A Dirty Death (20 page)

The double gunshot rang out, deafeningly loud, as was the scream that followed it. Lilah couldn’t remember afterwards exactly how long it must have been before she and Roddy crashed down the stairs together to investigate. It seemed at the time that she lay in bed, utterly paralysed, for an immense age, praying for a sign that it was all something perfectly normal after all. Guy had used a shotgun on foxes and pigeons from time to time; perhaps Sam was just warning off some predatory creature. But no – the gun had gone missing. When she remembered that, she knew something terrible had happened.

Then she and Roddy were outside in the yard, looking and listening with a mixture of fear and 
desperation for something to explain the shots. The complete silence made her aware that the dawn chorus had stopped. The shock must have sent all the birds winging across the fields to hide.

She was wearing only the T-shirt and pants that she slept in. Roddy had taken the time to wriggle into a pair of jeans, she noticed, as they both stared towards the empty slurry pit, where it seemed the noise had come from. For them both, the sense of history repeating itself was overwhelming.

At first there was nothing to see in the yard. Nothing moved or made a sound. Then one of the yard cats ran out of the office, scarcely touching the ground in its arrowlike flight. It seemed to Lilah like a living embodiment of acute fear. Yet she felt certain that there was nobody in the little room. Perhaps the animal had gone in there to hide when the shots rang out.

She and Roddy stood bewildered, in the middle of the yard. On three sides there were farm buildings, and behind them stood the house. Gates and openings led to fields, and to the approach lane, down from the main road.

‘Where’s Sam?’ said Roddy. The door of Sam’s room was standing open, as it did for much of the day. But at five in the morning, it should certainly have been closed.

Lilah understood then that she had known from 
the start who it was who had screamed. She knew that it was Sam she had come outside to find. A glance into his room arose more from a deferment of the inevitable than from any hope of seeing him.

‘He’s here somewhere,’ she said determinedly, and began to make for the side of the milking parlour, a short weed-infested path to a little-used area between the parlour and the tractor shed. Roddy followed close behind her.

‘Why are you going this way?’ he demanded.

‘The scream came from this direction. At least—’ She slowed her pace and looked around. Old paper sacks and empty cans were often dumped there, as well as useless tyres and broken tools. Tall stands of nettles grew between the junk piles.

Her first thought when she found Sam face down in the nettles was that the stinging must be unbearable. But of course, the stings weren’t worrying him, any more than the slurry all over his face had worried Guy. Her second thought was that she herself could endure no more, and she cried out, a low-pitched, groaning cry of pure anguish. Roddy put both arms clumsily around her, squeezing her, shaking her, wanting her to stop.

‘Not again,’ he said.

Lilah’s moans turned to hoots of frantic and 
ghastly laughter. What was she supposed to do now? Make another telephone call to the police, rouse her oddly absent mother, persuade Roddy to get himself stung all over whilst examining Sam for signs of life?

They stood together, helpless children, staring at a thick patch of blood on Sam’s back. It seemed to glisten and quiver like something alive that had landed on him from above and behind.

A car engine roused them, as a vehicle drove into the yard. A great terror filled Lilah. The man with the gun had come back, and was going to shoot her and Roddy as well. She screamed, a single high note this time, and Roddy jumped away from her. A door slammed, but they still had no idea who the visitor was, out of sight in the yard. Torn between running away and hiding amongst the tractor and trailers, or risking her life on it being some blessed rescuer, Lilah stood unmoving.

‘Hello?’ called a familiar voice, ‘Sam?’

‘Ohhhh,’ she gave a long sigh, and turned to run to the friendly arms, when her mother’s voice came from the house.

‘Jonathan? What on earth are
you
doing here? What’s going on?’

‘I thought you’d be able to tell me. Cappy heard a noise, like a shot, and she thought she also heard a shout or scream, from this direction. She sent me to investigate.’ 

To Lilah, still concealed, his voice sounded different. Stilted, almost rehearsed. But then, if he was afraid he’d come on a fool’s errand, he would have practised his explanation in advance, wouldn’t he?

