Upon A Dark Night Page 10

  She tugged her hand away. ‘For God’s sake, will you all stop treating me like a four-year-old?’

  She was angry with herself as much as them, playing the spoilt brat and insisting they treated her with respect. She felt guilty giving bad reactions to this well-meaning sister who wanted to take her over. There was no way she could explain the degree of alienation seething within her.

  She asked, ‘Where do I live?’

  ‘Hounslow,’ said Doreen. ‘Quite close to Mummy. We’ll take you back in a day or two. Now that Jerry’s here, he’d like to see a little more of Bath. It is his holiday.’

  ‘Tell me the address. I’m perfectly able to travel.’

  ‘We wouldn’t hear of it,’ said Doreen, taking a more assertive line. ‘What if you had another blackout? Look, I know you want to be independent. So would I. We’re like that, aren’t we, you and I? Believe me, Roz, you need someone to keep an eye on you, at least until we know you’re back to normal.’

  ‘Doreen’s right,’ Imogen weighed in, in her role as social worker. ‘There’s nothing like the support of one’s family.’

  Doreen said, ‘You must speak to Mummy as soon as possible and put her mind at rest. We can ring her from the place where we’re staying.’

  Imogen said, ‘You can call from here. There’s a payphone downstairs.’

  ‘Let’s do it now,’ said Doreen.

  All this had happened at a pace too fast for Rose – or Roz -to take in. She didn’t yet feel comfortable with this stepsister who wanted to take her over and she balked at the prospect of phoning a mother she didn’t recognise. Naively she had imagined being reunited with her family would solve her problems, restore the life she had been severed from, but she was discovering that she didn’t want to be claimed by these people she still regarded as strangers. She needed more time to adjust.

  She said to Doreen, ‘You call if you like. I’d rather not speak to her yet’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’d feel uncomfortable and it would show in my voice. You can tell her what happened. Say I haven’t got my memory back yet.’

  Doreen’s expression tightened. ‘I think you ought to speak to her.’

  Imogen was nodding.

  Ada backed her friend. ‘Jesus, if it was my Mum, all she’d want to know is that I was alive and kicking. But if I sounded like a zombie on the end of the line, she’d go bananas.’ She told Doreen, ‘You cover for your sister, love. Phone’s on the wall at the bottom of the stairs. You can’t miss it.’

  Ada’s air of authority succeeded. Doreen Jenkins sighed, shrugged and left the room.

  Ada asked Rose, ‘What’s up, kiddo? You ought to be over the moon. Don’t you take to your long-lost sister?’

  ‘That’s immaterial,’ said Rose.

  ‘In other words, she’s a right cow.’

  ‘Ada, I didn’t say that!’

  ‘The trouble is, we can’t choose our families,’ said Ada. ‘We’re stuck with the beauties we’ve got. I can talk. The Shaftsbury mob could teach the Borgias tricks. You managed to escape yours for a bit, and now they’ve caught up with you.’

  Imogen, as usual, tried to compensate for Ada’s outspokenness. ‘I found her pleasant to deal with, and there can’t be any doubt. She’s made a special trip from London to find you.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘The photos clinch it, don’t they?’

  Rose folded her arms. ‘It’s hard to put into words the way I feel. I’m sure she’s doing this from the best motive. I suppose I’m panicking a bit. Or pig-headed. Part of me doesn’t want to be taken over. You see, I feel perfectly well in myself. I could manage. I can manage, here, with Ada.’

  ‘What you’re overlooking,’ said Imogen, with a hard edge to her voice, ‘is that you’ve been managing with the help of Avon Social Services. That was fine while you were homeless and without family. Now, you see, the rules have altered. I can’t let you stay here when your own people are willing to take you back.’

  ‘You’re kicking me out, in other words.’

  ‘I’ve got my job to do.’

  ‘Tonight?’

  ‘Why put it off until tomorrow? Your sister’s offering you a comfortable room somewhere.’

  Ada put a beefy arm around Rose’s shoulders. ‘Life’s a bummer. Like we said, petal, whatever, wherever. Let me know when you get home. Directly, right?’

