False Accusations_Nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide...

by Cora Harrison

  The solicitor wasn’t in, but she left him a brief note telling him about her visit to Rosie and about her concerns. ‘Would you back me up and tell the sergeant that you feel that her mental state warrants visitors if he makes any objection?’ she wrote. ‘I’m off now to persuade a young man to act the part of Rosie’s boyfriend.’

  Chapter 15

  There were only two butchers’ shops in Brocklehurst and Flora picked out the largest. A friendly-looking woman was in a glassed cubicle where she handled all the money affairs well away from any contamination. The Osmotherley shop in Willowgrove didn’t have any such fancy hygienic ways, but Jason might well be picking up more modern habits in his apprenticeship. She saw him then coming out from the back of the shop. He had a sulky look about him and she decided not to approach him directly. Jason could be difficult to handle. According to Paula he didn’t care for this apprenticeship and appeared to think that his twin Anthony had an easier life, although, reflected Flora, with all the unemployment among university graduates, Jason might well be better off in the future than his more intellectual brother.

  Nevertheless, that combination of being slow on the uptake and sulky made him difficult to deal with. He was aggressive, too, she remembered. That had just begun to come out when he was in his last year at Willowgrove School, but she had heard several tales from the secondary school in Brocklehurst and now Paula had come up with an even more serious story. Flora decided to approach the matter in an oblique way. She went around and tapped on the door of the glass cabinet and the woman came instantly to the door.

  ‘You’re Mrs Morgan, aren’t you?’ Her smile was very friendly. ‘You were the head of Brocklehurst School when our Joanne was in the infants. She’s in secondary school now, would you believe it?’

  ‘A lovely little girl,’ declared Flora instantly. Most infants were lovely; she salved her conscience with the thought. It was only when they started approaching the teen years that they became nuisances. ‘I wonder, could I have a little word with you; it’s about another pupil,’ she added and waited until she was inside and the door was shut before she told the story about Rosie. It was nothing new, of course. The woman knew all about it.

  ‘Jason!’ the woman yelled, opening the door, ‘take that apron off and go with Mrs Morgan. She wants you to visit that poor little girl! Bet it was a gang, Mrs Morgan, that’s what it will be. Some valuable pearls stolen, too. That’s what my husband heard. Terrible thing, isn’t it? Don’t know what the world is coming to, do you? Well, here’s Jason. Well, well, Mrs Morgan, our Joanne will be ever so sorry to have missed you.’

  Flora doubted it. Joanne, she thought, was probably in her early teens and would have little or no interest in a former headteacher. However, she sent her love to the unknown girl and stepped through the door, which was, after a vigorous nod from the butcher’s wife, being held open by a sulky-faced Jason.

  Certainly a bad-tempered young man, thought Flora as she glanced at the surly face a few times as he walked silently by her side. He was not just sulky, but quite angry, too, and from time to time his large hands clutched into fists as though he were barely able to control himself.

  Jason’s irate feelings probably originated from his time at secondary school, she reflected. All of the class from Willowgrove — even Jim Madden, who was never considered too bright by the other children — had been placed together in one form and only Jason was placed in the lower group. Benjamin Price was sent to a private school and Rosie, of course, went straight into the remedial stream, but that would not have interested Jason. Rosie was Rosie and no one expected her to be the same as the others. Jason was a different matter. Large and opinionated, he saw himself as a leader and, of course, he was shocked when the secondary school viewed him differently. Secondary schools, she had often thought, did not consider the mental and psychological well-being of their pupils in the way that primary schools did and secondary schools often had only themselves to blame for the instances of bad-temper and even violence that erupted from time to time. They were the ones that believed in segregation, in ability streaming and took no notice of the feelings of the children. Jason and Anthony were twins; this fact was inescapable. They should have both gone into the same class and the teachers, like teachers at primary school level, should have coped with their different abilities. But that didn’t happen.