It was Roddy who acted. He ran around the corner into the yard, shouting, almost babbling, as he went. ‘Jonathan, we’re here. It’s Sam. He’s been shot. Amazing you hearing it all the way to your place! It
was
loud, though. I was almost deafened. He’s in the nettles, and there’s a horrible lump of blood …’

‘Where’s Lilah?’ demanded Jonathan, striding up to Roddy, and putting a hand on his shoulder. The boy looked up at him with something close to adulation, so great was his relief that a grown man had appeared on the scene.

‘Here,’ she muttered, showing herself. ‘It’s this way.’ Like a guide at a tourist attraction, she outstretched an arm in invitation. ‘We haven’t touched him.’

‘Lilah?
Lilah!
’ shouted Miranda, still in the kitchen doorway, ‘What did you say has happened?’

‘Come and see for yourself,’ snapped the girl, suddenly shaken by rage. How did her mother always manage to avoid the worst of these moments, when everyone else was having their world turned inside out? 

The woman hovered helplessly, in bare feet and a flimsy silk kimono clutched around what Lilah knew was nakedness beneath. In unison, the three turned away from her, and went around the side wall to view the unbearable.

If Roddy had expected Jonathan to take manful charge, creating reassuring order from chaos, he was disappointed. Their neighbour simply stood staring at Sam for what felt like several minutes.

Sam was wearing a khaki-coloured cotton shirt and a pair of old faded trousers which he favoured in warm weather. The belt was unfastened and the buckle end of it flopped loose, just visible through the leaves and stalks of the nettle patch. He had sunk further into the nettles since Roddy and Lilah had first found him; some of the plants had begun to spring back to their former position, partly hiding him from view.

‘It is definitely Sam, is it?’ said Jonathan at last.

‘Of course it is,’ Roddy was impatient. ‘We have to
do
something.’

‘We were told off last time for doing too much,’ Lilah reminded him.
Last time
left a ghastly echo in her head – it was halfway to assuming that there might yet be a
next time
as well.

Belatedly Miranda joined them, her feet floundering in Guy’s old wellingtons, making her look clownlike. ‘I’ve phoned the police,’ she said briefly, not looking at Sam, turning her head 
awkwardly away. ‘God knows what they’re going to think.’

‘Who cares what they think!’ Roddy burst out. ‘This is
Sam
and he’s dead.’

‘Easy does it, Rod,’ soothed Jonathan. ‘It’ll be all right.’

‘It won’t though,’ said Lilah, her voice too loud in the fragile morning. ‘We’ll really have to sell the farm now.’

‘What?’ Miranda queried, faintly. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Think about it,’ said the girl, harshly. ‘How can we possibly manage?’

‘Don’t worry about that now,’ Jonathan told her. He seemed to have decided that his most useful role was as a calming influence in the midst of all the horror. All he succeeded in doing was irritating both Roddy and Lilah, who were beginning to realise that his presence was contributing nothing at all.

Three policemen came this time, which everyone immediately understood was unusual. Den was not amongst them, and Lilah crazily assumed that he had been forbidden to come because of the personal connection. She was sure he’d told her he was on duty today. Only later did she realise that his shift probably didn’t start until eight or nine a.m. The three men had extremely 
serious faces. They walked all around Sam, and one of them pushed gingerly through the nettles to examine him, his hands raised to avoid stings. ‘Has anybody called the doctor?’ he demanded. One of his colleagues grunted an affirmative, and watched impassively as the more intrepid one felt Sam’s neck for a pulse, and gently turned him to look at his face, befoe letting him roll back to his original position.

Jonathan’s presence felt intrusive to Lilah now. An outsider, nosing his way into their trouble, breaking the boundary that would have kept this new death strictly in the family.
Thank God
, she thought,
that he didn’t bring his dog
.

‘Should we have called a doctor?’ she asked.

The leading policeman shook his head. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said. ‘We’ve got someone on the way.’

The other two men muttered to each other, a rapid exchange of jargonised information. Lilah heard ‘inquest’ and ‘a string of murders’. They looked even more serious now, if that was possible.

Then they all began to cast around for clues, or so it appeared to Lilah, looking at the ground; striding first to one corner, then another; peering into the tractor shed and the deserted and dusty winter cowshed. ‘Any sign of a weapon?’ one of them asked. Nobody spoke. 

‘It might’ve been Daddy’s gun,’ said Lilah, before she stopped to think. ‘Someone stole it from Sam’s room.’

