A Dirty Death (33 page)

Lilah knew then that she had been doubly blessed. ‘She’s all right!’ she screamed, alarming herself and Roddy at the force and volume of her words.

Miranda gave a little shrug. She was paler than Lilah had ever seen her, with strange mauve smudges under her eyes. She was gripping herself by the upper arms, as if cold, and kept glancing at the car quickly, then away again.

Lilah turned to the numerous policemen. ‘She’s cold,’ she said accusingly, nodding towards her mother. One of them caught her eye.

‘Right,’ he said, as if receiving an order. ‘John, 
there’ll be a blanket in the back of your car.’ Another man headed vaguely for the gap in the hedge and the parked cars.

Lilah realised that the apparent inactivity was because everyone’s attention was drawn to the proceedings in and beside the car. They seemed tensely coiled, waiting for some climax yet to come. The siren of an ambulance preceded the vehicle along the lane, but nobody turned away from the man inside the car. With Miranda out of the way, two of them were able to crawl in and assess his condition.
He’s sure to be dead
, thought Lilah, dispassionately.

But slowly, a second miraculous birth was being enacted. Inch by inch, feet first, he was being extracted from his metal womb. As a pair of clean blue trainers appeared, a new sound filled the void: an eerie, despairing shriek from the emerging man. Not so much pain, Lilah felt, as misery and failure and fear.

All in a moment there was a man lying on the ground, moaning and cursing, blood on his face and head, and something seriously wrong with his right shoulder. Two men knelt beside him, two more approached. One of them dangled a pair of handcuffs. ‘How is he?’ he demanded, his tone impatient and gruff.

‘He’ll live,’ somebody said.

‘That’s all I wanted to know,’ growled the 
man. Then he took a breath, and intoned the police caution, familiar from countless television dramas. And Lilah tentatively stepped closer for a proper look at Terry’s face.

He was younger than she’d imagined, looking no more than twenty-six or seven, and his face was shockingly, agonisingly, familiar.

Miranda had received a letter from Barbara, which she showed to anybody who might be interested. ‘That’ll explain it, I expect,’ she said to Sylvia, who had remained by her side throughout Sam’s funeral. She pulled the blue envelope from her bag and handed it to her friened. She knew the contents off by heart, and recalled it as she watched Sylvia read.

Tim Rickworth also had a letter, which he showed to Jonathan. He had found it on the kitchen table when he finally got home after the great chase.

Lilah made her apologies to her mother as they left the churchyard and Sam’s grave. ‘I promised I’d go and see Den this afternoon,’ she said.

‘Of course,’ Miranda acknowledged. ‘I thought you went every afternoon, anyway.’

‘I do,’ smiled the girl. ‘Shall I give him your love?’

Sylvia glanced from mother to daughter, surprised at the banter. ‘You two seem remarkably happy,’ she commented. ‘In the circumstances.’

It was early afternoon before Lilah located Den in his new room, lying in a high metal bed. She leant over him; the side of his face was covered now, from temple to jaw. He was awake, staring at the 
ceiling. Then his eyes turned to her, and she watched a smile dawn. She reached out a hand and found his. ‘Does it hurt?’ she mouthed, not sure whether any voice came through the choking emotion in her throat. He shook his head, making the slightest movement, and winced. The contradiction seemed amusing to her, and she grinned.

Then he winked at her, the self-consciousness of it making him appear boyish, vulnerable. To her, he wasn’t any longer a policeman, but a valued ally in the insanity that had exploded all around them. And more than that, he was someone who had nearly died, because of something rotten in her family, and for whom she now felt responsible.

‘How was the funeral?’ he asked.

She grimaced. ‘It was horrible. But I’d say the case is now closed, apart from a few lingering questions.’

‘Don’t ask me for answers,’ he whispered. ‘I’m meant to be resting.’

‘Just one thing, if you’re up to it.’ He waited. ‘What’s happened to Tim Rickworth? He’s turned into a completely different person.’

‘That’s an easy one,’ he said. ‘He used to be in the SAS – still on the payroll, as far as I know. It makes him good in a crisis.’

‘Are you saying that the police asked him to come out on the farm? As a security thing?’ 

Den nodded and grinned crookedly. ‘Good idea, eh?’

Lilah pursed her lips thoughtfully. ‘I’d rather you’d told us,’ she said. ‘But yes, it was quite a good idea.’

On the day after his capture, Lilah had obtained permission to visit Terry, escorted by a policeman. He was in the same hospital as Den, kept under twenty-four-hour guard. He had a smaller facial dressing than Den’s, and his arm in a rigid splint.

