Markby pulled up outside St Barnabas church, Lower Stovey in mid-afternoon, the following day, Saturday. ‘Wind’s getting up again,’ he observed.
Meredith peered through the windscreen. The tips of the trees surrounding the churchyard bent and swayed. The inn sign of the Fitzroy Arms rocked agitatedly on unoiled hinges. It carried a faded heraldic representation, the most distinguishing feature of which was a small animal of vague species, apparently a rodent. It seemed particularly apt. Norman the landlord had been standing in his doorway, alone and palely loitering, but identifying Markby’s car, he scurried back indoors.
Meredith said, ‘Doesn’t he look like something you find when you turn over a stone?’
Markby grinned. ‘Between the police and one of the village women, the mother of his latest dalliance, Norman’s got good reason to keep his head down. I’ll drop you here and go on to the farm. Tell Ruth I shouldn’t be long.’ He glanced past her towards the church. ‘Why do you want to go in there before you see Ruth?’
‘It’s just something I feel I have to do. I have to go in there and see it’s all right now, just an empty building with no dead bodies except in stone effigy. If I don’t, the last image I’ll have of the interior of the place will include Hester slumped in the pew. I don’t want it to be that.’ She paused. ‘Ruth told me the church was built as an act of atonement for a murder so it’s as if history has come round to repeat itself. You can’t help, somehow, getting an odd feeling when you’re walking round it, outside and inside. Inside you’re under the eye of all those Fitzroys and outside you’re under the eye of the Green Man, up there on the wall. What do you think the medieval masons thought was over there in those woods?’
‘I don’t know what they believed,’ he said a little sourly. ‘But as far as I’m concerned, whatever’s been there or is there, is human.’
But even I, he thought, have had moments of doubt, if I’m to be honest. Superstition has deep roots. We all pretend we’re not affected by it. We’re all just that little bit afraid of what we don’t know.
Meredith had pushed open the door and swung her legs to the ground. As he drove away towards Stovey Woods, he could see her in the windscreen mirror, standing by the lych-gate, watching his car.
A little before the road ran out at the edge of the woods, he came upon a wooden board with the name Greenjack Farm burned on it in pokerwork, at the entry to a turning on the right-hand side. Several cattle in a field beyond the sign were lying down. Folk wisdom believed that meant rain. He glanced at the sky appraisingly as he jolted the short distance down the track to the farm gate.
Twenty-two years. Could it really be so long? What had happened in the meantime? He’d married and divorced. He’d climbed to the rank of superintendent. He’d never become a father but he was the uncle of four, thanks to the efforts of his sister and her husband. He had met Meredith, something which still filled him with wonder as a man who had unexpectedly, and undeservedly, been offered a second chance. So why, when life so manifestly went on, opening new horizons, couldn’t he let go of this old puzzle?
‘Because,’ he said softly to himself, ‘I believe that in some way I can’t yet fathom, it has to do with the death of Hester Millar. Because I feel I’m on the edge of knowing. That I do, in the back of my mind, already know.’
And that other death? That of Simon Hastings? To say nothing of the sense of failure which had dogged him for all those years. Would the former ever be explained or the latter exorcised?
He got out of the car, pushed open the gate and went through, taking care to close it behind him. A black and white border collie dog ran towards him barking but not aggressively.
Markby said, ‘Hello, old fellow!’ and the dog wagged its tail and accompanied him, making figure-of-eight movements around the visitor’s feet as he continued on his way.
There was someone in a former stable building on the right. The doors of the end loosebox had been removed and part of the stone wall knocked out to make a wider opening. It was from in there that he could hear intermittent rattling and a voice uttering sounds indicating physical effort. Curiously, he poked his head through the gap.
