Murder at the Meet

by Bruce Beckham

  ‘Aye – the raw potential’s too good to ignore.’

  Skelgill nods in agreement.

  ‘She covers the ground more like a lurcher.’

  The man regards Skelgill thoughtfully.

  ‘Thee’d know a bit about that – the fastest in the dale.’

  Now Skelgill makes a self-deprecating exclamation.

  ‘That crown slipped long ago – I’m not even the fastest in my family.’

  Now the man grins ruefully.

  ‘We all have to slow down sometime.’

  ‘Aye – step aside for the next generation.’

  Skelgill is speaking from direct experience, but perhaps there is something in his choice of words that resonates with Sean Nicolson. The man looks at him mournfully, and to his surprise he lowers himself to sit on a low ridge of exposed rock, squinting into the afternoon sun. Skelgill accepts the unspoken invitation, and he too sits, leaving a yard between them. As one taciturn northerner to another, he decides he must cut to the chase.

  ‘I know about Nick.’

  From Sean Nicolson there is only silence. He is unmoving, merely blinking.

  ‘We had a DNA test done – for another reason. In case the DNA on Mary Wilson’s key fob were from her baby. That it were a wild-goose chase all these years. We got the result this morning. The computer made the match with your original sample.’ Skelgill is taking pains to let the man know he was not trying to trick him in their meeting yesterday.

  ‘So that’s it.’

  Skelgill is unsure of the man’s meaning.

  ‘Did you know?’

  Another pause ensues.

  ‘Happen that’s what she were going to tell me.’

  Skelgill feels a surge in his pulse rate, when his heartbeat has only just recovered from his ascent.

  ‘On the day she disappeared?’

  Sean Nicolson looks at him; there is barely concealed anguish etched across his broad countenance.

  ‘She had on her bright pink scarf. That’s what she used to wear. It were our sign.’

  Skelgill is about to pounce on the admission – when inexplicably he apprehends something of the time warp.

  ‘You mean it was a sign to meet?’

  Now the man stares broodingly in the direction from which Skelgill has ascended.

  ‘It were one afternoon.’ He glances at Skelgill, suddenly wild eyed. ‘It were – like – Christmas Day. Not that I could forget. About this hour – it were just getting dark.’

  ‘Aye. It would be, that time of year.’ Skelgill waits patiently for him to continue.

  ‘I were here. Inspecting the flock.’ He indicates loosely around them. ‘I heard her calling – I suppose I didn’t know it were her. From Cummacatta. Just sounded like it were a lass in trouble. I ran down and climbed over, into the wood. As I got closer I realised she were calling her dog. It had run a fox to earth – in the –’ (he pauses and looks again at Skelgill) ‘ – in the Kissing Cave.’

  Skelgill finds bizarre images forming in his head concerning the cave, as though he has floated above the fellside, and can see it far below, and the story unfolding in a vivid hallucination. His hands at his sides, he grips stalks of heather, like an airline passenger hanging onto his seat knowing a bumpy landing is imminent. But still he holds his tongue.

  ‘I’d shouted as I approached – so she must have known it were me. I got the dog out, checked it were alright.’ Now he begins to struggle to put into words what he wants to say. His mouth is dry and his speech becomes more disjointed. ‘There were something about her – I mean, not bad, like?’ He refers to Skelgill, as if seeking his approbation. ‘She said I want to thank you. I said what do you mean? She said – it is the Kissing Cave. A Christmas kiss.’ He breaks off again. He shakes his head, now staring at the ground between his feet. ‘It were like a dam breaking.’

  Still hunched he turns his head and gazes appealingly at Skelgill.

  ‘Me and Mary – we didn’t know what we were doing. Aye, it were wrong – but we couldn’t stop. You see – it should have been us together – she kept saying that. She’d always loved me. And I were the same. But – the time with Megan – we were just eighteen – we weren’t even courting. I had to stand by her.’

  Skelgill is reminded that he has divined something of this very misalliance.

  ‘You knew Mary at school, growing up, teenagers, then as young adults, the pub, the wool. You were close.’

