by Rebecca Tope
They woke next morning to a steady drizzle, which cast a sullen gloom over everything from the first moment they opened their eyes. Sam, in his self-contained room which opened directly onto the yard, struggled with his clothes in the semi-darkness, forcing his thoughts away from the terrible morning, only a week and a half ago, when Lilah had shouted for him. The ghastly business of retrieving Guy from the slurry haunted his dreams, and he feared it would do so for the rest of his life.
As he went out into the yard, a sack held over his head and shoulders against the rain, he cast his eyes up the rising slope to where the roof of the Grimsdales’ house could be seen. It was something he did every morning, without knowing why. The sun rose over that roof; perhaps that was it. In winter months, the first pale suggestion of dawn came to that stretch of sky first. There was also the telltale plume of smoke, rising from the chimney, indicating the wind direction. However early Sam and Guy might have risen for the morning milking, Amos and Isaac were always earlier. Once or twice Guy had joked that he thought they must be vampires or zombies, living a nocturnal existence. Sam had disapproved of such remarks – weren’t the youngsters scared enough of the brothers already?
The fact that there was no smoke on this particular morning did not strike Sam as odd; the drizzle would have obscured it anyway. He could barely even see the house. Glumly, he trudged to the field gate, halfway down the lane, and called the usual ‘Ho! Ho!’ at the cows, to bring them trooping submissively into the milking yard. He had convinced Lilah and Roddy that he could manage on his own. The cows behaved much better for him than they ever had for Guy, and if they pushed into the stalls in the wrong sequence, what did it matter? They all got dealt with, one way or another, and the milk yield was just as good as it had ever been.
Lilah’s alarm clock was set to coincide with the final minutes of the milking, so that she could play a part in returning the cows to their field, while Sam sluiced down the equipment and tidied up. As she emerged into the persistent rain, she too glanced up towards the Grimms’ house. What she saw did not give her any indication of the day’s weather. Running clumsily, a hand held to the side of his head, which was splashed grotesquely with deep red, was Amos Grimsdale. As he came closer, she could see how sunken his eyes were, his mouth a dark circle of suffering and horror. He was trying to speak.
Hesitantly, she moved towards him, remembering all the times she had run away and hidden from him, creating a bogeyman with which to frighten herself. Now, she had no choice but to behave responsibly. A few moments later she could hear his words: ‘Isaac! Help me! Isaac – he’s dead.’
CHAPTER FOUR
Sam and Lilah both followed Amos back to his house, trying to soothe his babbling, numbly prepared for whatever horror they might encounter. Lilah had run back to her own house first, yelling at Miranda to wake up, phone the police, send them to the Grimms’ house. She wasn’t sure that anything would be done as she’d ordered.
‘He won’t really be dead,’ said Sam, repeating it like a mantra, trying to convince Amos or perhaps himself. But when Lilah looked at the vicious lesion on the side of the old man’s head, she was not reassured. When they found Isaac, lying in his jumbled bed, not bleeding, but staring with sightless eyes at the ceiling, they had to agree with Amos. A ghastly cavity beside Isaac’s right eye showed where a savage blow had been struck, forceful enough to kill him. The clear assumption was that the same attempt had been made on Amos, but with less skill or effectiveness. Together they turned to him.
‘Who was it?’ asked Sam. ‘What bloody bugger did this, eh?’
Amos sat down heavily in a chair beside the bedroom door, ignoring the pile of clothes draped over the seat and back. He looked dazed, vacant. At first Lilah thought he was groping for a description of the murderer, remembering the face and trying to put a name to it. But then he began to slide sideways, like a badly propped-up doll, and she realised they were not going to get any answers from him.
‘Sam!’ she cried. ‘Catch him!’ Carefully they laid him on the floor, and then scrambled around and over each other, putting a pillow under his head, covering him with a grimy blanket.
‘He’s still breathing,’ Lilah whispered, after a few moments. ‘What about his pulse?’
Sam shrugged. ‘No good at first aid. Never mind all that, so long as he’s breathing. Let’s just hope your Mum makes that phone call.’
