by Rebecca Tope
It wasn’t a particularly distressing conversation. Her mother had never felt anything for Sam, had barely spoken to him over all the years he’d been with them. Miranda saw no reason to betray her own complicated relationship with him. She talked for a few minutes before she understood why she had made this particular call.
‘We’ll have to sell Redstone, Mum,’ she said. ‘And that’s going to mean a lot of work. A sale of livestock and machinery, showing people round, packing up, moving. I think I’ll need your help.’
The reply was prolonged. Her mother reminded her that she was over seventy, and that she had all the work she could manage dealing with her father, who was getting more forgetful every day. She wondered, with some sharpness, what Miranda thought she could possibly do to help with a farm sale.
Eventually, Miranda interrupted her. ‘Well, I think I get the message. Would you be interested in having our new address when we have one, or shall I just get out of your life completely?’ And she slammed the phone down with a crash, wiping her hand across her eyes.
‘Mum?’ came a small voice from the doorway. ‘Who was that? What did you mean about our new address?’
Lilah looked like a tousled child, and Miranda held out a hand to her. ‘Nothing,’ she said, with a quivery smile. ‘I just proved to myself yet again what a lousy judge of character I am, that’s all.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Later, after the milking had somehow been accomplished, Lilah began to speak to Miranda of her fears. ‘I don’t think I’ll sleep very well tonight,’ she began, with a strained little laugh. ‘Even if Amos was the one who shot Sam, there’s probably still someone out there who bashed Isaac to death. Where do you think he is now?’
‘Far away from here, I hope,’ said Miranda, with a yawn. ‘Not scared of him, are you?’
‘Den said I had a right to be. He said we ought to get a relief milker to take over, and someone else to keep things going, and move into town until everything’s settled.’
‘All right for him to talk. What about all our things? And the hens. If we’re going to do something like that, then it’ll be properly, after we’ve sold the whole place.’
‘That’s what I thought, too. Except I don’t want to sell up. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.’
‘Well, I think we’ll be forced to sell in September.’
‘Why September?’
‘Isn’t that when farms are always sold? Something to do with Lady Day or Michaelmas. We bought this in September, and moved on October the tenth. My birthday, God help me.’
‘Whatever happens in September, we can’t manage properly now. Not just the three of us. I keep thinking Sam’ll know how to do that, and then remembering. We’re completely lost without him.’
‘So we can have a relief milker, but stay here and do the rest. That’ll take the worst of the pressure off.’
Lilah said nothing. Her mother wasn’t listening properly, refusing to understand just what trouble they were in. But all Lilah could think of was how tired she was, and how it didn’t really matter if someone came and shot her in the night, if she was fast asleep and knew nothing about it. Then her mother surprised her.
‘Sleep in with me tonight, why don’t you? It’s been a horrible day, and you’ve coped fantastically with it all. You can have Daddy’s side of the bed, if you promise not to snore. Sylvia offered to come and stay with us, but I think I’d rather we faced it on our own, for now.’
Lilah wasn’t sure how to respond to that. There were elements of her mother’s friendship with Sylvia that she had always found unsettling. She smiled faintly at her mother’s uncharacteristic solicitude. ‘That’ll be nice. Thanks.’
‘Good. Now, go and have a bath and get to bed.’
‘But it’s barely eight o’clock.’
‘So? You’ve been awake since five – that’s long enough for anybody. Get along with you. I’ll be up myself in a bit, when I’ve got Roddy in.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Outside, shutting up the hens, I think. If he hasn’t fallen asleep somewhere.’
‘Aren’t you worried about him?’
Miranda sighed. ‘Of course I am. But I can’t say anything, can I? He’s an adolescent boy. If he’s not scared, that’s something to be thankful for.’
‘But—’
‘Hush now. Leave Roddy to me. I won’t let anything happen to him.’
‘Is he sleeping in with us as well?’
Miranda laughed. ‘No, but I might suggest he puts a chair across his door.’
‘Don’t bother. He’s already thought of that for himself.’
