Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  Ten minutes later, sitting in front of the blazing fire in the cosy sitting-room, supplied with cups of fragrant Earl Grey and thin, crisp lemon biscuits, it was hard to see Iris Osborne, with her fluffy white hair and twin-set, as a gun-toting old harridan. ‘I told the other policemen I hadn’t seen anything of that poor woman,’ she’d greeted them when they’d introduced themselves as police officers.

  ‘That’s not principally why we’re here,’ Jenny said mendaciously, explaining that in view of a recent tragic case where a farmer had shot dead an intruder, they were making a check on all firearms, something routinely done in outlying districts where people might be expected to have them. Checking whether they were safely locked up, how many they had, whether they were licensed. Dangerous things, guns, if they fell into the wrong hands.

  Oh, she had no need of a licence, Mrs Osborne assured them, since she didn’t own a gun of any kind – well, only an airgun that had belonged to her husband, for scaring pigeons, and you didn’t need a licence for that, did you? In any event, she didn’t even know how to load it, or where the pellets were, still less use it. If she wondered why a detective inspector and a constable were occupied with such a mundane task in the middle of a well-publicised murder investigation, she didn’t ask.

  ‘Only an airgun? That’s all right then. As long as you don’t have any other sort,’ Abigail smiled. ‘You don’t? No, of course, I can see you wouldn’t have! Not even one of those toys people buy to frighten intruders? Well, you’re quite right not to. If the intruder was armed, it might spark him off to use his first.’

  Mrs Osborne gave a gasp of horror, a hand to her pearladorned bosom. ‘What a terrible thought! But do come in and have a cup of tea, while you’re here. It’s a lovely day but there’s a really cold wind out there and you look frozen. Come in, I’m sure you’re allowed five minutes for a tea break!’

  So here they were, in front of a roaring fire, being regaled with stories of how the cottage had suffered in the floods, with Iris Osborne really savouring the drama of the situation, now that it was all over. There’d been nothing like it in living memory, she informed them dramatically, water rushing down the lane like a mad thing, swirling around the house, the lane outside impassable on foot.

  ‘I can still hear it sucking and slopping away!’ She blanched at that, her distress very real even under the drama. The flood had poured in, she went on, it was unbelievable, the main rooms had been under eighteen inches of water, and the cold-store alongside the house, dug at a lower level, still wasn’t back to normal. ‘And oh, the smell! You wouldn’t believe it – nor the amount of mud it left behind. I had to get a cleaning firm in to help, even after the boys from the farm had got rid of the worst. And then Reuben sent Vera down to give it a final polish – so now, we’re almost as good as new – or will be when I get my chairs back. I’m afraid the covers on three of them were ruined! Nothing for it but to have them re-upholstered. That’s why it looks a little bare in here at present.’

  ‘The boys?’ Abigail asked, when she could get a word in. The poor soul couldn’t see many people to talk to, she was thinking. Thinking also that three more chairs in here would be three too many. The room was tiny – charmingly furnished with antiques and a great deal of pretty china, but the ceiling was too low, the windows too small, the panelling too dark to allow for the amount of furniture already there.

  ‘The boys?’ Mrs Osborne repeated, and laughed. ‘Well, that’s what they seem like to me, though they’re in their forties, both of them. Jared Bysouth bought the farm from me after my husband died, and though I’ve never been very happy about the pigs, I’ve learnt to ignore farmyard smells over the years, and I must say he and his brother, Reuben, are always willing to help me out when I need a strong arm – or a Land Rover to get me out, as happened in the floods.’

  ‘Don’t you find it lonely out here?’ Abigail asked.

  ‘I haven’t time for that, dear! I keep myself busy. All this –’ she gestured to the old furniture with its patina of age and the deep shine that came from years of polish and elbow-grease, at the delicate porcelain – ‘it’s really my showroom. I buy and sell antiques, you see – in a small way, although, if I do say it myself, I’ve quite a reputation in seventeenth-century porcelain. It brings in a bit of pin-money.’

  ‘Really? How do you get customers?’ Jenny asked, tactfully showing the surprise Mrs Osborne evidently expected. No need for her to know they’d already made it in their way to find out about her business.

