The Way, the Truth and the Dead

by Francis Pryor

  Lane broke in. ‘And was that something you had arranged in advance?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t. He was doing his morning patrol, checking on licenses and permissions.’ He paused briefly while he re­­assembled his thoughts. ‘He immediately jumped forward and kicked the rod out of his hands and followed up with a hard punch in the gut – just as Hansworth had done to me. And it winded him, too.’ Again he paused. Alan could see he was reliving the situation. ‘But instead of letting him gasp for air, as I was still doing, he caught him with a massive upper-cut to the jaw which sent him over backward into the river, where he was caught by the stream. As he floated away I saw him convulse a couple of times, face down in the water. Then the body seemed to go still, but it was floating away rapidly by then.’

  Lane poured him out a glass of water, which he half emptied in one gulp. Alan was intrigued by his hands. For such a large man, and a working farmer, they were surprisingly small and delicate.

  ‘Continue in your own time, Mr Cripps.’

  Sebastian nodded, then resumed. ‘Joe followed him downstream, as I couldn’t move. The body floated past Short Acre Wood and when I joined him about ten minutes later he’d managed to snag him with a long branch and had pulled him to the bank. But by then we could both see he was very dead.’

  ‘And was that when you planned the deception?’ Lane’s question had a hard edge to it.

  ‘No. I was all for coming clean. After all, it was Hansworth who had started the violence, not me. And you could say that Joe was just doing his job: protecting his employer. But Joe reckoned that no court in the land would ever believe us – and now I think he was right. Everyone would assume that I, his landlord, had arranged it. I remember Joe mentioned a recent case over in Norfolk, where the keeper was caught with the carcasses of two dozen hen harriers and the jury found the owner of the estate guilty too. And it didn’t matter that he protested his innocence. Nobody believed him.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s all about class, not justice.’

  Alan had read about the case and he still agreed with the jury’s verdict. But he said nothing.

  ‘So what happened next?’

  Lane’s question was deliberately vague. He didn’t want the lawyer sitting with them to intervene and break Sebastian’s chain of thought.

  ‘Well, it was Joe’s idea. He said we must make it look like an accident. So I left him to it. The next day Joe had already booked a few days’ leave, as it was the end of the fishing season.’

  Lane was frowning, shuffling through his notes. But Alan knew what the next question should be.

  ‘What happened then, between you and Joe Thorey?’

  Briefly the young lawyer looked anxiously at his client, who seemed unfazed. So he sat back and said nothing.

  ‘Well,’ Sebastian slowly began, ‘Thorey replaced Hickson as head keeper.’

  Alan noted that Sebastian was now using their surnames, as would befit their employer in such a hierarchical set-up.

  ‘And Bert Hickson took early retirement,’ Lane added helpfully.

  Sebastian was starting to flag. He needed encouragement as there was still a long way to go.

  ‘Yes, and Thorey moved into Keeper’s Cottage.’

  ‘And was Thorey still friendly?’ Alan decided to risk another nudge.

  ‘No. That was when things began to change between us. The shoot did well and credit where credit’s due, much of that was down to Thorey. But he became very over-confident. Liked to shoot his mouth off. I’d have told him to shut up several times—’

  ‘But you were in a difficult situation,’ Lane cut in.

  A little more encouragement. Lane glanced at the lawyer, who was sitting, motionless.

  ‘And then he started the blackmail.’ At this Alan looked at Lane, who was having trouble concealing his excitement. ‘At first it was small things: extra leave, an end-of-year bonus, a new Land Rover. But soon he became greedy. And I didn’t have the money. I told him so. He said he didn’t care, that he’d ask Sarah – because he knew she did.’

  ‘And did Sarah know about the “arrangement” you’d both come to over Hansworth’s death?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Sebastian was indignant. ‘I didn’t want to implicate her in any way at all. But now I realised that was precisely what Thorey wanted me to do. And I was damned if I would.’

