A Dirty Death

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘He’d been a teacher, I understand.’

  Lilah stared at him. ‘Who on earth told you that?’

  He spread his hands, a caricature of innocence. ‘It’s in the files somewhere. Perhaps he got a pension? That’s probably it.’

  ‘Well, it was a million years ago. When he was in his twenties. I wasn’t born until he was nearly forty. Do you always go back into a person’s past history like this?’

  Den’s face was carefully inexpressive. ‘This is a murder inquiry. We go into everything.’

  ‘So the file on my father’s death is still open, is it?’ She stared hard at him.

  ‘It certainly is,’ he said primly. ‘Nothing concrete yet, but …’ He scratched his head gently with the tip of one long finger. ‘It’s all rather complicated. My Chief Inspector’s been looking through all the interview notes and he’s got a hunch.’

  ‘That’s supposed to mean something, is it?’

  ‘It means we’ll all be out for ten hours a day asking a lot of questions. I’ve got to speak to your mother. Is she in?’

  ‘Oh yes.’ Lilah flipped a hand towards the house. ‘She’s always in these days, playing the tragedy queen act to the hilt. And never lifting a finger to help us out here.’

  Den ran a tongue over the front of his teeth, too professional to make any response to Lilah’s bitterness. He raised his gaze to the sky, giving her time to change the subject. Watching him, she could read his thoughts as if they were written in highlighter on his brow.

  ‘You can’t blame me for being cross,’ she complained. ‘We’re expected to just get on with our lives, not knowing anything, whether there’s some crazy killer loose out there – or whether you’re going to turn up at five o’clock some morning and drag one of us away under arrest. It’s not a good way to live, believe me.’

  He put out a hand, and rested it on her shoulder. The effect was extraordinarily soothing. She took a small step towards him, yearning to rest her head against his chest, against the smooth-knit, navy-blue jumper. But she couldn’t do that. If she gave in now, letting weakness flow through her, she might never again find the strength to keep going.

  ‘Let me ask you straight,’ he said, letting the hand fall. ‘Do you believe your father was killed deliberately?’

  She looked up at him, running the picture past her inner eye, yet again. Guy in the slurry, on a clear May morning that was just like any other day. Guy didn’t have accidents. Guy would never even allow the thought of suicide into his mind.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she dithered wretchedly. ‘Every time I think about it I end up believing he must have been – but I can’t bear to imagine who might have done it.’

  ‘There were certainly plenty of people who disliked him,’ Den said with a little frown. ‘Except maybe your mum’s friend, Mrs Westerby. She doesn’t seem to have made much effort to win friends.’

  ‘He was impatient with people,’ she agreed. ‘But that was just because he had strong opinions. He was brave enough to be honest. He was really …’ Her tense voice broke, and she felt her face crumple. ‘He was a great father to me. I can’t bear to think of never seeing him again.’

  With a great effort she swallowed the tears and tilted up her chin. Den rested his hand once again on her shoulder, saying nothing, watching her swing from acting like a lost little girl to accepting heavy responsibilities, taking control of herself. His respect for her grew considerably as he observed the transformation.

  ‘Go and talk to Mum,’ she dismissed him. ‘I’ve got too much to do.’

  Obediently, he walked towards the house.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Amos had never been in hospital before, not even when he got his hand caught in the turnip-chopper and lost the tops of two fingers. Isaac had bound it up with dock leaves and then salved it with his own glycerine-based ointment, and it had healed up perfectly. The other time, when he trod on a four-inch nail, hadn’t been so easy, but it had never occurred to them to consult a doctor.

  Now, here he was with young girls fussing over him, bringing him plates of inedible, unfamiliar food, sticking glass tubes under his tongue, forcing pills into him three times a day. It was, at least in the first few days, worse than any nightmare. The bed was stiff and hard, the sheets so white they made his head ache, and no blankets to speak of. Of course, it was smotheringly hot in the ward, and blankets would have made it worse, but it felt all wrong to be lying in a bed with no proper weight to it. And he badly missed having the cats for company.

