FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) (4 page)

Sure, so now you get premonitions? He laughed inwardly at himself, and for the second time that day attempted to shrug off the queer feelings.

The door opened before he could raise a hand to the knob.

‘You selfish little swine!’ a woman’s voice hissed, her pale face seeming to hover without a body in the dark beyond the door.

‘Hello, sis,’ he said. ‘Nice to see you, too.’

‘He’s been dead five days, George,’ said his sister, and if looks could kill he’d be lying dead on the step, speared by the twin poisonous barbs of her eyes.

‘He’s not exactly going to miss me, is he, Amelia?’ he returned indifferently.

She folded her arms in the way his older sister always used to. George Lee guessed he’d always be the runt of the family in her eyes. Always the naughty boy getting into mischief. She even used to spank him on behalf of hi
s mother. She was about thirteen years older than him, but looked thirty, he thought spitefully, especially when she frowned in the bad-smell-way that she did. Her entire face crinkled up like the skin on one of his mum’s homemade rice puddings, cracking the foundation she pasted onto her naturally sallow skin.

‘Five days, George!’ she said. ‘Five days!’

‘I heard.’ He closed the door on the heat. Inside it was cool. It was always cool, he thought. Cool and musty smelling. Like someone had left damp washing out for a few days.

‘Where’s your respect? He was your father. The least you could do is come as soon as you heard.’

‘I came as soon as I could,’ he said putting his suitcase down and studying the white welt left behind on his fingers.

‘It took you five days? Christ, you only just got here in time to attend the bloody funeral. Mum’s in a real old state. You know how bad her nerves are.’

‘She’s always in a state,’ he said, almost under his breath.

‘That’s such a callous thing to say, George. She’s your mother and she’s just lost her husband. The least you could do as a son is give her your support when she needs it the most. You are a selfish swine, George.’

‘So you already said. I had commitments.’

‘What commitments? All you do is sit on that fat arse of yours and write crap. You
don’t know what commitment is. Take a close look at your marriage as a shining example.’

His brows lowered and he glowered at her, but he bit his tongue. ‘
My arse isn’t fat and I don’t write crap,’ he returned. ‘And my marriage is none of your bloody business.’ He pushed by her. ‘Where is she?’

‘In the living room,’ she said, shaking
her head like an angry school teacher before an errant child. ‘And be nice to her, for once.’

He shot her an acid glance and trudged down the cramped hall to the living room. The curtains were drawn, the room
caked in a semi-dusk. His mother’s small figure sat near the window in her favourite chair, silhouetted against the curtains. She didn’t register his entrance, her eyes staring at a photograph frame on a coffee table before her. It was their wedding photograph. George Lee recognised it at once; it used to stand on the mantelpiece over the fire. Black and white print. Ugly silver-plated frame that had been worn in places by its frequent polishes to the copper-coloured base metal beneath. They’d been married in 1960. Cassandra Cowper and Jeffery Lee – Cassie and Jeff. Amelia was born a year later. They had to wait another thirteen years before having a son. His dad had always wanted a boy, or so his mother used to say; but his father seemed to be perpetually disappointed with him, never quite coming up to the expectations of what a son should be. The man poured love liberally on his sister, on Amazing Amelia, but he had to stand constantly in her shadow trying to catch any dribble that she missed. George hated his sister.

There was a reason why so many of the victims in his books were women. Women, in his mind that looked
a lot like his sister.

Careful, he told himself; you promised yourself you wouldn’t think like this.
Not at this time. That’s Cameron Slade again, creeping to the surface. You promised you’d leave him behind in the flat. Try, in heaven’s name, for your mother’s sake.

‘Hi, Mum,’ he said dully, almost in a reverential whisper, as if the frame on the coffee table was some kind of holy relic and his mother’s
slightly bowed attitude one of solemn prayer before it. He regarded her bandaged knee and the walking stick that was close by her, one of those grey NHS things, standing against the chair. Arthritis. Runs in the family. His own knees were already playing up.

