“Oh my God,” Mr Blundy said from the rear, reacting naturally to the word arrest. “I should bl — I should hope not and all —”
“Just my little joke,” the girl said. Silly bitch, Mr Blundy thought, making a joke like that. Insensitive, that, for a nurse. The girl went on. “Miss Pately mentioned to me she had a niece and nephew living in London —”
“She did, did she?”
“Yes. Only just recently. She’d never spoken of them before. A Mr and Mrs Blundy. I telephoned a Mrs Whale —”
Ag said, “That’s us.” Mr Blundy caught the eye of the Bill over her shoulder and looked away fast. Ag went on, “My aunt’s quite all right, thank you, nurse. I’m looking after her now, so you won’t need to bother, not till we go, like.”
Mr Blundy froze with sheer horror. Stupid bitch. Better to be honest about what would have to come out in the end anyway. He opened his mouth to put things right, then saw the dangers just in time. You couldn’t really say Auntie was all okay when Ag spoke but now she’s dead.
The nurse, however, seemed to understand perfectly. “It was more of a social call, really — she likes a visit, but in spite of the op she’s really as fit as a fiddle, wonderful for her age. You must have seen for yourselves.”
“Yes,” Ag agreed. “Wonderful’s the word for Auntie. Such a sweet old soul.”
“Managing all on her own too,” Mr Blundy said. He too had to play now.
“Yes, I know. I wish all my old ladies were as capable. Some of them are terrors.”
“I’ll bet,” Ag said with an understanding smirk. Mr Blundy thought, why doesn’t the girl push off? Ag said, “I’d ask you to step up, only she’s sleeping. Seems a shame to disturb her. I’ll say you called, nurse.”
“Right, thanks, Mrs Blundy. How long are you staying?”
“Don’t know yet. Hard to say, like.”
“A week or so?”
Ag nodded. “I reckon. At least a week.”
“Well, that’s fine. I’ll look in again this time next week and I’m always available in the meantime if I’m wanted. The op was some while back now but you do have to be careful with a gastrectomy, you know.”
*
The nurse had turned for the door after saying goodbye, and she and the Bill were making for the patrol car and Ag was about to shut the door on them thankfully when there was a tremendous crash against the door of the outside earth closet, followed by another.
The Bill stopped.
Mr Blundy virtually collapsed; Ag hissed in his ear, “Think of something, quick.” She pushed him out of the door, willy-nilly.
“Now what was that, sir?” the Bill asked.
“My son,” Mr Blundy said with desperate inventiveness.
“Oh, have you a son?” the district nurse asked brightly. “Miss Pately didn’t say anything about a son.” There was another bang. “Is he all right?”
“Oh, yes, perfectly all right. It’s just that he’s not used to earth closets,” Mr Blundy explained. “And the door jams. Just a little kid, he is. I’ll see to him, don’t you fret, young lady.”
The girl’s face crinkled into a friendly grin. “I won’t embarrass him, then. Is this his first visit to the Dales?”
“Yes —”
“I’m sure he loves it, doesn’t he? What’s his name?”
She was only showing an interest, of course; but Mr Blundy ground his teeth, consigning her to the tortures of hell. What was his son’s name? He just stopped himself saying Harold. “Damien,” he came out with and God alone knew why.
“Oh, how unusual — and very nice. Well, thank you so much, both of you.”
“Thank you,” Ag said. The girl walked towards the patrol car and she and the Bill got in and backed out into the road. Mr Blundy and Ag stared at each other speechlessly for a moment, then the recriminations began.
“Stupid bitch, saying she was all right —”
“Only a moron’d say he had a son when he hadn’t. S’pose they check?”
“Oh, come off it, Ag. Why should they, eh? One thing’s sure since you’re on about checking — they’ll check your flaming Auntie, check she’s not dead, one day soon.”
Ag stamped her foot. “Drove me to say she was well, you did, hanging about like a wet hen and not —”
“That’s right, blame me. Never think you’re wrong, do you, eh? My aunt’s quite all right, thank you,” Mr Blundy mimicked mincingly. “God, talk about brain, some people! Not all right at all, is she? But I tell you one thing: the record says she is. Says she’s not only all right but is as fit as a fiddle, wonderful for her age, capable, manages for herself. Now, that makes four things — four facts that’ll lead to us being nicked for certain soon as they find her, right?”