  He and Isaac had got themselves a television six or seven years ago, and he was quite familiar with the world of a hospital through programmes like Casualty. He knew many of the technical terms, and how the doctors were always tired and the nurses always fresh and kind. But he had discovered that the reality was utterly different. He hadn’t known that they would bring him a funny-shaped bottle to piss into. He hadn’t known about the long, empty hours in the afternoon when you couldn’t sleep, and nothing happened, and all you could do was lie there and think. On the telly, everything was constant rush and bustle and panic bells ringing. Here, everyone was old and confused and endlessly complaining.

  One night he had been woken by something grabbing his wrist. Terrified, he tried to see what it was, but there was apparently nothing there. Only when the grip tightened did he look down on the floor to find an old lady sitting there, her nightie obscenely rucked up around her waist, tugging mindlessly at him. When their eyes met, she croaked, ‘Take me home, Daddy. Please take me home.’ Horror gripped him, and he cried out, a long peal of anguish and despair, which brought two night nurses rushing to the bedside to bundle the poor old creature away.

  The police came to speak with him, nearly every day. They asked him if he remembered what had happened in the house that morning. He knew they were being careful about Isaac, not sure whether Amos knew his brother was dead. He did know, of course he did, but it was too difficult to speak of it. He mumbled at his questioners, disconnected words, which didn’t make any sense even to him. It was much easier not to talk. When the nurse asked him if he’d prefer chicken or pork for his dinner, he made no response. What did it matter? When the food came, it was impossible to determine which it was, anyway.

  He lay there, on those long afternoons, with his head throbbing and the brightness of everything too much to bear, and let his thoughts drift where they would. And they almost always drifted to Miranda Beardon. He remembered, as clear and vivid as a memory can be, the day the family first came to Redstone. The lithe young woman, with brown arms and a lovely head of hair, had come running up the field to introduce herself to him and Isaac. Her two little children followed her, laughing and rolling in the long grass, like some advertisement for butter or toilet tissue. Isaac, the younger brother, had been red-faced and shy with her, but Amos had seen a vision, and was not going to spoil it with oafish behaviour. He had drawn himself up, squared his shoulders, and asked her in. The house hadn’t been such a mess then, with Mother not long dead and money coming in from contracting work.

  She had spoken quickly, breathlessly, about having no idea how to be a farmer’s wife, but facing the challenge eagerly. The cows were to be Jerseys, which had such sweet faces, and seemed small and docile enough, from what she’d seen. Which wasn’t much. She had chattered on for fifteen minutes, not letting him get many words of his own in. Then she’d gone back down to the big farmhouse and the older husband – older than Isaac, but not quite so old as Amos, by the looks of him. The husband who moved like a bull, always sure of himself, always quick to anger, shouting at that wretched Sam and, as the years went by, his own boy child, too.

  Amos could watch a good deal of what happened at Redstone, either from his bedroom window or from the corner of his sole remaining field. It was not so far distant, and his eyesight was good. As Guy purchased their land, each time with absolute politeness and prompt payment, the brothers felt diminished. They put the money in the bank, and bought a few things –
the television, a better car, and a new tractor – but the money never seemed to go down. ‘Why are we doing it?’ Isaac demanded, the last time. ‘We’ve got enough money already.’

  Amos had shrugged. ‘’Tain’t easy to gainsay that Beardon. And he’ll make a better job of it than us’ll do. Money’ll be there for us, when it’s needed.’ The truth was, he’d lost the will to keep on farming, trying to grapple with the constant stream of documents and regulations that came in the post. Applications for this and that; returns to tell them what animals you had, and how old they were; people trying to sell you things. It was all rubbish, but rubbish you daren’t throw away. The brothers would struggle to read it all, then shake their heads and carefully stack the papers up on their mother’s old bureau, until the pile was halfway to the ceiling.

