Beneath the Soil

by Fay Sampson

  She let Alan’s affirming words wash over her. The effect was more calming than she had expected.

  He rose. ‘If there’s anything I can do … If there’s any news, don’t hesitate to ring. Any hour of the day or night.’ He pressed her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry. I should have offered you a cup of tea. Or a cold fruit juice?’

  ‘No thanks. I get offered more tea and biscuits than is good for my waistline. I’ll be off. Millie, look after your mother.’ He smiled as he passed the pale, silent teenager. ‘I’ll be praying for you too.’

  ‘That’s it, then?’ Tom reappeared as the front door closed. ‘You’ve been signed off from work. We’ve been prayed over. There’s nothing else we can do?’

  ‘I’ve exhausted everything I can think of,’ Suzie told him.

  The rest of the day stretched out in front of her. And all the days after that. She tried not to think that the next time she contacted the minister it might be to arrange Nick’s funeral.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Tom was upstairs with Dave. There was no sound of music. Suzie had no idea what they were doing. She felt sure Tom must have told Dave about Nick – in confidence, of course.

  Millie would have rung Tamara.

  How long would it be before the phone began to ring with friends giving her their sympathy and making well-meant but useless offers of help?

  Suzie wandered through the house, unable to settle to anything. Her nerves were tensed, waiting for news from DS Dudbridge. She trusted him more than DCI Brewer. She both longed for and dreaded that call.

  After a while, Millie came downstairs and went into the little-used dining room. She began laying things out on the teak table – a large Ordnance Survey map, a pad of paper.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Wait till Dave’s gone.’

  It was about five o’clock when the boys emerged from Tom’s room. Dave came through to the kitchen, where Suzie was wondering helplessly what to do for a meal she did not feel like eating.

  ‘Sorry about this, Suzie.’

  So he did know.

  The ginger-haired teenager hesitated. Normally, at this point, Suzie would have invited him to stay for a meal. But she was too preoccupied to be hospitable. And Millie was waiting silently in the dining room doorway.

  ‘OK, then,’ Dave said after a pause. ‘I’ll be on my way … See you, mate,’ he said to Tom as he made his way to the front door. ‘Chin up.’

  The door closed behind him. The Fewings were alone.

  Millie turned and walked back into the dining room. Suzie obeyed her unspoken command. Tom raised his eyebrows, then followed Suzie’s beckoning gesture.

  ‘Right,’ Millie drew a deep breath. ‘We’ve got to get to the bottom of this.’

  ‘Do you think the police aren’t trying?’

  Millie ignored her. She gestured at the map. It covered the whole of the moor, with the towns and villages around it. ‘This story is all over the place. Let’s go right back to the beginning. It started here.’ She laid her hand on Saddlers Wood, a mile or two outside Moortown. ‘Two days before Eileen Caseley was shot, we were here. If we hadn’t been, none of this would have happened. Mum wouldn’t have gone to the funeral. Dad wouldn’t have got Bernard Summers talking. You wouldn’t have met either of those solicitors.’

  ‘I would,’ Suzie put in. ‘John Nosworthy, at least. He had some money to give me after the tractor pull. That would have happened anyway.’

  ‘And Clive Stroud,’ Tom agreed. ‘He and Mum were already set up to be there.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t have been the same,’ Millie said impatiently. ‘I’m sure it wouldn’t. Right from the beginning, everybody thought Mum knew something. And then there’s Dad. He meets Bernard Summers here.’ She moved her hand to Moortown. ‘And next day, as far as anyone knows, this geologist bloke meets his end in a stream somewhere here.’ This time she indicated a wider area of open moor. ‘Next thing we know, someone gets Dad to drive his car across the moor to here.’ She pointed out Fullingford, far over to the west. ‘He must have driven it himself, mustn’t he? So why?’

  ‘The police don’t seem to know any more than we do,’ Suzie said. ‘Or if they do, they’re not telling me. If they’ve taken Elizabeth Stroud in for questioning, that must mean they now think she’s a prime suspect.’

  Tom gave a short laugh. ‘Perhaps it wasn’t Philip who killed his wife, after all. If Stroud’s wife found out Clive had been two-timing her with Eileen, she might have been the one who bumped her off.’

