Authors: Rebecca Tope
‘Your father’s is still in the case under his desk,’ Claudia said coolly. ‘We forgot to tell them about that one. If you’re really sure about this—’
‘Yes, yes, fetch it,’ he snapped to Mary.
‘But … the milking …’ Mary hesitated, the sound of the motor in the parlour still throbbing across the yard. ‘You haven’t finished, have you?’
‘That can wait,’ he blazed at her. ‘Do as I tell you.’ He jabbed his stick into the gap between a sturdy cast-iron beet chopper and a pile of paper sacks full of sand. The low growl of a creature in pain or distress was the response.
Mary lifted her chin. ‘Just the gun, or a box of cartridges as well? And Ma – you’re going to be late for work if you don’t go in about two minutes.’
‘Gun and cartridges,’ Gordon grated, as Claudia squawked and started to leave the shed.
The women went into the house together, separating at the foot of the stairs. ‘Ma?’ Mary stopped her mother as a thought struck her. ‘What were you doing out there in the first place?’
‘What? Oh, I just wanted to have a talk with Gordon, and I knew he’d try to avoid me if I waited until he was in the house. So I decided to tackle him while he was milking and couldn’t get away.’
‘I see,’ said Mary with a frown. ‘Well, don’t tell me about it now. And mind how you drive. I’d better help him finish off that wretched badger, poor thing. Except they’re protected, aren’t they? And surely they’re not really such a threat to the cows? Do you think he knows what he’s doing?’
‘He went mad when he saw it, chasing it
across the yard and yelling his head off. Must be stress over the Sean business, I suppose. Normally, he’d be the first to give the thing the benefit of the doubt. He’s not his normal self at all.’
The gun was kept unloaded in a wooden box in Daddy’s Room. Cartridges were in a drawer of the desk. She had no doubt they’d all genuinely forgotten about it when the police asked about firearms. Gordon had his own newer one, never having cause to use Daddy’s. Mary had been enthusiastic about shooting in her teens and had always taken on the job of cleaning the gun for her father. Handling it confidently, she went back to Gordon and his prey.
‘Torch!’ he ordered, as he loaded the shotgun. Mary hurried back yet again to the house, uncomplaining, her head full of partly-answered questions and slowly growing suspicions.
The badger died quickly, but not before giving a heart-stopping scream of rage and pain, the sound merging into the shattering explosion of the gunshot in the enclosed space. Gordon left it a moment and then thrust his hand into the gap and pulled out the bloodied body. ‘Doesn’t look old or diseased to me,’ said Mary mildly. ‘Seems rather a fine specimen.’ The strong alien smell of the animal filled their nostrils, hinting at a secret other-world existence, disturbing and somehow
shocking. Mary closed her mind to the way it had died.
Gordon threw it out into the yard, with an effort. It was a dense, heavy body. Then he handed her the gun. ‘Time I got back to the cows,’ he muttered.
Heather and Abigail O’Farrell cared no less than Lilah or Den about the solution to the mystery of who had killed their husband and father. But their need to know the truth was diluted by the change wrought on their daily lives. Abigail had ridden home on the school bus, for once, instead of hanging around in town and then cadging a lift from her boyfriend, surprising her mother by arriving at four-fifteen. She came in through the back door, having first visited her collection of animals and topped up their food and water pots.
‘Fallen out with Gary?’ Heather asked, looking up from her chair by the fire and displaying little curiosity.
‘No,’ said the girl with a scowl. ‘Of course I haven’t.’
‘So how come you’re so early?’
Abigail’s shoulders drooped and she flung her schoolbag violently onto the sofa. ‘I had to see to the animals. And I’m starving. Is there any food in the house?’
‘Eggs. Jilly brought them for us. And a few other things. She went to Tesco on the way home from work.’
‘Good for her. Is she going to do that every day?’
Heather shivered, a habitual reaction to difficult questions. Abigail knew better than to assume she was cold. ‘Well?’ she insisted. ‘Is she?’
‘I don’t expect so,’ managed her mother, in a little-girl voice.
‘You’ll have to do it then, won’t you? You’ll have to drive to the shop and buy food. Otherwise we’ll starve. You’ll have to cook it sometimes, as well, because I won’t be here all the time. For a start, I’m going to Glastonbury this year. You and Dad both said I could.’
‘That’s not till June, Abby. I’ll be back on my feet by then.’
‘Are you sure? How many years is it now? I was ten – I know that much. So long ago that I’ve forgotten what it was like to have a normal mother. And now you’ve decided to get better at
last, have you? Great! Pity Dad won’t be here to see it, though.’
‘I hate it as much as you do,’ Heather said, her voice suddenly very much stronger. ‘I often think you don’t believe that. Do you think I’m just pretending to be so weak and tired all the time?’
‘Who cares what I think?’
‘There’s just us now.’ Heather’s tone was decisive, different from her usual whine. ‘We shouldn’t be fighting. I will try to get better, honestly. And I won’t stop you going away with your friends.’ She began to get out of the chair. ‘I’ll even scramble those eggs for us – how about that!’
