by Nicola Ford
‘Are you trying to tell us that Gerald did kill Jim?’ Clare asked.
Estelle raised her right hand. ‘I’ve been unable to share this with anyone for four decades. It would be easier if you would allow me to tell it in my own way.
‘The last few months have been more difficult than any of us would have wished. Losing Gerald, then having his name dragged through the mud. What has sustained me is the knowledge that it was what he wanted. But he would have detested the idea that anyone else might get hurt because of it. Least of all someone Peter is fond of.’
David felt decidedly uncomfortable as he watched the smile that Estelle lavished on Clare.
‘It’s time to end it.’ Estelle turned to David. ‘You’re very astute, Dr Barbrook. I was fully aware that my husband had not left with Joyce Clifford. He would never have left me.’ David couldn’t mask his surprise. ‘I know what you must be thinking. But believe me, I had no illusions about Jim. I knew he felt nothing for me, but if he’d ever tried to leave me and Peter, Gerald would have cut him off without a penny. And life without easy money was inconceivable for Jim.’
‘But you knew about the affair?’ Clare asked.
‘Oh heavens, yes. It wasn’t the first and I very much doubt it would have been the last. I had passed the point of caring about Jim’s dalliances. His philandering and gambling were minor irritations I’d learnt to live with. It was his drinking that made life unbearable. I’m not sure whether you will understand this’ – she looked from David to Clare – ‘but I think you might, my dear. You’re an attractive young woman’ – Clare blushed – ‘and attractive young women attract men like Jim – wastrels.’
David shifted in his seat.
‘I knew what he was like from the start. But he was utterly charming and such fun to be with. In the beginning, I would have forgiven him anything. But then he started to drink; really drink. And he changed. He became abusive – at first just verbally, but then physically too. I’m sure I don’t have to paint you a picture. For a while, I thought I might be able to stop him drinking. Persuade him that we should try to make a go of it for Peter’s sake. But nothing changed. And then he started to threaten Peter.’
He leant forward in his chair. ‘Did Gerald know?’
She shook her head. ‘Not at first. He knew Jim drank too much and he knew about the arguments, but he had no idea that Jim hit me. I didn’t want anyone to know how bad it was – least of all Gerald. I made all of the usual excuses: slipping on wet floors, walking into furniture.’
‘But why hide it? If Gerald had known, surely he could have helped,’ Clare said.
‘If I had my time again, maybe I would. Lord knows I’ve thought about it often enough.’ Estelle shook her head, staring down at the carpet. She seemed caught halfway between the present and a darker place. She lifted her head, looking first at Clare and then David. ‘I didn’t tell Gerald because I was afraid of what he might do. You see, I’d known for a long time that Gerald was in love with me.’
David lowered his eyes to the floor, unable to meet Estelle’s gaze. Ed had been right; there had been more than the affection of a brother and sister-in-law between Gerald and Estelle, at least on Gerald’s part.
‘What happened when he found out?’ Clare asked.
‘He didn’t find out how bad it was until it was too late.’
‘Too late?’ Clare said.
‘Until I’d killed Jim.’
The words rattled around inside David’s brain, jumbled, making no sense. ‘You killed Jim.’
Estelle nodded. ‘Everything Gerald did was to protect me.’
Clare said, ‘He must have loved you very much.’
Estelle turned to face her, eyes glistening. ‘He gave up his career, his friends and his reputation.’
‘How did it happen?’ David almost whispered.
Estelle took a cotton handkerchief from her sleeve and dabbed at her eyes, then sat with it in her lap, twisting it first one way and then the other. ‘This is the first time I’ve spoken about what happened that evening with anyone other than Gerald.’ She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before opening them again. ‘I came home one evening to find Jim in Gerald’s office with the safe door open. I didn’t even know he had the combination. He’d been drinking. When I asked him what he thought he was doing, he started yelling and shouting. I tried to shut myself in the kitchen to get away from him. But I couldn’t get the door locked in time. And it just made him worse. He was raving. He grabbed hold of me and started shaking me. I kept screaming at him to stop. But he wouldn’t. He kept banging me against the table. I thought he was going to break my back. I tried to use my hands to brace myself against the tabletop. Then I felt something – a bread knife. I just took hold of it and rammed it towards him as hard as I could. It was all over very quickly. There was blood everywhere. I didn’t know what to do. Then I heard Gerald’s car.’