Inside it was dark and it took a moment to accustom his eyes to the gloom. Ancient straw was piled in the corners, a hayrack was used as a receptacle for junk, strings of cobwebs dangled from the roof. Pride of place belonged to a Victorian pony-trap, its shafts resting on the ground. It’d once been painted blue and red and although the paintwork was damaged now and dull the trap was still clean. Someone was engaged in buffing it up still more. He was an elderly man, working slowly but doggedly, a cloth gripped awkwardly in a hand with knuckles distorted by arthritis. He looked up as Markby’s shadow filled the opening into the yard and straightened with an effort and another mumbled exclamation. Markby, realising that with the yard light behind him the old man could see nothing but a sinister dark outline, was obliged to step inside and make himself properly visible.
‘Good afternoon,’ he said.
The old man stood, rag in hand, and contemplated him.
‘I seen you before,’ he returned at last. He chuckled and shook the rag at Markby. ‘Yes, I know you. I’ve seen you before.’
‘Yes, Mr Jones, you have, but it was a long time ago. I didn’t think you’d remember me.’
Martin Jones came towards him, head tilted to one side, faded eyes scrutinizing the newcomer’s face. ‘I disremember your name, though. You’ll have to tell me.’
Markby told him and added, ‘It was twenty-two years ago I came here asking about the Potato Man.’
A long sigh escaped old Martin. ‘You still looking for him, then?’
‘Yes, and for the murderer of Miss Millar.’
Puzzlement crinkled the old man’s features. ‘I don’t know her.’
‘She lived in Lower Stovey with Mrs Aston. Mrs Aston used to be Miss Pattinson, the vicar’s daughter.’
‘I remember little Miss Pattinson. She was a pretty little thing. But she doesn’t live in Lower Stovey no more.’
‘Yes, she does, Mr Jones. Only she’s called Mrs Aston now. Miss Millar was her friend and she died, she was killed, in the church here.’
He wasn’t sure he was right in talking to Martin about the death. It was possible his son had decided not to worry the old man with the grim news. But the idea of death was less worrying to Martin than the location in which it had occurred.
‘It don’t seem right.’ Martin waved the cleaning rag back and forth as if wiping away a stain. ‘Not killing that woman in the church.’ He began to look distressed.
Markby decided on distraction and moved nearer to the pony-trap. ‘Going to take it out for a spin?’
At this Martin perked up again, the death in the church immediately wiped from his mind. ‘No. Only pony on the farm now belongs to young Becky and that’s a riding animal. Put him between the shafts and he’d likely bolt away. But it’s a good conveyance. I’m minded to sell it. You never know, someone might want it.’ He gave the nearest wheel another rub with his rag. Then turning his head so that he could see Markby, he added, ‘Becky’s my granddaughter.’
‘You’ve got a grandson, too, I believe, Gordon?’
Martin frowned. ‘I haven’t seen him in a while.’
‘He didn’t come the other day to see his mother? On his motorbike?’
‘He may have done. The days all seem one to me now.’ He squinted at Markby. ‘I remember you, see. You look much the same, you do. Some folks change. I remember the Potato Man and all kinds of things that happened back then. But I can’t seem to keep in my head things that happen nowadays.’ He frowned and as if there was a necessary time delay between absorbing a question and focusing on it, went on, ‘That’s a noisy thing, that motorbike. When I was his age I drove this trap here into Bamford. I didn’t need no motorbike. Kevin don’t like that motorbike either. He don’t like Gordon bringing it in when there’s beasts in the yard.’
‘Where is Kevin now?’ Markby asked.
A shake of the head. ‘I don’t know. I don’t recall seeing him today. He’s likely about the place.’
‘What about Mrs Jones, Linda?’
The old face brightened. ‘She’s a good woman, Linda. She’ll be over to the house.’ He turned back to the trap. ‘You don’t know someone as wants a good conveyance like this ’un, do you?’
Markby said apologetically that he didn’t. The old man nodded and returned to his polishing. It seemed the conversation was over.
‘Nice to have seen you again, Mr Jones,’ he said to him, but got no reply.
