Death of a Friend (29 page)

‘Mr Aspen, would you please tell us honestly, did you believe that Clem Nesbitt was being sexually abused?’ Den hoped he wasn’t spoiling any delicate strategy of the Inspector’s, by being so direct; he was encouraged by Smith’s passive acceptance of the question.

Clive’s mouth worked oddly. He kept his eyes fixed on the desk. ‘I think he was frightened and unhappy. His whole demeanour changed last autumn, a few weeks into the term. It was at the same time as Charlie Gratton started spending a lot of time at High Copse.’

‘And you leapt to a wholly unjustified conclusion, didn’t you, sir?’

Clive raised his eyes to meet Den’s for the first time. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said stubbornly.

Raising a forefinger to interrupt Den, Smith returned to the fray.

‘This … um …
experience
you had at Bradstone. Was anyone else there at the time?’

‘No, of course not. Except—’

‘Yes?’

‘There were other riders on the road outside. It’s a very quiet road. There’s a large farm close by and two or three houses. One of the houses has a stable block, not far from the church. There was a commotion from the horses. I’d tied Hotspur up near the church gate and he joined in. Someone was riding a big horse quite fast along the path. It rises steeply up from the river valley and I heard the hooves.’

‘But you didn’t see it?’

‘Only a brief glimpse through the trees. It was definitely big – I’d say a hand bigger than Hotspur. But I wasn’t very interested. You see—’

Smith held up his hand. ‘Yes, I know. You were otherwise engaged,’ he said. ‘Have you ever been to High Copse Farmhouse?’ he added suddenly.

Clive shook his head minimally. ‘Never,’ he said.

‘And you deny killing Charlie Gratton?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘All right, sir. Interview terminated at … 12.45 p.m. on Saturday 10th April. You’re free to go, Mr Aspen, but I strongly suggest that you stay in close touch with your doctor, in the light of last night’s episode. It strikes me that you are in need of help, although I’m not officially qualified to judge, of course. We can provide you with an emergency number, if the situation flares up again over the next two days. Your
wife is waiting for you at the front desk and she undertakes responsibility for your wellbeing. Do you understand, sir?’

‘Of course,’ said Clive, standing up slowly, leaning his weight on the table momentarily, as if about to fall. Den realised he probably hadn’t slept at all the previous night. ‘Thank you, Inspector.’

Den waited for the post-mortem on the interview, trying to guess Smith’s conclusion from the bizarre encounter he had just witnessed. The two men went to the canteen for a much-needed lunch. ‘Gut feelings?’ the Inspector prompted.

‘A clever nutcase,’ Den began. ‘All over the place as far as normal emotions go. Definitely ought not to be let loose in a primary school.’

‘But did he kill Charlie?’

Den hesitated, rerunning Clive’s flat denial, rummaging inside himself for the elusive gut feeling. ‘Maybe not,’ he managed indecisively. ‘I mean, the motivation isn’t very strong, is it? And how would he have known where to find Charlie that day?’

‘Spur of the moment? Riding over there on the offchance? Red mist sort of thing?’

Den scratched an earlobe. ‘I don’t know, sir. There doesn’t seem to be the slightest scrap of evidence, other than the fact that Hotspur was
known to kick out. And what about that other horse he says he saw?’

Smith shrugged. ‘The place is crawling with horses. And he might be trying to throw us off the scent. So we’re a little way off a conclusion yet. But let’s not despair, eh?’

‘I’m still going to Ashburton, then?’

‘Oh yes. And when you get back from there, you are finally,
definitely
, going to talk to Lady Hermione Nesbitt. It might be five o’clock, or even later, but you’re not going home until it’s done. And then, once you’ve written up all the reports, and assured me there are no more unturned stones out there, you can have tomorrow in peace – probably.’

‘Right, sir.’

Smith rapped a finger on the table. ‘I’m not unhappy with your work on this, Cooper, but I’m not blinded with admiration, either. However it ends up, you’ll have learnt something. Whatever mistakes you’ve made on this one, I won’t want to see them made another time. Understand?’

Mistakes
? The choice of word didn’t bode too well for his chances of promotion. ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said meekly.

