Authors: Rebecca Tope
‘Wouldn’t want to worry us. Not that we’d worry, really. Us knows he’s done nothing wrong.’
‘But he was Sean O’Farrell’s friend?’
She smiled thinly. ‘Funny pair, you be thinking.’
‘Hard to see what they had in common, maybe.’
‘Plenty they had in common,’ she flashed. ‘Growing up together all those years, like brothers at one time.’
A missing jigsaw piece suddenly became apparent. ‘When exactly did Sean come here?’
‘Born right here,’ she said. ‘His mum and dad had the cottage, and Old Man O’Farrell before them. Sean’s granddad, he was.’ She let her gaze wander to the untidy garden beyond the window. ‘None of them made old bones, in that family. Least of all Sean,’ she added with a grimace. ‘What be poor Heather a’gwayne to do now?’
‘And Abigail? Does she talk to you? She seems a rather lonely girl.’
‘Abby be fine, with her beasts and that boyfriend. ’Tis Heather’s the worry.’
‘How did Abby get on with her father?’
Jilly smiled again and Den could see a revelation coming. ‘Do ’ee mean her father – or Sean?’
Two years earlier, Den would have quivered with excitement at the implication. He would have snatched at the fact of a child fathered outside the marriage. But now he knew better. If Jilly Speedwell was in on the secret, it was likely to be a leaky one.
‘I meant Sean,’ he said coolly. ‘But if you have information about the girl’s parentage, I’d be happy to hear it.’
She kept her eyes on the garden, speaking slowly. ‘Funny the way time changes things. Heather was a lovely young thing, outside all
day, singing and laughing. Must’ve been high summer when she fell pregnant with Abby. Us knew it could never have been Sean – more like a brother than a husband to her. Happy enough, seemingly, and he took the little one as his own.’
‘So …?’
‘Us all believed ’twas Gordon’s.’
How dim-witted Den felt he’d been, not to see it coming. Who else, after all, could it have been? A roll in the summer hayfields, the young master and wife of the impotent herdsman, starved of physical affection and doubtless happy to have her own baby. An image of the scene, with Lilah’s face and body in place of Heather’s, filled his mind. Sixteen years or so had done little to change Gordon Hillcock: even in the grey stretches of January he was at it, indulging his appetites on young women who by rights belonged to somebody else.
He lost all will to continue the interview and took his leave a few minutes later, unable to shake himself free of thoughts of Lilah. He had little doubt that she was intent on protecting Gordon Hillcock from prosecution for murder – or that she had every chance of success. She had three months’ start on the police; she knew his temperament and at least some of the background of Dunsworthy and its residents. He wondered how far she would go. Would she merely content
herself with attempting to obliterate any indicators of Hillcock’s guilt, gossiping to police officers and sending anonymous letters? He didn’t think Lilah fully understood how widespread was the belief in Gordon’s guilt. Mrs Speedwell had had no hesitation in fingering him as the killer. Try as he might, Den could find little consolation in this.
His interview reports were getting scrappier by the day, despite the flurry of new leads that had been made following the arrival of the anonymous note about the Watsons. Danny Hemsley wasn’t slow to point this out when Den returned to the station. ‘It’s worrying me, Cooper, I don’t mind telling you. How about we start a new tack? Find the unanswered questions, right?’
‘Unanswered questions,’ echoed Den, dully.
‘Points of contention, things a defence lawyer would home in on. Like, why did O’Farrell struggle into the barn when he only had seconds to live?’
‘I thought we’d covered that one, sir. He was trying to get to the phone in the office. It’s the quickest way.’
‘Tunnel vision, Cooper. Throw some more guesses at me.’
Den obliged, forcing his thoughts into lateral directions. ‘He wanted to get to Hillcock and the recorder. One or both of them. He was trying to get away from somebody in the yard. He was
afraid of being trampled by the cows. He had something in the barn or office or parlour that he absolutely had to get to before he died. He was cold. Quite frankly, sir, I can’t see we’re ever going to know for sure.’
‘It helps, though, don’t you see? It gets us inside the scene.’ Hemsley jotted down Den’s answers. ‘For instance, this first one assumes that milking had already started, or was just about to start. But if that was so, the cows would already be standing around the yard, more or less filling it to capacity. Wouldn’t it make a major disturbance if the attack happened in the middle of a great herd of cattle? Doesn’t that have a bearing on the time it happened? Wouldn’t you say it had to be before the cows were brought out of their stalls and into the yard?’
