Serious Intent

by Margaret Yorke

Though she could not name it, it was happiness.

  She had another drink, and then a third. As she prepared her meal, she began to sing.

  ‘I’m just a little tipsy, Sinbad,’ she declared, aloud. ‘Well, never mind. Who cares?’ and, pouring herself a refill, she danced a little jig, while Sinbad, stubby tail wagging to and fro approvingly, looked on.

  Steve had asked his stepmother what would happen to The Willows.

  ‘I’m sure I don’t know,’ Ivy had replied. ‘I don’t know what happened to his son. Tom never mentioned him, but they’d kept all that stuff of his. His mother wouldn’t part with it, and after she died, Tom hadn’t the heart.’ She’d thought it such a pity all those books lay there unused, when they could be sold to bring in money for the local playgroup. ‘Maybe they fell out,’ she said.

  ‘Are you sure he didn’t do the old man in?’ Steve asked.

  ‘Of course he didn’t. What a thing to say,’ said Ivy.

  ‘Well, he did kill his wife, didn’t he?’ said Steve.

  But Ivy didn’t know that. She had lived in Haverscot only since she married Joe.

  ‘Where do you get these ideas?’ she exclaimed. ‘I think the son’s dead. He must be, or he’d have been at the funeral.’

  Steve didn’t show her the newspaper cuttings.

  ‘Why didn’t you?’ Mark asked. He found it scary. An escaped murderer had come to old Tom’s house, and he, Mark, had met him.

  ‘She’d have ticked me off for poking around,’ Steve said.

  He’d put the papers away in his room. Mark thought that was stealing, although with Tom dead, they couldn’t be of use to anyone, not like the books and other things. Where was the murderer now? No one seemed to be looking for him. He must have been recaptured.

  ‘If we see him again, we’d better tell the police,’ he said.

  ‘We’ll do that,’ Steve agreed. ‘There might be a reward.’

  Mark knew the son hadn’t killed old Tom. There was no blood, and Tom had looked so calm.

  He went on going to The Willows. It was easy. He told Ivy that his mother would be home early, and simply left her place when it suited him.

  He did not visit The Willows every night, only when he needed a new book. Then he would stay and watch television for a while. Mark could pretend Tom was there. His hat and raincoat hung in the cloakroom, and there were still biscuits and drinking chocolate in the kitchen. Sometimes Mark helped himself, always washing up and putting things away.

  Ivy had said that the house might be sold. When that was to happen, a board went up outside, and Mark never saw one at The Willows. Perhaps it would stay empty. If the son was still on the run, he wouldn’t move in because the police would be sure to catch him; Mark was certain he was back behind bars, if he had escaped, but Steve might have been wrong about that. People were let out, even if they’d done dreadful things; he’d heard Sharon and Ivy talking about it.

  ‘Free to do it again,’ he’d heard Ivy say, about a man who’d done something awful to a woman. When Mark asked what had happened, they’d been vague.

  Steve sometimes did get things wrong. Mark had gone off him, rather; apart from taking money from Tom, he now went round with a group of boys among whom was Greg Black. Ivy thought he was at the youth club, but he never went there. Mark, however, copied Steve’s methods and sometimes told Ivy he was going to see Terry Gardner and would go home from there. Such an explanation was acceptable to Ivy; Susan would approve of that friendship and it was so close – no journey through the middle of town, where the rough element hung out, was involved.

  Soon Sharon would be going back to work and Ivy would look after Adam. She had more time, now that she was no longer needed at The Willows.

  Ivy paid no attention to Steve’s remarks about Tom Morton’s son. He’d been reading too many horror books or watching alarming videos. She knew he spent time with Greg Black and a boy called Bruce, but she could not stand over him all the time, watching where he went and what he did; she and Joe had taught him right from wrong, what more could they do? He’d grow out of his interest in morbid matters. While he was at Tom’s, he’d been safe from such influences, but those days were past. She missed the old man. The solicitor had sent her a cheque in settlement of her wages, with a bonus, and that was good; she bought new duvet covers for Steve and Kylie, and Sharon gave her a perm. Sharon had been apprenticed to a hairdresser before she had the baby.

