by Rebecca Tope
‘You know I can’t.’
She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, and he knew with complete certainty that after all, she was unable to dispel the memories of their shared discussions of his previous murder investigations. He knew then that Lilah would never really forget him, even if she lived to be as old as Granny Hillcock. Those three years they’d spent together would always count for something. She was always going to hear a little voice whispering Den when anything happened to bring her into contact with the police. It was a very small consolation.
‘So you’re helping out here, are you? Doing some of Sean’s work?’ He was trying to return to a safer footing. ‘Busy time, I imagine.’
She smiled crookedly and he cursed himself. What a bloody waste, he repeated to himself, thinking of what they’d had and what they’d lost.
He found Ted tinkering with a piece of machinery in a rickety open-fronted shed, down a steep track leading away from the main farm buildings. The sound of a motor starting up and sporadic hammering had drawn him to investigate, and he stood quietly watching the man for a few minutes, trying to assess his eligibility as a murder suspect.
There had been no good or valid reasons for dismissing Speedwell from his calculations, and yet he found it quite impossible to imagine this small, unassuming man deliberately lunging into another human being with a sharp metal implement. There was something about him that literally made the idea unthinkable.
Speedwell had the hazy morning light on him as he bent over a blue-painted machine that Den thought he recognised as a power harrow. It had numerous metal teeth mounted on a frame about ten feet in length, with a complicated tower arrangement sitting on top; this was the focus of Ted’s attention. The implement was connected up to a tractor, which was noisily chugging, making it easy to approach without being heard. No longer hammering, Ted was now poking the innards delicately – and presumably dangerously – with a long screwdriver. Den had to walk right up to him before the man became aware of his presence.
Ted looked up slowly, with no trace of alarm or guilt. ‘Oh, ’tis you,’ he said calmly, his voice skilfully pitched to be audible above the engine. ‘How’d you find me?’
‘I heard the motor and the hammering,’ Den shouted. ‘Can we go outside?’
Speedwell ignored the suggestion, peering again into the bowels of the machine. Den had to try a less direct approach. ‘That looks a fine piece of equipment. Is it new?’
‘Got it last year,’ Speedwell agreed. ‘Something’s come loose down here, seems like. Not been working proper for a while now.’
‘Don’t they come with a guarantee?’
The man shrugged. ‘Not worth the paper it’s written on. Quicker to do it us-selves.’ He looked curiously at Den. ‘Got more questions for me, then?’ He went to the tractor and manipulated the throttle, reducing the noise, but not turning it off completely. ‘There – ’ee can hear better now,’ he said. ‘No need to go outside.’
Den glanced around. It seemed he was destined to have all his conversations with the farmhand in inappropriate surroundings. The building was ramshackle at best, perhaps used originally for storing hay or sheltering animals. It now housed two tractors; several large black rubber buckets stacked tidily and covered with a liberal coating of reddish-brown dust; a big metal barrel standing on one end and streaked down the sides with oil; and a chaotic assortment of tools associated with the maintenance of mechanical implements. It was divided into two sections, the further one closed off by a door. The corrugated iron roof was sound, but there were gaps in the walls where more corrugated sheets had been nailed up as patches. The front was open, impossible to secure. ‘Never get anything nicked from in here?’ he asked idly.
Speedwell shook his head impatiently, as if the idea was fanciful. ‘Can’t see anyone coming down here to thieve a few tools,’ he elaborated, obviously thinking the police habitually nursed the most unreasonable of suspicions.
Den moved to the silent second tractor and leant against a big black tyre. He folded his arms and tried for a relaxed demeanour.
‘Just tell me one more time where you were on Tuesday, and whether you saw anything out of the ordinary,’ he invited. ‘And whether you’ve remembered anything else you should tell me.’
‘What sort o’ thing?’ Speedwell continued to poke the harrow with his screwdriver.
‘Perhaps I should tell you that we spoke to your son yesterday,’ Den prompted. ‘It was a few days before we discovered that Eliot and Sean were friends. It seems a bit strange that you didn’t tell us that when we saw you on Wednesday.’
Distaste carved grooves around Speedwell’s mouth. ‘We didn’t think of it,’ he said curtly.