  At this, even the young lawyer was leaning forward. He fully expected Lane to ask the obvious leading question: Did you kill him? But he didn’t.

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘I decided he had to go. You can’t give in to blackmailers. They’re the lowest form of life. So I decided to set a mantrap for him. I knew there was one in an out-house on the farm and I’d been shown how to set one by Bert Hickson when I was a boy. I concealed it near some cages where we were raising pheasant chicks. I knew Thorey fed them twice a day.’

  To Alan’s eyes, Sebastian seemed much calmer now. He took a sip of water, then continued.

  ‘The pens were in the woods down by the river. Anyhow, I set the trap one wet afternoon and went back there the following morning. And it wasn’t a nice sight at all. He’d lost a lot of blood and had passed out.’

  ‘But was still alive?’ Lane asked.

  ‘Yes, I could feel his pulse. But it was very weak.’ He took a deep breath. ‘I prised open the jaws and pulled him out. Then I filled his pockets with stones—’

  ‘Actually you used broken bricks,’ Alan broke in. ‘Was there any reason why you didn’t use stones?’

  Sebastian shrugged.

  ‘No, none. They were lying around, that’s all.’

  It was the reply Alan had expected. Brick rubble had been used to build up and consolidate the towpath after the catastrophic floods of 1947. Stone was confined to the area of the medieval abbey, some distance from the river.

  ‘Well, anyhow,’ Sebastian continued, ‘I filled his pockets and dragged him to the river. Chucked a few extra bricks on top of him for good measure.’ He paused. They could all see he had no regrets. Then he added, as an after-thought. ‘And good riddance to him.’

  ‘And Stan?’ asked Alan, leaning forward. It was the question he had wanted to ask from the beginning of the interview.

  ‘He was a good man,’ said Sebastian. ‘He didn’t deserve what happened to him.’

  This time it was not the reply that Alan expected.

  Then Sebastian sat back and closed his eyes. Something inside him seemed to have closed down, as if he could not contemplate any more horror. Alan made to speak, but Lane placed a restraining hand on his arm.

  ‘All in good time,’ said Lane.

  Alan almost exploded in frustration. But one glance into Lane’s face was enough. His gaze was rigid. Alan knew when to shut up.

  Twenty-Five

  It was early morning. Only just light outside. Harriet rolled over, reached down to the floor and flicked the switch on the electric kettle. She prodded Alan, who was still half asleep beside her. He grunted.

  ‘D’you still want to do it, Alan?’ she asked, as the kettle started to emit pre-bubbling sounds.

  Despite drinking too much wine with last night’s spaghetti, he knew exactly what she was talking about. The previous evening he had asked whether she would do him a big favour. He was having trouble laying Stan’s memory to rest. He kept returning to that evening by the Mill Cut, when Lane had showed him the scene where they had just discovered Stan’s body. He hadn’t been there, but in the intervening months he’d recreated the scene many, many times and now was having trouble disentangling his memories from his imaginings. The more he thought about it, the more he knew that Stan’s death had been no accident. And everything now pointed in Sebastian’s direction. But why did he do it? What was his motive for taking so much trouble to kill such small-fry as Stan? The more Alan tried to reason it out, the less progress he made. Then on Thursday, just after he’d ­finished Lane’s phone call about Sebastian’s confession, it came to him: he knew what to do. Somehow he m
ust exploit Harriet’s emotional perception. If anyone could, she would discover what had driven Sebastian to kill.

  * * *

  Alan decided not to drive to the mill. He didn’t want his distinctive muddy Fourtrak to draw people’s attention – and being a Saturday morning the dog walkers would be out in force. So they took the footpath that ran diagonally across the low-lying fields that led down to the mill pool. When they got there, Alan talked her through everything Lane had told him: starting with the police in the car park, and what Lane had said about Stan’s smart new bike. Stan loved that bike. He would never, ever leave it anywhere unlocked. But this time he had. Was it the drink? Was he intending to come back? But whatever he was contemplating, Alan didn’t think it was suicide.