  From time to time, during the years, Flora heard bad accounts of him, but always thought that, with a decent, honest, hardworking set of parents that he would straighten himself out eventually. It didn’t, she thought now, look as though that was going to happen too soon. Great tales of his drinking were whispered about in village shops. He was looking at her now as though he were summoning up courage to stand up to her, and then he stopped abruptly.

  ‘I’m s-s-sorry, Mrs Morgan,’ he stammered. ‘I’m afraid that I can’t go with you. I don’t feel very well, upset stomach, you know. Sorry about that!’ And with those words he turned rapidly and strode away.

  Well, thought Flora. She was taken aback. Usually past pupils were pleased to see her. People remembered the teachers of their youthful years with more affection than they did those long-suffering souls who had seen them through their troublesome adolescent years. She shrugged her shoulders. It might be true that he had a hangover. That party on Willow Island had gone on into daybreak. Goodness knows what they had been drinking. Simon, certainly, had been sickened to the point of violence by the sight of a cooked breakfast.

  Or was it that the boy was seriously alarmed about the thought of going into a police station?

  She thought about it for a while and wondered whether to go back into the station. Rosie had a very vague idea about time. She would await the arrival of Jason, ‘her boyfriend’ with far more patience than any other girl of her age. Hours would melt into days without her expressing any sense of surprise or impatience, thought Flora.

  But the same would not be true of Sergeant Dawkins. He would be keen to get this case wrapped up and to hand it on to his superiors. Rosie was in her second day of captivity. It was worth a try, she thought, as she crossed the road, to tell the solicitor about Jason’s violent reaction to the idea of visiting a police station. Very soon the thirty-six hours would be up for Rosie.

  Ted Bradley was in. Just back, according to the secretary, busy with a coffee machine, who greeted her with a beaming smile and promised a second cup would be forthcoming as she ushered her into the front office.

  ‘Mr Bradley was so sorry that he had missed you. He’ll be delighted that you came back,’ she insisted as Flora tried to hang back and wait.

  He did, indeed, look glad to see her and she salved her conscience by thinking that perhaps he didn’t have too much to do. Near to retirement. He must be at least her own age, probably a few years older. She took the proffered chair, sank into it and looked across at him, sorting through her thoughts.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about someone who might have killed Mrs Trevor,’ she said. ‘And I’ve been considering Jason Osmotherley, one of the twins. Jason always had a bad temper. I saw him today. I tried to get him to visit Rosie, who has been telling the police that he is her boyfriend. Well, I manoeuvred his employer’s wife into sending him off with me. He looked furious, kept clenching his hands into fists as we walked along the road but in the end, he just wouldn’t go into the police station with me. Just made a silly excuse and turned on his heel.’

  ‘How old is he? Nineteen? They’re still very self-conscious at that age. Didn’t want to see Rosie, embarrassed in front of his former headteacher, embarrassed by the whole situation, embarrassed at the idea of being thought to be a boyfriend of this strange girl ...’ Ted enumerated his points on his fingers.

  ‘Or he just didn’t want to go into a police station,’ said Flora quietly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘If he was the one who killed Mrs Trevor, then that is the last place that he would want to go,’ said Flora.

  ‘But why should he kill Mrs
Trevor?’

  Flora thought for a moment. ‘I have a feeling that he might have been...’ She hesitated for a moment. The word ‘abusing’ had come into her head. It seemed ridiculous and inappropriate when talking of two nineteen year olds, but Rosie was different.

  ‘About five weeks ago,’ she began, ‘Paula, a good friend of mine, phoned me. I was a bit taken aback, because she asked me if I wanted to see a “rave” in Mr Osmotherley’s field. She asked me to come and have dinner with her and we could see the rave from her windows.’

  The solicitor was smiling. ‘You brought earplugs, I hope. I’ve heard that they can be pretty deafening.’

  ‘Well, no, I should have, of course, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about.’ Flora thought back to that evening. Simon had disappeared. Piper, the puppy, nicely cooled down by a swim in the river had been in his kennel with a bucketful of cold water and a large bone. She had faced yet another of those long empty evenings and so had been pleased by the invitation. ‘When I turned into Dewhurst Lane,’ she went on, ‘I met Rosie and her sister Jenny. Jenny, of course, was wearing something that looked like two black bandages, but Rosie was wearing one of those pretty chiffon dresses and I must say that she looked gorgeous.’

