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Authors: Marjorie Eccles

BOOK: Untimely Graves
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Abigail smiled. ‘There’s nothing to say she did. But little old ladies don’t usually have dangerous things like handguns lying around. She should be warned about that, even if it’s only for her own protection.’
‘Maybe so. But I’m beginning to wish I’d never said anything!’
‘Don’t worry, we won’t mention your name – we won’t let her know we even know she has a gun, unless it’s necessary. But thanks for your time, Cleo.’
‘Oh, don’t mention it,’ Cleo said. ‘Any time you want me to snoop on my friends … Is that all?’
‘Yes, you’ve been very helpful – but look, don’t get the wrong idea –’
‘All right, I’m sorry, I know. You’re only doing your job.’
‘This the house?’ enquired Jenny from the front seat, as they turned into Corby Avenue, a neat street of semis with shining paintwork and spring gardens being coaxed into bloom. Clusters of nursery-reared polyanthus in day-glo colours were helping on the crocuses. Universal pansies abounded. A forsythia or two was already flowering. Number 5 was conspicuous for having none of these. Jenny looked at the Mini that had been rubbed down and prepared for a long-forgotten respray, and now sat
abandoned on a weed-sown drive, at the overgrown grass plot, strewn with primary-coloured plastic toys. The windows were smeary again and the grey net curtains sagged on their wires. ‘What
can
it be like inside?’
‘Don’t ask,’ said Cleo. ‘The mother’s a PhD and the life of ordinary mortals passes her by.’
John Riach cast his eyes around the office he’d set his sights on seven years ago, knowing it should rightfully have been his then, and now, at last, was. Only temporarily, he reminded himself with his usual caution, but permanent tenure of the school bursarship was now in the palm of his hand, and if he couldn’t grasp it this time, he wasn’t the man he believed himself to be. The last obstacle had been removed. Charles Wetherby had been eliminated from the scene. And John Riach was here, every detail of the job at his efficient fingertips, the right man in the right place. He wouldn’t be passed over this time, as he had been before. They wouldn’t be able to look on him as ineffectual any longer, someone who faded into the background.
He’d always been too easily overlooked, despite his undoubted abilities, something which he blamed on his small stature. He was slight, under middle height, always conscious of this when he was in the presence of taller men, especially men like Wetherby. Lack of height was in his genes, an inheritance from his father who, like many other short men, offset this by aggression, a well-known compensating factor. Aggression all too often vented on his son. Riach had taught himself not to give his enemies this sort of handle to use against him, not even to think it. His resentment stayed curled up inside him like a sleeping snake, while outwardly he appeared pleasant, self-effacing, reliable, all the qualities needed for a second fiddle.
He pulled the chair closer to the desk. A new chair was first thing on the agenda. This one had suited Wetherby’s long frame but its high back dwarfed its present occupant, giving out quite the wrong signals. The rest of the room wasn’t to his liking, either, but its life-expectancy was doomed anyway: it was only a matter of time before the new offices would be built.
Taking off his rimless glasses, he polished them on the maroon
silk handkerchief in his breast pocket, refolded the handkerchief and placed it with the points just showing, adjusted his cuffs and the discreet gold and enamelled cuff-links and placed his well-kept hands in front of him on the blotter.
Everything that had once been Charles Wetherby’s would now be his. The increased salary which would be useful but wasn’t paramount, the increase in power which was. The house that went with the job … the wife?
A surge of adrenalin hit him.
Riach had schooled himself not to give an inkling of how much he wanted to step into Wetherby’s shoes, and believed his colleagues were still unaware of the burning desire he kept so well hidden. Just as he’d disguised the extent of his feelings for Hannah. He’d known they were dangerous and he’d taught himself to keep them well under control, at least in public.
But now, with an unaccustomed stab of excitement, he allowed his thoughts to dwell lingeringly on her, something he could at last legitimately do. A small smile touched the corners of his mouth. Yes, Hannah. She wouldn’t, he thought, be – ungrateful. After all, he had, if nothing else, smoothed her path …
He closed his eyes and imagined her as he’d first seen her, when she came with Wetherby to the school on his appointment as Bursar. Dark, slim, and with those lovely eyes, a mirror to her grave and gentle manner, so much in contrast with Wetherby’s arrogant self-importance. It was the thought of her, the daily chance that he might see her and talk to her, that had stopped him from seeking another job when Wetherby had been given the position that he, John Riach, as Assistant Bursar, had pinned his hopes on when the former Bursar had retired. Despite his furious disappointment, he had stayed on in a subservient position, hoping – though for what, he hadn’t rightly known.
