Scared to Live bcadf-7

by Stephen Booth

  Fry found herself staring at a mahogany barometer on the dining-room wall. She’d never understood those things. If the mercury was up or down, what did it mean? She preferred those weather houses, or whatever the things were called, with two little Jack and Jill figures. At least it was always clear what they were telling you. Sun or rain, and no ambiguity.

  ‘Didn’t you say you were in Neighbourhood Watch?’

  ‘We keep an eye on the security of property, we don’t spy on our neighbours.’

  Fry could see a woman doing something in the garden. ‘Is that your wife? Could I ask her?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Sliding doors stood open to the garden, because it was still warm enough for that, even in late October. At least it was preferable to the Lowthers’ overheated conservatory.

  April Ridgeway was wearing the cashmere, with a waxed body warmer and gardening gloves. When asked, she gave a similar story to her husband’s. She had never spoken to the occupant of Bain House. There might have been some talk about Miss Shepherd in the village, but she made a point of not listening to gossip.

  ‘Have long have you lived in Foxlow?’

  ‘Nine months.’

  ‘So Miss Shepherd was already living at Bain House when you moved in.’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You’re interested in wildlife, Mrs Ridgeway?’ asked Fry, watching her tighten some wire netting on a bird table.

  ‘Very much so. We both are, aren’t we, Martin?’

  ‘It’s one of the reasons we came to live here, in the national park,’ agreed her husband. He stood back from the bird table and inspected his wife’s handiwork.

  ‘That netting is to stop the grey squirrels,’ he said.

  Fry frowned, struggling to understand why wildlife enthusiasts would put food out in their garden and then try to stop wild animals eating it. But during her time in Derbyshire, she’d learned that there were things about the country she would never understand.

  ‘Our only regret was that we couldn’t go somewhere that still has red squirrels. We’re members of a conservation society that supports work to protect them. Reds have been wiped out in Derbyshire, you know. In fact, the whole of the Midlands.’

  Fry didn’t know, and didn’t really care. Perhaps she should have sent Ben Cooper here and taken the neighbours on the other side of Bain House instead.

  ‘You know, it was once possible for a red squirrel to cross from one side of Britain to the other without touching the ground,’ said Ridgeway, taking advantage of her silence. ‘That was when we had the true wild wood, the ancient pine forests that had grown here since the Ice Age. But those trees died, or were cut down. And then the grey squirrels came.’

  ‘If you have an interest in wildlife, I wonder if you’ve been aware of anybody lamping in this area?’ asked Fry.

  ‘Lamping?’

  ‘You know what that is, sir?’

  ‘Oh, we know what that is, all right. If we knew about anything like that going on around here, we’d report it straightaway. But what has that got to do with this suspicious death you’re investigating? Was the lady killed by poachers?’

  ‘I’m afraid we just don’t know.’

  He took her ignorance as confirmation of his own fears. ‘That’s another problem our native wildlife is facing, you know. Animals are the first victims when society starts to fall apart. Look at all those stories of illegal immigrants stealing swans and butchering sheep in the fields.’

  ‘You read the Daily Mail, then?’ said Fry impatiently.

  ‘You’re not from this area yourself, by the sound of your accent.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘A city person? Birmingham, at a guess?’

  ‘Very close.’

  ‘Ah, I can understand why you came here, then. Seeking to get back to the real England, like we did.’

  ‘No, not at all.’

  ‘I know it’s not politically correct to say it, but many of your colleagues agree with our views.’

  ‘Not me.’

  Ridgeway smiled and gestured at the bird table. ‘We sometimes think of grey squirrels as the immigrants of the animal world. They’re nothing but vermin, after all — rats with furry tails.’

  Fry felt the anger rising, but she’d promised herself she was going to be more tolerant of people she had to deal with. Even those who infuriated her as much as Martin Ridgeway.

  She consulted her notebook, partly to cover her irritation, and partly to remind herself of the questions she would otherwise fail to ask.