  Rose nodded.

  ‘In fact, I’ll give you one of my cards.’ Ada went to the cupboard beside her bed.

  ‘Your said Imogen.what?’

  Ada had been full of surprises from the start, but the idea of a homeless woman having cards to hand out was the most incredible yet.

  The expression on Imogen’s face was priceless.

  ‘You can have one, too, if you like,’ Ada said. ‘I’ve got about two thousand.’ What she had was a handful of postcards. ‘Aerial views of Bath. Lovely, aren’t they?’

  Imogen said, ‘Ada, you’re the limit’

  Ada gave her a disdainful look, ‘They’re legit. I got them out of a skip, sweetie. They’re all fuzzy. Some cock-up with the printing. They were being chucked out. How many do you want?’

  Imogen shook her head.

  Rose told Ada, ‘You’ve been more than a good friend. You’ve kept me sane.’

  ‘Send me one of these as soon as you get back to Hounslow, right?’ said Ada, putting a bunch of them in her hand. ‘And when you’ve got yourself together again, come and see me. I’ll be here if I’m not doing another stretch – and if I am I’d still appreciate a visit.’

  Rose couldn’t speak any more. She picked a Sainsbury’s bag off the back of a chair and started putting her few possessions into it.

  Twelve

  The farm ‘at Tormarton’ turned out to be closer to Acton Turville than Tormarton, Diamond only discovered after cruising the lanes for three-quarters of an hour. This was a corner of the county he seldom visited, unless you could call racing through on the motorway a visit. On this bleak October afternoon, contending with patches of mist, he concluded that if any stretch of countryside could absorb a three-lane motorway without appreciable loss of character, it was this. The two people he met and asked for directions said they couldn’t help. Locals both, they hadn’t heard of a farmer called Gladstone. When eventually he found the farm (luckily spotting a police vehicle at the end of a mud track) he had no difficulty in understanding how the body had lain undiscovered for up to a week. The stone cottage looked derelict. The outbuildings were overgrown with a mass of soggy Old Man’s Beard, its hairy awns, silver in high summer, now as brown as if the Old Man smoked sixty a day.

  The remoteness of the place meant that he could not in all conscience tell Wigfull that he merely happened to be passing. Instead he gave no explanation at all when he hailed the party of diggers.

  ‘Any progress, John?’

  If Dracula himself had stepped out of the mist Wigfull could not have been more startled.

  ‘I said how’s it going?’

  ‘What are you…?’

  ‘Is there any progress?’

  ‘If shifting half a ton of soil is progress, yes,’ Wigfull succeeded in saying.

  ‘But you haven’t found anything?’

  ‘If you insist on standing there,’ said Wigfull, ‘you’ll get your shoes dirty.’ It sounded more like a threat than a warning. He was more sensibly clad than Diamond, in gumboots and overalls.

  Diamond took a step back. Perhaps to make the point for Wigfull, one of the men at work in the hole deposited a chunk of soil where the big detective had been standing.

  Pre-empting the next question, Wigfull said, ‘It’s an exploratory dig. We’re keeping an open mind.’

  ‘Sensible. How deep do you intend to go?’

  ‘When we come to the end of the loose stuff, we stop.’

  ‘Sounds as if you’re almost there.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Alerted to the fact that this was the critical point in the excavation, Wigful
l bent over the hole and instructed the two diggers to take care.

  Diamond, too, stepped closer and peered in. The depth was a little over four feet. ‘Difficult to see. You want some lighting on a day like this.’

  Wigfull didn’t respond.

  The spades were definitely scraping on the bedrock. One of the diggers climbed out and the other asked for a rake. It was increasingly obvious that nothing so bulky as a corpse was buried there. Diamond stepped away from the trench and took a few paces across the field. ‘There’s another hole here, by the look of it,’ he reported.

  ‘We know,’ said Wigfull with ill-concealed annoyance. ‘There are three, at least.’

  ‘I’ll see if I can find some more for you.’ Why, he thought after he’d spoken, did Wigfull bring out the worst in him?