  ‘Word of mouth, mostly. And I advertise in magazines and trade papers. Quite a lot of my business is done by mail order. Using my home as a showroom cuts down on overheads, and it does mean I never get bored with my decor!’

  ‘Well, I must say that’s very enterprising.’

  Mrs Osborne laughed. ‘Oh, I’ve never been one to let the grass grow under my feet. You should ask my daughter.’

  ‘And I bet she isn’t one to make a penny where she can make a pound, either,’ Abigail said as they walked back to the car. ‘She’s one of a type. All charm and little old lady sweetness, while underneath … Did you see the look she gave me when I asked about having a replica? Went through me like a road drill.’

  ‘I know. Reckon she was telling fibs?’

  ‘Maybe not. I’ll have another word with Cleo – she seemed certain enough but she admits she only got a very quick glance and it might have been an airgun she saw. Which still won’t be much use to us when it’s a handgun we’re looking for. Though whatever she says, I wouldn’t put it past Mrs Osborne to keep some sort of weapon handy – and be prepared to use it – to protect her property.’

  ‘You can’t say it isn’t worth protecting,’ Jenny said, looking back at the cottage as they reached the car. ‘All that lovely furniture and china.’

  ‘Not to mention the house itself. Charming, isn’t it?’ Abigail followed Jenny’s glance to what was almost a cliché of a country cottage. ‘Especially in summer, I suppose. Roses round the door, even. All the same, I’ll bet that one’s Albertine. The rose with the wickedest thorns I know.’

  ‘Yes, but I wouldn’t fancy living out here. And the place still smelt funny and damp, didn’t it?’ Jenny said with a shudder. ‘It’s not my idea of the dolce vita.’

  ‘Nor is this,’ said Abigail as they reached the gate of the grim, flat-faced, three-storey farmhouse that would have made Cold Comfort Farm seem welcoming.

  There was no answer to their ring on the front door, which they’d chosen because it was the only entry with any sort of path. But nobody ever used front doors in farmhouses, it was probably hermetically sealed. They picked their way round to the back through the farmyard muck, thankful for the protection of the winter boots they’d both taken the precaution of wearing.

  It was a farmhouse of the old-fashioned kind, enclosed by barns and outbuildings, maybe part of the piggeries, and a yard filled with various pieces of unspecified, dangerous-looking machinery. To one side stood a hen pen with several coops and a few chickens pecking desultorily at trodden grass. A neglected kitchen garden flanked it and a huge, mean-looking dog of dubious ancestry flung itself dementedly at the wire netting of a dog run. The back door of the farmhouse opened right into the yard but there was no answer to their knock. Abigail was trying the knob when a man with a black and white border collie at his heels came round the corner. The other dog, behind the wire, immediately sank down, head on its front paws, watching.

  ‘Mr Bysouth?’

  ‘Reuben Bysouth. What do you want?’

  He was rough, all right, as they’d been warned. Tight jeans, belted under his belly. Long, unwashed, curly black hair tied back into a high ponytail with what looked like a bootlace. It didn’t take a genius, either, to guess that his dark chin wasn’t intentional designer stubble but simply the result of not bothering to have shaved for two or three days at least. One of his front teeth was missing and the rest wouldn’t bear close inspection. His sweatshirt was greasy with food
stains.

  You learned not to show either surprise or disgust at anything or anyone when you were in the Force – if you were wise – but Abigail saw the fastidious Jenny gazing at him with the same sort of horrid fascination she herself felt. He reminded her of one of the sluggy things that had laid hundreds of its progeny in the leaf axils of her angelica, before eating it alive.

  ‘DI Moon and DC Platt,’ she told him. ‘We’re here on a firearms check.’

  ‘We’ve had all you lot round once – haven’t you got more to do than waste other folks’s time as well as your own?’ he asked with a surly look.

  She wasn’t going to let him rattle her. ‘We’re not here for the same reason. Will you please show us your guns, and your licences? You or your brother. It won’t take more than a few minutes.’

  He seemed about to refuse, then changed his mind. ‘My brother’s out.’ He opened the back door, which led into a one-time scullery that now appeared to be used as a farm office as well as a dumping ground for old boots, waterproofs, unspecified machinery parts, some of them rusty. Papers of various kinds were held untidily in bulldog clips and jammed on to spikes. There was an old metal filing cabinet and, sitting incongruously on a formica-topped table with splayed legs, a small PC.