‘George,’ she said, her voice a ghost of its former self. ‘You came.’

‘Of course I came,’ he said, immediately eaten up by guilt. Yes, he could have gotten here the same day his sister phoned him to tell him their father had died suddenly and unexpectedly. But he chose not to. Let him wait, he thought, the way I had to wait for him to bother with me. Which was hardly ever except to criticise me.
‘Your hair’s too long; your clothes don’t sit on you right; your face is dirty; your homework’s shocking; your attitude stinks; look at you – you’re an insult to manhood; don’t you swear at me, young man; there – any more of that from you and you’ll get another damn good thrashing!’

George Lee choked back a torrent of memories that built up
behind his dam wall of resolve; he felt tiny cracks beginning to appear in it.

‘You were busy?’ she asked, the raising of her left bro
w a fraction filled with meaning.

He nodded. ‘Very busy,’ he lied. ‘I came as soon as I could.’ A screaming silence hung in the air. ‘Where is he?’ he asked tentatively.

‘At the undertakers. Do you want to see him?’

He shook his head. ‘No, not yet. I couldn’t…’

‘We could drive out…’

‘No, really, it’s fine,’ he said.

‘He looks so peaceful,’ she said, her voice even, almost matter-of-fact.

He moved to sit down opposite her, put his hands on his lap. Stared at the photograph frame between them. As in life he felt his father had always come between hi
m and his mother. Far from wanting a boy, George Lee detected a huge amount of jealousy in his father’s behaviour towards his only son. He couldn’t get close to his mother because of it. And gradually his poison infected her and he managed to turn her against him, too. Hell, it was bad enough having to see the man in the photo, let alone seeing him dead in a coffin.

‘When’s the funeral?’

‘Wednesday.’

He nodded. ‘Is there anything I can do?’ he asked.

She regarded him with eyes that speared deep into his soul. He found he had to turn away. ‘You’ve done enough,’ she said.

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

She shrugged. ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I didn’t hear your car pull up,’ she added.

‘I had an accident on the way here. In the village. A young boy-racer called Steve rammed his bloody car into mine.
My Uncle Gary’s going to be taking it to his garage. God knows how much damage it’s done. I can’t drive it in its current state, that’s for sure. So I’ve got to wait until I can get a hire car through the insurance. Till then I’m stuck here…’ He realised what he’d said and opened his mouth to extricate himself from it, but no words came out.

‘It seems you are, George,’ she said.
‘Never mind, your Uncle Gary will sort it out for you.’

Gary Cowper was her brother. She had two, the other being
Robert Cowper, both of them running the local garage and hanging onto it well into retirement. The Cowpers were a big influence in Petheram. Every place has such a family, thought George Lee; a family that had its hands in anything and everything, sat on local committees or influenced them, were the loudest and brashest at any village affair, and were the ones you didn’t talk openly about in a negative manner, or you’d feel in one way or another their own negative influence. The Cowper brothers took after their father for being headstrong, and in their younger days fought with anyone and everyone over anything or nothing. There was even talk that they were the first villagers to be busted by the police for being in possession of LSD back in 1968. They were a pair to be reckoned with till they grew older and got themselves trained up in their father’s garage. They took it over when the old man died. The sign over the garage office still read Cowper and Sons.

George liked his Uncle Gary. A blunt, grousey old man now, but he
’d always had a soft spot for his sister’s boy. It was Gary Cowper that first tried to show George the inner workings of an engine, finally having to admit the lad simply didn’t have it in him. But George appreciated the attention all the same. Attention he rarely got from his own father. Many of the heroes in his books were based loosely on Gary Cowper. No-nonsense, gritty, good-with-their-hands salt-of-the-earth guys, who’d throw a punch at the same time they’d throw a party. His Uncle Gary was the only family member ever to have read one of his books and said it was good. That didn’t mean a great deal in reality, as Gary Cowper only ever read the sports page in the tabloids, but his uncle’s praise and unconditional acceptance meant a great deal to George.

‘Is my room ready?’ he asked.