If Mrs Jones was in the house she was probably in the kitchen. Markby made his way round to the back door and sure enough, it was open and he could see the figure of a woman moving in the dim interior. He knocked on the door jamb and she looked up in surprise.
‘Superintendent Markby,’ he said quickly and held up his ID.
She came towards him wiping her hands on a tea-towel pinned round her waist and he saw that she’d been making pastry.
‘Never another one!’ she said, not crossly but in a mild amazement. ‘I had a feller here the other day.’
‘Yes, Inspector Pearce. May I come in and have a word, Mrs Jones?’
She shrugged. ‘You can come in. I don’t know what word it is you’re going to have. I’ve told all I know. I only saw poor Miss Millar as I drove past the church. I didn’t see where she was going. My mind was on other things. I do wish, though, that I’d stopped and had a word with her. You never know, it might have made a difference somehow. But then, it might not. You never know about these things, do you?’ She pointed with a floury hand at a chair. ‘Sit down, why don’t you?’
Markby sat down and she returned to the table and rolling out her pastry.
‘I’m just making a few little sausage rolls and fancy bits,’ she said. ‘Cheese straws and that sort of thing.’
‘Would that be for your son’s twenty-first party?’ he asked.
She was startled. ‘How’d you know about that? Oh, right, Gordon came when your inspector was here. Yes, for the party. Gordon was for getting it all from a shop but I don’t reckon to shop-bought sausage rolls. I’ve made the cake and all.’ She pointed proudly at the nearby dresser on which sat a large fruit cake. ‘I’ve got to decorate it yet,’ she explained. ‘I’m going to put twenty-one on it in icing in the middle and pipe “Happy Birthday, Gordon” round the edge.’
‘Very nice, too.’ Markby paused then said, ‘I saw your father-in-law in the barn. He’s cleaning up a pony-trap you’ve got in there.’
She clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth. ‘That old trap. He’s always in there messing about with it. Still, it keeps him occupied. Did he try and sell it to you?’
‘Not really. He just asked if I knew someone who wanted a conveyance, as he called it.’
She laughed. ‘He usually tries to sell it to people. He’s not, you know—’ She tapped her forehead. ‘He’s not gaga, but not quite in working order up there, either. His mind goes along its own road, if you understand me.’
‘I understand. He remembered me, though.’
Her hands stopped working. She rested them on the flat disc of dough and her eyes searched his face in a level, thoughtful gaze.
‘You’ve been here before? I don’t remember you.’
‘It was twenty-two years ago.’
The level gaze faltered. She turned her attention back to her work, picking up a knife and cutting the rounded edges from the pastry so that she was left with a neat square. ‘Surprised he remembered you,’ she said, her voice muffled. ‘He doesn’t remember much.’
‘But he remembers what happened a long time ago better than last week,’ Markby observed. ‘He even remembered why I came here. It was when we were enquiring into the attacks on women in and around Stovey Woods. The Potato Man. Do you remember that case, Mrs Jones?’
The hand holding the knife shook. ‘Barely. Is that what you’ve come about, after all this time? Haven’t you got enough
to do with the murder?’ Her voice was harsh.
‘Enough, certainly. But sometimes one thing leads to another and it can take years for everything to work itself out. You do remember the Potato Man, then?’
She put down the knife and collapsed abruptly into a chair, making it scrape noisily on the flagged floor. ‘I was only a girl, seventeen.’
‘Were you engaged to Kevin Jones then? I met Kevin at the time. I seem to remember he wasn’t married.’
‘We were courting.’ The words were almost inaudible.
‘And you got married soon after?’
She raised her gaze briefly to meet his then dropped it again.
‘I always believed,’ Markby said softly, ‘that the rapist was a local man. I’ve also always believed there were more rapes than were ever reported.’
‘Do you now?’ she said dully. She made a visible effort to pull herself together. ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’
Markby leaned forward, resting his clasped hands on the edge of the table. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing,’ he said conversationally. ‘But many a witness doesn’t come forward because he or she believes what he or she knows isn’t important. Or that he or she knows nothing. Yet when we do find these people and talk to them, it’s amazing what they start to remember.’
