It felt surreal. A blood-spattered layer spread across reality. Surely, beneath it, lay the truth: that Isaac was still sitting in his kitchen, or striding on his hill, and would turn up in a minute to stand against that wall, beneath his rugged crown.
The old dog meandered round the farmyard, his tail down and his purpose lost. A broken length of police tape lay bedraggled on the ground outside the bull’s dim shed. I wondered what had happened to the bull.
The house was closed up and forbidding. But on looking round, I saw Bryony in the back field with two young men, doing things to sheep. When I walked over to meet her she introduced them as Jimmy and Cameron Airey from the neighbouring farm.
“I couldn’t manage without them. Lambing,” she said. She looked exhausted.
The Aireys nodded and smiled at me cheerfully. Both had blond hair, red cheeks and irrepressible grins that kept breaking out until they remembered to be mournful and sober. As I offered condolences to Bryony, they eyed me with sly interest, which made me guess that they knew all about my arrest and night in prison.
Bryony left them with the sheep and walked back to the house with me.
“I really am sorry,” I said. “If I’d got here earlier it might not have happened.”
“If I hadn’t gone to the doctor’s, it might not have happened,” she said dully. Her eyes were bruised with shadows.
“Those two don’t seem too bothered about Isaac.”
“The Aireys? They’re a different generation. Their dad’s cut up, but the lads didn’t really know him.”
“No? I would have thought, being farmers–”
“Those two aren’t going to be farmers. Anything but, they say. They’re both students, home for the holidays, which is lucky for me because I can’t do it all on my own.”
“What about Selena?”
“Her,” said Bryony. “She’s as much use as a pig in a laundry. She’s just gone out for a Long Walk.” The capital letters were audible and ironic. She plodded into the kitchen and looked round with a sigh.
“Shall I put the kettle on?” I said.
“Don’t bother, orange squash will do. I’ve got to go out again in a minute. Some of the wall’s come down at Low Garth so that’s the next job.”
I found glasses and filled them. His hands on the taps. My fingerprints overlaying his. Every print of his would soon be overlaid, superseded, buried.
Bryony slumped down in Isaac’s old chair. “Selena’s never taken much interest in the place, so I don’t suppose she’ll start now. Isaac used to try and persuade her to go round with him and learn stuff, but it didn’t work.”
“Couldn’t she go round with Luke?”
Bryony laughed shortly. “They’d get nothing done.”
“But she wouldn’t learn from Isaac?”
“No. She told him she was scared of cows,” said Bryony. “Scared of the machinery. Scared of sheep. Everything. The truth is, she didn’t want to try. And she doesn’t understand the importance of the routines. The fact that you can’t just skip them or only do them when you feel like it. She hasn’t grasped that.” She drained her glass and stood up again wearily. I followed her out into the yard: the bull scuffled in its shed, unseen.
“What will you do with the bull?”
“Sell it, if we can persuade Selena to,” said Bryony. “Though I’m not sure if anyone local would buy it now. Not because of superstition, just out of respect.” Her face folded, momentarily. “It’ll go to market.”
“I thought maybe it would get put down.”
“Why? It’s not the bull’s fault. It’s what bulls do. That’s why you have to have to be so bloody careful round them.” She trudged across the yard. The Aireys had gone.
“Shall I give you a hand with the wall?”
“It’s hard work,” said Bryony.
“I don’t mind.” Together we negotiated sheep and cows, crossing two muddy fields to where a section of wall had sagged and spilt its top courses.
“Bloody walkers,” said Bryony. “What’s wrong with using the stile?” She began to gather the fallen stones into piles by size, and I copied her; then tried to fit the chunks of rock together on the broken wall, in double ranks interleaved with slate, as she did.
It was like an oversized, extremely heavy game of Cuboids. The first ten minutes were fun. The next ten were so-so. After that my hands began to hurt, and my shoulders ached, and none of the rocks would fit but kept trapping my fingers. I was glad when Bryony finally straightened up, wincing. She looked pale.
“Are you okay?”
“Just tired. I’ll stop in a few minutes. I’m making a right mess of this anyway: I haven’t got the knack. Isaac could do it just like that, clunk clunk.” She sighed, rubbing her face. “I wish whoever made him fall over in that stall was here now, with a hundred miles of wall to build. From scratch.”
