A Death to Record

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Right.’ Den was trying to work out the timetable. ‘First Mrs Speedwell, then the milking – he starts about three – then the Hillcock women. They don’t get back from work till nearly six. Do I keep Mike with me for all this?’

  ‘Has he got wheels?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘Then leave him to do the Speedwell lady, and you go and shadow Hillcock. See what he does before milking starts. Where are the cows? Does he do it all on his own, or does someone else usually help? It was this time yesterday the deed was done. Just see what gets thrown up from watching the routine – okay?’

  Den wasn’t happy. The prospect of spending more than a minute in the company of Lilah’s new lover was horrible. ‘Yes, sir,’ he managed.

  Claudia Hillcock was so distracted that she could barely pretend to be listening to the wretched woman who sat facing her. The counselling room was small, with the blandest of furnishings: modern, upright chairs, a low table useful for the occasional drawing of geneagrams or arrangements of coins, in one of Claudia’s favourite symbolic games.

  ‘He just won’t listen to me,’ the woman was complaining. ‘Every time I start to speak, he leaves the room. What am I supposed to do about that?’

  ‘You might have to accept that he’s afraid to hear what you have to say.’

  ‘He’s not afraid – he’s bored. That’s what he says. That he can’t be bothered to stay and listen because it’s always the same old thing.’

  ‘And is it?’

  ‘Well …’ The client stopped; Claudia hoped she was genuinely trying to answer the question. The brief silence gave her thoughts an opportunity to return yet again to the topic of Gordon and the murdered Sean.

  The antipathy between the two men had been building up for years. Claudia had listened to supper-time tirades from her son scores of times. Sean had ignored an instruction; Sean had been overfeeding some of the poor milkers; Sean had ordered the wrong semen from the AI place; Sean had sent the whole herd through the footbath three times in one week, which anyone could see was sheer madness, as well as very cruel.

  ‘Then sack him, why don’t you?’ she’d asked, many a time. ‘Get someone else, who’ll do things your way. God knows, there’s plenty of herdsmen out there looking for a job.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Gordon always sighed. ‘Not after all these years. And what about Heather?’ In his twenties, Gordon had been rampant, working his way through every nubile female for miles around, including the pretty young wife of the herdsman. Sean had been nerveless and – even then – disaffected, and Heather must have been impossible to resist. Claudia had turned a blind eye: something she had always been skilled at doing. There had been several incidents over the years where she had badly failed her family.

  During her training as a counsellor, some of this had inevitably been revived, and much of her residual guilt expunged. Her supervisor was a deeply wise woman, who had gentled Claudia through the initial wracking self-recriminations, at the same time forcing her to confront the aspects of her nature that she preferred to avoid. Claudia had emerged reborn, changed – at least in her own eyes – almost out of recognition. The relationship she had now with Gordon was as good as anyone could expect. They gave each other plenty of space, with Mary as a useful buffer between them.

  Her experience after three years as a counsellor was that every family had secrets. There had been times, in the counselling room, when wives had disclosed the true parentage of their children, that she had wanted to say: But this is a commonplace. Why, I could tell you a story of my own – but she never did.

  Not that Gordon ever showed the slightest hint of claiming Abigail for his own. When Granny started her accustomed rant about great-grandchildren, Claudia never caught a flicker in her son’s eyes. When Abigail was involved with a group of Year Nines at school who’d been identified as running a not-so-amateur racket, cheating younger children out of their pocket money, and Sean had been distraught about it, Gordon had seemed merely amused. But Claudia believed she knew better than to take his feelings at face value. She believed that Gordon himself stuck with Sean as his herdsman because he wanted the girl where he could see her.

  Which, of course, gave rise to some strange logic if Gordon had suddenly flipped and killed his herdsman. Heather and Abigail would have to leave – the cottage would be needed for a new man. Nobody would expect the Hillcocks to extend charity to the point of letting them stay. And if Gordon had killed Sean, then Claudia and Mary would have to rally round to defend him – that much went without saying. Except that she didn’t know how to do that, and the search for an answer to this problem was the main cause of her inattention to the wretched client before her.