Linda Jones made no reply and he went on. ‘I’m not seeking to stir up old pain, Mrs Jones. I’m not seeking to make anything public. But I believe he’s still here in Lower Stovey and I mean to have him yet.’
Something in his voice, a touch of steel, had frightened her and she looked up, shying her head away from him like a nervous beast.
‘Don’t be alarmed,’ he urged. ‘I told you, I don’t mean to make anything public. Just now, you said you wished you’d spoken to Hester Millar when you passed her. It might have made a difference, you said, or it might not. But you did right to tell the police about it. Because whether it makes a difference is something the investigating officers will decide. So many witnesses,’ Markby added with a pleasant smile, ‘try to second-guess us. They tell us what they think we want to know and leave out things they fancy aren’t important.’
She said very quietly, ‘If there were other women who were attacked by that man, women who haven’t come forward ever, it will be because they have spent more than twenty years burying that memory. They wouldn’t be able to tell you anything. None of them saw his face. All they heard was a footstep, a breath and then that horrible earthy-smelling sack—’ She put her hands over her face and, after a moment, took them away.
‘Mr Markby,’ she said, her voice shaking a little but still filled with resolve, ‘I can’t tell you anything. I – I wish you weren’t still looking for him and I can’t say I hope you find him. All it will do is stir up old trouble, memories no one wants recalled. Those women who didn’t come forward, they had their reasons. They were maybe going steady with a young man and were afraid that he might not want them any more, if they were dirtied in that way.’
He hadn’t meant to interrupt at this moment when she’d at last begun to speak, but he couldn’t prevent himself exclaiming, ‘It wasn’t their fault. The women themselves had done nothing wrong.’
‘Does that matter?’ she asked simply. ‘The result’s the same. They might have been told by their families not to go near the
woods, it wasn’t safe. They might have gone there anyway and then been afraid to own up. They’d be blamed because they disobeyed. The family would say, the girl had brought it on herself.’ Her gaze met his briefly, ‘There’s no way out,’ she said. ‘Not living in a small place like this. Clever people living in towns might say differently. But here, well, certainly twenty-two years ago, we all knew each other so well. We all had to live cheek by jowl. No one wanted to believe there was something – someone – so evil here, in Lower Stovey, so they had to believe it was somehow the victim’s fault, do you see?’
He did see. After a moment, Markby said, ‘The young man, the girl’s boyfriend, you spoke of, he might have guessed what had happened?’
She gave a faint travesty of a smile. ‘Oh yes, he might have guessed. And he might have said, so long as no one knew, he’d not speak of it again and I – the girl wouldn’t speak of it and it’d be forgotten.’
‘And has it been forgotten?’
‘No,’ she said quietly. ‘The knowledge is like some kind of growth, like a fungus that you get on rotten wood. It gets bigger and smells fouler and you can’t do anything about it because you’ve agreed to pretend it’s not there. After a while, you can’t speak of it but you’re aware of it, oh, you’re aware of it there at your shoulder all right. I can’t speak of it, Superintendent, I’ll never speak of it.’
Markby’s gaze drifted to the birthday cake.
‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s possible, but I don’t know, no more does Kevin. You see, we were courting at the time and we – well, we were going to get married anyway when I was eighteen so we sort of jumped the gun, if you like.’
‘So that’s another thing between you that you never speak of?’
She gave that sad smile again. ‘How can we, now?’
Markby got to his feet. ‘I’m truly sorry to have bothered you.’ He hesitated. ‘It’s just, I’ve been remembering the Potato Man for over twenty years, too. He’s never left me. I failed to find him. That matters to me. Because I failed to find him after the first reported attack, on Mavis Cotter, other women became his victims. It is, if you like, on my conscience. It’s the thing at my shoulder which doesn’t go away. I’ll follow up any small clue, even now. Goodbye, Mrs Jones.’
