by Rebecca Tope
Maybe, after all, going out with Alexis would have been a bad idea. He had forgotten she was a few years older than him. What he wanted was a younger girl. Someone fresh and funny, trusting and supportive. Someone pretty and bright and cheerful. Someone, in fact, just as Lilah had been, before she’d met bloody Gordon Hillcock.
He had one last try, when he presented himself in the DI’s office promptly at five. ‘I still don’t get it,’ he complained. ‘You could have made just as good a case against Hillcock, and I’m not going to pretend I think you’ve got it right, because I’m damned sure you haven’t.’
‘Bear with me, Cooper, there’s a good chap. I’m doing this for you, if you did but know it.’ The Inspector pressed his lips together tantalisingly and gave a fleeting wink. ‘Trust me, my friend, okay? We’re all working towards the same end here, whatever it looks like at the moment.’
Den stared at him, mind churning. ‘Surely you’re not using her as bait?’ The realisation hit him smack between the eyes. Hemsley winked again, but said nothing. ‘Good God, what’ll the Super say if he finds out? Wasting all this money on the legal stuff …’
‘All done in perfectly good faith, I promise you. There’s a strong case against the woman: motive, means and opportunity. Circumstantial evidence. An unusual manner at the scene. Countless people have been charged on less than that. And I wouldn’t call it bait, not at all. More of a face-saving exercise, thanks to your untidy love life, if you must know the truth of it.’
‘But …’ Den went cold as the implications dawned. Hemsley was playing a game that Den could never have guessed at. A ruthless game that was causing considerable misery to an innocent woman. ‘But surely …’ he tried again.
‘Nothing more to be said. As far as you’re concerned, Mrs Deirdre Watson killed Sean O’Farrell, and just for the record I for one would not be altogether gobsmacked to discover that she really did. Give her another couple of days and things might take a surprising turn.’
‘You think she might confess?’ Den’s scepticism was close to a sneer.
Danny tapped the side of his nose and said nothing.
Lilah looked at Gordon’s face and knew Mary’s planned confrontation wasn’t going to happen. It had all gone beyond that. She only needed to ask him one question: ‘Did the calf die last night?’
He didn’t even pretend surprise that she knew about his deal with destiny. ‘It died,’ he nodded. ‘Nice little heifer, too. Choked to death before I could get it born.’
‘Oh dear,’ she said weakly.
‘I’ve been arranging for a dispersal sale,’ he said tonelessly. ‘And a relief milker to tide us over until then. He starts tomorrow afternoon. Funny – it only took a couple of phone calls.’ He sat down heavily on one end of the sofa. Lilah fixed her gaze on the thick socks he wore, unable to meet his eyes.
‘Sale?’ said Claudia in a high voice.
‘What calf died?’ demanded Mary, in counterpoint.
Gordon looked slowly at each in turn. ‘You’ll be all right,’ he told them. ‘You’ll both have what you’ve been wanting for a long time – to be rid of this place. It’ll all go to you, half each.’
Mary gave an inarticulate cry; Claudia put a hand to her throat. Lilah ignored them.
‘So you’ll be milking again in the morning,’ she said. He nodded. ‘We can go after that then. I can drive you.’
‘Yes,’ he smiled. ‘You can drive me.’
They slept together again that night, but without making love. Gordon wept in his sleep, hot tears dripping onto Lilah’s neck, where she clasped him close.
Afterwards, Den believed he had known what was coming, from the first split second he recognised her car as it drew up outside his flat. He’d been on the verge of leaving for work, stepping through his front door. She always was good at timing, he thought daftly, watching her walk round to the passenger door, waiting for Hillcock to emerge. He stood like a dazed bullock on the threshold of the slaughter house, knowing instinctively that something appalling was about to happen.
Wordlessly, Den led them up to his flat. In the main room, where Lilah and he had spent countless evenings before going to bed together, he arranged his visitors with slow formality.
