A Death to Record

by Rebecca Tope

  Den obliged, forcing his thoughts into lateral directions. ‘He wanted to get to Hillcock and the recorder. One or both of them. He was trying to get away from somebody in the yard. He was afraid of being trampled by the cows. He had something in the barn or office or parlour that he absolutely had to get to before he died. He was cold. Quite frankly, sir, I can’t see we’re ever going to know for sure.’

  ‘It helps, though, don’t you see? It gets us inside the scene.’ Hemsley jotted down Den’s answers. ‘For instance, this first one assumes that milking had already started, or was just about to start. But if that was so, the cows would already be standing around the yard, more or less filling it to capacity. Wouldn’t it make a major disturbance if the attack happened in the middle of a great herd of cattle? Doesn’t that have a bearing on the time it happened? Wouldn’t you say it had to be before the cows were brought out of their stalls and into the yard?’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Den argued. ‘If two people were fighting in the yard with them, they’d just back away and clear a space.’

  ‘Would they? Are you sure?’

  ‘They would if one of them was O’Farrell,’ Den said confidently. ‘They were scared of him.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Mrs Watson, Mrs Hillcock, Mary. Even Granny Hillcock said he was a nasty sod – though we can’t be sure she’s got the right man.’

  ‘What about Hillcock?’

  Den thought back to the milking session he’d observed. ‘They’re a bit nervy with him, too, but it looked as if he could gentle them if he tried. I guess O’Farrell ruined their trust in people generally.’

  ‘So whoever went into the yard, they’d shy away?’

  ‘I’d say so, yes.’

  ‘Which I imagine – as I said before – would make quite a commotion. Clattering feet, a few raised voices, that sort of thing.’

  ‘Raised bovine voices, you mean, sir?’ The picture conjured by the DI’s words was accurate from Den’s own rather limited experience. A herd of a hundred cows in a confined space, trying to avoid a fracas in their midst, would be difficult to ignore.

  ‘So if an outsider killed Sean in the yard, with the cows, during milking, Hillcock and Mrs Watson would almost certainly have noticed something going on. And unless they’re in a conspiracy together, it seems that this was not the case. Therefore, O’Farrell died before milking started, which was just after three.’

  ‘And that would put Mrs Speedwell in the clear,’ Den realised. ‘She didn’t get home till quarter to. Hardly time to get up to the yard and do the deed.’

  ‘But it leaves Mr Speedwell very much in the picture.’

  Den sighed wearily.

  ‘There’s another unanswered question,’ Hemsley pressed on. ‘Why didn’t the attacker make any effort to hide the body?’

  ‘We’ve been over that as well, sir. Assuming we’re right that it wasn’t dragged into the barn, then it seems most likely that the killer didn’t realise what he’d done. And if it had been dragged or carried, the attacker would have got blood all over him, as well as needing to be pretty strong. As I see it, Sean was left in the yard to sort himself out and consider his evil ways.’

  ‘Or the killer was interrupted?’

  ‘Could be,’ Den agreed.

  ‘The weapon. Thrown down in a barn across the main yard from where the attack took place. How did it get there? Run that past me, will you?’

  ‘There’s a gate at the end of the railings, just before the biggest of the cowsheds, that opens onto the main yard. The attacker would have opened it, gone through, closed it behind him, crossed the yard and tossed the fork in through the first doorway he came to.’

  ‘Passing on his way cars and possibly people in the yard.’

  ‘Only Mrs Watson’s car. And if she saw him, she wouldn’t think anything strange of him carrying a fork from one side of the yard to another. But she would have been in the office anyway, so there wasn’t much risk of her seeing him.’

  ‘Why bother to do that? Why not just leave the thing lying in the yard?’

  ‘Habit. A tidy mind,’ Den suggested. ‘Or – obviously – nobody would leave a sharp tool where cows were going to be milling about in a few minutes’ time. It would be second nature to put it somewhere safe. Ted was going to need it next day for the silage. He was having trouble without it, after Forensics brought it in as evidence.’

