Evie, page 19
‘Absolutely nothing, as far as I can make out!’
‘Really? But—’
‘What, exactly, did you say to Clark in the lane yesterday?’
‘Heavens! I don’t know! Everything I could think of as far as I can remember. All the foul language I learnt from my girls! And then some of my own! I don’t know, Roger! Why d’you ask? Has someone complained?’ Roger smiled, the anxieties of the recent days, beginning to ease.
‘Apparently not, and whatever it was it seems to have done the trick!’
‘What “trick”?’ Alice asked. ‘I did say I’d call the police but considering the state he was in I doubt if that would have discouraged him. Did it?’
‘Not completely, it seems. Ferdie says he went up to the Lucas farm, assuming Giorgio was still working there, I suppose. Edwin put him right on that, gave him his marching orders and said he was calling the police and …’
‘And?’
‘And that, according to Ferdie Vallance, was the last anyone saw of him. When I’ve had some breakfast I’ll go down to the lower farm and have a word with Dave Crocker. The weather was pretty wild here yesterday. No one got much work done and there’s been some storm damage, apparently.’
The damage Ferdie Vallance had referred to had not been caused directly by the storm, which had no more than slightly worsened the condition of the charred sill to which the iron ladder had been fixed. The reason the metal attachments had pulled free, causing the ladder to hesitate, tip backwards and then crash down onto the derelict cattle pens underneath it, had been the sudden weight of Norman Clark as he lowered himself over the sill and, half blinded by rain and the blood flowing from his injured head, began to descend it.
Hester, fearing that when he reached the ground and still under the illusion that she was his wife, Norman would pursue her, had fled and then stopped in her tracks when she grasped the situation and, just as Ferdie and Dave had done, foresaw what was about to happen. All three of them watched speechlessly, Dave and Ferdie crouching, leaning out, through the aperture in the barn wall and Hester from across the yard, as the ladder, bearing Norman Clark’s huge weight, came slowly away from the wall, pieces of splintered wood falling past him as he clung helplessly to it. Then, as it swayed outwards, the lower attachments had pulled out of the ancient mortar and it swung back, further and faster from the wall as the force of gravity took it. Peering down at the falling man, his fingers white on the rungs of the ladder, Ferdie and Dave saw the look of terror on his face and heard him cry out as he groped with one hand towards them. Then came the sound none of the watchers would ever forget, as Norman Clark’s skull made noisy contact with the edge of a granite water trough.
The three of them had gathered round, oblivious of the wind and rain, staring at what was left of Norman Clark. He lay, spreadeagled on his back, like an over-stuffed rag doll. His head, draining of blood, had cracked open like a raw egg on impact with the edge of the trough. Hester turned away and retched.
‘Go to Thurza,’ Dave told her but she shook her head.
‘What’ll us do?’ she said. And then louder and more desperately, ‘What’ll us do, Dave?’
The prospect of the situation falling into the hands of the judiciary was not an option for these three, whose experience of life had taught them that ‘the law’ was something to be avoided at all costs. It was the law that threatened you if you trespassed, poached game or pilfered apples. It dragged people off with their hands behind their backs and threw them into cells, flogged them, hanged them or sent them to the colonies. During their years at the village school, each class had been addressed by a senior police officer from Exeter, and although he had removed his helmet, smiled at them and even attempted a joke or two, he had gravely lectured them on the absolute necessity of avoiding a life of crime – with all its inevitable unpleasantness – and had vividly described the misery of being sentenced to life behind bars. Witness boxes, warrants, oaths, juries, prison officers, policemen, executioners and especially judges were all ‘the law’.
‘So. What’ll us do?’ Hester repeated, tearfully. ‘We killed ’im!’
‘No we didn’t,’ Dave told her. ‘Fallin’ off the ladder killed him.’ Dave’s nose, where Norman Clark had struck it with his forehead, had stopped bleeding but was swelling visibly.
‘S’pose we could of warned ’im,’ Ferdie said, uncertain where self-defence ended and guilt began.
‘’E wouldn’t ’ave listened,’ Dave said, sounding as though he had a clothes peg on his nose, ‘’cos he thought it were Evie down ’ere and that we was just tryin’ to stop ’im gettin’ at ’er.’ There was a pause while their brains grappled with their situation. ‘Who knows ’e come ’ere?’ Dave said at last, almost to himself.
