Scratch that. Who knows what the grown-up Adam Tredwin had turned into? He had enough dosh to get a business up and running, that’s for sure. And what if they got round to measuring their successes against each other? How would the author of trashy novels and failed marriages measure up to the owner of a garden centre? Yeah, maybe Adam was married, had kids, too…
George Lee abandoned the garden centre and trudged thoughtfully to his uncle’s garage on the far edge of the village.
Actually it wasn’t strictly in the village. It stood one hundred yards away from a stone block by the side of the road inscribed with the village’s name. The garage had begun life in the 1930s as a tiny petrol station owned by the Cowper family, serving Petheram and the outlying villages. It was essentially a wooden shack that over the years had been built upon and extended into an even bigger, sprawling collection of wooden shacks, the purveying of petrol long since abandoned in favour of vehicle repairs, MOTs and the selling of a few second-hand cars.
He passed a row of three cars with prices stuck on their windscreens, one of the cars wet and shiny with a bucket of soapy water by its front wheel. The place looked deserted.
‘Uncle Gary!’ he hollered as he opened what constituted the office door. There was a desk crammed with paperwork, a grubby old phone, and an even grubbier computer that looked to have come from the Ark. There was a calendar on the wall with a naked woman on it with an arm barely disguising her overly-large breasts. No concessions to being PC still, he thought, shaking his head. Uncle Gary was an old-school kind of guy, both irritatingly behind the times and vaguely appealing in equal measures. ‘Uncle Gary! Shop!’ he shouted.
A door opened behind him and a large man, his red face scowling angrily, eyes hidden in piggy slits, raised a shotgun and pointed it directly at George.
‘Get your hands in the air, you no good thieving bastard before I splatter your brains all over the floor!’ he said unequivocally.
7
A Small Place
‘I hope to Jesus that thing isn’t loaded, Uncle Gary,’ said George, calmly shaking his head.
Gary Cowper lowered the gun and grinned broadly. ‘Ah, come on, George! We used to play cowboys and Indians all the time when you were young. Me the bad guy, you the good one, remember? Where’s your sense of fun gone these days?’
‘I also seem to remember you letting me play with that dangerous thing, too. The gun was taller than me when you let me have it to play with in the yard outside. Anyhow, kids don’t play cowboys and Indians these days. It’s a thing of the past. You’ve got to get with the time.’
‘Thing of the past?’ Gary Cowper put the gun against the wall and ran a hand through what greasy grey hair remained on his pink pate. ‘That’s me, that is. A thing of the past. Come here, boy, time for a man-hug!’
He didn’t wait, but instead launched himself at George and took him in a tight embrace, squeezing the wind out of him. ‘Great to see you, George!’
‘You too, Uncle Gary…’ he said, as the man released him and wiped an arm across his nose. ‘Anyhow, I thought you’d gotten rid of that thing ages ago.’ He nodded at the shotgun. ‘What the hell do you need it for?’
‘To take on ornery critters,’ he said in a badly executed faux Midwest accent. ‘You’ve been away too long,’ he chastised suddenly, backing away and wagging a podgy finger. ‘What is it this time, a year or more? How can you not see your mother in over a year? See what happens when you don’t come – people die.’
‘That’s hardly my fault.’
‘What I mean is, you never know when you might last see someone. Someone close. Take me, for instance – the next time you come I could be dead, too. I’ve approached that time of life, you know.’
George Lee smiled thinly but warmly. ‘You’ll go on forever, Uncle Gary.’
Gary Cowper grunted. ‘Not with my brother on my back all the time,’ he murmured. ‘He’s going to drive me to my grave.’
How the two brothers ever managed to get on George had no idea. Gary and Robert Cowper were like chalk and cheese. Robert was the gentler of the two, the ones with the brains. He took care of the finances while Gary saw to the mechanical side of the business. It was Robert who bought cars from the auction for Gary and his numerous and short-lived apprentices to make fit for sale, something Gary always complained about. ‘He knows nothing about sodding cars, but he won’t even let me tag along to give him advice,’ he said.