  ‘He told me yesterday that he wouldn’t care if I did leave him,’ the client was mewing pathetically. ‘Ever since I started coming here, and trying to talk to him about things, he’s just got colder and more uncaring. It really isn’t going the way I wanted it to.’

  ‘You wanted me to show you how to change him,’ Claudia returned. ‘You thought I’d explain him to you, and you could just go home and make everything all right. Don’t you remember I said at the start that it doesn’t work like that?’

  The woman frowned and pushed out her lower lip. She looked for all the world like a mutinous three-year-old. ‘Yes, but …’ she began.

  ‘It’s hard, Celia, I know. If we could have had Steve here as well, it might have been clearer – but the fact that he won’t come is a message in itself, do you see? He isn’t interested in sharing his feelings with you. I think you have to accept that. What you have to do now is to decide whether or not you choose to remain in a marriage that’s conducted on that basis.’

  ‘But … what should I decide? I never thought it would come to this. It didn’t cross my mind not to stay married.’

  ‘Nobody’s saying there’s a right or wrong answer. It’s what you – you, yourself – choose to do. Plenty of people live in that sort of marriage, quite contentedly. There’s nothing wrong with it.’ She was speaking automatically, words arising from one of the most fundamental tenets of her work. She had little hope that the client was hearing her. Sometimes she blamed her own profession for the idea that marriage should consist of total union, complete revelation of the contents of each heart and soul to the other. At other times she blamed the endless magazine stories, films, soap operas, novels that built up a picture of relationships as something that went beyond fantasy into realms of utter impossibility.

  ‘So I should give up then, should I? Stop talking to him altogether? That’s probably what he’d like.’

  Claudia sighed. ‘You could try saying less. Leave a vacuum and you might be surprised at what happens.’

  ‘You think I nag him, don’t you?’

  I’m damn sure you do, thought Claudia. She shook her head. ‘I think you’re very anxious to get him to listen to you. It’s not a nice feeling to be ignored, after all. But he might be hearing a cracked record. It might help if you assume he has heard you, but he doesn’t know how to reply.’ Claudia felt like a cracked record herself; she’d said all this for several sessions now. If she could just concentrate a bit more, she might be able to think up a few practical strategies the woman could try – but that always felt manipulative if she only had one half of the couple in front of her. The chances of doing any real good were not high without the wretched Steve in the room as well.

  The big clock above the woman’s head showed only five minutes to go. The relief was like a drink of cool water. Claudia picked up the diary on the corner of the low table. ‘I’m not sure about you, but it seems to me that we’ve done nearly everything we can. We agreed six sessions, I think? What would you say to just having one more – cutting it down to five?’

  She knew what the reaction would be; the petulant lip pushed out again. ‘I don’t feel as if we’ve got anywhere, really. Steve isn’t the least bit different from how he was at the start.’

  Claudia gritted her teeth. How ni
ce it would be to possess the magical powers that clients so often invested you with. ‘Well, let’s give it one more week, okay? Try to keep in mind what we’ve been saying this afternoon. Give some serious thought to what’s good in your marriage, what you like about Steve, and what sort of circumstances produce the sort of behaviour you’re happy with. Keep on trying to avoid doing the things that you know lead to problems. Think about what you say to him – listen to yourself.’

  The lip quivered. ‘You upset me, saying that about choosing whether to stay in the marriage. I never wanted to separate. That would be terrible.’

  ‘There you are then. That’s a tremendous thing to have realised. Just knowing that will give you more strength to help put things right.’ God, she sounded revoltingly bracing, to her own ears. It wouldn’t matter if she thought the client understood a word she was saying, but it was her own failure that she couldn’t find the language to get her message across. She knew she couldn’t bear more than another hour of this futile exercise.