  The man seems a little shocked by Skelgill’s apparent empathy.

  ‘Happen she wanted a baby.’

  Now Skelgill gives a slow exaggerated shrug, as if to say isn’t this the way of things.

  ‘Were it just the one time?’

  Sean Nicolson shakes his head forlornly.

  ‘Like I say – she had on the pink headscarf. She said she’d wear it again. Come up with dog to the edge of the wood – it would be a sign she were free, alone. Afternoons between her shifts – and when I were over here. I always come in the afternoons.’

  Skelgill is frowning perplexedly; yet he speaks in a conversational manner.

  ‘And on the day of the shepherds’ meet, when she disappeared – were you still seeing each other then?’

  The man looks alarmed – that Skelgill, who seems to understand so much, is so wide of the mark with this question. He shakes his head, his expression pained.

  ‘She suddenly stopped coming. In the spring, it were.’ He glances sharply at Skelgill. ‘Later I worked it out. Megan told me she was pregnant – she came home from work all excited – Mary and Aidan were having a bairn after all that time.’ The man’s features are tortured. ‘She were even laughing – because of what had happened to us. Took them twelve years of trying, she said. Took us twelve minutes by accident.’

  Despite his outward calm, diverse thoughts and questions are jostling for prominence in Skelgill’s mind. But particularly salient is the man’s last remark, and his observations of the ostensibly barren Mary; fecundity was not an issue, after all – for either of them. Such reasoning prompts him to make what he knows to be a rather banal observation.

  ‘You and Megan – you had no more bairns.’

  Sean Nicolson shakes his head philosophically.

  ‘She had a difficulty with the birth of our Alison. She took a fit – it were bad. She didn’t feel she could go through it again.’

  A silence ensues; it seems to Skelgill that he must revisit the central issue.

  ‘Just to be clear – you didn’t know about Nick?’

  Again the man cranes to stare at him.

  ‘How could I know?’

  Skelgill feels entitled to inflect a hint of scepticism into his rejoinder.

  ‘You didn’t have a conversation about it? About her being pregnant?’

  But Sean Nicolson resolutely shakes his head.

  ‘Like I say – she stopped coming. I didn’t know what to think. If it were Aidan’s – that she were too embarrassed to face me. Or if it were mine – too late, she’d already made her bed – patched up whatever problems there were. Or she might not have known herself – and she were mortified. I were mortified. Megan and me – our lass were eleven – what could I do? In the end I had to settle that the bairn must have been Aidan’s. She withdrew for a while and then gradually I’d see her at the pub, she were distant – then it were nodding terms. When she came up for wool, she always picked a time when Megan were there. Like she knew that’s how it had to be from now on.’

  In the silence that ensues Skelgill ponders what he would have done. Grasped the nettle, surely? But perhaps it is something easier said by an outsider than done by a participant.

  ‘She must have known. She must have been in turmoil.’

  Sean Nicolson flashes an agonised glance in response to Skelgill’s analysis.

  ‘If only I’d followed her.’

  Skelgill realises he means on the day of the meet.

  ‘Would she have gone to the Kissing Cave?’

  The man
seems too troubled to answer directly.

  ‘I could have protected her. She wanted me to come.’

  Skelgill finds himself playing devil’s advocate.

  ‘You don’t know that. You’re going by the headscarf. She had a stall full of them for sale. Happen she just picked one without thinking owt about it.’

  But Sean Nicolson is shaking his head.

  ‘She waited.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘When she was leaving – with the dog. She stopped – until I looked up from shearing. She was looking right at me. I knew it from her eyes.’

  It does not escape Skelgill that yesterday the man had denied he could know her mind. But was that no more than a self-referencing denial – a wish that he could not have known that Mary Wilson had something of great portent to impart? But Skelgill persists with his appeasement.

  ‘You think it now – you’re putting two and two together. You couldn’t have known it then. You can’t blame yourself.’

  Sean Nicolson regards Skelgill with a sudden urgency, though in his pale eyes confusion reigns.

  ‘Meg – she doesn’t need to know about this? It were all int’ past. The lad – he doesn’t need to know?’

