by Rebecca Tope
‘Mrs Watson, can you persuade me that you did not, on Tuesday last, take a heavy garden fork and attack Mr Sean O’Farrell with it?’ He spoke with total seriousness. ‘Because I am more and more certain in my mind that you did precisely that.’
Deirdre turned again to Den for rescue. Her face was now a pallid grey, her eyes drawn back in her head like an animal in pain. It was awful to see.
‘Of course I didn’t kill him,’ she said huskily. ‘This is intimidation,’ she added, struggling for control. Both men could see that she was shaking and close to tears. ‘I was just doing the recording,’ she burst out, with a break in her voice. ‘It’s my job.’
Den was frozen in his chair, horrified at what his superior had done, but he had no choice but to trust his tactics.
‘It was Gordon,’ Deirdre shouted, slapping her hand on the table. ‘I know it was Gordon. There was no one else. He hasn’t told you it was me, has he? He wouldn’t do a thing like that. Gordon and I are friends … and …’ she wavered. ‘It wasn’t me,’ she repeated.
Hemsley nodded calmly. ‘I’m sorry to have upset you. You can go back to your cell now. And I must persuade you to get a solicitor. Either one of your own choosing or someone we find for you. Your position is very serious; you’ll need to take legal advice. Any application for bail will be listened to, but I can’t say how it will be treated.’
Deirdre Watson looked ten years older than when she had come in. Den shuddered at the power of the police to shatter almost anybody’s equilibrium. Not for the first time, he felt ashamed of this power. ‘I’ll take you,’ he said.
‘Now?’ she asked in a pitiful voice.
‘Yes, now,’ he said. ‘The Inspector hasn’t got any more questions for you.’
She cast a look of pure loathing at Hemsley as she got to her feet, but she said nothing.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
‘I’m going to come inside you tonight,’ Gordon murmured.
‘No! Gordon, you can’t. It’s right in the middle of my cycle.’ She stared at him in panic.
‘It’s okay,’ he soothed, with an oddly distant smile that gave no glimpse of the man she thought she knew. ‘Inside – but not so you can get pregnant. Think about it.’
Before she could understand, he had laid a gentle forefinger against her anus, tapping it rhythmically, a feather-light touch. Then he leant over and switched off the bedside light, plunging the room into thick darkness.
Lilah swallowed. He wasn’t consulting her, he was simply announcing his intention. There was absolutely no room for resistance, and so the idea never got itself formed. This was Gordon, her lover! Anything he did was – had been – all right with her. The pressure against her flesh intensified and she let go. She detached her mind as if it were a balloon floating away. Go with the bodily sensation … Gordon had taught her that from the start. The surprise was that this hadn’t happened before. He liked his sex varied and this was, presumably, just another variation.
There were few preliminaries. As it began, words spoke in her head. Penetration. She hadn’t known properly what it meant until now. Violation. Intrusion into a dark, forbidden, secret place, pushing ruthlessly, then agonisingly withdrawn only to re-enter, tearing something more than delicate tissue.
She lay flattened into the mattress, her face in the pillow. She never thought to scream or whimper. She let herself become body and flesh, experiencing the wrongness until it turned, from one second to the next, into the greatest ecstasy. It was pain distilled, wickedness made easy. All you needed was a man with functioning genitals and anything was possible. She was being taken into another realm where there was total freedom. The word Death replaced the others. You could die doing this and it would be all right.
Behind her, invisible, the man was gasping. His thrusts were still slow: she wouldn’t be unduly damaged by his invasions, after all … but she knew what was happening. The sounds were entirely different from his orgasms so far. He was hurting himself, suffering … dying. All she felt was a wetness, but she could smell the unmistakable smell.
She knew afterwards. It was as if he had clearly informed her, with those three silent words. Penetration, Violation, Death. He had told her what he had done, by showing her what he was capable of.
She stayed there in bed with him, but she didn’t sleep. She lay for an hour listening to his regular breathing, wondering about her future, fiercely keeping the lid on the panic that swirled inside her. When Gordon woke up abruptly at the end of the hour, she froze, pretending to be asleep.
