A Death to Record

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Messing about with the muck spreader?’

  ‘That was before. He only had the afternoon off. I haven’t seen him since just after two.’

  ‘But where were you?’

  Ted worked his shoulders uneasily. ‘Here and there. Cutting silage, filling up the hopper with cake. Mostly just messing about in the Dutch barn. It was cold and my hip was paining me.’ He spoke with a trace of self-pity; he’d made no secret of his tendency to work at half-speed these days, especially in the winter months.

  ‘So you just say you were away in the fields somewhere, you hear me? Did Gordon see you this afternoon?’

  Ted shook his head. ‘Doubt it. As far as I could tell, he went straight from the house to the office after dinner, and got talking with the recorder until they started milking.’

  ‘As far as ’ee could tell?’

  He frowned painfully. ‘You know how ’tis up there; all those buildings, like a maze. You could have five people working there and they’d never see each other. If someone wanted to creep round unseen, it’d be easy. Gordon could have gone out of his back door, past the calf-pens, through the shippon and into the gathering yard without me or the recorder seeing him. The recorder always parks right outside the parlour, where you can’t see anything that’s going on. Even the old granny very likely wouldn’t have caught sight of Gordon or Sean from her window, if they stayed in the far corner of the yard.’

  Jilly felt her confidence ebbing. Who could trust the police to notice the obvious? If they discovered that Ted had been dodging in and out of the buildings and around the yard all afternoon, with nobody to vouch for what he’d been doing, things might get very unpleasant. ‘Then you’ve got to say you were hedging or ditching or something, in one of the top fields – all afternoon,’ she decreed.

  He pulled away from her. ‘Gordon did tell me I should have a look at the ditch along Top Linhay. If I said that’s where I’d been, he’d never doubt it.’

  She nodded her satisfaction, before changing tack. ‘And what about Eliot?’

  Ted sank against the sofa cushions behind him. ‘Why bring Eliot into it? He doesn’t come to Dunsworthy any more.’

  ‘Because someone, sooner or later, is sure to tell the police that Sean knew Eliot. Anything that happens to Sean is something to do with Eliot, you know that.’

  Ted’s eyes closed again. ‘Then we’d best hope Eliot was at work all day,’ he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Dunsworthy farmyard at six next morning was an all-female arena. Lilah was on the tractor, scraping mucky straw from the cows’ sleeping quarters, while the animals milled about in the gathering yard. Strands of police tape had been strung across a section of the yard, with the intention of safeguarding a spot where the previous evening’s searches had found blood on the ground. The forensics team had stayed until almost midnight, with searchlights and photographers. It hadn’t taken them more than an hour or so to find a likely murder weapon in the shape of a three-pronged garden fork, thrown down onto a pile of straw in a different barn from the one containing Sean’s body. They had also found – with considerable good fortune – enough blood outside to identify the site of the actual attack.

  By the time they left, a scenario had emerged that seemed to fit with their findings. Sean had been attacked with a fork in the gathering yard. This yard was bordered on two sides by the barn in which the body had been found and the milking parlour. Over a hundred cows had been through it subsequent to the attack on Sean, and it was liberally strewn with manure and mud. Nonetheless, a distinct trail of blood had been detected, leading from a featureless point in the yard to the door of the barn. The victim had dragged himself – or been dragged – the twelve yards of the trail, entered the barn and died there. The tape had been strung across that corner as a matter of routine, but the team had gathered just about all the samples and pictures they needed. Little more could be added to the accumulating hypothesis of what had happened until the pathologist made his report.

  Lilah’s mind had been in turmoil ever since Claudia had phoned her at eight-thirty the previous evening, telling her what had happened. It had taken a long time to absorb the facts and their implications. Bewilderment, panic and rage all flooded through her. ‘How on earth could they think it was Gordon?’ she demanded finally.

  Claudia had sounded distant. ‘Because he was on the spot, I suppose.’

  ‘Have you arranged for a solicitor to be with him when he’s questioned?’

  ‘We haven’t really got anybody. Don’t they provide someone, if you ask?’

  Lilah snorted. ‘Only if they’re forced to. We should find somebody who’ll do a good job, not some bored junior from a rota.’

