FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) (11 page)

‘So then she left the village and went back home to
Manchester. Did you hear anything of her after that?’

‘No I didn’t. But I was visited
in 1981 by a man calling himself a ufologist – a certain Daniel Baker Forde.’

‘A ufologist?’

‘They study UFOs, apparently. Anyhow, he was in the process of writing a book about alien abduction and heard about the case of Sylvia Tredwin. Intrigued, he came to Petheram to find out more, but of course, everyone closes their doors on him. Everyone except me. We had quite a long discussion, going through some of the things we’ve just talked about, and he says there are themes in Sylvia’s case that has resonance with other cases of alien abduction he’s come across. He told me he would try and get an interview with her.’

‘And did he?’

Brendan Mollett reached into the box-file and took out a hardback book. Its black dust jacket bore a picture of a lone figure standing beneath a beam of light.
Hands from the Sky: Untold Stories of Alien Abduction,
was emblazoned in lurid red letters across the top of the cover. He opened the book at a bookmark that had been slotted in, and handed the book to George.

‘
Published in 1982. He sent it to me. It seems he did get his interview with Sylvia after all,’ said Mollett. ‘The case of Sylvia Tredwin appears as part of a full chapter on alien abduction in the UK.’

George looked to where
Mollett had underlined a segment – half a page – in pencil. It related to Sylvia’s testimony about her abduction, a few more details about her experiences aboard the so-called spacecraft, but not a great deal more than Brendan Mollett had disclosed. It did, however, mention that Sylvia had undergone hypnosis to gather more information. The passage left George wondering what had happened to the results of this hypnosis. In the end, Sylvia Tredwin’s case had been used as nothing more than slim evidence to bolster whatever crank theory this Daniel Baker Forde was trying to pedal.

George didn’t recognise the small-time publisher. He flipped to the back of the book, read the blurb about the author. ‘Is he still around, this D. B. Forde?’

Mollett said he didn’t know. George asked to borrow the book.

‘By all means, but please return it. It forms part of my collection on the history of Petheram,’ said
Mollett. ‘You don’t mean to talk to the author, do you?’ he asked.

‘I might,’ said George. ‘Depends where he is now. If he’s still alive.’

‘Good luck with that,’ he said. ‘This might be useful.’ He produced a business card from the box. ‘OK, so it was 1979 when Forde gave it to me, but it has a contact address and telephone number on it. It’s a start, I suppose.’

George studied the card. ‘He’s a local man. Lived just outside
Plymouth.’

‘He could have moved many times since, so don’t get too excited,’ Mollett warned.
His face fell serious. ‘Have you been to Flinder’s Field recently?’ George said yes. ‘Would you like me to show you exactly where Sylvia was found, and the spot where my father’s body was discovered?’

George eyed him. ‘If you don’t mind…’

‘I regularly visit the scene of my father’s death. Some people call it morbid, but every now and again I like to place flowers there. I don’t know why, I have a real grave I can visit.’

‘Sure, that would be helpful,’ said George.

‘And maybe I could fill you in on the medieval history of the village as we walk.’

George groaned inside. ‘That would be great,’ he said. He licked his lips in an unconscious action. ‘Perhaps you could show me the spot whe
re the burial mound used to be.’

‘No problem,’ he said, beaming. ‘But watch the fairies don’t get you!’

‘About here…’ he said.

George Lee had been watching
Brendan Mollett with interest as he scampered about in the grass, every now and again the man bending double to inspect something in the field. Finally, he looked up and pointed, his red sun-washed face beaming.

George walked casually over to him. ‘So this is where the old burial mound used to be, huh?’ At first glance he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary that marked it out as such.

‘See,’ said Mollett breathlessly, ‘the grass is stunted, not as healthy.’

True, thought George. Now he looked at it he could plainly see Mollett was standing almost in the centre of a rough circle created purely by the relative height
and slight discolouration of the grass. ‘Well I’ll be…’ he said. ‘I can see it now that you point it out.’

‘From the air it stands out like a sore thumb, so I’m told. Yes, this is the site of the prehistoric burial mound, I’m sure of it. This is where Flinder’s daughter was apparently taken by the king of the fairies into his lair, never to return.’

‘Apparently,’ he said disinterestedly. ‘And so where was Sylvia Tredwin found exactly?’

Mollett lowered his brows, shaded his eyes from the sun with a canopy made from his hand, and studied the large field. ‘This way,’ he said, trudging up the gentle incline. George followed. At last Mollett paused. ‘Just about here,’ he declared. ‘Yes, I’m certain of it. This is where Bruce told the police he’d found Sylvia that night, as far as he could tell.’