They each had an equal share in the business, technically, but each brother made his money from the different aspects of the garage and it seemed to suit them both, in spite of Gary’s grousing. Uncle Robert, George thought, was the kind of man they’d photograph to put on pension or stair lift adverts. The kind of guy women wanted to cuddle and men opened up to. It was hard to believe – if you could ever believe Uncle Gary – that Uncle Robert had been a bit of a hothead in his youth, like all Cowpers. It seemed to George that Robert had become an old slipper early on in life.
‘Where is Uncle Robert?’ George asked.
‘Where he usually is,’ said Gary. ‘In the office with his papers and calculators. Doesn’t know the meaning of getting his hands dirty, does you Uncle Robert. Do you want a cup of tea? I’ve just boiled the kettle.’
George looked at the mug of half-drunk tea sitting on the counter. Its insides were dark brown with years of tea stain. ‘I’ll give it a miss, thanks,’ he said.
‘Seriously, George, you ought to come home more. Your mother’s getting old, too, you know,’ he said, picking up the mug and slurping down the sludge-like contents noisily.
‘Yeah,’ his tone non-committal. ‘Mum said you had a car for me.’
Gary Cowper went behind the counter and removed a set of car keys from a hook. ‘VW Golf. Bit of a shed but it will tide you over till you sort out your own wreck.’ He tossed the keys at George, who caught them, just, at his chest. ‘We’ve had a lot of dents in bumpers this year – people hitting deer,’ he said. ‘You know what they’re like – they just bolt out of the hedge right in front of you and then BLAM! Your car can be a write-off. At least badgers go under the bloody wheels. You – well you had to hit that kid Steve. Mind you, everyone calls him a little dear…’ He smiled mischievously.
‘Yeah, desperately funny. Anyway, he hit me. Driving too bloody fast, like you say. I see Adam Tredwin is back in the village…’ he ventured casually.
‘I see that too,’ he replied. ‘It’ll be a bit of a bugger making that garden centre work, though. Mind you, the Tredwins were never blessed with much sense.’ He gave a smirk and tapped the side of his head. ‘If you get my drift…’
‘What happened to her?’ George asked, his thoughts spilling out before he could rein them in.
‘She broke down in tears, that’s what happened. Never seen anyone so upset. Your poor mother…’
‘Not my mum,’ he said. ‘Sylvia Tredwin. What happened to her?’
‘Christ, that’s ancient history. What do you want to know about Sylvia Tredwin for?’
‘Because,’ he said, shrugging.
‘You mean you don’t know anything? Not a thing?’
‘I never paid her much attention till I heard her son was back. Anyhow, she left the village when I was very young, and I remember everyone just acted like the family had never ever been there. Pretty soon I forgot about them too. Recently, I heard something happened to her…’
‘I should say,’ Gary Cowper said, leaning on the plywood counter and nodding. But he didn’t provide details.
‘Can you tell me?’
‘Sure, take a seat, got all day. Nobody’s buying cars – that’s your uncle’s crap for you – and nobody wants their cars repaired. We’ll be out of business before the year’s done, just you see…’
‘I remember her as being very pretty,’ George said, trying to get his uncle’s mind back on track. ‘But I only saw her two times, I think, before the Tredwins left Petheram.’
Gary Cowper fingered the end
of his red, bulbous nose in thought. ‘She was a looker, that’s for sure. Sylvia was an outsider, a young snip of a thing that Bruce Tredwin brought back from Manchester, or somewhere big like that. Came home to his mother and said they’d already got married, just like that. Took their vows in some grotty register office somewhere. Maybe Bruce was scared his mother would disapprove of the match so decided to make sure she had no choice in the matter. There was plenty to disapprove of. Anyhow, she had no choice except to let them shack up with her for a while till they got their own place – a ramshackle old thing that used to belong to the Hoskins. Sylvia was bad for him…’ he said.
‘Bad in what way?’
‘Well, Bruce was besotted with her. She could do no wrong. But that’s not what everyone else was saying about her. What with her short skirts and big tits hanging out all over the place, they say she’d laid half the village within six months.’
‘Any truth to that?’