‘I’m not telling you off, lad. I just want you to stay on your toes. Now, I’ve warned Phil you two are in for a heavy afternoon. He’s coming
in at two, so you’ve got half an hour or so to gather your thoughts. The Moor’s going to be thick with grockles, and it’s a fair old way to Ashburton. Off you go, now.’

‘Right, sir,’ said Den.

Den decided to go for a short walk while he waited for Phil Bennett. Walking often helped to settle his thoughts, and the Gratton murder had got under his skin in unexpected ways. It had been peculiar from the outset, linked as it was in his mind with the bizarre death of Nina Nesbitt. If Frank Gratton – who stubbornly remained as Den’s favourite suspect – had killed Charlie, then the death of Nina would turn out to have no connection, unless something momentous had taken place during Frank’s meeting with her not long before she died, which Den doubted. The Cattermoles presumably had done no more than inadvertently provide the venue for the deed.
Full of holes, lad
, DI Smith’s comment reverberated,
and Den could see what he meant. Motive, yes; means, definitely. Opportunity, however, was very much less obvious. How did you hang about inconspicuously on a large horse in someone else’s field, waiting for your victim to happen by? At the very least, you’d need information on where he was likely to be at a given moment. And for that, Frank would have needed to be in communication with someone at High Copse. In which case, it seemed, after all, that the Cattermoles may have had a part to play in the killing of Charlie.

He turned his thoughts to the events of the previous morning, and the revelations from Mandy Aspen. Whichever way you looked at it, Clive Aspen was going to need watching. The Social Services would probably have to be brought in, and the old sledgehammer and nut routine would be set in motion. Teachers interviewed, references checked, children observed; unlikely scenarios put forward as obvious fact.

Den was as confused and uneasy about child abuse as anyone. He was, however, convinced that it was much too easy to cause real harm in the pursuit of faint suspicions; that it was even possible to introduce a climate of damage where all was harmless innocence before. His natural common sense cried
Witch-hunt
and
Hysteria
when listening to some of the more excessive
briefings from so-called experts on the subject.

With his mind still focused on Clem and the complexities inherent in extracting objective truth from a child, he decided he’d been enough of a wimp for one day. If he walked briskly, he could get as far as the edge of Dartmoor and back before he had to meet Phil. Up Station Road, straight on and like magic you were on the Moor before you knew it.

From the hill above the town he could look back over a grid of new houses where once there had been fields. He remembered roaming free with the family dog, getting out of the house where his parents were too bound up with each other to take much notice of him.

Outside the last row of houses before the edge of town, he noticed a little boy crouched on the pavement, intently examining something at his feet. About six or seven, with a halo of curly blond hair, he was a child of eye-catching beauty. Den’s instant reaction was to regard him as a potential victim. Any predator could come along in a car, and scoop up the child in seconds. The whole thing was so vivid in his mind, he could actually feel the small, wriggling body against his own chest, as if he himself were the abductor. He almost approached the child, to tell him to get home, where it was safe.

And then he stopped himself. There was in
reality nothing dangerous in what the lad was doing. His home was a few feet away, his mother probably keeping an eye on him from one of the windows. He was old enough not to run in front of any cars – which was by far the worst hazard. With a deep frown, Den carried on walking, accelerating his pace slightly, in case the sight of him alarmed either the boy or an observing parent.

Something new had occurred to him, something that was slowly taking shape in his mind. Something about the whole logic of society’s attitude to the abuse of children. Hadn’t he just demonstrated this to himself – and become aware of the most uncomfortable implications? Because the general assumption now was that no child was safe out in the streets alone, didn’t that actively
encourage
the idea of damaging any child thus encountered? Didn’t it give the message – this child is fair game? It’s breaking the rules, behaving irresponsibly, giving itself up as a sacrificial victim? No wonder Clive Aspen had become so obsessed.

And there was something of a catch-22 about all this. Society made loud, hysterical noises about the evil wickedness of child abuse, and kept all its children under lock and key to protect them. But by so doing, it conveyed a general expectation that any child not adequately
protected was fair game, there for the taking. Den knew it was all very well to theorise. He knew what had happened inside himself for a fleeting second. He had seen the little boy as an object of beauty, something it might be gratifying to
touch inappropriately
, as the social workers would say. He had felt the tingle in his own balls, like a tiny current of electricity. It wasn’t enough to know that he would never –
ever
– act on it. That didn’t matter. He had glimpsed the possibility, understood what the great mass of ordinary self-deceiving people said they would never be able to understand. He didn’t think he was uniquely perverted or disgusting. Den believed that if it had happened to him, it could happen to virtually any man alive. And if that was true, then wasn’t his work as a police officer utterly futile, if not impossible?