George approached the spot carefully, almost with trepidation. In his mind’s eye he could see Sylvia standing before him, cold, wet and naked, the storm raging around her. He felt a sudden, inexplicable bond with the woman. Her sad, vacant eyes came back to haunt his thoughts. What had they seen, he wondered? He glanced over in the direction of the site of the flattened burial mound, but ten yards away. Was there a connection?

With fairies? He laughed inside at himself. George Lee, you’re letting your imagination run away with you!

‘So she was found up here, but does anyone have any idea where she was headed when she disappeared?’

‘No one has any idea.’

‘I’m assuming she was asked many times.’

‘And she said she couldn’t remember. Her memory had been wiped, she said, by the men from the spacecraft. She said she remembered being at home, then feeling drowsy, and the next thing finding herself somewhere in the countryside seeing bright lights that came to take her away.’

‘What kind of bright lights?’

‘I don’t know, George. I only know what I gleaned from newspaper reports and that book by Forde, and what little other people said about it at the time, but that was mostly conjecture.’

‘Do you believe she was abducted by aliens?’ he asked.

He shrugged. ‘Not for me to say. I’m a logical man, but there are many things that we simply do not know enough about.
’

Cameron Slade was beginning to assert himself, thought George. He could feel the novelist’s mind ticking over; the plot starting to come together like a spider weaves its web. Single points connected by a multitude of disparate threads that were quickly forming into a complicated story.

‘So where was your father found?’ he said.

Mollett pointed to the tree line ahead, some fifty or sixty yards away. ‘This way,’ he said, walking with purpose towards the dark band of fir trees. They came to an electric wire slung low to keep the sheep out of the wood. Mollett stepped awkwardly over it and pushed his way a few yards into the wood. The smell of warm pine was almost overpowering, thought George, and already the light was subdued. Further ahead, the lines of straight redwood trunks disappeared into a permanent semi-dusk.

‘Here,’ he said definitely. ‘Right here by this tree.’

‘This tree isn’t thirty years old, is it?
I mean, it’s not the one from which the bough broke and killed you father.’

‘Quite right. This part of the forest has been harvested and replanted since.’

‘So how’d you know it was here?’

He bent down and parted the encroaching brambles. ‘There’s a small stone plaque that I was allowed to keep here in memory of my father.’

And so there was, thought George. Little more than a moss-covered stone, carved with a name that was almost indecipherable. Mollett stared at it and gave a sigh.

George looked back to Flinder’s Field. From this position he could plainly see the spot where Sylvia Tredwin had been found. ‘Do you think he saw her that night, saw Sylvia?’ he asked.

‘It’s possible,’ he said. ‘The police determined he was killed on the same night.’

‘Was he involved?’

Mollett stiffened. ‘What do you mean involved?’

Cameron Slade was considering plot devices. ‘Was he involved with her disappearance?’ he asked bluntly. Then he realised what he was implying and cursed Cameron Slade’s lack of tact. ‘Sorry, Brendan, I didn’t mean…’

But it was too late, he could see that. Brendan had taken umbrage with the suggestion and was making his way out of the wood. ‘You’re just like the others,’ he said. ‘I offered you my help, but you’re no better than all those cranks that pedalled their ludicrous theories.’ He stopped at the wire and turned back, his face more disappointed than angry. ‘My father was a very good man, George. A
very
good man. Ask anyone who remembers him. To imply that he was somehow involved in Sylvia Tredwin’s disappearance is not the kind of thing I expected from you.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said again, following him. ‘I mean, it’s just such a coincidence, that’s all…’

‘He was searching for her, as he’d been searching for two weeks. He happened to get caught out in a storm the same night as she was discovered and it’s no fault of his that he was struck by a falling bough.’

‘Here, though, within sight of where she was discovered…’

‘I’m not talking to you, George Lee. Please don’t bother me again.’

And with that he thrust his hands in his pockets and strode away across Flinder’s Field and down the hill towards the village, carefully skirting the site of the burial mound, George observed.

Damn, he thought. George Lee sat down on the edge of the field and waited till Mollett’s form was an indistinct dash disappearing through a gap in the lush hedgerows at the field’s end. He soaked up the quiet, scanning the field and waiting for it to give up its answers. Needless to say, it did not.

You are a fool
, said Cameron Slade.
You could have persisted. It was plainly obvious the man might have said something else if you’d only kept at him. Do you want this novel to be your breakthrough or not? If so you have to be harder, more clinical. You’re useless at times, do you know that?

‘Shut up, Cameron,’ George said shortly, getting to his feet and brushing away grass and dirt from his trousers.

‘I need you to bring your father’s boxes down from the loft for me,’ his mother insisted.

She turned to face him. A fresh batch of condolence cards and flowers had arrived with the afternoon’s post and formed a gaudy backdrop to her obvious misery. ‘Can’t Amelia get them for you?’ George asked. But of course,
he regretted saying it.

‘They’re heavy,’ she said, breathing forcefully down her nose, the only outward sign of her annoyance at him.