Hannah had always felt warmly towards him, he was sure of that. Outwardly, she’d never shown him any more than friendship, but then she wouldn’t, would she? Women like Hannah kept to their marriage vows, no matter what, and he respected her for that. Her life with Wetherby had been miserable. Not that she’d ever said anything – though she’d been on the point of doing so the other day, he was sure – but Riach had quick intuitions, especially where she was concerned, and what he
didn’t actually observe for himself, he sensed from the atmosphere that surrounded the couple. And from the unemotional way she’d received the news that Wetherby was dead.
He had volunteered to accompany the young policewoman, Tracey Matthews, who’d been detailed to do the job, and they’d been only too glad to accept his offer. It always helped, they said, when friends or relatives were there to play a supportive role, for the bereaved to have a shoulder to cry on. Except that Hannah hadn’t cried, had she? Not a tear. He was exultant. Everything pointed to the fact that the wheel was, at last, spinning his way.
He glanced at his watch. There was much to do. Amongst all the other duties and administrative details that had been piled on his shoulders since Wetherby had died, he had to make sure that the police investigation wasn’t getting in the way of the smooth running of the school. There were tasks concerning that which were likely to take him all afternoon. After that, at six, he had an appointment with the Head in his study, where he’d receive confirmation of the decision of the board of governors, and no doubt a congratulatory glass of sherry on becoming Bursar of Lavenstock College.
The wind was in the right direction, blowing away from the pig farm, which was perhaps as well, given the strength of the aroma without benefit of a breeze.
‘Whew!’ Jenny wrinkled her short nose. ‘And they try to tell us pigs are really clean animals!’
Where were the sties? There wasn’t a sign of anything that Abigail would have called a sty, nor were there any pigs or piglets, for that matter. Instead, there was a series of low, domed sheds set in acres of oozy mud, which ran right up to the farmhouse. Was this what organic pig-rearing meant? If each hut represented even one pig – and she’d no idea whether this was so or not – she reckoned there was quite an investment there. Had the floods reached this far? Hard even to begin to envisage what a disaster that would have been. Though it looked as though the farm might have escaped the worst: from the dip in the lane where Wych Cottage stood, the land rose towards the farmhouse in what might almost stand for a slope in these parts. The water level had by now gone down dramatically, but a keen wind still rippled the standing water in the lower fields.
They stood outside the car, which Jenny had drawn into a convenient widening of the narrow lane, half-way between Wych Cottage and the farmhouse. ‘Let’s try the cottage first, while our feet are still clean,’ Abigail suggested. ‘We don’t want Mrs Osborne coming down on us like a ton of bricks before we start, accusing us of dirtying her clean floors. She might be hiding behind the door with that gun.’
Ten minutes later, sitting in front of the blazing fire in the cosy sitting-room, supplied with cups of fragrant Earl Grey and thin, crisp lemon biscuits, it was hard to see Iris Osborne, with her fluffy white hair and twin-set, as a gun-toting old harridan. ‘I told the other policemen I hadn’t seen anything of that poor woman,’ she’d greeted them when they’d introduced themselves as police officers.
‘That’s not principally why we’re here,’ Jenny said mendaciously,
explaining that in view of a recent tragic case where a farmer had shot dead an intruder, they were making a check on all firearms, something routinely done in outlying districts where people might be expected to have them. Checking whether they were safely locked up, how many they had, whether they were licensed. Dangerous things, guns, if they fell into the wrong hands.
Oh, she had no need of a licence, Mrs Osborne assured them, since she didn’t own a gun of any kind – well, only an airgun that had belonged to her husband, for scaring pigeons, and you didn’t need a licence for that, did you? In any event, she didn’t even know how to load it, or where the pellets were, still less use it. If she wondered why a detective inspector and a constable were occupied with such a mundane task in the middle of a well-publicised murder investigation, she didn’t ask.
‘Only an airgun? That’s all right then. As long as you don’t have any other sort,’ Abigail smiled. ‘You don’t? No, of course, I can see you wouldn’t have! Not even one of those toys people buy to frighten intruders? Well, you’re quite right not to. If the intruder was armed, it might spark him off to use his first.’
Mrs Osborne gave a gasp of horror, a hand to her pearladorned bosom. ‘What a terrible thought! But do come in and have a cup of tea, while you’re here. It’s a lovely day but there’s a really cold wind out there and you look frozen. Come in, I’m sure you’re allowed five minutes for a tea break!’
