by Jane Renshaw
‘Yes, getting a little ripe.’ Hector was contemplating a row of dead birds.
She wanted to reach out and touch them, the deep tawny brown of their backs, the iridescence at their necks, the sad little beaks. They hung in pairs from string tied around their feet, and as Hector prodded one of them its head nodded together with that of its companion in death.
And, shuddering inwardly, she remembered Karen’s ridiculous story of the murdered babies and turned away. That story, and all the other things Karen had blurted out – again, Dawn. It had been as if Dawn didn’t edit what came out of her mouth. And she’d been completely insensitive to other people’s feelings. She’d once said to one of the girls in the class, ‘Your skin is really really dark! You really are literally black!’ And she had told Claire, ‘You’re bigger than most of the boys!’ – as if this was something Claire wouldn’t have realised.
If she thought it, she said it.
Just like Karen.
Well, it could be useful, couldn’t it, the girl blurting things out?
Back in the kitchen, they found Damian sitting at the table eating grapes from the fruit bowl. Hector put a hand on his back.
‘You can’t still be hungry.’ But he reached past the boy to take a grape himself. ‘There’ll be seven guests for dinner tomorrow – Damian won’t be here, so that’s eight in all... Two people per hen pheasant, three per cock, so...’
‘May as well do the lot,’ Damian had suggested. ‘Left-overs are always acceptable, and you and Mrs Mac can have some too, Claire.’ The face turned towards her had been full of innocent helpfulness. ‘Claire was saying she used to work for an Icelandic family. I imagine Icelandic cuisine is pretty game-heavy? Maybe you could do pheasant Islandais?’
The little bastard.
14
Karen stood at the end of the track in the grey morning gloom and looked at the wheelie bins. There were two of them: black lid for general waste and blue lid for recycling. They were kept up against the fence where the track widened as it met the public road, next to the sign saying ‘Moss of Kinty’. She’d found the rescue phone, inside the Tesco carrier, in the ditch to the right of the bins.
She pulled out the phone and read the text message again, as if overnight it might magically have changed into something else, something innocuous. But there it was:
OK see you at 6 at boathouse
The phone number that the message had been sent from was 07700 900566.
All night, those words had been going round and round in her head. Had whoever owned the phone arranged to meet someone at the boathouse and then...
What?
The two of them murdered Chimp?
But why would anyone want to kill lovely Chimp?
The unread message was obviously responding to a message that had been sent. The phone owner must have sent a message arranging to meet, and then deleted everything from the phone – contacts, everything in the sent box and the inbox – but in the time between deleting and turning off the phone, that text message had snuck in without them noticing. The phone was set to silent, so that could easily have happened. And then they had dumped the phone.
Why would they do that, unless they wanted to get rid of anything that could be incriminating?
Oh God.
Anna would say it was as if Chimp’s spirit was guiding her. As if he’d made her pick up that carrier bag –
She looked down at the ditch. Either someone passing had chucked it at the bins and it had ended up in the ditch, or it had been put in the wheelie bin and fallen out when the bin was blown over. The bins were always being blown over. They should probably be tethered to the fence, but that was the kind of thing no one at Kinty could be bothered doing.
She had to face it: the most likely people to put stuff in this bin were the people who lived at Kinty.
Someone at Kinty might have known Chimp?
Someone at Kinty might have killed Chimp?
Ade had been in the boathouse at the pond when Karen had first met him. She had run from him, that first time, terrified that he might be a psychopath who hung out at the pond looking for victims.
Which was ridiculous.
Ade obviously couldn’t have had anything to do with Chimp’s death, but what about the others? Jagdeep and Doffy? Could Ade have gone to the boathouse because he suspected something had happened there?
Maybe she should show the phone to Gwennie. Gwennie would know what to do. She might recognise the phone as belonging to one of the group. Maybe someone who’d left before Karen had arrived.
