"Did you attend the court?"
"No. They said I was too young to be cross-examined. My version was presented in the form of a written statement."
"What was his defense?"
She glanced at him. "That I'd launched in without provocation and he refused to defend himself for fear of injuring me. His barrister argued that because the defendant was more damaged than I was, and because a thirteen-year-old couldn't have inflicted such harm on a grown man unless he allowed her to do it, I must have been the aggressor. It made me mad when I read the report of the trial. He painted me as a spoiled, rich brat with a bad temper, who didn't think twice about lamming into the hired help. You end up feeling you're the one in the dock when that kind of thing happens."
"How much damage did you do?"
"Not enough. Ten stitches in a slash across the bum and fuzzy vision after one of the prongs caught the corner of his eye. It was a lucky shot… meant he couldn't focus properly… which is why he didn't fight back. If he'd been able to see the fork, he'd have grabbed it off me, and I'd have been the one in hospital." Her expression hardened. "Or dead, like Ailsa."
10
Bella climbed the steps of her bus and pulled off her balaclava, running her thick fingers over her stubbly hair where her skin was beginning to itch. The army-surplus overcoats, balaclavas, and scarves had been handed out by Fox the day before at the rendezvous, with instructions to wear them every time they went outside. It hadn't been worth arguing about at the time, the cold alone made everyone grateful for them, but Bella was very curious now about why disguise was necessary. Fox knew this place too well, she thought.
A sound from her curtained kitchen area caught her attention. She assumed it was one of her daughters and reached out to pull the drape aside. "What's up, darlin'? I thought you were with Zadie's kids-" But it wasn't one of hers. It was a skinny little boy with shoulder-length blond hair, and she recognized him immediately as one of the "spares" who had been in Fox's bus at Barton Edge. "What the fuck are you doing?" she asked in surprise.
"It weren't me," muttered Wolfie, cringing away and waiting for the slap.
Bella stared at him for a moment before dropping onto the banquette seat beside her table and pulling a tin of snout from her coat pocket. "What weren't you?" she asked, prizing open the tin and removing a packet of Rizzlas.
"I didn't take nothing."
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched him squash a piece of bread inside his fist. "Who did then?"
"I don't know," he said, mimicking Fox's classy speech, "but it wasn't me."
She eyed him curiously, wondering where his mother was and why he wasn't with her. "So what are you doing here?"
"Nothing."
Bella spread the Rizzla on the table and ran a thin line of tobacco down its center. "Are you hungry, kid?"
"No."
"You look it. Ain't your mum feeding you properly?"
He didn't answer.
"The bread's free," she said. "You can take as much as you like. All you have to do is say please." She rolled the Rizzla and ran her tongue along its edge. "You wanna eat with me and my girls? You want me to ask Fox if that's okay?"
The child stared at her as if she were a gorgon, then took to his heels and belted it out of the bus.
Mark lowered his head into his hands and massaged his tired eyes. He'd hardly slept at all in two nights and his energy reserves were at zero. "James is certainly the suspect in this case," he told Nancy, "though God knows why. As far as the police and coroner are concerned, there's no case to answer. It's a crazy situation. I keep asking him to challenge the rumors that are flying around but he says there's no point… they'll die down of their own accord."
"Perhaps he's right."
"I believed that at the beginning, but not anymore." He ran a worried hand through his hair. "He's been having nuisance calls and some of them are vicious. He's been recording them on an answerphone and they're all accusing him of killing Ailsa. It's destroying him… physically and mentally."
Nancy plucked at a blade of grass between her feet. "Why wasn't natural causes accepted? Why does suspicion remain?"
Mark didn't answer immediately and she turned her head to find him grinding his knuckles into his eyes in a way that suggested lack of sleep. She wondered how often the phone had rung the previous night. "Because at the time all the evidence seemed to suggest an unnatural death," he said wearily. "Even James assumed she'd been murdered. The fact that Ailsa went out in the middle of the night… the blood on the ground… her normally robust health. He was the one who whipped up the police to look for evidence of a burglar and, when they couldn't find any, they shifted their attention to him. It's standard procedure-husbands are always first in the firing line-but he got very angry about it. By the time I arrived he was accusing Leo of killing her…which didn't help." He fell silent.
"Why not?"
"Too many wild accusations. First a burglar, then his son. It smacked of desperation when he was the only one there. It only needed evidence of an altercation to make him look doubly guilty. He was put through the wringer about the nature of his and Ailsa's relationship. Did they get on? Was he in the habit of hitting her? The police accused him of locking her out in anger after a row, until he asked them why she wouldn't have broken a windowpane or gone to Vera and Bob for help. He was pretty shocked by the end of it."
"But that all happened in the police station presumably… so how does it explain the continuing suspicion?"
"Everyone knew he was being questioned. He was taken away in a police car for two days on the trot and you can't keep a thing like that secret. The police backed off when the postmortem findings came up negative and the blood on the ground was shown to be animal, but it didn't stop the rumor-mongers." He sighed. "If the pathologist had been more specific about cause… if his children hadn't cold-shouldered him at the funeral… if he and Ailsa had been more open about their family problems instead of pretending they didn't exist… if the blasted Weldon woman wasn't so puffed up with her own importance…" He broke off. "I keep likening it to chaos theory. A small uncertainty triggers a chain of events that results in chaos."
"Who's the Weldon woman?"
He nicked a thumb to the right. "Wife of this farmer over here. The one who claims she heard James and Ailsa arguing. It's the most damaging accusation against him. She said Ailsa accused him of destroying her life, so he called her a bitch and punched her. Now he's tarred as a wife beater along with everything else."
"Did Mrs. Weldon see them arguing?"
"No, which is why the police and the coroner rejected her evidence… but she's adamant about what she heard."
Nancy frowned. "She's been watching too many movies. You can't tell a punch by sound… or not against a person, anyway. Leather on leather… a hand clap… it could have been anything."
"James denies the argument ever took place."
"Why would Mrs. Weldon lie?"
Mark shrugged. "I've never met her but she certainly sounds like the type to invent or exaggerate a story to give herself some kudos. James says Ailsa was driven mad by her gossiping. Apparently she was always warning James to watch what he said around the woman because she'd use it against him at the first opportunity." He gave his jaw a troubled stroke. "And that's exactly what she's done. The more distance there is between herself and the event the more certain she becomes of who and what she heard."