* * *
Lilah dropped off to sleep in the bath, and dreamt vividly of a catlike figure lurking in the shadows of the yard, waiting to pounce and kill. She woke with a jerk of panic, splashing the cooling water and taking a moment to realise where she was. Heavily, she got out and dried herself, then pulled on a long T-shirt and padded into her parents’ bedroom. Guy’s side was no longer as it had been when he was alive. The bedside table had gone, replaced by a bookcase. A clean, plump pillow awaited her, and she let her head sink into it, feeling young and frightened. Her insides were hollow, as if she’d been filled with some kind of cold gas. Her last thought was for the morning milking, inescapably looming up. And then tomorrow evening’s milking. And the morning after that. It seemed impossible. She knew she wouldn’t do it properly. Maybe, she thought muzzily, maybe Sam’ll come back.
Miranda’s mother phoned back the next day, and got Lilah. ‘Your mother sounded very upset,’ were the cautious opening words. ‘I hope she’s over it today?’
‘It’ll take a bit longer than that,’ the girl replied, only half her attention on the conversation. She was watching Roddy outside, trying to get the tractor into reverse gear. It had taken him ten minutes to start it. Roddy had never been very good with the machinery, and had only driven the tractor in times of crisis.
‘Well, dear, I didn’t mean to make her so cross. It was just …’
‘Oh, I don’t think it’s you, Granny. It’s everything here. She told you about Sam, I suppose.’
‘She said you’d have to sell the farm. I don’t really understand why. It all sounds like some kind of nightmare.’
‘That’s exactly what it’s like. Everything’s falling apart. Except—’ She had woken with a faint stirring of optimism, after a long and peaceful night’s sleep in her mother’s bed.
‘Well, I don’t know what to say,’ twittered her grandmother. ‘It’s all too much for me, at my age.’
‘Too much at any age, I should think.’
‘So what are the police doing about it? Haven’t they arrested anybody yet?’
‘Well, sort of. Though we haven’t heard anything definite. I don’t suppose it’ll be long now.’ Outside, Roddy had found reverse gear, and the tractor had taken a sudden leap backwards, narrowly missing the corner of the barn. Lilah gave a small yelp of alarm.
‘What, dear? What’s the matter?’
‘Oh, nothing, Granny. Look, I can’t really talk to you now.’
‘Well.’ The voice was decidedly offended. ‘I just thought …’
‘I know. I’ll tell Mum you rang. Bye.’
She blew out her cheeks with exasperation as she put the receiver down. What a waste of breath that had been. Poor Roddy was still wrestling with the tractor controls, his face pale, as she went outside to help him, giving the back of the tractor a very wide berth.
‘What are you grinning about?’ her brother demanded. ‘This bloody thing’s impossible.’
‘Leave it,’ she called, over the engine noise. ‘You’re going to cause an accident. What were you trying to do, anyway?’
He switched it off, but didn’t move to get down from the cab. ‘I’ve got to be able to use it. I was practising, that’s all.’
‘Well, it’s pretty stupid to do it on your own. I could have shown you how to work it.’
‘I know how to wor
k it. I got it started, didn’t I? I twiddled all the right levers.’ Lilah walked to the open-sided engine and peered in.
‘So you did,’ she said. And she turned them all off again. ‘Now let’s get down to something useful.’
‘Who was on the phone?’
‘Oh, Granny. She’s such a pain. Silly old biddy, waffling on. Mum yelled at her yesterday, and I suppose she’s fishing for an apology.’
‘Everybody’s silly and stupid to you today.’
Lilah paused a moment. ‘Yes, they are,’ she agreed, and marched off to the barn. ‘And these stupid calves need feeding!’ she called over her shoulder.
Lilah found her mother mildly stupid that day, as well. After the restful night, where exhaustion had swamped every emotion, she’d woken feeling infinitely better, and at first assumed that everyone else would be the same. Even before the call from her grandmother, Lilah had found that this was not the case.
‘God, I wish I could get away from here,’ were the first words she heard Miranda say when she woke up. ‘I’m going to have to find a way of escaping, even if only for a few hours.’
