by Tom Sharpe
“But logs don’t fall on newly planted pines.”
“Of course they don’t. But haven’t you seen the sawn-off stumps of much older and bigger ones they’ve used for firewood in the Hall? Those pines shed needles in hundreds and thousands and could easily cover something up.”
“Provided whoever is looking doesn’t step on it. They’d be puzzled to find a soft log.”
“He’s hardly soft now, is he? He’s got rigor mortis.”
“Yes, but you wait. In this hot weather he’ll start to rot any minute, and then he’ll turn all soft and squidgy, not to mention smelling to high heaven.”
“That won’t matter if we cover him really well with plenty of pine needles. You two” – Emmeline pointed at Josephine and Penelope – “go over that way, and we’ll go this side where the trees are much thicker.” A minute later all four quads had disappeared into the young trees.
Half an hour later, Emmeline had found a hollow which was filled with fallen leaves and pine needles. She showed it to Samantha who was delighted. Best of all it was screened by a thick undergrowth of young saplings.
“It’s exactly right. We’ll get the other two and bring the Colonel down. We can shove him in there for now.”
“Hadn’t we better clear all these leaves out and have it ready for him before we fetch him? And what about the bonfire we build? People are going to wonder what on earth it’s for.”
“What people? Nobody comes up here. They’ll think it’s for Guy Fawkes Night or something like that. Anyway, the quicker we can get the body into that hole the better. You go and find Penelope and Josephine and we’ll meet up at the wood pile. It won’t take me long to get this lot out.”
Back at the wood pile the four of them started to drag the Colonel’s body back to the hollow, Penelope grumbling loudly that this wasn’t as much fun as she’d thought it was going to be. Suddenly there was the sound of a shot and a bullet embedded itself in a nearby tree trunk, narrowly missing the girls. Three of the quads instinctively dived for cover and flattened themselves amongst the pine cones and bracken on the floor of the woods. Samantha, however, hid behind the nearest tree and so was able to see Edward walking towards them. To her amazement he reloaded and carried on firing his rifle, this time aiming for the dead body which lay where they’d dropped it, propped against a tree.
“Killed you, you bastard!” yelled Edward as he drew closer to the body. “Teach you to trespass, you dirty Hun!”
“North by north-west!” whispered Samantha, which was their code for going anywhere but north or northwest. She needn’t have worried since the gormless Edward didn’t know his north from his west from his east. He moved steadily forward, oblivious to the three girls creeping sideways out of the line of fire.
Samantha had picked up a few stones and was throwing them to distract him when a particularly large one accidentally hit him on the head. Edward looked startled and began to topple forwards: trying to save himself he tripped on an exposed tree root and the gun went off, shooting him between the eyes. There was a sudden silence.
“Oh, shit,” said Samantha. The others stood up and joined her.
“Bloody hell!”
“Bloody hell is right. Now we’re for it.”
“Oh, never mind all that! Quick, change of plan. Help me lift Edward up and let’s put him closer to the Colonel’s body,” said Penelope, which they did. She then took the gun from where it had fallen and fired a few more shots into the Colonel’s body, then pushed the gun back under Edward’s body so it was clear he had fallen on it after it had gone off.
“Now it looks as though he was the one who pinched the body and was using it for firing practice or something when he tripped up and killed himself. Which, of course, is exactly what he did.”
“Genius,” said Samantha, “except now we don’t get to burn anything, which is a pity.”
“Don’t whine. Come on, let’s get on with it before someone arrives to see what all the noise was about.”
Half an hour later the quads had removed any sign of the track they had made while dragging the naked corpse through the pines and had headed back to the Hall, having buried the Colonel’s medals and clothes in the hollow.
∗
Not long before that, at the insistence of Sir George, the coffin had been removed from the family plot by the pall-bearers and returned to the hearse. As it wound its way back up to the gate and on to the main road, Eva could be seen getting in a taxi and following on. “Don’t forget to insist that he’s cremated,” Sir George told her as she left. “I don’t want to hear any more nonsense about his being buried here.”