Or was it in fact even more important than he thought? If everyone was naturally tempted to misbehave, then society required discipline and law enforcement for its very survival. It hung together like a carefully constructed archway, with the police force as the keystone, keeping it all in place. It felt like a precarious role to be playing.

Forcing himself back to the murder of Charlie Gratton for the hundredth time, he applied the new revelation to the people he’d
met over the past ten days. Many of them might qualify as abused children. Frank, seduced by his own mother during the bewildering years of adolescence; Hugh and Clement, shared around the family while their father effectively forgot their existence; Mandy Aspen, bizarrely abused in retrospect by her obsessive husband. And then, he thought ruefully of his own Lilah, who had not enjoyed the most healthy of relationships with her volatile father. He wondered what the emotionally inadequate Nev Nesbitt’s early years had been like, and those of the three fatherless Cattermole girls. The more you delved, the less ‘normal’ anyone’s life appeared to be. The surprise, really, was that there weren’t more murders and abuses perpetrated by these damaged individuals.

He walked as far as the fringe of Dartmoor, where gorse flourished. He could see brilliant yellow flowers glowing luminous in the afternoon light. He remembered his mother saying,
When
gorse isn’t flowering, love’s out of season
, every time they visited the Moor. It had seemed to him just another foolish country saying that gained currency only by being regarded as quaint by people who scarcely knew gorse from blackthorn. But now it provided a welcome counterbalance to his grim musings on the human condition. And it made him think of Lilah. He had parted
from her on a sour note and he ought not to leave it that way.

He turned round, thinking that if he hurried he might have time to phone his fiancée before going to Ashburton. He had not taken a phone with him when he went out. Much of the purpose of the walk had been to escape human entanglements for a while.

But Phil was early and impatient to be off. Den could see that the afternoon was disappearing fast and they needed to reach Frank Gratton’s stables.

Easter Saturday afternoon saw Alexis galvanised into action, as if possessed.

‘We’re going to get this house clean,’ she announced. ‘Wash away all the gloom and doom and focus on the future. Boys, don’t even think of going anywhere. I need your help.’

Hugh made a hissing noise, interpreted by them all as annoyance. ‘I’m going over to Granny’s,’ he said.

‘You can go later. Clem – what about you?’

The younger boy glanced tentatively at Hugh and shrugged. ‘I’m going to Granny’s as well,’ he said, without looking at her.

‘Then we’d better get started right away.’ She assembled an impressive collection of buckets, brushes, sponges, dusters. She vacuumed the
living room carpet and rolled up the rugs. She fetched a ladder and climbed up it to tackle the picture rail, coated as it was with a sooty black deposit. The skirting boards were hardly any better, and she set Clem to scrubbing them clean.

Martha, swept along by the energy and by something oddly appropriate in the timing, did her share. ‘Let me have the ladder,’ she said. ‘We’d better take down the curtains and get them cleaned.’ Alexis made her wait until the picture rails were finished and then turned her attentions to the windows themselves.

‘Where’s Nev?’ asked Hugh as he reluctantly swept cobwebs from walls and furniture with a long-handled feather duster. ‘He should be helping.’

‘He’s around somewhere,’ said Martha. ‘We don’t need any more people in here. We’d just get in each other’s way.’

‘Nina would laugh at us,’ Alexis said, glancing down at Clem, still diligently cleaning the skirting board. ‘But we can’t go on as we did when she was here. It was her fault we never did any cleaning. She despised such housewifely activities. But it’s different now. We’re going to be
normal
. For the kids’ sake, if nothing else.’

Martha shook her head, eyebrows raised in bewilderment. ‘I don’t know about that. But this room’s looking better already.’ She returned to
her struggle with the curtain hooks, stretching perilously from the top of the stepladder.

‘Careful!’ Alexis warned. ‘You’ll have to get down and move it before you can reach the last ones.’ She hovered beneath her sister.

‘Phew,’ panted Martha. ‘What a smell up here! Old dust and cobwebs and smoke from the fire, all mixed together. We should be ashamed of ourselves.’