  ‘But not trendy,’ he said quietly and she remembered that he had talked of having teenage children of his own.

  ‘Not trendy,’ she repeated, remembering her conversation with the two girls. Jenny trying to be polite, but obviously embarrassed, Rosie full of chat about her mother being away for the weekend with her boyfriend, and the fun that she and Jenny were going to have while mum was absent. ‘We could see everything from Paula’s windows,’ she went on, remembering the scene. When the main road to Brocklehurst had been widened and improved six years before, it had by-passed the village of Willowgrove. The Osmotherleys’ twelve-acre field lay between the houses on Church Street, in the middle of the village, and the main road. It was a large field by local standards, shaped like a hexagon drawn at high speed by a young child. When she had passed it on her way home from Brocklehurst the evening before her dinner with Paula, the Osmotherleys’ large red tractor with the hay rake attached and a huge green hay-baling machine were both just coming out of the gate, leaving the field an immaculate shade of pale lemon. Here and there small, fat, rectangular-shaped bales of beige-coloured hay had been left scattered on its surface like cushioned seats on the parquet of a hotel reception area. A few crows had been gleaning the corpses of worms, unwary frogs and harvest mice, but otherwise the field had been magnificently bare and looking twice its normal size.

  But in the cool of the evening the twelve-acre field had sprung to life. There must have been about four hundred boys and girls thronging the grassland, mostly dressed in jeans with bright, fluorescent T-shirts in orange, yellow, fuchsia and green, but some in more exotic outfits. One girl wore a full-length skirt in a paisley pattern and over it a sweater that looked as though it had been knitted by a playful kitten with lumps of wool in various odd places and huge holes in others. Like most farmers of the area, Mr Osmotherley grew a crop of hops. These had not been harvested yet. They grew twenty foot high, the vines twining around the posts and wires that had been erected at ten-foot distances apart and the air had been spiced with their sharp, green smell. Many of the girls were wearing crowns of twisted hops and Benjamin Price had a magnificent garland strung around his bare chest. The pretty girl that he was with had been wearing his afghan waistcoat over her ragged miniskirt.

  Jenny had been with a young man whom Flora had never seen. He was dressed in a white T-shirt bearing the slogan: GO-GO and shorts that had been made from a pair of jeans cut off at knee length — probably with a blunt-edged saw — there were straggling threads of blue denim down his sun-bronzed legs. His hair was styled in a strange crest, called, she had been informed by several trendy pupils, a Mohawk.

  ‘And how was Rosie enjoying things?’

  Flora smiled. She did enjoy talking to someone so quick on the uptake. He had visualized the scene from her description.

  ‘Well, you can imagine. Just at a most romantic moment between Jenny and her boyfriend, Rosie came up. Paula and I were too far away from them to hear what Rosie said, but I am pretty sure that I could guess. This wasn’t Rosie’s scene. Even though she looked like a pretty nineteen-year-old, fundamentally she was mentally much younger and she was getting bored and feeling out of place.’

  ‘Poor Jenny,’ he said compassionately.

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Flora, again pleased at his understanding. ‘Jenny has been made to feel responsible for Rosie since she was a small child. She didn’t ignore or shout at her to go away as a lot of teenagers would have done in her place. She whispered something in the ear of Mr Go-Go, who melted back into the shadows of the dark green hops, then she took Rosie by the hand and went over to the gate which led from the twelve-acre field into the hop garden.’

  ‘Looking for a baby-sitter.’ He nodded his understanding of the scene.

  ‘Jason Osmotherley was standing there,’ went on Flora. She gave a half smile. ‘He was wearing this dazzling Hawaiian shirt. He was by himself, looking at Jenny. She came up to him, kissed him affectionately on the lips. He put his arm around her and they stood there entwined for a few minutes and then Jenny released herself, placed Rosie’s hand in Jason’s and watched them walk across to the burger van.’