  He fished in a drawer for a key, unlocked a cupboard and showed them the three double-barrelled, twelve-bore shotguns inside. ‘See, all locked up, just as they should be. Satisfied?’

  ‘And your licences, please.’

  He went into an adjoining room, shutting the door behind him, but not before Abigail had a glimpse of a well-tended kitchen, a brightly burning fire in a wide inglenook, surrounded by gleaming horse-brasses, had caught a smell of lavender furniture polish mingling with savoury cooking odours. One of the Bysouths at least was not averse to comfort and cleanliness, it seemed.

  Reuben came back within a minute or two with the necessary papers. Two of them were licensed to Jared Bysouth, one to Reuben Bysouth. ‘Thank you, sir, everything appears to be in order.’

  ‘What did I tell you? Waste of everybody’s bloody time.’ He opened the door and they stepped out into the yard. The mongrel behind the chain-link fencing set up a frenzied barking and Bysouth snarled at it to shut up, which it did immediately. The silent collie slunk alongside its master, keeping a shifty, sideways glance on the two women, while Reuben stepped close on their heels, a manoeuvre which gave them no alternative but to walk towards the gate. But Abigail had no intention of being hustled. She stopped suddenly and turned, so that she almost collided face to face with Bysouth, not a happy experience.

  ‘Watch what you’re doing, can’t you?’ he growled.

  Abigail ignored the gentlemanly manners. ‘Before we go, I’d just like to check on one or two other points. You told the officers who asked you previously that you didn’t know anything of the woman who was found in the river, just down there –’

  ‘Course I didn’t bloody know anything about her, I’d have said if I did, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘Memory can be a funny thing, sometimes we remember things afterwards that we’ve seen or heard, but not registered at the time.’

  ‘Well, I don’t.’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Abigail caught a glimpse of a woman with pale, gingerish hair and a bulky figure encased in a floral pinny, coming from round the corner of one of the outbuildings. The heavy bucket dragging down her right side, the cautious way she crept along, her feet making hardly a sound, the downbent head, eyes averted, might have made her almost a caricature of a drudge, a cowed and abused woman, had not the picture been so real.

  ‘Then perhaps we can speak to Mrs Bysouth – she might have remembered something you don’t.’

  ‘She’s not here.’

  The lie was patent. ‘Who was that woman who just went into the house?’

  ‘I didn’t see any woman,’ Bysouth returned. ‘Probably the cleaner.’

  He stared her down. And short of forcing their way into the farmhouse and searching for Vera Bysouth, there was nothing they could do, as well he knew.

  On their return, they found the incident room in a state of mild excitement. While they’d been out, at last a break – of sorts – had happened.

  A delivery man, just back from holiday, having seen for the first time the appeal in the local paper for information on the dead woman, had come into the station and offered what he thought might be some useful intelligence.

  Several times, he said, during the week before his holiday, while he’d been delivering feedstuffs to the farm, he’d noticed a blue Fiat, with a woman in the driving seat, parked in the same spot where Jenny had parked the car. He’d wondered what she was doing. It wasn’t the sort of area frequented by picnickers and sightseers.

  Nowhere to sit except scrubby, sodden fields full of reeds and nothing to see except more of the same – and anyway, it was hardly picnic weather, was it? Plus, it had been earlyish in the morning each time he’d seen her. He’d thought she might have been some sort of artist, drawing or photographing the flooded landscape.

  Unfortunately, that was all he could tell them. He hadn’t noticed the number of the car, or even much about the occupant, except that it was a woman, he’d been too concerned with negotiating his truck down the narrow lane.

  Caution dictated that no automatic assumption should be made that the car had belonged to the dead woman, but no one seemed to be doubting that it had, that its driver had ended up in the Kyne. And what about the car, had anyone else seen it – where was it now? More door-stepping might provide some of the answers, and the first of those to be questioned were the folks at Kyneford. ‘The Bysouths?’ asked Jenny.

  ‘And someone else,’ said Abigail. ‘Mrs Osborne.’

  ‘I’m going to find a few minutes to visit Ted during my lunchtime,’ she told Jenny. ‘I need to stock my fridge up as well, so I’ll kill two birds with one stone and get him something nice to eat while I’m at it.’

