FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller)

by D. M. Mitchell

  ‘Can I help you?’ she asked.

  ‘Who the blazes is it now?’ came the familiar voice of William Talbot, unseen at the woman’s back.

  ‘I’ve just seen your show, and it was brilliant,’ said George, craning his neck to peek around the door. He caught sight of Talbot sitting at the dressing table, his reflected face staring at him from the lighted mirror. He’d hung his black jacket over the chair and had a glass of something alcoholic in his hand. ‘Forgive me, I was given your details by a man called D. B. Forde. I understand your father and Forde were close colleagues.’

  ‘Oh yes, we know Mr Forde,’ said the woman. ‘Don’t we, Will? A nice man. He’s helped us out over the years…’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Talbot.

  ‘I wondered if you could spare me a few minutes to discuss a case your father was involved with.’

  ‘Jesus, man. I’m knackered. I’ve just finished my show. I need to have a drink, take a shower.’

  ‘Sure,’ said George. ‘I just needed to catch you in.’

  ‘We’ll meet you in the theatre bar in an hour’s time,’ said the woman. She leant closer to George, whispered, ‘He’s always like this after a performance. It takes it out of him. He’s not usually so grumpy.’

  ‘I heard that,’ said Talbot. ‘Close the door.’

  She rolled her pretty eyes and shut the door on George.

  He waited in the bar, ordering another drink at a hugely inflated price, and was checking his watch for the umpteenth time when William Talbot and the woman turned up nearly a full hour late.

  ‘You must be desperate to see me,’ said Talbot, sitting down at the table. ‘I thought you’d have buggered off a long time ago.’

  ‘Will, that’s not the way to talk to a complete stranger,’ admonished the woman. She sat down, reaching out her slender hand across the table. ‘I’m Patricia, his long-suffering and unfortunate wife.’

  ‘You’ve got fifteen minutes, because we have to be somewhere,’ said William Talbot.

  ‘Thanks for seeing me,’ said George, taking an instant dislike to the stage hypnotist. ‘My name’s George Lee, I’m a writer…’

  ‘I don’t know anything about any of my father’s cases,’ said Talbot shortly. ‘So you’ve wasted your time.’ His breath reeked of alcohol.

  ‘Perhaps you can remember, if you tried,’ said George.

  ‘My father’s been dead a long time now.’ He reached into his pocket and took out a cigarette packet.

  ‘You can’t smoke in here,’ said Patricia gently.

  ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘They treat us like lepers.’

  ‘Your father regularly hypnotised people whom Mr Forde was interviewing regarding abduction.’

  Talbot smirked. ‘Yeah, I know all about that shit. And my father called himself a professional? Well he did himself no credit by getting himself hooked up with Forde. But desperation will drive a man to anything.’

  ‘Desperation?’

  ‘Money, old boy,’ said Talbot in a feigned accent George could only suppose was meant to be Talbot’s father. ‘He’d got himself into all manner of financial difficulties. He bought shares that turned out to be worthless. Pumped all his life savings into them. Forde offered good money to hypnotise those cranks, and my father couldn’t afford to turn it down. He’s not the only guy who ever had to swallow his pride.’ He glanced at his wife. ‘Shit, why can’t they let a man smoke inside? I ain’t standing round the back in the goddamn alley like a fucking tramp.’

  George saw Patricia place the tip of her index finger on her husband’s arm in a comforting gesture the man was wholly unaware of. She looked at George and smiled, but he detected all manner of things beneath its frail surface. He saw that her dress was lacklustre and worn; the earrings she wore were cheap plastic, as was the thin bracelet on her wrist. William Talbot’s jacket was shiny with wear, and his white shirt collar a little too grey to be anything but quite old. Money was something the Talbots didn’t have much of either, George surmised, and he figured the man would rather be doing anything but treading the boards of minor theatres. He saw crushed dreams in his weary, middle-aged face, in the stink of his breath.

  ‘We’re planning to move to Canada very soon,’ Patricia said out of the blue.

