Kenworthy waited for a reaction, but there was none.
‘I’m sorry: there was no school bus the next morning, was there? They were on half-term holiday. So Davina would have been able to lie in. And you weren’t the only one who was about in the woods that night. Patricia Cave was also abroad, up and snooping, always nosing, wanting to know all the undercurrents. You called desperately on her for help. She made terms. She’d help carry the corpse. She would keep her mouth shut. Only you had to get out of the Grange, out of the commune, out of their lives, leaving her the clear field she had had before you came. Including a clear field with John Horrocks. But it was different in the light of morning; you knew Triss couldn’t hold you to it, that she could not have said a word without admitting herself an accomplice. You hung on. Triss cut her losses, lit out the day after Gleed’s raid. Gleed’s minions picked her up the day before yesterday sleeping rough in an old barn off the A6, somewhere south of Manchester. And Triss has talked. I have a full copy of her statement.’
‘You don’t think the word of that bitch will count for anything?’
‘No. I don’t think that for a moment. That’s why I’ve brought you here.’
Kenworthy was a well-built man. His body commanded the space between the girl and the exit. Her knees were jammed under the table. Her eyes glanced at the window. Short of a farm spade, with space to swing it, she could never have broken her way out. Bacon, eggs and baked beans were congealing on the plate in front of her.
‘Claustrophobic, isn’t it?’ Kenworthy asked.
‘You can keep me here all night if you want. I’m not saying another word.’
‘Listen!’
The command was so sudden and firm that in spite of herself she did listen. But there was nothing to hear that meant anything to her. There was only the wind in distant restless trees, a loose-fitting clanking on one of the caravans, a bullock snorting. Kenworthy let the night fill their ears.
‘You think you’re going to break me down?’ she said at last. ‘You think I’m a romantic or something?’
‘You’re what the Americans call a tough cookie. In another few minutes we’re going to see how tough.’
‘You’re a fool, Kenworthy.’
‘Listen!’
Somewhere between their field and the village, the passion of a barnyard cat, the gurgle of water from a feed-pipe into a cattle trough.
‘The night is never empty,’ Kenworthy said.
‘Bollocks.’
And then there was hardly anything to be heard beyond Kenworthy’s regular breathing. It was almost an hour after they had first sat down together that they heard new sounds: something that distinctly did not belong to the setting. It was a rhythmic beat, as of metal against resonant metal; a chanting; breathless, ill-humoured and insistent. Soon it resolved itself into marching feet, accompanied by improvised percussion.
‘Whore of the Beaker Folk – whore of the Grange – whore of the Beaker Folk – whore of the Grange –’
There was a barefaced, primeval self-satisfaction in the women’s voices. Within a minute they were in a circle round the caravan, striking its panels with their pokers and sticks, the classical chorus of enraged rustic decency as perpetuated in folk-lore and literature.
Then a second’s silence was followed by apparent consultation outside. Kenworthy got up and flung open the door on Mrs Scadbolt, a copper kettle in one hand, a brass fire-shovel in the other; behind, to her left, stood Emmeline Malkin with a dustbin lid; to her right Alice Brightmore, using saucepan lids as cymbals; behind them other pale faces, indistinguishable in the darkness.
‘All right, ladies. As you know, I am not here in any official capacity. I don’t think I can do better than leave her to you –’
He began to step down from the trailer, and Mrs Scadbolt squeezed past him into the space he had vacated.
‘No!’ from Christine. ‘Mr Kenworthy, please –’
‘Of course, you ladies have seen nothing of me –’
‘Whore of the Beaker Folk – whore of the Grange –’
Three of the women were in the trailer now. Someone pulled Christine’s hair. Vera Scadbolt was leering into her face, her crimson cheek-bones close under her eyes. Someone else tore at the neck of Christine’s blouse.
Kenworthy stepped sideways and tapped on the window of the next caravan in the line. Gleed jumped down, followed by a woman officer in plain clothes.
‘She’ll talk. She’d put her neck into a noose to get those women off her back.’
‘Quite clever,’ Elspeth said, ‘if a trifle circuitous. I don’t really see the need for all the convolutions – except for the sake of a man in his forties who sees his youth rapidly vanishing.’
Kenworthy pulled into the verge and switched off the engine to allow passage to a milking herd.
‘Far from it. She was a tough baby. Without utter breakdown, there’d be little hope of a conviction. Damn it, I wasn’t even sure myself. To get a confession, I knew I would have to spend a long time with her, and that I would need a convincing cover story – one that would convince both her and everyone else in the village. So I was able to push her. I took her step by step down the track where she’d carried the corpse. I made her look at the gap where the Anathema Stone had been. I took her into Davina Stott’s bedroom. Now and then she quailed, but never beyond the point at which it might not have been just another spot of theatre. And all the time there was the thought in her mind that I might really be going to swing it circumstantially on the vigilantes. Also, she was never quite sure whether I wanted her or not. Every man has his price, and she must have thought she was within my bracket.’
‘There ought to be a medal struck for Mrs Scadbolt and Co.’
‘They played ball. After I’d had a word with my good friend Geraldine Cartwright. But what really kept me on the qui vive was the constantly recurring theme of Davina’s script. Christine was the one who had returned it to the Hall for Doreen Malkin to find. A bad mistake: not because it told me anything for a very long time, but because it told me so little that it preyed on my mind.’
‘And what about John Horrocks now?’
‘Poor devil. A hard lesson. I hope he’ll learn to keep better company. He might even stand by her, as faithful spouses tell the judge. But at least they’ll both have leisure to think.’
They were now descending a one-in-five gradient that called for a halt on the white line of a major road. He looked back over his shoulder at the roots of a hornbeam sprawling over lichen-covered rock.
‘You know, one of these days, we ought to think of a holiday up here. Some time in the spring, when the ash-buds are breaking and there’s a shimmer of lady-smocks in the hayfields.’
Copyright
First published in 1981 by Collins
This edition published 2012 by Bello an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited Pan Macmillan, 20 New Wharf Road, London N1 9RR Basingstoke and Oxford Associated companies throughout the world
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Copyright © John Buxton Hilton, 1981
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The Anathema Stone Page 20