  Amos’s adoration of Miranda had taken deep root, and over the years it blossomed prodigiously. The sight of her would lighten his day and colour his dreams at night. If it hadn’t been for her husband, he’d have found ways of speaking to her, wooing her with gifts, offering her anything at all. He knew how delightful a woman’s body could be, had more experience in that department than most people suspected. He was haunted constantly by imaginings of himself and Miranda in lustful embrace, but he never even came close to doing anything about it. Even when he saw that Sam slipping into the house when the husband was away, and Miranda there all alone, and coming out half an hour later, hitching at himself in that obvious way, Amos knew he could never aspire to a similar privilege. It gave him cause to detest Sam, but it only enhanced Miranda in his opinion. A goddess such as she was clearly needed homage of that sort. More fool Guy, for leaving her unguarded.

  If she’d been his, he’d have built a ten-foot fence around her, and fed her on cream and peaches. He’d have wound wild flowers into her hair and knelt nightly at her feet. Amos dreamt, quite contentedly, of his alternative existence as a sultan with a single concubine.

  Before the Beardons arrived, the Grimsdales had been much the same as other farming families round about. The brothers scarcely ever talked of those times, now. They made little effort to pinpoint where it all began to go wrong, where they’d fallen off the bus that had taken everyone else headlong into prosperity. Once in a while, Amos would blame Isaac for their plight. He would grumble, in a long monotonous tirade, ‘I don’t see how I’m meant to do anything, with you a drag on me, the way you are. Never wanting to do anything, scared of your own shadow. Look at you. Can’t even give the place a good clean, or wash your sheets. And that cat – it’s expecting again, when I told you to keep it in. We’re overrun with the bloody things as it is.’ And on he would go, obsessively listing every grievance, pausing only to draw breath and fix Isaac with a resentful stare, knowing there would be no response.

  Isaac would grin crookedly, and cock his head almost to his shoulder, in the way he had of taking criticism. Almost always there’d be a cat on his lap, or squirming round his legs. The cats loved Isaac, and he loved them, and for all anyone could tell, that was enough for him. That and his potions, mixed from flowers and leaves; docks and buttercups, comfrey and feverfew all gleaned from Mother, who’d known everything about plants that there was to know.

  ‘Time for tea, Mr Grimsdale,’ came a chirpy voice, followed by a crashing clatter of metal and china, heralding the tea trolley. Having roused him, the woman went away, and there was a long, frustrating interval while cups were slowly handed round to all the other beds but his, or so it seemed. When the drink finally arrived, it was weak and tepid, and tasted like nothing he had ever called tea.

  Sometimes, after tea, the patients would be ousted from their beds and sent to the day room to watch television for an hour. Amos had been excused from this so far, after a glance at his chart hanging at the end of the bed. At first, when he moved, his head had throbbed and seemed to swell, and he would moan and lie back with closed eyes. This seemed to make the nurses nervous, which was a convenient discovery. Now, when his head was feeling a lot better, he sustained the moaning act, as a way of gaining some peace.

  He had noticed how carefully he was treated, by comparing himself with the other patients. Little groups of nurses talked about him, at their ‘station’ as they called it, shooting glances at him and widening their eyes. The police would come at odd times when there were no other visitors, and sit beside him, hot and intimidating in their dark uniforms. Amos gave them no help for a week, but then he grew tired of the whole business and began, all of a sudden, to speak lucidly.

  ‘Young thug,’ he spat, working his mouth with rage, ‘came in the night, in the dark.’ The policeman almost fell off his chair with excitement, and fished in his pocket for a pencil.

  ‘Did you see him? Can you give us a description?’

  Amos let his head sink into the pillow, experimenting with his stiff face, wondering whether he’d ever be able to frown effectively again. ‘I saw ’un,’ he said. ‘Dark eyes, he had. Thin.’

  ‘And he was young, you say? How young?’

  ‘I’d say around thirty, or less. Course, I couldn’t see his face.’

  The policeman lowered his pencil and stared bleakly at Amos. ‘Pardon?’ he said.

  ‘No, he had one of those woolly things over his head. Just a gap for his eyes. ’Cept he’d pushed it back, like it was too hot. Sweating, he was. Hair stuck to his head.’

  ‘What colour hair was it?’

  ‘Dark, I said. Like his eyes. Savage look he had.’