He sat up in the dark room, pulling the blankets off her, as if forgetting she was there. Then he got out of bed and took the pile of clothes from the chair standing against the wall. Lilah wanted to ask him where he was going, what he was planning to do. He must be intending to get dressed in the bathroom, not wanting to put the light on and wake her completely.
It was midnight. She could see the digital clock glowing on his bedside table. She heard him go softly downstairs and out of the back door. Death. The word repeated in her mind, echoing and swelling as she fell into a half doze. It was a relief to have Gordon out of the bed. Her rational mind told her all was well, that he must have remembered something he’d left undone, and would be back soon. She wanted to be genuinely asleep when that happened.
A sound woke her at ten to one and she was instantly clear-headed. ‘Oh God, he’s gone out there to kill himself!’ she muttered aloud. Why hadn’t she thought of that before? It seemed glaringly obvious now. In his own oblique way, he had confessed to her his killing of Sean O’Farrell, and now he was unable to see a viable future for himself. Suicide surely seemed to be the only option left to him.
Desperately she scrambled out of the bed and into a disorganised assortment of clothes. What had the sound been that had woken her up? A cow, she thought, moaning, long and low. Did that have anything to do with Gordon, or was it just luck that she had heard it?
She quietly let herself out through the back door. A light was on in one of the barns. In icy trepidation she approached its open front. Long metal gates separated it from the yard and inside were the dry cows – those due to calve in the next few weeks. Gordon was in a far corner with one of the cows. ‘Come on!’ he hissed. ‘For Christ’s sake don’t do this to me.’ There was something clearly wrong with the animal: her head was down and she was uttering low moans.
Normally Lilah would have run forward unthinkingly and offered assistance. But now Gordon was too strange and frightening for her to act spontaneously with him. She was a child again, faced with a terrible adult situation that she was powerless to influence. He was working on the unborn calf, pushing and pulling and cursing. As she watched, Lilah saw the cow collapse until she was lying prone. Gordon rolled with her, still holding onto the calf, redoubling his efforts.
‘Oh, God!’ he shouted. ‘Listen, will you?’ He raised his eyes to a spot near the roof of the barn. ‘If this calf dies, that’s an end of it. The whole place can go to hell and I’ll take what’s coming. If it lives and it’s a heifer, I’ll know I’m meant to carry on.’ It was a bizarre bargain with the Almighty, spoken with such intensity that Lilah had no doubt he would stick to it. Stealthily, terrified that he would hear her, she edged away.
She had to pass the storage shed where Gordon had shot the badger, on her way back to the house. Hanging from a beam in the roof was a rope. At the end of the rope was a well-tied noose, and upended immediately beneath it was a packing case.
The cow must be saved. Gordon must have heard her groans and gone to her aid, instead of carrying out his intention. Lilah forced herself back into the house, imagining the scene. As she crawled into the bed and pulled the blankets over her head, she really didn’t know whether she wanted the calf to live or die.
She lay awake for another hour, arguing with herself. She ought to go and help with the calving; she ought to phone the vet. She should go home to Redstone and never have anything more to do with the Hillcocks. But her limbs refused to move. Ever
ything was paralysed, waiting for Gordon’s fate to be decided by the suffering animal outside. After a little while, it did not seem bizarre at all that he should couch his decision in such terms. The viability of the farm had already been hanging by a thread before Sean was killed. Gordon had accepted that his future was beyond his own control – why not let it rest on an accident of biology? It was not for her to interfere. Anything she elected to do would not affect the final outcome. She felt beyond misery or horror or rage. She was a farmer’s child: she knew how puny human beings truly were.
Eventually she slept, a deep dream-wracked sleep from which she emerged at seven o’clock, aware that Gordon had not come back to bed. She sat up, instinctively looking out of the window for signs of daylight and sounds of a new working day. Faintly she heard the thrum of the milking machine and lay back for a moment, letting the first taut response ease up. Gordon was alive and milking the cows as usual. The world had not yet quite come to an end.