So here they were, in front of a roaring fire, being regaled with stories of how the cottage had suffered in the floods, with Iris Osborne really savouring the drama of the situation, now that it was all over. There’d been nothing like it in living memory, she informed them dramatically, water rushing down the lane like a mad thing, swirling around the house, the lane outside impassable on foot.
‘I can still hear it sucking and slopping away!’ She blanched at that, her distress very real even under the drama. The flood had
poured
in, she went on, it was unbelievable, the main rooms had been under eighteen inches of water, and the cold-store alongside the house, dug at a lower level, still wasn’t back to normal. ‘And oh, the smell! You wouldn’t believe it – nor the amount of mud it left behind. I had to get a cleaning firm in to help, even after the boys from the farm had got rid of the worst. And then
Reuben sent Vera down to give it a final polish – so now, we’re almost as good as new – or will be when I get my chairs back. I’m afraid the covers on three of them were ruined! Nothing for it but to have them re-upholstered. That’s why it looks a little bare in here at present.’
‘The boys?’ Abigail asked, when she could get a word in. The poor soul couldn’t see many people to talk to, she was thinking. Thinking also that three more chairs in here would be three too many. The room was tiny – charmingly furnished with antiques and a great deal of pretty china, but the ceiling was too low, the windows too small, the panelling too dark to allow for the amount of furniture already there.
‘The boys?’ Mrs Osborne repeated, and laughed. ‘Well, that’s what they seem like to me, though they’re in their forties, both of them. Jared Bysouth bought the farm from me after my husband died, and though I’ve never been very happy about the
pigs
, I’ve learnt to ignore farmyard smells over the years, and I must say he and his brother, Reuben, are always willing to help me out when I need a strong arm – or a Land Rover to get me out, as happened in the floods.’
‘Don’t you find it lonely out here?’ Abigail asked.
‘I haven’t time for that, dear! I keep myself busy. All this –’ she gestured to the old furniture with its patina of age and the deep shine that came from years of polish and elbow-grease, at the delicate porcelain – ‘it’s really my showroom. I buy and sell antiques, you see – in a small way, although, if I
do
say it myself, I’ve quite a reputation in seventeenth-century porcelain. It brings in a bit of pin-money.’
‘Really? How do you get customers?’ Jenny asked, tactfully showing the surprise Mrs Osborne evidently expected. No need for her to know they’d already made it in their way to find out about her business.
‘Word of mouth, mostly. And I advertise in magazines and trade papers. Quite a lot of my business is done by mail order. Using my home as a showroom cuts down on overheads, and it does mean I never get bored with my decor!’
‘Well, I must say that’s very enterprising.’
Mrs Osborne laughed. ‘Oh, I’ve never been one to let the grass grow under my feet. You should ask my daughter.’
‘And I bet she isn’t one to make a penny where she can make a pound, either,’ Abigail said as they walked back to the car. ‘She’s one of a type. All charm and little old lady sweetness, while underneath … Did you see the look she gave me when I asked about having a replica? Went through me like a road drill.’
‘I know. Reckon she was telling fibs?’
‘Maybe not. I’ll have another word with Cleo – she seemed certain enough but she admits she only got a very quick glance and it
might
have been an airgun she saw. Which still won’t be much use to us when it’s a handgun we’re looking for. Though whatever she says, I wouldn’t put it past Mrs Osborne to keep some sort of weapon handy – and be prepared to use it – to protect her property.’
‘You can’t say it isn’t worth protecting,’ Jenny said, looking back at the cottage as they reached the car. ‘All that lovely furniture and china.’
‘Not to mention the house itself. Charming, isn’t it?’ Abigail followed Jenny’s glance to what was almost a cliché of a country cottage. ‘Especially in summer, I suppose. Roses round the door, even. All the same, I’ll bet that one’s Albertine. The rose with the wickedest thorns I know.’
‘Yes, but I wouldn’t fancy living out here. And the place still smelt funny and damp, didn’t it?’ Jenny said with a shudder. ‘It’s not my idea of the
dolce vita.
’
‘Nor is this,’ said Abigail as they reached the gate of the grim, flat-faced, three-storey farmhouse that would have made Cold Comfort Farm seem welcoming.
There was no answer to their ring on the front door, which they’d chosen because it was the only entry with any sort of path. But nobody ever used front doors in farmhouses, it was probably hermetically sealed. They picked their way round to the back through the farmyard muck, thankful for the protection of the winter boots they’d both taken the precaution of wearing.