‘Not necessarily,’ Den argued. ‘If two people were fighting in the yard with them, they’d just back away and clear a space.’
‘Would they? Are you sure?’
‘They would if one of them was O’Farrell,’ Den said confidently. ‘They were scared of him.’
‘Says who?’
‘Mrs Watson, Mrs Hillcock, Mary. Even Granny Hillcock said he was a nasty sod – though we can’t be sure she’s got the right man.’
‘What about Hillcock?’
Den thought back to the milking session he’d
observed. ‘They’re a bit nervy with him, too, but it looked as if he could gentle them if he tried. I guess O’Farrell ruined their trust in people generally.’
‘So whoever went into the yard, they’d shy away?’
‘I’d say so, yes.’
‘Which I imagine – as I said before – would make quite a commotion. Clattering feet, a few raised voices, that sort of thing.’
‘Raised bovine voices, you mean, sir?’ The picture conjured by the DI’s words was accurate from Den’s own rather limited experience. A herd of a hundred cows in a confined space, trying to avoid a fracas in their midst, would be difficult to ignore.
‘So if an outsider killed Sean in the yard, with the cows, during milking, Hillcock and Mrs Watson would almost certainly have noticed something going on. And unless they’re in a conspiracy together, it seems that this was not the case. Therefore, O’Farrell died before milking started, which was just after three.’
‘And that would put Mrs Speedwell in the clear,’ Den realised. ‘She didn’t get home till quarter to. Hardly time to get up to the yard and do the deed.’
‘But it leaves
Mr
Speedwell very much in the picture.’
Den sighed wearily.
‘There’s another unanswered question,’ Hemsley pressed on. ‘Why didn’t the attacker make any effort to hide the body?’
‘We’ve been over that as well, sir. Assuming we’re right that it wasn’t dragged into the barn, then it seems most likely that the killer didn’t realise what he’d done. And if it had been dragged or carried, the attacker would have got blood all over him, as well as needing to be pretty strong. As I see it, Sean was left in the yard to sort himself out and consider his evil ways.’
‘Or the killer was interrupted?’
‘Could be,’ Den agreed.
‘The weapon. Thrown down in a barn across the main yard from where the attack took place. How did it get there? Run that past me, will you?’
‘There’s a gate at the end of the railings, just before the biggest of the cowsheds, that opens onto the main yard. The attacker would have opened it, gone through, closed it behind him, crossed the yard and tossed the fork in through the first doorway he came to.’
‘Passing on his way cars and possibly people in the yard.’
‘Only Mrs Watson’s car. And if she saw him, she wouldn’t think anything strange of him carrying a fork from one side of the yard to
another. But she would have been in the office anyway, so there wasn’t much risk of her seeing him.’
‘Why bother to do that? Why not just leave the thing lying in the yard?’
‘Habit. A tidy mind,’ Den suggested. ‘Or – obviously – nobody would leave a sharp tool where cows were going to be milling about in a few minutes’ time. It would be second nature to put it somewhere safe. Ted was going to need it next day for the silage. He was having trouble without it, after Forensics brought it in as evidence.’
‘Why not clean the blood off it first?’
‘In too much of a hurry. Worried that somebody would notice – cleaning a fork isn’t a very normal activity unless it’s part of a wholesale exercise where you do all the tools together. Perhaps he meant to go back and do it later, when nobody was about.’
‘None of this sounds like Mrs Watson, does it?’ Hemsley concluded. ‘That’s what you’re wanting me to think, right?’
Den took a deep breath. ‘Okay, say it
was
her. She could have met Sean in the smaller cow shed, started a row with him there, snatched up the fork and chased or followed him into the gathering yard, lunged at him with the sharp end and then taken the fork across the big yard, because she’d
have the same instinctive reasons for not leaving it lying around.’
‘Do we know where the fork was normally kept? Where would it have been to start with?’
Den had to think about this. ‘Not in the shed where we found it, that’s for sure,’ he concluded. ‘We asked Hillcock, didn’t we? What did he say?’
‘Cooper,’ said the DI warningly. ‘You have to be on top of that sort of detail.’
‘By the silage pit,’ Den remembered. ‘There’s a corner where you can stand things like that. I saw it when we went to see Speedwell in the yard. That would be the obvious place.’
‘And how far is that from the gathering yard?’
‘Ten or twelve yards. He’d collect the silage in the scoop on front of the tractor, and tip it over for the cows to reach. Then he picks up bits that had dropped in the wrong place, with that fork. It’s difficult to explain,’ he tailed off.