She’d better get back, or Ade would wonder why it was taking her so long to get the rubbish down to the bins. If he found out about the phone, about her keeping it from him – never mind all the Chimp stuff – he’d go apeshit. And when she thought about what she was going to do today... But he wasn’t going to find out, not about the phone and not about where she was going later. He, Jagdeep and Doffy were going off on a boys’ night out starting, as usual, half way through the afternoon. By the time he rolled in, half-comatose and stinking of beer, she’d be tucked up in bed as if she’d spent the evening darning socks and winding wool for Prim. And the women would cover for her. The women at Kinty all stuck together.
She started back up the track to the farmhouse. There was quite a slope from the road up to the house, and the track had been washed out in places, so there were big gullies that were tricky to negotiate on foot, let alone in a vehicle. The fields on either side of the track were the hay fields, which at the moment just looked like any other grassy fields, but Gwennie said in summer they were a mass of wild flowers because they cut for hay in September rather than following the modern practice of cutting for silage in June and July, which didn’t give wild flowers a chance to set seed. The ground here was so poor that they couldn’t grow anything except hay, really, but that was good for the native flora.
Moss of Kinty was right up in the hills, the far-off fields disappearing into bog and heather behind the house, although the scenery was a bit spoilt by the massive blue shipping container in the Top Park in which they kept the hay. There was low, misty cloud obscuring the tops of the hills.
The track kinked round and flattened out and then she was back in the farmyard. The yard was a bit of a mess, she had to admit, as she plitered her way across it to the back door. There was several inches of mud on top of the cobbles and it was all churned up with tyre-marks. There was a big untidy pile of plastic crates against the steading wall. And nylon rope lying in the mud. And lots of cigarette ends. And goose droppings.
The cattle near the end of the byre were looking out at her and she called out, ‘Hi Carlos, hi Henry’ when she recognised two of the six amigos, as Ade called the yearling stirks. That first time she’d come to Kinty, back in October, she and Ade had leant on the gate and watched them frolicking, the six of them running about the field like a pack of lambs. But in winter the cattle were kept in the byre where it was nice and cosy, although the stirks sometimes went a bit stir crazy and chased each other about, kicking up the straw and annoying their mothers.
She could hear the geese honking, and then they appeared from behind the white van with ‘Kinty Fallen Stock’ on the side, pink feet slapping the mud, heads leaning forward on their long necks, heading for Karen.
‘Okay, guys,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’
They stopped a few feet away and stood honking at her, Garfield in the lead. He was the new gander Ade had bought from a farmer near Ellon because they’d had to euthanise Botticelli after he got his leg trapped in some old machinery. But she wasn’t going to think about that.
It was really muddy. Damian would hyperventilate.
The back door of the farmhouse was open, and Prim was standing there holding onto it and looking at her.
‘Hi!’ said Karen. ‘Is Gwennie about?’
Prim didn’t say anything. She was a bit of a cliché, with long frizzy hair tied back in a scarf, and she was wearing a hand-knitted jumper an
d a colourful hippy skirt and wellies.
Karen kicked off her clarty trainers in the porch and shoved on her slippers and shuffled through into the kitchen. It was full of people and the air was thick and sickly with weed. Ade, in an old green fleece and jeans, was sitting at the table with Jagdeep, both of them smoking weed and looking at the laptop, and the little silver camel was standing in the middle of the table. Rainbow was at the range, her long plait of mousy hair down her back, a hand on her baby bump as she stirred a pot, and Doffy was shaking coal from the scuttle onto the fire, the dreadlocks that covered half his head falling into his eyes.
Ade got up from the table, pulled her against him and kissed her. ‘Take a look at this little beauty.’ He angled the laptop so she could see the screen. It was an eBay page with a photo of a camel like theirs, except that the velvet humps were red, not blue. It had sold for seven hundred and twenty pounds.
‘Wow.’
‘And ours is in way better condition.’ His leopard eyes were shining at her, and she felt a warm glow go through her. ‘The hallmarks haven’t been polished out.’