  ‘Next week, same time. Okay?’

  She didn’t wait to hear whether or not it was okay. Standing up, she ushered the woman out of the room and down the corridor. Leaving her at the top of the stairs, Claudia dived into the office for a word with Janice on reception before there could be any more discussion.

  ‘Phew!’ she sighed, as they heard the front door bang shut. ‘I’m getting too old for this job.’

  ‘Rubbish,’ laughed Janice. ‘You’re the best of the whole lot, and you know it.’

  It was plain that Janice had heard nothing about the Dunsworthy happenings. It was worth the thirty-five mile journey to North Devon just to be amongst people who knew virtually nothing about her home area. But it had a price, too. She felt isolated, anxious about her son.

  Anxious … What an inadequate word to describe what was going on inside her. When that tall young police sergeant had appeared with Gordon last night, she had at first suspected nothing of what was about to happen. She had been almost criminally slow to understand; to grasp the full implications of what was happening before her very eyes. She had even gone to bed while the high-powered searchlights were still playing on the yard, men in protective suits crawling through the muck looking for evidence that she fervently hoped they wouldn’t find. What, after all, could there be, after a hundred cows had trampled over the spot? Some blood – just enough to show where Sean had been attacked – and very little else. But she’d been pathetically pleased with her hint to Lilah that a bit of accidental damage to the police tape might not come amiss.

  Lilah had understood immediately, and cooperated magnificently, as Claudia had noticed on her way out that morning. But now it didn’t seem such a clever idea, after all. Forensic evidence these days could be found on the point of a pin, on the merest wisp of fluff from a pocket, couldn’t it? All Lilah had done was to antagonise the police, in all probability.

  It was time to go home. She and Mary shared a car, carefully planning their journeys to make this possible. Mary would be waiting at her school to be collected. There was something both irritating and comforting about having to pick up a grown daughter from school and take her home. It was as if nothing had changed in the last twenty years or more. They would usually chat amicably in the car, telling stories of their day. This afternoon, of course, they would have only one topic to talk about.

  Lilah drove back to Redstone at half past two, leaving Gordon to get on with the afternoon milking. Ted Speedwell followed his usual routine, moving the big lightweight gates behind the assembled cows, to channel them back into their cubicles after they’d been milked. It was his only contribution – and he made sure he was out of the way before the actual milking started.

  Den’s car was in the yard, as Lilah reversed hers out of the parking area beside the house. The sight of it mangled her emotions even further; her entire body felt stuffed with marshmallow. Her hands shook on the steering wheel. How long would the police hang about, asking the same questions, searching over and over for some speck of evidence that would incriminate Gordon?

  She tried to think intelligently. There must be the seeds of a plan somewhere, if only she could find them and set them germinating. On the assumption that Gordon was innocent, the obvious task was to identify who else might possibly be the killer. Ted Speedwell? Why not?

  She tried to think of anything incriminating in Ted’s behaviour or conversation in the brief exchange she’d had with him that morning. He hadn’t seemed sorry about Sean’s death. He’d been more upset at the disappearance of his fork – which, according to the official receipt left by the police in Gordon’s office, had been taken for forensic examination. ‘That fork’s the only thing that gets up the silage proper,’ he’d complained. ‘’Twill be a mess, trying to use that darned pitchfork instead.’

  If it was Ted’s fork that had been used to kill Sean – wasn’t that in itself suspicious? Not really, she had to admit. He habitually left it lying around where anyone could pick it up. And the image of the peaceable, ageing tractor driver committing such a sudden act of violence was an unconvincing one. Even if she could find a way of shifting police attention to Ted, she knew she wouldn’t be able to make a plausible case for the prosecution. Not even to save Gordon. There must be someone else …

  There was. The milk recorder, Deirdre Watson, who’d known Sean and his unsavoury ways from years of milking alongside him. She’d been there when Sean died; she’d more or less shared in the discovery of the body. She’d seemed uncannily calm; she’d returned to the farm that morning, when most people would be far too traumatised to contemplate such a thing. Lilah thought hard, and productively. Yes, there might well be something there that she could work with.

