What Dread Hand? (7 page)

‘You’ll regret this, you two-timing, double-crossing bastard,’ said Fred: he always did have a filthy temper, Fred.

Well, I did regret it: and not so very long after. Fred and me shares a car between us—a heavy old, bashed-up, fourth-hand ‘family model’, but at least it goes. And one evening, when he’d slouched off, ugly and moody as he was those days, to poach the river down by the Vicarage woods, I picked up Lydia and took her out in it, joy-riding. Not that there was much joy in it. We hadn’t been out twenty minutes when, smooching around with Lydia, I suppose, not paying enough attention to the road—well, I didn’t see the kid until I’d hit him. Jogging along the grass verge he was, with his little can of blackberries: haring home as fast as his legs would go, a bit scared, I daresay, because the dark was catching up on him. Well—the dark caught him up all right: poor little bastard. I scrambled out and knelt down and turned him over; and got back again, quick. ‘He’s gone,’ I said to Lydia, ‘and we’d best be gone too.’ She made a lot of fuss, woman-like, but what was the point of it? If he wasn’t dead now, he would be mighty soon, there wasn’t any doubt of it: lying there with the can still clutched in his fat little hand and the blackberries spilt, and scattered all around him. I couldn’t do nothing; if I could have I dare say I’d have waited, but I couldn’t. So what was the use of bringing trouble on myself, when the chances were that I could get clear away with it?

And I did get clear away with it. The road was hard and dry, the cars that followed and stopped must have obscured my tyre marks, if there were any. They found half a footprint in the dried mud, where I’d bent over him; but it was just a cheap, common make of shoe, pretty new so it had no particular marks to it; and a largish size, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary. No one knew I’d been on that road—everything Lydia did with us two was done in deep secret, because of Black Will. Will was doing time at the moment, for beating up a keeper who came on him, poaching, (we all spent most of our evenings, poaching.) But he’d be back some day.

And Fred promised me an alibi, when I told him about it: clutching at his arm, shaking a bit by this time, losing confidence because Lydia was threatening to turn nasty. ‘I’ll say you was in the woods with me,’ he said. And he did, too. They came to our door, ‘regulation police enquiries’; but Lydia wouldn’t dare to tell, not really, I could see that in the light of day, and they had no other sort of reason to suspect me, especially. And nobody did—it could have been any stranger, speeding along the empty country roads. Fred pretended to be reluctant to alibi me, cagey about saying where we was—because of the poaching. He managed it fine, it sort of threw their interest half way in a different direction. I thought it was decent of Fred, considering about me and Lydia. But brotherly love is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?

Or isn’t it? Because it hadn’t been all for nothing. No sooner was I clear of that lot than he says to me: ‘Well—has she told you?’

‘Told me what?’ I says. ‘Who? Lydia?’

‘Lydia,’ he says. ‘She’s having a baby.’

‘Well, don’t look at me,’ I said, and quick. ‘I’ve only been going with the girl a couple of weeks.’

‘And her husband hasn’t been going with her at all,’ said Fred. ‘On account of he’s been in prison for the past five months.’

‘For half killing a man,’ I said, thoughtfully; and I looked Fred up and down. Fred and me are no weeds, like I said; but Black Will, he’s half way to a giant.

‘And due out at the end of October,’ said Fred.

‘Well, good luck to the two of you,’ says I. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I had her for a couple of weeks, and now even that’s over. She reckons I ought to have stopped and seen to the kid: she’s given me the bird.’

‘She’ll give you more than the bird,’ he says, ‘and me too when Will comes home. When he knows about the baby, he’ll beat the rest out of her; and then God help you and me too.’

‘The baby could be Jimmy Green’s,’ I said. ‘Or Bill Bray’s. She’s been out with them, too.’

That’s her tales,’ he said, ‘to make you jealous. They’re a sight too scared of Will to let Lydia make up to them. And so ought you and I to have been too, if we’d had any sense.’ Only where Lydia was concerned, there never seemed to be time to have sense; and six months ago, Fred said, Black Will’s return had seemed like an aeon away. ‘So what are you going to do?’ I said.

‘What are
you
going to do?’ he said. ‘A hit-and-run driver—you can get a long stretch for that. The kid wasn’t dead yet, when they found him.’

Good old brotherly love!—Fred worrying about me, when after all I
had
pinched his girl. And him in such trouble himself.