‘Gordon has something to tell you,’ she said, looking at a point between the two men. ‘We came here because I feel we owe it to you. We should of course be at the police station. It’s completely against the rules.’
Den found himself wanting to skip the next part of the proceedings. He wanted to cut to the Why? and How? and What the bloody hell were you thinking of? It seemed somehow a gratuitous unkindness, like a stern father insisting on a confession, to force the man to utter the opening words.
Gordon seemed willing enough, however. He even smiled a little, as if finding something ironic in the situation. His words when they came felt rehearsed. ‘I can’t let you torture poor Deirdre any more,’ he began. ‘She and I go back a long way. I thought I could do it at first … that it was the perfect solution …’ He looked at Lilah as if for courage. ‘But for ever is a long time to live with this sort of thing.’ He inhaled deeply. ‘I killed Sean. I think you knew that all along.’
‘Because of the badgers?’ Den couldn’t stop himself from asking, suddenly urgently needing to examine the reasons for the deed. Until now, he had concentrated entirely on establishing where the guilt lay. ‘Because Sean was involved in baiting and lamping?’ It sounded feeble in his own ears and Gordon’s reaction made it more so.
‘Of course not. What do I care about bloody badgers?’ he scorned. ‘Who’d murder somebody for that?’
Lilah made a faint sound, reminding them of her presence. Den felt cold. His thoughts cartwheeled, trying to grasp all the implications of what was happening.
‘It was revenge,’ she murmured. ‘You know you always used to tell me, Den, how that was the most easily understood motive for murder? Explain it to him, Gordon,’ she prompted.
Gordon looked at her with a frown. ‘Revenge?’ he asked her dully.
She faltered. ‘Well, yes … sort of, at least.’ To Den she was agonisingly vulnerable at that moment. Not a responsible citizen persuading her partner to confess his crime, but a young girl adrift in a greasy ocean of male motivations and obsessions.
Gordon heaved a tremendous sigh. ‘No, I wouldn’t call it revenge,’ he judged. ‘It was more a case of killing the messenger. He told me something I’d spent my whole life trying not to know.’ He looked at Lilah. ‘You still don’t get it, do you, little one? I don’t think you understand even now what it was all about.’
She started forward, insulted and yet still concerned to shield him. Den put his hand out to her, not connecting, but achieving his purpose. She subsided and crossed her arms tightly over her stomach.
Den wanted it all to be over with. He wanted Hillcock tidied out of sight, leaving him to persuade Lilah that it had all been nothing more than a painful dream, an episode they could both file away as if it had never happened. It was going to be all right, he believed. Everything he’d wanted was actually coming true. He had to clench his jaw against the oncoming grin of triumph.
‘Tell us then,’ Lilah ordered Hillcock. ‘You owe it to me, at least, to explain yourself.’
‘Isn’t it enough that I’ve admitted to it? You know about last night? Did you follow me?’
She met his gaze. ‘You let everything hang on whether a calf lived or died.’
‘Hang,’ he repeated meaningfully. ‘Yes.’
She grimaced and swallowed hard. Gordon sighed again. ‘It took me most of the night; I thought I’d lose the cow as well, but she’ll be all right, I think.’
‘I wondered if I should call the vet.’
‘The vet wouldn’t have been any use.’
‘No.’
Den kept silent, aware that they were speaking in code; that there were aspects and secrets that he might never be party to. It didn’t matter now: he could afford to leave Hillcock some scr
aps.
Summoning reserves from somewhere, Lilah turned to Den. ‘It was really about Abigail, I suppose,’ she said. ‘Gordon …’ she prompted again.
‘You’re Abigail’s father, aren’t you?’ Den said. ‘She looks like you. And Sean found out – threatened to tell the girl, take her away, something like that. And you felt forced to kill him.’
‘Close, Sergeant,’ said Hillcock generously. ‘In fact, up to that afternoon I thought the same thing myself. Heather and I had a bit of a fling at more or less the right time. As you say, the girl looks like me. Heather let me believe it. She got what she wanted, and told me never to speak of it. Sean would raise the kid as his own, and everything would be decent and respectable.’ His face suggested bewilderment at the ways of this woman.
