Death of a Friend (5 page)

Den gave Alexis his full attention. Her wide mouth and grey eyes were attractive, but she had too narrow a head and too short a neck for him to find her seriously pleasing to look at. Her thick black hair seemed to resent any attempts at control. Martha was preferable, despite the same narrow head; she seemed to be more in proportion and her apricot-coloured hair singled her out as a person to be noticed.

‘I’ve been to see Hannah,’ Alexis said. Den noticed her hands were shaking. She stood in the kitchen, making no move to sit down.

‘How was she?’ Martha patted the back of one of the wooden chairs and her sister obediently pulled it away from the table and dropped into it heavily. 

‘Shell-shocked. At least … I suppose that’s how you’d describe it. On the surface, she’s quite calm, her usual self, but her eyes are weird. She didn’t look at me once. It was as if she was looking for Charlie, expecting to find him behind the sofa or in the fireplace. And Bill’s a total wreck. He just sits in that chair like a great sack of rubbish that no one wants. Considering Charlie was his son, not Hannah’s, you’d think he’d be getting the sympathy.’

‘How do you know he isn’t?’

‘People kept coming to the door. Well, two did. Mandy from the Meeting House and another Quaker, whose name I can’t remember. The drippy one. Anyway, they only talked to Hannah and more or less ignored poor old Bill.’

Den tried to remind them of his presence. ‘If I could just …’

‘Sorry,’ said Alexis curtly. ‘What do you want to know?’

‘When exactly did you see Charlie last?’

‘Ah, yes.’ Her face seemed suddenly longer and greyer. ‘As we’ve already told you, we can’t be very exact about that. He was here on Sunday morning. We didn’t have a proper lunch, people just got themselves a sandwich. The boys went off to their gran’s in the afternoon and I thought perhaps Charlie had gone with them. But Hugh says he didn’t. Richmond thought he’d gone for
a lie-down. It was all so chaotic here, you see.’

‘Was your sister’s body here on Sunday?’ The question was difficult to phrase tactfully.

Martha answered. ‘No. We brought her back here from the hospital in Exeter early on Monday, once we’d painted the coffin. We put her in the dining room with candles all round her, and she stayed there until Wednesday morning.’

‘So Charlie didn’t see her?’

Both sisters shook their heads. ‘We thought it was because he couldn’t cope with it,’ said Martha. ‘He was soft like that.’

‘But all the time he was lying dead in that ditch,’ moaned Alexis. ‘Why didn’t we go and look for him? Why did we assume he was just being a coward? We
knew
he wasn’t a cowardly person.’

‘He seemed very distressed at what happened to Nina,’ said Den, remembering his own experience of Charlie. ‘If you saw him like that, you’d naturally expect him to find the business of the funeral difficult.’

‘You don’t understand,’ said Alexis unhappily. ‘Charlie wasn’t like other people.’

‘Oh?’

‘He wasn’t
thick
, or anything like that. He did brilliantly at school. But he had … gaps. He couldn’t do more than one thing at a time. And he didn’t know how to play the usual social games.
He told people what he thought, no matter the consequences. But there was real magic in him. Charisma.’

Den nodded, trying to form a picture of the dead man. ‘And when you said about him going for a lie-down – which room would that have been in?’ he asked delicately.

‘Mine of course. He was sleeping with me. He was more or less at the point of moving in here. We were going to get a bigger bed.’ She tailed off, the lost future a great pit in front of her. ‘Charlie was part of this family,’ she wept.

Martha made soothing noises; Den permitted a short silence. Then Martha took up the thread. ‘It’s true. We’d come to see him as a permanent fixture. He and Nina did a lot together, too. With Nev away so much, it was good to have Charlie here as another man about the place. He helped Richmond with some of the heavy work now and then.’

‘Nev?’

‘Nina’s husband. Father of Hugh and Clem. If you’re looking for nice, normal nuclear families, that’s the nearest we can offer you.’

‘And where is he now?’

‘Probably Singapore Airport. He phoned us yesterday and said he’d try and get here sometime tonight or tomorrow. He was in Vietnam when Nina died. It took ages to contact him. In this
day and age, you’d think a person could get back within a week, but there you are. Apparently there was a volcano somewhere which delayed things. And once he knew we weren’t holding the funeral back for him, another day or two wasn’t critical. But it isn’t really fair on the boys. They can hardly wait to see him again.’