‘Poor old chap. Doesn’t he look pathetic.’ She stared curiously at the man she’d been afraid of for years. A ragged beard covered his lower face; his hair, which had been brushed for the funeral, was reverting to its normal scarecrow style. His skin was like the bark of a tree, so weathered and ravaged and unwashed was it. At least his wound seemed to have stopped bleeding. ‘Just a poor old man, who’s minded his own business all his life.’
‘Not sure about that,’ grunted Sam. ‘Blessed tinkers, these Grimms are. Not so old, either. What a way to live. Look at it!’ He glanced around the room, one of two bedrooms; at the filthy window, the unsavoury pile of old clothes in one corner, the heavily cobwebbed ceiling.
Lilah looked, and couldn’t restrain a little laugh. ‘Makes Redstone look like Buckingham Palace,’ she commented. ‘Funny – I’ve never been in here before, and I’ve lived next door for most of my life.’
Sam grunted again, and turned to look at the inert Isaac. ‘Two dead bodies in two weeks is going it a bit,’ he muttered. ‘Don’t like to think what the police’ll say.’
Lilah’s mind slowly absorbed what Sam had said. She stared at him. ‘But this is nothing to do with Daddy,’ she told him, earnestly. ‘How could it be? Daddy fell in the slurry.’
Sam nodded at her. ‘He did, lovey. He did indeed.’ And then came the slamming of a car door and the familiar tones of the young policeman. Despite the awfulness of the situation, Lilah felt a stab of pleasure as she recognised the voice. Meeting Den again so soon was at least a crumb of consolation.
A moment later, an ambulance siren was audible, and all was bustle amidst uniformed men and gentle questions. Amos was rushed away in the ambulance, which did little to reduce the sense of a very crowded little farmhouse. Sam and Lilah were banished from the bedroom while Isaac was examined in the greatest detail, as well as photographed. Then another carload of police arrived. All was suddenly serious. Den took Sam and Lilah out into the yard, and they explained what had happened.
‘Two sudden deaths, only ten days apart,’ Den said to himself. ‘That’s likely to change our view about how Mr Beardon died.’
‘Told you it would,’ said Sam to Lilah. ‘No such thing as coincidence – I’ve always said that.’
‘Don’t be stupid,’ she snapped back at him. ‘Of course there’s such a thing. It makes no sense at all to try to connect the Grimms with Daddy.’
Sam raised his eyebrows and clamped his lips together, a picture of stubborn patience. But then his eyes narrowed and he decided to speak. ‘It’s time you woke up to a few things about your precious father,’ he said. ‘You’re old enough now to give up some of your rosy ideas about him.’
‘What do you mean?’ She tried to keep the little-girl vulnerability out of her voice, knowing she often exploited her position when with Sam, just as she had with her father. Adopting adult behaviour when acting as a very junior farmhand had been impossible, and there had been a collective game – almost a conspiracy – to prevent her from growing up. To have Sam tell her now to act her age was an unkind shock, particularly in the present circumstances.
Den picked up Sam’s remark in a different way. ‘Are you saying there are things about Mr Beardon that the police should know?’ he enquired. ‘Things you haven’t told us?’
Sam rubbed one boot against a cobble set into the yard. ‘Bound to be,’ he mumbled. ‘You never asked me about him, did you? Him as a person. Just about finding him in the muck.’
Den drew a sharp breath and glanced at the group of police officers emerging from the house. Lilah was immediately aware of
how different things were this time. This was a crime, deliberately violent. Nothing could be touched, not even the body, until a full examination of the scene had been made. It was horrible – and oddly exciting, she realised with a twinge of shame.
‘Perhaps you two could come with us,’ an older man said to Lilah and Sam, with a nod at Den. ‘Thanks, Cooper. We’ll go through your findings when we’ve finished here.’ Lilah cast a desperate glance at Den, seeking explanations, reassurance. But although he met her eyes, he gave nothing away.