‘Where was Peter when all this was going on?’ Clare asked.
Estelle was emphatic. ‘Out. He’d been with Ed Jevons all day – drinking, we later discovered.’
‘What did you do?’ Clare said.
‘I didn’t do anything. I was useless. When I saw all of that blood I nearly passed out. I was shaking like a leaf. Gerald ordered me to go upstairs, run a bath and go to bed. He told me he would deal with it. I was like an automaton. I just did exactly what he said.’
For a few moments they all three sat in silence. As if no one knew exactly what the correct etiquette was during a confession to a killing.
Clare said, ‘If we’re going to stop anyone else getting hurt, we need to know what happened to the sun disc.’ Estelle nodded. ‘You said the safe door was open.’
She nodded again.
‘What was in it?’ Clare said.
‘Gerald kept the goldwork in there. At the time I was in too much of a state to ask Gerald what had happened with the safe. It wasn’t until later that he told me the disc was missing. Gerald thought Jim must have stashed it somewhere. He almost tore the house apart looking for it. But he couldn’t find it. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that Jim must have given it to someone before I’d found him. Gerald had heard whispers around the village that something was being planned, but he could never get to the bottom of it. That’s why he was so obsessive about security.’
‘But why was the Jevons disc in the safe in the first place?’ Clare asked.
‘Gerald had taken it out of the British Museum to compare it with the one he’d found during the excavations. They were identical in every way, apart from the damage. He was convinced they were made as a pair.’
David rubbed his hand across his chin and nodded thoughtfully. ‘They almost certainly came from different barrows. It’ll be interesting to see what the radio-carbon dates from the associated remains are. We’ll need DNA analysis to see if there’s any kin relationship between them.’
For a moment, Estelle’s face softened, the spark that had been so evident in her eyes at the beginning of the interview returning. ‘You sound so like Gerald. Everyone says Peter takes after his uncle. I suspect the village gossips thought he was his father. But I never really saw it. Peter has always been a much more restrained sort of a man than Gerald. Gerald had such a passion for what he did. It was his whole life.’ All at once the energy seemed to drain from her. ‘Sometimes I wonder whether Peter ever really got over not having a father around.’
David placed a hand gently on Estelle’s. ‘From what Peter’s told me, you and Gerald were all he ever wanted or needed.’
She smiled at him, squeezing his fingers with hers. Then, easing both of her hands away from his, she placed them resolutely on the arms of her wheelchair. ‘Where’s that tea we were promised?’ She manoeuvred herself over to a small brass buzzer mounted just above the dado rail in the corner of the room. Within seconds an assistant had arrived and was duly despatched in search of the missing beverages.
Clare said, ‘Why did Gerald decide to move the archiv
e and set fire to the outbuildings? What had changed after all these years? Was he scared of something?’
Estelle shook her head. ‘Not scared – worried. About eighteen months ago he came to see me. I could see he was preoccupied with something. At first he wouldn’t tell me what was wrong. Peter had been trying to persuade him to give the archive to a museum for some time. Gerald just ignored him. But then he got a letter from a researcher at a university offering to help him publish it.’
David looked at the floor.
‘Naturally, he refused. Gerald knew he could fob Peter off, but once other people started showing an interest in the archive again, wanting access … Well, he just couldn’t let that happen. When he told me he was going to destroy the archive, I couldn’t believe it. But he insisted it was the only way. When I heard about the fire, I knew he must have been responsible.’
