A Dirty Death (10 page)

For once, they found Miranda dressed and downstairs. She was wiping down the worktops with a pungent cloth, tackling the build-up of splashes and stains that no one seemed to have noticed.

‘Morning,’ said Sam, cheerily. ‘Going to be a nice one. Thought we might get started on clearing out the big barn today, but the weather’s more suited to an outdoor job.’

‘I could help you,’ Miranda offered. ‘It’s time I pulled my weight. We can’t go on as we have been, can we?’

Lilah looked at her, considering. ‘I’m not sure what you could do,’ she said. ‘I mean, it’d take so long to explain things to you—’

Miranda hovered between offence and amusement. Finally she chose the latter.

‘I know,’ she laughed. ‘I never was any use as a farmhand. But there isn’t much to do around the house, so could you give me a try?’

‘S’pose so,’ Lilah conceded. ‘You’d be better off asking Sam than me.’

Sam looked cornered, but gave a brief nod. ‘There’s sure to be something needing doing,’ he agreed. ‘Come out and find me when you’re ready.’

Miranda left it for half an hour, and then went to look for Sam. She had woken that morning with an urgent need to speak to him. The offer of help was as much a ploy to gain an opportunity to be with him as a genuine urge to do her bit. It seemed to her that there was a great deal to be said between them.

She found him in the milking parlour, dismantling the equipment ready for cleaning. His back was to her as he disassembled the milk units and sluiced them in the sterilising tank. In Guy’s coat; she felt, as Lilah had done, that he had taken on something of her husband’s personality along with the garment. His movements seemed
more deft than usual, his shoulders less bowed. He even seemed to her an inch or two taller than before. She watched the back of his head, the springy hair longer than he normally kept it, and felt a surging pulse between her legs. She moved forward to touch him.

He turned to meet her; he’d known she was there. ‘There you are,’ he said, not meeting her eyes.

‘I wanted to talk to you.’ But this was such a reversal of their usual encounters, where he would hurry into the house to see her, snatching opportunities as they occurred, that she didn’t know what to say.

‘You talk to me every day, at mealtimes,’ he said, deliberately obtuse.

‘Not alone. What’s the matter? You seem to have lost interest.’

‘The man’s
dead
, for God’s sake,’ he blurted, harshly. ‘Do you think I could …’ He went back to his work, shaking his head, closing the matter. Miranda was stunned. The pulse became more urgent, mixed with panic.

‘That’s
stupid
,’ she hissed. ‘Damn it, you can’t be saying you’ll never do it again.’

‘That’s how I feel now. As if all this is
because
of what I did.’

She was beyond words. She had encountered the over-developed morality of men before and
always found it misplaced and inconvenient. Now she felt insulted as well. For an androgynous moment, she could feel the kind of fury that she presumed led a man to rape. If she had been equipped for it, she would have thrown Sam onto the wet concrete floor there and then and plunged into him, in a rage of frustration. The more hurt and humiliation she could have inflicted in her revenge, the better she’d have liked it.

As it was, she took up a large metal bucket standing near the doorway, and dashed it against the wall, wanting simply to cause noise and confusion. The rolling clatter it made was disappointing, but enough to cover her departure and convey to Sam precisely how she felt.

Lilah hadn’t been into town since her father’s death. Each morning, she had made the farm her main priority, and found the day disappearing in an endless, insistent stream of tasks. Guy had very often given himself a long break in the afternoons, but Lilah hadn’t dared do the same. Even when Miranda started to take over some yard-based work, there suddenly seemed to be new things to do in the further fields.

But on that Friday, she finally decided she could manage a brief shopping trip. The prospect of meeting some different people, perhaps bumping into a friend, rediscovering something like normality, was very attractive. Her two best friends had moved away, and had not been
available during the crisis days, but she had lived here almost for ever, and knew virtually everyone who would be assembled at the stalls of the Friday street market. If there was time, she might even go into the big comprehensive school during the lunch break and look for Martha Cattermole.

