by Rebecca Tope
‘Eggs. Jilly brought them for us. And a few other things. She went to Tesco on the way home from work.’
‘Good for her. Is she going to do that every day?’
Heather shivered, a habitual reaction to difficult questions. Abigail knew better than to assume she was cold. ‘Well?’ she insisted. ‘Is she?’
‘I don’t expect so,’ managed her mother, in a little-girl voice.
‘You’ll have to do it then, won’t you? You’ll have to drive to the shop and buy food. Otherwise we’ll starve. You’ll have to cook it sometimes, as well, because I won’t be here all the time. For a start, I’m going to Glastonbury this year. You and Dad both said I could.’
‘That’s not till June, Abby. I’ll be back on my feet by then.’
‘Are you sure? How many years is it now? I was ten – I know that much. So long ago that I’ve forgotten what it was like to have a normal mother. And now you’ve decided to get better at last, have you? Great! Pity Dad won’t be here to see it, though.’
‘I hate it as much as you do,’ Heather said, her voice suddenly very much stronger. ‘I often think you don’t believe that. Do you think I’m just pretending to be so weak and tired all the time?’
‘Who cares what I think?’
‘There’s just us now.’ Heather’s tone was decisive, different from her usual whine. ‘We shouldn’t be fighting. I will try to get better, honestly. And I won’t stop you going away with your friends.’ She began to get out of the chair. ‘I’ll even scramble those eggs for us – how about that!’
Abigail watched her mother stand up and fold the rug that had been over her knees. Her hands shook and she shuffled her feet like a woman of ninety. It was dreadful to see, but the girl forced herself to resist the urge to help. There were days when her mother’s back hurt, sending sharp pains in all directions; days when she could hardly lift her arms to change her clothes; days when her head ached and her vision swam. But officially there was nothing actually the matter with her and hadn’t been for so many ghastly years, during which Sean had done all the housework, shopping and cooking and endured the disbelieving quips and comments that his acquaintances were prone to make. Abigail had watched her father distance himself emotionally from the situation, going through the daily routines like an automaton. He seldom even looked at his wife or spoke to her intimately. His conversation centred on logistics – whether he could go shopping as well as work a full day; whether Abby would be home for the evening meal or whether he’d have to drive a twenty-mile round trip to collect her from Gary’s. No wonder she stayed in Tavistock overnight as often as she dared. Gary’s mum didn’t mind, so long as they weren’t too noisy. She ran an off-licence, which stayed open in the evening, making it easy to keep out of her way. But Abigail had realised that she wouldn’t be able to do that any more. Dad wasn’t there to feed her animals. If she didn’t get home, they’d go hungry.
But on the bus journey home that day, it had not been the rabbits and guinea pigs and badger and birds she’d been thinking about. It had been her mother and how much she wanted to be held in those weak white arms and kept safe.
‘Have they said when I can go and see him?’ she asked without warning. ‘I hope you didn’t think I’d just stop asking, because I won’t. Everybody at school says I should be able to see him.’
‘You haven’t been talking to them all about it, have you?’ Heather turned stiffly to face the girl. ‘How could you do that?’
‘How could I not? They all know what’s happened, and it’s sick to try and pretend it hasn’t. He was my father, for God’s sake. It’s not just some horrible dream.’
‘The teachers should have told your friends not to say anything,’ Heather insisted. ‘Getting you upset for no reason.’
‘No reason?’ She stared at her mother in disbelief.
‘I meant …’ bleated Heather feebly. ‘I don’t know …’
‘Anyway, they all say they’ll come to his funeral, if they can get the day off school.’
‘They will not. I won’t invite them. They didn’t even know him.’
‘They did! Gary and Emma and Natalie and Matthew Watson – they all knew him. And some of the others.’
Heather was in the kitchen by this time, talking over her shoulder as she leant exhaustedly against a worktop, drained by the unaccustomed effort. ‘Matthew Watson? Who’s he?’
‘He’s in Year Eleven. His mother’s the milk recorder. He came here when Gordon did that farm walk. The whole Watson family came.’