  Suzie shook her head. ‘Somehow, that doesn’t fit. By the sound of it, he was a serial womanizer. Why should she suddenly take offence at Eileen? And what’s it got to do with Nick?’

  Millie was bending over, studying the map again, as if the secret was hidden there amongst the contour lines, the marks of bridleways, the green enclosures of woodland. Her finger strayed eastward again.

  ‘It comes back to the same thing. Whatever it is started that Saturday in Saddlers Wood. I’m sure it did. There must be something we’ve forgotten about. Maybe something we didn’t even notice at the time.’

  Tom blew out his breath and rumpled his hair. ‘As I recall it, Dad drove us out to Moortown and we had lunch at a pub. I can’t remember anything special that happened there.’ He looked questioningly at the others. They stayed silent. ‘Then Mum navigated us out to Saddlers Wood. There was this cart track going up to the farm. We parked at the bottom.’

  ‘Were there any other cars there?’ Millie asked suddenly.

  A pause. ‘Not that I remember. Wait. We did see a little green car driving away, but that was afterwards.’

  ‘But if someone else was there, who had no business to be, they might have hidden theirs.’

  ‘What are you getting at?’

  ‘I don’t know yet, do I? Go on.’

  ‘Right. So we walk up this cart track. But before we get to the farm, we hear a gunshot. Then Philip Caseley comes charging out from the woods. He looks upset, but he rallies round when he sees us. Mum tells him about how she’s chasing up the ancestry trail, and he tells us to go on up to the house.’

  ‘And Eileen Caseley’s there, and she looks upset too.’

  ‘Oh, and I forgot to say, the last we saw of Philip he was heading off down a small path that we found out afterwards leads to that ruined cottage.’

  ‘And on to Puck’s Acre,’ Suzie reminded him.

  ‘Fair enough. Anyway, Eileen invites us in for tea. And the place is pretty run-down. Not like a couple who’ve been told someone has found gold on their land.’

  ‘There’d been a quarrel between Philip and Eileen about that,’ Suzie put in. ‘And two days after we’d been there, she added that peculiar codicil to her will. And almost immediately after someone shot her.’

  ‘Never mind about that,’ Millie said impatiently. ‘That happened later. Go back to Saturday.’

  Tom frowned. ‘Well … Eileen Caseley gave us directions to find the remains of the cottage. Mum’s ancestral home.’

  ‘And yours,’ Suzie retorted.

  ‘So we find these ruins in a clearing, beside a stream. And while we’re poking around, and Dad’s taking photographs, there’s this sound of a branch breaking in the woods. Mum says she’s sure someone’s watching us.’

  ‘That’s what it felt like.’

  ‘Dad thinks it’s just an animal. A wild one, or maybe someone’s taking their dog for a walk in the woods. We have a half-hearted sort of look, and Dad calls out to see if anyone’s there, but there’s no sign of anything odd.’

  ‘I’m still convinced there was someone else there, besides us.’

  ‘Philip?’ suggested Millie. ‘He went that way.’

  Suzie shrugged. ‘We’ll never know.’

  ‘But that’s the point!’ Millie exploded. ‘Someone thinks we do know. Someone who doesn’t want us to know they were there at all.’

  ‘Clive Stroud!’ Light was breaking in Tom’s face. ‘I
f he was on some secret assignation with Eileen … If Philip found them …’

  ‘That’s what she was all dressed up for!’ Millie exclaimed. ‘I thought she looked remarkably smart for someone out in the back of beyond.’

  ‘Maybe that’s what that gunshot was about. Philip was trying to scare him off. Literally firing a warning shot across Eileen’s bows.’

  Suzie shivered. ‘That could explain why Clive Stroud was so sinister that day of the tractor pull. Why he warned me off coming back to Moortown. Infidelity is one thing. But with a murdered woman …’

  ‘Terrible PR for an MP,’ Tom said.

  ‘Except that Eileen was already dead by then,’ Millie said sceptically. ‘If you’d known he was there, you’d have reported it to the police, wouldn’t you? It would be too late to stop you.’

  ‘And you really think that day in the woods has got anything to do with someone carting Dad off?’ Tom asked.

