FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) (8 page)

Delighted, Georg
e gave him the details and rose from his seat just as a customer came through the shop door. ‘You’ve got business,’ said George.

Adam reached out a hand to shake again. ‘Thanks, George,’ he said. ‘For everything.’

George was perplexed by what he said, but shook his hand warmly.

He drove the beat-up old car to his mother’s house and parked outside. He considered going inside, but couldn’t face the two women, so he locked up the car and strolled down the street.

‘Where are you going?’ floated a voice from the house. He turned. It was his sister standing on the doorstep.

‘I need to take a walk,’ he said. ‘What’s it to you? Get off my back, will you?’

‘Mum asked you to sort out dad’s things.’

‘There’s plenty of time for that.
I only arrived yesterday.’

‘The funeral’s the day after tomorrow…’

He frowned. ‘So what’s that supposed to mean? I know when the funeral is.’

‘You coul
d at least stay here and help your mother. It doesn’t look good, you hardly showing any feeling whatsoever, treating this like some kind of a holiday. What will people think?’

‘How’d you know what I feel?’ he said. ‘Anyhow, what do I care what people think?’ He shoved his hands in his pockets and began to tramp away, his spirits deflated.
‘What’s all the fuss over a load of junk? It’s not going anywhere.’ He heard the door slam a little too hard.

He didn’t know where he was headed. Anywhere to get away from the house.
He found himself headed up the steep path that led to the wooded hills above Petheram. The sun beat down on him, hotly berating him. He really ought to go back and show his face. He couldn’t keep out of the way indefinitely.

Before he knew it he was standing by the stile that led into Flinder’s Field. He liked to think it had been his subconscious that had led him here, but he knew where he’d been heading. George Lee leant on the old wooden fence, stared across the field, a rim of dark trees in the distance marking its farthest edge. It had never been any good for growing things in, the shade of the trees always defying the successful planting of arable, and the trees could not be touched as they were now on managed Forestry Commission land. It
now supported sheep and provided winter silage for cattle.

He clambered over the stile, as he’d done as a kid, except nowadays it was a little harder on the knees. How fast the body starts to decay, he thought, tru
dging over the cropped grass towards the field’s centre. Why’d they call it Flinder’s Field, he thought? He never thought to question it before.

High above him he heard a beautiful, chiming musical score penned and performed by a lone skylark, and saw the tiny black sickle shapes of swallows swooping in a spotless blue sky in their hunt for flying insects.
The smell of dry earth, of sweet, drying grass and the faint aromatic scent of the fir trees wafting over from the woods swamped his senses and brought back more unwanted memories of childhood.

Without warning, taking him by surprise, George Lee broke down and cried.

‘One day,’ George Lee’s father had told him breathlessly, in a moment of morbid indulgence that followed the thrashing of his young son for getting his trousers dirtied in the local brook, ‘you will have to carry my coffin on your shoulders. It’s the lot of all sons.’

Why he’d said that George never knew. It seemed to have no relevance at the time, no bearing on the fact that his backside and upper legs were stinging from where his father had laid into him with a thin hazel stick which he used to keep by the door in the stand with the umbrellas for just such an
occasion. Was it to make his son feel insecure, vulnerable, that one day he’d lose his parents one by one and be left all alone in the big, bad world? Well, when that day comes, George promised, a film of tears blurring his vision, I’m going to take such pleasure from it.

That day had finally arrived
. George had declined seeing his dead father’s face, so he had to imagine what his father looked like through the oak coffin that sat in the back of the hearse. He imagined his expression in death to be every bit as implacable, as cold, as devoid of emotion as it had been in life. He didn’t want to see him at peace. He wanted to remember him as the nasty old man he’d been.

But that’s not what everyone else
was saying about him. There was a lot of talk about a man George didn’t recognise, too many wet eyes and blowing of noses by those who came to the house on the morning of the funeral, and it was at odds with the way he was feeling. He felt like he was one of those aliens that came down and took Sylvia Tredwin – looking on slightly bemused, studiously, an outsider. Even neighbours came along to show their last respects to his father, lined the street and bowed their heads respectfully as the beetle-black hearse crept beetle-like towards the church.

Here he took his place with three other men – Christian Phelps the landlord and George’s uncles, Robert and Gary Cowper – shouldering the weighty coffin on their shoulders. He heard his mother
, sobbing and limping behind, and muffled words of comfort from Amelia, whose voice was also breaking. The service inside the church was experienced by George Lee in a kind of blur. He would afterwards recall the coffin sitting alone in front of two ranks of seated mourners – many of whom he didn’t recognise – the sunlight bouncing off a brass candlestick, the grey wiry hair peeking out of the vicar’s nose that seemed to draw his attention all the way through so that he missed great chunks of it, the hymn that wasn’t in his key so he mouthed it rather than actually sang along, and a tearful eulogy written by Christian Phelps that might have been about a complete stranger for all that it seemed to relate to his father. He was glad to get out of the stifling confines of the church where he felt God was frowning on his lack of emotion.

