Gordon Williams (4 page)

As if Henry would ever have had the brains to think of building a dummy. To look at him now you’d never believe this was
the
Henry Niles. He looked like a man of fifty – and he was only thirty-four. He didn’t look capable of tying his own shoelaces. A helpless little man. Pawson instinctively took his elbow as he made to climb the steps into the rear of the ambulance.

“Strike a bloody light,” said the ambulance driver, who, like Pawson, was originally a Londoner. “I thought I’d get a buckshee day off with this snow. Couldn’t he have missed his shot for one bleeding week?”

“Doctor’s orders,” said Pawson. “How long d’you think it’ll take on these roads?”

“Should make good time. Not much traffic about today.” The ambulance driver grinned. “In fact, you could say only a madman would be out driving in conditions like this.”

Pawson didn’t laugh.

Henry Niles sat on the bench, his body twisting round so that he could look through the top three inches of clear glass. It was the only view he’d had of the outside world in nine years. This was the big treat of his week. Only he knew what he thought about as he looked through the glass slit. For ten years he had hardly spoken more than a few sentences at any one time. At his two trials and at the public inquiry into the escape it had been stated by psychiatrists that he had the mental age of a child of eight.

The ambulance pulled away from the main gate of Two Waters Institution for the Criminally Insane and picked up speed on a hard layer of snow left by the ploughs. The driver thought he might do the journey to and from the county hospital in fast time. With only one patient to be treated he stood a good chance of being home by five o’clock.

In the back of the ambulance Pawson brought out a folded copy of the
Daily Mail
from his hip pocket. It was his ambition to complete the crossword. He took no notice of Henry Niles who watched the snowy wastes of the huge moor. Frank Pawson found he couldn’t concentrate on the crossword clues. Today, he’d made up his mind, he would
definitely
ask Kate Grady to go out with him...

It had been the Reverend William Hood’s idea to improve the community spirit of Dando Monachorum by organising a children’s Christmas party on the Wednesday before Christmas Day, which fell on the Friday. The party was to take place between four-thirty and six-thirty in the school. Then, at seven-thirty, there was to be the first dance held in the village for some years.

“That will give them an hour to take the children home and get back,” he said to his church warden, Bill Knapman, who was not enthusiastic.

“There’s a lot of folk won’t come out again,” he said. “Who’s going to look after the children so’s they can go dancing?”

“They’ve all got somebody who can baby-sit for one night,” said the Rev. Hood. “They manage well enough to come to bingo every Monday.”

Bill Knapman changed the grounds of his attempt to dissuade the Rev. Hood.

“It’s not as though there’s a lot of young folks who want to dance,” he said. “They all go to Compton Fitzpaine if they want that sort of thing.”

“Precisely,” said the Rev. Hood. “It’s about time we did something for them here in Dando. If we don’t make the effort we’ll never get
anything
going around here. One would think you didn’t want to improve the quality of the community.”

“It’s not that, Mr. Hood,” said Knapman, who was eight years older than the minister. “The people about here aren’t very community-minded. They don’t like a lot of outsiders comin’ in, either, that’s why they stopped the Saturday night dances in the first place, we were gettin’ all they teenagers and whatnot, drinkin’ and makin’ trouble.”

He had been church warden under four vicars, all of them elderly men in semi-retirement, happy to conduct their two services on a Sunday and carry out a minimum of parish visiting. The Rev. Hood was only the curate but because the vicar, the Rev. Thomas, was ill he’d been in charge of the parish for two months. He had not been ordained long. Much as he supported the church, as a much-needed influence in these unsatisfactory times, Knapman had no great respect for the curate. He told himself that he was only trying to save the man from embarrassment. The dance would doubtless be a flop.

“We
want
some life about the village,” said the Rev. Hood. “That’s most of the trouble about these rural backwaters, the young people have nothing done for them so they drift away to the towns.”

“Aye well, there’s young people and young people, if you know what I mean. A lot of them like to travel round the villages and disrupt things, fights and the like. I could name a few of our own who’re never happy unless they’re making trouble.”