Abigail watched her mother stand up and fold the rug that had been over her knees. Her hands shook and she shuffled her feet like a woman of ninety. It was dreadful to see, but the girl forced herself to resist the urge to help. There were days when her mother’s back hurt, sending sharp pains in all directions; days when she could hardly lift her arms to change her clothes; days when her head ached and her vision swam. But officially there was nothing actually the matter with her and hadn’t been for so many ghastly years, during which Sean had done all the housework, shopping and cooking and endured the disbelieving quips and comments that his acquaintances were prone to make. Abigail had watched her father distance
himself emotionally from the situation, going through the daily routines like an automaton. He seldom even looked at his wife or spoke to her intimately. His conversation centred on logistics – whether he could go shopping as well as work a full day; whether Abby would be home for the evening meal or whether he’d have to drive a twenty-mile round trip to collect her from Gary’s. No wonder she stayed in Tavistock overnight as often as she dared. Gary’s mum didn’t mind, so long as they weren’t too noisy. She ran an off-licence, which stayed open in the evening, making it easy to keep out of her way. But Abigail had realised that she wouldn’t be able to do that any more. Dad wasn’t there to feed her animals. If she didn’t get home, they’d go hungry.
But on the bus journey home that day, it had not been the rabbits and guinea pigs and badger and birds she’d been thinking about. It had been her mother and how much she wanted to be held in those weak white arms and kept safe.
‘Have they said when I can go and see him?’ she asked without warning. ‘I hope you didn’t think I’d just stop asking, because I won’t. Everybody at school says I should be able to see him.’
‘You haven’t been talking to them all about it, have you?’ Heather turned stiffly to face the girl. ‘How could you do that?’
‘How could I
not
? They all know what’s
happened, and it’s sick to try and pretend it hasn’t. He was my father, for God’s sake. It’s not just some horrible dream.’
‘The teachers should have told your friends not to say anything,’ Heather insisted. ‘Getting you upset for no reason.’
‘No
reason
?’ She stared at her mother in disbelief.
‘I meant …’ bleated Heather feebly. ‘I don’t know …’
‘Anyway, they all say they’ll come to his funeral, if they can get the day off school.’
‘They will not. I won’t invite them. They didn’t even know him.’
‘They did! Gary and Emma and Natalie and Matthew Watson – they all knew him. And some of the others.’
Heather was in the kitchen by this time, talking over her shoulder as she leant exhaustedly against a worktop, drained by the unaccustomed effort. ‘Matthew Watson? Who’s he?’
‘He’s in Year Eleven. His mother’s the milk recorder. He came here when Gordon did that farm walk. The whole Watson family came.’
‘What – the woman who was here on Tuesday when it happened?’
‘I suppose so, yes. And Matthew came here that day it snowed before Christmas. Dad drove him home. That’s how most of them know him.’
‘As a taxi driver,’ Heather scoffed breathlessly.
‘If you like.’ Not waiting to see whether her mother was actually capable of scrambling eggs, Abigail snatched up her discarded bag and clomped doggedly up the stairs to her room. Although it was impossible to admit it to her mother, she had come home expecting to have to prepare the meal, as her father would have done, washing it all up afterwards; then stoking the fire, feeding the cats, taking out the rubbish: all the household jobs that Heather professed herself incapable of performing. How much of the work would the woman suddenly find herself able to do, after all these years?
Instead of laying out her books in preparation for homework, she slumped on the bed, leaning against the pillows and staring sightlessly at the darkness beyond her window. It was true that she’d talked to her schoolmates about her dad’s murder. It was weird for Heather to think she’d do anything else. But she hadn’t told her mother everything her friends had said.
Natalie had started it. Her dad knew Eliot Speedwell and had been talking about the Dunsworthy news over supper. ‘He says there’s always been trouble brewing there,’ Natalie had confided to Abigail. ‘Like a time bomb waiting to go off, he said. But he never thought it would be Mr O’Farrell who got himself killed. Says it must
have been worse than he thought. Says you’d be well off out of it, and you and your mum should try and get a new place to live before anything else happens.’
Abigail had wrapped her arms around herself in the chilly playground. ‘He’s talking rubbish,’ she’d maintained. ‘We don’t want to move somewhere else.’
‘You’ll have to, Abby. The house went with your dad’s job. Besides, you’ll need to live close to shops and stuff, with your mum in the state she is.’
At that point Emma Pearson had joined in. Emma lived on the other side of the school’s catchment area and knew none of the individuals concerned. ‘Aren’t you
scared
to go on living there?’ she enquired, eyes wide with melodrama. ‘I mean – there’s a
murderer
somewhere close by! And with these dark evenings – I’d be
petrified
.’
Abigail blinked. All she’d been able to think of so far, when she’d been able to think at all, was the absence of her father and the urgent need to get a glimpse of his body. She wanted to write him a letter, telling him the things she’d never been able to say, but every time she thought about that, she felt tears prickling behind her eyes, and had to stop. The idea that she had anything to fear came as a complete revelation.
‘So …’ Emma prompted. ‘Who d’you think did it then?’