‘What – the woman who was here on Tuesday when it happened?’
‘I suppose so, yes. And Matthew came here that day it snowed before Christmas. Dad drove him home. That’s how most of them know him.’
‘As a taxi driver,’ Heather scoffed breathlessly.
‘If you like.’ Not waiting to see whether her mother was actually capable of scrambling eggs, Abigail snatched up her discarded bag and clomped doggedly up the stairs to her room. Although it was impossible to admit it to her mother, she had come home expecting to have to prepare the meal, as her father would have done, washing it all up afterwards; then stoking the fire, feeding the cats, taking out the rubbish: all the household jobs that Heather professed herself incapable of performing. How much of the work would the woman suddenly find herself able to do, after all these years?
Instead of laying out her books in preparation for homework, she slumped on the bed, leaning against the pillows and staring sightlessly at the darkness beyond her window. It was true that she’d talked to her schoolmates about her dad’s murder. It was weird for Heather to think she’d do anything else. But she hadn’t told her mother everything her friends had said.
Natalie had started it. Her dad knew Eliot Speedwell and had been talking about the Dunsworthy news over supper. ‘He says there’s always been trouble brewing there,’ Natalie had confided to Abigail. ‘Like a time bomb waiting to go off, he said. But he never thought it would be Mr O’Farrell who got himself killed. Says it must have been worse than he thought. Says you’d be well off out of it, and you and your mum should try and get a new place to live before anything else happens.’
Abigail had wrapped her arms around herself in the chilly playground. ‘He’s talking rubbish,’ she’d maintained. ‘We don’t want to move somewhere else.’
‘You’ll have to, Abby. The house went with your dad’s job. Besides, you’ll need to live close to shops and stuff, with your mum in the state she is.’
At that point Emma Pearson had joined in. Emma lived on the other side of the school’s catchment area and knew none of the individuals concerned. ‘Aren’t you scared to go on living there?’ she enquired, eyes wide with melodrama. ‘I mean – there’s a murderer somewhere close by! And with these dark evenings – I’d be petrified.’
Abigail blinked. All she’d been able to think of so far, when she’d been able to think at all, was the absence of her father and the urgent need to get a glimpse of his body. She wanted to write him a letter, telling him the things she’d never been able to say, but every time she thought about that, she felt tears prickling behind her eyes, and had to stop. The idea that she had anything to fear came as a complete revelation.
‘So …’ Emma prompted. ‘Who d’you think did it then?’
That was too much for Abby. The dreaded tears had forced themselves into view, not so much from grief for her father as from an overwhelming sense of being under attack. She had shrunk away from her so-called friends, turning her back on them and trudging with bowed head to the girls’ toilets, the only refuge she could think of.
‘What d’you have to say that for?’ Natalie was demanding of Emma, as Abby left them. ‘Tactless cow.’
‘Well …’ Abby heard Emma start to defend herself, before she was even out of earshot.
Sitting on the closed lavatory seat, head in her hands, she’d tried to collect her thoughts. Clearly everyone found the fact that Sean had been murdered irresistibly exciting.
They didn’t notice or care that he was just as dead as if he’d had cancer. He was dead at thirty-eight, which even at her age, she knew to be ridiculously young. People often lived fifty years longer than that. Her own great-grandfather had recently died at eighty-nine, and old Granny Hillcock was past a hundred.
But, unlike her mother, Abby wasn’t worried about how they were going to manage, or where they were going to live. Abigail was worried, more than anything, that people were going to find out just what a wicked man her father had actually been.
The gunshot and simultaneous scream came clearly through the evening air. Abigail heard it from her bedroom and instantly knew what had happened. She flew downstairs.
‘Did you hear that?’ she yelled at her mother.
Heather was standing at the cooker, head cocked, eyes staring. She nodded.
‘Bodgy must have got out,’ Abby howled. ‘I can’t have latched his door properly when I fed him. They’ve shot him!’ Tears were spattered on her cheeks.
‘But—’ Heather couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Her daughter was already running up the farm drive.