‘I’m Lilah,’ she told him. ‘Your half-sister. I wanted to meet you and try to understand what you’ve done.’

He stared at her through furious brown eyes, set in their sockets exactly as Guy’s had been. His mouth went thin, pulled straight at the sides, so that he looked just as Guy would look when enraged by a disobediant farm animal.

‘I didn’t touch your old man,’ he snarled. ‘I wasn’t even in the county that night, and I can prove it.’

She stared at him. She had thought she was ready for anything, but it was a bad shock to find that he was stupid. Guy would have tolerated almost anything but stupidity in his children.

‘We know you didn’t kill him,’ she said coldly. ‘It was Elvira. Hasn’t anybody told you she confessed?’ 

Terry’s face went blank, and then he began to try to sit up, wrestling with the bedcovers. ‘Where is she?’ he demanded. ‘What have they done to her? I told her to stay safely in the woods.’

His concern was another surprise. ‘They found the hideout,’ she said, a spark of pleasure igniting at his panic. ‘That all happened yesterday. She’s been charged with killing Daddy and Sam. She
confessed
. The police are assuming that you were with her when she shot Sam.’

The policeman sitting near the door cleared his throat. When she looked at him, he shook his head. ‘Er—’ he said, worry puckering his face, ‘I don’t think …’

‘Oops. Sorry.’ Lilah said unapologetically. She turned back to her half-brother. ‘I’m not supposed to tell you. They probably didn’t know that I knew, come to think of it.’

Terry continued to struggle. The policeman opened the door and called a nurse. ‘Calm down, lad,’ he admonished. ‘There’s not a thing you can do about it.’

Terry threw himself back against the pillows, knocking his head on the metal bedhead. ‘Elvira!’ he moaned in anguish.

‘I saw you together,’ Lilah told him. ‘You make a funny couple, I must say.’

‘She’s a darling,’ he said, the Irishness of his voice making the word rich and warm. 

Oh my God, he really loves her
, Lilah realised. The desire to hurt him dribbled away. He’d made enough mess of his life already, without any help from her. But she had more to say yet, and despite a nagging sense of wrongness, she blurted it out.

‘He was a good father to us,’ she said. ‘Though he had his faults. I can understand that it wasn’t like that for you. I know you got Elvira to kill him for you, which makes it your crime at least as much as hers. He didn’t deserve that. I hope they put you in prison for a long time, for what you’ve done to me and Roddy. However bad things were, you’ve only made it much worse.’

He stared at her, his mouth twitching, and said nothing. She could see no remorse on his face.

‘I’m going in a minute,’ she said quietly. ‘But first I must ask you – why Sam? That still doesn’t make any sense to me.’

He closed his eyes and she thought for a moment he might refuse to answer her. But then his eyelids snapped up, and the look of hatred was there again. ‘That should have been
me
,’ he spat. ‘
Me
living on the farm, being his son. Leo never wanted any of it, but I did. I remember that Sam when I was little, when Dad lived with us. It was always
Sam Carter’s ten times brighter than you’ll ever be
. I hated him for as long as I can remember. Then, when I knew he was going to run the farm, 
that finished it. He remembered me, too. Said I looked just the same.’

‘So we were right – you
were
with Elvira when she shot him.’

He shook his head slightly. ‘Got more sense than that,’ he said. ‘Made sure of an alibi, like the last time. I visited your precious Sam a week or two after the old man’s funeral. Told him not to say anything. Showed him a picture of his boss the way I remembered him. Told him I’d get you and your little brother too, if he said a word about me visiting. Scared stiff, he was.’

All Lilah could do was turn away in sorrow.

Father Edmund wondered whether he was the first person to fit the whole puzzle together. Motive, opportunity, means. His inadequacy had lain in failing to convince the police when he had taken Amos to speak to them two days earlier, although at that point the truth was still partially obscured. He had needed to speak to Phoebe before the veil was ripped away completely.

She had been sitting on a garden chair on the scrubby patch of grass outside her cottage when he arrived. She barely even looked at him.

‘They have Elvira,’ he said, to show her that he knew. ‘I’m sure they’ll treat her gently, a girl like her.’

‘They’ll be saying she’s evil, to do what she 
did. They don’t understand that she can’t tell right from wrong. That’s your department, isn’t it, Father? Can you explain it to them? That she was just a pawn in that man’s hands?’

‘Of course,’ he assured her, more robustly than he really felt.