  ‘Or am I wrong? Maybe it was,’ he said to Harriet.

  Harriet frowned as she thought this over.

  ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It wasn’t. He’d have locked the bike up if he was thinking of killing himself. That’s what I’d have done. It shows the world that you are still in control. It’s more dignified. And whatever Stan’s other problems, he never lacked dignity.’

  Harriet had got to know Stan a few years earlier on a Saxon cemetery site in Suffolk.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. You’re right!’

  He could have kissed her. Should have done. But didn’t.

  ‘So why did he come down here, do you think?’ Harriet asked.

  ‘I honestly don’t know,’ Alan replied. ‘But we do know he’d been drinking. The official version is that in a drunken state he fell into the river, where he got carried through the mill wheel because the protecting grille over there’ – he pointed across the mill pond – ‘had recently been broken by a collapsing tree.’

  ‘And did that happen? Had a tree collapsed?’

  ‘Yes it had. Lane saw the damage with his own eyes.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘I don’t know how or why he fell into the water, but I’m fairly sure it wasn’t an accident, and now I strongly suspect that Sebastian might have been involved.’

  She paused to think about what he’d just said. ‘So presumably he got bashed about when he passed through the mill wheel?’

  ‘Yes. Lane said the injuries were terrible. In fact, that was almost certainly what killed him.’

  ‘And then what?’

  ‘He floated downstream and got snagged on barbed wire over by those trees in the distance, there. On Cripps land. His body was found by Bert Hickson, their ex-head keeper.’

  ‘The man you thought might have killed Joe Thorey?’

  ‘That’s right. But I was wrong. I realise that now.’ He was going to say more, but decided not to: he could see she was lost in thought.

  ‘Can you throw any light on why he came down here, presumably after dark – or else he’d have been seen by dog walkers – in the first place? And drunk?’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘As you can imagine, I’ve thought about that a lot. And I can only assume that Sebastian had arranged to meet him.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘And this is where I’m having problems. I’m reasonably certain that Sebastian knew that Stan had discovered there were Iron Age occupation deposits that extended out into his land all the way around Fursey island.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘Because I’m also absolutely certain he knew that the stone used at Fursey came from Barnack quarries. He’d put that information in his daybook and he dated the entry 8 October, the day he died. And I’ve confirmed the IDs with Hilary Porter at Saltaire, who did them. I’m in no doubt at all that the combination of waterlogged Iron Age settlements and high-status medieval buildings built of Barnack stone would have blighted the family’s land’s development potential. He couldn’t sell anything. He could never move: he was stuck. And it was all down to me – and Stan.’

  ‘So presumably that notebook also had information about the levels and the earlier deposits in the dyke?’

  ‘Yes, and I’m fairly certain that Sebastian must have known about them. And, looking back on it all, I can remember times when I think he was checking my movements. He once remarked that there was peaty mud on the Fourtrak and I’m fairly certain he was observing me when I went down to the Engine Drain to take pollen samples with Bob Timpson, and also when I met the engineer from the IDB, who gave me an accurate fix on the TBM in Stan’s notebook. And those are just two occasions. There may well have been others.’

  ‘So why was he so interested? Was it just the value of his land?’

  ‘I don’t know; that’s what’s been bothering me for weeks.’

  ‘Well, let’s think about Sebastian – as a person. What does he care most about? What motivates him?’

  ‘I don’t think it’s his wife. Certainly he cares about her reputation in the eyes of other people, but that’s not the same as loving her, is it?’

  ‘No.’ She looked rueful. ‘Sadly, it isn’t. And she left for Northamptonshire so rapidly when everything blew up. That’s hardly the action of a person who cares. So there must be something else.’

  ‘What, another woman?’

  ‘No, Alan.’ She was smiling now. ‘Some men are motivated by things other than sex.’ She thought for a moment. ‘He was a councillor and a farmer. Which do you think he preferred?’