My mouth dropped slightly open. “What do you mean, whoever made him fall?”
“Well, you don’t think it was an accident, do you?” she retorted. “Isaac wouldn’t have banged his head on that beam unless someone pushed him.”
“I didn’t know he’d banged his head.”
“I heard them talking about it when I brought them cups of tea. They reckoned he hit his head on the beam and fell over. Only I don’t believe he did. Oh, I know they found his hair snagged on it–”
“Did they?”
“I watched some guy in plastic overalls pick it off and bag it up,” said Bryony. “I told him, Isaac’s used this shed for thirty years, some of that hair’ll be older than you are. He could judge that beam to a T, he’d never knock himself out on it. But the guy wasn’t interested.”
“So what do you think happened, then?”
“Selena,” said Bryony. She bent down for a slab of slate. I was frozen.
“What? You think Selena killed Isaac?”
“Well, not exactly. Maybe not deliberately. But I can just see it now: him telling her to tidy up the yard, or something, and her getting on her high horse, and saying, it’s not my job, and giving him a shove, and down he goes.”
“And bangs his head on the beam?”
She shrugged. “Beam, shelf, whatever. Caught off-balance. Maybe the bull kicked him on the head. And off she runs because that’s what she does. She doesn’t think.”
“But Selena wasn’t even there. She was shopping in Keswick.”
“So she says.”
“You don’t think so?”
“Oh, she went to the supermarket all right. Came back with a load of stuff we didn’t need. Biscuits and sugar pops, and bagfuls of sweets. She’s mad for sweets.” Bryony clunked her slab down on the wall so hard I expected it to shatter. “I wouldn’t be surprised if she ran away from Isaac in a huff and went shopping straight afterwards. Be just like her.”
“But Keswick’s a long way. It would have taken her ages.”
“How do we know she went to Keswick at all?” countered Bryony. “There are shops a lot closer than that. Don’t put that little slate there, we’ll use it on the top as one of the coping stones.” I replaced it on its pile and hefted up a mighty boulder instead. My biceps complained, but my mind was buzzing.
“If Selena went to a supermarket,” I said, “surely her receipt would show the place, and the time.”
“You think Selena keeps receipts? She couldn’t find it. Went through the bag three times with the police, but it wasn’t there.”
“What did the police say?”
Bryony snorted. “What, Inspector Laughing Clown and Sergeant Frodo the two-fingered?”
“He’s called Hunter,” I said. “Hunter Brigg.”
She looked up from the wall. Must have heard something in my voice. “Sorry. He’s a friend of yours, isn’t he? I didn’t say anything about my theory to the police, because I expect they’ll work it all out in due course. And anyway it probably didn’t happen, and I’m just being a bitch because I feel so bad and I need someone to blame it on. He was the last of the line. That’s
it now, the farm’s dead, everyone’s dead. But it’s not going to help if they take Selena away. I really will be on my own then.”
Her voice cracked; but she controlled herself. “I seem to have brought bad luck on this family,” she muttered.
“I could just as easily say the same. What will you do? Will you stay on here?”
“For now,” said Bryony. “It’s all in the hands of the lawyers. The Aireys will help keep the farm going for now, do the milking and that, but in the long term I don’t know what will happen.”
She picked up two more slabs and stood with them dangling in her hands, shoulders drooping. For all her sturdiness, she looked worn out.
“Isaac wouldn’t have wanted to see me running the farm,” she said. “I do know that. He was set against me. He took to you straight away, I could tell. But he never took to me.”
“Isaac wasn’t against you,” I protested. “He liked you. He said he couldn’t keep the place going without you.”
“Isaac said that?” She stared at me, disbelieving. “Well, he never said it to me.”
“He said you worked hard, and knew the animals.”
Her chin jutted as she heaved the slabs onto the wall. “I did. I do. But he didn’t want me to be with Luke. He turned Luke against me before Selena even came on the scene.”
“Did he? How?”
“Well, somebody certainly did! Who else could it be? Luke rejected me overnight. I know that was around the time his mother died, but there was more to it than that. I think Isaac decided he didn’t want me in the family, and told Luke so.”
“So Luke dumped you.”
“He didn’t just dump me,” said Bryony. “He refused to even talk to me, as if he suddenly hated me – just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “And two days later, there was Selena, sitting on a gravestone with her come-on smile.”
