Grace Smith Investigates

by Liz Evans

  With my skin intact and my cycling confidence shot to pieces, I remounted and wobbled to the right turn down to St Biddy’s - or St Bidulph’s-atte-Cade to give it its full title.

  The village proper lay half a mile from the main road. The general store could have been built any time within the past forty years and was neither new nor old. It was a plain, stolid sort of building with a grey tiled roof, a central chimney stack and three pink-curtained upper windows. The ground-floor shop area had pane-divided glass windows either side of the door, a board for ads, and a small notice giving the opening times for the sub-post office.

  I’d intended to flash Barbra’s photos inside as a reasonable starting point for the legatee hunt. However, it seemed sensible to take a circuit of the rest of the place first. There was no point doing it the hard way if the three lucky winners were currently enjoying the tipples of their choice outside the local pub.

  They weren’t. Neither were they inside either of the two public houses that faced each other across the narrow road in alcoholic competition. The Royal Oak, on the left, seemed to be winning. A quick scan of the bar and tiny restaurant confirmed my trio weren’t in residence, although a reasonable number of the locals were. The Bell - for no discernible reason, since there was nothing between them that I could see - was empty.

  Now I was in the central portion of the village, the buildings were of the uneven brick-and-exposed-timber construction that had been in vogue around the time Shakespeare had started sharpening his quill. Narrow tracks twisted away down side streets, leading to small rows of cottages in some cases, barns in others, and occasionally just losing interest and running out a few hundred yards from the back of the village. The church was massively intimidating, and the last building in the village, apart from the St Biddy’s sheltered housing complex, which comprised a newish two-storey block of flats around a small green and a toy- town bus shelter.

  I walked the bike back to the general store, suddenly conscious of aches in places I didn’t expect to ache unless it was preceded by unusual activities involving whipped cream and swinging from chandeliers.

  Delving into my bag, I took out a clipboard with an attached pen and a form with lots of interesting-looking boxes for ticking. With the photo folder held under the bull clip at the top, I sashayed inside. ‘Hi. Lovely day, isn’t it?’

  The woman behind the grille that fenced off the post office section looked up from a column of figures she was totalling. The girl lounging against the shop counter continued to draw a tattoo on the back of her hand with fibre pens.

  ‘Carter! The lady wants serving.’

  Carter flicked a bored look in my direction. ‘Yeah?’

  The voice and the odd name made me realise I’d got the gender wrong. Carter wasn’t a plug-ugly girl. He was a slightly effeminate-looking boy.

  ‘Carter, we don’t want to see Mr Sulky, do we? Now, let’s open that mouth and let Master Smiley out, shall we?’

  The woman came out from behind her cage. She was a plump little body with creamy-white skin, pink cheeks, black-rimmed glasses and a cloud of thick white hair that was pinned up into a fluffy bun. The colour scheme was continued in her outfit of black skirt and silky white blouse with huge black spots. She’d accessorised with yellow plastic earrings and a pair of neon-pink terry-towelling slippers. The latter, I assume, because they were the only shoes that would fit her heat-swollen feet.

  ‘How can we help you, my dear?’

  She pronounced the ‘my’ as ‘moy’, with a touch of that country accent you sometimes hear in the older locals here (the younger lot mostly talk in estuary English).

  I bought chocolate and ate it as I browsed along the dull product displays, ticking off boxes on my clipboard form. I could feel their eyes following the back of my neck. Just when I thought they’d crack, shrieks and thundering music from outside distracted them.

  An old Ford Escort was cruising up from the centre of the village and swerving erratically - mainly because the driver was probably having trouble seeing the road. There seemed to be eight of them packed inside a motor designed for four. One of the boys - a skinny runt with tattooed chains around his biceps and green-striped hair - was standing up with his top half thrust through the open sun-roof. As the car came opposite the shop, he yelled over the thumping boom box: ‘Yo, Mr Saddo, how ya doing?’

  Something whistled through the air and hit the metallic sign advertising Ice creams sold here. It went flying. With an exclamation of annoyance, the woman ordered Carter to go and pick it up.