In an untidy procession, half the party left the house and crammed into one of the police cars. As they drove cautiously down the rutted, twisting lane, they met the undertaker’s men, in the same Renault Espace which had collected Guy’s body. Lilah felt a lurch of agony as she recognised it. The two vehicles could not pass in the narrow lane, and hesitated, nose to nose, before the Espace began to reverse. When they finally came alongside, the two drivers wound down their windows to speak.
‘Take him straight to Pathology, will you?’ said the policeman.
‘Right you are,’ agreed the undertaker’s man, neutrally.
‘Can we go round to Redstone and tell my mother what’s happening, please?’ Lilah asked, in a flat tone. ‘We’re not in any great hurry, are we?’
The man driving the car glanced at the policewoman next to him. She gave no perceptible response, but he seemed satisfied.
‘That’ll be all right,’ he said. ‘If you’re quick.’
They were eventually taken to a police station ten miles away and questioned separately. It took a long time for Lilah to explain about the Grimms, and how they were virtual strangers to her, despite their close proximity. She knew nothing about any relatives they might have. No, she had no idea who might want to kill them. Her father had said they were tinkers, gypsies, but only as an expression of scorn – they weren’t really. She thought they’d been born in that house. Perhaps they had shady acquaintances. They were poachers, probably. She threw out random suggestions, hoping to strike the right answer, as much for her own sake as for the requirements of the law.
‘Am I right in thinking they’ve been your close neighbours for – what? Fourteen years, did you say?’
Lilah nodded.
‘And you don’t know anything more than you’ve told me about them?’
‘No. Sam might, or Mum. But I really know nothing about them. They live on the money Dad gave them for the sale of their fields, I think. I have absolutely no idea who might want to kill them.’
At last, the interview ended, and they gave her a cup of tepid coffee. The atmosphere relaxed, and Den Cooper came into the room, clearly sent to look after her.
‘Oh, God,’ she sighed. ‘I think I must be in a nightmare. This is all so weird. Is there any news about Amos?’
‘They think he’ll live. He came round for a minute, apparently, but he’s badly shaken up.’
‘Aren’t we all,’ said Lilah grimly. ‘Why on earth did this have to happen, just when we were trying to get back to normal?’
‘You poor thing,’ he sympathised. ‘It must have been like a rerun of last time.’
She thought about it, staring up at the small window, and the tree pressing close against it outside. ‘No,’ she said. ‘It isn’t anything like last time.’
‘Well, we think it is.’ He fell silent, and started to fiddle self-consciously with the notepad still lying on the table. ‘We think we should probably have opened a murder inquiry on Guy Beardon, from the start.’
Lilah was dumb at first. Then: ‘But why? It doesn’t make sense. You haven’t got any reason to think that. There’s no evidence—’
‘That’s a problem, yes. There might have been some, but your Sam washed it all away. Not his fault. But we can’t just let it go. Not now. There’ll be a file opened and more interviews. They’ll probably let me do some of it.’
‘So we’ve got to live like that, have we? As an open file which could at any moment turn into a prosecution for murder?’
‘Until there’s evidence one way or the other, yes. But for now it’s Isaac’s killer we’ll be concentrating on. Poor old chap. What a way to go.’
* * *
They took her and Sam home again. The rain had stopped, and they could see Roddy in the barn, cutting a sack of calf nuts open with a penknife. Sam made a click of annoyance, and Lilah knew without his saying anything that Roddy should have opened it by pulling the string at the top. She remembered her father ripping ferociously at the obstructive fastening, which would only ever yield to a gentle touch. The harder a person pulled, the more impossible it became to unravel the string. ‘Lateral thinking,’ she said. ‘Roddy’s a lateral thinker. And he likes to use that knife whenever he can.’
The four of them gathered in the kitchen, which still had the remnants of the funeral foods – the scraps that Hetty had left behind – scattered on the worktops. Lilah spoke explosively, feeling the words echo inside her head, after she’d uttered them. ‘They think Daddy was murdered. They think the same person killed Isaac and possibly Amos as well, if he doesn’t get better. They’ll be coming to empty the slurry pit as soon as they can, to look for anything suspicious.’
Miranda’s face was white. ‘What exactly are they going to do?’