‘If Benny doesn’t offer at least four hundred, we should walk away,’ said Jagdeep. Benny was their fence in Aberdeen. Karen had asked why they didn’t cut out the middle man and sell on eBay, but apparently that was too risky.
‘No question.’ Doffy dumped down the scuttle and used a grubby cloth to pull the metal bit over the top of the firebox. ‘That was quite a find, Kaz.’
‘This is another matter, though.’ Ade opened the drawer in the table and took out the little silver fork. ‘It’s Georgian and the maker’s Coline Allan of Aberdeen, so it’s valuable, but it’s got the fucking family crest on it. Benny won’t touch it.’
‘Oh.’ The warm glow was gone. ‘Damn.’
‘Best put it back, if you can.’
‘Okay. Sorry.’
‘The general principle is that you don’t take anything that can be identified. I really don’t know why you didn’t get more stuff from that cabinet in the Chinese Room.’
Karen chewed her lip. She’d already explained that the other stuff in the cabinet seemed mainly to be a collection of snuff boxes, and she was worried that they would be missed. But Ade obviously thought she’d bottled it for no good reason.
The door opened and Gwennie came in wearing her big coat and shouting, ‘Fooking Garfield! I’m gunna ring the fooker’s neck!’ She made a face, put her fingers together in a beak shape and jabbed at her crotch, mouthing, ‘Watch... your... fanny.’ Then, back at normal volume: ‘That goose is a fooking sex offender.’
Gwennie was so great. She had fat, very red cheeks and short dark hair with some strands of grey in it. She was from Yorkshire and she had grown up on a farm so she was the one who knew most about what the animals needed and stuff like that. She and her partner Baz had lived at Kinty for six years.
‘Shopping trip tomorrow,’ she said, dumping down a load of kale on the table. ‘You need new wellies, love, and I could do with some undies.’
‘Okay,’ said Karen. ‘Gwennie – can I speak to you about something?’
‘Sure, love, what is it? Someone cut up that kale and sling it in the pot.’
Karen got out the chopping board. ‘I’ll tell you later.’
Oh-oh. She shouldn’t have said that in front of Ade. He was staring at her.
‘Women’s stuff,’ she added quickly. Then: ‘What’s for lunch?’
‘Take a wild guess,’ humphed Ade.
‘Bean stew?’
‘Got it in one.’
Rainbow grimaced. ‘Sorry.’
‘Well, I love the bean stew.’ And she really did. It was so good having proper vegan food instead of things like the fake sausages Mum bought, like Karen didn’t want to eat dead animals but the next best thing was pretending to eat them.
‘There’s a whole lot of goat in the freezer needs eaten,’ said Jagdeep.
Karen and Rainbow and Gwennie looked at each other.
‘We do have to eat the animals sometimes,’ said Ade. ‘It is a bit difficult to run a livestock farm along vegan lines.’
This kept coming up. Half of them were vegan and half weren’t, and the half that weren’t, which was basically all the men except Doffy, kept making snide comments, as if anyone was stopping them cooking their dead animals. As Gwennie said, why should they expect the vegans to do it for them just because they were female? To wind her up, Baz said being vegan wasn’t natural and nor was a man cooking.
But it wasn’t actually funny. It was like they hated the women being vegans because it made them feel secretly guilty. That was the one thing about Ade she really didn’t like – that he was such a carnivore, and was involved in the fallen stock side of things. They basically went round farms collecting dead animals, for a fee, and they were meant to dispose of them but the ones that were reasonably fresh they butchered and sold on as halal meat in Aberdeen and Dundee, with Jagdeep doing the deliveries because he was Asian. He wasn’t Muslim, but he called himself Mohammed and pretended to be when he was dealing with the customers. He told them that the animals had been slaughtered using halal practices. Ade argued that what they were doing meant fewer animals had to be killed, as they were putting animals that had died naturally back into the food chain, and every customer who bought meat from them was one fewer customer for the suppliers who actually followed the halal rules to kill animals, which were totally cruel. It was part of their ethos generally, Ade said, to take business away from people who didn’t care about animal welfare or looking after the land. But she hated even thinking about that side of what they did at Kinty.
