He was clenching and unclenching his fists but with still a degree of control.
I said, ‘You won the girl I wanted. You’ve a daughter and two sons. You’re lucky. You’d be a fool to light a bonfire. What good would it do?’
‘But you... you.’ He spluttered with hurt incoherent rage, wanting me dead.
‘Hate me if you like,’ I said, ‘but don’t take it out on your family.’
I turned away from him, more than half expecting him to haul me back and hit me, but to his credit he didn’t. I thought uneasily, all the same, that if he came across a less direct and physical way of doing me harm, he might take it.
I walked back through the garden door and Maudie, by the window, said, ‘What was that about?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Susan Palmerstone looks scared.’
‘Yes, well, I had a disagreement with Hugo, but forget it. Introduce Lorna to Bruce Farway and don’t put me next to her at lunch.’
‘What?’ She laughed, then looked thoughtful. ‘If I do, in return you can detach Tessa from Benjy Usher. I don’t like her flirting with him, and Dot is livid.’
‘Why did you ask them?’
‘They live practically next door, dammit. We always have Benjy and Dot.’
I did my best for her, but detaching Tessa from Benjy proved impossible. Tessa was a great whisperer and thought nothing of turning her back to prevent people hearing what she was spilling into Benjy’s ear. I got the turned-back treatment a couple of times and left Benjy alone to his foolishness.
Bruce Farway was taking an interest in Lorna, the delectably pretty sister full of good works. Susan stood with her arm through Hugo’s, talking brightly to Michael about horses. Intrigue and woven threads, typical of racing villages. Change partners and dance.
We ate Maudie’s splendid ribs of beef with the crunching roast potatoes and honey-walnut ice cream after. I sat between Maudie and Dot and behaved with propriety.
The younger children chattered about the rabbit run in the garden where the family pets had doubled themselves in number within the past year. ‘They’ll go to the butcher one of these days,’ Maudie muttered to me darkly. ‘They get out and eat my dahlias.’
‘One of the bunnies is missing,’ her younger daughter was insisting.
‘How can you possibly tell?’ Michael asked. ‘There are so many of them.’
‘There were fifteen last week and today there are only fourteen. I counted them.’
‘Probably the dogs ate one.’
‘Daddy!’
Lorna talked to Bruce Farway about pensioned-off steeplechasers, one of her current charities, and he listened with interest. Unbelievable.
The talk turned to Jericho Rich and his desertion of Michael’s stable.
‘Ungrateful beast,’ Maudie said vehemently. ‘After all those winners!’
‘I hate him,’ Tessa said with enough intensity to earn a sharp glance from her father.
‘Why especially?’ he asked.
She shrugged, tight mouthed, denying him an answer. Seventeen, full of unspecified resentments, she was one of those children who’d never lacked for anything but couldn’t settle for being one of life’s favoured mortals. She was a head-tosser besides a whisperer and she didn’t like me any more than I liked her.
Ed, her brother, sixteen and pretty stupid, said, ‘Jericho Rich wanted sex with Tessa and she wouldn’t, and that’s why he took his horses away.’
As a conversation stopper it was of Oscar-earning calibre, and in the breath-held aghast silence the front doorbell rang.
Constable Sandy Smith had called. Apologetically he told Michael that he needed Dr Farway and also Freddie Croft.
‘What’s happened?’ Michael asked.
Sandy told Michael, Bruce Farway and myself privately out in the front entrance hall.
‘That mechanic of yours, Freddie. That Jogger. He’s just been found along at your farmyard. He’s in the inspection pit. And he’s dead.’
Chapter 4
Jogger’s neck was broken.
We stood looking down at him, the sideways angle of his head to his body impossible in life.
‘He must have fallen in,’ Farway said as if stating the obvious.
From the other side of the pit Harve met my eyes, clearly thinking, as I was, that for Jogger to have fallen accidentally into an inspection pit he would have to have been reeling drunk, and even then I would have bet on his instincts to save him.
As if catching the thought, or at least the first half of it, Sandy Smith sighed. ‘He had a right skinful last night in the pub. Raving on about aliens under the lorries. Lone rangers, stuff like that. I took his car keys off him and drove him home in the end. I’d’ve had to arrest him for being drunk in charge, otherwise.’
Bruce Farway asked him officiously, ‘Have you informed his wife of this?’
‘Not married,’ Sandy said.
‘No next-of-kin at all,’ I amplified. ‘I have next-of-kin listed for all my employees, and Jogger said he hadn’t any.’
Farway shrugged, climbed down the metal ladder bolted to the inspection pit wall and bent clinically over the crooked body, lightly touching the bent neck. Then, standing upright, nodding, he reported to me almost accusingly, ‘Yes, this one’s dead as well.’
Two corpses found on my property in four days, he seemed to imply, were suspiciously excessive.
Michael Watermead, who had deserted the tail-end of his lunch party to follow me along to the disaster in the farmyard, asked curiously, ‘As well as what?’
‘The hitchhiker,’ I said. ‘Thursday.’
‘Oh yes. Of course. I was forgetting. On the way back from taking Jericho’s two-year-olds.’ The thought of Jericho brought a scowl to the naturally patrician features, his son Ed’s appallingly casual revelation as yet undigested, unprocessed.
Michael, I guessed, had been prompted to be present now in my barn by a mixture of straightforward morbid interest, supportive friendliness and the typical fuzzy overall sense of responsibility in the community which kept much of rural English life within sane parameters. He brought anyway a weight of authority to the proceedings which Harve, Sandy, Farway and myself might have lacked.
‘How long has he been dead?’ I asked. ‘I mean... hours? Last night?’
Bruce Farway said hesitantly, ‘He’s pretty cold, but I’d say fairly late this morning.’
We understood, all of us, that a closer guess was impossible at that point. The pit itself and the air temperature were cold also. The doctor climbed up the ladder and suggested that he and Sandy should again call for the ultimate in removers.
‘How about photographs?’ I said. ‘I’ve a camera in the office.’
Everyone solemnly agreed on photographs. I walked through the yard, unlocked the offices, collected my Nikon and returned to the barn. The others were still where I’d left them, standing round the pit looking down at Jogger with unreadable thoughts.
Although there was a certain amount of daylight in the barn from a window looking into the farmyard we always had to top it up with electricity for work. The overhead lights were all on, but even so I used flash for the pictures, taking several shots from round the rim of the pit and several others from its floor, down beside my poor mechanic.
I didn’t touch him, though I bent near to photograph his head. He lay in the angle between wall and floor; rough grease-streaked concrete walls, oil-blackened floor. He seemed to be looking at the wall six inches from his nose, his eyes, like those of so many suddenly dead, still open. The yellow teeth showed in two uneven rows within his mouth. He wore the old army jersey, the dirt-clogged trousers, the old cracked boots. He still smelled, extraordinarily, of oil and dust; of earth, not death.