Start with Ben’s baseball cap, Mr. Toad’s headgear. Something made me grimace and wipe my fingers after picking it up off the ground. Now I fancied that I could feel the texture on my skin again: the strip of fabric inside the cap, where the brim met the rest of it, had been faintly greasy. Not sweat, since it wasn’t damp, exactly. I had touched hair oil.
Ben was totally bald, so he didn’t use anything of that kind. Tom Oates, by contrast, soaked his hair in the stuff.
Another snapshot from that Sunday morning: Tom’s hands after he had struggled with the tree and I dragged him away. They were scratched, bleeding, one knuckle raw. Unwarranted damage, I realised, for a few seconds’ exposure to abrasive bark and leaves.
Hands... I tried to remember what Ben’s right hand looked like when I had made that futile check for a pulse. But I was looking away, eyes shut while my fingers rested on his wrist. Ben had been cremated, so there was no way of proving my new certainty that his palm would have been soft, unmarked, free of dirt or blisters.
It was such a weird feeling to see Tom as a killer. As if he had suddenly sprouted an extra head while we played darts at the Huntsman. I knew he had killed Ben Basgate and yet part of me couldn’t believe that.
He had, though.
He’d killed his uncle and seen the trouble he was in and thought fast, improvised feverishly. Ben’s bluster about felling that tree had provided Tom with the seed of his plan.
Just as I and every other local was aware, he knew that in the country, somebody is always watching. Only in cities can you count on being unseen. He had to work outdoors, and though Monks Farm is remote and secluded, there was always the chance of an early-morning poacher or hiker, a sharp-eyed shepherd or wandering child witnessing what he was up to. At the time they might think nothing of it, but once news of the “accident” got out, they would remember...
So he’d jammed the trademark red baseball cap on his head. Anyone sighting him from a distance would assume they were watching the master of the house. If they came right up to the house while he toiled to stage the accident, then he was finished anyway, so a perfunctory disguise had been sufficient...
Tom had felled the tree on top of a newly dead man, tossing the axe in beside him at the last moment. Then he’d thrown Ben’s cap down and slipped back to his bungalow. It need not have taken more than a quarter of an hour, start to finish — Tom Oates was strong and adept, unlike poor Mr. Toad.
And he’d had an unwitting accomplice in me.
That was not the nastiest insight while I swirled scotch in the glass, unable to drink because I felt so sick. The worst part was that I couldn’t prove a thing.
Toward dawn the following day, sleep out of the question, I crammed a few things into an overnight bag and fled to London.
I must have been operating on automatic pilot along the M4 motorway, since I rolled past Hyde Park some hours later with no recollection of events since bumping down the track into Drawbel Valley.
Tom? Tom Oates? He couldn’t have. But he did, and you know it. Round and round went the arguments.
Tom had been distraught, that wasn’t acting. Or not wholly. And ever since, he had behaved like a man in shell shock. Selina Grace had been right, at the funeral, saying that he loved Ben Basgate. Old farmer Basgate, Ben’s dad, had taken orphan Tom in, but Ben was older brother and father figure rolled into one.
The killer had lied and deceived, yet his grief was sincere: because he hadn’t planned to do away with Ben and had not wanted to. Somewhere on the Avon-Wiltshire border, zombie-driving over those undulating, ocean-roller hills, it came to me that not being able to make a case against Tom might be a good thing.
Instinct told me that he was a killer but not a murderer. He did not belong in jail and he would punish himself harder than any court could decree.
The only sane explanation was that for some reason he had snapped, lashing out at Ben — hence the skinned knuckle. Lost his temper in a flash (now I retrieved hazy memories of Tom having a hell of a temper as a kid) and been aghast at the result. They’d been out in the garden, Ben had been more than usually exasperating...
I could even divine why Tom had covered up for himself. It wasn’t fear of prison, but a killer cannot benefit by his crime, and Tom Oates could not bear the prospect of Monks Farm being sold to strangers and barred to him forever.
Ironically, he had not killed for gain — it wasn’t in him — but that was the outcome.
In London I crashed with friends and must have proved poor company, constantly preoccupied. Still half incredulous over my conclusions, wanting them to be wrong. I even played devil’s advocate, seeking to disprove what I’d worked out.
Was I mistaken about the grease inside Ben’s cap? No, the slippery touch on my fingers had revolted me, making me wipe them on my trousers, though I was too shaken at the time to identify what upset me. Not perspiration, but oil or hair cream.
There had been an autopsy on Ben Basgate. Surely the pathologist must have discovered that Ben’s death occurred before massive injuries were inflicted, if only by a few minutes? Had he checked Ben’s hands for confirmation that a sedentary man had been swinging an axe for a long while? Obviously not. There was no suggestion of foul play — partly due to my input. The pathologist was presented with the victim of a typical country accident, and he had accepted that version.
Very well, what about Solly Purchis? Could I be the only villager told about Ben’s purchase of the chain saw? Others might have added two and two, shared doubts with the police, and had them dispelled. A hopeful line — I so wanted to be wrong — but it did not last. I may not have friends in Drawbel (Selina didn’t count, she was more than that, and a secret besides), but people do tend to confide in me. It was likely that Solly had tried to get rid of the saw without going into details; probable, indeed, since admitting that he was stuck with the item rather than just having it in stock would invite them to haggle...
Turn and twist as I might, it all came back to a certainty impossible to prove.
One... accepts things. Ridiculous to exile myself on the strength of intuition and clues perceptible only to me — the material ones no longer available. To my hosts’ barely disguised jubilation, I went home to Drawbel.
Naturally the great bugbear was encountering Tom Oates. Naturally he was just about the first man I met; he came into the post office shop for cigarettes while I was stocking up on groceries. I looked away, mumbling for him to go ahead, I had a stack of stuff to pay for. Tom grunted thanks and was on his way again within a minute.
“Poor chap,” sighed Betty Higgs, misunderstanding my flinching from him. “Ghost of hisself, these days. Those shadows round his eyes... Gives my hubby the creeps, puts him in mind of them Nazi prison camps, he says.”
I couldn’t follow that. Betty said, “Well, the weight Tom’s lost, clothes hanging off him like a starving man. Never known a fellow grieve so. Tisn’t as if his precious uncle did him many favours, but he thought the world of him. What Tom needs is to get married.” She regards matrimony as Jewish mothers regard chicken soup.
Gradually I eased back into the village rut. Staying out of Tom’s way was easy enough, neither of us being overly gregarious. After a month or so I was having supper in the Huntsman when he appeared. We nodded to each other. I shut my brain down and still contrived to talk soccer to Albert behind the bar.
Studying his reflection in a copper warming pan on the wall, I saw that Mrs. Higgs and her hubby had been exaggerating, but not much. Tom was less trim than stringy, gaunt, and that oily black hair was frosted with grey. When he spoke to me, some casual remark, I answered quite naturally.