Dead on Dartmoor

by Stephanie Austin

  ‘He was a diplomat in the Far East – still is. He couldn’t care for me. But in the holidays I’d come down to Devon and stay with another cousin, Cordelia … But Olly, we’re not talking about me. Now, why don’t you tell me what happened?’

  He swallowed nervously. It took him a few moments to get his thoughts together. ‘When Grandpa died … killed himself … there was just Nan and me living here. We were all right. We looked after each other. We didn’t need anyone. Then Nan got ill …’ He stopped, looked down at the table.

  ‘Is she in a home?’ I spoke in a quiet voice, gently. I didn’t want to scare him.

  He wouldn’t look up at me. I was staring at the top of his head, his pink scalp visible through his spiky blonde hair.

  ‘Is she dead?’

  He nodded, his eyes still fixed on the tabletop.

  ‘When did she die?’

  ‘Last year.’ His voice had sunk almost to a whisper.

  ‘And you’ve been living here on your own since then?’

  He sniffed.

  ‘Did she die in hospital?’

  He shook his head. ‘Here.’

  ‘When the doctor came,’ I began, still trying to work out when things had gone wrong, ‘didn’t he realise that you were here on your own?’

  Olly muttered something.

  ‘What did you say?’

  He looked up at me, dashing away glistening drops of tears with the back of one hand. ‘She’s buried in the garden.’ He began sobbing helplessly. I foraged a tissue from my jeans pocket and gave it to him, waited for the sobs to subside, but he went on weeping unashamedly, an outpouring of suppressed anguish that continued for several minutes. I kept handing him sheets of kitchen paper from the roll by the sink, but every time the poor kid tried to stop crying and draw breath he started over again. ‘She didn’t want to be buried in the churchyard,’ he gulped eventually, ‘not after what happened to Grandpa … she wanted to be buried in her own garden … she wanted to be near to the paddock and the ponies … she used to give ’em carrots …’

  ‘Olly,’ I breathed, finally catching on. ‘Are you telling me you buried her, that no one knows she’s dead?’

  He nodded, swallowing back another sob. ‘Please don’t tell! They’ll put me in care. I don’t want to go in a home!’

  I sat back in my chair, gaping at him. ‘But how on earth did you manage it … you could only have been … what, twelve or thirteen. Did anyone help you?’

  ‘She was away, that nosy woman next door, on holiday, so I could dig the hole without being seen. All day it took me. I did it proper, you know, deep.’

  ‘Is she in anything?’ I asked, aghast.

  ‘I wrapped her in her eiderdown, took her down the path in the wheelbarrow. I gave her a pillow and put her gold necklace round her neck and a bunch of flowers in her hands and her prayer book. And I put in things she’d like … you know, like you see in graves on those history programmes on telly. They put in swords and pots and stuff. I put in photos of Grandma and Grandpa, and an old teddy that used to be Mum’s. Then I covered her up with a coverlet, and earth and I sowed wild flowers over the top of her. I thought she’d like that … wild flowers. They’re good for the bees. She was so worried about the bees …’ He stopped, staring at me, waiting for me to speak. But I was speechless. ‘I’ve done a crime, haven’t I?’ he asked, his voice rising pathetically. ‘Burying her in the garden?’

  ‘Well …’ I breathed at last. ‘I don’t think there’s any reason why someone can’t be buried in their garden if they wish, but … you see, every death has to be registered, officially. The doctor has to sign a death certificate, to say what a person died of. And if you’re saying that no one else knows …’ I puffed out my cheeks in a sigh. ‘So, how did she die?’

  ‘I went up with her tea one morning and she wouldn’t wake up. Course, she’d been in bed for weeks. Just too tired to get up, she said. She wouldn’t have the doctor, dared me to ring him.’

  ‘And you’re absolutely certain she was dead?’

  ‘Course she was!’ he cried indignantly. ‘She was lying stone cold in her bed for two days whilst I waited for that old cow next door to get off on her holiday!’

  ‘And ever since,’ I said slowly, just to be sure, ‘you’ve lived here alone and kept up the pretence that she’s still alive. And no one knows?’