David felt a knot of recognition twist in his stomach. He could barely believe it. This was his fault. His letter had been the catalyst for all of this. He looked at Clare. The thought that he had been responsible for putting her life at risk, however indirectly, made him feel sick.
Estelle was right; he had more in common with Gerald than he’d thought. In the end, Gerald would rather have seen his own reputation in tatters and be remembered as a murderer than have the woman he loved implicated or destroy the archaeology that had been his life.
They sat in the lay-by on the A4 looking west towards the Overton Hill round barrow cemetery, HGVs and vans dousing Clare’s Fiesta with spray. The one thing they were agreed on was that whatever decision they reached, they both had to be able to live with the consequences.
Clare made her views quite clear. The right and proper thing to do was to go to the police and repeat what Estelle had told them. David was equally forthright in letting her know that they shouldn’t withhold that sort of information from Sally.
What disquieted David most was not that Estelle had killed Jim, but that Peter had tried to dissuade him from talking to her. Did Peter know that his mother had been responsible for his father’s death? Had he been trying to protect her? But neither David nor Clare could believe that was true. If Peter had known he would never have risked inviting David to Hungerbourne or asking him to publish Gerald’s journals.
But whatever Peter’s motive, the fact was that Gerald and Jim were both dead while Estelle and Peter lived on. What purpose would be served by incarcerating an elderly woman already suffering from a debilitating illness? Besides, after everything he’d already gone through, the psychological effects of Peter discovering his mother had killed his father were unfathomable.
It was patently obvious that Estelle couldn’t have been responsible for what had happened on the photographic tower, the attack on Jo or, come to that, Jenny’s death. Whoever had been responsible wasn’t interested in covering up Jim’s killing. They were trying to stop anyone discovering the truth about what happened to the sun disc.
And so they decided. They would not be the people to reveal Estelle Hart’s secret.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
David returned from his trip to Marlborough to purchase supplies to find Clare sitting at his desk in the Portakabin, studying the contents of a large plastic bag.
He had thought it would prove difficult to continue with normal life knowing a secret of such enormous proportions. But in the event, he felt neither guilty nor anxious that they might be discovered. Sharing the decision with Clare had made it easier; not so much because the burden of knowing the truth had been halved, but rather because he was comforted by the knowledge that it bound them together in the same way that Estelle had been bound to Gerald.
But despite everything Estelle had told them, they were still no closer to retrieving the missing sun disc or discovering who had put Jo in hospital. What worried him most was that it was common knowledge that Clare had been asking questions about the sun disc. Ergo, someone thought she was too close to discovering the truth about its disappearance. And that meant she was still in danger. There was no way he could ask Sally for help. Not least because he couldn’t risk what Estelle had told them coming out. So keeping Clare safe was entirely down to him.
He scraped the mud from his boots on the metal door surround and nodded in the direction of the bag she held in her hands. ‘What’ve you got there?’
‘Take a look for yourself.’
He slipped the knife out of the plastic finds bag and smiled. ‘It’s an old bowie knife. I had one just like it when I was a kid – all the lads round our way did.’ But there was no hint of a smile on Clare’s face. She obviously wasn’t in the mood for exchanging childhood reminiscences. ‘What’s up?’
She shrugged.
‘Where’s it from?’
‘The backfill in Gerald’s trench.’
He reinserted the knife into the bag and slid it back towards her across the tattered desktop. ‘In my highly trained professional opinion, that thing is most definitely not Bronze Age.’ But when he saw her reaction his failed attempt at humour morphed into concern. ‘What’s wrong, Clare?’
She glanced across at the open door. He got up and closed it, before seating himself at the desk opposite her.
She looked at him. ‘You don’t get it, do you?’
He didn’t.
She sighed. ‘Estelle told us Gerald dealt with everything after she killed Jim. And we know Gerald closed the dig down straight away. And that thing’ – she pointed at the knife – ‘was found in the backfill in Gerald’s trench.’
