‘Where are you going?’
‘Oh, I got a call about my car – from the insurance company. They want to have a look at it, inspect the damage and sort things out. I’m going to see Uncle Gary – see if he can prise a bit more money out of them.’
‘That policy is important to me,’ she said.
‘I’m onto it, I promise,’ he said. ‘I’ve brought a few boxes down for you, if you’d like to have a look through them.’
She nodded her thanks. ‘You’re a good boy really,’ she said, turning to her meal preparations.
He hesitated. ‘You and dad always shared a bank account, that right?’
‘That’s right. Always. Why do you ask?’
‘Just interested. My wife never wanted me to share anything with her.’
‘That’s because of the calibre of the women you attract. In a good, close relationship it’s quite natural to share everything.’
‘No secrets, huh?’
‘No secrets.’
He left her alone and headed for the Tredwin house.
No secrets, he mused, smiling smugly to himself.
13
A Dog with a Scent
What he hoped to achieve by standing here outside the Tredwin place he had no idea still. But the woman – Adam’s sister, Eva – intrigued him. Like she was an itch he couldn’t scratch but was drawn to trying all the same. It was a strange carry on, that’s for sure. A secretive woman living here all alone in a house hardly fit for human habitation, sneaking about the village spying on people, avoiding all contact.
The stuff of a good thriller, whispered Cameron Slade.
George Lee ignored the chittering of his alter ego. This had gone beyond the mere plot for a novel. This was something far more interesting. And like one of the many cardboard detectives that populated his lurid books, he found himself sucked helplessly into a blind determination to know what had really happened to Sylvia Tredwin all those years ago, no matter what that involved. The fact that Brendan Mollett’s father had been found dead near the scene of her discovery only added spice to the tale and another mystery yet to be solved.
So, did he really think Eva, Sylvia’s daughter, could help him? Well he wouldn’t find out standing on the path, would he?
George walked cautiously towards the door, searching the windows for signs of life, but no one was watching him, as far as he could tell. Instinctively he glanced at his watch. Half seven. The sun still hanging in the sky, the shadows getting longer, the day beginning to cool down. There was an orangey glow bathing the wall of the house, his shadow cast black and forbidding onto it as he approached the door.
Adam might not take too kindly to the fact he was bothering his sister, he thought as he raised his fist to pound the door. Ah, to hell with Adam, he thought, and knocked loudly. There was no reply. No sound from within. He knocked again, and again.
‘Hello there,’ he called. ‘Is anyone in?’
He heard a shuffling from the other side of the door, as if someone stood there listening but was determined to keep quiet. So he knocked again.
Footsteps tapping quickly down a tiled hallway. Then the sound of a door at the rear of the house opening. George moved swiftly down the path that led to the back of the house and grabbed the handle of a tall gate that opened onto an overgrown back garden. He was taken aback by the sight of a slim, dark-haired woman tearing away from him down a brick path. She ran into a line of trees at the end of the garden and disappeared from view. He gave chase.
‘Wait!’ he shouted. ‘Eva, wait, I’m not here to hurt you! I just want to talk, that’s all!’
But by the time he’d reached the spot where he’d last seen her, she’d vanished. He pushed through the dense undergrowth and came to a narrow track bordered by high hedgerows, and he looked first one way and then the other, trying to determine which way she’d gone, but she was nowhere to be seen.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he said under his breath.
He returned to the house, paused at the back door and was tempted to push it open, have a sneaky look inside. But it was when he lifted a hand to the door handle that he heard a car pull up out front. He suddenly felt very awkward. What if he was seen? How would he explain himself, explain why he was snooping around the back for one thing, and why he was here in the first place? He thought it best to keep out of sight, sneak into the lane that Eva had taken and quietly disappear before anyone saw him. But his curiosity got the better of him and he crept along the side of the house until he had a good view of the visitor.