Eva nodded, knowing full well that she had promised Lady Clarissa that her uncle would be buried and not burned.
Feeling distinctly self-conscious, she followed the hearse all the way to the Vicarage where she got out and knocked on the door. A few moments later it was opened by a woman who looked at her enquiringly.
“Is there anything I can do for you?” she asked.
Eva said she’d come to speak to the Vicar but, by this time, his wife had spotted the coffin.
“Well, I’ll tell my husband it’s urgent although he is rather busy writing his sermon for Sunday,” she replied, and went back into the house. Presently, an elderly man wearing spectacles and a dog collar came out.
“I take it you want me to conduct a funeral. Is the deceased a local person?”
Eva shook her head. “I am certain he isn’t.”
“I can tell you’re not from your accent,” he commented.
Eva replied that she lived in Ipford herself, but had been asked to accompany the coffin to the Vicarage.
“I know he was a colonel in the war and had a wooden leg,” she added inconsequentially.
The Vicar looked at her over the top of his glasses.
“I ask because the graveyard is almost full and we can only bury people who live hereabouts. Where exactly are you living?”
“Actually I’m not living here. I was going to be staying here for the summer, up at the Hall…”
“Sandystones Hall?” asked the Vicar, looking shocked.
Some years before he had played golf with Sir George and been disgusted by his filthy language when he had hit a ball into a bunker. He had also strongly disapproved of Sir George’s habit of taking regular swigs of whisky from the silver flask he kept in his back pocket. Above all the Vicar objected to the Gadsleys’ refusal to attend any religious services on Sundays or any other day of the week, and was more than aware that everyone in the village disliked them intensely too.
He had just decided that anyone who stayed for the summer at Sandystones Hall must share all their undesirable attributes when Eva broke into his deliberations.
“The four men who brought the coffin down have gone away,” she said. “If you won’t take it into the church, I don’t know what I’ll do. I can’t possibly take it away by myself.”
“I’m afraid I can’t be of any assistance. It’s not as though I could even get such a huge thing into my small car, and in any case it’s in the garage being serviced.” He paused for a moment then went into the house and phoned the service station.
“I wonder if you would mind sending a lorry up to the Vicarage to take a coffin up to the Hall.”
“Somebody died up there?” said the man who had answered the phone hopefully. “Like that horrible bugger Sir-my arse-George?”
“I’d be glad if you didn’t use that filthy language,” snapped the Vicar. “I’m calling from the Vicarage…”
“Cor blimey! I do apologise, sir,” said the mechanic, who knew the Vicar’s views on swearing and bad language. He put the phone down and turned to the only other man in the service station. “You’re to take the pick-up and transport a coffin up to the Hall. Evidently some sod’s kicked the bucket up there. Let’s hope it’s that bastard Gadsley.”
The trainee started the pick-up and drove to the Vicarage. The coffin lay just inside the gate with a fraug
ht-looking Eva standing guard over it. But even with her help, the garage man found it too heavy to lift. Finally he ventured to the front door of the Vicarage to ask if there was anyone to help him get it into the pick-up. By this time the Vicar had finished his sermon and agreed to assist the young man. They each took one end of the thing and Eva tried to lift the middle, but it was still too heavy.
“There must be a very heavy deceased person in it,” observed the Vicar.
“Well, it took four men to get it here,” Eva pointed out helpfully.
“I suppose we’d better open it and take whoever it is out and then put the body back when we’ve got the coffin up on the truck.”
Eva thought how much Clarissa would hate her uncle being hauled about the place, but then again Sir George was going to go mad when the coffin was returned. It was hardly her fault. She stood by as the two men lifted the lid, took hold of the blanketed shape and pulled it out.
“The deceased’s lighter than I expected,” said the Vicar. “And a lot stiffer.”
