Dead Man Riding (9 page)

Alan said, ‘Meredith's found a barn that might do.' (Although the rest of us were on first-name terms, he remained Meredith. It was a careful judgement by his former pupils. A ‘Mr' in front of it would have been too formal, but he was still a don and too senior in years to us to be ‘Michael'.)

After a little hesitation Alan led the way across the yard and through the gate to the uphill track where I'd walked earlier in the morning. Just past Sid's field there was a gate on the other side, leading to a field of pale grass that had been shaved close for its hay. In the top corner below the wood was a grey stone barn that looked older than the house, pierced by narrow window slits.

‘Behold our college,' Nathan said.

We walked up the field in silence. The view from outside the old barn was even better than from the track, across the flat green fields of the Solway Plain to the sea and the Scottish hills. As we went inside a flock of startled house martins came skittering out over our heads and swung up into a cloudless blue sky. Inside was shadowy and sweet smelling, with shafts of sunlight coming through the window slits and illuminating random areas among the shadows. The new hay crop that had been taken off the field was stacked along one wall but the barn was so big there was still a lot of empty space. Alan and Nathan took the lead in piling up some of the hay trusses to make seats near the open doors of the barn where the light was best, seven hay piles in a semicircle, looking out at the view. We settled ourselves self-consciously, as if on a stage set and waited for somebody to speak. It was Nathan who broke the silence.

‘It's not far from here to the sea, is it?'

Kit said, ‘I don't think we're here to discuss the geography.'

‘I mean, it would be quite easy to get the Old Man away. Down to the coast, off in a fishing boat and in France or somewhere before they know he's gone.'

We all stared. Meredith asked gently what the purpose of that would be.

‘Well, as far as I can see it's either that or wait until they come and arrest him, and we can't do that.'

‘Why not?' Meredith again.

‘Well, he's Alan's great uncle and he seems a nice enough old chap in his way when he's not blazing away at people with shotguns. I take it if we've all decided to stay it means we're on his side and the main thing is to stop them hanging him.'

Midge gasped, ‘They wouldn't hang an old man like him, would they?'

‘Is it worse to hang an old man than a young one?' Meredith asked.

Midge started saying something, but Kit cut in, ‘I suppose you might argue that it's not so bad, because an old man hasn't got so much life left anyway.'

‘But death's an absolute. You can't look at it as if you're slicing cheese—'

‘If you go down that road, you'd say it wasn't so bad to murder an old man as a young man—'

‘Anyway, if he'd wanted to go he'd have gone by now wouldn't he, so—'

Everybody talking at once, then we all stopped at once, waiting for each other to go on. Meredith broke the silence.

‘So we have one practical proposition from Nathan, that we should help a murderer escape justice. Any comments on that?'

Midge said quietly, ‘After all, a man's dead. I don't see how we can get away from that.'

I started saying something, then stopped because Kit was speaking.

‘So you're arguing that we should let justice take its course?'

‘It depends what you mean by justice.' A groan from Kit. ‘It wouldn't be justice to hang an old man for accidentally killing somebody, but—'

‘What do you mean accidentally? By his own account he fired a double-barrelled shotgun twice at a crowd of people.'

‘People who were threatening him,' Midge said. ‘It could count as self-defence.'

‘Are we talking about justice or law?' Meredith asked.

‘Both, I hope.'

‘Essentially you're arguing that we should let the law take its course, but do what we can to influence that course?'

‘By helping him prove self-defence, yes.'

‘So you're against Nathan's proposition of helping him to escape?'

Sounding impatient, Alan said, ‘He wouldn't go anyway. He wouldn't leave his horses.'

It was his first contribution to the discussion. Up to that point he and Imogen had been the sitting at the far ends of the semicircle, not saying anything. Nathan looked disappointed. He'd clearly been enjoying the prospect of night escapes and fishing boats.

‘So we wait until the police come for him, then get him a good lawyer, is that it?'

