Things that move
IN THE FIRELIT parlour, with the rain coming at the windows in contemptuous spurts, Lol became aware of Merrily’s restlessness. She kept edging forwards on the sofa, pushing her hair back, focusing her gaze on something that wasn’t there.
They’d made not love but toast, over the fire and afterwards opened a bottle of English whisky someone had generously left in the church for the vicar last Christmas. Anything to establish a sense of normality, Merrily had said.
Ethel had settled on the rug under the hearth. But normality wouldn’t come in. Merrily stared at her glass, aglow on the coffee table. She’d said she hadn’t drunk alcohol, apart from communion wine and the occasional half of cider, in months and it had gone straight to her head, like a hot wire.
Jane had gone to bed complaining of a vague sore throat.
‘Fifteen drops of echinacea,’ Merrily said, ‘and possibly prayers that it isn’t going to be a cold and she’ll have to cancel the meeting with Eirion on Sunday night.’
‘He’ll come back, if necessary.’
‘You think?’
‘Unless he’s changed into someone entirely different. He’s had time to get to know lots of other girls.’
‘Yes.’ She picked up the glass and put it down again. ‘What did you learn from Darvill today?’
‘I learned… the rudiments of the Nine Man Morris. It’s the one dance they always finish with, whatever the occasion. Not as difficult as it looks. At first. It’s the one that ends with the Man of Leaves dancing a kind of counterpoint until the others turn on him with their sticks and he contrives to meet each one with his own stick and then escapes. We didn’t get that far. It was my first time as the Man of Leaves, but no mask yet.’
‘Are you finding you can do it?’
‘The Man? Well… yes. It’s just about getting into a state of mind. A bit like paranoia.’
‘How’s that?’
‘Don’t know. It’s just how I felt.’
He hadn’t told her what Gareth Brewer had said to him in the darkened cowshed. Just as he hadn’t told her about waking up with aching limbs and having dizzy spells that wore off during the day. On one level it was frightening, on another terrifying. He was scared of going to see superfit Kent Asprey at the Ledwardine surgery and ending up going down the brain-scan road, and scared of what else it might mean. He hoped it was psychological, although he didn’t know what he could do about that either.
Merrily slid the glass across the table.
‘Do you want to finish my whisky?’
He picked up her glass, but he didn’t really want it. He pretended to take a sip and put it down again.
‘Are you still OK about Lucy’s Night?’
‘Sure. In fact that… that’s become the least of it.’
Lol felt his chest tighten.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘I have a problem,’ Merrily said.
She was right. It was one of those problems that made all other problems seem banal and trivial.
Lol picked up the glass.
‘Had you met him before? I mean before the funeral?’
She shook her head.
‘He doesn’t go to church, he’s never been dangerously ill and in need of someone to visit him. Or got married, or anything like that. You don’t see him staggering down the steps at the Swan. You don’t hear him booing and jeering at parish meetings. He isn’t one of those vaguely sinister guys of whom people say – when they’d digging up his garden – that he kept himself to himself. He doesn’t. He keeps himself all over the place.’
‘Have I seen him anywhere? What’s he look like?’
‘There you go. He’s nondescript. Like most ginger-haired people, he has freckles. Which we always think of as friendly. What I’m asking myself is would I be thinking like this if I hadn’t talked to Charlie Howe for the first time in a while, and then Sarah Baxter, who I didn’t know.’
‘What was the first thing that… struck you?’
‘Just… warning bells. The kind that most people wouldn’t notice. You can’t live in an area like this and automatically suspect everybody who hunts or shoots. Although you know you’d never do it yourself, you come to accept that some of them are pleasant, generous people who just love horses and riding. And, and… shooting at things that move. When you hear about someone who’s been shooting wildlife since the age of ten and thinks that’s the best thing about living on a farm… that’s a bit… you know… disturbing, but not particularly shocking. And when you hear this person likes to take holidays in Africa because of an interest in wildlife…’
‘Ah.’
‘Is that a huge leap? He might just enjoy taking photographs.’
‘Doesn’t necessarily mean he goes after lions and elephants.’
‘Even if it’s antelope, it doesn’t make me exactly warm to him. But then I’m just a soppy woman. And he seems like a decent guy. Helping his stepfather, after the death of his half-brother. Helping him with the farm he insists he never wants to take over because farming can ruin your life.’
‘It can. It’s no rural myth that a lot of farmers end up hanging from a cross beam in the barn.’