‘No one,’ Hester said. ‘No one but us three. Mr Bayliss phoned to say as he’d been seen near the village and then—’
‘Then Edwin Lucas rang and said he’d turned up at his place …’ Ferdie added.
‘But no one knows he come down ’ere,’ Dave said. ‘’Cept us.’
Ferdie, eyes and mouth gaping, looked from Hester to Dave and then back again. If any ideas were going to come, they would be from one or the other of them, because his mind had, for the moment at any rate, been shut down by the horror of what had just happened. The rain fell solidly, blotting out everything beyond the wreckage that was all that remained of Norman Clark. They stepped back, into the shelter of the cart shed and stood, huddled, dripping, breathing unevenly in great shuddering gasps. With shaking hands Dave rolled a cigarette, the damp paper sticking to his fingers.
‘Can’t say ’e didn’t ’ave it comin’,’ he mumbled, holding a match to his roll-up. ‘Can’t say the bastard didn’t deserve it!’
‘He were gonna kill Dave and me!’ Ferdie said, slightly restored by the fact that they were sheltered now and Dave was drawing on his roll-up in a positive, familiar way. ‘If ’e ’adn’t seen you, Hes, thought you was Evie and tried to get down to you – ’e would of done for Dave and me and no mistake! We was no match for him with that temper on ’im!’ He paused, his eyes on a veil of wind-driven rain as it swept away up the valley. ‘Us gotta get rid of ’im!’ he concluded. ‘That’s what us gotta do.’
‘And how d’you reckon we do that, eh?’ Dave asked, hopelessly, dragging on his cigarette. There was a pause.
‘Easy,’ Ferdie said, surprisingly. A thought had swum suddenly into a head that was still fuddled by the blow Norman Clark had struck him. ‘Slurry pit,’ he said. Dave and Hester looked at him incredulously. ‘’T’wouldn’t be the first time,’ Ferdie added, almost defensively, in response to their shocked reaction. ‘Though I reckon there’s not too many alive now as remembers it. I weren’t no more’n a nipper when I ’eard of it and you was most prob’ly not even born, Dave, so …’
‘Remembers what?’ Dave demanded.
‘Story went that six lads from the village all marched off together to World War One and on’y three come back. “Kitchener wants you” the posters said so off they went. Left right. But out in them trenches two of those boys got so’s they couldn’t take it no more – the shellin’ and the dead and the blood and the mud … Threw down their rifles, they did, and hid in a ditch. And this bloke, Horace something he were called, told the MPs where they was to. Charged ’em with desertion, the army did! Stood ’em up against a wall.’ Ferdie raised and then slowly lowered an imaginary rifle. ‘And shot ’em dead by firin’ squad! Hardly out of school, they was, those lads.’ There was a shocked pause.
‘Well, go on, then,’ Dave said soberly. ‘What’s that got to do with Norman Clark?’
‘Well, the word got out, see,’ Ferdie went on. ‘And when this Horace come back here … well … folk … sorted ’im out.’
‘Sorted him …?’ Dave asked.
‘Sorted …?’ Hester echoed.
‘Yeah,’ Ferdie continued, becoming more confident as he retold the story. ‘Sorted ’im proper, they did. First off, no one was to speak to ’im, see, an’ ’e were cold-shouldered in the Maltsters! ’E couldn’t get work nor nothin’. Took to doin’ ’is drinkin’ miles off, where no one knew ’im. Took their time over ’im, they did, the Ledburton folk. Then he just … wasn’t about no more. Last time anyone recalled seein’ ’im was in the Crown, over to Aunebridge. Locals reckoned as a bunch of Ledburton blokes waylaid ’im on ’is way ’ome and did for him. Never seen again, ’e wasn’t. Folk came up with lots of notions ’bout where he could of bin dumped. Some said the Exe, or the bottom of that ole mineshaft over Brewer’s way. Or in a slurry pit. I reckon ’twas a slurry pit, meself. Everyone had a slurry pit in them days.’ Ferdie’s eyes had moved past Hester and Dave and settled beyond the lowest extremity of the yard where, below the newly repaired wall, lay what remained of the Lower Post Stone slurry pit. Less used now, since the dairy herd had been moved up to the higher farm, it lay, putrid and stinking. Deep beneath its crusty surface and rendered down by acrid gases and toxic fluids, were broken farm implements and a tangle of disintegrated bones. Over many decades, long before regulations said otherwise, deformed calves, dead sheep, the carcasses of foxes, the odd badger and whole litters of feral kittens had been slung into the rank sludge. At least one overzealous foxhound that had mistaken the surface for a short cut back to the pack had been drawn down to an ugly death.