I said, ‘Doesn't it seem odd that the police haven't arrested him by now? After all, it must have happened more than a month ago. If it did happen.'

‘Something happened,' Alan said. ‘He thinks he killed somebody, even knows who.'

‘Mawbray, son of the magistrate, whoever he may be. But all we know is that on a particular night your uncle fired on a group of people in the dark and since then nobody's seen Mawbray's son. Even that assumes that your uncle's account is more or less what happened – and that's making a big assumption.'

‘You think he's lying, Nell?'

‘Not lying exactly. But he's a man with a strong sense of drama, to put it mildly.'

‘There's the other barn,' Alan said. ‘It really was burnt.'

Midge said, ‘Then there were those boys.'

‘Yes, shouting “murderer”. But even at best, all that would prove is that some people think he's a murderer – or choose to pretend they think he's a murderer.'

Nathan clutched his head and groaned. ‘Any minute now she's going to start talking about that tree.'

We stared at him. ‘What tree?'

‘You know, the one in the quad and whether it still exists if there's nobody around to see it existing. No?'

‘Not unless you want me to.'

‘No. So you're saying it's all moonshine – the Old Man never killed anybody and nobody thinks he did, they're all just pretending to think he did.'

‘Has Nathan given a fair summary, Miss Bray?' Meredith sounded amused. I knew I'd pushed my argument further than it deserved, but didn't want to back down.

‘Fair enough.'

‘Can you explain why they should all be acting in this way?'

‘Let's go back to that Mafeking meeting of his. Accepting for the sake of argument that it happened more or less as he told it—'

Alan interrupted, ‘I accept that at any rate. It's exactly the kind of lunatic thing he would do.'

‘Or brave,' Midge said quietly.

‘Lunatic or brave,' I said, ‘we accept that he did it, and it obviously made him enemies. Let's take another jump and assume some people really did come on to his land and burn down his barn, and he and Robin really did go out and fire at them.'

‘So you're accepting his story after all?' Kit said.

‘No. Here's where I start questioning it. From his account, the only reason for thinking he killed Mawbray's son is that nobody's seen the man, or the boy or whoever he is, since that night. Doesn't that allow two possible interpretations?'

‘More than that,' Meredith said quietly.

Nathan cut in, more loudly, ‘I think I see what Nell's getting at. The Old Man shoots at Mawbray's son in the dark and misses. Mawbray's son goes into hiding and his friends pretend he's dead to get the Old Man hanged.'

I think we all wished that he wouldn't talk so breezily about being hanged. It gave the thing too much hard reality.

‘They might not intend to go that far. Perhaps when they decide he's suffered enough, Mawbray's son will come out of wherever he's been hiding – or back from wherever he's gone – and they'll pretend it's all a great joke.'

‘Pretty cruel joke,' Kit said. ‘So what Nell's saying is nobody's dead at all?'

‘I'm suggesting it's a possibility.' I'd been carried along by the argument and wasn't as sure as I'd pretended. I'd never have admitted it at the time, but I can see now I wanted to impress Meredith. If I had, he was showing no obvious signs of it.

Imogen said slowly, ‘One thing about Nell's version – it explains what the housekeeper woman was hinting at last night – that we shouldn't believe the story. If she'd heard local rumours…' Her voice trailed away and we waited for her to go on, but she didn't. She was carefully not looking at Alan.

‘If she knows it's all a nasty joke, why doesn't she tell the poor old chap?' Nathan asked.

And Kit answered, ‘Maybe she doesn't like him.'

I opened my mouth and shut it again. She'd shown no sign of dislike when he was stroking her haunch, but I couldn't bring myself to tell them about it.

There was silence for a while, then Meredith asked if we thought we'd made any progress. Kit, who seemed to have taken on the job of group spokesman as usual, thought not.

‘We haven't even gone round in circles, we've gone backwards. We started with what our ethical responsibilities would be if the Old Man's a murderer, then we were talking like lawyers about reducing it to manslaughter, now we're wondering if anybody's dead at all.'