  ‘I don’t want them to take me into care. Her next door, she’d bring in the social services if she knew.’

  ‘But you can’t keep this up for ever!’

  ‘Just until I’m eighteen,’ he told me innocently. ‘They can’t put me in care then.’

  ‘I don’t know how you’ve managed it,’ I admitted, shaking my head. I couldn’t believe he’d kept this secret for over a year without something going wrong. He’d been incredibly lucky.

  ‘I stay out of trouble. I never bunk off school, I do all my homework,’ he told me solemnly. ‘I don’t give no one a reason to come round here, asking questions. I feed myself proper, like Nan taught me—’

  ‘But how do you manage for money? What about the bills?’

  ‘Oh, I started forging Nan’s signature years ago,’ he said nonchalantly, a touch of pride in his voice. ‘She wanted me to do it,’ he added hastily, ‘her eyes were bad. She couldn’t see to write. Course, she’d never go to the optician. I used to write all the cheques and sign forms for school and everything. Then we put all the bills, electric and council tax and that, online. Dead easy. I set it all up for her, on the laptop.’

  ‘What about cash?’ I asked.

  ‘Grandpa left me his money. I get it from the post office, I’ve got my own account.’

  ‘What about your nan’s pension?’

  He blushed, red, to the tips of his ears. ‘Well, I couldn’t stop it, could I? Not without telling them she was dead … I don’t spend it on rubbish. I’m ever so careful. Just on food …’

  ‘And the bassoon?’

  ‘That’s not mine,’ he responded defensively, ‘it belongs to the band.’

  ‘And the laptop and the drone?’

  ‘I am allowed Christmas presents!’ he answered indignantly.

  ‘You’re committing fraud, Olly.’

  He bit his lip. ‘I’ll be in trouble, won’t I?’

  ‘Perhaps, a bit,’ I responded evasively. ‘And you’ve got no other family?’

  He shook his head. ‘Nan left this house to me in her will. There was no one else to leave it to.’

  ‘Have you got a copy of that will kept safe somewhere?’

  ‘Yes, this house is mine.’

  ‘Well, not quite.’

  His pale eyes narrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Your nan can’t leave you anything if she’s not legally dead. When a person dies their will has to be sorted out by lawyers, go through a process called probate. But she can’t be legally dead without a death certificate. D’you see?’

  ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I admitted hopelessly.

  ‘They won’t want to dig Nan up, will they?’ he asked anxiously. ‘If anyone finds out?’

  ‘Well, of course they will! There will have to be an autopsy, to make sure she died of natural causes.’

  ‘You gonna tell?’

  ‘No. No I’m not,’ I promised after a moment. ‘I give you my word.’

  He let out a breath. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘But,’ I added, leaning across the table towards him, ‘there is a price for my silence.’

  His eyes grew round in horror. ‘That’s blackmail, that is.’

  ‘It most certainly is,’ I assured him. ‘You can tell me everything you know about Gavin, for a start. Why did he want to look in that mine on the Moorworthy estate? And don’t try telling me that you don’t know because I don’t believe you.’

  Olly bit his lip, hesitating. ‘He said that a friend of his had been killed there … about a year back. Fell off a cliff or something.’

  ‘In th
e woods?’

  ‘He got over the fence one night, he was trespassing.’

  ‘Did he tell you this friend’s name?’

  ‘Gavin just called him Ben,’ he replied, shrugging. ‘I don’t know how he knew him, but it wasn’t from our school.’

  ‘And he didn’t say why Ben had gone there?’

  ‘No, he didn’t. But he didn’t believe he’d fallen off a cliff. He thought someone had pushed him.’

  I considered this for a moment. Olly suddenly got up and opened a kitchen drawer, took something out and threw it on the table in front of me. ‘And these aren’t mine.’

  I picked up a pair of wire cutters.

  ‘I found them in a pocket of the rucksack,’ he said. ‘They must be Gav’s.’

  I squeezed the handles of the wire cutters experimentally. If Gavin intended to cut through the wire fence in the woods, he would have needed something more powerful, heavier. I doubted if these were man enough for the job. I considered them for a moment, then pulled Olly’s spare key from my back pocket.