‘How long has he been away?’

‘Oh …’ Martha stared at Alexis, trying to work out her reply.

‘Five or six months,’ the younger sister supplied. ‘I think he went in September or October.’

Den closed his eyes a moment, trying to disentangle the morass of carelessly dropped loose ends.
Nev Nesbitt phoned Wednesday afternoon, check flights
he wrote on his notepad. ‘The boys’ gran,’ he remembered. ‘That’s Mrs Nesbitt senior, Nev’s mother, right? You mentioned her yesterday. She sees a lot of the boys, does she?’ He reran the scene at Nina’s death, when an elderly woman had appeared from nowhere to scoop up both boys like a protecting angel. It could only have been Hermione Nesbitt.

‘She’s very fond of them,’ Martha nodded. ‘But she doesn’t like us much. She doesn’t approve of us. Couldn’t stand Nina. Didn’t even come to the funeral, although she did show up on Monday morning and spent a few minutes with the body.
And she brought Hugh back at the same time.’

‘Er … could you explain that?’ Den asked.

‘Oh, I think there was some problem with his bike, so he stayed the night with Hermione. Clem was here on his own on Sunday evening. You remember, don’t you?’ Martha checked with Alexis. ‘We played Downfall with him.’

Den summarised. ‘Let me get this right. Both boys cycled to Bradstone on Sunday. Clem came back alone and Hugh was driven home next morning. Isn’t it rather a long way for a young boy on his own?’

‘I don’t think so,’ said Martha stiffly. ‘Only about four miles as the crow flies. They go across the fields. There’s a path some of the way. It’s very ancient actually, a bit of local heritage.’ She lifted her chin and stared out of the window for a bit. ‘Hoskins mentions it.’

‘And who might Hoskins be?’ asked Den, irritable at this sudden glimpse of Martha the schoolteacher.

‘He wrote books about Devon. And other counties, I think. He lists everything of interest. I’m rather shocked you don’t know that.’

‘Well, I’ll know another time, won’t I?’ he flashed back, before catching himself and smiling an apology. ‘Where were we?’

The two women looked at him and said nothing. ‘Just working out where everybody
was,’ he said. ‘Hugh at his gran’s, Clem here, having got home safely on his bike.’ He wrote a few words. ‘Lucky boys, having such freedom,’ he added.

Alexis snorted and Martha cast a quick glance at the ceiling in ill-concealed exasperation.

‘I’d better go and talk to Mr Taverner, then, if you’ll just tell me where I can find him.’

Outside, Richmond was pretending to be busy in his office. High Copse Farmhouse no longer operated as a farm, despite retaining twenty acres of land, comprising two fields, a generous garden and a large apple orchard behind the house. The barns were mostly offices, the pigsties provided a playground for the boys and the former shippon was now a large warehouse full of animal feedstuffs. The business of supplying feed to smallholders and rural families with domestic pets was a thriving one, selling at low cost as it did. Bulk bags of dry dog food; layers’ pellets for hens; powdered milk as substitute for nursing mothers, whether bovine, canine or feline; and a hundred different kinds of food and equipment for horses, ponies and donkeys, formed the main stock. There was also tinned dog food and cat food, hay, straw and corn. Combined with Martha’s work as a teacher and Alexis’s as a conference organiser, the family’s
income was adequate to sustain a reasonable lifestyle. The stream of cash-and-carry customers brought a variety and vitality to the place which everyone living there seemed to relish. Richmond was a man inclined to bonhomie, living up to his surname of Taverner, conjuring images of rotund ancestors standing beside the firkin and holding forth on the politics of the time.

Nonetheless, Richmond had resented the fact that Nina contributed scarcely a penny to the family budget. Admittedly she had the boys to take care of, but once Clement had started school, he saw no reason why she shouldn’t pull her weight. Instead she spent her time flying round the countryside with placards, leaflets, megaphone and a perpetual sense of outrage. Richmond had found her both frustrating and embarrassing. When he married Martha, four years earlier, it had not been with a view to spending so much time with her sisters. ‘We’ll have our own rooms,’ she had promised him. ‘We’ll hardly know there’s anyone else in the house.’ At first they had tried to keep it that way, but their official sitting room was dark and cold. It was the original dairy and looked out over the converted shippon in all its cement-block-
and-steel
-girder glory. Before long, they were in the kitchen with everyone else, any idea of genuine privacy abandoned. Being the only man amongst
three women and two youngsters had brought with it a whole set of mixed blessings. Not one of them waited on him; if he wanted a cup of tea he had to make it himself. On the other hand, if a household gadget broke down, he was expected to fix it. Nobody wanted to hear his stories of late deliveries, awkward customers or sudden hikes in feed prices. Instead, they jabbered on about village gossip, Martha’s efforts to instil a respect for English literature into stubborn young heads or Nina’s latest exploit. For this reason, if no other, he had welcomed Charlie Grattan into the family circle with some relief.