‘He told her he’d marry her. That they’d be rich with her inheritance from Amos. You know the man I mean?’ She was clutching herself, with both hands, and her face was grey.

‘I do,’ he said. ‘I know him and I know his mother. And I see it all now.’

He went to call at Redstone that same evening. When Miranda answered the door to his knock, limping from a bruised leg, he walked in before she could refuse him entry. ‘You might be interested in what I have to tell you,’ he said.

Together they went into the living room, where Lilah and Roddy already sat, watching something mindless on television. ‘Switch it off,’ said Miranda, and invited the vicar to sit down in Guy’s armchair.

‘Hello, Mr Larkin,’ said Lilah with unconcealed hostility. ‘What brings you here?’

‘He says he’s got something to tell us,’ her mother explained.

‘Can’t think what,’ said Roddy. ‘It’s all obvious now.’ 

‘What do you mean, boy – obvious?’ The vicar was already losing his fragile composure.

Lilah interposed. ‘There’s a pattern to the whole thing,’ she said slowly, tiredly. ‘It’s all about fathers. Fathers and people letting each other down.’ She sighed. ‘Funny, you call yourself “Father” as well, don’t you? And you’ve been just as useless as the others.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ he blustered. ‘I didn’t come here—’

‘It’s true, though,’ said Roddy.

The vicar sat back, fighting an urge to get up and run away. He was horrified by what was happening. The last thing he’d expected was that it would all rebound on him. Any tracks he might have left had been carefully covered – or so he believed.

Roddy resumed the attack. ‘You haven’t been
fatherly
at all, have you? Jonathan says you knew Terry was hanging around here. You knew he’d come to confront Dad about being abandoned as a kid. You just sat back and let all this happen.’

The boy was on his feet now, fists clenched, pouring out a lifetime of dislike for the man in front of him.

Lilah took over, more gently. ‘You see,’ she said, ‘all this happened because people failed as fathers. Amos was Elvira’s father, but he never faced up to it. He just carried on, hoarding money for no 
reason, cutting himself off. Now Phoebe’s dying—’

‘What?’ The vicar didn’t try to conceal his amazement. ‘I’ve just seen her, this afternoon.’

‘She’s got cancer. So she needed someone to look after Elvira, and she told the girl who her father was, and said they’d find a way to make him take care of her. Phoebe didn’t know about Terry. She just thought she could bully or shame Amos into doing what she wanted. When Isaac was killed, that must have seemed pure good luck to her – or witchcraft. Elvira repeated her mother’s intentions to Terry, who decided it made more sense to kill both Isaac and Amos, so Elvira could have all the money directly. After all, Terry really does love Elvira. He wanted to look after her. He decided to kill both the Grimms, but he made a hash of it, which is probably typical.’

The vicar felt the ground disappearing from beneath his feet. He hadn’t dreamt that the Beardons would be so well informed. But he fought to regain some credibility.

‘Terry told Elvira he’d marry her,’ he offered, in a humble tone. ‘Isn’t that something just a bit … redemptive?’

‘They fell in love,’ Lilah confirmed. ‘So perhaps that’s right. Redemptive,’ she repeated slowly. ‘That sounds rather nice.’

‘They had a camp in the Mabberley woods,’ she went on. ‘From about Easter onwards. He 
was backpacking, pretending to be an ordinary tourist. That’s when the Wing Commander saw him. He must have met Elvira somehow. And he saw Dad in town and confronted him. Cappy was there, but couldn’t see Terry’s face.’

‘And Guy told him to bugger off, which was a great mistake,’ Miranda contributed. ‘A fatal mistake, in fact.’

‘We’re only guessing on that, but Cappy did think there was a major argument going on,’ Lilah went on. ‘He had an old photo of Dad, which might have helped him recognise him. Or Elvira could have pointed him out.’

‘Anyway, they plotted to kill both their fathers,’ Roddy summed up. ‘Only they swapped, to confuse everybody.’

‘Which was quite clever,’ said Lilah. ‘I just wish Daddy could have known about it. In a weird way, I think he’d have been rather impressed. And I suppose it would be easier to kill someone else’s father, rather than your own,’ she added.

‘What I don’t completely understand is Sam,’ said Miranda, with a forlorn sniff. ‘I’m still confused about that. I understand Terry’s jealousy. I always thought Guy was unfair about that, the way he would talk about his own boys in comparison with Sam. But how did Terry know that Sam was part owner of Redstone? Lilah thinks that was the final straw for him.’