  ‘I have a good mind to report the whole lot of them to the police.’ She stepped to the window and gestured for them to get off the forecourt. This had the inevitable effect of increasing the catcalls. As the car sped away, one of the girls pushed her bottom up against the back window and mooned us. With screams of laughter, they headed out towards the main road.

  The postmistress and I exchanged small, tight smiles at the manners of the modern young.

  Carter retrieved the sign. But instead of a thank you, his employer asked him what on earth he was wearing. Since he was in a rather oddly formal short-sleeved shirt tucked into a pair of blue jeans, I couldn’t see there was much to upset her.

  ‘It’s the holidays, Gran.’

  ‘You are at work, Carter. We have our standards. Now go and change into some proper trousers.’

  ‘They’re all creased.’

  ‘Then you should have told me. As soon as I’ve finished here, I’ll press them.’

  Carter muttered something that might have been ‘Terrific,’ and slouched back to droop himself moodily over the shop counter. I returned to box-ticking with a vengeance.

  The woman cracked. ‘May we help?’

  ‘It’s for my thesis. I’m doing a course at the university: socio-economic trends in the last decade and their effect on down-sized rural-centred retail units. I’ve already had a hint it could be published commercially.’ I unclipped the photo wallet. ‘I was here the other week. Took some snaps of typical customers. I’d really like to use them, but I don’t want to put anyone in without their permission. Have you any idea where I can find these people?’

  I fanned three prints. The woman barely glanced at them before shaking her head. ‘We don’t know them.’

  ‘Are you sure? If you took another look—’

  ‘I’m quite sure. Now, if you’re not going to buy anything else, perhaps you’d be going.’

  The temperature had gone down by ten degrees. I’d hit a nerve somehow and I wasn’t going to get any further here. With a casual shrug, I turned away.

  The bike was leaning against the shop front. Leaving it there, I walked forward to the position I judged Barbra must have been in when she fired off that film. At first glance it didn’t look feasible. The small dirt track was called Cowslip Lane. It was bounded on one side by someone’s stone garden wall, and appeared to be in full view of the shop doorway. There was no way the trio could have failed to notice Barbra snapping away.

  I took a few more paces and saw what wasn’t visible from the main street. A tiny stone seat was set into the wall and hidden by a profusion of exuberant bush branches leaning from the cottage’s garden.

  I eased myself on to the slab and drew my legs to sit cross- legged. I just about fitted and Barbra was shorter than me.

  Forming a round with finger and thumb to imitate a camera lens, I closed one eye and squinted through the leaves, pretending I was snapping the shop doorway. Carter’s bored face stared back at me from about eighteen inches away.

  Schlepping over in a desultory amble, he slapped his butt against the wall. ‘You really from the uni?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t I be?’

  He raised an indifferent shoulder. ‘I dunno. Just wondered.’ Hooking a thumb in his waistband he pulled it down a fraction to reveal a hoop pierced through his navel. It was complete with a diddy padlock in the shape of a grinning skull. It was a working model, as Carter demonstrated by snapping the bar ope
n and closed mindlessly. ‘Put it in myself. What you think?’

  ‘You’ll get blood poisoning.’

  ‘I put it in disinfectant first.’

  I looked him over now that I could see him clearly. He was a plain, overweight cherub with light brown hair tinged with ginger. His round, wide-lipped face was liberally dusted with freckles and, judging by the lines of angry pink sunburn glowing along the neck and sleeves of his shirt, he also seemed to have been cursed with that non-tanning skin that often comes with reddish locks. The tattoo he’d been drawing on his hand was a skull with dripping fangs.

  ‘You finished at the shop for the day?’

  ‘No. Gran’s gone up to the flat. I can watch the door from here.’

  ‘She seemed a bit upset when I asked about the photos.’

  ‘She thinks you’re a Social Security snooper. We had one last summer. Checking for benefit claimants doing casual work on the farms.’

  ‘Do you get many of those?’

  Carter raised a bored shoulder. The movement pressed those pubescent breasts that had fooled me into thinking he was a girl against his shirt. ‘Some. Asylumers from the ferries and sun- tanners from the cities who move to the beach in summer. Not that Gran cares about them, but some of the locals got into trouble last time. And they’re our bread and butter.’