  With her new hair-do, Ivy felt ready for the next few rounds life had to offer her. She was growing used to widowhood: it was more respectable, she had found, than being divorced, as she was before – people were surprised and sorry when they heard about it. There was plenty to do each day; she had children to collect from school most days, and there was Mark – other children were left with her occasionally. Tom had paid well for what she did for him but she could find other cleaning jobs if things got tight. At the moment, they were managing.

  Sharon’s baby’s father sometimes came around; he was unemployed and living with another girl who was pregnant by him. Sharon was still fond of him; Ivy feared she might be fond enough to get herself pregnant again. It was all very well for him; he was sure of a welcome from either girl.

  ‘It’s no example for Kylie or Steve,’ said Ivy, after one such visit.

  ‘He’s got every right. He’s the father,’ Sharon had replied.

  ‘But he doesn’t have any of the responsibility, or the expense,’ said Ivy.

  Jason had brought a soft cuddly rabbit for Adam, but no money. There was nothing to stop him going round giving girls babies all over the country and living off each woman in turn. He was a nice enough young chap who wouldn’t hurt a fly, Ivy thought, but what use would he be in any trouble? And what chance had Sharon, now, of finding a man who would be, one like Joe? Though it was true she already had Sharon when they met: that thought consoled Ivy in her bleaker moments, but she had been married to Sharon’s father.

  She hoped Jason would stay with his new girlfriend and not want to come and live with them.

  10

  When Alan Morton went to The Willows, he had been on leave from prison.

  He was supposed to be spending the weekend at an approved hostel, but he had never meant to stick to that plan. From the time when he had first been taken on shopping trips to town as a preliminary to his release on licence, he had been preparing for his freedom.

  He should never have been given life. It was a case of manslaughter due to provocation, for June had been unfaithful to him. She had been having an affair with Phil Wickens, her childhood sweetheart, whom Alan had cut out when he had decided to make a play for June – largely because he wanted to get the better of Phil, who was a farmer. It hadn’t been too difficult; he’d simply swept her off her feet, pursuing her with gifts of flowers and boxes of chocolates, and persuading her to have dinner with him at various local restaurants during a long summer when Phil was working all hours bringing in the harvest.

  They had met at a young farmers’ dance. Alan, at the time, was the manager of a hardware store in the small market town of Billerton, and part of its business was concerned with spares for farm machinery, paint and other such goods. The event was held in the town hall; Phil Wickens, not a customer of Alan’s store, was a guest, and June was his partner.

  Alan had already met her across the counter of the building society where he had his mortgage; he had bought a house on the outskirts of the town and had been living there with a woman who had left him a few weeks before the dance. They had not been together long; none of Alan’s relationships lasted, and he had one divorce behind him.

  He had been invited to the dance to partner the visiting sister of a customer; they’d had dinner first, at The King’s Head in the town square. The customer, a market gardener, had been a generous host but Alan had bought drinks all round and liqueurs later; he had an expansive manner and a booming voice, impossible to overlook. The sister did not take to him and, at the dance, shed him for a quie
t man she found standing by the bar. Alan, adrift, asked various women whom he knew by sight to dance with him and was sometimes accepted; then he noticed June, who recognised him and smiled pleasantly. Alan swept her on to the floor as he, later, swept her off her feet by his pursuit.

  How meek she’d been, how sweet, smiling and attractive in her understated way, with soft blonde hair and large blue eyes. Even at that first meeting he had wanted to make her cringe and appeal to him for mercy, as he had his wife. He had had that wish, but she had left him, shown her bruises to a doctor and had obtained a divorce as soon as they had been apart for long enough.

  At least she hadn’t wanted any money.