  Alan was in no doubt. ‘Oh, he told me once that he hated the local government work, but he needed the money it ­generated. The trouble was, he only owned four hundred acres—’

  ‘Sounds quite a lot to me,’ Harriet broke in.

  ‘Not if the land’s poor quality and badly drained. His grandfather, the second baronet, had sold off the good land to pay death duties back in the 1950s. You can’t quite see it from here, but it’s that farm to the north of the pumping station.’

  ‘What? The picture postcard house, surrounded by trees and the apple orchard?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one. Isle Farm, it’s called.’

  ‘Ah,’ she said slowly. ‘I think we might be on to something.’ She paused, thinking this through.

  ‘You mean he was planning to sell up and use the money to buy Isle Farm?’

  ‘Or somewhere similar, yes, I do,’ she replied.

  ‘And of course development land is always worth far more than agricultural land.’

  ‘But not if it’s concealing huge Iron Age, Roman and medieval deposits. Developers would run a mile. Can you imagine the cost of digging the wet bits around Fursey?’

  Alan shook his head. What a dig that would have been. He would have loved the job.

  ‘Hundreds of thousands. Millions, even.’

  ‘So that was why he had to silence Stan – and later, of course, you. You both had the knowledge he feared.’

  Alan reflected on this. It all made sense. But there was one other small, but important, point.

  ‘So how did he get Stan to come here?’

  ‘Oh, that’s simple,’ she replied. ‘I can see it all now.’

  ‘But why down here at the mill, of all places? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘As I said, Alan, it’s simple. He could give your friend something that meant more to him then than any treasure on earth. He’d climb up a volcano to get it. And it was their secret. Nobody else knew about it. If they did, Stan would lose his job and finish his career.’

  Put like that, Alan understood, too. ‘It was whisky, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, as you told me, the very best malt. Maybe he drank half a bottle? I don’t know. But then it was a simple matter to push him in the river, and who knows, even steer him into the mill.’

  Suddenly, and without any warning, Alan wheeled round and dashed towards the river. Where he was violently sick.

  * * *

  The next day was Sunday. Alan was peeling potatoes, while Harriet prepared the joint of beef. The kitchen was warming up, so he opened a window. When the wind was from the right direction, they could just hear the morning cascade of the bells of Ely Cathedra
l.

  Yesterday afternoon Alan had heard that Richard Lane’s wife, Mary, would be spending Sunday with her father, who had been taken to hospital for observation after a minor stroke. So Alan had asked Lane to join them for Sunday lunch.

  As Harriet carved the beef, she mentioned to Lane that she and Alan had revisited the mill the day before and had come up with a slightly different version of Stan’s death. She then explained about Stan and the buried archaeology and the fact that Sebastian had undoubtedly seen Stan’s notebooks and almost certainly understood about the lowlying levels.

  ‘But why would that worry him so much?’ Lane had to ask.

  ‘Oh, that’s simple, Richard.’ Alan took over while Harriet placed thin slices of pink meat on their plates. ‘He realised that the presence of so much buried archaeology would completely destroy the value of his land to developers. It would cost a fortune to excavate – and of course there was always the strong probability that someone at English Heritage might decide to have it Scheduled – as indeed they have now. And if that happened, it would be game over.’

  ‘Yes.’ Harriet smiled as she handed Lane a steaming plateful. ‘And he would then be left with a small farm of not very good, poorly-draining land—’

  ‘In a world of falling commodity prices,’ Lane added.

  ‘So does that make sense to you, Richard?’ Alan asked.

  The answer to this question was crucially important. They both waited anxiously, while the policeman wiped his mouth with his napkin.

  ‘Yes. I agree with you both. It makes excellent sense.’

  As one, Harriet and Alan raised their glasses to their lips.

  ‘And will you be able to nail him for more than just ­Thorey’s murder?’ Alan asked.