Richmond supposed the police would want to interview him again about finding Charlie’s body. He had escaped to the office to keep himself occupied before they came looking for him. There was plenty to do, if only he could apply himself to it. Normally he enjoyed his work, being in charge, making decisions. He ran the whole operation entirely on his own, employing no outside help. Since Hugh had turned thirteen, he had sometimes been roped in to do some of the tidying up or a bit of gentle stock-taking; and any one of the sisters would take a turn at serving customers if Richmond had to go out. If none of them was available, he would put a large
CLOSED
notice on the gate and people came back another time. The sign was up now, as it had been since
Nina died. Tomorrow, though, they’d open up again, before too many customers were lost for ever to a rival. Already some people had ignored the sign and pushed through, desperate for a bale of hay for their precious animals. He knew he would have to think about

Charlie in another few minutes, but he put it off as long as he could. He had trembled on Martha’s bosom in bed the night before, unable to forget the awful mess their friend’s head had been in. He had tried not to look at it, once he’d recognised the jacket and old trainers belonging to Charlie. But the pitiful posture, Charlie’s useless attempt to shield himself with his hands, had been impossible to forget. He didn’t think he would ever recover from the shock of stumbling on the body on his own land. Richmond was scared and sad and confused, as he waited for his interview with Den Cooper.

The return of the forensics team to the ditch was disconcerting, too. Were they going to collect every blade of grass, every tiny fragment of hair, every speck of dried blood? He could see them crawling all over the area from his office window, despite it being the length of a field away. What a job, he thought. What kind of people spent their working lives poring over the unsavoury detritus of a murder?

High Copse lived up to its name, Den noticed, as he and the boy Hugh crossed the gravelled area and walked towards Richmond’s new barn. Behind the house, a steep hill was crowned with a copse of old English trees: beech, oak, ash. It had been reduced in size by the Cattermoles’ need for firewood, but not by very much. When the sisters were still small, Eliza, their mother, had sold the higher stretches of the land to an affluent incomer, who preserved it with almost religious fervour. Between the copse and the house an apple orchard straggled up the slope, the trees old and misshapen, a large hencoop positioned between them and a row of beehives along one hedge. On two sides there were more hills, and beyond the one to the east the rising outline of Dartmoor was visible. Below the house stretched a nostalgic scene of small fields and high hedges, a world seemingly untouched for centuries. No new fences or roads; no modern primary-coloured EC-subsidised crops such as linseed or rape – at least not this early in the season.

‘It looks the same as it must have done for hundreds of years,’ Den remarked to his young guide.

Hugh looked doubtful. ‘Wait till you see Richmond’s warehouse,’ he said, and gestured towards the building, set on a level below
the house. Very little of the original shippon remained, beyond the basic shape and size. New wooden door and window frames still looked raw and unfinished. The silvery metal cladding made an unnatural splash amongst the trees and grass.

‘I see what you mean,’ said Den ruefully.

Hugh took him into the office and then slouched on a stool near the door while the two men shook hands and Den sat down on a chair that looked as if it had been rejected from the High Copse farmhouse. One leg felt wobbly and he leant as heavily as he could on the table between himself and Richmond.

‘Lunch is in half an hour,’ Hugh said. Richmond nodded, keeping his eyes on the detective.

‘Tell me,’ said Den, to the boy, ‘when did you last see Charlie?’

Hugh wriggled his shoulders and frowned. ‘Must have been Sunday,’ he said. ‘When Clem and Alexis were painting the coffin. Friday and Saturday were crazy days. The phone kept ringing and Martha was shouting at everybody. Charlie didn’t come again after Sunday. I thought he had the right idea. But he was dead, wasn’t he? He died days ago. I heard Richmond saying he did.’ His voice rose higher and his sentences became more childish as he spoke, until he seemed to Den
like a much younger child.
Poor little chap
, he thought.