A Dirty Death

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Except it was Guy’s idea, not mine. He was always one for fancy names. Even the dogs had to be Chloe and Tamsin and Lydwina rather than Lassie or Blossom. Some of the cows’ names are completely over the top.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Sylvia firmly shook her head. ‘Only one wife in a million would have agreed to it.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to argue. I’m just happy you’re here. Without Guy I’m all at sea.’

  ‘I can imagine.’ Sylvia paused, according Guy his moment of silence. ‘But he was a bit of a despot, too, in some ways.’

  ‘Oh, Syl, I do love you. I’ve been needing to talk to someone sane for ages. I don’t know how you could have stayed away so long.’

  ‘Neither do I, now I’m here. Look, haven’t you got some wine or something? I’ve got all afternoon, and you don’t seem to be going anywhere. Time we caught up with it all.’

  They talked for three hours. They remembered Guy, and their own past history, and glanced at the future, and debated money and widowhood and Lilah and Roddy, and went back again to remembering Guy. For Miranda it was like plunging into a hot scented bubble bath after not washing for a month. She revelled and basked in it, and was almost glad that Sylvia had stayed away so long, such was the delight and relief she now felt.

  Action followed her restored good humour. Firstly, she tackled Guy’s side of the bedroom. Pulling open the wardrobe and the tallboy, she took out all his clothes and piled them onto the bed. There was no sense in keeping the suits or shoes for Roddy – she knew he’d never wear them – so she bundled them up to go to the charity shop in town. Casting her eye around the room, she began to imagine how she might rearrange it. The bedside cupboard on Guy’s side could go, and instead she could have a bookcase there, containing her favourites which were currently down in the sitting room. She might get rid of the wardrobe and buy a smaller modern one for her own use. She could even throw out the bed and replace it with something less monumental, something more her size.

  Miranda had known at the time that she was taking a calculated risk in marrying Guy. He had been thirty-five to her twenty-three. He had a world-weariness about him which she took for real maturity. Sexually, he had astonished and annihilated her. There had been a time, almost forgotten now, when you could almost see the electricity passing between their bodies, whenever they were within twenty feet of each other. He had been noisy, hairy, wicked and wholly irresistible. Those had been her best years and Miranda felt her gamble had been justified on that basis alone. Whatever Guy had turned into later, however contemptuous he became of her once she was floundering in maternity and he was pushing himself to the limits to pay for the farm – she had accepted it for the sake of those early times.

  She had been thankful, too, that he had never once made comparisons between her and Barbara, his first wife. Barbara and her two sons had been completely expunged from the Beardon consciousness; Lilah and Roddy only knew that there had been an earlier family, which had no bearing on their existence. Neither had ever shown any interest or curiosity concerning their half-brothers.

  That first marriage had not ended with any great crisis; it had just withered away. Guy had been teaching, after putting himself through years of self-motivated study, unhappy and angry at the daily grind and repetitive timetables – feeling like an exile from his native land. He supposed, he told Miranda, that he’d been a dull husband. Privately, she thought he’d probably been unbearably sorry for himself, even occasionally violent. Whatever Barbara might have felt, it was certain that Guy would neither have known nor cared. He had been a young man heading haphazardly up a blind alley.

  He had told her the story, flatly, before he’d asked her to marry him. Quitting his teaching career had been part of quitting his marriage. At thirty-two, he had turned back to farming in his native Devonshire and sought a new wife. The quest had taken three years, during which Guy had taken on one of his former pupils – Sam – and set himself up on a small rented farm, intent on rediscovering the agricultural skills learnt as a boy. With the birth of Roddy, and the onset of his forty-fifth birthday, he had set about finding and buying a bigger farm. Two years later they had moved to Redstone.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Den Cooper’s notebook was almost full. He had spent a whole day in the village interviewing as many of the inhabitants as he could find, starting with those who had been at Guy’s funeral. After all, they had been amongst the last to see Isaac Grimsdale alive.