‘Fair summary,' Meredith said. ‘Any conclusions?'

Midge said diffidently, ‘At least we're talking about facts. Either Mawbray's son is alive or he isn't.'

‘Indisputable,' Kit drawled. For some reason, Midge seemed to annoy him.

‘All right, stating the obvious. But surely there's something we could do to find out.'

Nathan said, ‘We might start by finding out who he is, or was.'

*   *   *

So we gave up any pretence of philosophic discussion and got down to ways and means. The problem was that we had only three possible sources of information at Studholme Hall. Of those, one was the suspect himself, another Dulcie Berryman who had offered one questionable piece of evidence, and then there was Robin who'd hardly uttered a word since we arrived. Widening the net was essential but that meant going back to the town or around the Old Man's neighbours and we felt we were in hostile territory. It was odd how quickly that feeling had grown on us. I supposed we simply weren't used to people disliking us and were too young to have developed thick skins.

It was Nathan who came up with both the simplest and most alarming suggestion – that we ask the police. He pointed out that it could hardly make things worse. If they were on the point of arresting the Old Man, at least we should know about it. If the whole thing might be the yokels' idea of a joke, we should know that too. At the very least, the police would know about Mawbray's son. Since we could hardly descend in a body on the local police station, Alan and one other should go. Alan looked unhappy, but agreed.

‘You've got standing after all,' Kit said. ‘I suppose you're the nearest relative.'

‘My father's probably that, but he and the Old Man quarrelled decades ago, so I'm the nearest one on speaking terms.'

Meredith agreed to go with him. As Alan's tutor (or more strictly, former tutor) he'd add weight to the deputation. The next question was when. Obviously not that day, because we'd been talking all morning and it would be too late for them to walk to town and back. Tomorrow then? But the next day was Saturday, so by the time they got to the police station it might be closed for the weekend and Sunday was out of the question. Monday morning then, a good comfortable few days away. On Monday morning we'd definitely start doing something. It seems strange now to think how fast and how slowly time seemed to move that summer – as if we were living simultaneously in both centuries, the more leisurely nineteenth and the hurrying twentieth into which time had just tipped us. While we sat up there in our barn below the wood at the top of the hill we could enjoy the view and choose to be part of it or not. And if we chose to be part of it then we could take our time, make our own terms with it. Even on that morning the barn was already becoming for us a kind of sanctuary, a philosophers' porch. Which was why nobody seemed very surprised when Alan made his proposal.

‘We'll live here. I don't see how I can stay under the Old Man's roof and go calmly down to the police station and ask if he's killed somebody. There's enough hay to sleep an army, we've brought some food with us and we'll get more from town. We'll move our books in and do some reading the way we'd intended.'

Instant agreement from Kit. Nathan added, ‘Anything but that confounded parlour again.'

Alan said, ‘I'm sure the Old Man will find you a room in the house, Meredith. After all, you're in a rather different position.'

‘On the contrary, I'm in exactly the same position as the rest of you. It's a perfectly good barn.'

I thought wistfully how good it would be to go to sleep in the sweet-smelling hay and wake up to the house martins' twittering but knew it would be no use.

‘What about us?' Midge said.

‘You'll stay in the house. At least you have a bed there.'

Imogen said instantly, ‘I'm not staying in Dulcie Berryman's bed.'

Alan turned from anxious to downright miserable, as he always was when he thought he'd offended her.

‘I'll speak to him. We'll find somewhere.'

I asked if we weren't bound, like the men, by the ethical impossibility of staying under the Old Man's roof but didn't get an answer because somebody spotted the wagonette going down the drive to the house, loaded with all our luggage. There was a surge downhill, Nathan running to get to it and start setting up their camp, Kit following at good pace in spite of his injury, then Midge and Imogen. Alan hung back to talk to me.

‘What's wrong with Imogen?'

‘What do you mean?'

‘She's been avoiding me all day, hardly said a word to me.'

‘She's tired.'