FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) (24 page)

‘
Try and stay awake, Sylvia. Tell me what you see.’

‘It’s the two elegant men in silver-grey again. They’re talking to me gently. Saying they’re going to examine me and not to be afraid. I tell them
I‘m not afraid, and they get a long metallic tube, steady my legs and push it inside me. I don’t feel pain. I just feel a kind of light-headedness, and I’m thankful they chose me to examine.’

‘And the
grain silo? What’s become of that?’

‘I was mistaken. It wasn’t a
grain silo at all. It’s a beautiful, shimmering room of white metal. I’m deep inside their spacecraft. It’s so peaceful, so clean, so safe. I don’t ever want to leave.’

Arthur Talbot blinked, sat back in his chair and wiped fingers across his forehead.
The poor woman had been drugged, possibly LSD or something similar. She didn’t know what she was experiencing. It was all real to her. But what these two men were really doing was horrendous…

‘And during the time you were in this spacecraft, h
ow many times did these aliens examine you?’

‘Many, many times,’ she said drowsily.

‘And what about Robert Cowper and Christian Phelps, did they return?’

She nodded. ‘It’s difficult to say. Yes, often. I grew afraid whenever I saw them, especially Phelps. He would climb on top of me and… And he would do things,
awful, dirty things, and if I didn’t do as he said he’d hit me.’

‘And
Robert Cowper?’

‘He mainly gave me the needles.’

‘Did he – molest you in the same way?’

She looked like she was about to break down again. ‘Yes. They both treated me like an animal. But the silver-grey men,
when they came they were different,’ she added. ‘They treated me very gently…’

‘OK, Sylvia, for now we’ll skip what happened next. We’ll return to it at a later date. I want you to move forward in time instead. To the time you are about to leave the – the spaceship. Can you do that for me?’

‘Yes, I think so.’

‘So what’s happening?’

‘I’m all alone. They leave me alone a lot. I seem to be back in the grain silo again, but I can’t be certain. My brain seems so fogged up I don’t know where I am anymore. I keep thinking Bruce will be annoyed for not having his tea ready after he comes back from the fields. Then I hear a noise, and as I look across to the door – it’s a kind of trapdoor in the metal sides of the grain silo – I can see a shadow of a man. Bruce, I say? I’m trying to move, but I’m still tied down, and right now I’m feeling the cold and I’m shivering. They’ve put some kind of sacking over my naked body. I can feel its course fibres next to my naked skin. Who’s there? I say it, but I can’t hear myself say it, and I’m not so sure I actually said it. But the man is coming over to me and bending over me…’

‘Can you tell me who it is, Sylvia? Who is this man bending over you?’

‘He says, “God help me,” as he looks down at me. I recognise his face through a kind of fog. It’s Thomas Mollett.’

‘And who is Thomas Mollett?’ asked Talbot.

‘A local man,’ she answered. ‘He’s telling me not to worry, everything’s going to be fine now. He’s here to help me. Tells me he worked out what had happened to me, why I’d gone missing. He’d followed Phelps out here one night. Waited till the two men had left and was now getting me out of there. He’s untying the rope around my wrists and legs. But I still can’t move them. He’s lifting me off the table. He’s got to hold me, because I can’t stand upright. I’m like a newborn puppy trying to find its legs. He takes off his coat and wraps it around my shoulders; it’s warm after being next to his body. We limp towards the door. When I feel the cold night air hit me, the wind and the rain, I start to come to my senses. It’s night time and blowing a gale, but as yet I don’t quite feel it. Thomas Mollett is dragging me across the field…’

‘Where are you now, Sylvia? Where is he taking you?’