  June left him to dance with Phil Wickens, and Alan realised that they were well acquainted; after the dance, glass in hand, he tagged on to their conversation and, persistent, bought them drinks. Phil was civil; he had not known who Alan was until June introduced them, and he did not want his company, but it was a jolly, social evening and he would not stoop to rudeness. Alan managed to have another dance with June. He was quiet and polite. He knew how to act when he wanted something, and sometimes he regretted the rage that surged within him when the meekness that had at first attracted him began to disgust him.

  He waylaid June outside the building society when she was going home, and several times in her lunch hour, inviting her to eat with him in Billerton’s new wine bar. In the end his sheer persistence prevailed.

  He took it slowly as the summer – hot and dry that year – wore on. June, disappointed because she saw so little of Phil while he was busy at the farm, fell in with Alan’s plans to meet, and during that time he never overstepped the mark. He was physically a short, stocky man and she did not feel intimidated, though she sometimes wished he would be less aggressive with waiters and car park attendants. But he spent money on her and he let her know that he admired her. Eventually, one warm July night, he succeeded in seducing her, not forcing himself upon her violently but leading her along with practised technique and alcohol. They were in his house, after an evening at an inn by the river. To his amazement, he discovered that she was a virgin – almost an extinct species, he believed. To June, this step, once taken, was momentous and it heralded her brief infatuation with Alan.

  Meanwhile Phil, who had always meant to marry her when his future at the farm was secure – his father ran it now – did not realise what was happening. Her engagement to Alan took him by surprise.

  June herself was being whirled along on a tide of flattery and sexual excitement, but she thought being married to Alan would be wonderful. He was attentive and seemed devoted to her; he owned his small, pleasant house and he had a good job, with plans, he disclosed, for running his own business in the future, though of what variety she did not learn.

  On her honeymoon, she discovered what her predecessor had also learned from harsh experience: Alan was a bully whose gentleness had been a fake. He liked to hurt people, and he was insanely jealous. He took to dropping in to the building society at odd hours and if he saw her smiling at a male customer he would attack her, verbally at first and then with blows, as soon as both of them were in the house – she never thought of it as home.

  Pride stopped her from telling anyone, at first. Several of her friends had warned against the marriage, telling her that she didn’t know Alan well enough, pointing out that Phil adored her.

  ‘He’s never said so,’ June had protested. ‘He never has time for us to meet.’

  June’s mother and father were disappointed in the match. They and Phil’s parents had always hoped the pair would marry. For all of them, the wedding had been an occasion for wearing a brave face, but June was radiant. Later, though, things changed, and June’s mother told Phil’s mother that she thought the marriage was a disaster. June was looking pale and exhausted, and if the couple went to functions in the town – as they did – Alan never left her side and would glower if she spoke to any other man.

  Phil’s parents gave a party in the New Year. They asked the Mortons, Alan and June, and at the party Alan saw June talking to Phil. In fact they were discussing the prospects for the new lambs, now beginning to arrive, and Phil had to leave the party to attend to some of them. June went to fetch her coat and followed him, and there, in the lambing shed, she confessed her plight.

  Alan saw them leave the house together. He did not kill her then, but he had noticed where the guns were kept, locked in a cupboard in the farm office. He’d have to find the cartridges; it shouldn’t be too hard. He went back two days later, when the house was empty, the men out on the land and Phil’s mother at a meeting of the women’s branch of the British Legion. Alan had known that the house would not be locked; as people were in and out all day, farmers often left their houses open. Even the collie dog was away in the fields, and it was easy for him to break into the gun cupboard and steal a shotgun. After a search, he found a box of cartridges in a desk drawer. Then he went home and sat waiting for June.

  Brooding in the quiet house, dusk falling outside, Alan thought about her faithlessness, convincing himself that he had been betrayed, and excited by the thought of vengeance.

  Sitting in the darkness, in his big armchair, its back towards the door, he heard her key in the lock and saw the lights come on. She hung her coat up in the hall, then went straight into the kitchen; that would be right, she’d got his meal to cook and would have bought food in her lunch hour or on the way home.

