“I’m all right. So’s Melanie.”
“Great. Glad to hear you’re looking after Mel. Did I ever tell you how I used to fancy her when she was a kid?”
Dave would have fancied Godzilla if it had worn a skirt. His late mother had fondly described him as incorrigible, a favourite word. He’d finished up getting Cheryl Stringer pregnant and marrying her before the baby was born. It wasn’t in his nature to do the decent thing, so everyone assumed that it was because he’d never found anyone with a sexual appetite to match Cheryl’s. Jason had never cared for Cheryl – she was so in-your-face – but these days she was proving impossible to avoid. In January she had started working as a classroom assistant at Melanie’s school and the two couples had fallen into a habit of seeing each other regularly. Melanie said that Cheryl was fun, but Jason couldn’t help wondering if it was an excuse, an opportunity for his wife to spend more time with Dave. She said that he made her laugh.
“Yeah, you told me.”
“Course, she was too posh for me. For all of us. No offence, mate, but I never figured out how you managed to catch her eye.”
He’d often asked himself that very question, never quite worked out the answer.
Dave drained his glass. “Same again?”
Jason hadn’t finished his drink, but his headache was no better and he decided he’d had enough. Especially of Dave. He pushed the tankard across the counter to Sally and shook his head. “Another time.”
“Off to kill a few more?” Dave mimicked the Sundance Kid firing his six-shooter.
“Later.”
Dave treated him to a knowing leer. Jason could smell the ale on his breath. “Popping back to the nest for a quickie, then? Don’t blame you, mate. Give my love to Mel, now, don’t forget.”
Jason loathed the easy familiarity of that Mel. He turned away, not trusting himself to answer. When he reached home, Melanie was in the front room. She used it as a study and was tapping on the keyboard of her computer. It was half-term, supposed to be a holiday, but she always found plenty to do. As he walked into the room, she glanced over her shoulder.
“You left early this morning.”
“I tried not to disturb you.”
“I heard the van when you set off.”
“Sorry.”
“Doesn’t matter. How did it go?”
“Well, you know. The usual.”
He’d never been good with words, not like Melanie. Anyway, how could you describe what he saw, what he felt? Nothing could have prepared him for this. The terror on the faces of the beasts, the staring eyes, the hoarse panting, the blood seeping from the wounds where they had in panic crashed through strands of barbed wire.
“Ready for a sandwich? There’s cheese in the fridge.”
She turned back to her computer. He wondered if he should go up behind her and kiss her on the neck. At one time, that would have melted her in a moment, but they had been married four years. Four years! Time to start a family, though she had always been reluctant. Weren’t teachers supposed to like kids? But she never behaved like all the other girls he’d grown up with. Always, Melanie was different.
“Good morning?”
“Not bad,” she said, still focusing on the text on the screen. “There’s such a lot of work to do with the national curriculum. By the way, I wouldn’t mind a sandwich myself.”
In the kitchen, Jason found the bread knife. He hadn’t expected marriage to be like this. What had he expected? He wasn’t sure, perhaps he’d never thought clearly enough about it before asking Melanie to share his life. Marriage was what people did, but he had assumed that, because Melanie was different, their life together would somehow be different from everyone else’s. After all, she was his fairy bride.
He ran his forefinger along the serrated edge of the knife, remembering how young Kevin Nolan had slit the throat of a terrified lamb the previous afternoon. The lamb was healthy, like all the other creatures down Beggarman’s Lane, but that was not enough to guarantee survival. Tests on blood and tissue taken from animals at an adjoining farm had proved positive and the rules of contiguous culling meant that their neighbours had to die.
“I wouldn’t mind a cup of tea while you’re at it,” Melanie called.
She talked like a woman of fifty, he thought, switching on the kettle. Not that she looked a day over twenty. Her face didn’t have a single line. Three years older, he’d only been vaguely aware of her existence during her teens. He’d never spoken to her until the night of a dance in the village hall, a couple of weeks after she finished at college. He’d watched her, with her friends, and found himself hypnotised. She seemed delicate and aloof from their chatter, a slim, almost boyish figure in a simple dress lacking all the slits and embellishments favoured by her companions. Something prompted him to talk to her, even though he had watched her reject overtures from a number of the other young men. Including Dave Sharpe.
A couple of months later, when their unlikely romance was turning into something more than a fling, he tried to explain how he admired her, how he loved to watch her when she was watching something or someone else. There was a stillness about her that entranced him, and something more: an air of not belonging that was neither loneliness nor isolation, but a sort of serene uniqueness with which he had fallen hopelessly in love.
Of course, he found it impossible to describe his feelings. At first she had teased him, but when she realised that he meant to be deadly serious, her tone had softened and she had said that she thought she knew what he meant.
“I never wanted to be one of the crowd,” she said, squeezing his hand.
“You’re not,” he said. “You’re almost – well, not quite human.”
“Thanks a lot,” she laughed, withdrawing her hand in mock indignation. “Sort of alien from outer space, am I?”
“No, no,” he said, his voice becoming hoarse with embarrassment. “But you’re not like Dawn and Becky and all the rest. You’re not like anyone I ever met before.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment, shall I?”