It was Adam Tredwin’s white van. George stared through the greenery that hid him from view. Adam just sat there, the engine purring away, the smell of exhaust fumes reaching George. Finally, after a few minutes, Adam Tredwin got out of the van and went up to the gate, slowly, deliberately, easing it open, almost as if he were fighting a great gale trying to blow it shut again. George watched as Adam stopped short of the house, standing on the path and staring intently at the property.
You ought to be going, George thought. What if he came around the back? He’d see you and what then? How’d you explain that? Coming round to borrow a cup of sugar wouldn’t wash. But he was transfixed by Adam’s calm, unfathomable expression of pained serenity. What was he up to? Why didn’t he simply go inside?
Then, to George’s surprise, Adam turned, went back to his van and drove off.
They’re all crazy, said Cameron Slade. Every Tredwin is a loon. You can’t go wrong with this story, mate. It’ll make you a fortune. Go and talk with him, pump him for more information. Ask about his crazy sister, about the ufologist, anything, just don’t let the opportunity slip. That’s always been your failing – never grasping opportunities when the present themselves, never really making them either. You wait for things to happen, like you’ve a right to have them happen. You’ll end up waiting till you kick the bucket.
‘Everyone’s a critic,’ George said. ‘Just leave me alone. I left you back at the flat. You shouldn’t be here…’
Then he realised he was talking to himself again and smiled, glancing around even though he knew there was no one around to overhear his absurd conversations with himself.
He saw Adam’s white van parked in the yard of the garden centre and went up to the main door. It was locked, of course, the shop in darkness. It was eight in the evening, after all. So he wandered around to the side entrance marked ‘private’ and rang the doorbell.
Adam Tredwin opened the door, a little surprised to see George there.
‘Hi, George. Everything OK?’
‘Hi, Adam. Yeah, everything’s OK with me. I just wondered if everything was OK with you. Look, I haven’t had chance to apologise for what went off at the White Hart.’
‘Like I said, it wasn’t your fault. You didn’t sing that damn song, after all. I’m fine, really.’
‘I invited you out,’ said George. ‘I feel sort of responsible for you having a shit night out. My Uncle Gary acted like an ass, too. But he was drunk. He gets like that when he’d had too many.’
Adam stared at his shoes. The silence was tending towards the awkward when he said, ‘You want to come inside a minute?’
‘Great,’ said George.
Yeah, great, said Cameron Slade.
The living quarters behind the garden centre were small but neat. Adam had had the place redecorated, and there was still the smell of fresh gloss paint and new carpets tainting the air. It was a smell that reminded George of the first day back at school after the summer holidays.
‘It’s not much but it’s home,’ Adam said, almost apologetically.
‘But temporary, I guess, until you get your parents’ place tidied up.’
Adam hesitated. ‘Yes, temporary. I was about to eat – can I get you something?’
George declined. ‘I won’t stay long, don’t want to interrupt your meal. I happened to take a walk past your parents’ house this afternoon – you know, taking in the sights, a trip down memory lane and all tha
t.’ Adam didn’t respond. ‘I think you’ve got your hands full, renovating that house. Must be a big job. How does your sister manage living there while it’s in that state?’
‘She manages,’ he said quickly.
‘No workmen there yet, I noticed.’
Adam shook his head. ‘You know how it is down here – they say they’re going to turn up and then don’t, or turn up when they want, in their own time. There’s a different kind of pace in Somerset. Far slower. You have to take it in your stride or it’ll drive you mad.’
‘Mad, yeah,’ said George, the irony not lost on him. ‘I thought I saw your sister Eva today…’ he ventured.
‘Really?’ said Adam. ‘That would be a rare sighting. She keeps herself to herself.’
‘I guess it must have been hard on her, on the both of you, what with all the things that went off with your mother…’
‘If what you’re implying is that past events had a direct effect on my sister, then you’d be correct,’ said Adam firmly. ‘The things that happened to my mother damaged far more than her health.’