  ‘I’m holding on to this.’

  ‘Why?’ he demanded indignantly.

  ‘Because you need me. Your next-door neighbour is very concerned about you and your nan. She was ready to phone social services when I talked to her. Don’t panic!’ I added, seeing the alarm flare up in his eyes. ‘She took me for a social worker. We’ll let her go on thinking that’s what I am. If she sees me coming in and out whilst you’re away at school, she’ll believe that I’m looking after your nan and there’s nothing to worry about.’ I sighed. ‘Somehow, I’ll find the time to pop in here a couple of times this week, and I’ll make sure she sees me going in and out. That should set her mind at rest.’

  Olly gave me a long, considering stare. ‘Why are you helping me?’

  ‘Because you’re going to help me, Olly. What’s the flying time of that drone of yours?’

  ‘Half an hour if the batteries are fully charged.’

  ‘Then get ’em powered up, ready for the weekend. You and I are going back to Moorworthy. We’re going to take a second look.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Some people think Dartmoor is unspoilt wilderness, untouched by man. But tin has been mined here since the Bronze Age, and copper and silver; and granite quarried. Over the centuries great oak forests have been cleared. The land has been ripped open, patched and pitted and scored with scars. Mining has created wrinkles in the landscape, long deep gullies, which, once the ore has been exhausted, are abandoned to gorse and scrub, to thorns, ferns and nettles, so that it becomes difficult to see them from above: from a drone, for example, especially when, as with the Moorworthy mine, there are also surrounding trees.

  It’s not that I’m interested in mines. Dark holes in the ground, natural or man-made, do not fill me with enthusiasm. I went caving with a boyfriend once, in Pridhamsleigh Cavern nearby. It was easy going, though horribly muddy, as far as the main cave, but I wasn’t mad enough to go deeper in. And no attempts of his to persuade me how wonderful it would be to squeeze my body through narrow fissures in the rock or dive under pools of icy black water could convince me otherwise. And I know that the screeching and wailing heard down there is caused by the wind and not the ghosts of lost cavers, but I was still scared shitless.

  No, my only interest in the mines of Moorworthy lay in finding out what Gavin was up to.

  I’d have liked to have phoned his parents and ask if they knew anything about the death of his friend Ben, but I didn’t want to intrude on their grief; and if they’d asked why I wanted to know I wouldn’t have been able to tell them.

  On Thursday I managed to find time to drop in at Olly’s house, parking on the verge outside his neighbour’s and waving to her cheerily when she saw me. I didn’t see the owner of the property; he was at school. I let myself in through the back door, and as I went through the garden my eyes strayed instinctively to the far end, where Dolly Knolly was sleeping peacefully, surrounded by her ceremonial grave goods, beneath her coverlet of flowers.

  I wandered down to where she lay and stood looking over the hedge into the field behind. It was a peaceful spot, surrounded by fields that swept upward to a copse of birch trees on the hill. I could hear rooks calling, the occasional bleat of sheep from distant pastures. I could understand her wanting to be buried here, where she had lived so long, rather than in the town churchyard. The ponies came down the field, pushing their heads over the hedge, gazing at me expectantly beneath long forelocks. I fed them fallen apples from Dolly’s garden, the soft hair around their muzzles brushing my open palm.

  I stayed in the house half an hour and had a good snoop around. Olly must have suspected I would do this because he’d locked his bedroom, and his nan’s. There was a third bedroom with a double bed and a dressing table in it, but the drawers had been emptied.

  As I was in the house anyway, I took down the grubby nets in the living room and put them in the washing machine, with a note to Olly to hang them straight back up, damp, when he got home.

  He was a remarkable boy. Most fourteen-year-olds, given money and complete freedom from adult control, would be living in squalor by now, surrounded by coke cans and pizza boxes, bunking off school, money all spent on computer games, getting into trouble and high on drugs. But not Olly. I looked around his neat and tidy home, his school shirts carefully hung on hangers on the old clothes horse, and I could have wept for him, for his neat and lonely little life.