By the time it was in the back of the pick-up, the blanket had slipped off.
“Bugger me!” said the young mechanic, and for once wasn’t rebuked for using filthy language. The Vicar was in too great a state of shock himself to hear or care what anyone else said.
His thoughts were fully concentrated on that broken branch and the motives of the person who had tried to make a sacrilegious idiot of him by conducting a church service for a piece of dead wood. By the time his pulse had returned to its normal rate and he could think sanely again, he was sure he knew who had set this disgraceful trap for him. The Vicar realised exactly who his enemy was: that monster Sir George Gadsley. They had always been at odds with one another, and this was the other man’s damnable way of trying to make the Vicar the laughing stock of the village.
Ignoring Eva’s cries of horror and determined to turn the tables on Sir George, he went to his study and phoned the police. “I have reason to believe there has been a very serious crime committed,” he told the Sergeant who answered. “I want you to come up at once and see the evidence.”
“Coming straightaway, Vicar.”
The clergyman put down the phone with a smile. He had begun to think it really was possible a crime had been committed at the Hall. He had often heard gunfire in the grounds there, and the villagers refused to go anywhere near the place unless they were collecting someone by taxi or delivering large quantities of alcohol or other expensive goods that made it worth the risk.
By the time the Sergeant and a Constable had arrived they were greeted not only by the Vicar but also one of the local men who had delivered the coffin in the hearse. He said that he was often up at the Hall as he had a contract to cut the grass on half the lawn each week provided, as he put it, the ‘bloody boy with the gun’ was guaranteed to be inside the Hall and forbidden to come out before he left.
“I’ve been there when he’s shot a deer,” he’d already told the Vicar, “and I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d killed other stuff too. He used just to throw stones at people, but it looks like he’s moved on.” The Vicar repeated this to the Sergeant who nodded as he took it all down. He had had past experience of the lad’s misdemeanours but it looked like this time it was too serious for anyone to intervene, magistrate or no magistrate.
“And now you’ll want to see the so-called corpse,” the Vicar announced. “And I can certainly corroborate the fact that there’s frequent gunfire up there. A bullet passed overhead when I was walking past along the road a month or so ago. But come and look what we found in the coffin.”
They went round to the yard where the Vicar kept his car.
“Just open it up,” he said. He’d closed the lid to add to the policeman’s surprise when he opened it again. A wooden corpse was the last thing he’d be expecting to see.
“Blimey, that’s not a dead body! Why on earth did they bring a piece of wood down here?”
“They were ordered to bring the coffin and had no idea what was inside it.”
“They came with a woman who said she was from Ipford, but that’s miles away,” put in the garage man.
Again the Vicar intervened. “She claimed she was from Ipford. She also told me she was supposed to have been spending the summer up at the Hall, which was why she was accompanying Mr Whoever was meant to be in the coffin. Gadsley asked her to arrange the burial.”
“So where is she now?”
“As soon as she saw the piece of wood in there she took off smartish,” said the garage man. “Come to that, I wish I’d done the same. If I’d know it was going to take as long as this, I’d have buggered off too.”
“Of course, she may well be back up at Sandystones Hall by now. I think you ought to check. You can use the phone here,” said the Vicar, giving the garage man a disapproving look.
“Do you know her name? I mean, I can’t just ask for the lady who was meant to be staying for the summer and has brought a coffin down here.”
“Oh, I think you can. They’re bound to give you her name and address even if she has gone back to Ipford,” said the Vicar, eager to create an embarrassing scandal for Sir George. He was helped by the Constable who announced that he’d found what looked like a bullet hole in the log.
“It certainly appears to be one,” said the Sergeant, to the Vicar’s delight. “We’ll just have to wait and see when forensics have done an or…auto…made a thorough examination of the log.”
