by Ann Granger
Dilys looked up and for the first time some emotion other than the maniacal triumph entered her flat features. Genuine regret touched them before she shook her head and resignation replaced it.
‘You tell Mrs Aston,’ she said to Meredith. ‘That I’m sorry. But it couldn’t be helped. She’d seen what you saw.’
‘You mean, Hester Millar saw your father’s box of trophies,’ Markby said. ‘Where is it now, Dilys?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe,’ her glance at Markby was both mocking and vindictive, ‘maybe you should ask Dad?’
Meredith saw a nerve jump in his jaw but he returned calmly, ‘Why did Miss Millar come to the cottage that morning?’
‘Brought us some jam,’ said Dilys with a sniff. ‘She was always making the stuff.’
‘Jam!’ exclaimed Ruth. ‘That was it. That was what Hester was holding in her hand when she came to tell me she was leaving. A pot of jam. It was such an ordinary thing I didn’t pay any attention. I clean forgot about it but now you tell me, I can see her standing there, holding it. She didn’t say she was going to Old Billy’s cottage but she must have been. It was my idea—’
Ruth broke off and after a moment added quietly, ‘So I did kill her, didn’t I? Morally, anyway. It was my idea she take the jam to the old man in person. Because she did that, she walked in on the old wretch gloating over his box of trophies.’
‘She wouldn’t necessarily have known what they were,’ Meredith objected. ‘They were just a jumble, a string of beads, a man’s signet ring and so on.’
‘A man’s?’ Markby asked her with a frown.
‘Yes, I realised straight away it was the odd item in the group. All the other things he’d taken from women, beads, earring, hairslide. But this ring was a big heavy thing, definitely a man’s—’ Meredith looked nervously at Ruth. ‘It had the initials SH on it.’ To Markby she added, ‘I was going to tell you about that. I hadn’t got round to it.’
‘I gave that ring to Simon,’ Ruth said quietly. ‘I showed it to Hester before I gave it to him. She would have recognised it. She knew bones had been found in the woods. I’d told her about meeting Simon there that day. She knew the ring must have come from him and she must have let it be seen that she knew.’
‘But she didn’t know how it got to be in that box,’ Markby took up the story as Ruth fell silent. ‘Old Billy had got the ring in the woods, for sure. But had he taken it from a man he’d found dead? Or a man he’d killed? She went to the church and knelt in the pew, seeking guidance. She knew she’d have to tell you, Ruth. And she knew that you and she should tell the police. It was going to take a lot of courage on your part. The story of your child would become known. She’d protected you before, all those years ago when you were pregnant. But she couldn’t see a way of protecting you now.
‘Dilys had followed her to the church. Hester might have glanced up as Dilys came in, we don’t know, but she wouldn’t have feared Dilys, even in the circumstances. She knew her too well. She might even have thought that Dilys didn’t know where her father had got the ring.’
Ruth stirred on the sofa where she’d been sunk in thought as Markby was speaking. ‘I still find it hard to believe,’ she said now. ‘But perhaps I shouldn’t. The Twelvetrees family was always beyond the pale in Lower Stovey. It’s funny, isn’t it? Every village has one family which is tolerated but disapproved of.’
‘Probably for good reason, even if it was the sort of reason no one spoke of. Perhaps Old Billy was the local drunk?’
‘He certainly drank but whether more than the other men, I don’t know.’ Ruth bit her lip. ‘But looking back, I can see he was violent, even then. Domestic violence they’d call it now. Back then they probably just said he knocked his wife and kids about. Mrs Twelvetrees cleaned for my mother. She often had bruises. The girls had them, too, when they came to school. But they weren’t badly marked enough for a teacher to start making enquiries. I suppose that if they ever were, they were kept home until the bruises had faded. There were days when Dilys didn’t turn up. When she came back she always said she’d had a cold, but I never saw her sniffing.’
‘At school,’ Markby mused. ‘Dilys and Sandra Twelvetrees, two little red-haired girls.’
‘Yes,’ Ruth said in surprise. ‘They did have red hair. Dilys still touches hers up with hair-colourant because she started to go white quite early.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘How did you know?’ she asked.