  ‘He doesn’t need to know that,’ said her husband, but continued all the same. ‘Nothing left for us here. The country is going to the dogs. We’ve tried all we can to get on, but now’s the time to move to pastures new. Pat’s got relatives over there – she was born Canadian – and our daughter Karen has married a Canadian. Seems the right thing to do, given the circumstances.’ Though he didn’t look too happy about the situation, George thought.

  ‘I’m sure it will be a good move for you,’ George said. ‘I’m interested in the case of a woman called Sylvia Tredwin,’ he persisted.

  ‘I don’t know of any Sylvia Tredwin,’ Talbot replied shortly.

  ‘Yes you do,’ said Patricia unexpectedly. ‘It was the last case your father was working on.’ She waited for her husband to respond, and when he didn’t she faced George again. ‘William’s father died shortly after interviewing this woman called Sylvia Tredwin. You see, he made tapes of each session – you know, those old audio tape cassettes? When he died I went through some of his things, because William here couldn’t face doing it. He kept tapes of every session with every client he ever had and stored them in date order in boxes in his study. The very last tapes were recordings of sessions with a woman called Sylvia Tredwin – I remembered because the name is slightly unusual, and because I recalled reading something about her in the paper once. She’d been abducted by aliens, or she claimed to have…’

  ‘Yeah, right, nutters, every last one of them,’ said William Talbot.

  ‘How did your father die?’ asked George.

  Talbot rubbed his eye. ‘A mugging gone wrong,’ he said. ‘He lived in Swindon at the time. Not the prettiest part of town either. Apparently he was accosted in the street late one night and stabbed, the mugger making off with a wallet containing three pounds, a bit of loose change and half a packet of Wrigley’s chewing gum. The old man didn’t have anything to his name. They picked the wrong man to mug and maybe they did it out of frustration, who knows? What I do know is my old man left me with all his debts,’ he added bitterly. ‘Nearly crippled us.’

  George had the feeling that they’d never quite recovered. ‘They never caught the murderer?’

  Talbot sat silently, looking at a spot on the table and rubbing it with his fingertip.

  ‘No,’ said Patricia. ‘They never caught the man. But the woman who came across him – he was still alive at the time, barely – said she saw a large black American car driving fast along the road. She described it as being like one of those flashy old ones you see in the movies, chrome bumpers, that kind of thing, but the police dismissed it. They couldn’t understand why a mugger desperate to take a few pounds would be driving a vintage American car, and in the end put it down to the distraught woman’s imagination. She had been out drinking, after all and was on her way back home from the clubs.’

  A large black American car? George cast his mind back to his meeting with Forde, and his mentioning of the Men in Black. He tried to shake away the ridiculous thoughts but somehow they lingered like a tiny splinter in the skin. ‘So you still have the tapes that Doctor Talbot made of Sylvia’s sessions,’ he pursued tentatively.

  ‘Yes,’ said Patricia. ‘In the loft back home. William didn’t want to throw them away. They have his father’s voice on them…’

  ‘Never listened to them, though,’ he said acidly. They ought to be dumped really. No use to anyone. Not now.’

  It was strange, but George could not recall clearly what his own father sounded like. He frowned. He didn’t have a single recording, video or otherwise, with his father on it.

  ‘I’ll buy the tapes from you,’ he blurted.

  ‘There’s such a thing as patient confidentiality, you know,�
� Talbot said. He shook his head. ‘No can do, Mr Lee.’

  ‘Hang on a minute, darling,’ said Patricia. ‘Don’t be too hasty. Would you use them responsibly, Mr Lee?’

  ‘Of course. I just need a bit of background information for the book I’m writing.’

  ‘And how much would you be prepared to pay for the tapes?’ she ventured.

  George poked his tongue into his cheek as he thought. He hadn’t really thought this through. ‘Two hundred pounds?’

  ‘Ah,’ said Patricia, angling her head. ‘Do you hear that, Will? He’s willing to pay two hundred pounds for the tapes.’

  ‘I heard,’ Talbot grunted.