  There was a painful silence. To Suzie it seemed as much of a dead end as it had been before.

  Then Millie gave a great yelp and leaped up from the map she had been studying.

  ‘What was that you said just now?’ she asked Tom eagerly.

  ‘Which bit?’

  ‘While we’re poking around, and Dad’s taking photographs.’

  Tom and Suzie stared at her.

  ‘Got it!’ Tom cried. ‘Did he show you those photographs, Mum?’

  Suzie struggled to remember. The search for her ancestors seemed far away and unimportant, compared with all that had happened since. ‘He copied two of the best ones across to me for my files. I didn’t see the rest.’

  ‘Where’s his camera? He didn’t take it with him yesterday, did he?’

  ‘On a work day? I shouldn’t think so.’

  Millie flew next door to the study. As Tom and Suzie crowded after her, she dragged open the drawer where Nick kept his camera equipment. She pulled out the Canon and waved it triumphantly.

  ‘Turn on the computer, Mum. We’ve got to see this. I’ll swear the answer’s here.’

  Tom rummaged in the drawer for the right cable to connect the camera to the computer’s USB port. Suzie found that she was holding her breath. Would there be any more photographs left on Nick’s camera from that day, besides the two she already had? Nick had selected for her a close-up of the cottage ruins and a longer shot of the clearing in which it stood, looking down over the pink spires of fireweed towards the stream with the ruins in the foreground. She had noticed nothing unusual about either of them.

  ‘Got it!’ Tom took over the desk chair. He brought up on the screen an array of thumbnail images. He scanned the dates. ‘Result! Trust Dad to take forty photos where half a dozen would do.’

  ‘So he didn’t delete the rest.’ Millie craned forward in excitement.

  One by one, Tom began to bring each of the photographs from that Saturday up to full screen. Some were similar to the ones Suzie had added to her files. There were more of the old cottage, taken from different angles, the shapeless walls of cob, disintegrating once they had lost their roof. There were artistic close-ups of weeds springing out of the crevices, a wall split by a young ash tree. Nick had picked out the wild flowers that carpeted the clearing. Even the word ‘clearing’ was losing its meaning as the trees began to take back what had once been a large open space. Charlotte Day’s kitchen garden, no doubt. The place where she hung her washing. Where her children played. Nick had peopled some of these photographs with his own family, sometimes not. Suzie’s imagination supplied other figures from a century and a half ago.

  She snatched back her wandering thoughts. What should she really be looking for?

  Tom leaned closer to the screen. ‘Not sure what he’s trying to get here.’

  Nick had turned his camera away from the cottage, to focus on the woods beyond the stream. Through his lens, Suzie saw more gradations of colour among the foliage than she would have thought possible. Her less artistic eye would have dismissed these leaves as simply green, but Nick had found a variety of shades of gold in the oak, the blue-green needles of fir, the glossy darkness of holly.

  ‘There!’ cried Tom and Millie simultaneously.

  Suzie’s attention snapped back to the new image which had suddenly appeared on the screen. The stream still ran sparkling in the foreground. Beyond, there was that same wall of trees. Except …

  ‘What is it?’ asked Millie. ‘It looks like a very small car’s headlights or a very big owl’s eyes.’

  ‘Somebody’s glasses,’ said Tom. Suzie could hear his breath coming fast.

  Her own eyes had fastened on what they were staring at. To the right of centre, among the leaves, Nick’s camera had caught the flashes of light from two small circles.

  ‘There was someone there in the woods,’ Tom breathed. ‘Well done, Mum! I assumed it must be a deer or something. But deer don’t wear spectacles. Someone really was watching us.’

  Suzie leaned further over his shoulder, craning to see more closely. Was that all there was? Just the reflection of light on a pair of glasses from – what? – thirty metres away? Nick had not used his most powerful lens.

  ‘Can you enlarge it?’ she urged.

  Tom homed in on that detail. A bigger, more blurred image replaced the whole. It was just possible to make out a pale oval surrounded by a darker smudge which merged into the leaves.

  Suzie scrabbled through her memories, trying to think of any of the players in this story who wore glasses. Philip? She thought not. Eileen? Possibly. Frances Nosworthy? No, and she was almost certain John Nosworthy did not. She couldn’t be sure about Clive Stroud. It was strange, but when you thought about almost any of your acquaintances it was possible to imagine them wearing spectacles, and less easy to remember which ones actually did.