‘Guessed,’ he said enigmatically, thinking of family photographs on the Twelvetrees mantelshelf. Three small children, all red-haired, and the later picture of Sandra née Twelvetrees posing for the camera in Disneyland, the sun setting fire to her auburn curls.
The duty solicitor, a pale-faced and earnest young man, looked unhappy. ‘My client wishes to answer your questions frankly and freely. Nevertheless, I shall point out to her when she is not obliged to do so.’
‘Fair enough,’ Pearce told him shortly. The tooth was beginning to nag again. He explored it with the tip of his tongue and winced. Beside him, Ginny Holding gave him a knowing look.
Pearce forced his mind from the tooth and concentrated on matters in hand. ‘Right, Dilys. Let’s start at the beginning. When did you realise your father was the rapist of twenty-two years ago?’
‘You don’t need to answer that!’ said the solicitor immediately to Dilys. To Pearce he said, ‘You have no evidence the late Mr Twelvetrees was responsible for the attacks. Why should my client think that he was?’
‘The box,’ growled Pearce.
‘What box might this be? It seems to have disappeared. It was, by the description, if it ever existed—’ The duty solicitor allowed himself a smirk. ‘Merely a collection of objets trouvés. The old gentleman might have picked the things up anywhere, lying on the ground, things lost in the woods.’
Pearce gave a faint groan. It was going to be one of those days. Again.
But Dilys chose to ignore her legal adviser. ‘I didn’t realise nothing. I always knew it. It was when my mother was bedridden it began. She couldn’t do a thing, not wash herself, hardly feed herself. She got enormous and Dad, he hated her for it. He’s stand in the bedroom doorway and call her filthy names. But he never got any further than the doorway, I saw to that. I’d come back home to live because my husband had left me. He went away with a barmaid, brassy floozy who worked at the pub in the village. Good luck to her, I say, and good riddance to him. I had nowhere to go so I had to go home. Ma had taken to her bed, anyway. Someone had to look after her and him, the old blighter. In that way, it sort of worked out. But that’s when he started that caper in the woods.’
‘Mrs Pullen …’ pleaded the solicitor. ‘This is very unwise and unnecessary.’
‘How did you feel about your father, Dilys?’ Ginny Holding asked in her soft voice.
‘He was an old devil. And when he was young he was a young devil. We were all terrified of him, all us kids. You only had to catch his eye and it got you a clip round the ear. When he came home from the pub in drink, he’d come upstairs and pull us out of bed to thrash us.’
‘Is that all he did, Dilys? When he came up to your bedroom?’ Ginny asked softly.
Dilys glared. ‘Wasn’t it enough? Ma would be hanging on his arm, begging him to leave us be, and he’d turn and smash his fist into her face. My brother William, the one they call Young Billy, he cleared off at seventeen and went to sea, got out of it. My sister, she married a soldier and went off to live in Germany. But me, I drew the short straw, it seems.’ Dilys’s gaze, as hard as marbles, met Pearce’s. ‘That kind of fear doesn’t wear off when you get older. I might have been too big for him to wallop me but I was still scared of him. See, he had another weapon. I needed to live there. I had no place to go. I had to put up with all his nonsense.’
Dilys’s voice sank and her gaze moved to her hands, resting on the table-top. ‘I knew when he’d been out fooling with those girls. I could smell it on him when he come home. I smelled it on his clothes wh
en I did the laundry, I saw the stains. He showed me those things he took from them. He liked to see the look on my face. He liked knowing that he could tell me and I couldn’t do a thing about it. He was a nasty old bugger and that’s a fact. But my concern was for Ma, that she shouldn’t learn about it. He’d led her a dog’s life. She was just worn right out and she couldn’t do with any more trouble. I didn’t have time to worry about those girls.’
Holding asked, ‘And did he also bother you in that way, Dilys?’
Dilys’s small eyes moved their stony gaze to her. ‘He didn’t fancy me, most like. I was never anything but a big lump who could cook and clean.’
‘Nevertheless, you were there, under the same roof. You were in no position to protest, as you’ve said. It wouldn’t be surprising if he’d taken advantage of that, if you know what I mean.’
‘I know what you mean!’ Dilys’s mouth snapped shut like a trap.
There was a silence. Dilys gave no sign of saying any more. Her eyes were blank. Pearce nudged Ginny. It wouldn’t do for Dilys to clam up now.