  ‘Why not clean the blood off it first?’

  ‘In too much of a hurry. Worried that somebody would notice – cleaning a fork isn’t a very normal activity unless it’s part of a wholesale exercise where you do all the tools together. Perhaps he meant to go back and do it later, when nobody was about.’

  ‘None of this sounds like Mrs Watson, does it?’ Hemsley concluded. ‘That’s what you’re wanting me to think, right?’

  Den took a deep breath. ‘Okay, say it was her. She could have met Sean in the smaller cow shed, started a row with him there, snatched up the fork and chased or followed him into the gathering yard, lunged at him with the sharp end and then taken the fork across the big yard, because she’d have the same instinctive reasons for not leaving it lying around.’

  ‘Do we know where the fork was normally kept? Where would it have been to start with?’

  Den had to think about this. ‘Not in the shed where we found it, that’s for sure,’ he concluded. ‘We asked Hillcock, didn’t we? What did he say?’

  ‘Cooper,’ said the DI warningly. ‘You have to be on top of that sort of detail.’

  ‘By the silage pit,’ Den remembered. ‘There’s a corner where you can stand things like that. I saw it when we went to see Speedwell in the yard. That would be the obvious place.’

  ‘And how far is that from the gathering yard?’

  ‘Ten or twelve yards. He’d collect the silage in the scoop on front of the tractor, and tip it over for the cows to reach. Then he picks up bits that had dropped in the wrong place, with that fork. It’s difficult to explain,’ he tailed off.

  ‘But it would be in easy reach, and might possibly have been left closer to the gathering yard than you think?’

  Den nodded uncertainly. ‘But there’d be no reason for Mrs Watson to be out there. She only goes into the office and the milking parlour.’

  ‘Maybe she needed to have a pee. I don’t expect there’s an outside privy?’

  ‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ said Den.

  ‘So she’d creep into a corner of one of the sheds or barns for that, don’t you think? Then if O’Farrell saw her, he might have said something he shouldn’t and she went for him.’

  Den frowned sceptically, unable to find much in that idea to persuade him. They played with a few more hypotheses, putting layers of detail onto two or three alternative scenarios, until Hemsley called a halt.

  ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Now what about these badgers? Rumour has it that O’Farrell indulged in baiting and/or lamping, that much seems certain. And yet at the same time he allowed his daughter to keep a pet one in the back garden. So what was going on?’

  Den had little difficulty with this one. ‘People kill rabbits, but keep tame ones,’ he pointed out. ‘It might not be logical, but it’s not unusual. And I get the impression that young Abigail could have pretty much anything she wanted. Plus it was one in the eye for the boss. Sean would probably have liked that.’

  ‘But aren’t badgers meant to be spreading TB like wildfire amongst dairy cattle? Wouldn’t O’Farrell have to be crazy to let one live on the farm like that?’

  ‘So long as Hillcock didn’t know, and it never got near the cows, he’d be okay with it. Hillcock never went down to the cottages, and certainly not into their back gardens. Mrs O’Farrell made a special point of telling me that.’

  ‘Why didn’t he?’

  ‘I don’t know. No need to, I guess. He phoned them from the house or his mobile if he had anything urgent to say.’

  ‘Hmm.’

  ‘There’s one funny thing, tho
ugh. The Speedwell front garden is full of junk, which was part of a dodgy scrap metal scheme that Sean and Eliot were into. You’d expect Hillcock to have something to say about that. It’s a real eyesore.’

  ‘Not relevant,’ Danny dismissed. ‘Now – the big one. Sean’s sex life, or lack of it. What does this say about his relations with his wife? Especially given this new stuff about the girl being Hillcock’s?’

  Den trod carefully. ‘All I can come up with is that it wouldn’t be likely to sweeten things between O’Farrell and Hillcock.’

  ‘But why would it come to a crisis now, after all these years?’

  ‘Danny!’ Den burst out. ‘It keeps coming back to Hillcock. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Don’t call me Danny,’ said Hemsley automatically.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Den, frustrated, feeling more than ready to terminate the session and make himself a large mug of coffee. ‘Did we just get anywhere, do you think?’