  She knew how Den’s mind worked – how he tried to see the best in people, and fought against the temptation to jump to conclusions. Her attack on him that morning hadn’t been very fair, she now admitted to herself. However furious she might be that he was involved in the murder investigation, she couldn’t seriously accuse him of letting prejudice affect his judgement. He’d told Danny Hemsley the full story – and if Danny was keeping him on the case, it could only be that everything would be squeaky-clean, every step of the way.

  Even now, when his personal feelings were so intimately involved, Lilah believed he’d go carefully and take heed of anything that might implicate another suspect. She knew a great deal about the realities of police work, too: the odd mixture of insane levels of thoroughness on the one hand, and a tendency to a profound intellectual laziness on the other. Combined with an inability to get to grips with anyone not fitting one of their stereotypes, this left them vulnerable to manipulation. Or so she hoped.

  Motive – that was where the focus of attention would be from here on. They had their murder weapon; they knew, more or less, who had had the opportunity to attack Sean at that particular time. What they didn’t know was why. And the power of that question never relaxed its hold.

  ‘What on earth’s going on?’ her mother demanded when she got home. ‘Everyone’s talking about your Gordon being arrested for murder. Is this to do with that phone call you got last night from Claudia?’

  Lilah nodded. ‘She asked me not to say anything to you. They haven’t actually arrested Gordon, though. They took him for questioning and kept him all night, but he’s home again now. Of course, without Sean, he’s got to do all the milking.’

  ‘So it is Sean that’s been killed?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  Miranda sat down heavily. ‘Shit, Li. Not again. How the hell do you manage it?’

  Lilah gave a bitter laugh. ‘At least I know the ropes by now. Serves me right for taking up with a policeman.’

  ‘Except I thought you’d dumped the policeman precisely because you didn’t want any more to do with death and drama and all that stuff.’

  ‘Can’t escape my fate, apparently.’

  ‘So did Gordon kill the man? Why would he do that?’

  ‘Of
course he didn’t!’ Lilah flashed back hotly. ‘There’s absolutely no evidence against him.’

  ‘Den’s not on the case, is he?’

  Lilah nodded ruefully. ‘Main investigating officer.’

  Miranda blew out her cheeks with surprise. ‘No prizes for guessing who he’d like to pin it on. Fancy letting him take it on!’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anyone else,’ Lilah realised. ‘They’ve had some budget cuts this winter, and Phil’s smashed leg won’t have mended yet.’

  ‘Poor old Den,’ murmured Miranda. ‘But it doesn’t seem fair.’ She sighed, drifting off the subject, as she often did. ‘But jealous souls will not be answer’d so.’

  ‘What?’ Lilah wanted to shake her impossible mother, who never seemed to offer the sort of support and advice she wanted.

  ‘It’s Othello.’

  ‘It’s always Othello. Your English teacher has a lot to answer for.’

  ‘Den likes it, as well. Remember? We used to quote bits at each other. All those lovely lines. “She will sing the savageness out of a bear”.’ She drew breath to throw other random quotes at her daughter, but Lilah interrupted.

  ‘That’s enough Shakespeare,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m not in the mood.’

  ‘Sean O’Farrell’s the badger baiting bloke, isn’t he?’ Miranda spoke casually, her back to Lilah as she started to remove shopping from a carrier bag.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know who told me. Hetty or Sylvia, or someone. I imagine he goes in for lamping them, too. But I suppose that’s not exciting enough for his sort. I remember – it was Hetty. She was in the Post Office, muttering about it. Somebody saw Sean with a shovel late one night, and said something to somebody else – I don’t know – it’s all nods and winks round here. But O’Farrell’s name is always the first anyone thinks of. Or Fred Page, of course. Because he’s got that dog.’