  His opening remarks were always the same: ‘Good morning/afternoon Sir/Madam. I expect you’ve heard about the violent death of Mr Isaac Grimsdale yesterday? I’d be grateful if you’d answer a few questions. I’m afraid it’s a murder investigation, which means we do require the full co-operation of everyone we approach.’ From there he worked down a list of endless repetitive questions. One of the more interesting was: ‘Have you any reason to think that Mr Grimsdale’s death might be connected in any way with that of Mr Guy Beardon?’ One of the more difficult was: ‘Can you please account for your own whereabouts between five and seven o’clock yesterday morning?’ Nobody liked to be asked to provide an alibi.

  After nine of these interviews, Den’s head was spinning. Before reporting back to the Chief Inspector he sat in his car for twenty minutes, trying to make sense of everything he’d been told.

  He had started with Wing Commander Stradling, who lived in an impossibly neat bungalow with his disabled wife Doreen. The old man had taken Den outside and given him a chair on the patio, so as not to disturb Mrs Stradling. His responses to most of the questions had been brief to the point of gruffness. He had lived in the village for eight years. He and his wife had had the bungalow built to their own design, as she needed special facilities. They had purchased the land twelve years ago when the village school and its playing field were sold off. Yes, he was acquainted with both the dead men, though much more so with Beardon than Grimsdale. No, he hadn’t the slightest reason to think the deaths might be linked. Hadn’t Beardon simply tripped and fallen into his unguarded pit? Short of entering into ludicrous flights of fancy – which he was sure the constable would prefer him not to do – he could not provide the slightest connection. He had been asleep in bed until six-thirty the previous morning, and had been seen by the postman at seven-fifteen, when he had been sitting with his morning tea on this very patio. A slim alibi, admittedly, but perhaps better than nothing. Doreen would confirm it, for what that was worth.

  Lastly Den had put the question which Chief Inspector Smith had so often insisted was the most revealing: ‘Did you like the two men?’

  The Wing Commander’s face had filled with a colour close to that of port wine. He drew in a long breath. ‘Grimsdale was innocuous, as far as I know. Beardon was a crass, insensitive pig. He went out of his way to offend people – me in particular. He made fun of people to their faces. No, constable, I cannot pretend to have liked him.’

  Den made an appropriate note and closed his book. ‘Thank you, sir, you’ve been most helpful.’

  Next stop was Father Edmund Larkin. Den quailed slightly at the prospect of questioning the vicar; they had come into contact before in their respective dealings with calamity and crisis, but Den doubted whether Father Edmund would remember him. He did not seem like a man who took much notice of people. Scrupulously he went through his questions. The Reverend Larkin answered ramblingly, giving minute detail where none had been invited. He had been in the incumbency for nine years, serving this parish and two others, covering a wide geographical area, which kept him fully occupied. The vicarage was old and too big for one person, but the PCC had yet to find him something more suitable. It was very close to the church, however, and adjacent to the village street, so parishioners dropped in frequently, and he felt he was au fait with most of what went on, at least in the centre of the village. He had not known the Grimsdales or the Beardons very well. Neither household came to church, and as they were both positioned in a somewhat isolated corner of the parish, he
seldom encountered them. They had experienced no deaths, weddings or christenings in his time here until now, and had therefore never availed themselves of his services. He had been in bed until seven-thirty the previous day, although there was no way at all that he could prove it except to assume that someone would probably have noticed him if he had made his way to the Grimsdale place and killed Isaac. People in this area rose early, after all.

  The last question gave him pause; like the Wing Commander before him, his colour heightened, the sallow cheeks turning a pinkish brown. ‘I had no particular feelings towards Isaac Grimsdale. I can’t say I found any reason to be fond of Guy Beardon, but, as I say, I hardly knew the man. My eulogy at the funeral summed up virtually everything I did know about him. He seems to have been successful according to his own lights. His family seemed to hold him in some esteem.’ Den’s brow wrinkled at that: what an odd phrase to use about a husband and father! He jotted it down verbatim.