‘Of course I’ll get them for you. What’s the hurry? They’re only old bits of paperwork.’

His mother limped to her chair and sat down, rubbing her knee. ‘Your father had an insurance policy
that was due to mature some months ago. It was to be quite a considerable amount. We were going to buy ourselves a new car, perhaps have a nice holiday with the money…’

‘And?’

‘I don’t know what happened to it. And the funeral’s taken up what little I will get from his life insurance. I need the extra money.’

‘Why didn’t you say?’

‘I didn’t want you to worry unduly. I’m sure it’s there somewhere. But there will be papers upstairs in the loft – you know how your father was so organised in that respect. He will have details of the policy stashed somewhere, and as they’re not down here the most likely place is upstairs in the loft. So please have a look through the boxes and see if you can find the papers for me, or bring the boxes down so that I might be able to search through them myself.’

‘Yes, I’ll do that straight away,’ he said.

‘Where have you been today?’ she asked matter-of-factly.

‘Here and there.’

‘With Brendan Mollett?’ she said.

‘Yeah. How’d you know?’

‘Amelia saw you. Where did you go?’

‘He wanted to show me where his father was killed.’

She blinked, stared at him. ‘Oh. His father.’

‘No one ever told me Thomas Mollett had
been killed on the same night as Sylvia Tredwin was found.’

‘That was a long time ago. People forget things.’

The smell of the flowers was at odds with the mood inside the house, thought George. ‘So it seems. We went to Flinder’s Field…’

‘Why would you want to do that?’ she said, her voice suddenly edged with rebuke. She looked away from him. ‘Don’t bother yourself with such trivialities, George. Please have a look for that policy at once.’

‘Sure,’ he said, regarding her with interest. Her fingers were clutching her knee, digging into the folds of her skirt.

‘Your knee hurts?’ he asked.

She removed her hand. ‘The policy, George, there’s a good boy.’

There’s a good boy. Designed to make him feel small. A child. Why did she always have to do that?

You could kill her off,
said Cameron Slade.

Like that’s going to help me, thought George.

In one of your books, moron. Put a slit in her throat. Sever her head…

She’s my mother.

She doesn’t act like one. Have her heart ripped from her chest by a maniac. You’d get a lot of satisfaction from that.

He toyed with the idea. Yeah, maybe, one day…

George Lee clambered up into the loft and turned on the light. I’ll be glad to get my car sorted and get away from here, he thought, facing the wall of boxes and black bin bags with a heavy heart. Jesus, dad, why didn’t you spend some time sorting through this crap before you died? And why keep so much? Surely most of this is useless junk. Junk that, for my sins, I have been ordered to sort out for you.

He pushed his way to a
chair pushed under the small self-assembly desk on which, beside a dusty old telephone, sat a precarious pile of old Radio Times magazines. He sat down and picked up the phone, surprised to hear the dialling tone. Not exactly an office, thought George, but somewhere his father could tuck himself away for a while when he needed to.

The one blessing – if it could be called such – was that his dad was indeed very organised. Almost OCD, in his son’s humble opinion. Even his screwdrivers in his shed were arranged in a rack from smallest to largest, the half-empty paint tins stacked according not only to their colour spectrum, but by make. It was sad then and it was sad now, he thought. But at least the boxes and files were all marked with contents, and even dated. It shouldn’t take him too long to locate the missing policy.

He sighed resignedly and set aside boxes of old gas and electricity bills going back twenty years or more; boxes of wage slips and bills for council tax and water rates. Boring, boring, boring, George thought. Then, half an hour later he came across a box-file marked ‘bank statements’ on top of another marked ‘insurance’. God bless your OCD, dad, he said, dragging it out of the stack and setting on the floor.

He waded through it and came across a number of policies. Car insurance, house insurance, insurance for the dog
, insurance policies that had matured or expired years ago and were no longer relevant. There was a copy of his life insurance his mother had already used to pay for the funeral. Then he finally laid his hands on what he assumed must be the life insurance policy his mother was desperate to find. He took it from its envelope and looked at the details. Sure enough, it had been taken out forty years ago, and true to what his mother believed it had matured eight months ago. There was a letter confirming this. And reference to a cheque for thirty thousand pounds.

Jesus, he thought. That’s no small amount.

So where was it now?

I
ntrigued, George Lee went to his father’s bank statements and sifted meticulously through them. There was a pile of statements relating to an account in the joint names of his mother and father. But when he checked the last statement coinciding with the date the cheque was sent he drew a blank. The cheque had not been paid into the bank. At least, not into their joint account.

He dug deeper
into the box and found a large brown envelope. Inside he found a pile of yet more bank statements. On closer inspection he saw that this account was at a different bank, and in his father’s name only. And sure enough, the cheque had been paid into this account eight months ago.