‘We’re in a wood. A big, deep wood. We hear voices behind us. A gunshot, like the muffled explosion of a firecracker going off. Thomas looks and sounds frightened. We’re now at the edge of the wood and he’s telling me to run for it. He’ll try and hold them off while I escape. So he turns back and faces them, telling me to get a move on. I do as I’m told. Thomas’s coat falls from my shoulder, but I don’t really notice it, and I wander into the field. I think it’s Flinder’s Field. Yes, it is, I’m sure of it. I look back, but all I see is a flurry of shadows, and I see someone bending down to pick up something. It looks like a log, and I see it strike another shadow. I think it’s Thomas Mollett that’s been hit, and I think to myself that I should go back and help him, but instead I wander across the mud of the field, feeling it squelch between my toes. I go so far and then I see another shadow striding across the field towards me. My mind is starting to clear and I’m beginning to feel the cold stinging of the wind and the rain that’s thrashing the trees all around. I don’t know what’s happening to me. Everything’s become a blur. I can’t remember who I am, what I’m doing here. I think I can see someone – a man. I don’t recognise him at first, not until he comes nearer. It’s Bruce! I’m happy, because I think he has come to get me, to take me away from whatever it is that I’m frightened of back there in the woods. He’s hugging me, kissing me, putting his own coat around my naked body. And now it’s coming back to me…’

Arthur Talbot waited. ‘Go on, Sylvia,’ he pushed.

‘
They came down from the sky and took me!
’ she said, terrified.

And then the blood-chilling screams of Sylvia Tredwin filled the room.

The explosion of truth sent severe, devastating shockwaves through George Lee’s mind.

He pressed the button on the hi-fi and the room fell silent, but he could still hear Sylvia Tredwin’s frantic, spine-chilling screams echoing through his head.

‘Oh my God!’ he said, sitting back in the chair. ‘
Oh my God!
’

His hand was shaking as he took the tape out of the unit and stared hard at it. Not his Uncle
Robert! That was impossible!

B
ut the evidence was overwhelming, as was the fear and the truth in Sylvia Tredwin’s pitiful voice. Robert and Phelps had kidnapped her in order to punish her for an affair with his brother-in-law that simply hadn’t been happening. But not only that, they’d subjected her to intense and unspeakable physical and mental atrocities, Phelps in particular, it seemed, driven by dark, sexual needs – but both men behaving as bad as each other. And what’s worse, they planned to use her for their own twisted, brutal gratification and then kill her, dispose of her body and make everyone believe she’d left Petheram altogether.

He’d known that his uncles had been tearaways in their younger days, heard rumours surrounding their supposed
drug-taking and bullying, their dominance as individuals and as a family within the village. But to think they could take the law into their own hands? To act as judge, jury and executioner?

Poor Sylvia Tredwin, he thought. Targeted because
she was an attractive outsider who, through no fault of her own, fuelled dangerous small-minded jealousies that burned hot in the cold, polite, distant hearts of the good folks of Petheram. All they needed was an excuse. And her supposed affair with a Cowper sister had been enough for Robert and Phelps to hatch and carry out their bizarre plan. That’s why Phelps got involved when Sylvia went missing, and searched his father’s land. Sure, on the face of it he knew the land intimately, so that’s why the search party gave him that section to look over, but that’s where Sylvia had been stashed away, unseen and unheard in his father’s disused grain silo. Phelps wouldn’t want anyone else from the search party sniffing around the place and stumbling upon their little secret.

It also explained why Brendan Mollett’s father, Thomas, had been found dead near the spot Sylvia stumbled into her searching husband.
Robert or Phelps had discovered Sylvia’s escape and had caught up with Thomas Mollett as he urged Sylvia to run from Langland’s Wood; they struck him over the head with a single blow – either with a log they picked up from nearby or with something heavy they carried with them – and then dragged his body so that it lay beneath the tree with the broken bough, carefully placing the bough over his head so that he appeared to have suffered a tragic accident, a result of the storm, an act of God.

But with Sylvia discovered
by her husband, and the police soon involved, Robert and Phelps must have thought the game well and truly over. Except Sylvia had been so traumatised by her experience, so drugged-up during her time in captivity, that it had turned her mind. They must have been breathing huge sighs of relief when she spouted the alien abduction story – something George, even with his limited knowledge of psychology, could understand, given the brutal experience she’d endured, as well as being heavily doused with mind-altering drugs. She retreated into recalling fantasy memories – disturbing in their own right – rather than suffering the full pain of the real ones.

But what of her hypnosis and the tape?

The full truth was all here and yet Arthur Talbot, the hypnotist, had informed D. B. Forde that nothing of any relevance came out of the sessions with Sylvia Tredwin. He did not reveal to the author that she’d confessed she’d been kidnapped and held prisoner, drugged and repeatedly raped; did not tell him that her belief in an alien abduction was the sad result of the drugs she’d been given and the trauma she’d experienced. He kept it very quiet. Why would he do that?