‘So what happened to her?’ he asked, trying for tenderness in his voice and trying too hard; it came out all wrong, like a man in a long black raincoat trying to tempt a kid into his car with sweets. He grimaced inside.
‘You’ve heard the tales, no doubt.’
He nodded. ‘But they’re tales, right?’
Adam’s expression remained fixed. ‘She went missing, she was found, she wasn’t the same afterwards – that much is not a tale. That much is a very cold reality.’
‘Look, I’m sorry. So how is your mother nowadays?’
‘I’ve told you before. She’s fine.’
‘In Manchester. Is that where you were living before you came back to Petheram?’
‘Yes,’ he said vacantly. ‘I know you think my sister must be a little crazy, keeping herself locked away like that, but she has her reasons. It’s her way of coping. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for my sister.’ He hesitated. ‘She sort of made me who I am. We’ve always been very close, unlike some siblings you hear of. We love each other very much. She looks out for me and I look out for her. Mother had long periods of illness, when she was in and out of hospital, so we only had each other to rely on, to get us through the darker times.’
‘She never married, your sister?’
Adam shook his head. ‘Neither did I. We’ve both had our chances. And you? Are you married? Children, maybe?’
George smiled thinly. ‘Used to be married. No kids, thank God.’
‘Thank God?’
‘Well, they’d have been caught up in a complicated mess, split between two parents and all that stuff. Parents are not always the best people to bring up their kids…’ he added, like it was a thought given voice. ‘And so what happened to your mother back in 1974 was a direct cause of her illness?’
Adam eyed him carefully. ‘To a large degree. You know, George, I hate to say this but the lane past our house is private property…’
George blinked at the sudden change of tack. ‘Is it?’
Adam nodded. ‘I’d prefer it if you didn’t go down there again.’ He smiled. ‘I mean, what with builders due in at any time it’ll soon turn into a building site and get quite churned up and dangerous. I’m expecting diggers, scaffolding and all manner of things. So in the interests of safety…’
George held up his hands apologetically. ‘Fine, I won’t go there again.’
‘No offence meant.’
‘None taken.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You say your sister doesn’t go out…’
‘That’s right. Well, rarely…’
‘I saw her at my father’s funeral. By the wall of the churchyard.’
‘I don’t think that was Eva.’
‘I’m sure it was.’
‘Then you’re mistaken,’ Adam said crisply. Then his features softened. ‘I know for a fact it wasn’t Eva. She never went out all that day. You saw someone else.’
George shrugged. ‘I was talking to Brendan Mollett today. Did you know his father was found dead near the spot where your father found your mother after she’d disappeared?’
‘I had heard, yes,’ said Adam, looking decidedly uncomfortable. ‘Look, George, it’s good of you to drop by like this, but I’ve had a long day and I’m famished.’
George took the big hint and got to his feet. ‘Sure, Adam. I understand.’
There was the loud sound of breaking glass, a large window pane being stove in. then another.
‘What on earth is that?’ said Adam rising quickly and dashing through to the shop.
Both main windows had been smashed, two bricks lying incongruously on the floor amid large shards of glass. Adam unlocked the shop door and ran outside. But whoever had thrown the bricks had disappeared.
‘Who would do something like this, especially out here?’ said George, genuinely taken aback by the mindless vandalism. It was then he noticed the flickering light, and a cloud of smoke coming from the van. ‘Hell, Adam, it’s on fire!’
Someone had poured petrol over the bonnet and set light to it, blue-edged flames licking the air savagely. Adam filled a bucket of water from a water butt and casually tossed it onto the flames. A second bucketful brought the small fire under control. Adam sighed heavily and dropped the bucket to the floor. He didn’t appear to be fazed by the episode, whereas George was shaking and his stomach had turned to jelly.
‘You’ll have to call the police,’ said George.
‘It’s fine,’ said Adam.
‘Fine? They bust your window and set fire to your van!’