With all thoughts on hold, she got up and dressed. She moved carefully as if a glass of water were balanced on her head. She didn’t want to do anything that might alter the course of events, from this point on. She only wanted to know. She wanted to understand the why? and the how? and the what next? But she wanted someone else to make the decisions, just as Gordon obviously did. The fate of a family was in the balance, but more heavily than that weighed the farm itself, the livestock and the machinery – the inexorable daily demands that Lilah knew so much about. The day they had sold the cows at Redstone had been as emotionally devastating as the day she’d found her father’s body in the slurry pit. Nobody who hadn’t gone through it could understand what it was like. And if Gordon was facing it now, then she knew she would have to be there at his side when it happened, whatever terrible thing he might have done.
Mary was at the breakfast table with a mug of coffee. Lilah met her eyes and exchanged a wordless acknowledgement that it was almost over; that this was quite possibly the last day before everything changed. ‘You’re up early,’ Lilah said.
‘I couldn’t sleep.’
‘Nor me.’
‘I need to talk to Granny. She’s the only person who can settle some questions I need answers to. Will you come up with me?’
‘Now?’
Mary nodded. ‘I’ve got an hour before I have to leave for school. And I can’t let it go any longer.’
Lilah sighed. It wasn’t what she had envisaged, but this was a time to let herself be led, wherever the awful final twists might take her. ‘All right then,’ she nodded.
Granny was awake, with the light on. Mary set down a mug of tea and bowl of porridge on the little table near the window. ‘Come and have it here,’ she invited. The old lady cooperated willingly as her granddaughter helped her out of bed and into the chair. ‘Not so cold this morning,’ Lilah said. Dawn was just breaking, the sky a yellowy-grey.
Within a minute or two, Granny was sitting by her window as usual, staring down towards the old shed where Ted and Den had found the dead calves. The outline of the two great oak trees made a pleasing winter picture against the lightening sky, with the big old shed nestled between them. ‘You get a great view from up here, don’t you?’ said Mary.
‘’Tiz my window on the world,’ agreed Granny. The presence of Lilah seemed barely to impinge on her.
‘Um … Granny … Do you remember when Gordon and I were little? Well, I was little – Gordon was thirteen or so.’
‘Noisy little tackers, both o’ you.’
‘Gordon was poorly, wasn’t he? I don’t remember it very well. I’d just started school, and when I got home one day, they’d rushed him to hospital and everyone was in an awful state. And he was gone for a long time. I never did really know what was happening. I remember him coming home, dreadfully pale and thin.’
The old woman’s face seemed to shrivel, the multitudinous wrinkles carved deeper than ever. ‘They died,’ she whispered. ‘My little Wendy and her baby brother, Jimmy. Both of ’em … just died. Faces all blue. I didn’t know they could die as easy as that.’
‘No, no, Granny. I didn’t mean them. That was ages ago.’ She paused to consider just how long ago it must have been. ‘Nearly seventy years, it must be. I’m talking about after that. When Norman’s boy was poorly. Your grandson, Gordon. They took him to hospital. You were there. I remember how worried you were.’
Granny had been nearly eighty, even then, Mary realised. What to her was a lifetime ago was to her grandmother just last week, and therefore less vivid than the formative traumas of her earlier years. But Mary persevered. Granny’s wits were very much intact, if you just gave the cogs time to start grinding.
‘Hospital!’ Granny echoed. ‘They been and made I go there once, and near let I vade away and die. And vur why? God knows!’ She scowled fiercely. ‘Lissen to I, will ’ee. Stay out of they ’ospitals.’
Another time, Mary would simply have leant back and let Granny’s distinctive tones just wash over her, knowing she was hearing a dialect almost lost for ever, conveying memories from a different world, a different age. Granny was a treasure to be cherished. But when it came to specific information, she could be deeply frustrating.
‘Did Gordon nearly die, too?’ she persisted. ‘Nobody ever mentioned it again. It’s as if the whole thing became a dark family secret. I don’t know how long he was away, but I know he had an operation.’
‘Six months,’ said Granny suddenly. ‘From start to vinish, six months. Your poor mam was thin as a rake with the worry. The lad came home two, three times, but went back for more. Drugs, gamma rays …’
‘Gamma rays?’ Mary interrupted. ‘You mean radiotherapy?’
