The events at the Upminsters’ farm had raised the tension in the village, and the night before he had argued with Margaret, after telling her who it was who had committed the murders and why. And now, she was back at her manor house, and he wasn’t sure what she would do, what he should do. The police would be interested in his analysis, no doubt claim it for their own, not that it concerned him. If he had wanted fame and recognition for his unique approach to quantum physics, he would have been out on the lecture circuit, receiving awards, and being paid well. His papers had been published, and although there had been some who had visited the pub to discourse on his area of research, not many had come in total. He cast his line one more time, knowing that his mind was not at one with the fish.
‘Another day we will meet on the battlefield of life,’ he said. He had to admit that the fish had a better life than him; it did not have to deal with the reality of revealing the truth.
***
Linda Wilson had remained unflappable during the visit of the two police officers. But isn’t that what I’m meant to do, she thought. To pretend that I’m comfortable when I’m not, especially with that thug in the Greek Islands, and how about that banker, stiff upper lip, well-respected in the city, yet a pervert. How I hated him.
The visit of Inspector Tremayne and Sergeant Yarwood had left her perplexed and a little frightened. She had loved Eustace when she had been in her teens, an innocent love.
She remembered the first time she had sold herself. A former boss, who had propositioned her, had taken her to a hotel in the countryside for the weekend. ‘I’ll set you up in a flat in Mayfair, pay your expenses,’ he had said as they had driven along in his Porsche with the hood down.
She hadn’t wanted to, the man was not the most attractive, but he was decent, and eventually she had agreed. With time, she got used to the generosity of a man in return for the comforts of life, and what she had to give in return concerned her less, but the return to Salisbury had given her time for reflection.
She’d been six months in Fitzhampton when she had seen Eustace walking casually through the centre of Salisbury. It was another month before he shared her bed again. He was her first love, a forbidden love as he was married, and she had never forgotten.
It had also been a time for him to unburden himself to her, and later to tell her about how cold Gladys had become after their son died, the inconsolable grief that she felt. He also told her about the village of Compton and the various personalities, and how he hated the place, but couldn’t leave it.
And now, Eustace had been knifed by Gladys, and Linda knew that she wanted to see him. She drove to the same house where they had made love many years before, and where Gladys’s sister, Mary, now resided in the home of her parents. Linda knew she would not be welcome.
‘You’ve got a nerve,’ Mary said. She was the same age as Linda, yet she looked much older, the result of three children, and if the truth was known, a husband who used to beat her until he had walked out three years earlier, never to be heard from again. Mary hoped that he would never return, and in his absence, she had filed for divorce, the house belonging solely to her. It had been given by their parents to both Gladys and Mary, but Gladys had signed over her half out of love for a sister, and an understanding of the strain that the woman had been living under.
Not only had the husband been of little worth, the eldest son was a delinquent, the daughter, not yet sixteen, a tart, and the youngest son not entirely right in the head and a simpleton.
And there she was, Linda Wilson, the nemesis, Mary’s one-time friend.
‘I’m sorry, Mary,’ Linda said. ‘I just had to know that Eustace was fine.’
‘He’s fine, no thanks to you.’
‘I’m innocent, Mary. I’d like to see him.’
The door opened, bringing a remembrance of what had been before that awful night so many years ago when Gladys had found Eustace and Linda in bed together. The accusations that flew, the pulling of Linda’s hair, the harsh words said by Linda in return.
And in time, the recriminations and Gladys leaving Eustace once again for a couple of months, driving her parents mad after she had returned to the parental home, a young and unruly child in tow.
And now, the woman who had caused such conflict was at the door. The two women embraced.
‘Your life has been different to mine,’ Mary said as she wiped a tear from her eye.
‘Some good, some bad, but I’ve missed you.’
‘I’ve seen you in Salisbury, but you wouldn’t have recognised me.’
‘I had, but what could I say? I never wanted to hurt Gladys or you, but these things happen.’