  ‘It’s a bit late …’

  Lilah had another thought. ‘Did they find a weapon? Do they know what was used?’

  ‘I don’t know. They wouldn’t tell me, would they? They seemed interested in Gordon’s gun. They’re still out there now, with horrible bright lights, crawling all over the yard beside the parlour. It’s all very disconcerting, like something you see on telly. I just hope you can manage the morning milking for us? It’s rather a lot to ask, I know. But at least you won’t be all on your own – the recorder’s going to be there, Gordon says.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The milk recorder. You know – that Watson woman. She was here all afternoon.’

  ‘Was she? Well, that’ll be fun for both of us.’ Lilah tried to swallow the growing sense of dread, fending it off with flippancy. ‘You can stop worrying about the cows, anyway,’ she added. ‘I’ll be there.’

  She wanted to finish the call and close her ears to any more of the dreadful story. But she knew she couldn’t. ‘Gordon didn’t do it, did he?’ she said softly. ‘I mean – it surely must have been somebody else.’

  ‘He was on the spot,’ Claudia repeated. ‘It isn’t looking very good, if you think about it. Basically, it must come down to him or Ted.’

  ‘But—’ Lilah wanted to scream a denial. ‘We can’t let it be him,’ she said desperately.

  ‘We won’t if we can help it,’ Claudia assured her gently.

  Two hours later, just as Lilah was going to bed, Claudia phoned again. ‘One more thing,’ she said in a tone that was unmistakably conspiratorial. ‘Well, two, actually. The first is – I found a solicitor. Somebody Mary used to know. He says he’ll sit with Gordon while they question him.’

  ‘Good,’ said Lilah listlessly. ‘What’s the second thing?’

  ‘Well – they seem to be putting a lot of very flimsy-looking tape across one corner of the yard. I assume they’ve found something they think is evidence there. It really does look very flimsy. You’ll see what I mean in the morning.’

  Lilah felt a surge of affection for the woman. ‘I’m sure I will,’ she said, on a short laugh.

  Deirdre Watson’s headlights were visible before she turned off the road, and Lilah followed her progress from the tractor seat. Having made a reasonable job of cleaning out the cowshed, she should have switched off the tractor and got started on preparing the milking parlour for the first cows. Instead, she waited another minute, until the recorder’s car was in the yard. Then, as Deirdre got out of the vehicle, Lilah revved the tractor and reversed it clumsily into the nearest strand of police tape. One or two cows standing close by trotted rapidly out of her way. The tape snapped and the tractor shot forward again, turning in an arc towards the clustered animals.

  As Lilah had hoped, Deirdre appeared at the corner of the barn, peering through the metal-pole fence to see what was going on. It was impossible to speak over the noise of the tractor, but Lilah ventured a loud shout at the cows, designed to sound as if she wanted them to scatter out of her way. Then she brought the vehicle to a sudden shuddering halt, sending it skidding on a slippery patch of muck.

  Bewildered cows did their best to dodge her, several of them crossing the line recently marked out by the now-broken tape. Lilah switched off the engine and jum
ped down from her seat, one hand to her mouth. ‘Gosh! What have I done?’ she cried in a high-pitched voice. ‘That tractor’s got a mind of its own. Lucky I didn’t hit one of the cows, just then.’ There was a moment of deep silence, before a cow coughed, and the faint bawl of a calf came from somewhere.

  Deirdre stared at her. ‘Are you the relief milker?’ she asked.

  ‘Sort of. I’m Lilah Beardon, Gordon’s girlfriend. You’re Mrs Watson, aren’t you?’

  ‘Deirdre – yes.’

  ‘Well, look, you’ll have to be my witness that this was all a stupid accident. The police are going to go bananas at me when they see what I’ve done. Cows trampling all over their evidence. Mind you, that tape was ludicrously flimsy. They’d probably have broken through it anyway. You’d think someone would have told them this was the gathering yard, wouldn’t you?’

  Deirdre gave a forced laugh, still bewildered by what she’d seen. ‘They probably worked it out for themselves. I doubt if you’ve done anything too awful. Not after the cows trampled it all yesterday in any case. Do you think this is where Sean was attacked?’