  ‘Have either of you noticed a blue Vauxhall Astra in the village recently? No? A vehicle of any kind acting suspiciously?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Any vehicles at all visiting Bain House?’

  ‘We can’t see the entrance to Bain House from here, so we wouldn’t know.’

  ‘And did you hear anything unusual on Saturday night, or in the early hours of Sunday morning?’

  ‘Our double glazing is very good. We don’t hear much noise at night.’

  ‘One final question, sir — do you possess a firearm of any description?’

  Ridgeway hesitated. ‘I do have an air rifle.’

  ‘Oh? What power?’

  ‘No more than twelve foot pounds, so I don’t need a licence for it. I’m a law-abiding citizen, you see.’

  ‘What do you use an air rifle for? No, don’t tell me — let me guess. You use it for shooting squirrels.’

  ‘Also crows, rooks and magpies, which steal the eggs of song birds. They’re all classed as pests, so it’s lawful to shoot them on private property.’

  ‘I can understand that. But what’s the problem with squirrels?’

  ‘The invasion of grey squirrels has driven our native reds into remote sanctuaries, protected forests in Wales or Scotland. Now all they can do is cling on in dwindling numbers, powerless against an alien species.’ Ridgeway took a step towards her and lowered his voice. ‘Our kind of people are just like those red squirrels. We’re being driven out by the vermin.’

  ‘I think I’m finished here,’ said Fry.

  As she was shown out, she wondered why the Ridgeways had bothered joining Neighbourhood Watch if they knew nothing about their neighbours and couldn’t even see the adjoining properties. But she supposed there was only one reason, from their point of view — they thought it would provide protection for themselves.

  In the dining room, Martin Ridgeway tapped the barometer, as if out of habit. It appeared to be some kind of ritual before he opened the door of his barn conversion.

  Fry looked over his shoulder. One hand pointed at ‘Stormy’ and the other at ‘Change’.

  ‘Is that good or bad?’ she said.

  Ridgeway scowled. ‘The same as bloody usual.’

  Rose Shepherd’s other neighbours were called Birtland. Cooper found their address to be a bungalow, with a long curving drive leading off Pinfold Lane. The property was only a few decades old, but built after the introduction of national park planning regulations. There were no red brick terraces and plaster porticos here, no incongruities like those allowed in some of the forties and fifties developments. This place was stone clad and mullioned, designed to blend in with its surroundings.

  Even so, Cooper thought he would never get used to some of these new properties. They gave the impression that someone had sliced off a piece of landscape with a bulldozer and flattened an area big enough to plonk down a bungalow. There seemed to be no regard for the natural contours of the land.

  ‘Mrs Birtland?’

  ‘Yes?’ The grey-haired woman who answered his knock peered cautiously past a security chain.

  He showed his ID. ‘DC Cooper, Edendale CID.’

  ‘Is it about the murder?’

  ‘Oh, I see someone’s been talking. Was it the officer who called earlier?’

  ‘No, but word gets around.’

  Cooper smiled. He was pleased to hear that, for once. ‘May I come in? You can check m
y ID, if you want.’

  ‘No, that’s all right.’

  She took the chain off and let him into the bungalow.

  ‘Edward and Frances, is that right?’

  ‘I’m Frances, Edward is my husband.’

  ‘And is Mr Birtland in?’

  ‘Yes, Ted’s in the back. Would you like a cup of tea, Mr Cooper?’

  ‘No, thank you, Mrs Birtland. I won’t be keeping you long.’

  Being called ‘Mr Cooper’ made him smile even more. That really was a rarity in this job.

  ‘Ted,’ called Mrs Birtland, ‘we’ve got a visitor.’

  Edward Birtland didn’t get up when Cooper entered. He was seated in a well-used armchair by a random stone fireplace, a fragile man of about seventy. He held out a hand politely, and Cooper couldn’t do anything else but shake it. The grip of Mr Birtland’s fingers hardly registered.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘how did you hear someone had been killed?’

  ‘The murder?’