  Behind the vicarage was a smallholding of three or four acres, run by a Mrs Sylvia Westerby. This was Miranda Beardon’s best friend, only just returned from a fortnight in Corfu. Her name had already been mentioned more than once and he was curious to meet her. After a long delay she opened the front door of her oddly misshapen little house and to Den’s surprise he found he had to lower his glance only slightly to meet her eye. She must have been close to six feet tall. At eleven in the morning she was wearing a flowery blouse and bright red shorts, which struck him as an outfit unsuitable for farmwork. She had wide bony shoulders and slim hips, giving her the silhouette of a young man. She held a cigarette between her fingers and a towel was wrapped round her head.

  ‘Sorry. I was washing my hair,’ she said. ‘Come in.’

  She took him into a living room that looked as if it had just been ransacked by a very determined burglar. ‘Sorry about the mess,’ she said carelessly, obviously not sorry at all. They sat together on a sofa, forcing Den to twist at an awkward angle in order to watch her face as she answered his questions. She answered readily in a husky voice. She had lived in this house for twenty-five years. She and her husband had moved here from Bristol and produced three children, the youngest of whom had died in an accident when she was five. The husband had left her not long after and then died of cancer. (‘Served him right!’ she laughed.) The surviving children were now in their twenties and living in Wales and Spain respectively. Sylvia herself made a precarious living by breeding Angora goats – which were a real pain, breaking out all the time and never doing what you wanted them to – as well as keeping fifty free-range hens of various kinds, and teaching a few hours a week in the evenings. When asked for more detail, she explained that she currently ran classes in rug-making, plant propagation and recovering from divorce. ‘Funny mixture, I know – but I reckon to turn my hand to almost anything. Most people are more ignorant than me,’ she said, ‘though I say so myself.’ She had got back from Corfu the evening before last, landing at Gatwick and driving herself home. ‘Bloody airport car park – cost nearly as much as the flight,’ she grumbled. She had been fast asleep, dead to the world, until at least ten the previous morning, and no, she couldn’t prove it. No, there couldn’t possibly be any connection between the two deaths. She was still getting over the news about Guy – it had been a complete shock when Miranda phoned her yesterday. She had liked the Grimsdales very much. She always stopped for a chat on the rare occasions they came into the village. ‘Isaac was two sandwiches short of a picnic,’ she said, ‘if you know what I mean.’ Asked for elaboration, she explained that the older brother had been very dependent on Amos, although perfectly able to do outside work and drive a tractor. ‘It’s lucky it wasn’t the other way around,’ she said. ‘He’d never have coped on his own.’ As for Guy, well, she’d liked him. Under his bad-tempered and bullying veneer he had been an intelligent and trustworthy man. It was true that he’d been awful to Sam, and sometimes much too sharp with young Roddy, but she’d met worse. Miranda seemed to cope with him, which was the main thing.

  She visited Redstone all the time. She and Miranda were best friends. They had coffee together at least once a week, and had minded each other’s children and animals over the years – Miranda’s children and Sylvia’s animals. They had met the first week the Beardons had arrived at Redstone, in the shop. They’d just clicked instantly. They made each other laugh.

  ‘Oh, one thing,’ she said as he was leaving, ‘see if you can catch Phoebe Winnicombe. She’ll tell you plenty about the Grimsdales.’

  But Phoebe and her daughter Elvira had not been there when he knocked on the door of the stone cottage overlooking the churchyard, so instead he had made his way to the Rickworths’, an expensive, modern house on a slope, with a small paved garden. He was expecting to be similarly disappointed on a weekday morning, but surprisingly both Tim and Sarah had been at home. Tim, not much older than Den, opened the door and smilingly invited him into the main room, where Sarah sat in front of a computer with headphones over her ears and a microphone attached. She was clearly interrupted by Den’s intrusion: when she saw his uniform, she removed the headphones and sighed audibly.