  ‘Well I’m not from the Social - honest. I’m a student.’ And if you say Aren’t you a hit old? kid, you’re dead, I thought.

  Instead Carter announced he couldn’t wait to leave school and go to college.

  ‘What are you going to study?’ I enquired. I’d have laid money on an NVQ in Terminal Boredom and Body Mutilation.

  ‘Astrophysics,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna do stuff about space: quasars and black holes and all that. Like in Star Trek.’ Moodily he blew air over those thick lips, forming tiny bubbles of spittle on the bottom one. ‘I hate this place. There’s nothing to do, and you can’t get out unless you’ve got wheels.’

  ‘What about the bus? I saw a stop.’

  ‘Did you read the timetable? We get two a day. One early morning, one late afternoon. Nearest evening stop’s a mile down the main road. And the last bus gets back at nine thirty. It’s deadsville, this place. It’s where lobotomy donors go to retire.’ He threw another weary look around the idyllic country scene. ‘Give me a twenty and I’ll sort your photos for you.’

  ‘Make it a fiver - if you can give me names and addresses.’

  ‘Twenty.’

  ‘I could show them around the village.’

  ‘No one will tell you. They’ll just think you’re a Social Security snoop like Gran does.’

  ‘How come you don’t?’

  ‘I don’t care if you are.’

  It was going on Barbra’s bill anyway, so I delved into my trousers and rescued two notes I’d pinned inside. Holding them between my middle and forefinger, I said, ‘OK. Grass.’

  ‘If I had any, I’d do it myself.’

  ‘No, I meant—’

  ‘Yeah, I know. It was a joke, right?’

  ‘Right,’ I said meekly. I passed up the photo folder.

  Carter shuffled the prints quickly, interest finally replacing the flat stare in his pale green eyes.

  He passed back the shots of Mrs X with a head shake. ‘I don’t know her. She’s not from the village. But this one’s easy.’ He handed back the snaps of the bloke. ‘That’s Harry Rouse. ’S funny, Gran was saying just before you came that he hadn’t been in all week. He’s big on humbug mints - buys bags of them. He lives up at Tyttenhall Farm.’

  ‘Has he lived there long?’

  ‘He was born there, I ’spect. The Rouses have been around for ever. Why?’

  Because there would be plenty of local gossip to establish whether Harry had ever enjoyed the hospitality of HM Prisons, that was why. However, since that information wasn’t included in Carter’s pieces of silver, I contented myself with a vague mumble of the ‘just curious’ variety, and asked about the parrot.

  ‘Bloody hell, what is she like? Will you look at those feathers.’ Carter snorted. ‘They reckon they’re a few braves short of the full war party up there.’

  ‘Up where?’

  He handed the final clutch of snaps back and jerked a thumb in the direction of the church end of St Biddy’s. ‘It’s about a mile outside the village. Opened this spring. Listen for the drums and if they stop—’

  He paused. I fell for it. ‘Yes?’

  ‘Be afraid. Be very afraid.’ Twitching the tenners from my fingers, he started back towards the shop.

  ‘Hang on. Where do I find Tyttenhall Farm?’

  Carter swung back to shout, ‘Straight back to the main road, turn left, take the first track on the left. You can’t miss it.’

  He was right, I couldn’t. It was the road Mr Timpkins’s lorry had emerged from just prior to our near fatal connection.

  There was no obvious sign of a house as I wheeled the bike up the hard-baked track, and I was just beginning to wonder if Carter had sold me a dummy when I got to the top of a slight rise and discovered the farm lurking in a natural hollow.

  For some reason I always expect farmyards to look like those twee illustrations on calendars set in some cod-Victorian era: fat hens, jolly pigs, big-eyed cows and rosy-cheeked kids romping in the barn. A sort of cross between Old Macdonald’s place and the- Waltons-go-scrumping.

  This one fell well short of the picture. Apart from a scrawny ginger cat, there was no sign of life - animal or Walton - at all, although there was a pungent aroma that became stronger nearer the house and which gave it an air of four-legged things doing what comes naturally.