“You better had,” he said. “I want to marry you.”
To his amazement, she said yes. No play-acting, no messing. He could not believe his good fortune. Why him? In the past, he’d done all right with the girls, even if he would never be in Dave Sharpe’s league. At least he was muscular and fit and poor tubby little Hannah Stott had once told him that his hazel eyes were the most beautiful she had ever seen. He was never mean with money and no woman would ever feel the slap of his hand, which was more than you could say for many men, even in this day and age. But Melanie had a brain and wanted to use it. She could make something of herself.
As for Jason, he didn’t think he’d ever find a job that truly suited him. Perhaps his old Maths master had been right in branding him as lazy. It went deeper than a visceral loathing of algebra. Above all, Jason admired beauty. He admired it in a landscape, in a summer sunset, in the face and body of a gorgeous woman. How easy to become lost in rapture, to pass the hours in quiet adoration. But there was no beauty in work. Routine bored him and so he moved from job to job. He had been a garage mechanic, a gardener, a farmhand, a butcher’s assistant, a slaughterman at an abattoir.
A week before the wedding, he asked Melanie if she’d ever loved anyone else. Idle curiosity, no hidden agenda – but for some reason, his inquisitiveness upset her out of all proportion. She was usually calm, unworldly even, and he was surprised to see her eyes filling with tears.
“Listen,” she said gently as he stammered an apology. “It doesn’t matter. But you must promise me one thing.”
“Anything,” he said. His worst nightmare was that she would pull out of their engagement. Twice already he had dreamed of her failing to show at the church on the day itself and of his mortification as everyone in the congregation stared at him in horrified sympathy.
“You must keep this
promise and never break it.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t suppose you ever heard of Melusine?”
He shook his head. She often treated him as a pupil; it amused her to teach him things. He didn’t mind; he was content simply to let her words wash over him, not absorbing the lessons, just luxuriating in her company.
“Melusine was a beautiful fairy but she had a terrible secret.” A faraway look came into her eyes. “One day each week, she became half-woman, half-serpent. A man fell in love with her and she agreed to marry him, on one condition, that he never saw her on a Saturday.”
“What happened?”
“Someone poisoned his mind, and said that was the day Melusine met her lover. When her husband broke his word and found out the truth, he lost everything. Including Melusine.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Listen, I’m like Melusine. I ask just one thing of you. You must promise never to be jealous.”
“So you’ve got a terrible secret?” His tone was jokey, but her flights of fancy baffled him. “It’s not the new vicar, is it? I saw him across the street the other day. Quite a hunk. The church shouldn’t allow it.”
She put a finger to her lips. “Shhh, darling. No, I don’t fancy the vicar, but I do want you to trust me. Now, are you going to promise or not?”
“You really want me to?”
She nodded seriously and he realised that he must not get this wrong. Not now, when he was committed to her. Even though he did not know why, he had to make his promise.
“I swear.”
Her face broke into the loveliest smile and within moments he forgot about Melusine. In the years that followed, there was no hint that Melanie might have a terrible secret. She did not smoke, did not drink, and she had to be persuaded into any bedroom games that were not pretty conventional. Even now, he told himself he was crazy to believe that she was deceiving him.
He took the sandwich and cup of tea into her. “Here you are.”
“Thanks. So when are you going back?”
“Five minutes.”
“I’ll have your tea ready by half six.”
“Great.”
“No problem.”
She was still glued to the computer screen. He drank in the sight of her. Her hair was the same rich chestnut shade he had always loved, her skin was as white and unsullied as when they first kissed. Yet something had changed. He was no longer special to her; she had stopped trying to educate him to understand what appealed to her. Nowadays he featured in her life in much the same way as their shabby old furniture or the framed views of Brimham Rocks that hung on the wall of their living room.
“See you later, then.”
“Mmmmm.”
He closed the door quietly. As he rooted in his jacket pocket for the keys to the van, he wondered who had stolen her affections. Dave Sharpe? Checking the map in his glove compartment, he told himself for the hundredth time that life was not so cruel, that the only reason he was obsessed with the fear that Dave was cuckolding him was because such a betrayal would be too hard to bear.
Heading for the next Infected Premises, he couldn’t rid his mind of Dave’s gloating smile. As lads, they had played rugby together in winter and cricket in summer. They had so much in common and people regarded them as bosom buddies. Dave was fun and he was generous, but there were moments when the mask of good nature slipped. Taking a short cut along a single-track lane, Jason remembered a game one July when he and Dave had batted in partnership. It was one of those days of which cricketers dream. The ball kept speeding off his bat to the boundary. Even the best bowlers on the other side were helpless in the face of such a sustained attack. When he was one run short of his century, Dave called him for a quick single. The ball was in the hands of the cover point fielder, a farmer with a famously strong arm. Jason hesitated for a second, then put his head down and ran. His stumps were shattered when he was two yards short of the safety of the crease at the far end. In the bar afterwards, Dave had bought the drinks and said he took the blame. Jason argued with him, saying that if he had set off straightaway, he would have made his ground. But secretly, he knew that Dave was right. It was a reckless call, his fault. Perhaps he had been too anxious to see Jason achieve his moment of glory. Or perhaps he had wanted to deny it to him forever. Jason had never scored a ton since.