He stood before
the grave in the churchyard with a gathering of select mourners, snatched up a handful of dirt when his time came and tossed it onto the coffin, noticing how his fingernails were dirtied by it, and he tried to scrape it out as the vicar went through the ritual of ashes to ashes and all that. He smiled weakly as someone he didn’t know patted his shoulder reassuringly.

It was then, as he looked up, that he saw the young woman looking over the church wall some distance away. Pale-faced, long dark hair, slim. He couldn’t help but stare at her. And she seemed to be staring directly at him.

Who was she, he thought? She looked familiar, but at this distance, with the dappled shade from the graveyard trees causing her face to shape-shift with the agitated shadows playing over it, he couldn’t be sure. Eventually it just became too uncomfortable and he looked away, back to the grave. Someone had thrown in a rose, a large red one. It struck him as faintly unusual. Single red roses were signs of romance, not funerals. He scanned the line of people, his mother included, to see who might have thrown it, and guessed it must have been his mother. He couldn’t remember her having a red rose. Mind you, he couldn’t remember much of the day so far, he thought.

When he looked back to the wall the woman had disappeared.

Was this the same woman his father and Uncle Gary had seen?

‘Did you see the woman by the wall?’ he asked his Uncle Gary as they left the grave.

‘What woman?’ he responded quietly, his mind elsewhere.

‘A young woman – she was standing by the wall, looking at us.’

He gave a perfunctory glance at the wall. ‘She’s not there now,’ he said. ‘There are quite a few people that have turned out to see your dad off. He was liked, you know. It was probably one of them. Or a rubberneck.’ He said it like he didn’t care.

George suffered the funeral tea
that had been pulled together mainly by his sister Amelia and then crept out as soon as he could into the sunshine. There, that was over and done with, he thought, wandering into the rear garden and sitting on a garden chair. One down, one to go…

He really shouldn’t be so heartless, he thought.

‘You OK?’ said a voice behind him.

He turned to see Brendan
Mollett. He was a round man, jolly looking, retired a couple of years ago and looking well on it. He wore a black suit and tie that didn’t sit on his frame too well, the trousers a little tight at the waist, like it was a suit brought out of the back of the wardrobe just for the occasion. George hadn’t really been aware of him at the funeral. Too many other things were clouding his mind and making him blind to so much today, he thought.

‘Hi, Brendan,’ he said, annoyed at having to go through the pretence all over again. He wanted a little peace from it, to be honest.
‘I’m fine,’ he said.

‘How are you holding up?’
Mollett’s eyes were genuine.

‘Holding up just fine,’ he said, turning away from him.

An uncomfortable silence fell between them that George wasn’t about to fill.

‘I remember when you were born,’ said
Mollett, ripping through his memories for something with relevance.

‘Yeah?’ he said.

‘Your dad was in a real state about it. I mean, he nearly lost your mother when Amelia was born all those years before. So when your mother went into hospital to have you…’

George had heard the tale often. Rolled out to remind him how he nearly killed his mother. Like he was a plague or something sent to destroy their lives. His mother had indeed nea
rly lost her life when she’d given birth to Amelia. It had been touch and go, apparently, and they agreed there would never be anymore children. Somehow, he slipped through the net and she became pregnant again. And again his mother hung between life and death. Except this time she was older, and death’s door so close you could see the peeling paint. She survived – survived what, exactly, nobody ever revealed – but she survived to bring little George Lee into the world kicking and screaming to be let back inside again. He knew even then he didn’t want any part of it, forced to take part in life against his will. It often crossed his mind that this was one of the reasons his father had taken against him so. The seven-pound killer in nappies.

‘Is there a point to this, Brendan?’ he said, somewhat a little too sharply, for
Mollett visibly recoiled. George softened. ‘Sorry, Brendan. I’m not myself today…’

Brendan
Mollett smiled knowingly and patted George’s shoulder with a father’s rough tenderness. The alien action, too familiar for his liking, caused George to feel uncomfortable.

‘It’s difficult to know what to say at times like these,’
Mollett admitted. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you. I was thinking of something to tell you about your father…’

‘It’s OK,’ he said, discreetly removing his shoulder from the warmth of the hand penetrating through his shirt.
Then Sylvia Tredwin nudged away everything else and barged her way to the front. ‘I’m told you’re quite the historian, Brendan.’

‘I do my
bit for the community,’ he said, bemused by the sudden change in direction.

‘They say you’d like to open up a museum.’