  The door knocker echoed inside an apparently empty house. It looked like I was going to have to make another trip out here to verify that my photo was who Carter claimed it to be. Mildly irritated, I started walking backwards, my eyes on the windows for a curtain twitch or movement inside.

  The collision came as a complete surprise - to me at least. The old boy I’d collided with seemed unfazed. Staring from under a lank fringe of white hair, he acknowledged my automatic ‘Sorry’ with a laconic ‘Ahr.’

  ‘I was looking for Harry Rouse.’

  ‘Ahr.’

  ‘Do you know where I can find him?’

  ‘Ahr.’

  ‘Are you going to give me a clue?’

  Life improved. His next sentence expanded our verbal contact by fifty per cent. ‘Stop here,’ he said.

  He produced a key tied to his belt by a large lump of string, went inside and closed the door firmly behind him. It seemed unlikely Harry hadn’t heard my onslaught earlier, but perhaps he was deaf and the old boy would rout him out for me.

  I’d decided to stick with my mature student’s thesis story. Maybe I could even invent a few questions about the decline in rural farming around here, I decided, contemplating the silent outhouses and deserted yard. Creaky hinges and turning handles announced the arrival of someone from inside the farmhouse. I swung back with my best welcoming smile, clipboard poised professionally - and froze.

  The dangerous end of a double-barrelled shotgun was pointing straight at my head.

  5

  I found I’d put my hands up. Keeping them in what I hoped was a placatory position, I started to back away, placing each foot carefully in case he interpreted a sudden movement to keep my balance as threatening.

  After we’d executed a one-hundred-and-twenty-degree circuit, it occurred to me we weren’t doing a random dance: he was deliberately manoeuvring me so that I ended up with the barn at my back. As he advanced he forced me to back up to keep a respectable distance between my head and those barrels.

  ‘Look, why don’t I just get on my bike and pedal off into the sunset? Wouldn’t that be a great idea?’

  Evidently not. The barrels kept coming and I kept demonstrating one of physics’ basic laws: viz., for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Eventually I was forced to a stop by the immovable roughness of the
barn door.

  ‘So what now?’

  The barrels came several inches closer. They looked like a pair of sightless eyes. Despite the weight of the gun and the fact he’d had to follow me over the uneven ground, the line of his aim hadn’t shaken or wavered once.

  ‘Gorin.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Gorin ... Gorin ...’ The barrels were jerking in an alarming way by now as he repeated the word. ‘Gorin.’

  I guessed I was supposed to go in. The doors didn’t give when I leant my full weight against them. Fumbling behind my back, I tried to locate the handle. I couldn’t. My failure agitated the geriatric Ned Kelly in front of me even further.

  ‘Gorin ... Gorin ...’

  ‘I’m gorring ... er . .. going.’ I desperately didn’t want to turn my back on those barrels, but I was going to have to in order to get the damn door open. With fear clomping up and down my spinal bones like a line of boot-scoopin’ centipedes, I wrestled with the bolt and handle, half expecting a couple of cartridges to smash straight into the small of my back and erupt from the front of my bowel. I was trying to recall some more of those school physics lessons. Did sound travel faster than bullets? Would I hear the bang before the blast hit me or after?

  The doors opened outwards. Ned Kelly stepped away to give me room to swing one of them wide.

  The interior was a surprise. Despite the lack of an Old Macdonald set outside, I was still expecting hay bales, four-legged creatures and the sort of pungent atmosphere that you tend to get when you combine the two.

  The place was empty. There were several wooden horse stalls down one side, an even smaller pen away in one corner and assorted implements hung from wall hooks, but not a sniff (literally) of livestock or a wisp of straw on the bare concrete floor.

  ‘There ... There ...’ The barrels jerked in small, sweeping motions towards the far stall.

  With more descriptive circles of those deadly pipes he indicated I should sit down. Without taking his eyes off me, he backed slowly away until he came to the opposite wall. He felt behind him and slid a thin leather strap from one of the hooks. Using his teeth and one hand, he tied a slip noose in the end. In order to do so he had to put the shotgun under his arm and clamp it against his waist. Several times he fumbled the operation and had to glance at what he was doing.