‘What happened after your mother died?’ Ginny prompted.
Dilys blinked and shrewd suspicion returned to her expression. ‘After Ma died? What should I do? I stayed there, cooking and cleaning for him. Not that I ever got a word of thanks. I still needed a place to live and as long as Dad was alive and living in the cottage I had a roof over my head. I knew old Mr Jones wouldn’t throw Dad out and I knew young Kevin wouldn’t, not while his father was alive. But old Martin Jones was getting older and so was Dad. If old Jones died, young Kevin might decide to get us out. Or if Dad died, it’d be easy. I wasn’t the tenant. Dad was. I knew Dad wouldn’t ever agree to go to a retirement home. He wouldn’t even go to hospital. So it was in my interest to look after the old blighter and keep him alive, wasn’t it?’ Her flat gaze returned to Pearce’s face.
Pearce felt a deep depression settle over him. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘Tell me about Simon Hastings.’
‘Dad never killed that chap!’ Her voice was vehement. ‘Not intentional, not like you mean. It was an accident. Could’ve happened to anyone.’
‘Go on.’ Dilys had stopped as if she’d expected Pearce to agree with her. ‘Why was it an accident?’ Pearce asked.
The solicitor interrupted again. ‘My client can’t tell you that because she doesn’t know. She wasn’t there when Simon Hastings died.’
‘I know what Dad told me!’ said Dilys truculently to him.
‘Yes, Mrs Pullen, but you don’t know it happened that way. You weren’t a witness. Your father’s account may have been flawed.’
‘He was telling me lies, you mean?’ Dilys glared at him. ‘So what am I supposed to do? Sit here with my mouth shut and let these coppers think Dad killed that hiker? Well, he didn’t. He told me so and I reckon he told me right. How do I know? Because he was that scared, that’s why. Something had happened he hadn’t counted on, see? You didn’t know my father and I did. You didn’t see him that evening when he come home and told me about the hiker and I did. Fair shaking in his boots, he was, and as white a sheet.’
She turned her attention back to Pearce and Holding. ‘Dad had met Miss Pattinson, as she was then, hadn’t he? Coming from the woods and crying. Dad knew she hadn’t met the Potato Man because he was the Potato Man. She said, she was crying for her mother who’d just died. But Dad thought different. He was curious. He went up to the woods and he came across this chap, a hiker. The feller looked odd, Dad reckoned, as if upset about something and angry. Dad asked him if he was the reason Miss Pattinson had run out of the woods in a fair old state. And the feller just went for him, went for Dad. Swung a haymaker of a punch at him and Dad, he ducked it and fetched him a cracker in return. The hiker went down and hit his head on a fallen tree. That was it. Dead as a doornail. Dad took fright when he saw he was stuck there with a corpse on his hands. He pulled a lot of branches and stuff over him and came home. That night he went back with a spade and buried him. And I know that’s right,’ Dilys added with a glower at her legal representative, ‘because I was there that time! He took me with him.’
The solictor broke in with desperation in his voice. ‘Mrs Pullen, do you realise—’
Dilys turned on him. ‘You don’t need to keep on calling me Mrs Pullen. I’m Dilys Twelvetrees. That’s what I was born and that’s what I’m still.’
‘Did you divorce Mr Pullen?’ Holding asked her.
Dilys stared at her scornfully. ‘What for? He was gone. What’s the point in divorce?’
‘Then technically you are still Mrs Pullen,’ Holding said.
‘I’m Dilys Twelvetrees,’ she repeated obstinately. ‘It was never a name to be proud of but I’d rather have it than Pullen, any day.’
‘I don’t think it matters if Dilys chose to resume her maiden name,’ Pearce said firmly, with an irritated look at Holding. ‘So, you went back to Stovey Woods that night with your father and helped him bury Simon Hastings?’
‘Mrs – Twelvetrees!’ said the solicitor loudly. ‘You don’t have to answer that. You’ve said quite enough already.’
‘You keep quiet,’ Dilys said to him. ‘I know what I’m minded to answer and what I’m not.’
‘We discussed this, Mrs Pu – Twelvetrees! I explained—’
‘I know what you explained.’ Dilys returned her attention to Markby. ‘Dad needed me to hold the lantern. Anyway, he knew that if I helped him, it’d be difficult for me to go telling anyone about it. I was in it, too, wasn’t I?’