In my mind’s eye I saw Selena, elegantly perched upon the wall: a mermaid on dry land and combing out her long wet hair. “Luke was hurt. He was grieving,” I said.
Bryony began to pile slates in a leaning row along the top of the wall, tugging them angrily to and fro until they stabilised. “Yes. Luke was grieving. That made him vulnerable. He was very persuadable, was Luke: he’d believe anything you told him. And Isaac was the only person who might want me off the farm.”
“But I still don’t–”
“When Selena turned up Isaac was as nice as pie to her, not that she’d thank him for it. She liked to make out he was some sort of bully. But he never told her to mend a wall or muck out the shippen.”
“That’s because there was no point. He knew she couldn’t do it, and you could. Isaac thought highly of you, Bryony. Really.”
She gave me a twisted smile. “It doesn’t matter now what Isaac thought. I’m all that’s left to care about this place. Selena won’t. But I’ve always loved the farm, this land, even more than Luke did.” She ran her hand over the top course of the wall, caressing the stones.
“Bryony? Did you ever buy one of my pictures?”
“Why?”
“There was one left by the bull’s shed when Isaac…” I couldn’t say it.
“Yes, I know. Inspector Laughing Boy told me. The answer’s no, I didn’t buy it.”
“Did Isaac, do you think?”
“Not that I’m aware of. Not his thing. You probably dropped it out of your sketchbook when you were here before.”
I probably hadn’t – not with those dots of glue of the corners – but there was no point telling her that. So I just said, “Well, I suppose so,” while Bryony slapped the wall as if it were a large, docile animal.
“That’ll do for now. Should stay up a bit longer. Thanks for your help.”
“I don’t think I was much help,” I said ruefully.
“It’s nice to have the company, though.”
“For me, too. Is my scooter still around here somewhere?”
“Behind the cottages. I’ll show you.” Bryony walked back with me to the farmyard.
I paused to stroke the old dog, Tag lad, lying by the door. His tail wagged feebly, without enthusiasm. He was missing his master, I thought. As was I. I felt grief throttle me like a ligature around my neck, a hand closing on my heart: though still no tears. I ached for him because I had not known him.
“Here you are,” said Bryony. The scooter was propped up against the cottage’s back wall next to a narrow path. “And there’s your helmet. You can get back to the road faster this way if you don’t mind it being a bit rutted .”
“I didn’t know there was a footpath here.”
“I just wish the hikers would stick to it,” said Bryony, “instead of climbing all over my bloody walls.” She waved goodbye and stumped back to her ewes.
I managed to jam the strap back onto my helmet by the loose staples until it looked vaguely legal. It would have to do until I bought a new one. Putting it on, I began to push the scooter up the path.
Halfway along, I turned and gazed back at the haughty shoulder of the farmhouse. Then I looked for Raven How, and for Ruby spying on me from her windows: but from here Raven How was entirely hidden.
The path emerged onto the road through a small gate a hundred metres from the main drive. Mounting the scooter, I began to putter carefully along; and there, a little further down the road, standing by the verge, I saw Selena.
She was clutching a handful of bedraggled daffodils. A strange, exotic figure she appeared, with her outsize coat and wild hair: Ophelia in search of a pond.
As I chugged towards her, it occurred to me that quite possibly Selena had bought one of my pictures – or, perhaps hadn’t bought it at all but had filched it from my house while she looked through my cards in the bedroom. It would have been easy for her to stuff one up her borrowed jumper. I wouldn’t have noticed it was missing: I didn’t keep a count of my cards until they went out to the shops.
Selena turned and smiled, and then walked right out in front of the scooter. I had to swerve to a sudden halt and nearly went into the wall again.
“You mustn’t do that,” I said, “my brakes aren’t that good.”
“I knew you’d stop.” She was carefully made up. The siren look: black eyeliner, dark lipstick, blusher, the works. I wondered who for. Yet under her voluminous coat she still wore Luke’s old, frayed jumper.
“I was waiting for you,” said Selena.
“How? You didn’t know I was coming.”
“But I knew you would. He said you’d come back.”
“Who said it? Isaac? Did he say that?”
“You had to come back.” Her gladness gave me the unwelcome suspicion that her face was so assiduously made up just for me.
“I’m very sorry about Isaac’s death,” I said formally.