Stumbling in the dark, Abigail focused on the lights of the yard and house. The sharp bend in the drive meant the buildings were closer than the distance she actually had to travel. By day, she would have cut across the pasture instead of staying on track. But there was a wire fence and a ditch, impossible to negotiate in the dark.
Finally she arrived, panting and desperate. The milking machine was the only sound. Whirling round, she saw the milked cows slowly making their way back to their stalls for the night, a light on as always in the old lady’s window.
It was bewildering: surely that scream had rung out only seconds before? How could everything be so quiet and ordinary already? The light mounted on the corner of the milking parlour was illuminating part of the yard, and she moved to the brighter area. The black-and-white striped head suddenly seemed to fill the entire frame of her gaze. She couldn’t see anything else, couldn’t understand how she’d missed it till then. Lying a yard or two from the door of a smaller barn, was her precious pet. The blood on the grey chest told the story in an instant. She knelt on the cold mud and stroked the warm fur. The front feet were crossed appealingly, the snout extended, the glazed eyes open. In a moment of hope, she ran her hand down the long curve of the back, to find the crooked break on the hind leg that had given Bodgy his limp. The knob of misaligned bone confirmed his identity, and she wailed aloud her grief and rage.
There was only one person who could have shot him. Without conscious thought, she got up and headed for the milking parlour.
Gordon was applying a unit to the udder of a cow, his back to the steps on which Abigail stood. She picked up a plastic pot of teat disinfectant and threw it at him. It caught him squarely on the back of the head.
Gordon and Abigail had never before confronted each other in anger. She had always known him as affable but uninvolved: the boss man, powerful and remote, with his restless succession of girlfriends and deepening worried frown as the farming industry seemed set on collapsing on top of him. Sean had warned her not to let him find out about her animals – the badger in particular. Badgers were a universally sore point on every level, and Abby’s insistence on keeping Bodgy as a pet had already caused innumerable arguments.
‘If he shows any sign of sickness, he’s got to go,’ Sean told her. ‘And you’re never to let him into any of the fields. And if anybody asks you, I never said you could have him. I thought you’d just got a few rabbits and the jackdaw – right?’
She’d nodded a casual assent and carried on as before.
Now Gordon had found the badger and shot him. And he was glaring at her, his face glowing with shock, one hand to the back of his head. He went on staring, as if his eyes were telling him something impossible.
‘You shot my badger!’ she screamed at him before he could utter a word. ‘You’re a monster, a murderer! I hate you!’ The words were much too inadequate for what she was feeling. She jumped down the steps and hurled herself at him, fists flailing. The cows in their herringbone stalls shifted uneasily, unable to turn their heads to see what the noise was about.
Gordon grabbed her forearms in hands that felt like mechanical crushers. ‘Stop it!’ he ordered, his face an inch from hers. ‘Behave yourself.’ His eyes, glittering dangerously, stared into hers. They seemed to be spilling over with pain and anger and a near loss of control. She withdrew, pulling back against his grip, alarmed most of all by the naked suffering she could see in his face. Surely the missile hadn’t hurt his head that much? She hoped it had, of course she did. It would serve him right. But she didn’t like having to watch the consequences.
They stood there for a long moment. A unit detached itself from a cow, swinging out and missing Abigail’s shoulder by half an inch; she flinched. Gordon relaxed his hold on her and took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Who said you could keep a pet badger?’ he demanded. ‘And how was I to know it was yours? Don’t you have any idea how I feel about the creatures? I had ten reactors to the TB test this morning. Ten!’ he shouted. ‘They’ve all got to be destroyed, and it’s all because of badgers.’
‘Badgers don’t give TB to cows,’ she snarled into his face. ‘That’s just stupid. I would have thought you’d have more sense than to believe that rubbish.’
‘Oh and you know all about it, do you?’
‘More than you do.’ She shook with the passion of her certainty, and the thrill of telling Mr Hillcock, the boss, just what she thought.
But he didn’t look as if he was listening. He seemed to be concentrating on something inside his own head, his eyes still fixed on hers, but flickering now. His mouth even twitched at the sides in a tiny smile that wasn’t friendly or forgiving, but spoke of a connection that gave him pause.
