The Village Fate

by William Hadley

  The next thing to catch her eye was the paperback novel, a leather bookmark showed how far she’d reached …I do hate it when people turn down the corner of a page, don’t you? The cover illustration was nothing special. It gave no indication of the book’s notoriety, but Claudilia’d heard about Fifty shades of Grey. She wasn’t surprised to see it there. If Maggie had been going on a trip though, wouldn’t she have taken something to read? Yes of course she would, Claudilia dropped it into the handbag with the other items.

  The night stand had a small drawer above a larger cupboard, a place to keep more valuable or precious items. This is where Claudilia looked next. She slid the drawer all the way out, checking to see if anything was taped to the back …I saw that in a film once, it’s where the safe code was hidden. There was nothing so Claudilia laid the drawer on the duvet to inspect its contents.

  The first thing she noticed was some HRT tablets, which suggested the late Mrs Muck was not as young as she’d claimed. To satisfy her curiosity Claudilia opened the handbag, she took out the passport and checked the date of birth. Maggie was fifty-three. There it was, in black and white, she was …or had been, in very good condition for her age.

  The next thing Claudilia picked up from the drawer was a leaflet about breast implant care and maintenance. It was promoting the services of a clinic in Upstate New York, and recommended the replacement of implants after eighteen or twenty years. The eminent Doctor Vanswiser had reassuringly grey hair and impossibly white teeth. As he smiled out from the front page of the leaflet he guaranteed the very best results and absolute discretion. A phone number was highlighted and a few notes, including a price in dollars and pounds, were scribbled on the back. Claudilia thought about taking the leaflet but decided against it. There’s no harm in laying a false trail after all.

  In the back of the drawer, an open box of condoms indicated that even if Maggie wasn’t likely to get pregnant, she was being careful not to catch anything nasty. Explaining how she had contracted a STI when she wasn’t sleeping with her husband would be tricky. In this at least she’d demonstrated some rare good sense. Claudilia replaced the condoms in the drawer, checked there was nothing else of interest, and slid it back into the bedside table.

  Claudilia opened the cupboard beneath the drawer and peered inside. Old perfume bottles, a few ancient diaries and birthday cards was all she saw at first. Pushing them to one side, she wasn’t surprised to find a pair of fluffy handcuffs …straight from the fifty shades starter kit no doubt. She moved a few more bits around till her hand settled on what she thought was a dog’s toy, or a rubber bone. As she drew it out into the light of the room she could see it was a toy, but not one for Hamish to play with. Turning it over, examining it from every angle, her first thought was how anatomically detailed it was …Do they have models for this sort of thing? Claudilia was very pleased she was wearing gloves, she tucked her latest find back into the cupboard and closed the door.

  Next the ensuite, Maggie’s bathroom. The first place to inspect was the cupboard over the sink. She found Maggie’s toothbrush and dropped it into a small makeup bag. She added a hairbrush and a comb from the dressing table. Deciding this was all she could carry on her bike, and feeling sure she’d taken enough to suggest a quick exit, Claudilia went downstairs and out to the patio.

  Her bike was where she’d left it, she put the items she’d collected into the basket and stretched the waterproof cover over the top. Claudilia went back into the house looking for keys, no one left home without locking up these days, not even in the most trusting of rural communities. In the hall, on a half-moon table, she found a basket with both house and car keys. She removed a Yale and Chub key and left the others, the ones with a Range Rover tag.

  Now it was time to take care of the elephant in the room, or the corpse in the gym to be more precise. Claudilia had been thinking about this while she worked her way around the house, and she’d come up with a plan.

  From the shed, the one used by the gardener to store his tools and equipment, Claudilia took a wheelbarrow. She lined it with an old hessian sack and went back to the gym. Maggie was still on the exercise bench …I’d be bloody amazed if she wasn’t. Claudilia lifted the lifeless body and sat it in the wheelbarrow.