Granny shook her head vacantly. ‘He came right again. Quiet, mind, and zolit’ry for a bit. Never many friends. That little boy from the cottages used to follow ’un about, zame as ’ee did. Norm and Claudia zed us should try and put it all behind us. And ’tiz what us did.’
‘But …’ Mary’s head was filling with questions that she couldn’t hope that Granny would answer. How could Claudia, the counsellor, advocate repressing and denying such a critical event in their lives? Not just preventing Gordon from properly processing his experience, but shutting Mary out of it altogether, presumably hoping she would have no lasting memory of it. It seemed extraordinarily perverse and completely out of character. These events had taken place in the early seventies, when openness and honesty had surely been the rule of the day.
But perhaps not, in medical matters. Especially not if cancer was involved.
Granny had returned to her scrutiny of the world outside her window. ‘There be old Speedwell,’ she remarked. ‘Zee? I always knows it be Ted, from the way ’un walks. Watch now.’ Mary looked over the old woman’s shoulder. Ted Speedwell was walking from his cottage to the yard, his legs much more bandy from this vantage point than they appeared to someone on the same level. He hitched up one hip as he walked, which Mary had never noticed, either. It occurred to her that the joint must be stiff, and perhaps painful.
‘’Tiz always worse on a cold day,’ Granny continued, reading her mind. ‘’Ee should’a zeen ’un that day – when was it? – when us had the frost. Poor ol’ feller could barely walk, and I zeen ’un spend all day over to haybarn.’ She pointed to the Dutch barn almost out of her field of vision, to the left. Ted happened to be walking past it as she spoke. Mary slowly scanned the whole picture. On the far right, Granny could see the big oaks with the shed between them. In the foreground, partially obscuring that shed, was the gathering yard where the cows waited to be milked every afternoon. The big cowshed itself was out of sight except for its roof. Directly in front of the window was the milking parlour, with the attached tank room and office, and the small barn where Sean’s body had been found. Granny Hillcock certainly did have a window on the world.
Mary looked at the old woman thoughtfully. ‘That was Tuesday last week – the day it was frosty. The day Sean was killed.’
‘Po
or ol’ Ted, diddlin’ around over to Dutch barn all afternoon,’ she repeated. ‘I zeed ’un. Windin’ up string, brushin’ down vloor, movin’ dusty ol’ haybales about.’
Mary smiled at the unnecessary alibi, imagining a defence lawyer trying to persuade Granny to repeat it all in court. Lucky it wouldn’t be required. Fortunately for Gordon, his grandmother would never reveal what, if anything, she’d seen him do that day.
Lilah stirred where she sat on the end of the bed. Mary threw her a swift look, which said, Hang on. We’re getting there.
‘Do you remember Heather? She came here nearly twenty years ago when she married Sean O’Farrell, the boy at the cottages. She had a baby girl later on.’
Granny smiled sentimentally at the mention of the baby. ‘Not enough babbies on the place – not since my Wendy and Jimmy passed over. But there was a baby … same round cheeks, same eyes. I used to go and zee ’un. What did I care who might have sired her?’
Mary exhaled in relief. ‘Heather’s baby was a Hillcock! Is that what you mean?’
The old lady’s eyes twinkled. ‘’Twas the corn harvest, a real hot zummer. The girl were mazed with the guilt of it, till I tell’d her she mustn’t worry. Every woman needs a babby and that silly sod of a husband weren’t never a-gwayne give her one. Never a need to say a word to Claudia.’
‘You’ve got a wonderful memory, Granny. You’re a wonderful woman. Isn’t she?’ she addressed Lilah, sitting frozen on the bed.
The girl nodded and forced a smile, but couldn’t manage any words.
‘Go home,’ Mary advised, when they were downstairs again. ‘There’s nothing useful you can do. You being here is probably just prolonging the agony.’
Lilah shook her head. ‘I don’t think I can,’ she mumbled. ‘Though I can’t face Gordon, either.’
‘We’ll tackle him this evening,’ Mary resolved. ‘Get it all out in the open.’
Lilah’s insides turned to jelly. ‘Okay,’ she managed to whisper, wondering how any of them were going to get through the intervening day.