‘How was I to know it was yours?’ he repeated, more quietly. ‘How do we ever know what’s ours?’ he added, more obscurely. She knew then he’d regained mastery of himself; he wouldn’t hurt her now. And she realised too that she no longer wanted to hurt him, either. The atmosphere had become too terribly sad for the trivia of fisticuffs. She pulled right away from him, and he let her go.
‘I’ll never forgive you,’ she choked. ‘I loved Bodgy. I rescued him from the road when a car hit him and broke his leg. I’ve had him for months.’
‘Did your father know about it?’
‘Of course he did.’ She was defiant again, her chin jutting forward. ‘And he told me not to tell you. You didn’t know half of what went on down at the cottages.’ She was taunting him, backing away up the steps out of the parlour well, knowing she was beyond his reach.
He lifted one arm, hand in a fist. ‘Go away, little girl,’ he shouted at her. ‘Get out of my sight. I hope I never have to see you again.’
It was after nine that evening when Lilah drove quietly along the road to Dunsworthy and left her car on the grass verge before the farm entrance. She’d brought a torch with her and used it to negotiate the dark and treacherous way to the O’Farrells’ cottage.
The girl, Abigail, opened the door to her, peering out through a gap of a few inches before slowly moving back to admit her. Cuddled against her chest was a rabbit, the browny-grey fur suggesting it was, or had been, wild. ‘What d’you want?’ she demanded. There were smudges on her face, betraying a recent bout of weeping.
‘I came to see how you’re getting on, that’s all,’ Lilah reassured her, in a voice deliberately sweet and chirpy. Abigail stroked the rabbit and said nothing. Lilah tried a more serious tack. ‘My dad was murdered a few years ago, you know,’ she confided. ‘I’ve got some idea of how you must be feeling.’
‘I don’t think so,’ snapped the girl. ‘Not after what’s happened here today.’
Lilah’s blood congealed. Surely nobody else had been killed? It was her own terrible experience that murders tended not to come singly.
‘What?’
Abigail scowled at her. ‘Your preci
ous boyfriend shot my badger,’ she burst out, tears welling.
Lilah could feel an answering hysteria. ‘What?’ was all she could repeat.
But Abigail had no intention of telling the story again. It had been bad enough trying to get her mother to listen quietly, without bleating about upsetting Gordon and getting them thrown out of the house. She couldn’t hope for much understanding from the murderer’s girlfriend.
They were inching their way towards the living room. Lilah wondered where Heather was, and why she hadn’t come to see who was visiting at that time of night. ‘Where’s your mum?’ she asked desperately. ‘You’re not here on your own, are you?’
Abigail made a scornful sound and pushed open the living room door. ‘Mum, there’s someone to see you.’
Lilah watched Heather O’Farrell lift her head and focus slowly on her face. She saw the lack of understanding. ‘Hello, Mrs O’Farrell,’ she said. ‘You know me – I’m Gordon’s girlfriend. We’ve seen each other once or twice. I gather there’s been more trouble here today?’
The woman shook her head slowly. ‘That was Abby’s fault. Her badger got out and went up to the farmyard. Gordon shot it. You can’t blame him. He didn’t know it was hers.’
‘That’s awful,’ Lilah sympathised readily. ‘Horrible things seem to all happen at once, don’t they?’ she went on clumsily. ‘Actually, I came to say how sorry I am about Sean.’ She looked round for Abigail, but the girl wasn’t there. Footsteps thumped up the stairs. ‘She seems to have a way with animals,’ Lilah went on. ‘That looked like a wild rabbit.’
‘Rabbits, hedgehogs, squirrels – her’s a proper little Gerald Durrell.’ Heather waved a vague hand towards the back wall of the room. ‘But the badger was the favourite. Her be ever so upset about it.’
Lilah dimly understood how grief for the animal would get entwined with that for her father, the two losses adding up to more than double the initial sadness. ‘I’m sure Gordon wouldn’t have …’ she stammered.