When he arrived at the site, the man from the Ministry came up as he was slipping on his white biohazard overall and rubber boots. “You took your time.”
Jason’s wave took in Kevin Nolan standing by a picket fence, supping Coke from a can, and Bob Garrett sitting in the cab of his van, reading The Sun. “Better things to do with my day than spend hours hanging around here, waiting for the word.”
“Look here, you know the score. We have to get the go-ahead from the vet. But if you keep buggering off, we don’t know where we are.”
Jason shrugged. He was freelance, and right now the Ministry needed as much help as it could get. Three million animals didn’t kill themselves. None of the slaughtermen liked the Ministry blokes. They were pen-pushers, more comfortable in a warm office than on the land. Most of the slaughtermen had learned their trade on farms, they were countrymen. They didn’t have to like what they were doing or the people who paid them to do it.
Bob Garrett jumped down from his cab. “Eh up, pal. Wipe that smirk off your face. We all know you’ve been off giving your old lady a good seeing-to.”
Garrett’s ex-wife lived across the road from Jason. The previous summer, Jason had spotted him eyeing up Melanie when he brought back the kids and she was sunbathing on the lawn. No matter how many times he told himself that other men were jealous of him, it never helped, never made him feel good. What was wrong with him? Why did he feel damaged by the way they lusted after his lovely fairy wife? And things were getting worse. He couldn’t shake off the fear that people were laughing at him behind his back. They knew something that he did not.
Kevin Nolan was sniggering, but Jason didn’t rise to the bait. “How many are we doing this afternoon?”
The man from the Ministry consulted his clipboard. “Eighty-five cattle. Not a big job. I just spoke to the vet. We should be set to go in a couple of minutes.”
Jason opened the door of his van and picked up the gun from the passenger seat. “Better get ready, then.”
Their task did not take long. They were using captive bolt guns rather than rifles. A blank cartridge fired a four inch steel bolt into the animal’s skull and a spring retracted the bolt. Once the animal had been stunned in this way, it was pithed, by means of a steel rod being thrust through the hole and into the brain.
As usual, not everything went according to plan. One bull had to be shot and pithed four times. The more he fought for life, the more Jason’s temper frayed. What was the point of struggling? The bull wasn’t sick, but it had to die anyway. Those were the orders. He wanted it over as quickly as possible and resented the doomed bull for delaying the inevitable. The more time you had to think about what you were doing, the worse it was for everyone.
“Where next?” he asked the man from the Ministry.
“There’s a couple of dozen lambs penned up the other side of the barn at the end of the lane. You and Garrett head off there now, I’ll catch up once I’ve had a word with the farmer.”
The farmer had turned up during the killings. He’d stayed over by the fence, watching the destruction of his herd. Jason could tell the man was close to tears. In the early days, he had talked to the farmers whose herds he shot, tried to console them. But what could you say? Most people round here reckoned that it would be enough to vaccinate the animals and claimed the culling was unnecessary. But the powers-that-be in London thought differently, and that was what mattered.
Jason held the lambs while Bob Garrett shot them. He took care not to look at the faces of the creatures, settling his gaze instead on fields in th
e middle distance. The countryside was full of death, but Nature didn’t seem to notice. Ragged robin, elderflower and foxgloves still bloomed.
“These fellers in the Thatched Tavern were talking last night,” Garrett said. “They’d killed fifteen hundred sheep and cattle on one farm and then they were told to disinfect round a jackdaw’s nest for conservation reasons. Christ, would you bloody believe it?”
Jason grunted. Perhaps all wars were like this; everyone had an anecdote to tell. Live lambs suffocating to death under the corpses of sheep with cut throats. Wagons driven by young squaddies, carrying the carcasses to the burial pits and leaking blood all along the country lanes. Each storyteller liked to spin a yarn more absurd or more horrific than the last.
“You all right?” Garrett asked. “You look – sort of glazed. On a promise for tonight, then?”
Jason felt his chest tightening. He wanted to grab the man, shake him by the neck until he choked, demanding to know why he kept talking about Melanie. What was going on – something that he, the poor old husband, was the last to know?
He strode away, unable to trust himself to speak. Surely he was wrong in suspecting Dave. What about Garrett himself? He was an older man and Jason supposed he was good-looking if you like that sort of thing. Or even Kevin Nolan? Kevin’s last year at the school had been Melanie’s first as a teacher. Jason remembered her saying that he was a rascal, but somehow she couldn’t find it in her heart not to like him. That was the trouble with Melanie. She never saw through people, she was too naïve to realise that the men she liked were only interested in one thing.
“Where are you going?” Garrett demanded.
Jason pointed to the heap of bodies on the ground. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“If you don’t wait for whatsisname to show up and sign you off, there’ll be hell to pay.”
Jason shrugged. “So what?”
He’d walked away from jobs before. Even as he clambered out of his overall and boots, his headache was easing. Garrett gave a disgusted shake of the head. Kevin Nolan was grinning. Surely, surely, Melanie couldn’t have slept with that lad?
Vintage Crime Page 30
