A Dirty Death

by Rebecca Tope

  Clumsily the people in the room got to their feet to leave. They exchanged muttered remarks, almost afraid to shatter the funereal silence – remarks born of a frustration that there were no clear answers to the mystery of how Guy had died, combined with resignation to the fact that finally the fun seemed to be over. A few people looked furtively at the Beardons; if anyone in the neighbourhood was destined to die violently, then Guy Beardon was the man. This was said with all the certainty of hindsight. Suspicious glances were thrown at Sam, who had been subtly but steadily chosen by the whole community as the most obvious candidate for Guy’s murderer. Stories of his public humiliations, his relationship with Miranda, were whispered. If it had been Sam, then good luck to him, appeared to be the general feeling. A conspiracy of approval was almost tangible.

  Lilah didn’t know what to say to her mother. Miranda had not referred to the likely outcome of the inquest beforehand, and seemed disinclined to comment on it now. Her face betrayed no emotion, until Sam caught her up outside and said resentfully, ‘Bit much, telling a man off after he’s dead.’ It took both women a moment to realise what he meant, then Lilah gave a short laugh.

  ‘Dad would have liked it, don’t you think?’

  ‘Can’t see how you make that out,’ grumbled Sam. ‘It’s like saying it’s all his own fault. Makes me mad, that. Typical of those bloody stuffed shirts in offices.’

  ‘You can see his point, Sam,’ said Miranda, her voice oddly harsh. ‘To them, Guy was a pig-headed fool who got what he deserved.’

  ‘Mum!’ protested Lilah. ‘That’s not very nice. How can anyone deserve to die like that? I still can’t bear to think about it.’

  ‘That’s another thing,’ put in Sam. ‘Going into such detail with you two listening. It’s not decent, if you ask me. After all, he was your dad – and husband.’ The afterthought came with a glance at Miranda which Lilah found peculiar. Sam went on with his complaint, ‘It made me feel sick, anyway.’

  ‘I didn’t really mind that,’ said Lilah thoughtfully. ‘I was impressed in a way that they did go into such detail and let us stay to hear it. It meant we were being taken seriously, somehow. Did you feel that, Mum?’

  ‘I didn’t feel anything. It’s all feelings with people these days. I just kept thinking, over and over, how arrogant he’d always been about everything. Always overriding everybody, thinking he knew better. Always ordering people about, getting everything his own way. I was wondering what his last thoughts might have been. Do you think he might have acknowledged, at that very last moment, that he was partly to blame? Would that even have occurred to him, do you think?’

  ‘Stop it, Mum. Don’t be so callous. You can’t say it’s a person’s own fault if they’re murdered.’ Even now, she could not persuade herself absolutely that this was the case. She continued to cling to the picture of an accidental fall, as definitely preferable. But too many facts pointed to the theory of a deliberate killing, and she spoke at least partly to try to convince herself.

  Miranda was in pugnacious mode. ‘You can. Of course you can.’ She seemed about to say more, but after a glance at Sam, she fell silent. He seemed oblivious to what she was thinking, staring round at the dwindling crowd of people walking back to their cars or heading off to the shops. It was impossible to read his thoughts. But Sam wasn’t stupid, that much was sure.

  Lilah jigged impatiently. ‘Come on, we’d better get back. I’m hungry, and Sylvia might be worrying. And Chastity might be calving by now. She’s due today. It’s her first time; she might need help.’

  ‘Chastity!’ hooted Miranda, an increasingly angry look in her eyes. ‘That’s another thing – those stupid names he chose for the cows. What did he think everyone thought of him, calling a cow Chastity, of all things?’

  Not to mention Hildegarde, Chionia, Undine, Theodora and Weatherproof, thought Lilah, a touch of sympathetic hysteria rising within her. Yet, where Miranda deplored the eccentric choices of names for the new calves, Lilah thought it was glorious.

  ‘Let’s get fish and chips,’ said Roddy. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘And eat them in Dad’s car!’ Lilah was horrified, but the others voted her down. They seemed to think something had been resolved, that there was cause for relief and forgetting. That even if Guy had been pushed head first into slurry and held there till he stopped breathing, it mattered less, now that the inquest was over.