  ‘Well, they obviously think it’s important. They’d taped off the area to include the barn door. Isn’t that where Sean was found? I’m still very hazy about the details.’

  Deirdre nodded. ‘It’s very strange coming back here again after yesterday. Doesn’t seem a lot of point to it, really. But Gordon insisted.’

  ‘Did he? Did they let you speak to him?’

  ‘Not really. We were both together in the office for a few minutes with the policeman, and he made it clear he wanted the recording to go ahead as normal. Why – do you think they expected us to conspire together somehow?’

  ‘They’re supposed to keep witnesses separate,’ Lilah said. ‘Now, let’s get this show on the road.’

  Deirdre cast her eyes skywards for a second, in a moment of exasperation that Lilah found mildly offensive. ‘That’s what everybody says,’ Deirdre explained. ‘I must have heard it a hundred times, just before milking starts.’

  Lilah couldn’t see why this should be a problem, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘Could you describe the policeman?’ she asked, a few minutes later. She already knew what was coming. It had been one of her first panicky thoughts. But she hadn’t checked it out until now.

  ‘Very tall. A long face, mid-brown hair, blue eyes …’

  ‘I thought so,’ nodded Lilah.

  Working with a woman always unsettled Deirdre. When she started the job, she had asked, ‘Are there many herdswomen these days?’

  ‘Very few,’ her Field Manager had replied. ‘They’ve got more sense.’

  It was a memorable remark, but Deirdre didn’t quite believe it. It had nothing to do with sense – it was something altogether more visceral. Docile in the face of exploitation, dependent and patient, the cows were necessary victims in the dairy industry. Something about this tension, this dubious morality, disturbed women very much more than it did men.

  The demands of the milking and recording always kept conversation to a few brief snatches, much of it concerning the animals surrounding them. Lilah abandoned any attempt to feed them according to their yields, as was the usual routine; Deirdre assured her that none of them was on antibiotics and their milk therefore to be discarded. ‘That’s a relief,’ Lilah said. ‘Have you ever let antibiotic milk into the tank?’

  ‘Once,’ Deirdre admitted. ‘I’m covered by insurance, but I never want it to happen again. You should have seen the herdsman’s face.’

  ‘It wasn’t here?’

  ‘No.’

  Deirdre was noting down the yields directly onto the parlour sheets, risking them getting mucky or wet, to save time. Lilah was surprisingly quick, given that she had never milked these particular cows, nor any at all for over a year. When Deirdre commented, she smirked and said, ‘Like riding a bicycle, I suppose.’

  ‘A lot of them aren’t giving as much as they should,’ Deirdre noted. ‘Must be because you’re strange to them.’

  ‘What exactly happened?’ Lilah finally permitted herself to ask, as the recorder sealed her boxes and started to pack away her equipment. Deirdre told her the story in a tight, unemotional voice.

  ‘Was Gordon terribly upset?’ Lilah demanded abruptly. ‘When he found Sean, I mean.’

  ‘Shocked,’ Deirdre told her judiciously.

  ‘There you are then! He wouldn’t have been so shocked if he’d killed him!’ Something childish and pathetic appealed to Deirdre’s mother instinct. This girl was very young – much too young to get drawn into the mess that was unfolding on Dunsworthy Farm. Her salvation, if it was to exist at all, probably lay in coming from a farm background herself. She’d have that robustness in the face of disaster somewhere inside her, the harsh experience of pain and helplessness and cold and trouble that they all shared, and which marked them out from the rest of mankind. Even policemen, Deirdre realised, though they might not accept the distinction.

  Outside it was very slowly getting lighter. An unfriendly east wind had sprung up since the milking had started and a few hard spatters of icy cold rain were starting to blow in on the gusts. If by nothing else, the two women were united in a desire to get on to more important business. And for then both, the next item on their agenda was an interview with Den Cooper, Detective Sergeant.

  Lilah watched the recorder drive away, standing at the door to the tank room, thoughtfully nibbling at a chapped lower lip. The weather was not conducive to standing for long in the open air, however, and she retreated to the parlour, where the usual quagmire greeted her. She’d have to do at least a token washing-down – cleaning the clusters and scraping muck from the stalls.