‘Gladys said you were selling yourself.’
‘Does it bother you?’
‘It would have to be better than the drudgery that I’ve endured over the years. My husband was a bastard.’
‘Eustace told me that you had had it rough. I could have helped.’
‘Even if I wanted it, you couldn’t have. And besides, money’s not the issue.’
Inside the house, Eustace sat in a wheelchair. He looked up as Linda entered, wanted to dash over and give her a hug, not out of love, but out of friendship. A person who had visited him, but not to criticise, as Mary had done, for his treatment of Gladys, not that he had done anything wrong. Or the police continually quizzing him, attempting to find out a reason for Gladys attacking him.
‘Thanks for coming,’ Eustace said.
‘I wasn’t sure, but then the police visited me.’
‘There’s nothing to be ashamed of, and even Mary, not that she’d approve openly, would understand. You two were such great friends once.’
‘Before that day, but let’s not dwell on the past.’
‘I’ll heal, but it’s Gladys I’m worried about. I want to go and see her.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘Mary doesn’t have a car, and I don’t want to ask anyone else.’
‘We’ll go now. My car’s outside, and you don’t have to tell Gladys that I brought you.’
Chapter 23
Barry Woodcock had his head under the bonnet of his old Land Rover; his wife, Gwen, was in the farmhouse kitchen baking a cake, while the three children, usually not visible, were scurrying around the place. One of them was throwing a ball to a dog, another sat on the step leading up to the front door reading a book, and the third crawled along the porch. The farm had an air of tranquillity. However, disturbing news had been received from Forensics about a hitherto unresolved piece of evidence from outside Gloria Wiggins’ garage, a plant leaf that had been found squashed into the mud. It had taken several weeks, and in the end Louise Regan, Forensics head, had driven to the Royal Botanic Gardens in London for one of their experts to identify the leaf. It belonged to a Crested Cow-wheat, a small flower rarely found in England. And now, the complication was that at the far end of the Woodcocks’ farm, the plant had been found growing. It wasn’t damning evidence, as the area where the plant grew was not isolated. A path ran alongside, only separated from it by a low fence, but no one would have stooped to pick up the rare plant, as it was not attractive, no more than a weed to the uninformed.
‘Barry, we need a serious word,’ Tremayne said. Clare thought the three children were attractive: the eldest already starting to look like his father with the high forehead, the prominent chin. The daughter had the look of her mother, the eyes of her father, while the youngest showed no visible signs of either parent, but it was mainly face down on the floor. Clare thought the floor too cold to be crawling over, but then she was no expert on the subject.
‘Two minutes,’ Barry said.
After ten minutes, not the two stated, Woodcock came into the house and sat at the kitchen table with Tremayne and Clare. ‘That’s the problem with old vehicles,’ he said. ‘It’s not a lot of money to repair, but it’s time. I’ll have to take off the head, check the valves, and then replace the head gasket. There goes my Sunday.’
&
nbsp; ‘How are you with pulleys, Barry?’ Tremayne said.
‘What’s this all about?’
‘A leaf was found up at Gloria’s garage. We believe that it came in with her murderer.’
‘A leaf? What’s that to do with me?’
‘It’s rare, and your farm has some of it in the far corner, next to the path. We can prove it came from there, and it’s not as if other people have trodden around your farm.’
‘Nobody except Gwen and me, and she’d not go up there often.’
‘The leaf places connects the murder scene and your farm.’
‘I don’t know why. It’s not as if I go traipsing around the fields. There are some cattle over that way, and I sometimes go up there in the winter to give them some feed, but not recently.’
‘What’s the story with the path alongside?’
‘It’s just one of those public thoroughfares that have been there for hundreds of years. We sometimes go for a walk up it on a Sunday, Gwen and me and the children. Also, hikers use it on a regular basis. You can walk almost into Salisbury on the paths. But why would anyone pick up a plant, it makes no sense?’