Apart from a few dead branches in the lane, none of which was too large to be shattered by the wheels of Roger Bayliss’s tractor, he could see very little storm damage to the farm buildings of Lower Post Stone. Hester called to him from the door of her cottage and enquired after Evie’s departure. He told her all had gone well and asked where Dave was.
‘Round be’ind the barn, sir,’ she told him. ‘Where the storm damage be.’
The iron ladder, fractured and warped, had been pulled away from the trough across which it had fallen and laid, horizontally, against the foot of the barn wall.
‘What happened to your nose?’ Roger wanted to know.
‘’Tis nothin’, sir,’ Dave told him. ‘Just a scratch and a bit of a bruise from when the ladder come down. ’E was swingin’ loose, see, from where ’e broke away from the sill. ’Tis rotten as a pear up there, sir, since the fire.’
‘Lucky no one was hurt,’ Roger said.
‘Yessuh, very lucky indeed … Wasn’t expectin’ you and Mrs Alice back so soon, sir?’
‘No. We changed our plans after my wife saw Norman Clark in the lane yesterday. We wanted to be sure there hadn’t been any trouble. See any sign of him down here?’
‘Not down ’ere sir, no. Though he were up by Mr Lucas’s place.’
‘I warned Lucas he might be,’ Roger said.
‘And he warned me, sir. On the yard telephone but …’
‘But no sign of him, eh?’
‘No, sir. No sign.’
‘Right,’ Roger said. ‘Any other damage, d’you reckon?’
‘Not as far as I can see, sir, no.’
Satisfied that Norman Clark’s assault on Alice, resulting in her damaged wrist, appeared to be his only crime on the previous day, Roger found himself focusing on that. In a terse conversation with Constable Twentyman’s immediate superior, he registered the assault and was asked for the names of any witnesses. When it transpired that the only other person who could confirm Clark’s presence in the valley was Edwin Lucas, who had sent him on his way, the police seemed to lose interest.
Roger drove Alice to Theo Parker’s consulting room where her injury was examined. Although no bones were broken there was considerable damage to the tendons and soft tissue of the hand and lower forearm. Parker strapped the wrist and advised Alice to wear it in a sling for a couple of days and then resume as much movement as she felt comfortable with. He sat at his desk to write an account of the injury and of his treatment of it.
‘The police will need that,’ he told Roger, sliding his report into an envelope.
‘Such a fuss!’ Alice said, almost apologetically.
‘Not at all,’ Parker told her. ‘It wouldn’t have taken much more pressure to break a bone or two. Added to which, you were in charge of a moving vehicle at the time. So, a serious assault, I would say. The law will probably need a formal statement from you when they charge him.’
‘If they catch him,’ Roger added. ‘They don’t seem to be having much success with that.’
It had taken Rose very little time to sense the tension in the Crocker cottage.
‘What’s up with your nose, son?’ she demanded. ‘If you was going to tell me you walked into a door, don’t bother yourself ’cos we Crockers don’t walk into no doors!’
‘It’s like I told Mr Bayliss, Ma. It were the ladder done it, when I were sortin’ out the storm damage.’
‘I see,’ Rose responded tartly. ‘And that’s “storm damage” on the knuckles of your right hand, is it? Mabel told Eileen as Ferdie Vallance has got a lump the size of a mangel on the side of ’is head! That’s “storm damage” too, I daresay? Some’at’s goin’ on, Dave, and don’t you deny it!’ Her sharp eyes flicked between Dave’s and Hester’s. ‘Just look at the pair of you! Two more guiltier faces I never did see! And there’s Alice Todd – I mean Bayliss, with her arm in a sling! It were Norman Clark done that, I knows that much! So you might as well tell me the rest of it, Dave! You knows full well I’ll get it out of you in the end!’ This being true, he told her.
She made him begin at the beginning, at the point when Hester, seeing Clark enter the yard, blew the police whistle as a warning to her husband, through to the moment when Norman Clark lay dead, the heavy rain washing away the blood that had ceased pouring from his shattered skull. Rose narrowed her eyes.