‘But it would be in easy reach, and might possibly have been left closer to the gathering yard than you think?’
Den nodded uncertainly. ‘But there’d be no reason for Mrs Watson to be out there. She only goes into the office and the milking parlour.’
‘Maybe she needed to have a pee. I don’t expect there’s an outside privy?’
‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ said Den.
‘So she’d creep into a corner of one of the
sheds or barns for that, don’t you think? Then if O’Farrell saw her, he might have said something he shouldn’t and she went for him.’
Den frowned sceptically, unable to find much in that idea to persuade him. They played with a few more hypotheses, putting layers of detail onto two or three alternative scenarios, until Hemsley called a halt.
‘Enough,’ he said. ‘Now what about these badgers? Rumour has it that O’Farrell indulged in baiting and/or lamping, that much seems certain. And yet at the same time he allowed his daughter to keep a pet one in the back garden. So what was going on?’
Den had little difficulty with this one. ‘People kill rabbits, but keep tame ones,’ he pointed out. ‘It might not be logical, but it’s not unusual. And I get the impression that young Abigail could have pretty much anything she wanted. Plus it was one in the eye for the boss. Sean would probably have liked that.’
‘But aren’t badgers meant to be spreading TB like wildfire amongst dairy cattle? Wouldn’t O’Farrell have to be crazy to let one live on the farm like that?’
‘So long as Hillcock didn’t know, and it never got near the cows, he’d be okay with it. Hillcock never went down to the cottages, and certainly not into their back gardens. Mrs O’Farrell made a special point of telling me that.’
‘Why didn’t he?’
‘I don’t know. No need to, I guess. He phoned them from the house or his mobile if he had anything urgent to say.’
‘Hmm.’
‘There’s one funny thing, though. The Speedwell front garden is full of junk, which was part of a dodgy scrap metal scheme that Sean and Eliot were into. You’d expect Hillcock to have something to say about that. It’s a real eyesore.’
‘Not relevant,’ Danny dismissed. ‘Now – the big one. Sean’s sex life, or lack of it. What does this say about his relations with his wife? Especially given this new stuff about the girl being Hillcock’s?’
Den trod carefully. ‘All I can come up with is that it wouldn’t be likely to sweeten things between O’Farrell and Hillcock.’
‘But why would it come to a crisis now, after all these years?’
‘Danny!’ Den burst out. ‘It keeps coming back to Hillcock. Can’t you see that?’
‘Don’t call me Danny,’ said Hemsley automatically.
‘Sorry,’ said Den, frustrated, feeling more than ready to terminate the session and make himself a large mug of coffee. ‘Did we just get anywhere, do you think?’
‘I’m not sure we did,’ Hemsley scanned the
notes without much sign of hope. ‘But it never hurts to get the facts aired one more time. Especially when we’re almost a week into the investigation and have bugger all to show for it.’
‘I’ll go and get some coffee,’ said Den.
Abigail O’Farrell felt swamped. She rode the bus to school that Monday in a seat by herself, her face pressed against the cold glass, her eyes fixed on the muddy verges speeding past below her. It was her favourite thinking time, when she went over old memories, or dreamt about the future. Since last Tuesday she’d had more than enough to think about: the way people were behaving, the changes that she was going to have to face. Everyone had guilty secrets, even if they pretended they hadn’t. She herself certainly had secrets – and not just the one she said she would keep on Gary’s behalf. He had trusted her enough to show her the puckered purple scar on his foreskin, the result of catching his willy in the zip of his jeans when he was eight. ‘Will it stop you from having sex properly?’ she’d asked in an awed voice.
‘Hope not,’ he said, with a mixture of pride and brave endurance that she found deeply lovable. ‘I’m lucky it didn’t have to be removed altogether.’
Well, it was a leaky sort of secret, that one.
Gary’s mum had told loads of other mothers about it, and there were people at school who could remember it happening. The exciting part was that Gary had let her have a look at it, and it did help her not to think about the much bigger secret; the one that nobody else but her knew about. The one that might change everybody’s mind about her dad, even if he was dead and there was loads of sympathy for Mum and her, being left on their own after a horrible murder. Everyone knew how kind Dad had been, making sure Mum was okay – doing all the shopping and cleaning, as well as his job which sometimes took him ten hours a day, as he never tired of saying. Even if he was sometimes a bit hard on the cows – and she’d seen some of that herself when she was younger – and if he had some fairly unpleasant friends like Fred Page, who looked at you as if he wanted to do something disgusting to you – well, they all thought Dad must be okay because he was such a good husband and father.