  In a penitent mood, he took a slow walk around the boundary of the late Farmer Gladstone’s land, in truth not looking for more evidence of recent digging. The methodical Wigfull could be relied on to find anything suspicious. Instead, he mused on the purpose of the holes. If they weren’t used to bury things, what were they for? A search? There was the stock story of the recluse who leads a frugal life and secretly has a hoard of money that he buries. Had someone heard of the old man’s suicide and come shifting earth on the off-chance? Three trenches suggested rather more confidence than an off-chance.

  The neglected field was a conservationist’s ideal, the hedge bristling with small trees and shrubs, with mud-slides showing evidence of badgers along the far side. He stopped and looked over the hedge at the deep ploughing that presumably indicated someone else’s land. What had the neighbours to say about old Gladstone? he wondered. And had they noticed anyone digging on his land in recent days?

  Having toured the field, he approached the house, which was open. The SOCOs had long since collected all the forensic evidence they wanted, and now it was in use as a base for the police. Some attempt had been made that afternoon to get a fire going in the range. He used the bellows on the feebly smouldering wood and soon had a flame, though he doubted if it would give much heat to the kettle on top. The range stood in what must once have been the open hearth, and the section where they had started the fire was intended for coal, but he didn’t fancy exploring the outhouses in search of some.

  Here, as the fading afternoon gave increasing emphasis to the flickering fire, he felt a strong sense of the old man shuffling around the brown matting that covered most of the flagstones, seeing out his days here, cooking on the range, dozing in the chair and occasionally stepping outside to collect eggs from the hen-house, or to wring a chicken’s neck. His bed was against the wall, the bedding amounting to a pair of blankets and an overcoat. Thanks to the work of the SOCOs, the place was very likely cleaner at this minute than it had been in years.

  The chair – presumably the one the body had been found in – stood in a corner, a Victorian easy chair with a padded seat, back and wooden armrests. He saw the chalkmarks on the floor indicating the position it had been found in. There, also, were the outlines of the dead man’s footprints and of a gun.

  A shotgun is not the most convenient weapon for a suicide, but every farmer owns one and so do many others in the country, so the choice is not uncommon. Methods of firing the fatal shot vary. Gladstone’s way, seated in the chair, presumably with the butt of the gun propped on the floor between the knees, and the muzzle tucked under the chin, was as efficient as any. With the arms fully extended along the barrel, both thumbs could be used to press down on the trigger. The result must have been quick for the victim, if messy for those who came after. Diamond looked up and noticed on the ceiling a number of dark marks ringed with chalk. He recalled the rookie constables in their face masks assisting the police surgeon and was thankful that his ‘blooding’ as a young officer had not been quite so gruesome.

  For distraction, he crossed the room to a chest of drawers and opened the top one. An immediate bond of sympathy was formed with the farmer, for the inside was a mess, as much of a dog’s breakfast as Diamond’s own top drawer at home. This one contained a variety of kitchen implements, together with pencils, glue, a watch with a broken face, matches, a pipe, a black tie, some coins, a number of shotgun cartridges and thirty-five pounds in notes. The presence of the money was interesting. This drawer, surely, was an obvious place any intruder would have searched for spare cash. The fact that it had not been taken rather undermined his theory that the digging outside had been in search of Gladstone’s savings, unless the digger had been too squeamish to enter the cottage and pick up what had been there for the taking.

  The lower drawers contained only clothes, so old and malodorous that the sympathy was put under some strain. He closed the drawer, blew his nose, and looked into the cottage’s only other room, a musty place that could not have been used for years. It was filled with such junk as a hip-bath, a clothes-horse, a shelf of books along a window-ledge, a wardrobe, a roll of carpet, a fire-bucket and other bits and pieces surplus to everyday requirements.

  Diamond sidled between the hip-bath and a bentwood hat-stand to get a closer look at the books, all of which had suffered water-damage from a crack in the window behind them. They told him little about the man. There was a county history of Somerset and two others on Somerset villages; an Enquire Within Upon Everything, several manuals on farming; one on poultry-keeping; and a Bible.