‘The facts point to someone walking on the plant without realising what it was, or picking it up.’
‘The cows could have carried it into the yard, and then dropped it,’ Barry said.
Tremayne wasn’t sure what to make of what the man was saying. Woodcock had an air of bewildered innocence about him, and others had said that he was not too bright. Yet Rupert Baxter portrayed the jovial publican with great conviction, and he had admitted to a searing intellect. Was Barry Woodcock more than he seemed? Tremayne did not know. The man’s educational qualifications had shown that he had left school with no O or A levels, and since then his life had been on the farm.
Lacking any more questions, Tremayne and Clare left the farmhouse with Barry and walked across the field to where the leaf had come from.
‘I don’t know much about horticulture,’ Tremayne said as the three of them stood looking down at where the plant grew.
‘It’s a weed to me,’ Woodcock said. ‘No idea why the cows haven’t eaten it. Maybe it doesn’t taste good, although I’ve not found them to be fussy with what they chew on. The grass in summer, a bale of hay in the winter.’
On another side of the field, the cows grazed without taking any notice of the three people.
‘It gets cold up close to the trees on the other side of the field,’ Woodcock said.
‘Perishing cold,’ Tremayne agreed. ‘Now look here, Woodcock. We’ve gone out of our way to give you the benefit of the doubt, but each time the evidence mounts against you. Nothing concrete, you’ll understand, but circumstantially you’re guilty. A couple of hundred years ago, you’d be convicted and strung up for less, but nowadays we’ll not get a conviction, though we can hold you pending further investigations.’
‘I can’t be away from the farm. There’s too much to do.’
‘We’re trusting you on this one, but each time we come out here, another titbit becomes known. What do you know about Eustace and this other woman?’
‘We all knew, not that we ever spoke to him about it, and Gwen wouldn’t have told Gladys.’
‘We’re not sure if she knew the extent of the affair, but she had apparently accepted it.’
‘If I did something like that, Gwen wouldn’t stay calm.’
‘Violent?’
‘She’s got a temper, and maybe she’d hit me, but it’s not going to happen, is it?’
‘How would we know,’ Tremayne said.
‘I wouldn’t do that, not to Gwen. We’re too close for that, and besides, Eustace may have needed the other woman, but with Gwen, I don’t.’
‘A good marriage?’ Clare asked. The three had moved away from the far side of the field and were back in the farmyard.
‘I reckon so. The Upminsters’ marriage was always fiery, not that we ever saw it, but sometimes Eustace would have a black eye. The Fosters rarely argue, and you know Desdemona.’
‘We’ve still not figured her out,’ Clare said.
‘Nobody has,’ Woodcock said. ‘She’s a local, the same as we all are, but she doesn’t look as though she comes from farming stock. Her father was a short man, wiry, with red hair. Desdemona takes after him, but she’s got no strength to her, not like he did. He’d be out on his farm day in, day out, and still be in the pub three times a week for a few pints. Desdemona, even when she was at school and then as a teenager, didn’t socialise much, and she was not out and about with the local lads. More of a stay-at-home, not like Hamish.’
‘Hamish is local, we know that.’
‘Local, he certainly is. Anyway, he used to get out and about, and then he was with Desdemona. Not sure what he saw in her at the time, although she was attractive, more demure than the others and he fell hook, line, and sinker for her.’
‘Another dead end,’ Tremayne wryly admitted to Clare as they left the farm, with Barry Woodcock looking at them less than enthusiastically. He still had five hours more work for the day, and it was late afternoon. It would be dark, and the children would be in bed, before he entered the farmhouse that night.
If Tremayne and Clare were psychic, they would have known that he was a worried man. However, Woodcock soon put the thoughts of impending doom to one side and headed back to the field to bring in the cows for milking. Then he had to cut some firewood to heat the house, let alone clean out the barn, and as for the Land Rover, that would be a job for another day.