  Skelgill stares back, alarm gripping his own features. The man hunches over once again, catching his head in his hands and tearing agitatedly at his scalp. Skelgill feels a strange sense of awe – the shepherd is fifteen years his senior – in the man and the fells around him he sees his long life of labour, loyalty, and love. But what he speaks of is police knowledge – effectively public knowledge. The authorities cannot choose which stones to turn, or turn a blind eye to what they discover. The new DNA evidence is a fact that could have a bearing on a murder investigation. It is not as simple as sweeping it under the carpet.

  But he notes the man has made no overtures regarding his innocence, or any attempt to reiterate an alibi. Has he not considered why the detective might be sympathetic to his predicament? Does he not see that the very fact of what he believes Mary Wilson was about to reveal could underlie the motive for her murder? Skelgill has to plumb the depths of his emotions in order to fashion a response to the man’s entreaty – but eventually the right words come to him.

  ‘Do you want your Mary’s killer brought to justice?’

  Sean Nicolson seems to take an age to answer.

  ‘Aye. More than owt I can think of.’

  14. ALL SAINTS

  Monday morning, Balderthwaite

  ‘I mean, Guv – it all adds up. If he got wind that she was going to spill the beans – or even if she told him outright – that’d be the motive he’d need to do away with her. Just look at him. Crocodile tears.’

  ‘Leyton – shush! Leave it till after.’

  Skelgill hisses through gritted teeth, a reprimand he supplements with an elbow into the ribs of his colleague. Thus reproached, DS Leyton makes a face of insubordination, unseen by his taller superior at his shoulder. He licks a drip that has trickled from his nose onto his upper lip, and resets himself to stand to attention.

  For his part, Skelgill is glad about the rain. From a self-conscious perspective the charcoal trenchcoat he has excavated from a rarely visited cupboard masks the inadequacies of his one and only ‘funeral suit’ – which, on reflection, is pretty much his only presentable formal outfit these days. Though he is no follower of fashion, even he can discern that those cheap polyester suits he purchased for his probation as a detective are a good fifteen years out of date – and, truth be told, snapped up in a clearance sale from a traditional tailor in Penrith were probably already well behind the mores of the time. So he is relieved that the preening DI Smart, in his immaculate designer wear, cannot make some direct comparison, to steal a devious edge in their exchanges, or less subtly humiliate him in the eyes of DS Jones.

  But there is another reason, far more profound, that he welcomes the downpour. Had it been a spring day resonant with birdsong, of floating butterflies and gently swaying golden daffodils, of electric blue sky and fair-weather cumuli – perhaps the kind of day Mary Wilson herself would have chosen – that would have seemed to Skelgill to cheat her of the solemnity that is due to her memory. It would be an acceptance that, at last, everything is fine; the birds a-singing, the bees a-buzzing; and Mary Wilson is at peace and light prevails over darkness. Not so. All things are not bright and beautiful. Far better that cloud cloaks proceedings. That the heavens have opened up to lament her short life; that the fells that ring the dale in which she grew up, that she would have known so well, are shrouded from sight and run with invisible tears; that the scene is reduced to a small pocket of dank claustrophobia into which the funeral-goers have been pressed. Opaque is the low stone church of All Saints, the most ancient building in the dale, of stone and slate and moss and dripping gutters; the walled churchyard, its turf muddied underfoot; on one side the gate into the village school, where Mary and her classmates learned and laiked; and came through sometimes – perhaps for religious services, perhaps just for mischief. Perhaps Mary, who liked her own company, would lie amongst the silent gravestones, their weathered entreaties straining skywards, to gaze in wonderment at the cerulean heavens.

  Now her coffin is poised to be lowered into the cloying earth. From a respectable distance the detectives watch on. To Skelgill’s eye the scene is reminiscent of a Remembrance Sunday, a gathering around the village war memorial. Men and women in knee-length overcoats, tilted figures, their heads bowed, their ranks diffuse in the mist, such that those they mourn might mingle like ghosts in their midst; long lost kin, local lads that fell in France and Flanders and futility, their shattered bones forsaken. Except this morning there is only one spirit that wanders lonely among the crowd, touching their hearts, their souls, their consciences; seeking to reassure, or to reproach; or perhaps seeking the bright pink headscarf that was never found.