Feeling shy and very exposed, she took the smaller of their two cars and drove herself the eleven miles into town. Passing through the village on the way, she noticed Father Edmund coming out of the Post Office. He spotted her instantly, and gave her such a piercing stare that she almost stopped, thinking he wanted to speak to her. When he made no move, she pushed harder on the accelerator again, wondering at the sudden tightness in her chest. There had been something very disturbing in the look he’d given her.

It was a bright day; the hedgerows and fields seemed to shimmer with life and weeds grew almost as you watched them. The narrow lanes sported pink campion and cow parsley and the occasional excessive hogweed, towering high and arrogant above everything else. Guy had called them Triffids, and took delight in felling them with a well-judged chop from his bill-hook.

As she drove, Lilah became aware of a sense of escape. Forgetting the weird vicar and all the events of the past weeks, she began to hum brokenly ‘Oh my darling Clementine’, which had
always been the song she and Guy sang together in the car, from the time she’d been a tiny infant. The memories were still there, intact, she found, and was cheered. She only had to sing ‘Thou art lost and gone for ever, dreadful sorry, Clementine’, to feel her father with her, laughing and intimate and warm. The obvious meaning of the words themselves was irrelevant. Sentimentality would have been a betrayal. For the moment, feelings about Guy had been put on hold, waiting for the inquest into his death – due the following week – to be over.

As she drove into town, she had to stop at a T-junction. The traffic was heavy – tourists mostly, she noted – and she had to wait some time. Then a police car turned from the main road into the one where she waited, and she recognised Den. Without thinking, she waved hard at him, anxious to catch his eye. At the very last moment, he saw her, and she could see every step in the process by which he remembered their last encounter. Then he braked, a few yards back from where she was, and leant out of his open window.

‘Can I talk to you?’ he called. ‘Pull in for a minute, will you? I’ll just turn round.’ He indicated a farm entrance a little way ahead as his intended turning place.

Easier said than done
, she thought. Several cars were behind her, all wanting to get out into
the main road. What was she supposed to do? As a gap appeared in the traffic, she pulled out, turning left, and drew in at the roadside, fifty yards beyond the junction. Someone hooted at her, and she almost drove off again. Everything seemed difficult, confused. Cars whizzed past her, and she felt frightened and breathless.

Then he was at the passenger door, leaning down from his immoderate height, smiling through the glass at her. He was in uniform, his smartness making him seem important and reliable. ‘I can’t leave it here,’ she said helplessly. ‘What do you want me to do?’

He opened the door. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to flummox you. But I wanted to see you and it seemed too good a chance to miss. Are you in a rush to get somewhere?’

‘Not really. Sort of. It’s not important.’ His long face was the epitome of patience. He gentled her, sensing the tension.

‘Drive round to the car park, then. I’ll meet you there. Is that okay?’

‘I’ll never get out into this traffic again. Look at it!’

‘Allow me.’ He stood up straight, and went round behind her car. In a state approaching disbelief, she watched while he stepped into the road, and held up one hand. The closest car ignored him, but the next one hurriedly drew to
a halt. Fumblingly, she started off, jerking the clutch and steering an amateurish arc as she got under way.

He took her to a small backstreet café for coffee, and gracefully folded himself into the cramped seat. He asked her how she was feeling and whether things on the farm were still under control. She watched him, knowing he had something more to say. The sun had caught his cheeks, roughening the skin. Again she remembered how she had admired him as a schoolgirl.

He began talking as soon as they had their coffee in front of them. ‘Amos is doing well,’ he said. ‘They think he’ll make a good recovery.’

‘Thank goodness for that. Though it’ll never be the same for him, without Isaac. I don’t suppose he’ll want to stay in the house, by himself. Poor old chap. He looked so awful, staggering down the field to get help, covered in blood.’

She was prattling, much as she’d done that morning with Sam. Talking helped, she’d discovered. Just stringing words together, letting them pour out to anyone who would listen, was comforting in a strange way.