He shrugged. ‘Where there’s smoke…’ he said, winking.
‘But no real evidence.’
‘I heard it from good sources, your Uncle Robert in particular. She tried it on with him once, you know. He was not so bad looking back in those days. That’s what he said, and your Uncle Robert is many things but he doesn’t lie. Seems she just couldn’t help herself. A bit off her rocker. Not your average Somerset lass, I can tell you. It’s all that smog they had back then in Manchester. Affects the head. She was strong on tall tales. You could never quite believe what she told you. Lived in a world all of her own. Said she was related to the Queen at one time. Said she’d been a singer in Nashville. All of it crap. She wasn’t liked locally because of it. Brash city ways and all that, I guess. Sure, she was a sight for sore eyes – Christ, Bruce Tredwin landed on a good lay there – but beyond that, heaven knows what he saw in her. Guess bedtimes must have been too much fun for him to see her shortcomings. He was blinded by his dick.’
George nodded. ‘OK, so what happened to her?’
Gary Cowper gave a smile and raised a brow. ‘It was weird. She just went missing one day. Bruce Tredwin gave it a while then contacted the police. They carried out a search of the area, so did some of the people from the village – your dad was heavily involved in looking for her – but they never found her. Mind you, it wasn’t that serious a search. Then talk got round to everyone believing she’d run off with someone – there’d been a young salesman hanging around their house trying to sell double glazing. Everyone thought it might be him she’d taken a fancy to. In the end the police contacted him and he said he’d never seen her since her refusal to buy a new set of windows ‘cause they couldn’t afford them.
‘Anyhow, a fortnight later Bruce stumbles across her in the middle of Flinder’s Field. Turns out she’s stark naked and rambling, can’t say where she’s been except they came down from the sky and took her.’
George Lee frowned. ‘Sorry? Did you say down from the sky?’
‘Sure did. When they finally got her to talk, she finally told everyone she’d been abducted by aliens. Little green men. You know, all that crank stuff.’ He made a motion with his hands to the ceiling as if it was a spacecraft lifting off.
‘Get away!’ said George. ‘You’re pissing up my back!’
‘Hand on heart. Said they’d experimented on her, impregnated her. Then let her go. That’s why she hated her kid so much.’
‘She hated Adam?’
‘Couldn’t stand to be near him, poor kid. Said he wasn’t hers. All that crazy shit. She went inside some place for loons for a while, seemed to get a little better and came out. We started to see her around the village again. I guess that thing with Bruce was the final straw…’
‘What thing with Bruce?’
‘Bruce got knocked down one evening. You know how they can drive round here…’ He nodded through the window at George’s battered car. ‘The twisting, narrow roads don’t allow for getting up any great speed, but they do it all the same. Nothing’s changed in that respect. Anyhow, Bruce is walking home from the pub one night and this idiot driver ploughs into him and never stops to check out what they’ve done. Poor bloke was put into a coma for a week before he died. Sylvia was seven months’ pregnant, see, with their second kid. But the episode broke Sylvia once and for all, I guess. After the girl was born she left the village, taking Adam with her.’
‘And the hit-and-run driver was never found?’
He shook his craggy head. ‘Nah, the police were useless.’
George blinked thoughtfully. In his writer’s mind there began to grow the germ of an idea for a story. He was intrigued. No wonder they called her “poor Sylvia Tredwin”. He now wanted to learn more about this mysterious, fascinating woman.
‘Does anyone believe her story about alien abduction?’ he pressed.
‘Would you?’
‘Something obviously happened to her. Something to worsen her already fragile condition; something that tipped her over the edge. She went missing, after all. Then she turns up naked in Flinder’s Field…’
‘She was a crazy bint,’ he said, Gary’s face suddenly dropping serious. ‘Leave it at that.’
‘Who was crazy?’ said a voice from the doorway to the garage’s inner office. It was George’s Uncle Robert.
He was slimmer than Gary, had more hair, and possessed a gentle air about him. He had a wad of papers clutched to his chest, almost protectively.
‘Hello, Uncle Robert,’ said George.