That was too much for Abby. The dreaded tears had forced themselves into view, not so much from grief for her father as from an overwhelming sense of being under attack. She had shrunk away from her so-called friends, turning her back on them and trudging with bowed head to the girls’ toilets, the only refuge she could think of.
‘What d’you have to say that for?’ Natalie was demanding of Emma, as Abby left them. ‘Tactless cow.’
‘Well …’ Abby heard Emma start to defend herself, before she was even out of earshot.
Sitting on the closed lavatory seat, head in her hands, she’d tried to collect her thoughts. Clearly everyone found the fact that Sean had been murdered irresistibly exciting. They didn’t notice or care that he was just as dead as if he’d had cancer. He was dead at thirty-eight, which even at her age, she knew to be ridiculously young. People often lived fifty years longer than that. Her own great-grandfather had recently died at eighty-nine, and old Granny Hillcock was past a hundred.
But, unlike her mother, Abby wasn’t worried about how they were going to manage, or where they were going to live. Abigail was worried,
more than anything, that people were going to find out just what a wicked man her father had actually been.
The gunshot and simultaneous scream came clearly through the evening air. Abigail heard it from her bedroom and instantly knew what had happened. She flew downstairs.
‘Did you hear that?’ she yelled at her mother.
Heather was standing at the cooker, head cocked, eyes staring. She nodded.
‘Bodgy must have got out,’ Abby howled. ‘I can’t have latched his door properly when I fed him. They’ve shot him!’ Tears were spattered on her cheeks.
‘But—’ Heather couldn’t get the words out fast enough. Her daughter was already running up the farm drive.
Stumbling in the dark, Abigail focused on the lights of the yard and house. The sharp bend in the drive meant the buildings were closer than the distance she actually had to travel. By day, she would have cut across the pasture instead of staying on track. But there was a wire fence and a ditch, impossible to negotiate in the dark.
Finally she arrived, panting and desperate. The milking machine was the only sound. Whirling round, she saw the milked cows slowly making
their way back to their stalls for the night, a light on as always in the old lady’s window.
It was bewildering: surely that scream had rung out only seconds before? How could everything be so quiet and ordinary already? The light mounted on the corner of the milking parlour was illuminating part of the yard, and she moved to the brighter area. The
black-and
-white striped head suddenly seemed to fill the entire frame of her gaze. She couldn’t see anything else, couldn’t understand how she’d missed it till then. Lying a yard or two from the door of a smaller barn, was her precious pet. The blood on the grey chest told the story in an instant. She knelt on the cold mud and stroked the warm fur. The front feet were crossed appealingly, the snout extended, the glazed eyes open. In a moment of hope, she ran her hand down the long curve of the back, to find the crooked break on the hind leg that had given Bodgy his limp. The knob of misaligned bone confirmed his identity, and she wailed aloud her grief and rage.
There was only one person who could have shot him. Without conscious thought, she got up and headed for the milking parlour.
Gordon was applying a unit to the udder of a cow, his back to the steps on which Abigail stood. She picked up a plastic pot of teat disinfectant
and threw it at him. It caught him squarely on the back of the head.
Gordon and Abigail had never before confronted each other in anger. She had always known him as affable but uninvolved: the boss man, powerful and remote, with his restless succession of girlfriends and deepening worried frown as the farming industry seemed set on collapsing on top of him. Sean had warned her not to let him find out about her animals – the badger in particular. Badgers were a universally sore point on every level, and Abby’s insistence on keeping Bodgy as a pet had already caused innumerable arguments.
‘If he shows
any
sign of sickness, he’s got to go,’ Sean told her. ‘And you’re
never
to let him into any of the fields. And if anybody asks you, I never said you could have him. I thought you’d just got a few rabbits and the jackdaw – right?’
She’d nodded a casual assent and carried on as before.
Now Gordon had found the badger and shot him. And he was glaring at her, his face glowing with shock, one hand to the back of his head. He went on staring, as if his eyes were telling him something impossible.
‘You shot my badger!’
she screamed at him before he could utter a word. ‘You’re a monster, a
murderer!
I hate you!’ The words were much
too inadequate for what she was feeling. She jumped down the steps and hurled herself at him, fists flailing. The cows in their herringbone stalls shifted uneasily, unable to turn their heads to see what the noise was about.
Gordon grabbed her forearms in hands that felt like mechanical crushers. ‘Stop it!’ he ordered, his face an inch from hers. ‘Behave yourself.’ His eyes, glittering dangerously, stared into hers. They seemed to be spilling over with pain and anger and a near loss of control. She withdrew, pulling back against his grip, alarmed most of all by the naked suffering she could see in his face. Surely the missile hadn’t hurt his head that much? She hoped it had, of course she did. It would serve him right. But she didn’t like having to watch the consequences.
They stood there for a long moment. A unit detached itself from a cow, swinging out and missing Abigail’s shoulder by half an inch; she flinched. Gordon relaxed his hold on her and took a deep, shuddering breath. ‘Who said you could keep a pet badger?’ he demanded. ‘And how was I to know it was yours? Don’t you have any idea how I feel about the creatures? I had ten reactors to the TB test this morning. Ten!’ he shouted. ‘They’ve all got to be destroyed, and it’s all because of badgers.’