Because he needed the money, George thought. His son William had said as much. He was in desp
erate financial difficulties. Arthur Talbot didn’t reveal to Forde the truth of Sylvia’s disappearance for a very good reason; instead he went straight to his Uncle Robert and tried to blackmail him.

That’s the connection, he thought, with the big black American car and Arthur T
albot’s death. He hadn’t been mugged; it had been made to look like a mugging gone wrong.

The car his uncles were buying for Brendan Mollet
t – the Ford Classic Consul – had been bought from a guy in Gloucester, a little over thirty miles from where Talbot was living in Swindon. Gary, as was usual, would have driven Robert up to buy the car and then left him to drive it back to Petheram; they liked to give old cars a good run to test them so the journey might reveal potential faults that might need rectifying later in the garage. Except Robert used the excuse to make a detour and arrange to meet with Talbot. Whether Talbot and Robert discussed money, or whether he meant to kill him or not, after Robert had stabbed Talbot and made his death look like a mugging, he’d have driven home secure in the knowledge that he had a legitimate reason to be in the area. Any brief time delay between setting off and arriving home – the time he spent meeting with Talbot – could easily be put down to teething troubles with the classic car. But someone did see the distinctive car in the area, and reported it to the police, a drunk on the way home from the clubs. So they dismissed its connection to the murder as being highly unlikely.

So was his Uncle Gary involved in all this?

George Lee hated to admit it, but he felt sure he was. Bruce Tredwin’s death hadn’t been an accident, he knew that for sure. But who had been driving? George thought hard about it. Robert or Gary may have used his father’s car to knock Bruce down – Gary had been very keen to keep the repairs to the car’s wing secret, so he had to have been in on it. Did his uncles then threaten his father to keep quiet about it, maybe tell him they’d tell the police he’d been at the wheel?

There were still too many unanswered questions, but for now George knew more than enough.

He
also had a good idea where Adam Tredwin and the missing Christian Phelps might be.

He stuffed the tapes into his coat pocket and clattered downstairs. Thankfully, only his mother was sitting at the kitchen table. Her face was grey, her eyes tired and hollowed out.

‘Where are my uncles?’ he said.

‘They’ve gone,’ she an
swered faintly. ‘George, you need to see a doctor…’ she said.

He pulled up a chair and sat opposite her. ‘No, I don’t. I know the truth, mother. I’m not crazy, like you’d have me believe.’ He took a tape out of his pocket. ‘I have it all here. It’s Sylvia Tredwin’s confession
while she was under hypnosis. She tells it like it really was.’ He slid the tape back into his coat.

‘I don’t understand. What do you mean hypnosis?’

He shook his head. ‘It’s a long story. The main thing is dad wasn’t having an affair with Sylvia Tredwin.’

She stared at him, uncomprehending. ‘
Affair? Don’t be ridiculous – an affair! Your father?’

‘
You still try to cover it up, don’t you? Can’t admit your marriage wasn’t as firm as you’d like everyone to believe. But the affair never happened. He was teaching her to read, that’s all.’

‘
Teaching her to read?’

‘Nothing more heinous than that. He was meeting up with her regularly just to go through a few
reading lessons. She was illiterate.’

‘
I… I didn’t know,’ she stammered. ‘I thought… Are you certain?’

‘And you told Uncle
Robert about the affair, right?’

She blinked rapidly, but the rest of her face was frozen.
‘Yes, I did. I confided in both your uncles. But what has that got to do with anything?’

‘Sylvia Tredwin’s story of alien abduction was just that
, a fabrication on her part to mask the true horror of what actually happened – Mum, your brothers kidnapped her, kept her locked up in old Phelps’s grain silo, punishing her for her affair with dad.’

‘George! That’s a monstrous thing to say! They’d never do anything like that to anyone. Sylvia Tredwin was crazy. Everyone knew that.’

‘Not so. She sure went crazy afterwards, but it’s what happened to her at the grain silo that drove her there. They raped her, Mum. Drugged her and raped her.’

She rose from her seat. ‘I can’t listen to more of your cruel ramblings, George! It’s too much for me to take!’
She put her hands to her ears, turned away from him.