‘You went shopping yesterday,’ Lilah pointed out.
‘That doesn’t count.’
‘So where might you go, leaving me and Roddy to the wolves?’
‘Don’t worry, I’d come back and defend you at bedtime. But I’m useless here anyway. I could go and see the land agents, for a start. And think about where we might move to. With Roddy going on to A levels next term, the timing’s really not too bad.’
‘Oh, Mum. Don’t start that again.’ And Lilah had run downstairs, refusing to listen to any more.
After the phonecall, and Roddy’s awful attempts at tractor driving, the final remnants of Lilah’s good mood evaporated. She thought about Sam, dead in the nettles, and now lying on some cold metal tray, being probed by pathologists. It was not much more than twenty-four hours ago, and already it felt like weeks. Unlike Guy, Sam had left few physical traces of himself behind. The police had asked them not to go into his room until they’d finished examining it, and Sam had been meticulous about keeping all his things in there. Everything around the farm had been used equally by the two men, but somehow Guy’s mark was still the one left on everything. His quirky names for things, his rage if anything was left out of place, his make-do-and-mend with lengths of wire and string – everything still shouted the fact of his existence. It was almost as if Sam himself had never been much more than a ghost.
After lunch, when there was a brief lull in the farmwork, Lilah remembered her father’s will. ‘Did Sam make a will?’ she asked her mother.
‘I shouldn’t think so. Not to my knowledge.’
‘So who inherits his share of Redstone?’
‘I was rather imagining it must be me.’
‘Is that how it works? Surely he did have relations somewhere, even if he never talked about them?’
Miranda rubbed her brow, between the eyes. ‘He did. He had a brother, quite a lot older. I met him once, before we moved here. Let’s hope he’s dead by now.’
‘He wouldn’t be that old. The solicitor will have to look for him.’
‘I wish you hadn’t raised this subject,’ Miranda sighed. ‘Now I’m going to worry that we’ll never afford to buy a new house. Not if we have to give a chunk of what we get for Redstone to some strange Carter man. The law of inheritance is very unfair – I’ve always thought so.’
‘If Dad hadn’t made a will, would Sam have inherited anything?’
‘I assume not. But can we stop this please? I had to go over it all with the police yesterday, including Sam’s brother. They seemed to think he might have to be investigated, which is stretching it a bit, if you ask me. I can’t believe he’d have heard about Guy, guessed Sam had inherited something and come out here to kill him. It’s preposterous.’
Lilah shook her head at this diversion. ‘I’m not talking about motives for murder. I’m talking about what’s going to happen to us.’
Miranda shrugged. ‘We’ll figure something out; we’ll have to, won’t we?’
Lilah put both hands to her head. Somewhere there was a thread leading out of this mess, but all she could see so far was a fog of hopelessness, with destitution at the end of it.
* * *
The phone continued to intrude into the day. Midway through the afternoon, Den called, and asked for Lilah when Roddy answered.
‘Lover boy,’ he said, with a rude face, handing Lilah the receiver.
‘There’s been a development,’ Den said. ‘Yesterday, Jonathan Mabberley brought in some mucky clothes he’d found. We think they must have been worn by someone who’d got into the slurry pit.’
Lilah drew breath to tell him oh yes, she knew all about the clothes, but she found the sense to keep quiet. ‘Oh?’ was all she said.
‘And we’re certain they were worn by a woman.’
‘Ah.’ It jolted her, fear and surprise filling her throat, swelling her heart.
‘So that’s the way the investigation’s going now. They want me to tell you and your mother that there’ll be someone along to ask you a few more questions. Not sure when.’
‘Any chance that it’ll be you?’
‘Not an earthly. I’m not even in the running. It’ll probably be Dave Spooner. He’s okay.’
‘So when will I see you?’ She sounded pathetic to her own ears, but was well beyond caring.
‘Not sure.’
She paused, giving him time to say something personal, something friendly, but he didn’t. Disappointment added to the leaden sensation inside her. How stupid of her to expect anything else.