  ‘Wonder how she got young Jason to look after Rosie. Promised him something, maybe?’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Flora cautiously. She didn’t think she wanted to know about that. ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘a minute later Jenny slipped back into the hop garden.’

  ‘And Jason was left with Rosie.’

  ‘And Jason was left with Rosie,’ repeated Flora. ‘Paula and I watched. We were amused, at this stage, while Jason bought Rosie a burger and a can of coke. He bought one for himself also and they sipped and munched companionably for a while. Everyone seemed to be pairing off,’ said Flora, remembering how couple by couple they had slipped from the bright, wide-open, bare field to the scented darkness of the hop garden.

  ‘You thought he would go off and find himself a grown-up girl.’

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Flora. ‘But oddly enough Jason wasn’t getting tired of Rosie; he was moving closer and closer to her; we even saw him throw back his head and laugh at something that she said. I think it was at that moment that I began to get worried. I had never known Rosie to say anything remotely funny, or even to understand a joke. I doubted that she could produce one sentence humorous enough to make the sophisticated Jason Osmotherley laugh. I was uneasy as I saw his arm move around her shoulders. Rosie hardly seemed to notice it. She went on sipping her coke delicately and smiling sweetly into the face above her. He’s quite a good-looking lad, of course. But then he took her hand and walked her over into the hop garden.’

  ‘And, at that stage, like most, he wouldn’t be too worried about her intellectual problems. What did you do?’

  ‘Got Paula to ring for the police,’ said Flora tartly. ‘As a concerned householder, of course,’ she added. ‘There were fires everywhere. They had used the left-over wisps of hay for them. And then there was the music. Even with all the windows closed it was mind-blowing. The police came, quite quickly, sirens blowing, and Mr Osmotherley came back from the show and told all the girls to go home and then stood over all the boys with a bull-whip in his hand and made them clear up the field. But afterwards, I worried about Rosie and wondered how long she had been in the hop garden with Jason.’

  ‘Were they long enough in the hop garden for Rosie to become pregnant, did you think?’

  ‘Or long enough for Mrs Trevor to think that there might be a possibility that Rosie would be pregnant. Rosie, of course, unlike a normal teenager would have told her mother everything,’ replied Flora. ‘And knowing Mrs Trevor, she might start putting pressure on Jason, and on his father and mother, for marriage. Jason, in her eyes, wouldn’t be good enough to marr
y Jenny, but Rosie would be a different matter. Mrs Trevor was getting tired of having Rosie around her neck. Someone told Paula that Mrs Trevor wanted Jenny to take Rosie to live with her, but Jenny refused.’

  ‘That would prove quite a motive for the murder of Mrs Trevor by Jason Osmotherley.’ He sounded meditative. Her story had impressed him. She had now provided possible motives for both Darren and Jason.

  Flora said nothing. Let him think it out himself. It would come better from the solicitor than from herself. She continually reminded herself of what her brief was, and of how during her training, great emphasis was placed on warning the volunteers that they must not get involved in the rights and the wrongs of the case, but must content themselves with being a voice and a support for vulnerable young people. She would, she thought, getting to her feet, go home now and take Piper for a walk down Dewhurst Lane. After all, the less he went out into the big world, the more frantically excited he got.

  Dewhurst Lane was a very narrow, pot-hole marked country lane. Although some people used it as a short cut to Sally Gardens estate and to the opulent houses of Wood Avenue, there was no real need for anyone to use any part of it beyond the first few yards where the road bent sharply and where the Trevors’ bungalow had been built on the site of an old farm cottage — something that Mr Trevor had inherited soon after his marriage. The marriage itself only lasted a few years and then, when Jenny was about two years old, Mr Trevor went to China for six months, sent there by his firm. He had, apparently, fallen in love with a Chinese woman there, someone quite unlike his forceful wife, or so the village had surmised. Anyway, he had left Mrs Trevor in possession of a bungalow and with the responsibility of bringing up the children, one of whom, by now, was showing developmental problems.