  ‘Try the next picture,’ Millie ordered.

  The image on the screen changed again. Nick had shifted the angle, so that he was looking further up the stream. The screen of foliage was still there on the left, but more of the foreground was now the sunlit flower-strewn grass on the nearer side of the brook. There was no sign of a flash of light among the leaves.

  ‘Must have scared her off. She never realized she’d be photographed,’ Millie said.

  ‘She?’ asked Suzie and Tom together.

  ‘Of course it’s a woman. Didn’t you see her hair?’

  Tom clicked back. Those twin flashes of light reappeared. He enlarged the detail again. Suzie frowned. She felt that if she stared at it long enough, she could believe that Millie was right, that there was a cloud of darkness surrounding that indistinct face. Something more crinkled than the texture of the leaves it melded into.

  ‘Do you suppose Dad noticed it?’ Millie asked.

  ‘I doubt it. He would have said so, wouldn’t he? We only saw it because we were looking for something out of the ordinary. Something whoever was there that day didn’t expect us to see.’

  Suzie was still staring at that blur of a face with what must be quite a large pair of glasses. Horn-rimmed. Where had she seen a pair like that?

  Suddenly she jumped, so violently that she knocked Tom sideways on his swivel chair.

  ‘Yes! I’m almost sure it’s her! Those glasses!’

  ‘Who?’ Tom and Millie demanded.

  ‘Oh, what was her name? … Gina Alford! Clive Stroud’s agent.’

  THIRTY-THREE

  ‘Are you sure? You can’t really recognize her from this blurry photo, can you?’ Millie asked.

  ‘Of course I’m not sure. How can I be? I corresponded with her, but I only met her once, at the tractor pull. But she does have big horn-rimmed glasses like that.’

  ‘I bet the police have got the kit to enhance this better than we can,’ Tom said.

  Suzie’s mobile was already in her hand. She dialled DS Dudbridge’s number, her thumb clumsy with haste. To her relief, she got through.

  ‘Mrs Fewings? Still no joy, I’m afraid. We’re not giving up, though.’


  ‘We’ve found something. On Nick’s camera. This could be the person he was meeting.’

  She poured out their discovery, and their attempts to distinguish the face.

  ‘I can’t be a hundred per cent sure it’s Gina Alford, but it fits.’

  ‘I’m coming over.’

  ‘No. Don’t waste time. If she knows where Nick is … if she’s got him, you have to find her.’

  ‘Point taken. I’ll send someone round to pick up the camera. We can probably get a better identification than you could.’

  Suzie put down the mobile. Her brain was working overtime, trying to disentangle all the implications if what she guessed was right.

  ‘But what would Clive Stroud’s agent be doing in Saddlers Wood?’

  ‘Spying on him?’ Millie suggested. ‘We said that he might have had an assignation with Eileen that day, and Philip found out. They had a row, Philip fired his gun, and then came storming out when we met him.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with this Stroud guy’s constituency agent?’ Tom asked. ‘What he does in his spare time is his own affair.’

  Suzie thought back to that sunlit afternoon in Moortown square. Gina Alford, possessively aggressive. Scorning Suzie’s ability to have set up everything right for her MP. Even then, Suzie had sensed that the frizzy-haired, bespectacled agent’s demeanour was more than professional jealousy.

  ‘I think she’s in love with him.’

  ‘You mean …?’ Millie was rapidly working out the consequences. ‘It might not have been Philip who shot Eileen because she was having an affair with Clive? It could have been this Alford woman taking out a rival who looked as if she was getting too serious.’

  ‘If she overheard an almighty row, and knew that Clive really was thinking of divorcing his wife, and Eileen was going to leave Philip, she might have felt driven to stop her, yes.’

  ‘So,’ Tom said slowly, ‘she goes back on Monday, gets hold of Philip’s gun and does the deed. But she’s worried because she remembers there was this family in the clearing on Saturday taking photographs, while she was on her way back to wherever she’d hidden her car. She knows there’s a chance that this guy with the camera might have caught her in one of them.’