***
Cuthbert Wiggins sat on the stool that Tremayne usually took in the bar at Rupert Baxter’s pub. It had been two days since Barry and Gwen Woodcock had been interviewed at their farm, and Tremayne and Clare had spent most of the time at the police station. Not that Tremayne enjoyed his time there, but there was paperwork to deal with, the prosecution cases of the Reverend Tichborne and Gladys Upminster to be dealt with, the key performance indicators that needed addressing for Superintendent Moulton, and a chance for Tremayne’s aching knees to recuperate.
At Compton, a man who should not have been in the village, as one of the conditions of his bail had been to keep clear, spoke to Baxter. Wiggins had consumed his first pint and was ordering a second. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘I’ve not seen you in here before,’ Baxter said.
‘I couldn’t keep away. I’m in a lot of trouble, and the police are still suspicious of me.’
‘There’s only one person I can think of.’
‘Cuthbert Wiggins, I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,’ Wiggins said as he thrust his pudgy hand across the bar to shake that of Baxter’s.
Baxter shook the man’s hand firmly. ‘We always thought you were a myth,’ he said.
‘That was how Gloria wanted it to be. I hadn’t seen her for a long time before she died. Not that it’s important, but what was she like as she aged?’
‘Vindictive, venomous.’ Baxter saw no reason to moderate his opinion purely on the basis that the man opposite had been married to the woman once.
‘She didn’t change.’
‘Why are you here?’ Baxter asked. He looked at the man opposite, could see that he was shorter than Gloria, yet she had married him when she had eschewed other men’s advances. Rupert remembered that he had attempted to take her out on her return to the village, but she had not wanted him, and no man had been near her since then. And yet, a small, neatly dressed and bespectacled man had wedded and bedded the woman.
‘I don’t know. I came here not so long ago, and it didn’t turn out well. It may be just an attempt to make amends, to convince those that knew her that I was real, and I didn’t kill Stephanie.’
‘You certainly hit the lovely Sergeant Yarwood heavily on the head.’
‘I still regret that. Is she fine?’
‘She appears to be. They’re here most days, Tremayne and Yarwood.’
‘They’ll not like me being here.’
‘Someone said you
were after Gloria’s last will and testament, hoping to benefit from it.’
‘Not out of malice. She was a lovely woman when I met her, and then she dumped me, took me to the cleaners.’
‘Don’t they all,’ Baxter said, remembering back to when his wife had moved out, the trouble he’d had afterwards, the costs, the emotional distress.
‘I never fully understood what changed in her.’
‘I knew her as a child, and there wasn’t much affection in her. Sure, she had friends, and then boyfriends, but you never knew with Gloria what she was thinking. Her parents were the same. Did you ever meet them?’
‘Briefly, and only the once.’
‘Her father was a soulless man,’ Baxter said. ‘I don’t think he ever smiled. Her mother would at least say hello and occasionally stop for a conversation, but she didn’t smile either. Did you kill her?’
‘Who? Gloria? Not me. I never saw her after the divorce, and I’ve never been to the village since then. Believe me, I wasn’t that sad when she died. It seems heartless, but I can’t say anything else.’
‘No one here was distraught. A sense of disbelief but nothing else. Are you staying?’
‘I shouldn’t, but I feel drawn to the place. A premonition of something evil.’
‘There’s a room upstairs. Fifty pounds for the night, although you might have to deal with the ghost.’
‘Is there one?’
‘There are some that say there is, and I don’t discourage the speculation, but no, there’s nothing. Just creaking floorboards, and me winding my way up to the toilet during the night.’
‘I’ll take it. No doubt the police will be out here soon enough.’
‘No doubt. Tremayne likes his pint of beer, and I serve the best.’
Chapter 24
Tremayne sat in the living room of his house; he was feeling the worst he had felt for some time. If asked, he would have said it was just the malaise of a murder investigation that had stretched on for too long.
The DI Tremayne Thriller Box Set Page 132