‘Rubbish! It’s not a sin to let your curtains get dirty. You know what’ll happen, don’t you? If we put them in the machine, they’ll disintegrate. It’s only the cobwebs holding them together.’

‘Then we’ll get new ones,’ said Martha.

‘And we’ll paint every room. Smarten the whole place up. Who knows – when things settle down a bit, we might even think of moving.’

‘We can’t move,’ came Clem’s thin voice. ‘Not ever.’ He stared at his aunt with huge eyes. ‘What about Mum?’

‘That’s right,’ said Martha, descending from the ladder and putting her arm round him. ‘We can’t leave Nina. Who’d buy a house with a grave in the garden, anyway?’

‘Well, that’s that, then,’ said Alexis nastily. ‘Meanwhile we’re going to keep on at this dirt and filth. I won’t live like a tramp any longer. I’ve had enough.’

Martha was placatory. ‘Fine by me. I’ve no
objection to doing some cleaning. Just don’t talk about moving. Whatever you decide to do is your own business, but Richmond and the boys and me are all staying here.’

‘And Nev,’ said Hugh from the corner.

‘Yeah,’ echoed Clem, pulling away from Martha. ‘It’s his
duty
.’

Martha and Alexis looked at each other and then at the child. Nobody spoke. Martha swept dust and dog hair from her black leggings. Clem kept rubbing at the same short stretch of skirting board.

‘You’re right about one thing,’ Martha said with artificial brightness. ‘This place certainly is filthy. First thing on Monday I’m going to Plymouth to buy one of those fancy new vacuum cleaners with a transparent stomach. Richmond can pay for it. I can’t wait to see what it picks up – probably enough hair to make a whole new dog, for a start.’

Nobody even tried to laugh.

On the same afternoon, Silas Daggs was also doing a bit of overdue cleaning. The corgi was sixteen years old and had forgotten everything it had ever been taught about lavatory arrangements. Silas knew he should confine it to the kitchen, where the lino was easier to clean, but he hadn’t the heart, so there were frequent lapses on the
living room carpet. Even he could smell it on this mild afternoon. He threw open the window and tried to assess the extent of the task.

The carpet was a good one. He remembered when it had arrived, in a large van with a lot of other items. He hadn’t expected to be lumbered with so many of his grandfather’s possessions, but he hadn’t objected, either. He and the old man had got along very well, back in the days when Silas was in his thirties and increasingly unlikely to find himself a wife or follow any conventional way of life. His grandfather had understood; they’d gone walking together, birdwatching and speaking little. ‘You’re my favourite,’ he’d confided. ‘The others would make poor use of my good things.’

Hannah had been in Africa and Bill was courting the doe-eyed Eloise, who anyone could see was never going to set the Tamar on fire. She’d been raised on the Moor with four or five older siblings, miles from anywhere. She’d been like a child from a fairytale, who had never quite adjusted to living in the twentieth century.

Silas was uncomfortable with his inheritance, obscurely guilty. He tried to make up for the imbalance in small ways. He watched helplessly as Eloise imprisoned herself in the little house, scared of the big world outside, scared of just
about everything except her firstborn, the silent and inscrutable Frank.

Silas had visited regularly, bringing her a basket of eggs or fruit from the garden. He would sit and talk to Bill for a little while and then go off to find Eloise and little Frank, doing his best to make them laugh, showing them tricks with lengths of string, pointing out different birdcalls in the garden. He even took them a puppy he’d come across on one of the farms; a little collie which they kept for a few months and then passed to someone else when it demanded too much exercise and attention. Eloise had a couple of cats, but Silas noticed she never let them onto her lap or showed them any affection.

He wondered now whether he’d done more harm than good by somehow encouraging her to stay as she was, voluntarily shut away from civilisation in the little cottage, welcoming Bill home from his work with the dairy, waving Frank off to school and then drifting through the day in silent isolation. Silas wondered if he could somehow have got her out, if he could have found her a little job, helped her to make friends, join in with village life. She went to Quaker Meeting, of course, and took her share in the smaller tasks, but she never seemed to belong. He assumed that nobody now remembered her at all. Even Barty White, who had known her for a few years, was
unable to conjure an image of her now, thirty years later.