We went out in the car, where no one could hear us: our old landlady’s pretty deaf and takes no interest at all in our comings and goings, but Fred wasn’t taking no chances…

Because it was all Fred’s idea: that I will say, and stick to it—it was Fred’s idea. Dead men tell no tales, said Fred; nor dead girls, neither. ‘If they find she’s in the family way—it’s like you said, she was spreading it around she’d been going with half the village. Once she was past talking, Will couldn’t pin it on us two: not to be certain.’

‘Speak for yourself,’ I said.

‘She’d be past talking about the hit-and-run, too,’ he said. ‘You say she’s sore about that. She won’t tell now, because it means admitting she was joy-riding with you; but once Black Will gets it out of her that she was—and he will—then she’ll tell about the accident too; it’ll make her feel easier.’

‘So what do you suggest?’ I said.
‘I’m
not killing the girl, I can tell you that, flat.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ll do that. You’ve done one killing,’ he said, not too pleasantly, I thought, ‘that’ll do for you. All I want from you now is an alibi.’

‘What, me alibi you?’ I said. ‘No one’d believe it for a minute. One twin speaking up for another—the whole village would testify how “close” we are.’ (The whole village not knowing anything about us and Lydia.)

But Fred had thought of all that too. If a straight alibi failed, he said, there were other ways of playing it. He had it all worked out—suspiciously well worked out, I ought to have thought; but he gave me no time for thinking. ‘It won’t come to any alibi, our names probably won’t even come into it—as you say, the baby could be fathered on half the male population of Birdswell. But if it does—well, you alibi for me, I alibi for you; they’ll know it was one of us, but they’ll never know which of us; and if they don’t know which of us, they’ll have to let both of us go.’

‘And Black Will?’ I said. ‘When we’ve not only seduced his wife, but murdered her—which one of us will
he
let go?’

‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘we’d have to clear out anyway, if it got as far as that: start again somewhere else. But the chances are a hundred to one it’ll never come to it. After all, no one suspected you of the hit-and-run affair.’

He kept coming back to that: and sort of—nastily. I didn’t forget that I’d done him wrong, pinching his girl. But that was his lever, really: while he kept reminding me, he could pretty well force me to go in with him—he was in trouble, but I was in trouble deeper.

So we worked it out: we worked out everything, to the last detail. This was Tuesday, we’d do it Thursday night. I’d see nothing more of the girl; but he’d get her to go driving with him on pretence of talking over the baby business. And he’d lead round to the accident, advising her, maybe, to confess to the police it was me; and drive past where it happened. And get her to get out of the car and show him where the boy was lying… And then—well, then there’d be a second hit-and-run killing on that lonely corner.
‘You
got away with it,’ he kept saying. ‘Why not another?’

There was a kind of—well, justice, in it, I thought. After all, it was because she was threatening to tell about the hit-and-run that I was letting her be murdered. ‘But what about clues?’ I said. ‘Even I left a footprint.’

He had worked that out too. He and I are the same size, of course, and most of our clothes are the same as one another’s. Not for any silly reason of dressing identical, but simply because when he’d go along shopping, I’d go along too, and mostly we’d like the same things; or he’d buy something and it’d be a success, so I’d buy the same, later. We must dress the same on the night, he said, because of the alibi: and we checked our stuff over, shoes, grey flannels, shirts, without jackets—this all happened in September. Our blue poplins were in the wash—we’d worn them clean Sunday, and second-day Monday; so it would have to be the striped wool-and-nylon—a bit warm for this weather, if anyone remarked it, but we’d have to risk that, I said, we daren’t ask the old woman to wash out our blue ones special. The last thing we wanted, was to do anything out of the ordinary. That was what the police looked for: the break in routine. That was asking for it.

Our shoes were the same: same size, same make, bought together; a rubber sole with bars across it, but, like I said, new enough not to be worn down, or have any peculiarities. And everything else we’d wear identical: not only for the alibi, but in case of bits caught in the girl’s finger-nails or what-not—you’ve only got to read the papers. Not that he meant to get near enough for that. But she might not—well, she might not kick-in at once, if you see what I mean; he might have to get out of the car and do something about it. And in case of scratches, he said, I’d better be prepared to get some scratches on my own hands too—we could say we’d been blackberry-ing or something.