  When he picked the Bible off the shelf, the cloth cover flapped away from the board where the damp had penetrated. A pity, because it was clearly an antique. In the end-paper at the front was inscribed a family tree. It went back to 1794, when one Gabriel Turner had married Ethel Moon. Gabriel and Ethel’s progeny of nine spread across the width of two sheets and would surely have defeated the exercise if a later architect of the tree had not decided to restrict further entries to one line of descent, ending in 1943, when May Turner married Daniel Gladstone in St Mary Magdalene Church, Tormarton.

  So far as Diamond could discern from the handwriting and the ink, all the entries had been made by two individuals. It appeared that the originals had been inscribed early in the nineteenth century, with the object of listing Gabriel and Ethel’s family; and the later entry was post-1943, to provide a record of May’s link through the generations with her great-great-grandparents. Daniel, presumably, was the suicide victim.

  Sad. Now the old farmer would probably be buried in the church where he and his bride had married over half a century ago. Even more touching, the Bible also contained a Christmas card, faded with age, and inside it was a square black and white photo of a woman with a small girl. A message had been inscribed in the card: I thought you would like this picture of your family. God’s blessing to us all at this time. Meg.

  Odd. He turned back the pages to check. The writing was clear. Daniel Gladstone had married May Turner, not Meg.

  A second marriage? If so, the message seemed to suggest that it was a marriage under strain.

  Hearing someone enter the cottage, he replaced the Bible and its contents where he had found it. John Wigfull heard him and looked through the door, his hair and moustache glistening from exposure to the mist.

  ‘Digging around?’

  ‘I thought that was the order of the day,’ Diamond answered.

  ‘We’ve given up. It’s too dark to see a damned thing and the mist is coming down.’

  ‘You’re right. I was getting eye-strain looking at his books,’ said Diamond. ‘Not much of a reader, apparently. What an existence. No papers, no telly. I’m not surprised he decided to end it. Did you find any personal papers?’

  ‘There was a deed-box. I’ve got it at Manvers Street. Birth certificate and so on. It establishes clearly who he was. We can’t trace a next of kin, so a health visitor will have to do the formal identification for us. At least Social Services were aware of his existence. Not many round here were.’

  ‘You’ve talked to neighbours, then?’

  ‘They scarcely ever saw him. There was some friction. I think the
fellow on the next farm made several offers to buy him out when he stopped working the land, but he was a cussed old character.’

  ‘Aren’t we all, John?’

  Wigfull was reluctant to bracket himself with the farmer or his rival. ‘What I was going to say is that no one could stand him for long. He married twice and both women divorced him.’

  ‘Any children?’

  ‘If there were, they didn’t visit their old dad.’

  Diamond explained why he asked the question. He picked the Bible off the shelf again and showed the Christmas card and photo to Wigfull.

  There wasn’t much gratitude. ‘Could be anyone, couldn’t it? There’s nothing to prove these people were his family. I mean, the Bible looks as if it belonged to the wife. It’s her family tree in the front, not his.’

  Diamond didn’t pursue it. Wigfull was discouraged by the digging and even more discouraged by Diamond’s visit.

  ‘So will you come back tomorrow?’

  ‘No chance,’ answered Wigfull. ‘I’ve got to get the body identified before we can fix a post-mortem. These lonely people who kill themselves without even leaving a note are a pest to deal with. For the present, I’ve seen more than enough of this God-forsaken place and I’m chilled to the bone. I might send a bunch of cadets out to turn over the other trenches. I don’t expect to find anything.’

  ‘Any theories?’

  ‘About the digging? No. If we’d turned up something, I might be interested.’

  ‘There must be some explanation, John. It represents a lot of hard work.’

  ‘You think I don’t know? Anyway, I’m leaving. If you want to stay, be my guest. There are candles in the kitchen.’

  Thirteen

  Doreen had a taxi waiting outside Harmer House. She opened the rear door for Rose, helped her in with the two carrier bags containing all her things, and got in beside her.

  The driver turned to Doreen and asked, ‘All right, my love? All aboard and ready to roll?’