  An awkward silence descended, which George, against his better judgement thought he had to fill. ‘OK, three hundred pounds, my last offer.’ He was thinking over his last bank statement and wondering whether he had that amount of spare cash. He wasn’t exactly flush himself. And there might be nothing of interest on the tapes – that’s what Forde had said. He was about to go back on his offer when Patricia spoke up.

  ‘That sounds very reasonable, don’t you think, William? And he’s a nice man. He won’t do anything with them that your father would have disapproved of.’

  But William Talbot rose from his seat. ‘They’re not for sale,’ he said.

  ‘Darling,’ said Patricia, reaching out and placing her fingers on his arm. ‘Think about it. The three hundred would come in useful…’

  He glowered furiously at her. ‘I don’t need charity,’ he said. ‘I don’t need this man’s three hundred. Come on, Patricia, let’s get out of this dump.’

  With that he stormed away, leaving Patricia Talbot looking helplessly into George’s eyes.

  ‘Now!’ bellowed Talbot. Patricia got up and nodded her apology at George.

  ‘Here,’ said George, handing her a piece of paper. He’d already taken the precaution of writing his details down while he waited for the Talbots’ arrival. ‘Just in case he changes his mind. My mobile number and the address where I’m currently staying.’

  ‘He won’t,’ she said, taking the paper. ‘You know what pride is like…’

  That could have gone a lot better, though George, blowing out a sigh.

  18

  The Disappearance

  Christian Phelps saw the woman again, but this time he didn’t tell his wife. Neither did he tell the police when they came round to the pub asking questions about the fire at the Cowpers’ garage. No, he told them; he’d not seen any suspicious people hanging around. There’d been a few strangers in the pub on the night of the fire, but that wasn’t too unusual. Sorry, he couldn’t really remember them. But then he gave them some kind of vague description just to get them off his back. They seemed happy with that and left him in peace.

  ‘You never mentioned the woman,’ his wife said. ‘We should have mentioned the woman you saw the other night. She was acting strange, you said so yourself.’

  ‘I dunno, maybe I imagined it,’ he said.

  ‘It could be a lead,’ she said. ‘They could be the perpetrator.’

  She watched too many crime dramas on TV, Phelps thought. ‘Leave it alone, eh? I told you, I might have been mistaken. Perhaps there was no woman after all.’

  ‘Well I ought to ring them and let them know,’ she said, heading for the phone.

  ‘Jesus, woman! OK, OK! I’ll ring them. Leave it to me.’

  ‘Well don’t leave it too late. She might try to burn the pub down next.’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘You get ready for bed and I’ll ring them now.’

  ‘You’d better,’ she said, ‘because I won’t be able to sleep at nights knowing there’s an arsonist prowling the village.’ She checked all the smoke alarms before she finally ascended the stairs.

  Phelps made a pretence of ringing the police, even conducted a lively conversation with an imaginary officer on the other end of the dead line. He heard the bedroom door close and he put the phone down. It was late. The place in darkness. He strolled through to the bar, peeped through the window onto the street. She wasn’t there this time, but that didn’t stop his heart crashing against his ribcage like a tomcat about to go in the bath. This entire thing was freaking him out.

  Are you certain she looked like Sylvia Tredwin?

  No, he couldn’t be certain, but the uncertainty was the thing that was freaking him out, because who else would be stalking him like that? He wished Bruce Tredwin had never found Sylvia that night.

  He grabbed his coat. ‘I’m just going out to check the generator,’ he called up to his wife.

  ‘This late? Can’t it wait till morning?’

  ‘I’m always too damn busy and if I don’t check the thing out I know full well it’ll pack in on us when we next have a power cut. You know how we rely on it.’

  ‘Then get a professional in and stop tinkering with it!’ she called.

  ‘Sure,’ he said, curling up his nose at her. When had he stopped loving the woman, he thought? Had he ever really loved her?

  No, he hadn’t, he realised that now. There was only one woman he ever really loved, and that was Sylvia Tredwin.

  But was it love? Or had it been desire? How can you separate out the two?