  She got the mop, the one which had acted as a substitute door lock the previous day, and wiped the floor wherever she’d walked. The muscles in Maggie’s body had started to relax, a puddle of urine sparkled on the wooden floor beneath the bench. Claudilia was certain that Maggie wouldn’t want it to stain, and anyway it would attract attention if left. She mopped up the liquid and dried the floorboards with a role of paper towel from the cupboard. That done, the mop and towel went into the wheelbarrow beside Maggie. Claudilia checked the sauna was turned off …we don’t want it starting a fire, then she shut and locked the gymnasium’s big glass doors.

  Maggie didn’t look at all uncomfortable sitting in the wheelbarrow. Her head was back and her eyes closed, she might have just been drunk, or even stoned.

  Claudilia checked the time, it was half past four. She pushed her bicycle across the grass to a gate in the trees. She went through and onto a path around the huge digestion tanks. With her bike she walked across to the chipper they’d demonstrated on Friday, she checked the key was still in place. It was. Claudilia tucked her bike out of sight and returned to the garden where Maggie was waiting.

  Her passenger felt light as she pushed the barrow across the lawn and through the gate. They went around the tanks and across the grass. A moment later she was by the chipper and loading Maggie feet first into the funnel designed for feeding branches towards the rotating knives and crushing teeth.

  d

  Her clothes! Claudilia had to remove Maggie’s clothes. They might get caught in the mechanism and jam something important. She slipped her small Swiss army knife, the one she always carried, from her pocket. …very useful for opening envelops in the office and bales of hay at the stable. She sliced off the shorts, knickers and tank top, adding them to the other personal effects in her basket.

  Not wanting to run the engine for a moment longer than necessary, especially this late on a Sunday afternoon, Claudilia positioned the still warm figure in front of the business parts of the chipper. Then, having checked the shoot was pointing into the delivery hopper, she turned the key. The engine seemed even louder than before, and Claudilia was convinced it would bring people running. There was not a moment to lose, discovery now would lead to some very awkward questions.

  Claudilia engaged the rotors first and then the knives. Next she pushed buttons to start the circular cutting blades, deep in the bowels of the machine they growled into life, and last of all she started the conveyor. Maggie’s body lurched forward.

  First her feet and then her legs were flailed by the short pointed knives. In seconds a mixture of bright red blood and pink-white tissue coated the walls of the cutting chamber. This was where, at least in normal use, twigs and leaves were ripped off branches prior to bigger teeth crunching through the thick bows. But Claudilia had found another use for the chipper, the one Hubert had joked was so simple, even his sister could operate it. She wondered what her brother would say if he could see what she was feeding into his favourite new toy.

  Shins and thigh bones splintered as Maggie continued moving forward through the machine. For a moment the engine faltered as it went from thighs to hips, but clever sensors identified the engine was under an increased load and ceased Maggie’s forward movement. The feed belt reversed half a metre, the noise increased and Maggie resumed her forward journey. The conveyor was going more slowly, the engine working at higher revs and developing extra power, it was ready for the more dense bones in the human torso.

  In the bowels of the chipper, metal teeth crunched through the carcass, ripping chunks of skin and tissue from the skeletal frame. Muscles which Maggie had dedicated hours each day to toning were torn through like paper. Ribs, hands and arms disappeared between mechanical teeth. A str
eam of something dark red, not quite liquid but too runny too be a solid spewed from the shoot. In the hopper, the new more gooey version of Mrs Mackintosh mixed with the grass silage and kitchen waste.

  Maggie’s head was the last thing to go. Her spinal cord had been ripped from her skull. Some vertebrae had remained attached, they flopped back and forth while it bounced and rotated on the spinning knives, like a grotesque beach ball caught in a flume ride. A spike latched onto soft flesh, it pulled the face towards the knives before tearing free, taking a portion of cheek with it, the macabre display was resumed. Maggie’s face was torn apart in chunks, slices of flesh came off, an eye was ripped out and an empty socket stared up at Claudilia. Thrown this way and that by spikes and knives Maggie was becoming less recognisable one feature at a time. The nose, the one she’d spent thousands reshaping was gone, leaving just a harsh red gash. Her jaw was broken and some exposed bone poked through the skin. Lumps of hair were ripped away, taking the scalp where it had been rooted, and exposing shining white cranial bones.