‘They seem to have shared in a few schemes over the years. Sean borrowing money from your son for various ventures – scrap metal and that sort of thing. How did you feel about that?’
Ted shrugged. ‘Nothing to do wi’ us. Us kept our noses out of it.’ The simple honesty of this appealed to Den. He felt a strong urge to accept the man’s words at face value, and go home for the rest of the weekend. He might have done it, if events had not conspired against him.
Once more he went over the same tedious ground. ‘Just tell me again exactly where you were on Tuesday afternoon.’
Speedwell sighed and worked his lips as if about to spit. ‘Up to Top Linhay, far end of the farm. Maybe half a mile off.’
‘Did anyone see you there?’
The man shook his head. ‘Who’d be up there?’
‘And you stayed until it started to get dark?’
‘Aye. Close to four, must have been.’
Den cocked his head and leant back against the tyre. ‘Not much of an alibi, is it? Seeing there are no witnesses.’
‘Didn’t know I would want one, did I? Be ’ee telling me I should take some bloke everywhere with me, so’s I can prove everything I’ve done?’
Den scratched an eyebrow. ‘Good point,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we can leave it there …’
Speedwell wasn’t listening. He’d managed to prod something significant inside his machine, and suddenly crowed in triumph. Carefully, he extracted a small metal ring. ‘Got it! There’s the little sod’s been causing all the trouble.’ He placed the rogue component in his pocket and moved to turn off the tractor engine. The familiar sudden silence was tangible.
The two men were standing on either side of the harrow, Den preparing to terminate his interview. Simultaneously they both heard a weak animal bleat from the closed-off half of the shed. They both frowned and looked towards the door.
‘What was that?’ asked Den.
‘Search me,’ returned Speedwell, already moving to investigate. ‘Sounded like a calf.’
The door was padlocked shut, with an unobtrusive chain wound round a wooden post. Speedwell tugged at it and then shifted a few inches sideways to peer through a small hole in the panelling. ‘Jesus Christ!’ he gasped and began tugging harder at the chain. Den went to help him, quickly realising that the weakest spot was the door itself.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Get one of those tools – something long and strong.’
Ted came back with a long-handled sledgehammer, but did not hand it to Den. ‘Stand back,’ he ordered, and swung it clumsily at the door. The wood cracked but did not give until he dealt it a second blow and the panel to which the chain was attached gave way. Den yanked it open and the two men stood shoulder-to-shoulder, peering into the murky interior.
Ted had already seen what lay inside. Seven young calves were stretched out on the floor with the barest scattering of filthy straw beneath them. A sour smell of distress and suffering rose from them. All but one had their necks extended, mouths open, tongues protruding, eyes staring. The exception was hunched miserably, head turned into its flank like a baby fawn.
Speedwell bent over each in turn, lifting the heads and letting them flop back. ‘Six dead and one with only minutes to go,’ he pronounced.
Den was baffled. ‘But
…’ he stammered. ‘I mean … Why?’
Speedwell straightened and moved back to the doorway. ‘Us’ve never kept calves in here,’ he said slowly. ‘’Tis certain the boss don’t know they’re here. Poor little buggers’ve starved to death, look. Gasping out for something to drink.’ His features crumpled and Den thought he was going to weep. The acute cruelty of it was only slowly getting through to him as he tried to make sense of the discovery.
‘Wouldn’t anyone have heard them?’ he demanded. ‘Wouldn’t they have bawled day and night?’
Ted dashed a hand across his eyes and sniffed noisily. He nodded. ‘They’d have bawled,’ he agreed. ‘But ’tis a fair way to the yard, and with all the fuss over Sean, comings and goings … besides, there’s other calves in the barn. Us’d think it was them.’
‘But these would have sounded much further away.’
Ted shrugged helplessly. ‘Us don’t come down here much in winter. Help me with this little chap.’ He went back to the surviving calf. ‘Might save him if we’re quick.’
Den had carried calves before, for Lilah, but they had been skinny little Jerseys, light and easy. This was a much bigger specimen with a heavy head and long sinuous body. It was also skeletally thin and terminally weak. He lifted it into his arms while Speedwell led the way back to the yard. ‘How old would you say it is?’ he asked.