Brendan Mollett sat down beside George. ‘I’m trying to generate interest, but nobody seems to care about local history these days.’

‘I’m interested,’ said George.

‘Really?’

‘Sure. History’s important; you’ve got to preserve your heritage before it gets lost forever.’

‘That’s so very true,’ said Mollett, his face suddenly energised. ‘That’s just what I say. Once it’s gone it’s gone, unless someone does something about it. Collects it, writes it down, preserves it. That’s what I’ve been doing. There’s hardly anything about Petheram I don’t know,’ he beamed proudly.

‘So I heard. I’d like to find out more about Petheram’s history,’ he said. Certain aspects of it.’

‘I’m your man,’ said Mollett. ‘You’ll have to come round to my place and I’ll show you all the stuff I’ve got.’

‘That would be great,’ said George. ‘How about tomorrow?’

Mollett’s bushy eyebrows lowered. ‘I don’t know, George. Are you sure you’re up to it? I mean, you just buried your dad today. You need time to grieve.’

‘It’ll help me get over things,’ he said. ‘Take my mind off this – this sad time.’

‘Well, if you’re sure about that, George, then it will be my pleasure.’

‘10 a.m. tomorrow?’ he said.

‘That early?’

‘You say when.’

Brendan Mollett cleared his throat. ‘Make it eleven,’ he said. ‘If you’re sure about that…’

‘Brilliant,’ said George. ‘I didn’t know you were friends with dad,’ he added.

‘Not until about a year ago really. He helped me with something…’ He fell into thoughtful silence. His eyes clouding over. ‘Like you I lost someone close. I know what it feels like. Your dad, he wanted to help me, in his own way. So we became friends, sort of.’

George Lee nodded. ‘Great,’ he said. ‘Well, thanks for the invite and I’ll see you tomorrow then.’

Mollett regarded the man, taking his averted head as a signal that the conversation was over. He rose from the seat, feeling suddenly awkward, and went back inside the house to join the other mourners. George Lee stroked his lips contemplatively.

Later that day, George excused himself before the last of the mourners made their way home, takin
g the opportunity to steal away, with his sister’s blazing eyes telling him she would dearly love to admonish him for it, but holding back because of the presence of guests.

George Lee shrugged markedly as he left the house, as if shrugging away the feeling the day had left him with; as if shrugging away all that
fictional crap about his dead father. Jesus, they could write better novels than he could, he thought. It sounded more like they’d buried Nelson Mandela than the man he knew. But maybe that was it with funerals; maybe it wasn’t about the literal truth. It was about creating an ideal that would help those left behind to pick up the pieces and go on living. Whatever, it made him feel faintly nauseous. No way were they going to eulogise like that at his funeral when his number was up. He’d make sure they told it like it was.

Maybe.

He’d had to think twice about where the old Tredwin place used to be. It had been many, many years, after all, since he’d last been there. Thirty years or so to be precise. He remembered roughly where it was – like a lot of houses that made up the sprawling rural village, the Tredwin place was well off the main road through it. Most of the properties hereabouts had been farmhouses in their time, some still existing as such, and located down tiny roads no bigger than the width of a family car. They were scattered thinly and with no apparent order around the village, like a child’s building blocks tossed carelessly onto a green woollen blanket.

The walk down the lanes in the
strongly aromatic evening sunshine was very pleasant, but perhaps a little too distressing, for reasons he could not fully comprehend. He never took a walk when he came to visit his mother. Because to retrace old haunts only brought back what he wanted to repress, to forget. And as he progressed up the road and caught the first glimpse of the Tredwin house, nestling in a corner of a field with its attendant ramshackle collection of outhouses and barns, its rusted and long-defunct pieces of farm machinery sticking out of the sun-bleached grass like the many bones of creatures of fantasy, he was transported immediately back to the first day he went there.

A summer’s day, like this one, but remembered as being far hotter, far brighter, far more colourful. Adam was excited to be taking his new friend back to his house. Back then it had seemed far bigger to George than the house he looked upon now. He remembered seeing Adam’s father, Bruce Tredwin, in the front garden, which he’d turned into a vegetable plot. No roses around the door for the Tredwins; this house had to pay its way, it wasn’t for decoration. He’d seen Bruce before, in the street, here and there in the village, but not very much. The Tredwins were farmers and like a lot of farmers they only had time for the business in hand.

Bruce Tredwin looked up on seeing his son’s approach. He studied George through narrowed, suspicious eyes. He was a big-set man – far bigger than George’s own dad – good looking in a rugged, earthy sort of way. George’s dad worked in an office in Crewkerne. You never got muscles from working in an office. Your skin never looked the colour of the earth either. Not like Bruce Tredwin’s and his kind did.