  A loud crack reverberated around the loading chamber. No longer able to resist the mechanical onslaught, a large bone had broken. Maggie’s head deflated like a punctured ball. It folded in on itself and the spikes forced the last remnants of Mrs Margaret Macintosh of The Manor, Wimplebridge, through the primary knifes and into the crushing rollers.

  The whole of the inside of the machine was coated with blood, fleshy tissue, bits of bone and brain matter. Claudilia couldn’t leave it like that to be found the next day, but she didn’t want to put her hands inside to clean the mechanism …There’s sharp bits in there, I might get hurt. The answer was simple, she climbed onto the tractor and started its engine. Using the loader she added an oozing grab-full of the kitchen waste. A second load went in, and after a few minutes a third. When the chamber was empty, and everything had gone through the mechanism, there was nothing to suggest Maggie had ever been there.

  Still wearing the pink gloves and wrong sized shoes, Claudilia returned the tractor to where it had been parked. The silence was deafening. She’d expected to hear sirens and see blue flashing lights, but there was just bird song, and the hum of something electric in the background. She took the wheelbarrow back to the gardener’s hideaway, then returned for her bike. She felt sure that no one had seen her at the energy plant.

  At the house she put on her own shoes and returned the marigolds to under the sink. She locked the door from the kitchen to the patio with a key from a nearby drawer. With a final wipe of the surfaces she’d passed, Claudilia walked through the hall and exited the building, double locking the front door with Maggie’s own keys.

  Claudilia retrieved her bike from the patio, cycled down the driveway and turned towards the village. At five thirty she was back in her own kitchen, the kettle was on and three cups laid out. A cake was waiting on the patio table when Helen and Emma arrived.

  Chapter Forty-One

  You two look happy,” said Claudilia, and she shooed Mr Crumble off the chair from where he had been eyeing the cake.

  “What did you say to Mum?” asked Helen. “And don’t say “nothing” because my little sister saw the two of you talking.”

  “We did talk this morning,” answered Claudilia. “She asked how long I’d known and why I hadn’t told her. She was quite upset that I’d known for a week and not shared. Claudilia cut the cake and gave a slice to each of the girls. “I told her that our chats are private. I said unless there’s an imminent danger of you doing something stupid, that’s something even more stupid than normal, we’d promised to keep them to ourselves.”

  “Well she came home from church in a funny mood.”

  “What sort of funny?” Claudilia managed to say through a mouthful of cake.

  “She got us both into the kitchen, Em’ and me, told us to sit down and gave us each a glass of wine.”

  Emma butted in saying, “I thought she was going to kick me out of the house and tell me never to come back.”

  “She’d hardly give you a glass of wine first would she? Unless it’s that terrible stuff Helen’s dad buys and she wants to poison you.”

  “Anyway, she told us that she’d had a think and it’s all fine by her, and that means it’s okay with Dad because he thinks whatever she tells him to; but she’d rather we didn’t get our hair cut short and start wearing dungarees with sensible shoes - but I’ve no idea what she meant by that!”

  “Anything else?”

  “She’s going to buy me a new bed, a double, for my room and we can decorate it however we like, but she asked us to be discreet around Maggie and Alan.”

  “She treats me like a sister already so I don’t think it’ll be a problem” said Emma.

  “So what have you been up to?” asked Helen.

  “Not much; ...Well I can’t tell them I’ve been murdering the neighbourhood tramp, then sliced and diced her with our forestry equipment can I? “I’ve done some more baking, and frozen the last of the cakes for the fete. I need you both to come over on Thursday to help me decorate them, and bring your little sister will you.” She added to Helen. “She can help too.”

  Claudilia waggled an index finger at the girls. In her best impression of a Victorian matron she added, “Don’t say you can’t come Emma, you’re bound by the same rules as Helen now. That means you do what your aunt Claudilia tells you, or I’ll write you out of my will, do you hear? I’ll cut you off without a penny and you’ll be a dollymop, selling your virtue on the streets of London Town.”