‘Six, eight weeks,’ Ted guessed. ‘Could be more. The winter calving started back a while now.’ He was almost trotting back to the main buildings. ‘’Tis Sean’s doing,’ he decided. ‘Keeping them down there, all secret. Some business he had going. Must have helped himself to milk from the tank for ’em. Cheeky bastard.’
‘I still don’t see …’ Den floundered.
‘Wait till Boss hears about this,’ Ted said darkly. ‘Poor little buggers. Boss hates cruelty. Always on at Sean to give a thought to how the beasts be feeling.’ He pointed Den to the shed where Gordon had shot the badger, and told him to set the calf down. Rapidly he collected milk from the bulk tank and mixed it with a dash of hot water from a tap close by. ‘Lucky tid’n tanker day, or there’d be no milk for’n.’ It was a protracted, messy business, trying to get sustenance into the pathetic creature. Patiently Ted offered the milk in a bucket, but the animal was too weak to stand and the milk risked being spilt as he tried to tip it towards the dehydrated mouth. Den watched helplessly, while trying to keep part of his mind on his original reason for being there.
‘A lot of people have been telling me Sean was cruel,’ he said. ‘You think this was definitely his doing?’
‘Thoughtless, more than cruel,’ Ted panted. He was scooping handfuls of milk into the calf’s mouth, which was having better results. It swallowed painfully and emitted unhappy bleats. A lot of the milk was going onto the man’s trousers.
‘But he was good to his wife,’ Den prompted.
‘True enough. You’d think he’d be the same with the beasts, but ’twas as if he never saw they’d got feelings.’
Den could see no further purpose to remaining. ‘Good luck with the calf,’ he said awkwardly. ‘It’s a terrible thing to have happened.’ A thought struck him. This level of neglect represented an obvious breach of the law. He should make a report of it. Reluctantly he waited for Speedwell to finish. Before he did so, Lilah appeared.
‘What’s going on?’ she asked. ‘Where did that calf come from?’
Den explained it to her, keeping it brief. She leant over the sick calf and smacked an angry hand against a vertical post. ‘It’s sure to die,’ she said. ‘Look at it! And where’s the ear-tag? Were the others the same?’
Den turned to Speedwell, wondering whether he had noticed such a detail. ‘Not a tag among ’em,’ he said.
‘Were they all bulls? How could they have been missed? How old are they?’
‘Thirty calvings since end of October,’ Ted summarised. ‘Sean was meant to shoot all the bulls and take ’em to the hunt kennels. Easy enough to keep a few back.’
‘The bloody swine! Gordon’s going to be furious when he finds out. Poor little things, it’s bad enough without this.’
Ted nodded dourly.
‘If he wasn’t already dead—’ Lilah said, before catching herself.
Gordon would kill him, Den supplied silently. ‘There’s been a crime committed here,’ he said formally. ‘I’ll have to file a report.’
‘Then file it,’ his ex-fiancée said. ‘For all the good it’ll do. The calves died because Sean died. He was feeding them, raising them for veal, probably. He’ll have had some crony in Exeter or Plymouth who’d take them off his hands and sell them on.’
‘Sounds a bad business to me,’ Den said. The image of the dead calves floated before his eyes. He remembered the other dead calves, shot through the head and piled in the Dunsworthy yard. Was there any chance that Sean had been trying to save the lives of a few doomed youngsters? Had he thought he could rescue them and give them at least some sort of life? To judge by Lilah’s reaction, this seemed unlikely – it was just some illegal scam that had nothing to do with the welfare of the beasts. ‘Does this sort of thing happen a lot?’ he asked her.
She sighed impatiently. ‘It’s the first time I’ve come across it personally. But the facts make it pretty obvious. Without ear-tags, they’re illegal. The calves down in that barn were officially dead at birth. And it can only have been Sean keeping them there. Gordon would never have let them starve, if he’d known about them. There was a terrible run of bull calves, right through November and into December, with another three last week. Sean must have seen a chance to make some money out of them. Or thought he did.’