‘They’re sending round a forensics team, later on this morning. If they can’t find anything, they’ll have to let it go, I suppose. Have the inquest, and accept whatever the verdict says.’
‘It’s just a horrible coincidence,’ said Roddy, on the verge of tears. ‘It must be. Or if there has to be a connection, it could just be that somebody’s read about Dad in the papers and came snooping round, and—’ he tailed off.
‘And decided to try and murder two old men. Why would they do that, Rod? I can only think of one reason – to shut them up, because they’d seen or heard something about what happened to Daddy. And Sam says there’s no such thing as coincidence – don’t you, Sam?’
‘That’s what I think,’ Sam confirmed quietly. ‘And I told the police as much. The Grimms aren’t just two innocent old men. They’ve had their share of trouble. I told the police – ask around the village. Ask Hetty Taplow, for one. It was she that told me, years ago now.’
‘Told you what?’ Lilah and Miranda asked together.
‘I’d best not say.’ He ducked his head, defiant. ‘If Amos gets better, he can tell them himself. Anyway there’s work to be done. If those forensics chaps are coming, we’d best be ready for them.’ He clumped out into the yard, glancing automatically up the hill to the Grimms’ roof, and then he turned away with a grimace. Roddy followed him.
‘Somebody better start thinking about what’ll happen when I have to go back to school and take my exams,’ he grumbled, as he went. ‘I’m only on study leave, in case you’ve forgotten.’
That day seemed like a whole week of turmoil and confusion. Lilah took the forensics people all around the slurry pit, trying to describe how she’d found Guy, what exactly she and Sam had done, what she had heard and seen. Then they questioned Sam, Roddy and Miranda, in turn. It was obvious that nothing any of them said suggested a deliberate killing. Then the police widened their examinations by going into the milking parlour, Guy’s office, and finally the house.
‘I’ve read about this sort of thing,’ Roddy murmured to his sister, as the men went meticulously through the drawers of Guy’s office desk, picking up letters and bank statements and putting them carefully into plastic bags. ‘Though I thought they’d be much rougher than this.’
‘It’s not a drugs raid,’ she replied indignantly. ‘They’ve no reason to suspect us of anything.’
The police instructed Sam to empty the pit as quickly as he could, listening with some impatience to his explanations of the procedure and how long it would take. They would have to hire in a tanker, not having one of their own, and the muck would have to be spread on the fields.
‘Now, hang on a minute,’ said a senior policeman. ‘We can’t
wait while you do all that.’
‘So where should we put it?’ demanded Lilah. ‘It’s a health hazard if we just let it run across the yard and it might get into the stream if we’re not careful.’
The men looked around the yard, exchanged glances, and finally nodded reluctant agreement. ‘Take it onto the fields, then,’ they said.
A wide-diameter flexible hosepipe was lowered into the pit, and the tanker’s pump set going. Gradually, with a prodigious stirring-up of the slurry smell, the level fell. Soon the tanker was full and Sam drove off to a designated field to spread the muck. The job would take all day, at least, and Lilah’s help was only sporadically required. Aimlessly, she drifted away, unsure of what needed her attentions most. Roddy, true to form, had vanished to his room to revise for his GCSEs. Miranda was chopping brambles away from the garden gate. Lilah watched her for a moment.
‘Pity to cut them now,’ she called. ‘We’d have got some good blackberries from them later on.’
‘Not these bits,’ Miranda corrected. ‘They’re new growth. I swear they make a good three inches’ progress a day at this time of year. Another week and they’d be right across the gate. We couldn’t get in or out without being scratched.’
‘Mmmm,’ murmured Lilah, losing interest. An uncharacteristic apathy had gripped her, and she remained unmoving in the yard, with a few hens scratching close by and a large airliner rumbling overhead. The bustle of the forensics people had abated; most of them had already departed with mysterious plastic bags containing tiny scraps of who knew what.
Sam’s return with the noisy tractor and malodorous tanker came as quite a relief. It would take a dozen or more fill-ups to empty the pit, and then the distasteful job would be over until the coming winter. By then, we probably won’t be here anyway, thought Lilah, with a sharp sense of grief.