by Rebecca Tope
‘I can show you, if you want. Somebody’s taken the law into their own hands and done what Galton should have done days ago. So what are you playing at, telling me they’ve come home?’ Then his eyes narrowed as he mentally backtracked. ‘You never even told me they’d gone,’ he accused. ‘You came here to trap me.’ Small as he was, he was still substantially bigger than her, and very much stronger.
She hadn’t thought it through, she realised. It was one thing to catch the man out with a clever bluff, another to deal with what happened next. She had been so intent on extracting the truth, to have something she could take to the police, that she hadn’t planned the next step. But she couldn’t back away now.
‘You killed them,’ she accused. ‘You shot them and dumped them in a ditch.’
He shrugged. ‘Prove it,’ he challenged. But a faltering note caught her ear. Of course, he had never intended to reveal that he knew where the bodies were. He had, after all, been provoked into giving himself away by her ruse. But it was a hollow victory, if the dogs really were dead.
‘Take me to where they are,’ she commanded. ‘I want to see them.’
‘I’m buggered if I will. You go and find them for yourself. Why should I help you?’
She couldn’t think of a way to force him, and sadness was beginning to engulf her bravado. She had got what she came for, up to a point, but now she couldn’t see what good it could do. Nothing would bring poor innocent Freddy and Basil back, and their slaughter was all her stupid fault.
‘I’ll go and find them myself, then,’ she said, and turned to go.
‘And don’t come bothering me again,’ he spat at her.
She felt abandoned as she walked back to Hawkhill. Ariadne would perhaps have helped her find the dogs if she hadn’t been so bound up with the arrest of her beloved Peter. Phil might have put in a word and got a constable to patrol the roadsides for a few hours, if he’d still been with her. Then she realised that a ditch could just as easily be under a field hedge, well away from the road, and take forever to find, as a result.
She badly needed a confidant, somebody who would understand her feelings of guilt and misery at what had happened. She had met so few people since coming to Lower Slaughter, and of them, one was under arrest and the other had just virtually confessed to killing the dogs in her care. Which left only one other, and some strange instinct told her that he might just turn up trumps if approached for help.
This time, she walked to the beautifully situated old farmhouse, surrounded by its huge barns and lambing sheds. She’d gone back to Hawkhill first, had coffee and released Hepzie from her confinement with the parrot. The bird had its back turned to the room, and was concentrating on cleaning its claws. The dog was huddled in a corner of the sofa, not even getting up when Thea came into the room. There had obviously been no rapprochement between the two. Indeed, it was tempting to think the parrot had been roundly abusing the dog.
‘You can come with me this time,’ she told the spaniel, once the coffee was finished. ‘You can’t do any harm now.’ She even had the vague idea that Hepzie might come in useful.
Galton was driving his tractor across a field as she walked down the track. It was a few hundred yards away and she assumed he hadn’t noticed her. Finding a gateway, she went into the field and stood watching him as he pulled some sort of implement behind the tractor. It took a while for her to work out that it was spraying something onto the grass, through fine jets. ‘Blimey!’ she murmured. ‘He’s not organic then, is he!’
She waited patiently for twenty minutes, during which the man noticed her, waved, and carried on with his work. Eventually he finished the job and drove at high speed to where she stood, jerking the tractor to a bouncing halt beside her and switching the engine off.
‘Is that a chemical spray?’ she asked, waving at the implement.
‘It is,’ he nodded. ‘Kills the eggs that give the sheep intestinal worms and liver fluke. What would you have me do?’
‘I wouldn’t presume to judge,’ she said.
‘So what can I do for you?’
She clenched her jaw against the urge to rest her head on his chest and sob. ‘I came to tell you that Mr Angell’s dogs are dead.’ It was no good – a rogue tear trickled down her cheek before she could stop it.
‘No!’
‘That Lister man told me he’d seen them. He must have done it himself. He gave himself away.’ The full impact of the loss of Basil and Freddy had barely hit her yet. Now she conjured their good-natured manners, their soft coats and unexciting lives and felt a wave of misery. How and why they’d died seemed less important than the fact that they were dead, wasted on some stupid man-made altar erected to sheep, of all things.