‘I have proof!’ he said.

‘Get away from me!’ she screeched. ‘Get away from me! You’re evil! Evil!’

Amelia dashed into the room. ‘What’s going on?’

‘It’s George,’ his mother sobbed, ‘he’s saying horrid, horrid things about your uncles. Get him out of here, Amelia. I can’t bear to look at him anymore!’

Amelia’s eyes flashed. ‘Get out!’ she shouted. ‘Get out before I throttle you!’ She cuddled her mother, whose shoulders were jerking as she broke down into a fit of tears.

‘It’s all true,’ George said. He patted his coat pocket where the tapes were. ‘It’s all here. It’s all been recorded.’ He ran breathlessly to the back door. ‘I’m going to where Phelps used to have his grain silo, on the other side of Langland’s Wood. That’s where my uncles kept Sylvia Tredwin prisoner. I’ll prove to you all conclusively that I’m telling you the truth. I finally know what’s been going on. And you think me crazy, huh? Well you’ll see!’

He got into his car and drove quickly out of the village, his heart racing, his mouth sponged dry
, overcome by a sense of reckless urgency. He barely registered the drive up and out of Petheram, climbing the hills along narrow, winding country roads. He finally came to the spot where Brendan Mollett had brought him in his Ford Classic Consul, and parked the car. Stepping over to the fence that bordered the field. In the distance he could see the grain silo and the remains of the dilapidated outbuildings that used to belong to the elder Phelps back in 1974. He clambered over the fence and made his way over the summer-scorched, yellow, dry grass of the field towards the grain silo, on his left the ominous black stretch of dark fir woodland that was Langland’s Wood, a flock of sheep on his right making a bolt for it at seeing him, as if sensing his fiery determination.

Ironically, he thought
as he approached the buildings, the silo looked like a gigantic rusting robot straight out of one of Bruce Tredwin’s 1950s paperbacks. Tall, cylindrical, domed, two crows perched on top of it, ominously silent, regarding him with their bead-black eyes. George paused, looked about him. The buildings hadn’t been used in years, the roofs having collapsed a long time ago, stone filched from the walls for use elsewhere. Old bits of farm machinery, brown with rust, sat amid the tangled scribbles of discarded barbed wire in beds of weeds and grass. Not a soul for miles around. Deathly silent, save for the murmuring of the wind through the gnarled trees that had been allowed to grow around the tired old buildings, like aged sentinels keeping vigil.

It was then he began to doubt himself. Began to doubt the validity of his findings. There was no one here. Why should there be?

Because he
knew
what was going through Adam Tredwin’s mind. Knew it, because, as it turned out, they were very much alike, Adam and he. Kindred spirits, lonely and wallowing in hurt and pain and having to resort to the only salve within reach.

He went over to the large metal door on the grain silo’s side, grabbed the handle and gave it a twist downwards. It resisted, as if it had be
en sleeping and tiredly resented the sudden movement. The rusted metal of the hinges groaned as he eased the door open.

It was all but pitch-black inside the silo, and with the sun having played over its metal surface the air was warm and stifling.

‘Hello…’ he ventured quietly, but his voice was amplified by the cavernous structure. ‘Anyone here? Adam?’

The smell hit him. Human faeces. Strong and vile. He wrinkled his nose, pushing the door wider to allow more light into the silo. His eyes were growing accustomed to the dark. Something started to take shape against the far wall. He squinted, moved further inside the silo, his foot hitting a lump of wood; the floor was littered with debris, as if the place had been used as a dumping gro
und for all manner of farmyard rubbish. He’d have to tread carefully.

Then the object before him came into focus. It was a naked man sitting in a chair, his head bowed, his arms fastened behind him.

‘Christ!’ whispered George, putting a hand to his mouth and slowly moving towards the man.

The man was covered in filth – mud and his own excrement smeared down his legs. His hair was lank and greasy, and his white, shivering body covered in many bruises, like purple flowers growing through dirty snow.
George tentatively reached out and placed a single finger on the man’s lowered head.

‘Are you… Are you OK?’ he asked.

It was a ludicrous question and he knew it. The man lifted his head, his body shaking as he did so, the act clearly taking much effort. His mouth had a gag of filthy red cloth bound round it. His sunken, vacant eyes stared into George’s face.