  His terror of social services seemed to have come from the indomitable Dolly, who’d threatened to put him in a home if he misbehaved, and been fed by television reports of the terrible abuse suffered by children in some of these places. His whole life was now dominated by the fear of being found out, the danger of putting a foot wrong. He had no friends at school. He dared not invite anyone home, in case they discovered his secret. He dared not visit them, in case parents asked questions. The only time he seemed to interact with others was when he attended his youth band rehearsals once a month. He spent his evenings, weekends and school holidays completely on his own. And he was entirely without self-pity. He just got on with it. But it wasn’t good for him. He was learning to lie and to be a loner. What Olly needed in his life right now was a responsible adult, and I had no idea where I was going to get one of those.

  The coroner phoned me next morning, a softly spoken lady, Mrs Drew. She asked me if I could see her in her office, which meant a trip down to Plymouth. Fortunately, she had a window of opportunity that afternoon, which suited me because I wanted to get it over with. This was partly because I wasn’t looking forward to the interview, but also because the city of Plymouth is just too big, noisy and too full of concrete and traffic for my taste. The sooner I was in and out the better.

  Mrs Drew was very sweet and sympathetic, treading carefully with someone who had been through, as she put it, a traumatic experience. She asked me to tell how I discovered Gavin’s body in my own words and listened without interrupting; then she asked me to go over several points again. She was armed with photographs and little diagrams of the scene showing the exact position of Gavin’s body, provided by the police. She asked if I felt these were an accurate reflection of how I remembered things. I said that I did. I said nothing about drones or wire cutters. She told me that she would call me to give evidence at the inquest, but that this may not happen for several months. All I would be required to do was tell the court exactly what I had told her.

  ‘All the evidence so far points to this tragic death being an accident,’ she told me. ‘Of course, the presence of the weapon is disturbing, but again, the evidence points to the wound being self-inflicted. However, I may direct the jury to record an open verdict.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘No death certificate may be signed until after the inquest has taken place,’ she told me apologetically. ‘However, I am satisfied that no further evidence can be gathered from Gavin’s body, so I will be issuing an order of release so that his parents can bury
their son.’

  ‘I’m sure that will be a comfort to them,’ I told her, and she smiled.

  And that will be it, I thought unhappily, as I made my way down the stairs from her office. Accidental death, open verdict, what does it matter? It will be finished with, tied up neatly, no further investigation deemed necessary. It will be done. Case closed.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I collected Olly after his band practice on Saturday morning, dropping his bassoon back at Daison Cottages and picking up the drone. It was a fine day, with a clear blue sky that would offer it uninterrupted views. It was almost lunchtime by then, so we stopped off in Holne and I treated him to egg and chips in the community cafe which, like the only shop in the tiny village, is run by local volunteers.

  When we came to the gates of Moorworthy House, I drove on past. I wanted to tuck White Van out of sight of the road. But before I could find a likely spot, we were forced to slow down to a crawl behind a rumbling beast of a lorry piled high with black, plastic-wrapped bales of silage. Its swaying tailgate bore the legend ‘Moss and Pike’, its green paintwork thickly coated in dust. Some wag had written ‘clean me’ underneath the name with a finger. We trundled along behind it for about a mile.

  ‘It stinks!’ Olly complained, his hands over his nose.

  ‘It’s silage,’ I told him. ‘It’s fermenting. If you were fermenting, you’d stink.’

  He shook his head. ‘Silage doesn’t stink like that!’

  I had to admit the fumes wafting our way from the back of the truck were particularly noxious. In additionto the fermenting silage, periodic belches of grey smoke from the exhaust pipe added to the unpleasant ambience. I dropped back, away from the fumes, veering off the road when a muddy track into the woods opened suddenly on our right, bringing White Van to a squelchy halt in the golden shade of some beech trees. ‘This’ll do.’

  We clambered out and walked through the woods onto open ground. The moor stretched away into the distance, the purple flowers of heather gone with the end of summer, the green bracken ferns turning to rust. Ollie knelt on the grass and set up the drone, fixing his phone into the control unit so that we would be able to see what the camera was seeing. He switched the drone on and red lights flashed on its four rotors. A central light turned green. ‘Ready!’ he called out. It rose into the air, a giant insect, buzzing faintly.