Den looked at Lilah. ‘Is this news to you?’
She shook her head. ‘I noticed how alike they are, a few days ago. I was quite sure Gordon must be her father. But then Mary took me up to Granny’s room, and she told us a story that I finally realised explained that it couldn’t be true. But I asked Heather before I worked it out, and she saved me the trouble.’
Den blinked. ‘You’ve lost me. What does Granny Hillcock have to do with it?’
She flushed a painful shade of crimson and stared hard at the floor. ‘Tell him,’ said Gordon. ‘It’ll come better from you.’
‘Gordon isn’t anybody’s father and isn’t ever going to be,’ she mumbled. She looked at her lover. ‘That’s the message Sean gave you, is it? Your mother and sister and grandmother have all kept it from you, ever since you spent six months in hospital being treated for cancer. They wanted you to think Abigail was yours, so you’d believe you were a normal man.’ She looked at Den. ‘Being normal is important to Gordon.’
Gordon took up the story. ‘It was my father. I imagine he put quite some pressure on her. I think my parents convinced themselves the kid really was mine, in the end.’ His throat heaved with disgust. ‘And Sean told me the whole thing, just splurging it out, there in the yard, because I said something about having kids with Lilah.’
The girl made an inarticulate sound of pain.
‘You’re the victim here,’ Gordon said softly. ‘But you’ve had a lucky escape.’
‘Yes,’ she nodded, with tears on her cheeks.
Den shivered. As he looked at Lilah, he found himself feeling nothing resembling love. Perversely, now that she seemed to be turning away from Hillcock, Den wasn’t sure he wanted her after all.
Gordon grunted as if she’d punched him.
Den felt a surge of impatience with the whole sordid confession. ‘That’s enough,’ he said. ‘We’ll all go to the station now and you can make a statement.’
But Hillcock and Lilah hadn’t finished. ‘She only visited me twice, in all those months,’ he muttered. ‘When I was having radiotherapy and my hair fell out. When Spike and Bobby and Jason all died, leaving me the only survivor out of the whole group, she wasn’t there to help me. She wouldn’t go and speak to the doctors when they asked her. It was always Granny and Dad, never my mother.’
In spite of himself, Den was hooked. ‘What was wrong with you?’
‘It was Granny who insisted on taking me to the doctor. I had a lump, right here.’ He touched a point just below his collarbone. ‘My mother said it would go away if we just ignored it.’ He fingered the place reminiscently. ‘I was thin and apathetic and didn’t feel well. Granny took charge, and they said she’d saved my life. It was Hodgkins Disease – that’s a sort of cancer than young boys are prone to.’
Den and Lilah shifted restlessly, but said nothing. ‘I was in hospital in Bristol for nearly six months – though I went home a couple of times for a few days. That’s a long way to go, if you’re trying to run a farm. Granny and Dad came every weekend. Once they brought Mary. My mother came twice and cried the whole time. The nurses lost patience with her, because she made me cry as well. Anyway, the treatment in those days was massively aggressive. They removed my spleen and bombarded me with radiation. And I survived. I got completely better. They said it was a miracle. They must have told my parents that I was sterile as a result of the radiation, but they never said a word to me, and I never suspected. At least …’ He looked at Lilah as if asking for forgiveness, or understanding.
‘At least you did everything you could to hide it from yourself,’ she supplied unemotionally. ‘That explains quite a lot.’ She flushed and looked away.
‘So what about Sean?’ Den asked, like any plodding policeman.
‘No more to be said about him. He used me for his own purposes. He was a manipulator. Even Heather’s illness suited him. He thought he could get away with anything. And then he taunted me, because he could see how in love with Lilah I was. It niggled him to see me happy. He couldn’t resist bringing me down.’
‘Was it such bad news, though?’ Den persisted. ‘Thousands of men are sterile.’