As he reached the door he thought he heard a muffled sound behind him, as if she’d spoken, and he looked back.
She had taken sausage meat from a bowl and was rolling it into a long snake.
Without looking up at him, she said, ‘He had a working man’s hands.’
‘You’re sure of that?’
‘Oh yes. And they weren’t young hands, if you see what I mean. They’d calluses on them from years of work.’
Old Martin Jones was still in the barn as Markby passed by but he didn’t look in. He’d no wish to buy a conveyance. He got in his car and drove slowly down the track to where it joined the road. There, instead of turning left up towards the village, he turned right and drove the remaining two hundred yards to where the road terminated and the woods began.
Switching off the engine, Markby sat back and stared through the windscreen at the dark mass of the woods, shivering in the wind. Meredith would be at Ruth’s by now and they’d be waiting for him. He didn’t want to be involved in tea, cake and
chatter. He had to come here again. The woods drew him to them, the woods and their secret. He was right. He’d begun to work it out on the day of Hester’s death, the conviction growing ever stronger, just the details blurred. But what he hadn’t got was any kind of proof. And would he ever get it? Which was worse? Not knowing? Or believing he knew and not being able to prove it? And why Hester? If anyone had died, should it not have been Ruth Pattinson Aston, the local girl?
Markby got out of the car, slammed the door and made for the stile. He climbed over it and jumped down on the damp earth. He sniffed, able to smell the rain. The noise made by the wind in the trees was so loud now, it sounded like the angry roaring of some creature roaming in there. He had to force away the idea, remembering with a wry grimace his words to Meredith, that whatever lurked in the woods had only ever been entirely human. Markby turned up the collar of his jacket and set off down the narrow track between the trees.
When Alan’s car had disappeared from sight, Meredith turned in under the lych-gate and walked towards the church door. It was unlocked. Ruth had been here today. Ruth had courage. Before she went into the porch Meredith turned her head and glanced back at the Fitzroy Arms. No one stood in its doorway now but she fancied something moved behind one of the windows. She didn’t doubt she was being observed and another black mark being put down against her.
She opened the wire door and went down the few steps into the old church. It was cool and smelled a little musty, the odour of dust in old fabric hangings and piled up in nooks and crannies where Ruth’s duster couldn’t reach. By the place where
Hester had been found someone had put flowers in a vase. Hester’s story would become part of the story of this church, related to visitors in years to come.
The Fitzroy monuments in their splendour looked forlorn, forgotten, out of their time and their place. In their boastfulness of a lost grandeur, they put Meredith in mind of Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’. Nothing lasts for ever, she thought, not a great name nor great wealth nor a social system which put the squire securely at the top of the local heap. She tried to imagine Sir Rufus in his periwig, proceeding majestically to his appointed seat between obsequious rows of other worshippers, the majority of whom would’ve depended on him for their livelihoods. Or, to go further back, wicked old Sir Hubert, wheeling and dealing with the bishop, offering a church for a pardon. ‘I can’t say better than that, your grace, now, can I?’ And the bishop, knowing he’d got Hubert on the run, insisting that the new church must be large, splendid, well-appointed. Seen in the context of all the past, Hester’s murder was just one more event to be absorbed by St Barnabas and relegated in time, like the others, to history.
Outside the church again, the wind ruffled her hair and the uncut grass growing long on the untended graves swayed like a hayfield. Meredith walked around to the south side and stared up at the carving of the Green Man. There was a look of malign mischief on his face still, even though the stone was weatherworn. Meredith shivered, perhaps because of the carving, perhaps because the wind pierced the thin fabric of her shirt. Then she heard behind her a sound which wasn’t the wind or the rustling grass, a heavy, laboured breathing.
