“No, I can’t help you there.”
“Hear any shooting?”
“We often hear shooting in these parts. Look, I’d better find my dog.”
“We’ll need to speak to you some more, Mr...?”
“Priddle. Bernard Priddle. You’re welcome. These days I live in one of them poky little council bungalows in the village. Second on the left.”
The inspector watched him stride away, whistling for the dog, and said to one of the team, “A useful witness. I want you to take a statement from him.”
Mooney was tempted to pass on the information that Bernie was a publicity-seeking pain in the arse, but he decided to let the police do their own work.
The body was removed from Middle Field the same evening. Some men in black suits put it into a bag with a zip and stretchered it over the well-trodden ground to a small van and drove off.
“Now can I have my field back?” Mooney asked the inspector.
“What’s the hurry?”
“You’ve destroyed a big section of my crop. What’s left will go over if I don’t harvest it at the proper time. The pods shatter and it’s too late.”
“What do you use? A combine harvester?”
“First it has to be swathed into rows. It all takes time.”
“I’ll let you know in the morning. Cutting it could make our work easier. We want to do a bigger search.”
“What for?”
“Evidence. We now know that the woman Bernard Priddle saw — the driver of the Jeep — was the woman in the photograph I showed you, Mrs. Susan White, the dead man’s wife. We’re assuming the younger woman was White’s mistress. We think Mrs. White was suspicious and followed them here. She didn’t know about him buying the tied cottages. That was going to be his love nest, just for weekends with the mistress. But he couldn’t wait for it to be built. The wife caught them at it in the field.”
“On the raincoat?”
“That’s the assumption. Our forensic people may confirm it.”
“Nasty shock.”
“On both sides, no doubt.”
Mooney smiled. “You could be right about that. So that’s why he was shot. What happened to the mistress?”
“She must have escaped. Someone drove his car away and we reckon it was her.”
“So have you arrested the wife?”
“Not yet. She wasn’t at home when we called.”
Mooney grinned again. “She guessed you were coming.”
“We’ll catch up with her.”
In a tree in the hedgerow a song thrush sounded its clear notes and was answered from across the field. A breeze was cooling the air.
On the insistence of the police, Mooney harvested his crop a week before it was ready. He’d cried wolf about all the bother they’d caused, and now he suffered a loss through cutting too early. To make matters worse, not one extra piece of evidence was found, for all their fingertip searches through the stubble.
“Is that the end of it?” he asked the inspector when the final sweep across the field was made. The land looked black and bereft. Only the scarecrow remained standing. They’d asked him to leave it to use as a marker.
“It’s the end of my work, but you’ll be visited again. The lawyers will want to look at the site before the case comes to court.”
“When will that be?”
“I can’t say. Could be months. A year, even.”
“There won’t be anything to see.”
“They’ll look at the positions where the gun was found, and the body, and the coat. They map it all out.”
“So are you advising me not to drill next spring?”
“That’s an instruction, not advice. Not this field, anyway.”
“It’s my livelihood. Will I get compensation?”
“I’ve no idea. Not my field, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
“So you found the wife in the end?”
“Susan White — yes. She’s helping us with our enquiries, as we like to put it.”
“How about the mistress? Did you catch up with her?”
“Not yet. We don’t even know who she is.”
“Maybe the wife shot her as well.”
“That’s why we had you cutting your crop, in case of a second body. But we’re pretty certain she drove off in the BMW. It hasn’t been traced yet.”
Winter brought a few flurries of snow and some gales. The scarecrow remained standing. The building work on the tied cottages was halted and no one knew what was happening about them.
“I should have drilled by now,” Mooney said, staring across the field.
“Are they ever going to come back, do you think?” his wife said.
“He said it would take a long time.”
“I suppose the wife has been in prison all these months waiting for the trial to start. I can’t help feeling sorry for her.”
“If you shoot your husband, you must get what’s coming to you,” Mooney said.
“She had provocation. Men who cheat on their wives don’t get any sympathy from me.”
“Taking a gun to them is a bit extreme.”
“Quick and merciful.”
Mooney gave her a look. There had been a time before the children came along when their own marriage had gone through a crisis, but he’d never been unfaithful.
The lawyers came in April. Two lots in the same week. They took photos and made measurements, regardless that the field looked totally different to the way it had last year. After the second group — the prosecution team — had finished, Mooney asked if he could sow the new crop now. Spring rape doesn’t give the yield of a winter crop, but it’s better than nothing.
“I wouldn’t,” the lawyer told him. “It’s quite possible we’ll bring out the jury to see the scene of the crime.”
“It’s a lot of fuss, when we all know she did it.”
“It’s justice, Mr. Mooney. She must have a fair trial.”
And you must run up your expenses, he thought. They’d driven up in their Porsches and Mercedeses and lunched on fillet steak at the pub. The law was a good racket.
But as things turned out, the jury weren’t brought to see the field. The trial took place a year after the killing, and Mooney was allowed to sow another crop. The first thing he did was take down that scarecrow and destroy it. He wasn’t a superstitious man, but he associated the wretched thing with his run of bad luck. He’d been told it had been photographed for the papers. Stupid. They’d photograph any damned thing to fill a page. Someone told him they’d called his land “The Killing Field.” Things like that were written by fools for fools to read. When a man has to be up at sunrise, he doesn’t have time for papers. By the evening they’re all out of date.
An evil thing had happened in Middle Field, but Mooney was determined to treat it as just a strip of land like any other. Personally, he had no worries about working the soil. He put the whole morbid incident to the back of his mind.
Until one evening in September.
He’d drilled the new sowing of oilseed, and was using the roller, working late to try and get the job finished before the light went altogether. A huge harvest moon appeared while he was still at work. He was thinking of supper, driving the tractor in near darkness along the last length beside the footpath, when a movement close to the hedge caught his eye.
If the figure had kept still, he would have driven straight past. The face turned and was picked out by his headlights. A woman. Features he’d seen before.
He braked and got down.
She was already walking on. He ran after her and shouted, “Hey!”
She turned, and he knew he wasn’t mistaken. She was the woman in the photograph the police had shown him, Sue White, the killer, the wife of the dead man.