  ‘Well …’

  Frances Birtland chuckled. ‘It was Bernie. Our postman knows everybody.’

  ‘Of course he does.’

  ‘You brought him back to Foxlow when he’d nearly finished his round. He stopped and told a few people about it on the way home.’

  ‘I understand how Bernie Wilding knows everybody. The question I’ve come to ask you is how well you knew Rose Shepherd.’

  ‘We didn’t know her at all. She hadn’t been in the village long.’

  ‘About ten months,’ said Cooper. But it wasn’t the first time he’d heard that sort of period dismissed as if it was yesterday. Your family had to have lived in some of these villages for generations before you belonged.

  ‘Are you Foxlow people yourselves?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Birtland. ‘We’ve lived here all our lives. We had a house on the High Street when we were married. We bought this little bit of land when Ted retired, and had the bungalow built. It took all the money we’d ever have — though we didn’t know it at the time.’

  Cooper glanced at Mr Birtland, who smiled sadly and patted his wife’s hand.

  ‘I thought I had a good pension put away,’ he said, ‘with the company I worked for. But it didn’t turn out the way we planned. Once we’d paid for the bungalow, suddenly there was nothing left. So we just have our old age pensions to live on.’

  ‘The only way we could live any better is by selling the bungalow,’ said his wife.

  ‘And moving away from Foxlow, I suppose?’

  She nodded. ‘And we could never do that.’

  ‘Can you think of anyone in the village who would have known Miss Shepherd better?’

  Mrs Birtland shook her head. ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Have you tried the Ridgeways on the other side?’ said her husband. ‘They live in the barn conversion. Well, I say barn conversion — that was Church Farm until a few years ago. My grandfather was a cowman there. He worked for the Beeley family all his life. It’s gone now, and so have the Beeleys.’

  ‘One of my colleagues is talking to Mr and Mrs Ridgeway. Do you think they might have known Miss Shepherd well, then?’

  ‘We couldn’t say.’

  ‘Don’t you talk to the Ridgeways either?’

  The Birtlands glanced at each other, exchanging some thought that they decided not to share with their visitor.

  ‘They moved into the village about the same time as Miss Shepherd,’ said Birtland finally. ‘So I suppose we tended to associate them together in our own minds. We didn’t know where any of them came from. Being located where we are, at this end of Pinfold Lane, we’ve started to feel as though we’ve been cut off from the rest of the village by incomers.’

  ‘I see.’

  Birtland looked at him expectantly. ‘You haven’t asked us yet whether we heard anything,’ he said.

  ‘It was the next question, sir.’

  ‘Ah, good. Well, we’ve been thinking about it since we heard that Miss Shepherd had been killed. Was she shot?’

  Cooper leaned forward. ‘Did you hear shots on Saturday night?’

  ‘Well, that answers my question,’ said Birtland with a chuckle. ‘We think maybe we did.’

  ‘What time would that have been?’

  Birtland reached out to pat his wife’s hand again. ‘We disagree on that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ted thinks it was about two o’clock in the morning, but I think it was more like three,’ she said. ‘I don’t sleep too well sometimes, and I’m often starting to come awake by then.’

  ‘But you didn’t look at the clock to make sure?’

  ‘No, we didn’t. We didn’t take much notice, you see. We often hear people shooting around here. We always have, all our lives. As long as the shooting isn’t too near our house, we don’t bother. I don’t think Ted even woke up. If he did hear the shooting, he must have gone straight back to sleep, that’s all I can say.’

  Birtland laughed. ‘I don’t suppose that’s much use to you.’

  ‘Could you say how many shots you heard?’ asked Cooper, afraid to go back to the DCI with anything so vague.

  ‘Two or three,’ said Mrs Birtland.

  ‘Or four,’ said her husband.

  Cooper sighed. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘We would have come forward anyway when we heard somebody had been killed, you know. But we were told you’d be calling today.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  Mrs Birtland accompanied Cooper to his car. ‘I’m sorry if we don’t appear very hospitable,’ she said.