“If they find her.”
Mr Blundy raised his eyebrows. “Eh?”
“We got to get rid of her. Dispose of her. Like I said earlier. Dispose of the body,” she added in case Mr Blundy hadn’t quite taken it in.
“That’s daft and you know it,” Mr Blundy said. “Never get away with that we wouldn’t.” Suddenly he stiffened. “Oh, God. Go inside, do.”
“Why?”
“Big Ears,” Mr Blundy hissed. “In the bog. Go in and keep your voice down.”
*
Before following Ag into the kitchen Mr Blundy went into the earth closet and clouted Master Barnwell round those flapping lug-holes. “Just watch it,” he hissed. “I’ll duff you up proper, else.” He hadn’t removed the gag, so there’d been no opportunity for any rudeness from the kid, but the look in Harold’s eye was really terrifying. A nasty mocking gleam — and absolutely no fear whatsoever. He did have guts, all right, and he’d be able to make plenty of trouble when his day of freedom came, even if they could prove that natural causes had carried off Aunt Ethel — which in itself might be difficult if the body had been disposed of in the meantime. Concealing a death was almost certainly a crime in itself, the more so when you’d done it to avoid a rap for kidnapping. “You bang again, son, and I’ll bloody shove you down the bog-hole.”
But in the kitchen lay the most immediate food for thought, as voiced again by Ag. They had, she said, to get rid of the body. There was no other way.
“If there isn’t,” Mr Blundy said angrily, “it’s all your fault. If you’d said what had happened, that girl’d be laying her out now, and it’d all have been above board and honest. If —”
“Do shut up. You and your ifs.” Ag loomed over him, huge and threatening and, by this time, scared as well. She knew she’d made a hash of it, Mr Blundy could see that. “What’s done is done. There won’t be any questions asked for at least a week, so we’ve got that long, all right? A week to decide what we do.”
“Decide where we hide Auntie.”
“Yes. Couldn’t leave her much longer than that anyway,” Ag said. “Summer’s coming.”
“Get away with you, not up here it isn’t. More like winter half the time.”
“Maybe. Keeping’s still a problem.”
“I don’t think that’s very nice, Ag. Talking like that about your Aunt Ethel —”
“Don’t you go all virtuous, Ernest Blundy.”
Mr Blundy wasn’t listening. He said, “Look, Ag. I say we get that nurse back, tell her the proper facts, like.”
Ag shook her head. “No. It’s too late.”
“Yes, but facts is facts, Ag. They are facts, too. They’ll be substantiated by a whatsit, post-mortem. Better to face that than face the — the other —”
“What other?”
“Unlawful disposal of Auntie. Concealment like. Can’t you see?” His face appealed.
“I see one thing. A post-mortem, it’ll say she died sudden. Had a shock. Now who’s to say what the shock was — eh? Just you tell me that,” Ag shrilled at him, hands on hips, defiance set in overweight. “Old ladies only die of shock when somebody’s done something nasty to them.”
“Not when they’ve had a gastrectomy.” Mr Blundy was doing
his best with the new pronunciation. He blew out his cheeks with anger and frustration. How could anyone argue sensibly with Ag? “Just because she thought I felt her tits. God, how you twist things. You’re just being stupid. No one’s ever going to say we did her in … not unless we do anything with the body now.” He waved his arms at Ag, trying to penetrate her daftness. “That’s where the danger is. Nowhere else.”
“Just like you to argue, Ernest Blundy.”
Mr Blundy made a growling noise. “All right, then, it’s just like me to argue if you say so. I’ll go on arguing, ’cos I’m not disposing of any body. Auntie, she’s staying put. Staying in her own bed. I’m going to get that nurse girl back —”
“Don’t you dare. Just don’t you dare!”
“I got to do what’s right.”
“And that’s a laugh too.” Suddenly, Ag didn’t look in the least like laughing. Her big, pugnacious face seemed to crumple, her lips working. She gave a big snuffle and a sort of shudder and then started crying copiously. “It’s a right mess, is this. Poor Aunt Ethel. Dad’s only sister. Last of me own flesh and blood she is. Was. You never give me none to carry on.”