  The girls laughed and agreed to help later in the week. They had a short school day on Thursday and said they could do homework afterwards.

  “After that I’ve been tidying up. I had some rubbish to dispose of, just something that’s been hanging around far too long. It’s all done now; I’ll have a bonfire this evening and burn the last few bits.

  Soon afterwards the girls left. Claudilia went to the kitchen and sorted through some post she’d been ignoring for a week. There were a few bills to be paid but on the whole it was junk-mail, she piled it up with a stack of old newspapers and took everything out to the garden incinerator. Claudilia screwed up a few sheets of the Telegraph, just to get the fire going, and added a handful of twigs left over from the winter’s pruning. Once the fire was burning, and there was a bed of hot red embers, she tore pages from the late Maggie Muck’s passport and watched them disappear in the fire. One item at a time was confined to the flames interspersed with bits of wood and handfuls of dried leaves. She took the cash from the purse then dropped it in. The mobile phone followed, it flamed blue and green before crinkling to a twist of metal and plastic. A bit more garden waste to rebuild the flames and it was safe to put in the handbag. She took out the fifty Shades book first, …I might as well see what all the fuss is about.

  As the handbag burned, fuelled by more garden waste as well as a few colour supplements and a torn up Argos catalogue …Why do they send me this stuff? Claudilia went into the garden shed. She used a hammer and saw to reduce the makeup case to smaller fabric covered bits. She took a couple of good swings at the bottles of perfume and the iPad. They gave little resistance and were quickly smashed into shards of glass and twisted metal. Then Claudilia turned her attention to the keyring.

  Each of the house keys was cut in half and the pieces bent double in the vice, Claudilia kept going until she was convinced they could not be identified, she swept all the bits into a dustpan and added them to the fire, along with more hedge cuttings and papers. For the next couple of hours she tended the incinerator. Regularly lifting the lid and adding fuel, she made sure it kept burning red hot; by the time day gave way to night everything inside was beyond recognition. As a bonus, her garden looked much tidier.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Day Fourteen. Monday

  On Monday Claudilia arrived late at the office. After feeding Pumpkin and putting him out in his field for the day she’d gone to the green and met the estate workers preparing for Saturday’s fet
e. The hired generator would arrive on Thursday and each stall needing power would have to be in the right place. Claudilia gave their foreman a site diagram, and sent them off to paint the white lines which marked where each stall would be. But their first job was to cut the grass … We’ll do it before painting the lines this time.

  Claudilia walked into the farm office as the clock ticked past ten thirty, she was surprised to see Hubert looking all shiny and clean. He was wearing a dark blue suit and a crisp white shirt, open at the neck but no tie. Her brother had even polished his shoes. “What’s up Hubert, are you off to see the bank manager?” she joked.

  “No. It’s Gus Barker’s funeral this morning, eleven thirty at the church. Stuart announced it yesterday. I thought you weren’t listening, you looked distracted all the way through the service. You didn’t even scrounge lunch from us afterwards.”

  “I wasn’t distracted, it’s just that I’d been with you for a couple of evenings last week and I thought you might like some time alone.”

  “Nothing to do with Helen’s news then?” Or telling Marie to “learn to live with it.”

  “No. And I didn’t say that. I said Helen had made her choice and we’ll have to accept it. Oh God, I didn’t upset Marie did I?”

  “No, don’t worry, you told her exactly what she needed to hear. She already knew she’d have to suck it up, she just needed to hear it from someone who wasn’t me,” replied her brother. “Now getting back to Gus, the funeral’s at half eleven, then he’s being buried near his parents in the graveyard. I think we’ll close the office at eleven, funeral at half past, a few over-dry sandwiches at The Bridge Inn and a swift half curtesy of his sister. Back to work by half one or two o’clock.” Angus looked at his watch. “If I were you I’d pop home now and get changed, we’ll see you at the church in about forty minutes?”