Everyone stared around the yard again, as if expecting to see a gun propped neatly against one of the walls or gateposts. The man with Sam in the nettles stirred cautiously with his foot, trying to see whether it might be underneath the body.

The thought struck Lilah for the very first time that Sam might have committed suicide. He might have deliberately hidden the gun, planning to use it on himself one depressed morning, when the dawn brought nothing but dogged work and misery and hopelessness. She stared at each sombre face in turn, wondering if she’d been slower than everyone else and whether they’d all taken suicide for granted from the start. Only Miranda held her eye, and Lilah could see the same thought on her mother’s face. ‘Might he have shot himself?’ she said, the question almost a whisper.

‘Of course not!’ scorned Roddy. ‘Who’d shoot himself in the middle of a patch of nettles? Anyway, the gun isn’t here.’

‘Could you show me where the gun usually lives?’ asked the man who’d raised the matter.

Lilah summoned meagre resources of energy to explain. ‘After my father died, Sam said he would take care of it, and he put it in a little gap beside the chest of drawers in his room. It 
wouldn’t really have shown to anyone who didn’t know it was there. But it went missing. Sam and I noticed it was gone on Friday. We were worried, of course …’ This wasn’t true of Sam, she remembered. He had been strangely unconcerned. For some reason, she withheld this recollection, and seized on familiar excuses. ‘Everyone here has been so busy, and we hadn’t any idea who could have taken it, so we just sort of … forgot about it.’ It sounded flimsy, even to her own ears. She didn’t expect the police to understand that after everything that had happened, the loss of the gun had not seemed very important, even to her.

‘Will you show us his room, please?’

Lilah waved a hand at Roddy. ‘He can do it. I’m … just not up to it. Sorry.’

Roddy shrugged, and began to walk back to the house. The man followed him. They were gone for five minutes, and came back empty-handed.

‘No sign of a gun,’ confirmed the policeman.

‘Lilah told you there wouldn’t be,’ said Miranda sourly. She looked at each policeman in turn, defying them to speak. Her kimono was coming open as she relaxed her hold on it. It seemed to Lilah that everyone noticed this at once.

‘Mum, why don’t you go and get dressed?’ she said, briskly. ‘You must be cold in that.’

Carelessly, Miranda looked down at herself. ‘If I’m offending anyone, I suppose I should – but 
you’re not so respectably dressed yourself, you know,’ she said to Lilah harshly, and turned to leave. She didn’t react when another car squeezed into the yard and stopped directly behind Jonathan’s, boxing him in. Instead she continued her clumping progress back to the house. Lilah immediately felt naked, exposed; she wondered whether she could get back to the house without making a fool of herself. Her whole body felt battered and sore from the tornado of emotions still raging through it.

‘Now then,’ said the junior policeman, emerging cautiously from the nettles, and pulling a pad and pencil from his pocket, ‘time for some questions. Who was the first to find the – er, gentleman?’

‘Sam. He’s called Sam,’ Roddy said. ‘Sam Carter. Lilah and I found him together. We both heard the shots and the scream.’

‘Is he a relative of yours?’ The man had produced a notebook and pencil.

‘No. He works here,’ said Roddy, who was sounding confident and in control, getting into his stride. Lilah felt a surge of admiration for him.

‘Is it all right if I go and get dressed?’ she asked. The policeman with the notepad nodded. Jonathan was standing a little to one side, looking as if he felt superfluous.
Which he is
, thought Lilah, with a touch of bitterness. 

The police doctor from the newly-arrived car somehow found his way to the spot and winced when he saw the nettles. Then with a deep breath he plunged in to begin his examination. Lilah didn’t look. This was the part she had skipped last time, and her nerve was no stronger now. She hurried to the house, and made for her bedroom. Only after several minutes did she come out, and then it was to stay with her mother in the kitchen.

Miranda had made a pot of tea, and was smoking a rare cigarette. Lilah noticed that she was shaking. ‘They’ll be coming in for more questions in a minute,’ Miranda said. ‘Not that there’s much to tell them. I can’t work out the business of the gun, can you? Did Sam hear someone, and come out, and find someone with it, and then the person – whoever it was – shot him with it? With Guy’s gun? Is that how it was?’ Her words were staccato, sharp; shock and fear were plain on her face.