  ‘He’ll appreciate that after two weeks of hospital food. Give him my love and tell him to watch it, with those nurses,‘Jenny said. ‘I’ll pop in when I can.’

  ‘I will.’ Abigail laughed. She and the middle-aged, laconic sergeant had been partners for a very long time, and she found the picture of Carmody chasing the nurses, even had he been in the best of health, entertaining. Possible, of course, anything was possible, but she thought he’d be too afraid of what his Maureen would do if she caught him, for one thing.

  She wandered around the shelves at Tesco’s, shopping for one, since Ben – don’t think about it! – was unlikely to be there to share her meals for a while. What she did buy still looked depressingly meagre and spinsterish at the bottom of the trolley, especially following the woman in front of her, who seemed to have been shopping for England. How many cats did she have, for goodness’ sake, twenty-five tins of Kit-e-Kat, and three bags of kibble? Not to mention how many children. Dozens of packets of crisps, cornflake boxes the size of suitcases and enough sliced white bread to feed starving Africa. Abigail’s own supplies for a week barely filled one plastic bag when she’d emptied her trolley, even with the huge box of chocolate gingers she knew Carmody doted on and a bunch of grapes. She hadn’t been able to find anything else she thought he might fancy that didn’t need cooking, except fruit and chocolates.

  On the way out, pausing to adjust her slipping shoulder bag, she caught a glimpse, through the potted plants that screened off the coffee shop, of a woman with pale auburn hair. She paused and looked again. Yes, it was!

  She was sitting alone, in front of a cup of coffee and the largest cream pastry Abigail had ever seen, an expression of absolute bliss on her face as she dug in her fork and transferred the load to her mouth.

  Reluctant to interrupt such communion between a woman and her comfort, Abigail knew she might never get another chance to speak to her. She slipped into the coffee area through the space between a huge indoor tree and a Fatsia japonica. Plonking her plastic bag on the floor, she slid
into the free chair opposite the woman, who looked up with a guilty start, at the same time trying with a futile, involuntary gesture to shield the plate containing the cream cake. And then her face became suffused, a burning ugly red sweeping in a tide from her neck to her hairline.

  ‘Mrs Bysouth? Mrs Vera Bysouth?’ Abigail pushed her warrant card across. ‘I’m Abigail Moon, Lavenstock CID.’

  ‘I know who you are,’ the woman whispered, as if afraid of even raising her voice. ‘I saw you earlier on at the farm.’

  ‘I’d like to talk to you for a minute or two. Let me get you another coffee, you’ve almost finished that.’

  ‘No – I really must be going.’ She began to gather her bags together.

  ‘You can’t leave that delicious cake.’

  Vera Bysouth looked at the pastry, wavered, and was lost. ‘Well …’

  ‘Won’t be a sec,’ Abigail said, hoping the service would be quick, so that Mrs Bysouth wouldn’t have time to change her mind and disappear. She was lucky, and in a few minutes was back with two coffees and a wrapped sandwich for her own lunch. She was famished, but not even in the interest of solidarity and gaining evidence could she have faced one of those sickly confections sitting on the plate opposite, which Vera Bysouth shouldn’t have been eating either, in view of her pasty complexion, and a figure that was flabby, if not fat. Along with the auburn hair, she possessed such pale lashes and brows, such light eyes that she might almost have been an albino. Even her lips were colourless.

  ‘Thank you – Inspector, isn’t it?’ she breathed, accepting the coffee.

  ‘Abigail.’

  The woman opposite her opened two packets of sugar and stirred them into her coffee. Her voice was very nearly inaudible, and her frightened glance slid from side to side as she whispered, ‘I can’t tell you anything.’

  I haven’t asked, yet, thought Abigail. Vera picked up her fork again. ‘My one treat,’ she explained, softly apologetic, though she didn’t look as though she was enjoying it now. Shame to have spoiled the moment for her, but you couldn’t pass up an opportunity like this. ‘I know I shouldn’t,’ she went on, jabbing with the fork, ‘but it’s the only time I get to myself, once a week.’ She ate the last morsel of the pastry and pushed away the halffinished coffee. ‘Look, I have to go now, get the shopping done, he expects me back by half-past two.’ He. Not Reuben, not my husband. He.