain them. Suzie sensed her relief that they were going.

She gave Eileen her warmest smile. ‘I'm really glad to have met you. I spend so much time hunting up my ancestors from the past. And now and then I stumble across a relation I didn't know about who's alive today. I'm going to have to get my charts out and see if I can find where we fit together.'

‘I wouldn't like to go poking around in the past too much. You never know what you might find.'

Mrs Casely watched them walk through her kitchen. But she did not respond to their thanks and farewells.

‘Well!' Millie exploded, when they were safely across the yard. ‘Not exactly a bundle of fun, was she?'

‘Walk in her shoes,' Tom said unexpectedly. ‘How would you like to live out here, with precious little money, and only two of you to run all this?'

‘It would give me the creeps. Do you suppose they have any children?'

‘Well, I didn't see any Lego on the floor. No homework books on the kitchen table or wacky DVDs in the living room. Guess, if they have, they've grown up and left.'

‘If it was me, I couldn't wait to get away from this place. All these trees around it – I'd feel smothered.'

‘It occurs to me,' Nick said. ‘That path she told us to take. It's the one Philip Caseley went down when he left us.'

‘So? We'd better talk amongst ourselves while we walk along it,' Tom laughed. ‘Let him know it's humans coming and we're not something for the pot.'

They found the footpath without difficulty. Mrs Caseley had been right about the brambles. Nick pushed them aside where they arched over the path through the trees, but they sprang back behind them.

The way led downhill, becoming softer underfoot. Presently sunlight glinted through the branches.

Suzie stopped and gave a cry of delight. ‘This has to be it!'

The mounds of red-brown earth, stippled with grit and straw, had almost melted back into the soil they had been dug from. They were cloaked with ivy. Around them, spears of fireweed flamed with bright pink flowers. Nettles spread a less welcoming blanket. Here and there, young trees were beginning to grow back. A little stream ran through the combe below.

‘At least she didn't have far to carry water,' Millie observed. ‘Could be worse.'

A sudden snap made them start. Suzie was instantly aware how much her nerves were still on edge. They stood alert, listening.

‘Philip Caseley?' Nick asked. He raised his voice to call. ‘Hullo, there!'

Nothing answered him out of the darkness of the woods around them.

‘Probably just a squirrel landing on a dead branch,' he said.

‘Or a deer,' Tom added. ‘There must be some in this wood.'

Suzie said nothing. The hairs on her arms prickled. She had an uncomfortable feeling that they were being watched. It was silly. She had not yet recovered from the shock of that sudden gunshot. But if Philip Caseley was here, there was no reason for him not to show himself, as he had before.

Nick let out his breath. Then he got out his camera. ‘I expect you want me to do the usual?'

He moved around the ruins. Suzie could tell he was enjoying the play of sunshine on the mellow cob and the colourful fireweed. More photographs to enliven her files on the Day family.

She stroked the rough cob. What a contrast it must have been to move from this rural backwater, labouring on the red soil, working with the cows and other animals at Saddlers Wood Barton, to St Nectan on the edge of the smoke-hung Victorian city, and the industrial work of a dockyard labourer. Had he been happy with a bigger pay packet at the end of the week? Or did his heart ache for the peace of these woods and the fields he had left behind?

Nick had strolled away and was turning his lens on the stream and woods beyond. Tom went to join him, while Millie stretched out on the grass in the sunshine.

‘All done.' Nick stowed his camera away at last. ‘Have you had enough?'

‘I think so.' Suzie looked around regretfully. She had been filing away in her imagination Charlotte's life here with her children. Had she been glad of the less lonely life in a street of terraced houses, with plenty of neighbours to turn to?

How did Eileen Caseley cope on her own?

They made their way on down the track towards the spot at the side of the road where they had left their car.

‘Hey up!' Tom cried, as they came in sight of it. ‘Looks like we weren't the only ones up here this afternoon.'

A small green car was pulling out from the grass verge some way ahead of their own. It was only a moment before it was hidden by the hedges.