  Despite the inclement weather there is a creditable turnout. But Skelgill wonders how many (or, rather, how few) are actually closely associated with Mary Wilson. Her only near relatives of whom he is aware are her mother and her son. There must be cousins of sorts, but he is not familiar with them; in twenty-two years some of her relatives will have died, or moved away. Perhaps less so for her contemporaries, who now are in their fifties. Coming late into the church the police contingent had found a pew near the rear. It had taken Skelgill’s eyes a while to become accustomed to the gloom. In time there materialised identifiable silhouettes. At the very front, closest to the coffin on its bier, Jean Tyson, Nick Wilson – and Aidan Wilson. Should he be surprised that Aidan Wilson occupied the same row? There were others from the dale. Sean and Megan Nicolson (she beneath a hat that was surely more suited to ladies’ day at the races). Jake Dickson, his black hair slicked back, seemingly rocking agitatedly. Also unmistakeable from the rear, the towering hunched form of Patrick Pearson, just behind the family. And others that Skelgill could recognise, such as the present tenants of the Twa Tups (their minds perhaps half on the wake); and – to his annoyance – the flamboyant quiff that can only belong to the reporter, Kendall Minto – and Skelgill wonders how many others among the congregation are of his ilk, incognito, sniffing for a story. He hopes at least any photographers – or, heaven forbid, a camera crew – will have the decency to stay away.

  As it is, that the police are there mob-handed is far from ideal. Skelgill alone, he could have blended in, sufficient of a native to merit his attendance; perhaps even he and DS Jones, judged solely on this criterion, might have passed as genuine mourners. But DI Smart’s insistence on coming – inexplicable, in Skelgill’s view, given his slant on this investigation, his dismissal of the local angle – has destroyed any such illusion. No doubt he wants to parade himself as the white knight who has ridden to the rescue of the ailing case; yet he shows scant interest in those present; instead aloof, self-important, he seems more absorbed in DS Jones – he has contrived that she shares the shelter of his ostentatiously branded Boss umbrella, albe
it she has positioned herself tactfully between her two superior officers.

  Skelgill tries not to think about this. On his other side stands DS Leyton, the pair of them exposed to the elements. Despite having quashed his sergeant’s whispered outburst concerning crocodile tears, the point has sharpened his wits. The reference was made to Aidan Wilson. In fact, Skelgill would beg to differ; he sees no such thing, only the same stony contempt they had encountered during their abortive interview at his place of work. Skelgill has observed no engagement between the man and any other – certainly not with Jean Tyson (there is the impression of mutual disdain) – and not even with his son. His son!

  Therein lies another kettle of fish. If anyone strikes Skelgill as unnerved by these proceedings it is Sean Nicolson. His natural demeanour, of apprehension, of anxiety, seems amplified – as if at any moment the Sword of Damocles will drop to shatter his fragile secret. And it is a dilemma that is double-edged: there is the painful insight that he revealed during their fellside exchange, the loss of his beloved Mary. During the singing of Psalm 23, The Lord is My Shepherd, a movement of his hand attracted Skelgill’s eye – it was surely the involuntary act of wiping away a tear? There had been a sudden glance of alarm from Megan Nicolson – and her spouse’s reaction was to exaggerate the motion as if subduing an itch, and to ignore her attention, since to do otherwise would acknowledge the basis of her concern.

  Skelgill had wondered who might carry the coffin, and what this may reveal. But, in the event, the undertakers’ men had acted as pallbearers. Watching pensively he had contemplated whether they are recruited for their uniform height – and therefore if once a team is assembled, there is discrimination whenever a vacancy crops up: only candidates of five-foot nine need apply. Six burly men seems extravagant to haul such scant remains; but then his own memory is of just how heavy a coffin is; how first taking the weight almost causes the knees to buckle; how it digs into the unaccustomed shoulder; how hard it is to walk through a veil of tears.