Page 24

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With nothing to do but dwell on Roger’s death and wait for Sean, Julia decided that she might as well get Jake – and herself – out for a short walk before the light fell. The long summer evenings were over. It was starting to get dark earlier, and chilly, too. She would need to get a move on. She fetched Jake’s lead from the hook by the front door.

Jake could hear the merest clink of his lead from miles away. Astonishingly enough, this was the case even when he was, ostensibly, asleep. Before Julia had a chance to call his name he was inside and at her feet, bounding and barking. Henny Penny was looking ruffled and disgruntled in the spot where they’d been lying.

‘All right, Jakey. Good boy. Settle down,’ she muttered soothingly, to absolutely no effect. The only thing that calmed him was getting out into the road, and starting the walk. Once they were on their way, he would downgrade his state quite quickly from ‘hysterical’ to ‘overexcited’ and eventually – after about ten minutes – to simply ‘having a good time’. Julia ushered him out of the door, clipped on the lead and started walking. He was still in the ‘overexcited’ state when Aunt Edna appeared on the path, coming towards them.

‘Good afternoon, Aunt Edna. You’re looking well.’

‘Well’ might be something of an overstatement, but it was true that Aunt Edna seemed to have reached a sort of equilibrium. She was so ancient that she never seemed to get any older. She remained reed thin, tottery on her feet, confusing in her communication, yet, somehow, oddly unchanged. One could not discount the possibility of immortality.

‘All’s well that ends well,’ said Edna in a sing-song voice, and then enquired of Jake, ‘Don’t you think so, young man? All’s well, except for bad boys…’

Jake was terrified of the old woman, although in truth she had more to fear from a solid hunk of Labrador than he had to fear from her. One good wag of his tail would knock her off her feet, and from there, a broken hip would be a dead cert, by the look of her frail bones. Jake looked up at Julia for help, the whites of his eyes showing.

‘And except for murder most foul,’ Edna continued cheerfully. ‘Not well at all. Beginning or ending.’ She wagged her finger at Julia and repeated the words, ‘Murder most foul.’

Aunt Edna took hold of the end of a purple scarf – one of many in which she was entangled – and flung it dramatically round her neck. She doffed her non-existent hat in their direction, wished them both, ‘Good evening,’ and wobbled off.

Jake sighed in relief when they walked on.

‘I wonder what she meant by that. “Murder most foul”. She says the oddest things, does Edna, although some of the odd things are odd in a sort of meaningful way, aren’t they? I mean, there has just been a murder. Two. And it is certainly most foul. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s a quote from Shakespeare. Is it Hamlet ?’

She didn’t expect an answer from the dog, which she took to mean that talking to him in the first place wasn’t a sign of encroaching senility on her own part. It was expecting answers that got you put away for your own protection.

She took Jake for a good long walk, greeting familiar faces and even more familiar dogs as she went. She could never decide if she loved this part of village life or not – the endless meetings and greetings meant she couldn’t just take a quiet walk and have a good think. The one thing that her mind kept circling back to was Roger’s death, and the things she had learnt about his life just before he died. Would it all tie up, she wondered? Heading towards home, yet another familiar figure came into view. This one was male and gangly, and sitting broodily on a bench overlooking the river. He was eating a sandwich, tossing bits of crust to the ducks between bites. It was DC Walter Farmer.

Julia had decided not to interrupt his deep thoughts, and simply to walk on by, when he seemed to snap out of whatever it was he was thinking. He turned towards Jake, and greeted him with a click of the tongue. Jake stopped and rested his big head on Walter’s thigh, taking the opportunity to snuffle up a few breadcrumbs while he was about it. Walter stroked his ears and sighed.

‘Long day, I imagine,’ Julia said, sympathetically. She noticed that his face, which at the best of times was pale and sported a few lingering teenage spots, was afflicted with an uncomfortable-looking rash, which she put down to stress.

‘Very long, and it’s not over. I just came out here for a bit of a breather. We’ll be working a good few hours yet, me and the boss.’

‘You’ll be tired.’

‘It’s not just the long hours. It’s the responsibility, you know. Roger Grave, he was one of us. He was in our village. And now he’s dead. On our watch.’

Julia hadn’t thought of it quite like that. She felt for Walter, and for Hayley Gibson, too. Before she could offer words of sympathy, Walter continued. ‘It’s a terrible, terrible situation. And we’ve got nothing to work with.’

‘Do you know any more about what happened?’ she asked. ‘Are the forensics back?’

‘Not yet.’

‘I’m sure they’re prioritising the forensics, Grave being a policeman.’

‘Oh yes, they are. And you know, if a policeman is killed, we immediately consider what cases he’s working on. So there’s a lot of coppers working on that. See if there’s anyone with a grudge, or anyone who might want to silence him.’

Julia hadn’t considered the possibility that Roger’s death might be completely unrelated to Graham’s. That it might have nothing to do with Bethany, and the complicated personal relationships at play in Berrywick. That he might have been involved in investigating a drug cartel, or some such. Although frankly, she couldn’t imagine that a drug cartel would use The Complete Works of Shakespeare and an antique hall table as their weapons of choice.

Walter continued, ‘I’m working the other angle. And our prime interview subject, the one person we thought might know something, was beyond useless.’

‘You mean Bethany?’

‘Yes. She claims she’s made a big night of it. Drowning her sorrows, you know. Claims she can barely remember a thing – what time she went where, who she saw, who might have seen her.’

‘Well, that seems rather convenient.’

‘Doesn’t it just? And the other thing is, we have to be careful with her. She’s a grieving daughter, too, and we need to be sensitive. We’ve asked her a few questions, but we can’t just be dragging her in for a tough session with DI Gibson.’ There was a pause and Walter gave a tiny, almost imperceptible shudder at the idea of it. ‘Anyway, so now I’m tracking down her movements to see if she can be accounted for all that time. I’m on my way to the various pubs, trying to find people who might remember seeing her, to see if I can connect the timeline. I just thought I’d have five minutes of peace and quiet to watch the ducks and eat my sandwich before I set off. It’s the first time I’ve had a minute.’

The half-eaten sandwich was still in his hand, wrapped in wax paper, cheese and tomato showing through the bite marks. It looked home-made, and Julia wondered if he’d made it himself, or his young wife had. Either way, it was a sweetly domestic thing to see, a sandwich from home. Walter looked at it, sighed, pushed the paper back, and took a large bite.

‘Good luck with the investigation, Walter. I hope you find answers very soon. And I hope, I really hope, it’s not Bethany who killed Roger Grave.’

That last sentence just slipped out, sadly. It felt unbearable, the idea of a child killing a parent. Almost as awful as a parent killing a child.

Walter brought the remains of the sandwich to his mouth and was about to bite into it when he changed his mind. He tore it in two, and tossed one piece to the ducks still bobbing hopefully in the river in front of them, and the other half to Jake, who snapped it out of the air with so much concentration and precision that he might have been competing in some Olympic sport.

‘I hope so too, Mrs Bird. I hope so too.’