‘Bye then,’ she said, and put the phone down before he could say anything else. Only then did she realise that he must have been in a roomful of people, not daring to say anything more.
She went to find Roddy and told him what Den had said. His reaction came so quickly, Lilah could hardly register what he’d said.
‘A woman? Somebody Dad was having an affair with, you mean?’
She gazed at him, trying to follow his thought processes. ‘Maybe,’ she finally agreed, trying to ignore the sharp pang of denial that pierced her at the very idea. If her mother could have adulterous relationships, then why not her father, too? ‘But who? I can’t think of any likely candidates, can you?’
Roddy snorted. ‘Only about a dozen. Let’s see – there’s Hetty, Phoebe Winnicombe, Mrs Axford from the shop, your friend Martha Cattermole. We all know how much she liked him.’
‘Stop it,’ Lilah exploded, half amused, half horrified. ‘A woman could never have held him down in the slurry – could she?’
Roddy shrugged. ‘Women are sometimes pretty strong. Look at Sylvia.’
Lilah was about to dismiss this remark when it echoed oddly inside her head. People had been saying similar things to her over the past few days. ‘Okay,’ she said slowly, looking her brother in the eye, ‘let’s do just that. We’ll look at Sylvia. Come with me to wash down the parlour and we’ll talk it through.’
The conversation was broken by the clashing of metal equipment and the slooshing of water as they hosed down the walkways between the milking stalls. It was very different from talking to Den, with his careful attempts to avoid hurting her, and his even more careful loyalty to the secrets of the police investigation. Roddy knew no such caution.
‘Sylvia’s quite poor, isn’t she,’ he began. ‘Perhaps she thought Mum would ask her to move in here, if Dad was out of the way. And Sam. It would all work out for her, if she sold her place and used the cash to keep Redstone going. She could become an equal partner in the farm.’
‘So why attack the Grimms?’
‘Hetty told you the answer to that in the pub.’
‘But it isn’t working out, is it? Mum says she’s selling up.’
‘That’s because Sylvia hasn’t made her proposition yet. She’s biding her time. She doesn’t want Mum to make any uncomfortable connections. That would reall
y wreck it.’
‘But how did she get the gun?’
‘Either she tricked Sam into giving it to her, or she nicked it the last time she was here. Easy, either way. Sam wouldn’t expect her to shoot him, would he?’
‘Rod, I don’t like this. It all fits too neatly.’ Lilah threw a bucketful of water over the floor and then brushed at a patch of resistant muck. ‘And there isn’t the slightest bit of proof.’
‘I bet you she hasn’t got alibis for any of the three mornings,’ he continued. ‘And I bet your Den hasn’t given her a thought. If the same person killed Dad, Sam and Isaac, then she’s the only one with a motive for all of them.’
‘Okay, I can just about go along with the idea of her drowning Dad, but whacking people’s heads with a crowbar? And Amos said it was definitely a man.’
‘Did he? I haven’t heard that.’
‘Den told me. Somebody wearing a balaclava, and rough clothes.’
‘Sounds as if it could be anybody,’ Roddy commented. ‘Including Sylvia.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Lilah went to see Jonathan and Cappy that evening, curious about his interview with the police, and how they’d treated him.
Roxanne came to meet her at the curve of the lane, scenting her approach with the infallible nose of the gundog. But her greeting was subdued: a wag of the tail and a sniff of Lilah’s jeans. Together they went across the tidy back garden, where the barbecue had been held, and on to the patio. The house stood sideways to its driveway, making the rear as accessible as the front. In summer, the French doors stood permanently open and Lilah had long ago been invited to use them without formality. Now she stood for a moment, preparing to call out. Before she could draw breath, Cappy’s voice came from inside the room.
‘Honestly, darling, you are making a fuss.’
‘You haven’t any idea what it was like,’ came the reply, much harsher than Jonathan’s usual relaxed drawl. ‘Those men, like pigs, rummaging about in things they can’t begin to understand. You should have heard them. Asking all about the Beardons, how often we see them, whether we knew how Sam fitted in.’