  ‘I’m not sure we did,’ Hemsley scanned the notes without much sign of hope. ‘But it never hurts to get the facts aired one more time. Especially when we’re almost a week into the investigation and have bugger all to show for it.’

  ‘I’ll go and get some coffee,’ said Den.

  Abigail O’Farrell felt swamped. She rode the bus to school that Monday in a seat by herself, her face pressed against the cold glass, her eyes fixed on the muddy verges speeding past below her. It was her favourite thinking time, when she went over old memories, or dreamt about the future. Since last Tuesday she’d had more than enough to think about: the way people were behaving, the changes that she was going to have to face. Everyone had guilty secrets, even if they pretended they hadn’t. She herself certainly had secrets – and not just the one she said she would keep on Gary’s behalf. He had trusted her enough to show her the puckered purple scar on his foreskin, the result of catching his willy in the zip of his jeans when he was eight. ‘Will it stop you from having sex properly?’ she’d asked in an awed voice.

  ‘Hope not,’ he said, with a mixture of pride and brave endurance that she found deeply lovable. ‘I’m lucky it didn’t have to be removed altogether.’

  Well, it was a leaky sort of secret, that one. Gary’s mum had told loads of other mothers about it, and there were people at school who could remember it happening. The exciting part was that Gary had let her have a look at it, and it did help her not to think about the much bigger secret; the one that nobody else but her knew about. The one that might change everybody’s mind about her dad, even if he was dead and there was loads of sympathy for Mum and her, being left on their own after a horrible murder. Everyone knew how kind Dad had been, making sure Mum was okay – doing all the shopping and cleaning, as well as his job which sometimes took him ten hours a day, as he never tired of saying. Even if he was sometimes a bit hard on the cows – and she’d seen some of that herself when she was younger – and if he had some fairly unpleasant friends like Fred Page, who looked at you as if he wanted to do something disgusting to you – well, they all thought Dad must be okay because he was such a good husband and father.

  She hadn’t wanted to find him. She hadn’t been following him or spying or anything. She’d just been minding her own business, last summer holidays, looking for somewhere shady to sit with her Game Boy, because Mum was driving her mad in the house. She’d gone to her pets’ area, where she could watch the rabbits and other animals all getting on so nicely in their big cages that Dad had made for them. There was a copse of trees behind the cottages, down in a bit of a dip with a brook running through it. When she was little, Abigail used to spend hours down here on her own, paddling in the water and making dams and mud pies. She regarded it as almost her own private property, Dad should have known that. He shouldn’t have been there at all, never mind doing what he was doing.

  It had been horrible, the awful sounds and the dreadful violence of it. After that she hadn’t been able to feel the same about him, even though he’d been her same old dad around the house. She knew something was different, even when she managed to push it out of her mind.

  But she had never wanted him dead. He hadn’t deserved that – nobody deserved that. Even though she could already see that he wouldn’t really be missed, not even by her mum, and that without him there was a new sort of relief – still there was no way anyone should have killed him like that. She wanted to see him dead in his coffin and give him the special secret letter she’d written to him, and that she carried round with her, terrified that somebody might read it if she let it out of her sight. She wanted him to know that she knew what he had done, but it wasn’t going to be any use because what she really wanted was her old dad back, from before last summer. The dad she remembered when she was little, who played and sang with her and laughed at the things she said and took her round the farm with him, talking about how lucky they were to live in the country where there was space to be free and nobody on your back all the time telling you what to do. The dad who let her keep a collection of stray animals, even though Gordon would have a fit if he knew about the badger.

  Dad hadn’t always been rough with the cows, either. Only if one seemed to deliberately go against him did he lose his temper and punch it with his hard fist, or pull its tail up until it really hurt. Abigail knew that must be agony – the cow would moan and try to get away. Once a new heifer, brought in for the first time for milking, collapsed when Dad twisted her tail like that. Abby was twelve then and she never went back to watch the milking again, from that day on. She had trudged back to the cottage crying at the cruelty of it.