“Oh, high spirits, yes! That’s the whole point. You’ve got to give the younger generation a chance to get rid of their high spirits the right way. It’s when nothing’s provided for them they cause mischief. If you don’t mind me saying so, Mr. Knapman, I sometimes get the impression you’re rather scornful of your fellow men.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” said Bill Knapman. “It’s just that there used to be fights and all sorts at the dances here, the Compton Wakley crowd wanted to fight the Fitzpaine crowd and Dando wanted to fight them both – they’d be back and forth from the Inn and drink more’n they could hold and... well, dances is often just an excuse.”

“We can organise a pass-out system,” said the curate, brightly determined to push his plan through. “And I’m sure we have enough able-bodied chaps in the parish to handle any trouble. Dando has to move with the times if it isn’t going to shrivel up and die.”

In the end Bill Knapman had to agree to the dance. It was true what the young curate had said, he didn’t have a very high impression of his neighbours, but he knew more about them than any minister, even the old ones. He’d been born and raised within four miles of Dando Monachorum, on a farm his family had owned since seventeen hundred and forty-three. He had gone away to the war and when he’d come back he understood a lot of things about Dando. He could have told the curate of another night when they’d had a dance in the village, the night they found Mary Tremaine on the Fourways road, the night his father and the other men had gone off quietly to the field above the wood. Although he was part of Dando, he had been away into the world, and he could see the parish as it really was. If he had not been born there and brought up to take it for granted that one day he would take over the farm, he doubted very much if he would have chosen to live in Dando.

In the army, when he told them where he came from, they’d make jokes about inbreeding and incest and such things and he could understand why the outside world would think that about the West Country. Even he tended to turn his back on what happened beyond the parish boundaries. These weren’t clearly marked but you could
feel
it, you’d be driving along a narrow road and you
knew
when you’d passed out of Dando and Compton, and you wanted to go back. Back to what you knew. Nobody could deny they were a close lot.

When the first sheep had been found brutally stabbed and its throat cut he’d been one of the few who’d been in favour of reporting it to the police at Compton Wakley, the nearest station. Over the last few months six other sheep had been found slaughtered the same way, throat cut and the belly slashed and stabbed by some maniac.

He had told the police and no good had come of it, for none of the farmers had anything to tell the police except how they’d found sheep killed. He had not been popular for having brought the coppers in, prying and asking questions. Everybody had their own theories about who was responsible; it was lucky for Norman Scutt that he’d been in Exeter gaol when the first three were killed, for with him being a criminal already he would have been the obvious man to suspect.

It was a nasty thing to have in the area, with everybody theorising and suspecting, thinking the worst of their neighbours and at the same time, illogically, feeling guilty at being possible suspects themselves.

That dinner-time, the day of the children’s party and the dance, he went down to the Inn with his neighbour, Charlie Venner. It was only two days to Christmas and that made it all right to go to the Inn in the middle of the day. In the bar he saw the Scutts, young
Cawsey, Phillip Riddaway and Tom Hedden, plus a few more. As usual Tom Hedden was complaining about something – the price Colonel Scott was asking for hay. Hedden’s farm was too small to grow all the stuff he needed for his winter stock, it was too small any way you looked at it for a man with five children, but Hedden hung on year after year, out of obstinacy no doubt.

“If I give her up what’ll I do then, eh?” he’d say. “I’d have to move to a town and work in a factory or summat, not me I don’t. They’m tryin’ to push us small men off the land, not I they’m don’t.”

Bill Knapman, whose two hundred and fifty acres gave him a higher place in the Dando scheme of things than Hedden (and a
much
higher place than the Scutts and their friends), understood why Tom Hedden stuck to his farm, although this didn’t mean he had much sympathy for the man. A farmer who was continually on the scrounge for one thing or another was a nuisance. No sense, that was Hedden’s trouble, he had four sons all at school and a girl – Janice, who’d been born afflicted – five children to feed from a place that wasn’t big enough for a man and his wife.

And there was the money Hedden spent in the Inn. The part of Bill Knapman which had been to war understood why a man with too heavy a load on his back took to drink. The other part of him put it down to stupidity; a man who couldn’t take care of himself and his family properly should get out. A factory would be a good place for him.

“The professor been in lately then?” Charlie Venner asked loudly, knowing this would give them all a laugh.