  ‘Don’t worry. But if you do happen to remember anything more about Miss Shepherd, or about any visitors she had — ’

  ‘Yes, of course, we’ll let you know.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  Frances Birtland looked up the street towards the village. ‘You know, we always thought we’d be comfortably off when we got old,’ she said. ‘But look at us now. There are young kids around here who get more pocket money to spend than we get in pension. The world’s gone crazy, don’t you think? And it was just our luck to be at the wrong end of our lives when it happened.’

  Cooper knew what Fry would have said if she’d been at the Birtlands’ with him. ‘So much for neighbourliness.What happened to that famous communityspirit you’re always telling me about, Ben?’

  When he picked her up, Fry was about a hundred yards further down the road from the Ridgeways’ barn conversion, on the corner of the High Street. She seemed to be looking at the square tower of the church rising above yew trees in the graveyard, and at a cottage next to it, with honeysuckle hanging from the roof of the porch.

  ‘Any luck?’ he said when she got into the car.

  ‘They didn’t hear anything. Their double glazing is too good. You?’

  ‘The Birtlands might have noticed the shots. But they’ve been here all their lives, and they’re used to hearing people shooting rabbits.’

  They pulled in through the gates of Bain House and parked behind a dog handler’s van.

  ‘By the way, the Ridgeways think Rose Shepherd was a foreigner,’ said Fry.

  ‘That’s funny. The Birtlands think the Ridgeways are foreigners.’

  Fry snorted. ‘They’re from Luton.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Oh, I see. So the Ridgeways are the awful incomers. What happened to that famous — ’

  ‘I know, I know.’

  ‘Also, Mr Ridgeway kept banging on about grey squirrels. He seems to have a bit of an obsession with them.’

  ‘They’re a big problem,’ said Cooper. ‘The government ought to do something to eradicate them.’

  Fry just groaned. And Cooper wondered what he’d said wrong this time.

  8

  Moira Lowther gave her son another hug. ‘Take care, John. Give us a call if you need to talk. You know we’re here, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all right.’

  She looked suddenly anxious and tried to hold him back. ‘And y
ou’re taking — You’re doing everything you should, dear?’

  ‘It’s fine. Everything’s under control.’

  He walked back down the path, no longer seeming to care whether he stepped on the tortoises, or whether the angel was close enough to speak to. His green Hyundai stood at the kerb, just out of sight below the wall.

  Moira watched him until he vanished from view, and listened for his car driving away. Then she turned back to her husband. ‘Who was that on the phone?’

  ‘Just Tony.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You know, he used to work for the company. He went off a few months ago to set up on his own account.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I remember. He was the one I didn’t like.’

  Lowther laughed. ‘You and your likes and dislikes. Tony was always loyal to the company. Unlike some of these others, deserting a sinking ship.’

  ‘Is it that bad, Henry?’

  ‘Oh, we’ll survive.’

  ‘I don’t want to have to think about it right now.’

  ‘None of us do.’

  She gazed down the road, though the Hyundai was long since gone.

  ‘Do you think John will be all right?’ she said.

  ‘We’d better keep an eye on him. He’s very upset.’ Lowther put an arm round his wife. ‘And how are you coping?’

  The question seemed to start her tears all over again, and tears turned to deep, racking sobs. It was a few moments before she could get her breath back.

  ‘How did it happen?’ she said. ‘How on earth did it happen?’

  ‘Hell, I don’t know.’

  Mrs Lowther pulled out a tissue to dry her eyes. They both stood in their garden in silence for a while, listening to the trickle of water, the chatter of a blackbird. No one watching them could have told what they were thinking, or whether the Lowthers were even thinking the same thoughts.

  ‘Well, we have to make sure we look after the living now, don’t we?’ said Moira. ‘That’s the most important thing.’

  Henry Lowther patted her shoulder. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted,’ he said.

  ‘Between two and four a. m.?’ said Hitchens when Cooper and Fry returned to Bain House. ‘Is that the best they could do?’