Den nodded briskly, and stirred his coffee, even though he hadn’t put any sugar in it. ‘Don’t you want to know what he’s been saying?’

‘What? Has Amos been telling you about the
attack? Gosh, that’s progress, isn’t it. Was it somebody he knew?’

‘Well, he’s talking properly at last. And he’s given a bit of a description of the attacker. But it isn’t a lot of help, really.’

She frowned at him. ‘Is this some kind of test? You want to see if I’m nervous of what Amos might tell you? Surely you wouldn’t be that devious?’

He laughed, showing no sign of embarrassment. ‘No, I didn’t mean it to sound like that. I just thought you’d be keen to know, for your own purposes. I mean, aren’t you scared that there’s some maniac loose in the neighbourhood, hiding out somewhere, ready to kill again?’

She smiled. ‘You’ve been reading too many tabloid headlines,’ she said, feeling older and wiser than him. ‘My Dad would call this typical police scaremongering. You know – every time there’s a child killed or woman raped, some police person comes on the telly and says every woman and child should stay indoors, and behave with great caution. Making it our problem.’

He shook his head. ‘I don’t get it. Whose problem should it be, then?’

‘I don’t mean
problem
, exactly. Almost our
fault
. Blaming the victim. You’d have to hear Dad on the subject to follow the argument. He was brilliant at putting the other point of view. And he brought us up to be sensible. It’s no good – you’re
not going to make me believe in some monster hiding in the bushes.’

‘Then who killed Isaac?’ He leant forward, staring her in the face. ‘And who killed your father?’

‘I don’t know,’ she replied carefully. ‘But I think it must have been someone who hated him, or who would benefit from his death.’

‘And yet when it happened we all thought it was an accident. There are quite a few red faces over that, I can tell you. And I haven’t come out of it smelling of roses, by a long way.’

‘Why, what should you have done?’

‘Well, we didn’t look very thoroughly for marks where he might have skidded. We didn’t ask ourselves why he was so far from the edge – I mean, why did he go so far in? Lots of little things. The slurry wasn’t all that deep, really. He could have stood up in it. I’ve had a right telling-off, to be honest. Letting Sam move things about and clean up, not examining it right at the start. We just filled in the G5 and more or less left it at that. The post-mortem just confirmed what we assumed.’

‘We all felt sure it was an accident, then,’ she said. ‘It never occurred to anybody that it might have been anything else. It must happen all the time – I mean, murder isn’t the first thing that comes to mind when a person dies, is it? If the
Grimms hadn’t been attacked, we’d probably still be talking about an accident. Although—’

‘What?’

‘I don’t think I could ever really believe that. Dad wasn’t the type to have accidents. I keep saying that, don’t I? He just
wasn’t
, though. He always had everything under control. And he didn’t have a heart attack or a stroke or anything, according to that Coroner’s man. Somebody
must
have pushed him in, and then I suppose held him down.’ She shuddered. ‘What a terrible thing to do.’

‘And the inquest is next week.’ He spoke as if this was the real point that he had to discuss. Lilah waited for what might come next.

‘It’s sure to be embarrassing,’ he explained. ‘Foul play now looks much more likely than it did to start with, but there’s scarcely any evidence available to indicate what happened. Coroners don’t like that kind of set-up. It’s messy. “Unlawful killing by person or persons unknown” is what he’ll probably say. And nobody likes that. It puts a lot of pressure on the police, and makes the whole thing very public.’

‘There’ll be an inquest for Isaac as well, I suppose?’

Den nodded. ‘That’s much more straightforward. And everyone’s hope now is that we’ll find this gypsy—’

‘What? Who said anything about a gypsy? What are you talking about?’

‘Oh, Amos’s description. Sounded like some vagrant. Rather what we’d been thinking. Given that there’s nobody in the world could possibly have a proper motive for smashing that poor fool’s head in.’