“Who, the last of the big spenders?” said Harry Ware. “No, I’ve been struggling along without his two halves of bitter, thank you very much.”

George Magruder would have been surprised to hear what they said about him. He would have realised that their natural awe of a man who could afford Trencher’s Farm – without, as far as they knew, doing any work at all – had made them shy of him. If he had offered them a drink they might not have immediately taken him into their innermost confidences, but they would to some extent have accepted him as a
generous
outsider.

Instead they had taken his shyness for contempt. It was one thing for Colonel Scott to treat them with real contempt, for he was superior – he owned the Manor Farm and he was a colonel and he was rich and for centuries they’d lived with the unquestioned superiority of squires. They’d have held Colonel Scott in contempt if he behaved in any other way.

But a yank was different. He was an intruder. Other people had intruded – like the doctor and the curate – but it was different with them.

At half-past two Harry Ware shouted “Time”. He put a dishtowel over the beer taps.

“What’s all the noise about?” Norman Scutt demanded, shoving his empty pint glass at Harry Ware. “It’s Christmas ain’t it, give us another bloody pint.”

“Sorry, Norman,” said Harry Ware, “I got a long night ahead of me with the dance, I need my kip.”

“Give us another pint,” said Tom Hedden, who looked fairly well gone considering it was dinner-time.

“No more, sorry,” said Harry Ware. “Just drink up please, lads, plenty of time tonight for all you can hold.”

Tom Hedden had been enjoying himself, the Christmas spirit, all his good mates, darts and talk, the feeling that things weren’t so bad
– now they were being turfed out. He felt cheated.

“Oh, go on, Harry,” he said, his voice thick. “Just another pint like, aint Christmas every day is it?”

Harry Ware shook his head. He had already intended to let Bill Knapman and Charlie Venner stay behind for a few drinks, they were responsible, steady men and they spent well when they came in. Bill Knapman had known this, and he was irritated when Tom Hedden began pleading.

“Right now, your glasses
please
,” Harry called.

“Balls to your glasses please, give we another bloody pint,” said Norman Scutt.

“Come on, lads, we don’t want to make trouble for old Harry here, do we?” said Bill Knapman. It was one of his failings, he recognized, to act as though he had some kind of authority. Yet he couldn’t help thinking of the Scutts and that crowd as riff-raff, he’d been brought up that way and for all his experience in the army he couldn’t shake it off.

“There’s no trouble,” said Tom Hedden, almost pathetic in his desire for another drink. “All we’m want’s another pint, it aint a lot to ask for regulars like.”

Harry Ware shook his head, already washing up glasses. This annoyed Tom Hedden who reckoned he was entitled to a bit more respect. Nor did he like being talked to by Bill Knapman in that high and mighty voice. He banged his glass down on the bar. The glass cracked.

Harry Ware frowned angrily as he swept away the pieces.

“Sorry about the glass,” said Tom, leaning forward with his elbows on the bar. “All we’m want is just one more, that’s all.”

“I told you
no.
”

“I aint niver comin’ here again, niver givin’ you another bloody penny, Harry Ware you –”

Tom Hedden’s anger could find no words. He stretched his hand towards Harry Ware, as though to grab him. Bill Knapman was beside him, waiting for something like this. In the army he’d been a military policeman. He was that kind of man.

“Come on, now, Tom, let’s not be silly,” he said, taking hold of Hedden’s sleeve. Tom Hedden shook his arm, trying to free himself.

“I’m as good as anybody,” he shouted. “Leggo my arm, Bill Knapman or I’ll –”

There might have been a fight, but Bertie Scutt and Bert Voizey got on either side of Tom Hedden and coaxed him out of the bar. Bill Knapman and Charlie Venner stood their ground while the bar emptied. Bill Knapman didn’t care very much whether Hedden and Norman Scutt and the rest knew he and Charlie were having a drink after hours. If they weren’t such riff-raff they’d get the same treatment...

Just before lunch Louise and Karen went to look for a holly tree with berries, which were scarce that winter. Louise had already decorated the house with paper bells and a small Christmas tree and a few sprigs of holly cut from the trees at the end of the lawn but, as she said, holly without berries wasn’t holly at all.