Her expression grew reminiscent and when she began to speak again there was a change in her voice. It had gained the mesmerising quality of a traditional story-teller, softer, inviting the audience in to listen. Pearce realised they were all leaning forward, even the solicitor, hanging on her every word, knowing they were to be told something that would lodge in their own minds for ever.
‘Dad was pretty sure he could find where he’d left the hiker. But it was pitch black in those woods. You couldn’t see a hand in front of your face and not one thing looked like it did in daytime. We only had the lantern, an oil-lamp, it was. It made the shadows jump around in the trees like a lot of mad creatures dancing around us in the dark. We made a couple of false stops before we reached where Dad thought it should be. He said, “’Tis around here someplace, Dilys. Do you go and take a proper look round.” Well, I wasn’t going poking about in those trees, not knowing what was there, and very likely falling over a dead man. So I held up the lantern high and swung it round. And bless me, there it was.’
The solicitor drew in his breath slightly. Holding was frozen in an attitude of rapt attention. Pearce felt a frisson of anticipation.
‘You saw the body …’ he whispered.
Dilys gave him a curious, mocking look. ‘I saw the hand.’
‘Hand?’ gasped the solicitor.
‘Yes, hand. You deaf? I saw an arm, and the hand on the end of it, pointing up into the trees. It was poking out of the leaves and branches Dad had dragged over him, pointing up like a signpost to tell us where he lay. I said to Dad, “You buried the chap alive! He’s moved. He’s been trying to dig himself out!” But Dad said, “No, he ain’t.” Leastwise not that he knew of it. “It’s the rigor.”’
The solicitor muttered, ‘Good grief!’
Dilys, perhaps interpreting his comment as lack of understanding, went on to to explain it to him. ‘Rigor, that’s what sets in when something dies. Dad had seen in it cattle and sheep. The limbs go stiff and stick up all awkward. This hiker’s arm had just risen up in the air like of its own accord. The leaves Dad threw over him weren’t heavy enough to keep it down.
‘But Dad was put out because he couldn’t bury him easy with the arm sticking up like that. So he took a great swing at it with his spade. I heard the bones all crack but it didn’t fall because the muscles kept it upright. So Dad went at it like a madman, bashing it until it lay flat. Then he bent down and pulled off the signet ring that was on one of
the fingers. He said it would do to go with the other things. I told him he was a fool. It was evidence. He just told me to shut up. But I was right, wasn’t I?’ Dilys put the question suddenly to the solicitor. ‘It was evidence?’
‘You were right,’ he told her faintly.
She seemed pleased, nodding her head. ‘So, Dad dug a grave in another place and we rolled him in there and covered him over. Dad and I pushed the fallen treetrunk on top to stop anything digging him up. We were careful to move dry leaves and such over the place where the tree had lain before, so that no one should see it had been shifted. But in time, something must have dug up bits of him because that doctor fellow found the bones in a fox-hole, so I heard him tell the coroner. And the coroner agreed it’d been an accident, didn’t he? He said there was no evidence of foul play. Now you’re trying to make out different, but coroner’s already said there wasn’t. We went home, Dad and I, and for the first time, I stood up to him. In fact, I fair laid into him. I told him there was to be no more nonsense with the women up there in the woods or on the old drovers’ way. If it ever all came out, I told him, no way would the police believe the hiker had died by accident They’d believe Dad killed him because he’d seen Dad up to something with one of the girls. And Dad, for all he put a bold face on it, had had such a fright he gave in without a squeak. So that was the end of the Potato Man.’
Pearce found he’d been holding his breath. He expelled it in a long sigh. ‘Tell me about Hester Millar.’
Dilys gave an echoing sigh and her shoulders slumped. ‘Oh, that. That was a bit of bad luck, that was. She was a nice lady. I had nothing against her. But she walked in that morning and found Dad messing with the things in that old box. He would never throw it away. He liked to take them all out and put them on a table. He’d pick them up, one by one, turning them over in his fingers and remembering the girl he’d taken it from, chuckling to himself all the while. I hated him doing it. I was always afraid one day someone would walk in on us and I was right about that, too! Because Miss Millar did just that.