‘No. It isn’t, Lol, it’s just… is he protesting too much, supported and encouraged by his mother? This is Liam, the guy who on no account ever wants to inherit his stepfather’s multimillion pound farm. Sorry, I’m being… it all comes down to nothing, doesn’t it?’
‘I wouldn’t say it’s nothing… Tell me the Charlie Howe bit again.’
Inevitably recalling the one time he’d taken on Charlie Howe, when Charlie’s daughter, Annie, had been giving Merrily a hard time over the Frome Valley hop-kiln case. This was before they were any kind of item. But you live in hope, Charlie had said, not long before they’d parted, amicably enough. And then, less amicably, Don’t think this a victory for you, brother. Charlie liked to apply the term brother to men he wanted to feel threatened.
‘Smug,’ Merrily said. ‘Full of it, like “Look what I’ve got.” Then snatching it away, like kids do. Sometimes I’ve come close to liking Charlie. But – you know – not that close. I’ve no illusions about him. He was going on about crimes that go unnoticed in the sticks. How people don’t make waves because it isn’t neighbourly. Perhaps because they’re more isolated, don’t have many neighbours. Bottom line: he’s as good as saying Aidan Lloyd’s death was not an accident.’
‘How can he say that?’
‘I said he was as good as saying it. I don’t know what he knows that nobody else knows, and I was really trying not to speculate. It just… things come together in your head like… like a tune you really don’t like but can’t get rid of. I don’t want it to be true. I don’t want any of it to be true. I do want Aidan Lloyd’s death to have been an accident.’
‘Well, yeah, but…’
‘Charlie Howe’s an ex-copper. They don’t start to see things differently when they’re retired. I’m not a copper.’
‘Pretend you are. Just for a minute. Who else might want Aidan dead?’
‘Not his dad. They were getting on well for perhaps the first time, according to his mother. A lucrative deal with Waitrose, apparently more down to Aidan than Iestyn.’
‘Bit of an enigma, though, Iestyn Lloyd.’
‘Good farmer, good businessman. Proud of what he’s done. What he’s got. Always played his cards close to his chest. Not much of a mixer. And – oh yeah, there’s this. His ex-wife is convinced it’s dementia. The reason he’s become even less of a mixer.’
‘Oh.’
‘I’m in no position to know. At the funeral, I heard him say just three words, looking into his son’s grave. He certainly didn’t say anything much to me. When I went to say how sorry I was, he just shook my hand and nodded. I took that to mean he just wanted it all done and dusted, didn’t want gossip. I tried again to ring him – today – but he was in a meeting, as they say. In the end I left a message with his farm manager to say the service for Aidan would now be held at Kilpeck, in memory also of Julie Duxbury, and if he wanted to talk about it, et cetera, et cetera. Had a brief call from Liam Hurst to say he wasn’t sure if his stepfather would be there or not, under the circumstances.’
‘He’d know, of course. If Iestyn was…’
‘Of course he’d know. If you want to talk to Iestyn, you wind up talking to Liam. Who fixed up the quiet funeral? Liam. Who didn’t tell me much to say about Aidan? Who was better placed, in his travels from farm to farm, to put it around that Aidan spent most of his time behind a spliff?’
‘You could definitely be right about that.’
‘Sure, when you put all this together, it still doesn’t amount to much. Aidan Lloyd was still killed by a foreign van driver who skipped bail or whatever. Nobody has suggested otherwise.’
‘You know what I’d do?’
‘Tell Frannie Bliss.’
‘Wouldn’t be the first time. And he’s no friend of Charlie. Or Charlie’s daughter.’
‘He’s got Julie’s murder on his hands. And that garage guy on the Rotherwas. He doesn’t need half-arsed theories dumped on him. Besides…’
‘No… please… don’t start thinking this is going to wind up with me and Gomer nicked for illegal exhumation. It’s gone a long way beyond that now.’
‘I’ll think about it. Wouldn’t have much chance tomorrow anyway. Wedding.’ She looked at him. ‘You look knackered.’
‘Border morris… it’s supposed to be looser, more freewheeling than Cotswold. Actually more like a contact sport. I keep asking myself how I got into all this.’
It was already all a mist. Like asking himself how he came to dig up a grave. Like torturing himself with the insane thought that, because the Kilpeck Morris had not done their traditional walking circle around that same grave after their last dance with Aidan, the remains of his corrupted energy had entered the unremembered dreams of the last morris man to open his coffin.