“Yes. So am I. It’s a pity you were late at the farm,” she said. “You shouldn’t have been late.”
“I couldn’t help that.”
“It was bad luck. The police were asking about you. They wanted to know all about you and Isaac.”
“What did you tell them? I mean, there was nothing to tell,” I said.
She gave me a conspirator’s grin. “You know! About you fancying the socks off him.”
“No, I didn’t,” I said. “Nothing like that. I was interested in him, as a friend.” Even that brief relationship had been a dream, a chimera: based on a few kind words, and blown away on the cold wind.
But Selena just grinned all the wider. “You were staring at him the whole time. And getting yourself sat next to him at that dinner party! Your policeman boyfriend knows, does he? Or doesn’t he mind?”
I drew myself up, trying to be dignified. Not really possible in a grubby yellow coat astride a battered 50cc scooter.
“Sergeant Brigg is not my boyfriend,” I answered reprovingly. “And I didn’t fancy Isaac: I liked him. I probably stared because I thought he had an interesting face for artistic purposes. I’m sorry he’s dead. You obviously aren’t.”
“Of co
urse I am. I am sorry, Eden.” Her voice softened. “Don’t get cross. I’m upset too. The cops were asking about me and Isaac: it was horrible.”
“Why? What did they ask?”
“What was your relationship with your father-in-law like? I said he was a sad old man and I tried to be nice to him. That’s the truth. I was nicer than he deserved.”
My heart gave a thump of indignation. “Why? What did he ever do wrong?”
Her face screwed up. “Well… it wasn’t what he did. I mean, he didn’t actually get that far.”
“Did he say things to you?” The words congealed in my mouth. I didn’t want to know: but I forced myself to be specific. “Did he say… things that were suggestive?”
“I don’t know. He was just creepy. A creepy old man.”
“What exactly does that mean?” Now I was angry. Creepy seemed to be a catch-all term with Selena. She’d called Griff creepy: but then he’d tried to kiss her. Isaac hadn’t done anything, by her own admission.
Her face clouded uncertainly. She plucked the head off a wilted daffodil. “I don’t know,” she muttered. “I can’t say what I mean.” A second daffodil was beheaded: her hands began to tear apart the others. Petal after shredded petal was cast aside.
She was disturbed by too much death, I thought; and briefly wondered if Bryony could be right, and Selena had been present at Isaac’s death.
But Bryony was jealous. She needed a scapegoat: Selena just happened to fit the bill. There was no evidence at all against her – and after two bereavements in three months, surely she had a good excuse for acting a little weird. More liable to harm herself than anyone else. She needed somebody to keep an eye on her.
“I’m going to be staying at Ruby and Russell’s for a bit,” I said. “I’ll be able to come round and see you.”
Selena’s face lit up. “That’s good! Rather you than me, though.”
“Why?”
“Well, Russell… he’s so bad-tempered these days. And he looks at me all funny. Does he do it to you?”
“He hasn’t really looked at me at all.”
“While you’re there, will you come over and paint me properly?”
“Maybe. If I have time.” I didn’t think I had the heart to paint the farmhouse any more.
“I wish you would,” said Selena wistfully. “I liked you drawing me. It’s not like a photo, is it? Photographs are cruel. They’re meant to show the truth, but they don’t. They get it all wrong, don’t they?”
“They can do,” I said, remembering my police mugshots: lank hair pulled back, no make-up. Despite my terror, the camera had shown me as callous, sneering, hard.
“But you can make a painting any way you want,” she murmured. “You can show things the way they should be. You can make them real. Will you paint me?”
“I’m going to be pretty busy at Ruby’s.”
“But you must! Please, Eden!” She held out the broken daffodils, imploring me, a beautiful, wan beggar girl in something by Millais or Herkomer, ripe for a picture. “You have to paint me! I really need you to! That was why I went to Waterhead.”
“What was?”
“I followed you there,” she said eagerly. “That first day we met. I followed you from that guesthouse place. You never saw me, you were marching down Lake Road like your heels were on fire. You had your box thing under your arm.”
I stared at her, mute. Her eyes met mine: wide, green, full of longing, as deep as the sea.
“That was why I threw myself into the lake,” she whispered. “I wanted you to rescue me. I wanted you to paint me. To make me real.”
Chapter Sixteen