Galton sighed. ‘It’s nearly time to stop for some lunch. Do you want to come in and tell me the whole story?’
Without asking herself what she thought she was doing, she nodded, and he took her arm without ceremony, steering her down to the house. The spaniel trotted awkwardly behind them, pulling back occasionally to remind her mistress that she existed.
The story emerged in a handful of jumbled sentences, to which Galton listened carefully. He had given no sign of impatience for his lunch, and offered her nothing to eat or drink. ‘What a bloody mess,’ he said heavily when she’d finished. ‘Not one of us comes out of it very well, do we?’
‘Thanks for listening,’ she mumbled, aware of imposing on him.
‘Well, I was always an easy touch for a damsel in distress. Story of my life,’ he grinned.
He would make a brilliant friend, she decided. Unusually easy to talk to, big and amiable, but capable of vigorous action when needed – a man for every eventuality. Why had his wife deserted him, she wondered? Had he raged at her a few times too many? Had she given up competing with the sheep for his attention?
But she needed to stick to the immediate subject before exploring the man’s emotional life. ‘Do you think it could have been the Rhodesian ridgebacks who killed your sheep?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure it must have been, and he’s been trying to put the blame on Freddy and Basil. Now he’s gone and shot them. I suppose he’ll tell people he found blood on their jaws or something.’
‘He won’t tell anybody anything. You’ve got it all wrong,’ he told her. ‘He’d never let those precious ridgebacks out of his sight, believe me. It couldn’t have been them. And the coincidence would be too much, if your theory was right.’
‘So why – I mean, what—?’
‘He’s always had a down on Cedric. It goes back years. That house of his – it belonged to Cedric’s old uncle, thirty or forty years back, with some land attached. Lister’s mother was the housekeeper there. I never quite knew the whole story, but it ended up with a scandal, and when the uncle died he left the house to old Mrs L.’
Thea followed this tale with some difficulty. ‘So why the feud?’
‘Cedric contested the will. He was the next of kin and was expecting to get the place. He said some very damaging things, and the old lady—’
‘Lister’s mother?’
‘Right – well, she went off her rocker with the strain of it all. She wasn’t all that old, I s’pose, maybe just past sixty, but she seemed like a crone to us boys at the time. Mike Lister was a bit older, always a jack the lad, swaggering about with his gun, boasting about girls. He was a spoilt brat, youngest of three boys, came along when his mum was well past forty. Anyway, he swore he’d get revenge on Cedric and he’s been doing all he could to get to him ever since. He never lets up.’
‘And now he’s shot the dogs simply because he doesn’t like their owner? The man must be a monster.’
‘He’s not nice, that’s for sure. And sly. But Thea – those dogs really did kill my tups. You have to face up to that. It was totally wrong of Lister to get involved, but even so, they had to go, don’t you see?’
‘No, I don’t see,’ she shouted. ‘They were two fine animals, in the prime of life. They could have been sen
t to a new home where they’d be properly looked after. Besides, there was no blood on them.’
He heaved another sigh, even deeper than before. ‘They would have licked it all off each other. They like the taste of it – it’s a treat for them. It was them, I promise you. There isn’t the least doubt. You’ve created a web of fantasy around Lister and his ridgebacks that just obscures the truth. The simple truth. It’s possible that he was worried that suspicion would fall on his own dogs, and that was why he took it on himself to shoot them – as well as being glad to get at Cedric.’
‘So you’re saying I should have let you do it on that first day, when you came to Hawkhill.’
He grinned ruefully. ‘No, I’m not saying that. You’d never have let me. And I couldn’t have done it with you watching. It isn’t pleasant.’
‘Have you ever shot a dog?’
He shook his head. ‘But my father did, when I was twelve. I was there. It screamed. It scarred me for life, that scream.’
She looked at him, wondering at his tone. Slowly she understood that he meant what he’d said. The experience had done a damage that he permitted her to glimpse for a moment.