  They met Sylvia coming out of their lane, and awkwardly pulled up to speak to her. ‘Open verdict,’ said Miranda, before her friend could ask.

  ‘As expected,’ nodded Sylvia.

  ‘Now we just get on with our lives, I suppose.’ The bitterness in Miranda’s tone was deepening. ‘With the stigma of an unresolved death hanging over us for ever.’

  ‘Bit different from how it goes in the films,’ Sylvia agreed. ‘Anyway, all’s been quiet here. Though old Amos seems to be hanging about – must be lonely, poor old fella. Everyone seems to have forgotten about him. And there must be grockles in Mabberley’s woods. I could hear voices from up there. Picnic season, I guess.’

  ‘Sounds busier around here than usual,’ Miranda remarked. ‘Positively crowded.’

  ‘You’re not as isolated as you think. That should be comforting for you.’

  ‘Depends who it is,’ said Sam, something vigorous in his tone making them all turn to look at him. Miranda shrugged slightly.

  ‘Well, thanks a million, Sylv. Come and see me tomorrow, and I’ll give you a sandwich for your reward.’

  ‘Right. Don’t work too hard.’ And she walked off.

  ‘This car stinks of fish and chips,’ remarked Roddy, with something like satisfaction, as they climbed out of it. ‘Wouldn’t Dad be furious!’

  Lilah looked slowly at the faces of the three people she knew best in the world, and tears burst from her without warning. Sobs came explosively, choking her. The need for her father, his wit and his love, his strong arm and listening ear gripped her with a great violence. Nobody else would do. Nobody else understood her as he had done, and here they were laughing at him, angry with him. She felt herself drowning in loss and pain, flooded by her own tears, flooded with the whole terrible business.

  Hating her family and their casual cruelty, she ran headlong into the barn and threw herself down on a pile of loose hay.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  It took Lilah the rest of the day to recover. Miranda eventually forced her into the house, and sat her in Guy’s armchair in the sitting room, bringing her cups of tea, and making forlorn efforts to comfort her.

  ‘It’s all been too much for you,’ she said. ‘I should have realised. But, darling, please try to stop crying. You’ll make yourself ill.’

  Tears ran like a leaking tap, until her eyes were almost closed and her lips swollen in sympathy. When she went to the bathroom for a pee and glanced in the mirror, she hardly knew herself. She tried, experimentally, to make herself stop crying, by gritting her teeth, forcing her jaw muscles to bulge with the effort. It worked for a few minutes, but then an image of Guy came back into her mind, and it all started again.

  Roddy ignored her. When they sat down together for the evening meal, he gave one alarmed glance at her face, and kept his head down for the rest of the meal, eating quickly and then escaping to his room as soon as he could. Sam, who now ate all his meals with the family, where before he had sometimes fended for himself in his own room, tried to convey his understanding, making clumsy remarks about the farm and Chastity’s imminent delivery.

  Forcing herself, she went out with Sam that evening, to help him decide whether the heifer was safe to leave for the night. They watched her quietly, as she took herself apart from the other animals, and stood patiently, head down, sides heaving from time to time.

  ‘She’s all right,’ Sam pronounced, and Lilah agreed with him. By morning, there’d be a new little Jersey. With luck it would be female, and could take up residence in the area prepared for it in the barn. If luck went against them,
the little bull would be despatched at a tender age, to become Pedigree Chum or Kit-e-Kat.

  They walked back to the house, companionably silent. ‘Longest day soon,’ Sam commented, echoing Guy’s acute awareness of the unfolding seasons. ‘Best time of the year.’

  ‘The long evenings are nice. I can’t even imagine winter, with it getting dark at half past three.’ She was speaking on auto-pilot, her head muffled with the aftermath of so much crying. Sam was an easy comrade, equally willing to talk or be silent. It was impossible to associate him with Guy’s death, to cast him as the instigator of her misery and loneliness. She simply could not accept the general view that Sam had killed Guy. She knew Sam; she had seen his face when he first saw Guy in the slurry. Unless she was altogether useless at understanding people, then Sam had had nothing to do with it.