It was a farmhouse of the old-fashioned kind, enclosed by barns and outbuildings, maybe part of the piggeries, and a yard filled with various pieces of unspecified, dangerous-looking machinery. To one side stood a hen pen with several coops and a few chickens pecking desultorily at trodden grass. A neglected kitchen garden flanked it and a huge, mean-looking dog of
dubious ancestry flung itself dementedly at the wire netting of a dog run. The back door of the farmhouse opened right into the yard but there was no answer to their knock. Abigail was trying the knob when a man with a black and white border collie at his heels came round the corner. The other dog, behind the wire, immediately sank down, head on its front paws, watching.
‘Mr Bysouth?’
‘Reuben Bysouth. What do you want?’
He was rough, all right, as they’d been warned. Tight jeans, belted under his belly. Long, unwashed, curly black hair tied back into a high ponytail with what looked like a bootlace. It didn’t take a genius, either, to guess that his dark chin wasn’t intentional designer stubble but simply the result of not bothering to have shaved for two or three days at least. One of his front teeth was missing and the rest wouldn’t bear close inspection. His sweatshirt was greasy with food stains.
You learned not to show either surprise or disgust at anything or anyone when you were in the Force – if you were wise – but Abigail saw the fastidious Jenny gazing at him with the same sort of horrid fascination she herself felt. He reminded her of one of the sluggy things that had laid hundreds of its progeny in the leaf axils of her angelica, before eating it alive.
‘DI Moon and DC Platt,’ she told him. ‘We’re here on a firearms check.’
‘We’ve had all you lot round once – haven’t you got more to do than waste other folks’s time as well as your own?’ he asked with a surly look.
She wasn’t going to let him rattle her. ‘We’re not here for the same reason. Will you please show us your guns, and your licences? You or your brother. It won’t take more than a few minutes.’
He seemed about to refuse, then changed his mind. ‘My brother’s out.’ He opened the back door, which led into a one-time scullery that now appeared to be used as a farm office as well as a dumping ground for old boots, waterproofs, unspecified machinery parts, some of them rusty. Papers of various kinds were held untidily in bulldog clips and jammed on to spikes. There was an old metal filing cabinet and, sitting incongruously
on a formica-topped table with splayed legs, a small PC.
He fished in a drawer for a key, unlocked a cupboard and showed them the three double-barrelled, twelve-bore shotguns inside. ‘See, all locked up, just as they should be. Satisfied?’
‘And your licences, please.’
He went into an adjoining room, shutting the door behind him, but not before Abigail had a glimpse of a well-tended kitchen, a brightly burning fire in a wide inglenook, surrounded by gleaming horse-brasses, had caught a smell of lavender furniture polish mingling with savoury cooking odours. One of the Bysouths at least was not averse to comfort and cleanliness, it seemed.
Reuben came back within a minute or two with the necessary papers. Two of them were licensed to Jared Bysouth, one to Reuben Bysouth. ‘Thank you, sir, everything appears to be in order.’
‘What did I tell you? Waste of everybody’s bloody time.’ He opened the door and they stepped out into the yard. The mongrel behind the chain-link fencing set up a frenzied barking and Bysouth snarled at it to shut up, which it did immediately. The silent collie slunk alongside its master, keeping a shifty, sideways glance on the two women, while Reuben stepped close on their heels, a manoeuvre which gave them no alternative but to walk towards the gate. But Abigail had no intention of being hustled. She stopped suddenly and turned, so that she almost collided face to face with Bysouth, not a happy experience.
‘Watch what you’re doing, can’t you?’ he growled.
Abigail ignored the gentlemanly manners. ‘Before we go, I’d just like to check on one or two other points. You told the officers who asked you previously that you didn’t know anything of the woman who was found in the river, just down there –’
‘Course I didn’t bloody know anything about her, I’d have said if I did, wouldn’t I?’
‘Memory can be a funny thing, sometimes we remember things afterwards that we’ve seen or heard, but not registered at the time.’
‘Well, I don’t.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Abigail caught a glimpse of a woman with pale, gingerish hair and a bulky figure encased in
a floral pinny, coming from round the corner of one of the outbuildings. The heavy bucket dragging down her right side, the cautious way she crept along, her feet making hardly a sound, the downbent head, eyes averted, might have made her almost a caricature of a drudge, a cowed and abused woman, had not the picture been so real.
‘Then perhaps we can speak to Mrs Bysouth – she might have remembered something you don’t.’

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