It had been a gruelling morning, with the disturbing discovery likely to haunt him for some time. Casting around for a ray of light in this dark place, Den’s eyes fell on the soft-faced Ted, cradling the sickly calf. If Ted Speedwell killed Sean O’Farrell, I’ll eat Granny Hillcock, he thought passionately. The idea cheered him and he forced a swing into his walk as he went back to his car and coiled himself into the driving seat.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Gordon put in an appearance at the meeting on Saturday morning because he’d said he would. Although he had asked Sean to swap milkings to make it easier for him to attend, it was actually going to be possible to do both, if he got a move on. This, he acknowledged wryly to himself, was what Sean had insisted all along.
‘Why can’t you do the milking first?’ the herdsman had demanded. ‘They won’t start before ten-thirty, and you can easily get away from here in time for that.’
‘Because I don’t want to do three hours’ work beforehand. I don’t want to rush the washing down, change my clothes and then get my head straight enough to concentrate on what they’re saying. What difference does it make to you anyway?’
Sean’s answer to that had been vague and inarticulate.
Most of the local farmers had made the effort to attend. They’d hired a room at the White Hart in Okehampton, with coffee and lunch laid on, and a speaker from the NFU brought in – though nobody was too sure how that might turn out if things got militant.
Gordon had done the morning milking, washed everything down, changed his clothes and assembled his thoughts in plenty of time to be amongst the first to arrive. He took a seat in the middle of a row not far from the back of the room. He braced himself for the looks he would get as people recognised him and remembered the news stories from local TV and radio over the past few days. The Western Morning News had carried a story about Sean’s death and the weekly papers had made much of it at the end of the week. Gordon had no illusions as to how notorious he had become and how ambivalent many of his neighbours’ reactions were going to be.
Tom Beasley was the first to approach him, taking the adjacent seat to Gordon’s. ‘Heard about the trouble you’ve been having,’ he said flatly. ‘Must be hard, with everything else that’s going on.’
Gordon nodded. ‘That’s the way of it, but we have to keep going. This thing is to
o important to miss.’
Tom shook his head sceptically. ‘Can’t see any good coming of it. What can us do? Storm Westminster with a herd of bullocks?’
‘It’s what they’d do in France.’
‘They don’t care so much for their beasts in France. Us’d be too bothered about they hurtin’ themselves in the traffic.’
Gordon laughed his agreement. ‘True,’ he chuckled. ‘And the media would crucify us if anything happened to a cow.’ He tapped a copy of the local paper on the seat next to him. ‘If they mention Cold Comfort Farm again, I’ll not be responsible. Why can’t they take us seriously for a change?’
Beasley laughed sourly. ‘Us be nothing more than a setting for kids’ stories and telly sitcoms,’ he agreed. ‘’Tis enough to make men weep.’
‘Can’t go on, all the same,’ said Gordon grimly. ‘Milk money dropping again this month, no sign of any shift in lamb or pig prices, either.’
Beasley took up the refrain with weary familiarity. ‘My missus says us’d be better off breeding pedigree dogs for city folk than this. Her sister’s friend just paid five hundred quid for a golden retriever. Say nine or ten in a litter, two litters a year – you could live on that.’
Gordon snorted. ‘You have to think bigger than that, Tom. Keep four or five bitches, advertise in America – you’d clear twenty thousand a year, no problem. And no need to go out in the rain, either.’
‘Sell stock and machinery, and let the fields go back to nature.’
‘You get a grant for that. Not just set-aside, but special conservation areas for wildlife. You with that bit of river, too. You’d get more for otters and Christ knows what.’
The conversation was a well-worn one, laced with bewildered irony arising from the knowledge that, crazy as it might sound, their hypothesising was actually based in reality. There really would be more money in breeding lapdogs or letting their land lie undisturbed. Or in offering livery services to middle-class children with ponies. Or in renting out fields for paintballing games or historical re-enactment groups. Anything would be more lucrative than traditional agriculture. This awareness ensured that the farmers in the room carried with them a strong sense of alienation from their lifelong assumption: that they were of some importance to the fabric of society. The denigration of their way of life had not been subtle, especially in recent years. Nothing was now impossible and they sat with their heads drawn down between their shoulders awaiting whatever further extraordinary blows might rain down on them.