‘Probably kids,’ he said absently. ‘A bit of vandalism.’
‘A bit of vandalism?’ he echoed. ‘What if they’d set fire to your shop with us in it?’
‘They didn’t, though, did they? The insurance will take care of it.’
‘How can you be so calm, Adam?’
‘I’m going to get some boards to put over the windows,’ he said evenly. ‘And then I‘m going to get something to eat. I’ll see you around maybe.’
And that was that. George Lee left the garden centre shaken and more than a little confused. That wasn’t the work of petty vandals. Someone obviously had taken an intense dislike to Adam Tredwin and didn’t want him around.
It made George all the more determined to get to the bottom of what happened to Sylvia Tredwin. Its effects and implications, he was certain, were stretching all the way from 1974 to the present. And the first place to start, he thought, was by locating D. B. Forde – the ufologist who wrote the book on alien abduction. He was the one who had had significant access to Sylvia. Failing that he’d try and find Sylvia Tredwin and speak to her himself. One way or another, like a dog locked onto a scent, he was going to follow it to its logical conclusion, the thrill of the chase filling his body with a fizz of excitement.
14
Bad Dreams
When he arrived home George Lee thought he was imagining the smell of smoke, as if the reek came from the image of the burning van that remained lodged at the forefront of his mind. Caught in the last of the evening sunshine he saw his mother and sister in the garden, busy loading paper onto a small but fiercely burning bonfire. He immediately recognised the boxes by the women’s sides as those from the loft. It looked like his mother could not get the contents onto the fire quick enough.
He didn’t make his presence known. He retreated back into the house, pondering their actions. For a man she reckoned to love so much it seemed a little too soon to be destroying snippets of his life, albeit boring snippets. There were many papers covered in his scrawl, a direct link to him, to his hand, a hand that transcribed thoughts and feelings.
But I guess we all deal with grief differently, he thought. Take old man Mollett; a regular pilgrimage to place flowers at the site of his father’s death. He’d seen many a withered bunch of flowers by many a roadside over the years, sites of fatal accidents, and wondered why people would want t
o visit or commemorate the site of such tragedy. Did they imagine it happening, or in an alternative past try to place themselves there so they could step in to avert the accident. Was it guilt for not being there to help or what?
George Lee went up into his father’s loft, stood there in the light from the bare bulb and looked at the stacks of boxes and bags. Strange, but up here he felt closer to his father than anywhere else in the house, if close was the word. He was more aware of his presence, because this tiny room had been his. Some men have sheds; his father had his loft. Everything that appeared to matter to his father was stacked here. He’d hung onto it for a reason, even the mundane stuff. Even the secrets.
So what other secrets were stored in here, hidden away like the bank statements?
He spent a while sorting through masses of paperwork, none of it pretty exciting, eventually landing on a box marked ‘car stuff’. Idly, boredom beginning to eat away at him, he opened the box and sifted through the neatly-stacked papers within: old MOT certificates, bills for work done – all at Cowpers, naturally – services, tyre changes, car insurance policies going back donkey’s years.
Then he came across the bill of sale for his father’s car – a then four-year-old Ford Fiesta bought from his uncles’ Garage, his Uncle Gary’s primitive signature at the bottom. He thought nothing about it until he found a receipt for work to replace a badly corroded offside wing for the same car, carried out a year later, also signed by Gary. Something nagged at him as he stared at the innocuous-looking document.
He set aside the receipt and sat down at his father’s desk, taking the paper with D. B. Forde’s contact number out of his pocket and staring at it. It was a long time ago. He must surely have moved house since he gave the card to Mollett.
He picked up the phone and stabbed in the numbers, listening to the ringing-tone. His eye caught a slim box on a shelf above the desk marked ‘school reports’, and he frowned. Jamming the phone between shoulder and ear, he reached across and eased the box from its place in the pile and set it on the desk before him. As he lifted the lid a man’s voice buzzed in his ear.
FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) Page 11