By this time the Vicar was in a state of high excitement. The fact that the Sergeant had almost said ‘autopsy’ had been a moment so perfect he would treasure it for as long as he lived. He decided it was time to call in a senior detective to take charge. That way the scandal would really escalate, with Sir George’s name appearing on the front page of every dreadful popular paper. The best thing of all would be for the detective to find a genuine murder victim, though the Vicar was too godly to actively hope for that.
Instead he discreetly suggested bringing in higher police authorities.
The local Sergeant was only too ready to agree.
He was feeling distinctly peculiar, looking at that branch and trying to make sense of its sinister presence in the ornate coffin. The Vicar’s wife came out into the yard then and asked if they would like some tea or coffee. The Sergeant shook his head and thanked her. He really wanted something much stronger, like brandy, but it didn’t seem appropriate to say so in the present company. Instead he accepted the Vicar’s offer of the use of his telephone and called the Chief Superintendent at Ligneham, who took some persuading that the Sergeant wasn’t mad, pulling his leg, or more likely drunk or at any rate suffering from some morbid hallucination.
“No sane person puts a piece of timber into an expensive coffin and expects a respectable parson to bury the damned thing,” he barked.
“Well, someone has done so. And, to cap it all, there appears to be a bullet wound in it.”
“A bullet wound? In a tree trunk? You’re having me on. You can’t get…Well, I suppose if it’s a very small tree.”
“It isn’t. I mean, wasn’t. It is the branch of a moderately sized tree that’s been pollarded.”
“Pollarded? And that would be your professional opinion, would it? Are you a policeman, Sergeant, or a bloody gardener?”
Half an hour later two police cars with plainclothes officers in them had arrived and were parked conspicuously outside the Vicarage, much to the annoyance of the Vicar who was wondering what rumours about him were now being spread through the village. On the other hand, the Superintendent no longer doubted the Sergeant’s sanity. The lump of wood in the back of the truck proved he had indeed been telling the truth. Now the Vicar was telling him how he had been fired at, and only narrowly missed, close to the Hall by a youth with a gun the previous Wednesday.
“With an utter disregard for public safety, Sir George seems to encourage the boy to use lethal weapons on innocent people walking past the Hall,” the Vicar continued damningly. “He is
either a very bad shot or may, I suppose, be deliberately aiming above people’s heads. I suspect it’s because that family are so determined to prevent anyone intruding on their property. In fact, they’ve always been like that. One of these days a passerby is going to be killed, you mark my words.”
“And how old would you say this boy is?”
“He can’t be much more than seventeen. Maybe younger, for all I know,” the Vicar exaggerated.
“Sounds like he’s the same lad who was in trouble before, but now he’s using a rifle and a powerful one at that. It would account for the depth of the bullet hole in the log,” said the Superintendent.
“There’s no doubt about that, but if we’re to prove it we’ll need to match the bullet to the rifle, which could take a while,” said the Sergeant. “Hope he doesn’t do any more damage in the meantime.”
The Vicar looked puzzled.
“Why not remove the bullet now and take it with you when you go to the Hall? It shouldn’t be too difficult,” he said. “I have an excellent electric saw and chisels galore. We could hack it out in no time at all.” But the Superintendent shook his head.
“No, we’ll need to leave this as it is. It’s evidence, you know, so we can’t touch it.”
“Well, if you can’t touch it, how on earth are you going to be able to identify the gun?”
“Calm down, sir. Calm down. From what you’ve told me about pot-shots over the wall and the like, I reckon we’ve already got enough to nail these friends of yours.”
The Vicar almost levitated from his chair in disgust.
“They’re no friends of mine, I assure you. That infernal man has hated me for years.”
“It was just an expression, Vicar. But I thought your lot were everyone’s friends – aren’t you meant to love your fellow men?” asked the Superintendent.
“Yes, yes. And of course I do – on one level,” protested the Vicar, growing increasingly irate. “But you know, officer, he has always refused to let me carry out Christian burials in his private graveyard.”