After a painful silence, she spoke. ‘What’s Cedric going to say when he gets back?’
‘He won’t say much, never does. Look – don’t feel too badly about it. It’s a strange business, sheep-worrying. Any dog’s capable of it, if it gets its blood up. They just see red and act crazy for a few minutes. The minute they get a taste for it, there’s no stopping them. You can’t really blame them – it’s in their nature. And tups are easy prey – soft things. It doesn’t take much to kill them.’
She was silenced, both by his confidence that Cedric’s dogs were guilty, and his surprising forgiveness.
‘You’re being very kind,’ she said, humbly. ‘After I’ve caused you so much trouble.’ The guilt and grief remained lumpily in her midriff, tangled up with a mixture of other unpleasant emotions. Wasn’t she getting her priorities upside down, agonising about a pair of dogs when a human being had been savagely killed? Somehow the three deaths merged in her mind, a confusion of violence and rage that was frightening.
He merely nodded in calm acknowledgement.
‘I’d better go,’ she said. ‘And leave you to get on with your lunch.’
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Won’t you stay and have it with me?’
She looked round, seeing no sign of any food. Did he do all his own cooking, as well as housework and running the farm?
He laughed. ‘It’s just cold meat and bread, and a few bits. Most days, Dave comes in and has it with me, but he’s off on Thursdays. Dave’s the farmhand you guessed was about somewhere, when you came yesterday. There’s Eddie as well, when we’re busy.’ He fetched a joint of cold pork, on a large oval dish that looked like a valuable antique. Pickle, some tomatoes, crusty brown bread and a stoneware flagon of cider completed the repast. It could all have found favour with the occupants of the house a century earlier. Even the kettle was an ancient enamel object, sitting on top of the Aga.
‘You like nice things, don’t you?’ she observed, making an effort at normality. ‘I can’t see anything made of plastic in this entire room.’
‘Just like things that have some life in them,’ he nodded. ‘If you look after them, they’ll last for ever. Mind you, I can’t take the credit. Most of this stuff was here when my mum was a girl. It’s like living in a museum sometimes.’
‘But you keep it all so nice.’
He leant forward and winked comically. ‘You know – I discovered a secret weapon. It’s called a feather duster.’
She laughed more at his face than his words. He had somehow managed to transform himself into a Mrs Mop figure simply by doing something with his mouth, then angling his head and flicking an imaginary duster over the china on the dresser. ‘You’ll have to teach me,’ she said. ‘I’ve never quite got the hang of dusting.’
‘It’ll be that dog’s fault,’ he said, nodding at Hepzie who sat self-effacingly beside Thea’s chair. ‘They shake dry mud over everything if you let them in the house. You should have seen this kitchen when my mum had her two setters in here. There was a veneer of dust and dog hair over every blessed thing.’
What a man, she marvelled. And yet she felt no stirrings of physical attraction. He was being kind and funny and self-deprecating, but he wasn’t flirting, and so neither was she. There was a comfortable atmosphere, where she found herself trusting and believing him completely. ‘You know, I was really scared of you a few days ago.’
‘I was a bear,’ he admitted. ‘I get like that. I blame the world, mainly. Things will keep going wrong.’
‘So which is the real you – the bear or the pussycat?’
‘Both, obviously. As the whim takes me.’
‘What do the local people think of you?’
‘They’re cautious round me. I’ll bet you Cedric Angell warned you about me – don’t get the wrong side of old Galton, he’ll shoot you if you do, kind of thing.’
‘Something like that,’ she agreed.
‘Yet I’ve never done him any harm. I like the dopey old bugger most of the time. He can’t see beneath the surface, that’s the trouble. Just because I’ve bawled him out a few times, he thinks I’m an ogre.’
And your wife? Thea wanted to ask, simply to complete the picture. But she didn’t. It would have taken them into the wrong kind of territory.