She nodded. ‘It’s always ready for you, you know that. But you rarely come home to use it…’

Again that feeling of guilt creeping over him. ‘I’m busy, mum. You know how it is.’

‘Yes, I know how it is.’

He sighed, felt increasingly awkward. ‘I see that the garden centre has opened up again. It’s one of the Tredwins,’ he said, mainly to change the subject.

His mother’s jaw muscles worked away visibly as she stared at him. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s Adam Tredwin who’s bought it. He’s been here five months or so now.’

It was George’s turn to raise a brow. ‘Adam’s come back? Jesus, after all this time. How is he?’

‘I haven’t seen him. Or his sister. Not many people have. He keeps himself to himself. You know how the Tredwins were.’ It was said with a modicum of spite, which surprised him.

‘His sister’s here, too?’

‘That’s what I hear,’ she said stiffly. ‘Do you want some tea and cakes? Amelia did some shopping for me so there’s plenty of stuff in the cupboards.’

He shook his head. ‘I ate on the way down.’

‘Motorway services are not healthy,’ she said.

Motorway services served up far better fare than George Lee was used to, but didn’t say anything. ‘I vaguely remember
playing with Adam Tredwin as a young boy,’ he said. ‘I can’t really remember him having a sister. I must have been about eight years old when the Tredwins left Petheram. How is their mother, Sylvia Tredwin?’

For no apparent reason the photograph frame slipped and fell over with a loud clatter on the coffee table, making them both jump.

‘I need to repair it,’ she said, standing it back up. ‘Its stand is faulty. Well, it has been around a long time, like me.’ She stroked the top edge of the frame tenderly with an index finger. ‘I’d ask you to fix it, but you’ve never been good with your hands.’

The sentence hung in the air as George Lee tried to decipher its
deeper meaning. ‘So you’ve no idea how Sylvia Tredwin is?’

‘What’s this obsession with Sylvia Tredwin?’

‘It’s hardly an obsession. I was only making conversation, that’s all.’

‘So now you have to struggle to make conversation with your own mother?’ She didn’t say it with malice, just as a matter of fact.

‘Course not!’ he lied.

‘Leave poor Sylvia Tredwin alone,’ she said.

Poor Sylvia Tredwin. It’s what he’d heard many locals say about the woman. Poor Sylvia Tredwin, always with a sombre air, raised eyebrows and a sigh. He’d heard it as an eight-year-old when the family left the village for good – or so they thought. Poor Sylvia Tredwin. He never really got to the bottom of what tragic thing had befallen her to warrant it, or why when he remembered her she haunted his memories as a sort of young and glamorous recluse – undoubtedly extremely attractive, long and slim and leggy. But on the few occasions he saw her when he went round to Adam’s house to play, she wore a permanently vacant face that never once broke into a real smile, like a sad stone angel in a churchyard.

‘OK, maybe I’ll take some tea after all,’ he said, slapping his thigh and rising to his feet. He turned to see his sister Amelia standing in the doorway, arms still folded, face still smouldering.

‘I’m not making any for you,’ she said, turning and walking away.

‘She’s upset,’ said his mother.

‘Yeah,’ he said.

‘When you’
ve time I’d like you to bring down some of your dad’s old things from out of the loft. There’re boxes and boxes of stuff, junk, that kind of thing. You know how he never ever threw anything away. They’re too heavy for me to bring down on my own, what with my leg the way it is.’ Both of them looked directly at her swollen left knee wrapped in support bandages, and the walking stick leaning against the chair. ‘I can’t bear to do it myself, and a man that came to check the water tank in the loft told me that with the weight of it all the ceiling would come crashing down one day. You dad was going to sort it out but…’

‘Yeah, no problem,’ he said quickly. Her face looked as fragile and as pale as eggshell, liable to crack and disintegrate at any moment.

‘You’re a good boy,’ she said, giving a faint flicker of a smile. ‘I know you are.’

She said it as if trying to convince herself, he thought. ‘Mum…?’ he asked.

‘Yes, George?’