Margaret Milner took her into a lounge dominated by leaded
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bay windows draped in net and a wheel-shaped chandelier supporting electric candles. A display cabinet contained limited edition figurines, miniature cottages and commemorative plates.
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‘Andrew’s at work, of course,’ said Margaret. ‘He’s been very busy since what happened to Laura Vernon. But Graham says he’ll be back at the office next Monday. Apparently Charlotte is feeling better now. But people don’t really come to terms with these things properly until after the funeral, I find.’
‘Have you been in touch with the Vernons yourself?’
Margaret hesitated. ‘I’ve tried to ring Charlotte, but nobody ever answers the phone. You just get the answering machine.’
‘I’ve just come from the Mount myself,’ said Fry.
‘Oh?’ Margaret didn’t seem to know what else to say. She was wearing a long skirt and strappy shoes with flat soles, and she had a light sweater tied round her shoulders. She
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looked hot and uncomfortable, but then so did everybody in this weather.
‘I’ve been talking to Mrs Vernon.’
‘Is she — how is she taking it all?’
‘Not quite in the way you might expect.’
‘Oh?’ said Margaret again.
Fry walked across to the bay windows and peered through the net at the front garden. Close up, she could sec that the geraniums were wilting and turning brown, and their petals had formed a dark-red pool around the base of the chimney pot.
‘What sort of relationship would you say your husband has with the Vernons?’ she asked.
‘He works for Graham. It’s a good job and Andrew works hard.’ Margaret sat down, straightening her skirt, perching uneasily on the edge of an armchair. She looked at Fry anxiously, worried by the fact that she insisted on remaining standing by the window, despite the hint. ‘He was out of work for a while, you know. It made him appreciate having a secure job.’
‘Just a relationship between employer and employee, then? Or something more?’
‘Well, I don’t really know what you mean,’ said Margaret. ‘They work very closely together. You have to have a fairly close personal relationship, I suppose.’
‘A personal relationship? Friends, then? Do you socialize with the Vernons? Have you visited their house?’
‘Yes, we have. Once or twice. Graham is very hospitable.’
Fry watched her closely, noting the shift in the gaze, the
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involuntary movements of the hands that fidgeted constantly, as if seeking something to pat back into place, something that could be put right with a quick shake and a smoothing of the palms.
‘And Charlotte Vernon?’ said Fry. ‘Is she equally hospitable?’
‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ asked Margaret with a note of desperation.
‘No, thank you.’
‘I’ll make one, I think.’
‘If you like.’
Fry followed her into the kitchen, making Margaret Milner
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even more nervous as she slouched against the oak-effect units and got in the way of the fridge door being opened. Margaret stared at her over the top of the door with a plastic bottle of skimmed milk in her hand.
‘What exactly is it that you want?’
‘A bit of help, that’s all,’ said Pry. Tin trying to till in a few details.’
Cold air from the open fridge was filling the space between them, chilling Fry’s skin and condensing on the steel surfaces. Margaret seemed reluctant to reach for the handle to close it, afraid to reach too near to Fry in case she touched her and was contaminated by something that could not be killed by Jeyes Fluid and bleach.
‘I don’t know what details I can give you. I really don’t.’
Margaret actually walked away, leaving the fridge ajar, to switch on the kettle. When Fry slammed the door, Margaret jerked as if she had been shot, slopping water on to the work surface.
‘Would you know where to find Mr Milner just now, if you needed to?’
Margaret glanced automatically at the clock. ‘His office would be able to tell you where he is. He has to drive around a lot. Meetings with clients, you know. He’s so busy. He may not be home until late again tonight.’
Home late and she never knew where he was? Fry wondered whether Andrew Milner really was as busy as he told his wife. She wouldn’t accept that anything was impossible.
‘Maybe there are times when you don’t know where your husband is, but Graham Vernon does know.’
‘Of course.’
‘And sometimes, perhaps, it’s Charlotte Vernon who knows where he is?’
For a moment, Margaret did nothing but stare at the simmering kettle as if it had muttered a rude word. Then she opened her mouth and eyes wide and began to flap her fingers. ‘Oh no, what do you mean?’
‘I think it’s fairly straightforward. Mrs Vernon was quite open about it.’
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‘Was she implvinej something about Andrew? It’s quite ridiculous, isn’t it? She’s obviously not well. She must have been affected very badly for her to make up things like that.’
‘You don’t think it’s true?’
‘True? What nonsense! Andrew? Nonsense!’
‘You realize that the wife is often the last to know?’
‘Oh, but really … Andrew?’ She laughed suddenly, foolishly. ‘It’s just not possible.’
‘OK.’ The kettle began to boil, but was ignored. A small cloud of steam drifted across the kitchen, but dissipated before it could warm Fry’s chilled hands. ‘One last detail, Mrs Milner. Are you related to a boy called Simeon Holmes?’
‘Simeon is my cousin Alison’s son. They live on the Devonshire Estate.’
‘Were you aware that he was Laura Vernon’s boyfriend?’
Margaret wrung her hands and stared out of the bay window. ‘Not until Alison told me last night. She said he had to go to the police station.’