‘So,' Millie said, stopping dead on the path. ‘It wasn't a squirrel or a deer. There
was
someone else in the woods with us.'

‘S
hould we phone the police?'

Suzie was looking through the windscreen, but the rich tapestry of summer woods and meadows rolled past her unseen. She was seeing the round, scared eyes of Eileen Caseley in the farmyard; her husband plunging out of the trees with a dazed expression and his shotgun clenched in his hand.

‘Come off it, Mum!' Tom exploded from the back seat. ‘We heard a shot and saw a farmer with a gun. Big deal!'

‘Didn't you see his eyes, though?' Millie protested. ‘It was like he wasn't really there.'

‘You've been watching too many zombie films.'

‘Tom's right,' Nick said. ‘We startled him. I don't suppose he gets many visitors, up there in the woods. Once he realized why we were there, he was perfectly civil. He even told us to go on up and talk to his wife. He's hardly likely to have done that if he's just come away from a spot of domestic violence. Besides, she certainly wasn't suffering from gunshot wounds when we saw her.'

‘No, I suppose not,' Suzie admitted reluctantly. ‘But something had frightened her. What else could it be? Did you know that two women a week are killed by their ex or current partner? How many of those would have been saved if someone had stepped in earlier? I take your point that the police are hardly likely to take this seriously, but at least if we put down a marker and somebody else says the same, they're more likely to pay attention to that next call.'

‘I leave that to you,' Nick said. ‘Like Tom says, I'd feel a bit of a fool, reporting a farmer for firing a shotgun in his own woods.'

‘We don't know it
was
in the woods,' Millie argued. ‘The house wasn't that far from where we met him.'

An uneasy silence fell over the car. Suzie found her pleasure in discovering the ruined cottage where her great-great-grandparents very probably lived had faded into the background, replaced by more urgent present-day worries.

Nick was out in the garden, weeding the blaze of colour in the flower beds. Tom and Millie had gone out for the evening with their teenage friends. Suzie, as so often, found herself drawn back into the study to write up her afternoon's foraging into family history, while it was still fresh in her imagination.

She cast a glance at the shoulder bag she had dropped on a chair. Should she take out her phone and call the police? She had been too busy preparing a meal to do it when they got home.

But several hours had passed since then. The alarm she had felt at Saddlers Wood Barton was fading. It was easier to see it from Tom and Nick's point of view. There was no hope that the police would take her seriously. A farmer with a shotgun; a wife who looked alarmed when unexpected visitors called, but who had rallied round and entertained them with cups of tea? It sounded unconvincing, even to herself.

There was just that sharp unease, gnawing away in the corner of her mind.

She turned away and switched on the computer with an air of resolve.

She updated the file on the Day family with a description of the remains of the cottage and its woodland setting. Had the buildings in Saddlers Wood been so lost amongst its oaks and hazels then? Later, she would add Nick's photographs.

She closed the file. What now? Should she go out and join Nick in the garden? See if there was anything watchable on television?

She flicked through the printed sheets covering Richard and Charlotte's lives. Charlotte had outlived Richard, dying in 1913.

1913
. An idea flashed through her mind. She had followed up her great-grandparents in the 1911 census, released only three years ago. But it had not occurred to her until now that her great-great-grandmother would still have been alive. A secret smile started to grow.

Charlotte Day. She set to work.

The eager smile faded. A puzzled frown took its place.

An hour later she was holding out her results to Nick, where he sat enjoying a beer at the patio table.

‘Result!'

Millie had just come in from her evening out.

‘Go on, Mum. What is it this time?'

‘Do you remember Charlotte Day? She was my great-great-grandmother. The one whose husband discovered that murder.'

‘Don't tell me. She did it.'

‘Well, no. It's a bit less dramatic than that. But still … I was remembering the time when Dad and I went looking for the church at St Nectan, on the outskirts of the city, where my great-grandmother grew up. I was searching for family graves in the churchyard, and expecting to find quite humble ones, buried under grass and ivy. But there beside the path was this red granite tombstone, with a railing round it, and on it were the names of my great-great-grandparents, Richard and Charlotte Day, and two of their sons.'