  The sliding door into the adjoining barn had been sealed shut with rather more efficiency than the taped-off area outside, and she was curious to see what was inside. The building boasted no windows and she’d already observed that the outer door was similarly barricaded. The blue tape brought with it a stabbing reminder of the events on her own farm, more than three years earlier. She remembered the way the tape made your own home seem alien, and your own daily activities suspicious and open to misinterpretation. She shivered on Gordon’s behalf, and her own. In her mind’s eye, Gordon’s face floated, his full lips forming a teasing half-smile, his eyes slicing through all the normal defences between any two people, so that he could see clearly into her furthest depths. Gordon made her feel known, in every cell of her body. He knew her, what she wanted, what she thought. He knew, and he approved, and he acted on his knowledge.

  Whatever – whoever – was trying to take Gordon away from her now, was in for a great surprise. Because there was no way that Lilah was going to let him go. The merest glimpse of the idea made her feel as if all her skin had been peeled off and a vicious blast of cold air directed onto her naked nerve endings. What did it matter that the wretched Sean O’Farrell had been killed, anyway? He had been a shifty sort of character, always slinking away around a corner of a barn or calf-pen, never stopping for a proper conversation, never looking her in the eye. For all she knew, he deserved to be killed. There was no pang of sympathy in her for the murdered man. Every ounce of Lilah’s sympathy was reserved exclusively for herself and Gordon.

  The word murder felt wrong, as well. Ordinary concepts like birth, work, cold, exhaustion, sickness and death – all slipped askew somehow in the context of a farm. A farm was a closed secret community, out of public sight, struggling with eternal verities against the capricious elements, even in these days of heated tractor cabs and ubiquitous lighting. Life on a farm might not be as cold and dark as it used to be, but it was still just as elemental. Lilah had seen the brutality, the sudden loss of control in the face of pain, frustration and towering rage. If a cow accidentally trapped your hand between a gate and a wall, you either reflexively hit back, punching or kicking the animal, or you grimaced ruefully, cradling the afflicted hand and muttering something that accepted the beast’s ignorance an
d innocence. ‘Didn’t do it on purpose,’ or ‘Can’t expect her to understand.’ Lilah’s father had been in the former group, frightening and distressing her at times with his violence.

  Gordon Hillcock was the other sort. He was not vengeful against unthinking animals, nor enough of a fool to believe that animals hurt you deliberately. Lilah had seen very little of him in a social context, but he appeared to attract goodwill and fraternity from his neighbouring farmers. He raged only against the government, the supermarkets, the Ministry that had failed for thirty years to effectively address the perennial problem of TB in West Country dairy herds – just like any farmer. He worried about his finances, and the idiotic fact that it cost him more to produce milk than the dairies paid him for it.

  Of course Gordon had not killed Sean, she repeated to herself, a protective mantra of common sense and hope, as she ushered the cows back into their shed, promising them that Ted Speedwell would be along soon with their breakfast. Or if he had, another little voice persisted, then it would have been accidental, or self-defence. In any case, the police were never going to be able to prove anything. They were never going to find evidence sufficient to prosecute him amongst the muck and confusion of Dunsworthy. On this first day, that was all she cared about: that nobody was going to take Gordon away from her. Whether or not he had killed Sean O’Farrell was scarcely relevant to her, this morning. She wasn’t ever going to ask him; she wasn’t even going to think about it. Anything Gordon did was okay with her. She loved him, didn’t she? And love was all you needed.

  Den was attending the post-mortem on Sean O’Farrell, which started at eight-thirty that morning. The pathologist dictated his findings as he went on, noticing, as always, details that should have been obvious but weren’t, to a less skilled eye. ‘Slightly built adult male, aged late thirties, early forties. Reasonably well nourished … upper front incisor chipped … evidence of earlier injury on and around right ear.’ Here the man paused for closer inspection. ‘Ragged wound on top and back of ear, extending to skin beneath the hairline. Possibly caused by … um … clawing or biting. No indication of suturing. I estimate the injury was sustained up to a year ago and left to heal without intervention.’ Den edged closer, peering at the ear in question. A crooked silvery line ran out of the hair across the back of the ear and up to the top of it. The normally smooth curve had been badly damaged, leaving a split of at least half an inch. ‘Dog bite?’ he suggested.