‘Wait, wait. This isn’t making sense. You think this tramp or whatever went from Redstone to the Grimms’, randomly killing Daddy and Isaac, for no good reason, and now that Amos has told you what he looks like, you’ll just stumble across him one day and arrest him for a double murder.’ She raised her eyebrows at him, feeling again the sensation of her father somehow inside her, projecting his own clear-sighted cynicism onto the matter.

Den grinned uneasily. ‘Well, not quite like that. But you must admit it fits the facts.’

‘It doesn’t fit the
people
. It doesn’t fit with real life and what makes people do things. Surely you can see that?’

‘Okay, Miss Freud. Tell me where we’re going wrong.’

‘I already have. I don’t believe in psychopaths lurking in the bushes, killing for the sake of it. It’s fairytale stuff. I know it would be highly convenient for all of us if it was true, but it’s too bloody easy. Something’s going on, right here
amongst people we know, and you’re supposed to be figuring it out. You haven’t been asking the right questions. Oh – this is so
frustrating
.’

She wriggled on the plastic seat, gripping her hands together in a double fist. ‘This is unreal,’ she blurted. ‘You and me – we were at school together, for heaven’s sake.’

He laughed, and leant back, stretching out the long legs that had been folded up uncomfortably to fit beneath the meagre formica table. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ he said. She grinned back at him.

‘Nothing, really. It’s just – here we are, trying to make sense of two horrible deaths and you’re just Den Cooper, who used to be on the school bus. It doesn’t match up.’

He looked hard at her, his gaze flickering slightly, as he focused alternately on her two eyes. It made her feel very thoroughly inspected. She could see him thinking again.

‘I’d forgotten that feeling,’ he said slowly. ‘The job does that to you. You see crime and death and awful misery, even in this little place, and you forget what ordinary life is like. To me,
everything
is ordinary now. They call it being desensitised.’

She tried to get a sense of what he meant. What, anyway, was ‘ordinary’? She had seen unborn lambs that had to be cut up alive in order to be delivered; she had seen a cow die of bloat and countless rats and rabbits killed by the farm
dogs and cats. She had watched television news reports of carnage and unspeakable distress. She hadn’t been especially sensitive herself. And yet—

‘Then why do you look so queasy now?’ she asked gently. ‘Is it because you’ve never had to deal with a murder before?’

The word hung between them, threatening and alien. Each one of them leant back slightly, away from the very idea.

Den shook his head. ‘The first week I was in the job, a chap stabbed his wife eighteen times. I knew her and identified the body. But this is different. Too much mystery, too few clues, and whatever anyone says, there is undeniably a killer out there somewhere, and I for one don’t feel the least bit happy about that.’

‘Then ask me some questions. Pursue your enquiries. After all, I must surely be a suspect, officially speaking.’

‘Okay.’ He was abruptly businesslike. ‘How’s this? Was your father’s life insured?’

For a moment, she just stared at him. Then, ‘Heavens, I don’t know. Nobody’s said anything. Probably not, knowing Dad.’

‘Did he leave a will?’

‘I think so, yes. The solicitor is supposed to be sending it to Mum any day now. He wanted her to go and see him, but she said it could all be done by post.’

‘But you don’t know what’s in it?’

‘No, Mum’s in charge of all that. Except – Daddy did once say the farm would be mine when he died.’ She looked at a shiny chromium urn behind the café counter and paused before adding wistfully, ‘He probably didn’t mean it.’

‘But you believed him?’

‘I think I did, yes. But I thought it wouldn’t happen until I was at least forty.’

‘But it could only be yours if he specifically willed it to you. Otherwise, it’ll have to be divided between the widow and his children …’

‘
All
his children?’

‘That’s right. Why, are there others we don’t know about?’ His laugh died when he saw her nod.

‘Two. I’ve got two grown-up half-brothers. Mum thinks I’ve forgotten about them – she hasn’t even mentioned them since he died – but I haven’t. I’ve been thinking about them quite a lot lately. Do you think we’ll have to share Redstone with them?’