‘Yes,' Nick agreed. ‘I took a photo of it for you. So?'

‘Well, the odd thing was that I've never been able to find a record of Charlotte's death and burial, even though her name was on that grave. I found Richard's, but not hers. I hunted through the St Nectan burial register, and tried the GRO death registrations, and Charlotte Day didn't show up. I've just discovered why.' She paused for dramatic effect.

Millie perched on the edge of a chair and brushed back her blonde hair. Tom had appeared behind her, still spruced up for wherever his evening had taken him.

‘Shoot,' he said, with that affectionate smile in his blue eyes, so like his father's.

‘I've just checked out the 1911 census. I'd done it for my grandparents and great-grandparents, but I'd forgotten Charlotte would still be alive then. And guess what? She's there, but she's not Charlotte Day.'

Nick frowned. ‘You're not making sense, love.'

‘She's in that census, but she's down as Charlotte Churchward. She must have remarried in her seventies, after Richard died. Yet her name's still carved on that tombstone as Charlotte Day.'

‘Slow down, Mum,' Millie said. ‘How do you know it's the same woman, if the other name's on the grave?'

‘The census gives her age, which is the same as Charlotte Day's. She's living only a few streets away from where Richard and Charlotte lived in the 1901 census. And she was born in Moortown, just like Charlotte Day. Moortown's only a small place. It's thirty miles away from St Nectan, in the middle of the county. How many Charlottes are there going to be, born in Moortown in the same year and moving to end their days in St Nectan, also in the same year? And once I'd got her new name, I found her marriage record easily. Charlotte Day, widow, to Stanley Churchward, widower.'

‘I think I'm with you.' A slow smile spread over Tom's face, ending in a burst of laughter. ‘You mean, that grand tombstone was put up by Richard and Charlotte's children, and they disapproved of their mum taking off in her seventies and shacking up with this Churchward guy. So they carve her name on their father's headstone with
his
surname … well,
their
surname. They want to cut this Churchward marriage out of the record. I like it!'

Millie swung her long legs. ‘So great-great-granny shocked the children by having a last fling with her geriatric boyfriend.'

Suzie coloured. ‘Well, something like that. Mind you, it probably wasn't as romantic as all that. I expect Stanley Churchward just wanted someone to cook his dinner and darn his socks.'

Millie tapped her fingers on the patio table. Her grey eyes were thoughtful. ‘It just shows. That gravestone. You can't always believe the evidence in front of you, can you?'

Suzie had been glowing with the excitement of an unexpected discovery. But Millie's words placed a cold hand over her heart she could not explain.

She walked slowly back to the study.

That scene in the woods this afternoon had been disturbing, but she knew next to nothing about the people concerned. Did she have the right to meddle with the Caseleys' lives?

She had not understood as much as she thought she did about Charlotte Day when she had stood by her tombstone two years ago.

Then she thought of that murder committed in the house next door to the Days. Could Richard and Charlotte have done anything to prevent it? Could
she
keep silent about what she had seen today, even if she had got it wrong?

In a moment of swift decision, she picked up her shoulder bag, took out her phone and dialled 101, the police non-emergency number.

‘It's … Look, I know it doesn't sound much. But it's something I think you ought to know. We were up in Saddlers Wood outside Moortown this afternoon. We were on our way to Saddlers Wood Barton when we heard a gunshot. And then the farmer, Philip Caseley, came out of the trees. He was carrying a shotgun, but it wasn't broken over his arm. He must just have fired it. He looked … well, distraught. And when we went on up to the farm, his wife came out of the house looking really frightened … Yes, I know. It sounds a bit lame … Yes, I do realize you couldn't do anything about it without more to go on … Well, maybe there is an innocent explanation, but you needed to have been there.
Something
had scared her. I wouldn't want to think – if anything happened – that I hadn't said anything … Yes, thank you. Yes, if one of your officers happened to be passing, maybe to talk about farm security? I'd just feel happier.'