By the time she’d finished cutting up the kale, everyone except Karen, Gwennie and Jagdeep had left the room. Gwennie told Jag to ‘take yourself off’ and then she turned to Karen.
‘Now, love. What is it you wanted to talk to me about?’
Karen put her hand into her pocket to take out the rescue phone.
And stopped.
She couldn’t go bandying about wild theories, wild accusations – and it would be an accusation, if she told Gwennie what she thought that text message meant. An accusation against someone at Kinty. Because how likely was it that a passing murderer would select their wheelie bin to dispose of the phone in? Way up here on a single track road that saw a handful of vehicles a day? And maybe she was making a mountain out of a molehill here. That text could be perfectly innocent. It might even refer to a totally different boathouse.
‘I’ve been having nightmares again,’ she said, truthfully enough, and took her empty hand out of her pocket. ‘About Chimp.’
‘Aw fuck, Kaz.’ Ade came back into the room – had he been listening at the door? – and grabbed her hand. It looked small and white and pathetic in his strong, ruddy, man-sized one.
‘Did anyone here know Chimp?’
Gwennie frowned. ‘I don’t think so, love. Why do you ask?’
‘I just – I think it might help my PTSD, you know, if I could talk to someone who knew him?’
Ade put an arm round her waist, pulling her to him. ‘Next time you have one of those nightmares, you wake me up, okay, and we can talk all you want.’
‘All right, all right!’ puffed Gwennie. ‘Get a fooking room!’
‘Your wish,’ grinned Ade, ‘is my command,’ and he pulled Karen out of the kitchen and up the stairs to their bedroom. When he’d shut the door behind them, he said, ‘Okay. You know the drill.’
It was cold, but Karen pulled off her jumper and T-shirt and boots and leggings, bundling the leggings up so he wouldn’t see the phone in the pocket.
‘And the rest,’ said Ade.
She unfastened her bra and stepped out of her knickers. It was freezing up here! She wrapped her arms round herself, shivering.
‘Onto the bed with you, then, young lady.’
She lay down on her back. Ade stood, fully clothed, looking down at her. The daily inspection, he called it, like she was some sort of work of art and h
e was the curator with responsibility for it. It always made her feel like she was so precious to him, so lucky to be this cherished. She’d never in her wildest dreams ever thought that she’d be this loved by anyone, let alone someone like Ade.
But oh fuck fuck fuck!
She hadn’t shaved her legs or her armpits!
You never knew when the daily inspection would happen, so Karen always shaved her legs and armpits and plucked and waxed first thing in the morning, but today she hadn’t been able to have a shower because there’d been no hot water after Jagdeep soaking in the bath for an hour. She probably stank.
He knelt on the bed and peered at her face. ‘The spots are getting worse, if anything. Have you been using the tea tree oil?’
‘Yes. Every morning and every night.’
‘Okay. You might have to go to the doctor and get something on prescription.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘We have to do something, Kaz.’
‘I know.’ She wrinkled her own nose. ‘Sorry.’
‘You really would be so attractive if your skin was clear and you put on a little weight. Something to hold on to!’ He grinned down at her and, with the tips of his fingers, circled her nipples. ‘A little more meat on the bones!’
‘I must have a fast metabolism or something.’ She’d been trying to eat more, but she’d actually lost weight since Ade had said she should gain some. She hadn’t told him that, of course.
He shook his head. ‘It’s the vegan crap that’s the issue.’
She held her breath. He’d suggested once that she be less ‘fundamentalist’ about her diet and maybe eat some dairy, some chocolate and cheese, to help her put on weight. But she really didn’t want to do that. She’d started eating free-range eggs, but that was as far as she was prepared to go.
He smiled. ‘Don’t look so worried! I’m not going to get you eating steak and kidney pies or anything!’