  Christian Phelps didn’t go round the back to the shed housing the ageing generator; he had a meeting to attend. He thought about getting into his car. It was an automatic reaction, but of course his wife would hear it start up, so he decided to walk. It would only take him ten minutes on foot anyway.

  The night was warm, the sugary smell of dry grass hanging in the still air, and the call of an owl in the trees across the fields punctured the quiet, but Christian Phelps was not a man to savour such subtle delights. He was vaguely aware of the bats flitting between the trees in the lane up ahead like leaves in the grip of a gale, darting across a sky still glowing faintly as if lit by a dull blue light. It wasn’t pitch-black, but there were times when he passed under the shadow of trees meeting overhead like an umbrella when he thought it was stupid of him not to have brought a torch. But his mind was all over the place recently.

  Cowper had agreed to meet him at the crossroads on the outskirts of the village. He’d know what was going on. What to do.

  He heard a noise in the undergrowth to his left.

  ‘Who is that?’ he said nervously, looking for any signs of a shadow. All manner of nefarious creatures were conjured up by his active imagination from the shadows of the dense foliage. He admonished himself and strode on purposefully, only once looking back over his shoulders, a creeping sensation that he was being followed prickling his back.

  He reached the crossroads, a mere crossing of tracks that didn’t carry any traffic except tractors but which were once significant highways for the ancestors of Petheram. It was, reputedly, where they once hung criminals and buried suicides, but none of that could be proved, Brendan Mollett had told him. The stories didn’t make for relaxing companions, he thought as he stood in the gloom waiting for Cowper to turn up.

  ‘Damn you, where are you?’ he said under his breath.

  He heard the sound too late to do anything about it. He turned in time to catch a glimpse of a woman racing out of the dark towards him, something long held above her head, eyes burning fiercely and animal-like. He raised his arm instinctively to fend away the blow he knew must come, but he was struck across the temple and fell forward, the pain driving in like a freight train going downhill. He was on his hands and knees, gasping, attempting to right himself, staring at the bare legs and muddied skirt of his attacker when another blow, far more severe, met with his exposed head, and he collapsed in a heap, blood oozing from a deep wound.

  The next day Mrs Phelps came knocking at the Lees’ door. She was in a confused, emotionally-ragged state.

  ‘Cassie,’ she said to George’s mother, while he looked on bemused. The two women had been friends a long time. ‘Christian has gone missing!’

  Calm as always, his mother invited the woman inside and did what
she always did in a crisis and told her to sit down and offered her a cup of tea. ‘What do you mean missing?’

  ‘He went out to have a look at the generator last night, and I’ve not seen him since,’ she blurted tearfully.

  Mrs Phelps had always been a drama queen, George thought acidly. Little wonder she was a bit twisted in the head; she never left the pub, had few friends, and spent all day watching telly and drinking port and lemons, over the years this diet turning her brain to mush. She once claimed her dog had extrasensory powers and could read her mind. If it could then it was a bloody extraordinary feat, notwithstanding it was a dog, for Christ’s sake, because her mind was so damn addled he doubted even she could make sense of it. So George Lee wasn’t looking at her with much sympathy. Today he had other things on his mind. Having drawn a blank with the Talbots he was going to Birmingham to chase up the address he’d found with his father’s statements.

  ‘Have you checked everywhere? The cellars, for instance?’ said his mother.

  ‘Of course I have! He’s disappeared! He could be dead!’

  ‘Well, let’s not jump to hasty conclusions,’ she said folding a reassuring hand over Mrs Phelps’ trembling fingers. ‘When did you last see him?’

  The woman’s eyes were glazing over, staring into space. ‘Last night. As I said, he went out to look at the generator. But I must have fallen asleep, because I never heard him come back in.’

  ‘So he might have come back to bed for all you know?’ said George’s mother. ‘And got up before you woke. He’s probably gone out on an errand or something. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about. He’ll be back this afternoon. Have you tried calling him on his mobile?’

  ‘Yes, it keeps telling me he’s not available right now and to leave a message.’