‘Something else you didn’t know, then?’
‘No, no,’ cried Margaret. ‘Not Andrew. It’s impossible!’
Fry trod in the slithery skin of geranium petals as she left the house. Though still scarlet on the surface, they were black and rotting underneath. Impossible? The only thing that was impossible was the idea that she might have been willing to sit and take tea with Margaret Milner among her miniature cottages and net curtains.
While she turned the Peugeot round, Fry thought of one more place to try. This one would be a pleasure, she thought, as she remembered the way Helen Milner had looked at Ben Cooper in the street at Moorhay.
Helen took a phone call from her mother as soon as Diane Fry had left the house in Edendale, and she had to spend some minutes placating her. When she had finally hung up, Helen rang her grandparents’ number. She knew they didn’t use the telephone much, and had only been persuaded to have it put in for emergencies, with Andrew paying the rental. When it rang, she could picture the two old people looking at the phone in
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alarm, reluctant to answer it. Eventually. Harrv would get up slowly and take hold of the handset, answering the telephone being a man’s job.
‘Granddad, it’s Helen.’
‘Helen, what’s up, love?’
‘It’s the police, Granddad. They’ve been asking questions about Dad.’
‘Have they no ? lhat pillock with the big words, or the nasty piece of work that was with him?’
‘Neither.’
‘Was it ?’
‘No, it was the woman. Detective Constable Fry.’
‘Her? She’s nothing but a bit of a lass.’
‘Even so …’
Harry paused, considering. ‘Aye, you’re right. Best to know.’
Diane Fry found Helen Milner’s cottage to be one of four tiny homes created out of a barn conversion.
The barn had a wavy roof and there
was a clutter of old farm buildings at the back that no one had yet found a way of using. Inside, the walls were of undressed stone, with casement
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windows and pitch-covered beams. Most of the furniture was second-hand stripped pine, with wicker chairs and a rush mat on the kitchen floor.
Helen greeted her without any indication of surprise, and Fry guessed that the phone lines had been busy during her journey across Edendale. She expected this third member of the Milner family to be as unforthcoming as the others, to tell the same story of shock and ignorance, to use the same, familiar words of outraged innocence.
But she was amazed how long the visit lasted. And she was fascinated and enlightened by the story that Helen Milner had to tell her over the instant coffee in the hand-thrown pottery mugs. By the second coffee, Fry had almost forgotten what she had come for.
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22
The three old men had met at Moorhay post office, where they had collected their pensions. The post office had been busy, not just with the regular Thursday pension queue, but with hikers emptying the cold drinks cabinet and the little freezer where the choc ices and the strawberry-flavoured iced lollies were kept. There was barely room inside the shop to manoeuvre round the displays of postcards of Ladybower Reservoir and Chatsworth House. Bulging rucksacks were piled outside while their owners flicked through the guidebooks and the sets of National Park place mats.
Soon the hikers would be moving on through the village to the tea rooms and craft centre at the Old Mill, or the picnic site at Quith Holes; then they would head for the Eden Valley Trail, aiming to reach the Limestone Way to the south or the Pennine Way to the north. Within half an hour, they would have forgotten Moorhay.
Harry Dickinson had picked a small frozen chicken out of the freezer for Gwen. It was solid and heavy in his hand, and the frost bit painfully into his palm, numbing his fingers. But queueing at the counter to pay for it, he found himself marooned in a sea of young people, who bumped against him and elbowed him carelessly in the ribs. They seemed regardless of his presence, as if he was just another obstacle that had come between their grasping hands and the next Diet Coke.
A small vein began to throb in Harry’s temple as a girl pushed in front of him in the queue. She was wearing a crop top that left her midriff bare and striped leggings that made her hips and backside look enormous. Her dyed blonde hair exploded from the top of her head like badly baled straw, and when she opened her mouth to call to her friends, he saw a silver stud thrust through
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her tongue.
Jostling for position, she trod hard on Harry’s toes with her Doc Marten’s, and when he looked down there were dirty scuff
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marks and indentations in the shiny leather of his boots. If she had apologized, he would never have said anything. But sho turned awav without even seeing him. She might as well have trodden on a piece of litter that she could wipe off later.
Harry tapped the girl on the shoulder, and she stared up at him incredulously. Her lip turned hack in a sneer, revealing a grey wad of chewing gum squashed between her teeth. He noticed there was a stud through her bare navel that matched the one in her tongue.
‘Haven’t you been taught any manners?’ he said.
She looked at him as if he was speaking a different language.
‘What’s up with you, granddad?’
Her accent was local, and Harry thought he might actually have seen her around the village before. It made no difference.
o
‘If you shove in front of me and tread on my feet, you might at least apologize.’ ‘I’ve as much right to be in here as you.’ ‘As much. But not more. You’ll have to learn, lass.’ ‘Oh, get lost,’ she said. She pushed her chewing gum forward through her teeth so that it smeared across her lips. Then she wriggled out her tongue and dragged it all back into her mouth
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again, staring insolently at Harry. But she quickly lost interest in him and turned away as the queue moved forward.