  The policeman scribbled. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’

  ‘I was asleep, and something waked me. Some noise. I put my lamp on, by the bed, and called out to Isaac. He has nightmares once in a while. I thought maybe …’ The breath suddenly caught in his throat, as he remembered that Isaac would have no more nightmares. Grief collected somewhere behind his nose, stinging and cruel. He struggled to sit up, and the policeman tried feebly to assist him.

  ‘Then he came into my room holding the crowbar high. I knew he was going to hit me. He came right at me, mad-looking. His shadow was big behind him, on the wall.’ Amos shuddered. He would dream of that shadow, he knew. ‘I rolled off the bed, but he came after me, swinging the bar at me. It got me, and knocked me out. When I woke up, he’d gone and it was light outside. I went to find Isaac—’

  ‘Yes, we know the rest. Had you ever seen this man before? I mean, despite the mask, did you recognise him?’

  Amos shook his head, wincing slightly. ‘Looked like a gypsy. Rough clothes.’

  ‘Did you notice his hands?’

  Amos considered for a long time. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Can’t say I did.’

  ‘Would you know him again?’

  ‘I might, sir. My light was right on his eyes. You don’t forget the look of a man who’s wanting to kill you for no reason. We had nothing to steal. And Isaac – poor harmless old chap like him. Where’s the sense?’

  The policeman had no answers. ‘Thank you very much indeed, Mr Grimsdale. Now that you’re able to remember, we’re in a much better position to proceed. This description, as far as it goes, will be circulated, to begin with. Now you just rest, and leave it to us.’

  Amos lay back and watched the man walk away. He felt a faint regret at having broken his silence. It made the whole business seem trivial, ordinary. A masked madman had come into the house, swinging his crowbar, and casually murdered poor Isaac, who’d never done anyone the slightest harm. Nobody but Amos would care. Where was Isaac now? he wondered for the first time. Had they gone ahead and buried him, with a handful of villagers as witnesses? Or was he in some cold metal drawer somewhere, waiting until Amos was well enough to be there, and pay for it? And what about the cats? Was anybody feeding them?

  Questions flew around his head, like the troubles from Pandora’s box, biting at him and making him feel sick. He held a hand to his damaged head, the flesh pulpy beneath his fingers, scabs coming loose on his cheek. He knew he couldn’t stay in hospital any longer. The time had come to confro
nt what had happened, and go home to find a way of resuming his life. And to pursue the evil swine whose murderous eyes bored into his mind every moment of the day.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Den drove away, taking two floppy disks with him, containing copies of Guy’s few computer files, and a few more pages of notes, mostly relating to his interview with Miranda. Lilah hung about in the office, savouring the sense of Guy in the one room where his orderly streak had manifested itself. Shelves of farm requisites lined the walls, dusty but methodical. If an animal got into trouble, or a machine broke down, it was essential to be able to find the right medication or spark plug quickly. Guy had not been a man to waste time or endure frustration.

  Before she could decide whether the room might hold any important revelations as yet overlooked by the police, she glanced through the window. She must have subconsciously seen movement from the corner of her eye, because a man was walking down the drive to the gate. A man with a spring in his step, and a graceful Irish setter running ahead of him. Only Jonathan Mabberley would have such a dog. A dog only marginally susceptible to discipline, unable to resist running after sheep until they dropped, and utterly useless for any of the normal work a farm dog might be expected to undertake. But she was gorgeous; she adored the entire human race and would never dream of inflicting deliberate hurt on anything.

  With a sense of something close to relief, Lilah went out to meet him. Roxanne, the setter, flung herself at the girl, her front paws hooking expertly onto Lilah’s forearms, her smiling jaws drooling against her human friend’s chest. The paws were muddy, the jaws a little disconcerting, but Lilah wasn’t worried. ‘Hello, you beauty,’ she crooned. ‘You bad, beautiful dog. Hello, Jonathan.’

  ‘How are you?’ he asked, and it was clear he really wanted to know. ‘Get down, Roxy. Behave yourself.’ The dog took no notice.

  ‘Not so bad,’ Lilah smiled, feeling the crookedness of her mouth. How quickly a person could forget how to smile. ‘About what you’d expect, I suppose.’