‘And then?’ she prompted. Hester sat, cradling Thurza, her eyes downcast. ‘What did you do then, son?’ Rose repeated. Dave gulped, gathered himself and in a low voice described to his mother how he and Ferdie, using a length of chain, had weighted the body by lashing it to a disused harrow. Using the remaining chain, they had hauled the harrow over the deepest part of the pit, released it and thrown the chain in after it.
Rose, better than any of them, knew the history of the pit. How, for centuries, seething and putrid, it had absorbed the run-off from the cattle stalls, bubbling like a witches’ caldron under the summer suns and only rarely, in the time of floods, overspilling its fetid banks where nothing grew or had grown, either within or before living memory. Even in the coldest winter its surface seldom froze over. It was as though the fires of Hades fed it, so that in the season of frosts it lay suppurating, under a pale vapour, a blot on the snowy innocence of the surrounding landscape.
Rose sat, blinking slowly like a wise owl, breathing audibly as she concentrated on this awkward set of facts, concerned first with its immediate effect on her family and then, if that effect represented a serious threat, how that threat could be dealt with by whatever means were necessary to demolish it.
Born in the last years of Queen Victoria’s reign and raised in the tough environment of rural Devonshire, where, in the village school she had learnt her ABC and done her sums on a slate, Rose had endured poverty and witnessed sickness, deprivation and death. She was familiar with the harshness and often the injustice of the law which she regarded with a sullen blend of distrust and contempt. Country people of her generation survived, as their antecedents had done, by luck, hard work and a certain amount of animal cunning. An approach which she now prepared to apply to her son’s predicament.
‘Well,’ she began, in a low, controlled voice, engaging and holding Dave’s eyes. ‘Seems to me that although he deserved to die, ’twasn’t you as killed him.’
‘No,’ Dave said in the same level tone that his mother was using. ‘’Twas the fall as killed him.’ Hester nodded, affirming Dave’s innocence. ‘I tried to stop ’im usin’ that ladder, Ma, honest I did. But he come at me with the same hunk of wood he’d used to clout Ferdie!’
‘So,’ Rose concluded, ‘it were an accident, pure and simple. Or self-defence. Whichever. Either way ’twas not your doing. Not your doing, Dave. Right?’
‘Should us ’ave told the police, though?’ Hester asked, uncertainly.
‘There’ll be some as’ll reckon us should of,’ Rose said. ‘But you can’t trust the law. All that lot does is make matters worse, I reckon. Make up their minds to suit theirselves, they do, and never let no one speak. They close their ears to anything they don’t want to ’ear, truth or not. I’ve seen ’em make too many mistakes in my lifetime – too many jailings and unwarranted punishings not to keep well away from ’em. It’s not like there’s any doubt what Norman Clark done. Us all saw the state young Evie was in when she got away from ’im. And ’ow he ’alf killed Ferdie when ’e turned up ’ere, lookin’ for ’er. Anyway …’ she paused. ‘’Tis too late now! With ’im chained to that ’arrow and under six foot of sludge … No. What’s done is done. Just you remember this, none but us knows and none but us need ever know. Right?’
‘Ferdie knows,’ Hester said, plaintively. ‘And ’is Mabel’s gonna ask how ’e hurt ’is ’ead.’
‘Storm damage, Hester,’ Rose said firmly. ‘Ferdie Vallance is no fool when it comes down to it and his Mabel certainly isn’t. Sharp as a tack, Mabel be!’ Rose took Hester’s worried face gently between her rough hands. ‘There’s plenty of secrets in this valley, Hester, dear. Allus has bin. Allus will be. Now, pull yourself together, dearie, and make us a nice cuppa tea, eh?’
For some days Hester and Dave were, to varying degrees, uncomfortably cognisant of their involvement in this monstrous thing that had happened. A man, however flawed and dangerous, had died, possibly deservedly, certainly horribly and they had disposed of his corpse as if he were a tainted animal. But as time passed, rationality began to diminish any recurring feelings of guilt. After the heavy rain, the slurry pit soon resumed its normal level, its surface blooming with familiar areas of thickening, crusty scum. The crumbling masonry above the aperture in the end wall of the barn was repaired and a new pulley installed in preparation for the building of the two cottages, on which work was scheduled to begin in the New Year.