Harry hefted the solid weight of the frozen chicken in his left hand, staring at the back of the girl’s head. The tight breast of the chicken was smooth and hard, and coated in a thick layer of ice. He grasped the legs of the bird and let it begin to swing.
The girl screamed and cannoned forward into a youth in front of her in the queue. Everyone in the post office turned to look as she snarled and cursed at the old man. She was rubbing the place on her back where the biting cold of the chicken had touched her warm, naked flesh like a branding iron.
‘Sorry,’ said Harry.
Outside the shop, by the swinging Wall’s ice cream sign, Sam Beeley slipped on a discarded Coke can and hit the pavement with a painful thump, his ivory-headed stick clattering into the gutter. There was a flutter of consternation until two tall young
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men with Australian accents helped him to his feet and picked up his stick. Three girls who had leaned their hired mountain bikes against the shop window made a great fuss of asking the old man if he was all right and dusting him down, eyeing the
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Australians. They all circled round Sam in a kaleidoscope of colourful shirts and brown limbs, like butterflies momentarily attracted to a dry, leafless plant before passing on to seek new scents elsewhere.
Finally, they left him to Harry and Wilford, who assured them he only lived a few yards away. Though supported by his friends, Sam didn’t get very far before he had to stop and rest on a wall, gasping with the pain from his legs. He lit a cigarette and squinted at the churchyard across the road, where the gravestones gleamed white in the sunlight.
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‘You’ll be carrying me over yonder soon,’ he said, without
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self-pity.
‘We’re all heading that way,’ said Wilford.
Till not race you. It’ll happen soon enough.’
‘You have to accept the fact,’ said Harry, ‘that when you get to our age, death is always just around the corner.’
‘Do you remember that time in the mine, when I nearly got killed,” said Sam.
‘That was a good few years ago.’
Sam looked down at his legs. ‘Aye, but it left me a me
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mento.’
The three men were silent, staring at the houses opposite, not seeing the cars that went past, or the young hikers who had to step off the pavement to get round them.
It had been over twenty years since the accident had happened at Glory Stone Mine. They had been in a six-foot-wide worked-out vein, nearly a hundred feet high. The face sloped upwards in a bank of calcite like scree, with a miner drilling at the top, fifty feet up, silhouetted against the speck of his light. The sloping face was dimly lit, and the air was smoky from the blasting, with the roof nothing but a dusky darkness way beyond the reach of the lights. It was a vast and misty cavern of greys and blacks, thick with the acrid stink of explosives and dust.
Sam had been the miner at the top of the face. He had been
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in his fifties then, an experienced man who had spent most of his working lite in the mines. When his drill spill the brittle rock and the face had opened under his feet, his body had been thrown instantly backwards, his arms and legs tumbling among their own thrashing shadows until he hit tho foot of the slope and had been buried by an avalanche of calcite. Wilford had found Harry in the darkness, and together they had dug Sam out with their hare hands and dragged him to safetv. They hadn’t realized his legs were broken until he started to scream.
‘If the pain got too much,’ said Wilford, to nobody in particular. ‘Would you think of doing away with yourself?’
Sam looked thoughtful. ‘Aye, I suppose so.’
Harry nodded. ‘If there was nothing left for you. No hope. I reckon you’d have to.’
‘Depends on what you believe in, though,’ said Wilford. ‘Doesn’t it?’
‘
How do you mean?’
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‘Some folk don’t believe it’s right to do away with yourself.’
‘Ah, religion.’ Sam smiled.
‘Well, it’s a sin, suicide,’ said Wilford. ‘Isn’t it, Harry?’
Then Harry lit his pipe. The others waited, sensing an impending judgement or decision. They knew Harry did his best thinking when his pipe was lit.
‘It seems to me,’ he said. ‘There’s different sorts of sin. Sin isn’t the same as evil. God would forgive you a sin.’
They nodded. It sounded right and reasonable. None of them had got through almost eight decades without committing the odd sin.
‘It’d take a bit of courage, though. There aren’t any easy ways.’
‘There’s sleeping pills.’
Harry cleared his throat contemptuously. ‘That’s a woman’s way out, Sam.’
‘You could throw yourself off somewhere high. Raven’s Side cliff,’ suggested Wilford.
‘Messy. And you wouldn’t necessarily kill yourself.’
They shuddered. ‘You wouldn’t want that.’
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‘I can’t stand heights anyway. They make me dizzv.’
‘That’s a point.’
‘There’s hanging,’ said Harrv. ‘If you know how to tie a knot right.’
‘And you have to get the drop just right, else.’
Wilford pursed his lips, ran his fingers through his white hair, ‘Else what?’
‘You don’t die quick, you strangle yourself. Slowly.’
‘I’ve read somewhere that blokes pretend to hang themselves,’ said Sam. ‘They almost hang themselves, but not quite. For a bit of fun, like.’
‘Bloody hell, why would they do that?’
‘Sex,’ said Sam solemnly. ‘They say it gives you a bloody great hard-on.’
‘Ah. Well, that’d be a novelty, all right.’
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