  ‘Night night,’ they said to each other, briefly, unemotionally, at the door to Sam’s room. Early as it was, Lilah went up to bed as soon as she got indoors. Her bed had become a haven: a refuge from the relentless events threatening her peace. It had become a habit now to pull the covers over her head, curling an arm in front of her face to make an air pocket, so she could breathe. Her nose was still sore and tender from all the weeping. She felt ill and sorry for herself.

  But her last thought before falling asleep was of Chastity’s calf, and the way nothing could stop the force of nature, that there was always birth to balance death. And in her dreams it was springtime.

  * * *

  Next day, the subdued, careful atmosphere persisted. ‘Doubt there’ll be any more police visits,’ said Sam, in the middle of the morning.

  As if waiting for a cue, they heard a car coming down the lane, the moment he’d spoken. ‘It’s Den!’ cried Lilah, instantly recognising the car when it appeared. She was surprised at her own sudden enthusiasm.

  ‘Speak of the devil,’ muttered Sam, shaking his head. ‘Should know better by this time.’

  Once again the tall policeman unfolded himself from his car, standing over Lilah like a protective tree. She wanted to cling to him, weep on him, tell him everything in her unhappy heart.

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘It’s nice to see you.’

  ‘I thought, after yesterday—’ he began, examining her face. ‘You look a bit …’

  ‘Ravaged,’ she supplied. ‘Yes, I know.’

  ‘That wasn’t the word I would have used. Have you got time for a little chat?’

  ‘Not really. There’s a new calf. A little heifer. And we’re starting the hay today. Terribly late, and the forecast isn’t very good.’ She spoke distractedly, desperate to leave it all and drive off with Den to a place where she had nothing at all to do.

  He looked round, first at the buildings surrounding the yard, then up at the Grimms’ house. From this distance, with a little imagination, it resembled a fairy castle on a hill, rather than a neglected, old stone farmhouse. ‘I forgot you were so close to them,’ he remarked. ‘Practically next door.’

  ‘We are next door. They’re our closest neighbours. But we’ve never had much to do with them. We should be seeing to poor old Amos, I know. It’s just – it’s always so busy.’ She looked at him helplessly, thinking of Miranda messing about in the house, with time enough to make all kinds of difference to the workload if only she’d put in the effort.

  ‘Come and see the calf,’ she invited, suddenly. ‘She’s in the barn. That’s her mother you can hear, up in the top field.’ The low, repetitive bawling was a distant throb of distress which Lilah had never grown used to, even though it happened every time a cow gave birth. Sometimes, at night, it was unbearable, the bereft mother calling and calling for her baby, the embodiment of despair. Sometimes it seemed to Lilah that in her short life she had been party to a fathomless ocean of pain and misery, that all this suffering was there inside her, barely suppressed by her flippant ways and habitual optimism. And sometimes she couldn’t stop herself imagining every hurt and cruelty; every experimental laboratory; every horse used in war; every animal ill-used in the service of man; every creature sent terrified to the abattoir. All of it added up to an entire universe of horrifying anguish, and she had to breathe slow and deep to be able to carry on. At those times, she would seek out the company of Martha Cattermole, who believed passionately in animal rights. Martha shared the pain, while managing to make it bearable. ‘It does more harm to the humans than it does to the animals,’ she insisted. ‘When we stop being cruel, then all kinds of wonders will be possible.’ Lilah struggled mightily to understand and agree.

  ‘Poor thing,’ Den remarked now, and she could feel that he meant it.

  He followed her, good-natured and patient, into the barn. The little fawn calf lay in a bed of straw, huge, liquid eyes turned towards the visitors, the bewilderment of its situation clear to see.

  ‘I’m calling her Endurance, for obvious reasons,’ said Lilah.

  ‘She’s sweet,’ he said. ‘I hope she’ll be a good omen. Life going on, and that sort of thing.’

  She gazed at the calf, thinking about the phrase he’d used. She’d heard it before and yet it was as if it actually meant something for the first time. Life did go on, like a ribbon unrolling from some immense cosmic spool, whatever else might happen.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Life goes on.’ She was astonished at how much better she felt.

  The policeman moved away from the barn, after a few moments. ‘You’re too busy, then, for a talk?’ he said.