  And now he’d been dead for nearly a week and already she could hardly remember his face. She had a horrible scary feeling that he had been a stranger who’d just happened to live in the same house as her. Gradually over the past few years he had become more and more unknowable. Even before the thing in the copse, she had felt a yawning gulf opening between them and she had let it happen without doing anything to stop it. Parents, she had concluded, were only for when you were little and helpless. After that they were useless, and you had to find other people to love and talk to and share your secrets with.

  Like Gary. They’d been going out together for a year now, and she knew it was one of those great romances that last for a lifetime. They’d get married when she was seventeen or eighteen and they’d always tell each other everything and he would be the best dad in the world, as well as a sweet lover and a fantastic friend.

  She might even tell him one day what she’d seen Dad doing with Eliot Speedwell in the copse.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Lilah was feeling a lot less optimistic and powerful than she had a few days ago. Den knew she’d sent that letter; her whole gay triangle scenario, ludicrous now she thought about it, had crumbled to nothing almost before it started. Her only hope was that enough seeds of suspicion had been sown for Deirdre Watson to remain under police scrutiny. Lilah still thought Deirdre was a credible suspect. Maybe the woman had found out about Sean’s illegal calves – after all, it was part of her job to keep track of them all, with a proper ear-tag number for every single animal. Maybe she had tackled him about it and it led to a fight, with the recorder grabbing Ted’s fork.

  And then there was the badger baiting. Nobody seemed to doubt that Sean had been involved in that and Deirdre Watson definitely wouldn’t have had any stomach for that sort of thing. Nor would Davy Champion and his animals rights group. There was still hope, Lilah concluded. Just.

  After a few more phone calls to old acquaintances, Lilah had discovered that Jeremy Page had apparently taken extreme offence at his girlfriend’s being the object of police interest, and shouted his mouth off in the pub about it on Saturday night.

  ‘I’m going to see Gordon again tonight,’ she told her mother. ‘I don’t expect I’ll be back till later in the week. I’ll take a few clothes and shampoo, so I can go direct from there to college. Okay?’

  Miranda nodded doubtfully. ‘Looks as if I’m going to ha
ve to get used to living here on my own,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to think about selling the place,’ Lilah said for the hundredth time.

  ‘I’ll wait for prices to pick up,’ came the routine rejoinder.

  ‘Which they’re never going to do. They’re already umpteen per cent lower than when Daddy died.’

  ‘A blip. People are always going to want land. Besides, I’m not in any hurry. I quite fancy another summer here without the cows. I’d never find anywhere as nice as this.’

  ‘It’s nice everywhere in the summer. But it’s not my problem. You do what you want.’

  ‘Right,’ agreed Miranda peaceably.

  Outside, the Redstone farm buildings were decaying, rain and wind finding the weak spots; nettles and brambles growing up the sides of barns and sheds. Both the Beardon women knew that anyone buying the property now would probably raze everything but the house itself to the ground and start afresh with stables and looseboxes, or acres of glasshouses, and the whole character of the place would change beyond recognition. Neither was in any hurry for that to happen.

  ‘Gordon’s probably sorted out a relief milker by now,’ Lilah said. ‘He’s been talking about it for days.’

  ‘You don’t think he’ll use this as an excuse to get out of milk? Everybody else seems to be selling their herds.’

  ‘Shush!’ said Lilah with mock ferocity. ‘Don’t ever say that in his hearing. He’d rather die than sell his cows. They’re descended from the ones his father bought a million years ago. He might get sick of milking them, but he’s fantastically proud of them, all the same. He thinks he’s going to buck the trend and be the last dairy farmer in Devon, the way he talks.’ She frowned. ‘Though he hasn’t been quite so sure of himself these past few weeks.’

  Miranda sighed. ‘These men and their cows! Oh well – good luck to him, I say. I must admit he’s been clever, combining old-fashioned tradition with modern methods. Reminds me of somebody.’

  ‘Daddy, you mean. I had noticed, you know.’