‘I still need to find the dogs,’ she remembered. ‘Give them a decent burial, if they really are dead.’ The heaviness came back, the sorrow for the animals whose lives had been so constrained and dull. ‘People do such awful things to animals, don’t they. It weighs me down sometimes, just thinking about it. So much suffering and exploitation. Do you think there’ll ever be a time when it stops?’
He shook his head. ‘It couldn’t work – not with farm animals at least. If people stopped eating cows and sheep and pigs, then there’d be none left in a few years. Just a handful kept sentimentally as pets, and the odd carefully controlled so-called wild colonies on scruffy mountainsides, for the sake of the tourist trade. Look at the nonsense with wild boar going on now. Idiot people letting them run wild in the woods, and then panicking and shooting them when they get into a school playground. Seems to me you have to take the rough with the smooth. Wild animals can be aggressive. They get hungry and invade human territory, and then the same old conflicts start up again, just as they have for thousands of years. Human beings have to be in control, and their safety and property come far and away above anything else.’
She listened to this speech attentively. The underlying cynicism matched her own attitude towards much that went on. Human folly seemed to expand with every passing year, and sometimes she thought nobody could see it but her.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s just seriously bad luck to be an animal, I guess.’
This time he laughed, a booming guffaw that came from somewhere deep inside. Big men could be so noisy, she thought, briefly remembering Carl’s slight frame, and even Phil Hollis, though tall, could hardly be described as big.
‘Well, I really ought to go,’ she said, after picking at the food he gave her. The knots in her stomach prevented proper eating, she discovered. ‘You’ll have work to do, and I’m being paid to supervise the remaining livestock at Hawkhill. Except – I do need to find those dogs. Can you suggest where I should look for them?’
‘He won’t have taken them far. He’ll have had to use his car, probably did it late last night, and just bundled them out by the side of the road. There’s plenty of quiet lanes around here with a handy ditch running alongside.’
‘Do you think Sharon knew about it?’ There was something awful about that thought. And yet her face when Thea introduced herself suggested awareness. ‘She did, I suppose.’
Galton’s face softened. ‘Oh, Sharon,’ he said ambiguously. ‘You met her, then?’
Thea nodded.
‘Did either of you ment
ion me?’
‘Yes – she did. I gather you know each other.’
‘Obviously. It’s a small village.’ He grimaced and shook his head. ‘I can’t hope to explain it all to you, but let’s just say that Sharon and I go back a long way.’
‘Just as you and Phil Hollis do,’ she remembered.
Galton laughed. ‘Not that long,’ he objected. ‘Although now I think of it, she was at school with my wife for a year or so. I’d forgotten that. They both grew up in Stow.’
‘I see,’ said Thea, vaguely, aware that she did not really see at all. ‘You’re telling me that everybody knows everybody and it wouldn’t be safe to make assumptions.’
‘More or less, yes. But you can assume all you like about Mike Lister. I’ll never work out what Sharon sees in him. He can’t be a lot of fun to live with.’
She thought again of the comfortless house, and the downtrodden dogs outside. ‘No,’ she said. Then she collected herself. ‘Well, come on, Heps, mustn’t outstay our welcome.’ She went ahead to the front door and turned to thank Galton for his hospitality. He wasn’t behind her. ‘Where did he go?’ she asked the dog, who merely looked blank.
Then he reappeared, carrying a pure white sheepskin. ‘Here,’ he said. ‘Let me give you this. I have eight or ten done every year, just because it seems such a waste not to. It makes a nice bedside rug, maybe.’
She took it in wonderment, holding the soft wool to her face. ‘It’s gorgeous!’ she breathed. ‘Surely you could sell them, rather than giving them away?’
‘I don’t need money,’ he said, as if making a simple obvious remark. ‘It was good to meet you again, Thea Osborne. I hope it’s not the last time.’
Walking back to Hawkhill, she noted the way he’d used her name, as if he’d been storing it up for just the right moment. A flicker of her former fear recurred. Henry Galton was clever, mercurial and powerful. He had threatened her with his gun, fed her a classic country lunch and given her a sheepskin rug. What next, she asked herself.