The hairs on her neck prickled. Meredith turned slowly and
looked around her. The churchyard appeared empty. But she could still hear that eerie breathing. It came from the direction of a mossy tomb. For a few seconds she froze in pure panic. What was in there, trying to get out? Then, pulling herself together, she told herself firmly that it was in the middle of a Saturday afternoon and whatever was making its presence known in this deserted place, it was of this world and no other. Of course the sound didn’t come from the tomb. It came from behind it. Cautiously she picked her way towards the spot.
Behind the tomb, slumped on the ground, his back to the monument, was Old Billy Twelvetrees. His stick lay on the ground beside him. When his eyes fixed on her, he opened his mouth, but then abandoned the attempt to speak, merely pointing feebly at his chest.
He suffered from angina, Meredith remembered Ruth telling her so. She stooped over him, ‘Don’t worry, Mr Twelvetrees. I’ll get help. I’ve got my mobile and I’ll call an ambulance.’
Alarm crossed his face. He waved his hand in a gesture of negation. His mouth opened again and he wheezed, so quietly she had to stoop right down beside him to catch the words, ‘I don’t want – to go to – no hospital.’
‘You can’t stay here, Mr Twelvetrees.’
‘I – got – my pills. All I want – are – my pills.’ His hand dropped to his side and he tapped the pocket of his jacket.
‘Are they in your pocket?’ Meredith hunkered down and prepared to search his jacket pocket. She didn’t particularly relish pushing her hand down among the fluff and bits of sticky rubbish but there was a small bottle. She pulled it out and held it up. ‘These?’
He nodded.
Meredith scanned the wording on the bottle, opened it and tapped out a small white pill on her palm. ‘Just open your mouth a bit, can you?’
She pushed the pill through his withered lips.
The muscles of his face moved as he sucked on the pill. After a bit he wheezed, ‘I can get up now if you—’ Another wave of his hand.
‘I’ll help you. Look, here’s your stick and you can brace yourself against this tomb.’
Somehow she got him upright. A flush of colour had returned to his cheeks. He said, more clearly than before, ‘I get took sometimes like it. I just sat down for a minute because it come on bad.’
‘Perhaps we can get you home, Mr Twelvetrees, and then I can phone your doctor.’
‘I got pills,’ he repeated stubbornly.
‘Yes, I know, but I still think – let’s get you home first, shall we?’
With his stick to support him on one side and leaning heavily on her arm on the other, he progressed slowly to the path and down it, under the lych-gate, out into the street.
‘I live along there,’ he gasped, indicating the left hand row of cottages.
At that moment, Evie appeared in the pub doorway. ‘Summat wrong with you, then, Uncle Billy?’ Her round face wrinkled in alarm.
‘He’s had an angina attack,’ Meredith called to her. ‘Do you know his doctor?’
Evie gaped at her. ‘Oh, it’ll be Dr Stewart.’
‘Can I bring your uncle inside?’
Evie dithered and then stood back as if to allow them into the pub. But Old Billy gasped, ‘I can get to my house.’
‘If you’re sure,’ Meredith told him doubtfully. To Evie she called, ‘He wants to go to his house. Can you call Dr Stewart’s surgery and tell them what’s happened? I think someone should call on Mr Twelvetrees today.’
Evie blinked at her, then turned and went inside, with luck to ring the doctor.
She and Billy made an ungainly progress to his ramshackle cottage. Meredith propped him against the wall by the door and rapped the fox’s head knocker as loudly as she could. No one came.
Old Billy said, ‘Dilys will be about somewhere. You can leave me here.’
‘No, I can’t, Mr Twelvetrees. Haven’t you got a key?’
‘Don’t need no key. Back door will be open.’
Meredith’s gaze searched the row of cottages, seeking some access to the rear. She spied a narrow alley, little more than a wide crack, between the next cottage down and the one after that.
‘Down there, Mr Twelvetrees?’
He nodded. ‘Gimme a minute or two and I’ll be able to get myself round the back.’
She couldn’t abandon him, not in this state. ‘You stay here. I’ll go round and if I can get inside, I’ll go through the house and open the front door for you.’