How unfair could you get?
*
After listening to a news bulletin that indicated no progress in the Harold Barnwell case, they went upstairs to pay their respects.
Auntie had died with her eyes open and Ag hadn’t closed them after. She had died with her mouth open as well, being on the point of saying something or other that was now for all time lost. The result was an extraordinarily lifelike image, quite uncanny really, but the lack of movement quickly destroyed the illusion.
“Looks kind of set,” Mr Blundy remarked sepulchrally.
“Peaceful, I’d call it.”
Mr Blundy nodded, then scratched his head. “Wonder what it was what did it. You don’t die sudden from a gastrectomy. Or I reckon you don’t. Kind of creeps up on you.”
“Heart attack or stroke,” Ag said. “And you know who brought that on.”
Mr Blundy wished he hadn’t felt obliged to say something. Ag wasn’t going to forget his part in this, innocent of intent as it had been. She was crying again, but Mr Blundy felt there was some crocodile element in her tears, for she had never expressed much love for the old cow.
“I’m ever so glad we were here at the last,” Ag said after a moment.
“Yes, there’s that. We should be thankful for that.” Should they? A sight better if they’d not been. Mr Blundy cleared his throat of hypocrisy but nevertheless went on in the same vein. “Poor old soul, eh. Don’t know how you can ever think of, well, upsetting her, like.”
“How d’you mean, upsetting her?”
“You know.”
“Disposing of the body?”
“Yes.”
“Why not say so, then, ’stead of being mealy-mouthed about it? Anyway — what’s the difference, I’d like to know? Bodies are bodies, aren’t they? Dead. They’re ‘disposed’ of in graves, aren’t they, or cremated? It’ll make no odds to Auntie now. She wouldn’t want to cause trouble.”
She’d caused enough already, Mr Blundy thought but didn’t say so. “How about a service?” he asked instead. “Service?”
“Church. Be bound to want that, she would.”
“How would you know?”
“Well … folks always do.”
“Don’t know so much about that. Could have been one of them atheists.”
“Not in Yorkshire,” Mr Blundy said with no real reason. “Well. Offer up prayers later.”
“Kind of memorial service, like?”
“Yes. But only us two to go.”
Mr Blundy pursed his lips. “I reckon that’d be sort of, I don’t know, sacrilegious.”
She stared at him. “Why? Prayers is prayers. Before or after, comes to the same.”
“Depends,” Mr Blundy said slowly, almost unwillingly. “Depends on how she gets disposed of.”
Ag dismissed that. She asked, “You any ideas on that, have you?”
“Shove her off of High Force, I s’pose. Or drop her down Gaping Ghyll.”
“What’s Gaping Ghyll?”
“Big sort of pot-hole. Long drop into a cave. Read about it somewhere. Over by Ingleborough. Sheep fall down sometimes.”
“It’s an idea.”
“Oh no it isn’t,” Mr Blundy said forcefully. “Only joking, like. If you want to be done for murder, drop Auntie down Gaping Ghyll and welcome! What I read, it’s around a three-mile walk from the road, all upwards. Don’t be daft, Ag. The moment we shift Auntie into the light of day, we’ve had it.” He turned away from the death-bed and drew the curtains across the little window: Auntie had had her last sight of the mighty Pennines. He glanced across at Ag in the shadows by the bed. “Come on, then. Do the old lady up proper. It’s only right.”
She looked blank. “Do her up proper, what d’you mean? Lay her out?”
“No. Just close her eyes. And her mouth.” Mr Blundy sounded uneasy. “Don’t like the way she’s looking … it’s like she’s heard.”