David stared down at the contents of the bag. ‘You think this is the knife that killed Jim?’
Clare nodded.
He got up and walked over to where she was sitting. Feet tucked up underneath her, she looked like a depressed pixie. He laid a gentle hand on her shoulder and spun her round through ninety degrees to face him.
Crouching down, he pressed her hands between his and looked into her soft hazel eyes, the tiny golden flecks tarnished with worry. ‘This has really put the wind up you, hasn’t it?’ He paused, choosing his words carefully. ‘That is absolutely not the knife that killed Jim. Estelle told us she stabbed Jim with a bread knife. Remember? This is just some of the normal end-of-dig crap that gets chucked into the backfill.’ He squeezed her hands between his. ‘What Estelle told us, it’s not easy stuff to deal with. But we’ve made our decision and we’ve got to stick to it. We’ve just got to keep our heads down and finish the job we came here to do.’
Clare raised her eyes to his, smiled and nodded. It brought him no comfort. He recognised that smile. It said, ‘For external consumption only’.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
‘How are you feeling?’ Clare set the copy of the report down on the bedside cabinet and looked up to see Jo lying, hair pulled back from her face, looking towards her.
On the far side of the hospital bed, a long snake of plastic tubing led from Jo’s forearm to an intravenous drip hanging from a metal stand. The top of her head was swathed in bandages and her face was a terrifying palette of autumnal shades, streaked through with ruddy cuts. A criss-cross of jagged stitches ran down one side of her face and beneath her chin.
Jo touched two fingers to her mouth and croaked, ‘Dry.’
The sign hanging above Jo’s head said NIL BY MOUTH. A direction Jo made it very obvious she was less than happy about when Clare pointed it out. After a brief discussion with the nurse, she returned with a small cup of water to moisten Jo’s mouth, though she had to endure the indignity of being made to spit its contents into what looked like a cardboard bedpan afterwards.
‘Thanks for coming.’
‘You didn’t expect me to abandon you in here, did you? You had us really worried for a while.’
‘It takes more than a crap bit of Brit driving to keep me down.’ Jo’s mouth ceased the attempted smile at the point where the corner of her mouth met one set of stitches.
Clare nodded in the direction of the nurses’ office. ‘They tell me you don’t rememb
er what happened.’
Jo went to shake her head, but winced at the attempt. ‘I remember locking the office, and setting off back to camp. Then the next thing I remember is coming round with the nurse standing over me.’
Clare looked at Jo. She was always so confident and competent in everything she did that she’d never stopped to consider how young she was. But lying there swathed in protective wrappings, with the ephemera of life stripped away, she looked so fragile – almost childlike. It was a Jo entirely at odds with the force of nature who had breezed her way into the department on that first morning. She glanced down at the floor, blinking away tears.
If there was any other way, she wouldn’t do this. She would leave Jo to recuperate in peace. But she had no choice. There was a killer out there somewhere and Jo was the only person who could tell her what she needed to know.
‘What did David have to say for himself when he came to see you?’
‘I haven’t seen him. The only people I’ve seen besides you are Margaret and Peter. Peter brought me those.’ Jo directed her gaze towards an exotic and very obviously expensive bouquet of flowers in a vase on the bedside cabinet. ‘One of the nurses told me David had been in. But I was out for the count and they didn’t want to wake me.’
Clare wasn’t sure she should have started this conversation. But she knew it was too late to stop now. She dragged her chair closer to the bed.
She leant forward, her face close to Jo’s. ‘There’s something I think you should know.’
Jo’s eyes widened. ‘What’s happened? Is everyone OK?’
Clare rested her fingers lightly on Jo’s hand and smiled. ‘We’re all fine. It’s about your accident.’ The emphasis on the last word was unmistakable. She had Jo’s full attention. ‘David went back to have a look at the spot where it happened. You’d been rammed clean through the hedge.’
Jo pointed to her bandaged head. ‘I didn’t think I’d got this at one of your English tea parties.’