‘The beast has risen from its den,’ said Gary, giving a derisory snort.
‘Sylvia Tredwin,’ said George. That’s who.’
‘Ah,’ said Robert, going to the counter and plonking the paper down onto it with purpose. ‘Poor Sylvia Tredwin. Best forget about her. It’s tragic.’
‘I’d like to hear more…’ said George.
‘Well you’re not going to hear it from us,’ he said firmly. ‘We both have work to do, though your Uncle Gary seems to forget that.’ He stamped a finger down onto the paper. ‘MOTs to file, payments due, and we’ve got a discrepancy in March’s figures…’
‘Ah stuff the discrepancies!’ said Gary. ‘There’s always bloody discrepancies. I’ll bet you spend your entire day looking for them.’
‘Whatever,’ said Robert disinterestedly. ‘I’m sorry about your father, George,’ he said with a faint shrug. ‘It came as a shock to us all. Your mother’s getting ill with the stress. You’ve got to help her.’
It was an order not a request. ‘Sure I will, Uncle Robert. About Sylvia…’
‘Later, George,’ he dismissed, waving a hand and going back to his stuffy little office.
‘Jumped up little prick,’ Gary said, scowling.
‘Do you think Brendan Mollett will know anything about Sylvia?’
‘If a man knows anything there is to know about the history of the village it’s Brendan, nosey old bastard. He only keeps all that historical stuff because he likes to pry into other people’s business. Personally I’d drop this Sylvia thing. Leave it be.’
People kept telling him that, thought George. Which made him want to know all the more. ‘Maybe I will,’ he lied.
‘Tell you what, how about us ol’ pardners taking a few jars together? Phelps has a live band playing every Wednesday night at his pub. This Wednesday it’s a band called The Mud-Puddle Frogs – they do a sort-of American country and British folk mix. How about it?’
‘Sure, Uncle Gary. I need to drown my sorrows.’
‘Poor kid. Losing a dad can be hell,’ he said. ‘It was for us when we lost ours.’
George Lee wasn’t thinking about his dad, but he nodded his thanks all the same. ‘Sure, it can be hell,’ he said.
‘Did your mother ever find out any more about that woman?’
‘What woman?’
‘She hasn’t told you then?’
He shook his head. ‘What woman?’ he repeated.
‘Maybe it’s nothing, but your dad said there’d been a strange young woman
hanging about near his house. Never during the day but just as it’s starting to get dark. He saw her the evening before he died, too.’
‘What did she want?’ George asked.
Gary shrugged, the smell of engine oil coming off him as he did so. ‘I dunno. Some kind of nutter, I guess. He never got to speak to her. She’d just run off when he went to speak.’
‘Have you seen her?’
‘Maybe. Dunno. I caught a glimpse of someone hanging around the garage a couple of nights.’
‘A woman?’
‘Hell, I don’t know. It was too dark. I guess it looked like a woman, I can’t be certain. My eyes ain’t up to it these days. Look, it doesn’t matter. Like I said, probably some nutter up to no good. I told the cops, but useless swine that they are they said they’d look into it and never did. I’ve got good stock on the forecourt, I said. Sure, they said, and I could see the man was being sarcastic with his eyebrows. Clever bastards.’
George smiled. His Uncle Gary and the law had never been on good terms. ‘I’ll ask mum,’ he said.
Gary waved it all away. ‘Don’t make a big thing out of it. She’s got enough to worry about without some crazy bint stalking her. Just asking, that’s all. But if you see or hear of anybody strange hanging around let me know, eh? Your Uncle Robert is on the village Neighbourhood Watch committee and just loves all that vigilante kind of stuff. He wants to set up a Community Speedwatch thing, too. You know, those groups of no-good interfering nimbies in their hi-viz vests clocking you with speed cameras for the police? I told him straight, you do that and I’ll never talk to you again…’
‘Thanks for the car,’ said George, making a break for it before the man started on another of his rants.
‘Are you writing that stuff, still?’ his uncle asked as George made for the VW.
He nodded. ‘Yeah. You still reading the second one I gave you?’
FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) Page 5