‘Thousands of men don’t have a prime Devon farm to hand on,’ Hillcock spat back. ‘But it wasn’t just that. He laughed at me, deliberately trying to get a rise out of me. When I grabbed the fork, he laughed again. Still yammering away about my father and Heather and everything, when I knocked him down.’
‘How come Mrs Watson didn’t hear any of it from the office?’
Gordon shrugged. ‘I thought she might, especially when he screamed. But the doors were shut and she was probably cursing that computer of hers. Then Sean got up …’ He looked rather wildly at Den. ‘I had no idea I’d hurt him enough to kill him. He got up, even after the second jab I gave him. Stood there looking down at himself, as if it was a little scratch. I left him there and went back to the house, chucking the fork in the shed as I passed. I washed my hands of him.’
‘What did you think would happen? He’d have prosecuted you for GBH, at the very least.’
‘I wasn’t thinking about him. I was thinking about what he’d told me, and what it meant for Lilah, and the farm, and then there was the recording. I just got the milking done as usual. When I found him in the barn … dead … it was …’ At last the man broke down, hands over his face, shoulders shaking.
Den watched with detachment, thinking back to the evening when he and Young Mike had first been called to Dunsworthy. ‘You think he was trying to get to you? When he dragged himself into the barn? Was he heading for the parlour?’
‘Of course he was. Always had to have the last word, did Sean.’
‘He must have made a superhuman effort, with those injuries.’
Hillcock was plainly past caring. ‘Okay,’ said Den. ‘We’ll go now.’
‘I’ll stay here,’ said Lilah, brooking no argument.
Deirdre was released and driven home in time for lunch. The sense of having been in hospital, rather than police custody, was still strong. Her legs wobbled like a post-operative patient and she couldn’t face eating. She was weak and weepy and she no longer quite knew who she was.
People would know she had been seriously taken for a murderer. They would ask themselves how that could be. Some would sympathise, but in some confused minds she would always be guilty.
She felt rage at her treatment, but beneath that, pushing through like a prickly cactus, was fear. She knew now how treacherous the world could be.
After it was all over and Gordon had been taken into custody and Den was back in his flat, he found Lilah still curled in the same chair where he’d left her two hours earlier. He looked at her carefully. ‘Are you okay?’
‘No, of course I’m not,’ came the muffled reply.
‘You did the right thing, making him face the music.’
‘I didn’t make him. Nobody did. He decided for himself. He couldn’t go on letting Deirdre take the blame for what he did.’ She grimaced miserably. ‘It was all my doing, putting you onto her the way I did.’
‘You miscalculated,’ Den nodded. ‘Danny picked it up and ran with it. He knew she hadn’t done it, all along.’
‘What?’
‘Who? Danny?’
‘Hillcock of course. Not many people would care if the wrong person took the rap.’
‘I think they would. I don’t think anybody normal could live with something like that for long.’
‘And Gordon is normal?’
‘Don’t,’ she said quietly. She looked utterly defeated. ‘We can’t pretend Gordon never happened, you know.’
‘Come here,’ he said softly, going closer than he had dared so far. He bent over her and gathered her into his arms. Inside a voice was foolishly repeating a line from his distant schooldays. But yet, the pity of it, Iago. He didn’t think he could find any better words to express his feelings.
About the Author
REBECCA TOPE lives on a smallholding in Herefordshire, with a full complement of livestock, but manages to travel the world and enjoy civilisation from time to time as well. Most of her varied experiences and activities find their way into her books, sooner or later. She is also the author of the Cotswold Mysteries series featuring Thea Osborne.
www.rebeccatope.com
By Rebecca Tope
THE COTSWOLD MYSTERIES
A Cotswold Killing
A Cotswold Ordeal
Death in the Cotswolds
A Cotswold Mystery
Blood in the Cotswolds
Slaughter in the Cotswolds
Fear in the Cotswolds
A Grave in the Cotswolds
Deception in the Cotswolds
Malice in the Cotswolds