*
Next day Mr Blundy took the Granada into the market town of Hawes where he bought more newspapers, seeking more detail than was provided by the radio. On the way back he stopped in Askrigg for a read; he hadn’t liked to look too curious in the place of purchase — he knew this was being daft but he couldn’t help it, it was almost like an act of propitiation to superstition, to primeval gods. Anyway, the read in Askrigg didn’t reveal very much. There was no mention at all of the Loop: another death on the roads didn’t much signify. There was a bit of a splash about Harold Barnwell, with photos of his mum and dad. The mother looked a bit of all right, the father looked a bastard — fat, hard faced and greasy with wealth. Amazing what a few old bedsteads like Auntie’s could do. Anyhow: the kid had been noted missing just like the BBC had said, failing to report back to his teacher after visiting Brands Hatch. There was a large-scale hunt in progress but there still wasn’t a whisper of kidnap. Mr Blundy felt confirmed in his earlier view that the Bill had no leads and were flummoxed.
Good.
There was a photograph of a detective chief superintendent — efficient, grim faced, tight lipped, framed in the window of a car. Top-ranking Bill; he looked flummoxed and all.
Mr Blundy’s spirits lightened, but only for a brief moment. The basic problems remained and were very, very real: what to do with Aunt Ethel, and the kid himself. To be landed with a child and a body was certainly no joke. Shaking his head gloomily, Mr Blundy started up and drove back to Auntie’s cottage through more interminable Yorkshire rain. Funny that so many of the top cricketers came, or had come anyway, from Yorkshire, what with all that rain always stopping play. Rain, rain, gush, gush, down the windscreen …
Rain, rain. Some little jingle from childhood days. Go to Spain, that was it.
An idea — or not?
Not, on the whole. Unless you had your own boat, or your own aircraft, getting Auntie and the kid out of the country was just not on, frankly. Difficulty with Customs and that … in any case, Mr Blundy remembered, that was what the Bill always expected you to do. Once the cops cottoned on to kidnap, the ports and airfields would be soaking up an awful lot of Bill time.
On arriving back, Mr Blundy shoved the papers at Ag and she had a good, long read. At the end of it she sat and thought for a bit — cooking something up, evidently.
“I been thinking,” she said at last.
“Well?”
“Auntie and that. Does seem a shame really.”
Mr Blundy waited for more.
“I mean, what I suggested,” Ag explained with delicacy. “Though it may have to come to that in the end. Thing is, she’ll keep a week, say. And we agreed we’re safe for a week — that nosey nurse girl, she won’t come back for a week, we know that, and it’s not likely anybody else will.”
Mr Blundy stared. “Pardon me if I’m dense, like. But are you suggesting we keep Auntie for a week, and then d
eclare her? Is that it? ’Cos —”
“Yes,” Ag said with defiance.
“Stone the crows.”
“Now what is it?”
“What is it, she asks. I’ll tell you.” Mr Blundy sat up straight. “How do we explain that we didn’t tell the nurse the poor old soul had kicked the bucket when she came yesterday? Eh? Or do we say we just thought she was tired … then found out a week later she’d been dead all along, eyes and gob open an’ all —”
“Shut up and listen. She didn’t die yesterday, she died just before that girl’s next visit. Or anyway, some time between then and now. We —”
“Just a minute. How about the quacks? Can they determine a time of death, or can’t they?”
“’Course they can,” she snapped back at him. “Never listen, you don’t. Thing is, we haven’t been here all the time. We don’t know when she hopped the twig because we weren’t here when she did. See? Just after that girl left yesterday, we had a row with Aunt Ethel and —”
“And get done for murder, motive and all —”
“Oh, shut up. She wasn’t murdered —”
“Well, thanks a lot,” Mr Blundy said tartly, being badly on edge now. “I was under the general impression, like, that you’d accused me of shocking her to death when I touched what she thought was her tit and I hadn’t —”
“— she wasn’t murdered, she died a natural death and that’s what the quack’ll say since it happens to be the truth. Now then. We had that row as I said. Auntie got in a tizz and told us to go and we went. Some days later, just under a week, say, we come back … to say we were sorry and to see how she was. To our utter astonishment, we found her like she is now.” Ag jerked her head upwards towards the ceiling. “Dead. Well?”
Mr Blundy sent out a long, whistling breath. “I s’pose it does hang together in a sort of way, but where do we go? Thought of that an’ all, have you?”
“The Smoke.”
“London?”
“That’s what I said.”
“All the way back to London, all the way back up again just to say we was sorry?”
“She’s me last living relative.”
“Yes, but still.” Mr Blundy shook his head. “It’s stretching it a bit.”
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