  Alan, in stockinged feet, moved into the kitchen behind her. He called her name, stringing it together with shouted obscenities – ‘Bitch, harlot,’ and many more. She turned, terrified, and he shot her in the chest. As she sank to her knees, blood gurgling in her throat, he moved towards her and put the second shot into her head.

  There was a lot of blood. He hadn’t expected there to be so much. He wrapped her up in bin liners, tying the head and feet, and the waist. It was a good thing he hadn’t done it in the living-room; it would have messed the carpet up, and left evidence. As it was, if she were found, he meant suspicion to fall on Phil, her jilted lover.

  Late at night, he put her body in his car and drove off into the countryside, where he dropped her in a ditch a few miles from the Wickenses’ farm. Early the next morning, snow fell for several hours and it did not thaw for weeks; the snow plough was out on the roads and this caused heaps of piled- up snow to linger at the roadsides long after the main fall had gone.

  Alan told the building society that June had not been feeling well and had gone away for a holiday. He said nothing to her parents, carrying on his normal routine but now forced to cater for himself and deal with his own washing.

  The Wickenses reported the theft of the shotgun and a box of ammunition. No one had seen Alan enter or leave the farm; he had left his car in the lane outside and had slipped in quietly on foot. If anyone had come along, he had a story planned about wondering if they wanted to take advantage of a bulk order of wood preservative that he could offer at a bargain rate; when you were the manager of a business, there were always lines that you could push, and you could be absent from the premises without anyone’s permission.

  The kitchen took some time to clean, but as no one suspected trouble, he did it at his leisure, washing the walls and floor with soapy water more than once.

  After a time June’s parents wondered why they had not heard from her. She was out, he told them, every time they telephoned, but after two weeks they rang the building society, hoping to catch her there, and learned that she was, allegedly, away. The society was not happy about this long sudden absence, and June’s father went to see Alan.

  He was ready. He looked downcast and said that they had had a row. June had packed a bag and flounced out of the house, saying she was leaving him.

  ‘I thought she’d run off with that Phil Wickens,’ Alan said, managing to look distraught rather than aggrieved. ‘I knew they were having an affair. That was why we quarrelled.’

  June’s father could not believe that part o
f the story, but if June had walked out of her marriage, why had she not contacted her parents? Where was she living? Had she any money?

  ‘Her clothes?’ he asked.

  They’d gone, said Alan. He had packed them up and taken them to a charity shop, not in Billerton but across the county. He’d thrown away her toilet things. There had been time to see to everything, even to concealing the gun and ammunition. He might need them again.

  Her father had insisted on calling the police. At that time, he suspected suicide, though if that was June’s intention, why had she packed up all her clothes? Why hadn’t she come to them, her parents? Was she ashamed of having failed in her hasty marriage?

  She was found when a man walking with his dog along the high road where the snow had melted heard excited barking, and saw his pet scuffling in the ditch where Alan had dumped her body.

  Alan acted the part of the grieving widower to perfection. The cold had preserved June’s corpse and she was instantly recognisable when he was asked to identify her; her head wound had not obscured her features. There was no doubt that it was murder, and he was the prime suspect, but there was no immediate evidence to link him with the crime, and the gun could not be found.

  Alan had, at first, planned to leave it with the body, so that Phil Wickens would be linked with the killing. Then he changed his mind. He had travelled south and buried it beneath the ground in the garden shed at his parents’ home in Haverscot, more than a hundred miles from Billerton. Alan interred it there at night, when his parents were in bed; he did not enter the house at all, so that they had no knowledge of his visit.

  Because her body was so well preserved, the forensic pathologist found on it evidence of serious bruising. Some contusions had occurred shortly before death; others, yellowing, were healing. There were signs of a rib cracked not so long ago. Colleagues at the building society declared that, since her marriage, June had become jumpy – nervy, said one girl – and another had noticed bruises on her neck which could not be hidden by her uniform shirt. No one had liked to ask about them.