  Once again the questions were put, the replies noted. The couple repeatedly hesitated, each waiting for the other to answer – not from politeness so much as caution, it seemed to Den. When an answer did eventually come, the other partner would often disagree, especially over matters of fact. Tim said they had lived in the village for four years; Sarah said five. Tim said he worked as a consultant to a software firm; she said he was a self-employed computer games salesman. They did agree that she worked as a hardware designer specialising in sound reproduction. They barely knew the Grimsdales or the Beardons, but were good friends of the Mabberleys, on the next farm along from Redstone. They could think of no earthly connection between the two deaths, and they had no feelings about Guy or Isaac, except that they knew Guy had made himself unpopular with the likes of the Wing Commander. This caused another disagreement: Tim found it rather amusing, while Sarah thought it was unkind to tease the poor old chap. They’d both been in bed until about seven-thirty the previous morning, and could only provide each other as alibi. The atmosphere in the house was brittle and Den was relieved to conclude his interview.

  By this time he was hungry, and he called at the Ring o’ Bells pub for some lunch. Maggie Dansett, the landlady, made a big production of cutting a round of ham sandwiches. She leant over the bar towards him as he ate, more than ready for a gossip. ‘That Guy Beardon, he were a proper tartar to they chillun of his’n,’ she confided. ‘And worse to poor old Sam. You’ll have heard, I reckon, what a tongue ’e had on’n? Sharp as fish hooks and festered near as bad, too, I’d say. Now poor old Isaac, who never hurt so much as a fly. What a thing! You police people trawling all over the village, ’tis a bad business and no mistake. Folks is axing, who’ll be the third? There’s always a third, everyone knows that. Sooner you catch the bugger as did for poor Isaac, the sooner us’ll sleep at night.’

  Den smiled deprecatingly and finished his sandwich. He hadn’t intended to interview Mrs Dansett and her stream of consciousness was disconcerting. As far as he could tell she hadn’t said anything worth writing down, except for the reference to Guy’s ill-treatment of Sam. It went without saying that Sam had to be everybody’s first choice when it came to wondering who – if anybody – had pushed Guy into the slurry.

  Scanning the list he’d made first thing that morning, he realised he had seen all the main players; all those whom he considered most likely to be of assistance, having observed them closely at Guy’s funeral. Hetty Taplow came next, and her house was a mile away, in a row of workers’ cottages set close to the road, and comprising a tiny settlement all of its own. It was in the opposite direction to Redstone and the Mabberleys’, and he hesitated as to which course to take first. The decision came readily: Hetty was another Mrs Dansett – a gossip who knew everything and nothing. No hard facts, little but second-hand tales and wild suppositions,
spiced with tight-lipped judgements. Hetty could wait.

  He turned right out of the pub’s small car park and followed the winding lane past Redstone’s roadside entrance. Half a mile further on he turned left into another farm driveway.

  The approach was lined with stately horse chestnut trees, heavy with their white flowers. To his left, towards Redstone, lay a dense wood of oak and beech and ash: Jonathan Mabberley’s greatest asset. There had been talk, a year or two back, of the National Trust taking it over as a safeguard against the magnificent trees ever being destroyed. But Jonathan had resisted, giving every assurance that there was no threat to the trees from him.

  The house was of an old colonial style, improved and extended until it straggled over a considerable area. It stood sideways onto the drive, with a broad verandah at the front and a terrace leading down to another paved area at the back. Wisteria smothered many of the walls and a walkway linked the house to an old stone barn. It was immaculate; there were neither the sounds nor the smells of a farmyard.

  Den parked in a wide gravelled semicircle beyond the house and crunched his way to the front door. A red Irish setter stood wagging its plumy tail fatuously at him, as if he were an old acquaintance. The door stood open, but there was no sign of any occupants. He bit his lip, wondering what the dog would do if he tried to go inside.

  ‘Can I help you?’ came a well-modulated voice from behind him. Spinning round, Den came face to face with the owner of the house. It seemed impossible that Jonathan Mabberley could have reached his side without making any sound on the gravel, and Den’s mouth dropped open stupidly. As the farmer stood there, waiting, Den struggled to repeat his little speech. ‘Um – you’ll have heard about Mr Isaac Grimsdale’s death—’ he began.