‘No – Dilys—’ he began and grasped at her arm but let it drop to put a hand to his chest. ‘It’s coming on again.’
Meredith didn’t wait. She ran to the alley and squeezed down it, her shoulders rubbing the rough stone walls of the
cottages to either side. It led between the two gardens and then, sure enough, at the end debouched into a muddy lane which ran past the rear of all the cottages in the High Street. Meredith turned right and found the rear of the Twelvetrees’ home. It was secluded from the lane by a ramshackle fence of corrugated iron sheeting and a wooden door. To it was nailed, as if some ghastly talisman, an old, dried and dirty hairy object which she realised was a fox’s brush. She shuddered. To what purpose had it been fixed here? To keep away what unwished visitation? Avoiding it, she pushed the door. It creaked open and she hurried across the garden which appeared entirely given over to cabbages and smelled pungently of rotting greens. She fumbled at the back door.
It swung open beneath her touch and she found herself in the kitchen. The air there smelled of fried bacon. She called, ‘Dilys?’
There was no reply. She was half-way across the kitchen and almost at the door into the hallway, when her eye caught a jumble of objects on the kitchen table. Despite the urgency of her errand, curiosity made her turn aside to see them better.
All appeared to have been taken from a battered cardboard shoebox which lay to one side. The objects had been laid out in a kind of pattern as if some human version of a bower-bird had been setting out its hoard of bright-coloured garnerings to lure a mate. There was a string of beads. It had broken and the ends roughly reknotted. Beside it lay a very nice male signet ring, another ring with a large fake stone, a pearl earring, a woman’s wristwatch, a copper bangle and a blue plastic hairslide shaped like a butterfly.
The kitchen seemed unnaturally quiet. Meredith picked up the signet ring. It was heavy, expensive. On the shield was engraved, in Gothic lettering, SH.
She put it back gently, as if it might break. As if in a trance, she walked down the hallway and pulled open the front door. Old Billy still stood where she’d left him, propped against the doorjamb.
‘You’d best come in, Mr Twelvetrees.’ Her voice sounded distant, not her own.
She took his arm and led him into the hall and after a momentary hesitation, into the tiny parlour to the right, which gave on to the street.
Old Billy subsided into his armchair and leaned back with a sigh.
‘I’ll be all right now. You don’t need to stay. Dilys will be here in no time. She won’t have gone far.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘I’m sure!’ He raised the stick and gestured towards the door. ‘You go on! Our Dilys, she won’t be far away, just nipped out to see a neighbour most like. I’ve got me pills. I’m all right now, sitting here quiet.’
She left him, going out of the front door and pulling it shut behind her. A glance up and down the street showed no one but an elderly woman, unknown to her. She didn’t think that could be the absent Dilys who, Alan had told her, was Old Billy’s daughter. That old dame was at least seventy. The woman went into another cottage and shut her door. So that was that. Dilys cleaned for Ruth Aston. Could she have gone there?
Meredith wrestled with conflicting responsibilities, her mind reeling. In Old Billy’s interest, she ought to go back to the pub
to tell Evie that she’d left Mr Twelvetrees alone and check that the woman had called the doctor. But time was of the essence. She knew that the person she wanted to see was Alan and that it was imperative she see him as soon as possible. She had to get him back here before anyone else came, Dilys, Evie, Dr Stewart, anyone. Any of them might tidy away the objects on the kitchen table. Alan had to see them there, just as they were.
He’d driven to that farm, Greenjack. Meredith fumbled in her bag for her mobile phone and rang his. For some reason she was unable to make contact. She pushed the phone back in her bag and thought furiously. If she walked in that direction, towards Stovey Woods, she’d probably meet him driving back. Meredith set off down the street.
Soon she’d left the houses behind and the track led on between the drystone walls towards the woods, dark and hostile on the near horizon. The wind ruffled her hair. It carried a few spots of rain on it. Meredith stepped out briskly.