‘Blackberry-ing,’ I said. ‘That’d be bloody likely! We both detest blackberries, everybody knows it: or anyway, the old woman knows it, we never touch her blackberry pie.’ I knew he’d only said it to remind me of the kid: him and his little can of blackberries, spilt all around him…

‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘say we got scratched pushing through the brambles down by the river. Do your poaching down by the bramble patch.’

But she didn’t scratch him. It was all a bit grim, I think: he couldn’t be sure she was properly done-in and he had to get out of the car and have a look and—well, go back and take a second run at her. But she didn’t have the strength left to scratch him. All the same, he looked pretty ghastly when finally we met in the moonlight, in the Vicarage woods. He didn’t say anything, just stood there, staring at me with a sort of sick, white heaviness. I couldn’t exactly say anything either; it was worse than, talking it over, I’d thought it ever would be. I sort of—looked a question at him; and he gave me a weary kind of nod and glanced away towards the river. It was easier to talk about my angle, so I said, at last: ‘Well, I saw the Vicar.’

‘But did he see you?’ he said. We’d agreed on the Reverend, because he always walked across the church of a Thursday evening; you’d be sure of passing him, if you went at a certain time.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He saw me. I gave a sort of grunt for “good evening” and he said “Going poaching?” and gave me a bit of a grin. You’d better remember that.’ He nodded again but he said nothing more; and more to ease the silence than anything else, I said: ‘Is the car all right? Not marked?’

‘What does it matter if it is?’ he said. ‘It’s marked all over, no one could say what’s old or what’s new: you know that, from bashing the boy.’ As for bits of her clothing and—blood and all that, he’d had the idea of spreading a bit of plastic over the front of the car before he—well, did it. He produced the plastic folded in a bit of brown paper, and we wrapped the whole lot round a stone and sank it, then and there, in the river. There was blood on the plastic all right. It gave me the shudders.

But next thing he said, I really had something to shudder at. He said: ‘Anyway,
your
number’s up, mate. She’s shopped you.’

‘Shopped me?’ I said. I stood and stared at him.

‘Shopped you,’ he said. ‘She’d already sent off an anonymous note to the police. About the hit-and-run.’

‘How do you know?’ I said. I couldn’t believe it.

‘She told me so,’ he said. ‘It was on her conscience.’

Her conscience. Lydia’s conscience! I started to laugh, a bit hysterical, I suppose, with the strain of it. He put his hand on my wrist and gave me a little shake. ‘Steady lad,’ he said. ‘Don’t lose your head. I’m looking after you.’ It wasn’t like him to be so demonstrative, but there you are—it’s like the poem says, when times are bad, there isn’t no friend like a brother. ‘It’s just a matter of slanting the alibi,’ he said.

Well, we’d worked that out, too; like I said. There’d always be a risk that they wouldn’t accept a brother’s alibi, that we two was together. The other time, about the accident, they’d had no special reason to suspect me, they’d accepted that all right; but this might at any moment turn into a murder enquiry. And a murder enquiry into
us,
now they knew about the hit-and-run. But as he said—we had the alternative.

I hadn’t counted on its being Inspector Cockrill. When I realised it was him—come all the way over from Heronsford—I knew they meant business. And to be honest, it struck a bit chill to the heart of me. A little man he is, for a policeman, and near retiring age, he must be—he looks like a grandfather; but his eyes are as bright as a bird’s and they seem to look right into you. He came into the old woman’s best parlour and he had us brought in there, and he looked us up and down. ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘the famous Birdswell twins! You certainly are identicals, aren’t you?’ And he gave us a look of a sort of fiendish glee, or so it seemed to me, and said: ‘And devoted, I hear? An almost mystic bond, I hear? David and Jonathan, Damon and Pythias and all the rest of it? In fact,’ he said, ‘you might properly be called—blood brothers?’

We stood in front of him, silent. He said at last: ‘Well, which is which?—and no nonsense.’

We told him:
and
no nonsense.

‘So you’re the one that killed the child?’ he said to me. ‘And drove on, regardless.’

‘I never was near the child,’ I said. ‘I was in the woods, on Monday evening—poaching.’

‘Yours is the name stated in the anonymous letter.’

‘I don’t know who wrote the letter,’ I said. ‘But no one can tell us apart, me and my brother.’