  ‘It depends. I don’t like to leave everything to Sam. I could if it was important, but the work just mounts up. What’s it about?’

  ‘Just to keep you up to date, really. Amos described a chap who sounded like some sort of tramp or gypsy. He could be living rough round here somewhere. It would make sense to be careful.’

  ‘I’m still not scared,’ she told him.

  ‘Okay. That’s up to you. But I should also ask you again, whether you’ve heard anybody mention a stranger about the place. Anything at all peculiar. It’s easy to overlook things, so I’d like you to have a really good think. We’re desperate for some leads on this.’

  She frowned and tried to think. Her head felt thick and slow. ‘Nothing comes to mind,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe this man’s still hanging round here, anyway. Surely he’d get as far away as possible?’

  ‘He might. But that’s assuming it was just a random bit of violence, for no reason. With your dad in the picture, that isn’t very easy to credit. Wouldn’t you agree with that?’

  She nodded reluctantly, kicking at a stone, sending it clattering across the yard.

  He smiled down at her. ‘No more police talk. Let’s hope you can get some peace from here on.’ He paused, eyes on hers. ‘Hey, guess who I saw just now, out in the road.’ He was suddenly boyish, no longer the policeman.

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Elvira Winnicombe! Remember her on the school bus? How we used to tease her. Awful, really, but she was always so gullible. I knew she lived around here, and I’ve been trying to catch up with her mother, but somehow I never expected to see her again.’

  Lilah tried unsuccessfully to share his nostalgia. She managed a smile and a nod. ‘Nothing’s changed, really. Elvira goes to a day centre now, most of the time. She seems to be getting a bit more independent lately. Everyone keeps an eye out for her. Funny you’ve not seen her since school.’

  ‘I’m not out this way very often. It took me right back, seeing her again. They should never have sent her on the same bus as us; we made her life a misery, poor girl.’

  ‘I didn’t. I just kept quiet. I was scared she’d tell her mother, and Phoebe’s always been terribly fierce where Elvira is concerned. Besides, I wouldn’t dare provoke Elvira – I was two years younger than her.’

  ‘Still are, I should think,’ he joked.

  ‘No,’ she said flatly. ‘Now I’m about a thousand years older than she’ll ever be.’

  He took her between his big hands, holding her around the upper arms, a
nd gave her a gentle shake. ‘It’s going to be all right,’ he told her. ‘I promise. Just take care. Don’t go wandering over the fields by yourself without telling someone where you’re going, how long you’ll be. Take your brother with you, if you can. If it was just your dad’s death, I wouldn’t be so worried, but somebody treated the Grimsdales to a very savage attack. We can’t just ignore that. We’re going to be making an inch-by-inch search, starting from the far side of Mabberley’s and working all the way down to your outbuildings. It’ll take a while, but it has to be done. And if there’s anything to find, we’ll turn it up, sooner or later.’

  He was sounding like a policeman again, and Lilah sighed. ‘So there’ll be lots of kind policemen to keep an eye on us, will there?’ she said sarcastically.

  ‘For a few days, yes.’

  ‘But this is highly likely to scare the man away, surely, if he hasn’t left the area already? He isn’t going to sit under a tree and wait for you to find him.’

  ‘That’s probably true. Except we’ve got almost nothing to connect anybody with Isaac’s killing. Unless we find the murder weapon with fingerprints on it – which would be a miracle – our only hope is discovering some kind of motive. Even then, there’d not be much of a case.’

  ‘It’s hopeless, then, basically? Didn’t you find anything useful in the Grimms’ house? Footprints, or hairs, or something?’

  Den shook his head, and laughed. ‘Have you ever seen that house? It’s knee deep in hairs, from the cats. And nobody’s cleaned the floors for about six years. Plus you, Sam, Amos and all the ambulance men and our chaps tramping in and out. Yes, it’s fairly hopeless. But we have to look as if we’re doing something. And we don’t want any more deaths. Above all, we don’t want that. So watch it, okay?’

  She nodded. Every time she managed to push away fear, someone reminded her of her vulnerability.

  ‘And Lilah,’ he added, dropping his hands, but looking intently into her eyes. She felt again the urge to lean on him, and shelter against him.