The Judgement of Strangers (15 page)

‘As far as I can remember, Zeus’s wife, Hera, hated Heracles, and one night she put a spell on him. In his sleep, he lashed out with his sword, dreaming that he was killing imaginary enemies. Then he woke up and he saw that he’d killed his own children.’

‘And chopped them up.’ Lady Youlgreave snuffled, a sound that might have expressed mirth. ‘
He
did that, too.’

‘Francis?’ I smiled. ‘Not children, though.’

‘How do you know?’ She stared up at me. ‘There’s a lot you don’t know.’

She opened the book and seemed to become absorbed in a poem. I waited for a moment. Vanessa had warned me that these mood swings were becoming more frequent and more pronounced.

I cleared my throat. ‘Vanessa told me about your bird table. About the meat or whatever it was that the crows were pecking at. I don’t suppose you got a good look at it, did you? With your opera glasses?’

She raised her head once more and I realized at once that I was not forgiven or forgotten. ‘I said there’s a lot you don’t know, David. Even about your own family.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I saw the whole thing. I’m not blind.’ The irises of her eyes were mud-brown pools, the pupils almost invisible. ‘It was in a paper bag.’

‘What was?’

‘Whatever it was. A little head?’

‘So you saw who put it there?’

‘I told you. I’m not blind.’ She sniffed. Her eyes misted with tears. ‘I don’t understand. Why don’t I understand? Is it late? My watch has stopped. What’s the time?’

The door opened and Doris came in. ‘How about a nice drink before bed, love? A nice cup of cocoa?’

‘Medicine.’ Lady Youlgreave brightened. ‘It’s time for my medicine.’

‘Not quite, dear. I’ve put it all out on your bedside table, like usual. You can have the first one when you get into bed.’ Doris looked at me. ‘You’ll want to be getting home, I expect, Vicar. I saw Mrs Byfield’s car go by.’

She rushed out of the drive of Roth Park, her arms outstretched towards me.

‘Father! Wait!’

I stopped. Rain was drifting from a grey sky. Rosemary propped herself against one of the gateposts. She was out of breath and bursting with life. Even when wearing jeans and a white shirt which had once belonged to me, she somehow contrived to look elegant.

‘I found something. You’d better come and see.’

‘What is it?’

She shook her head. ‘Come with me.’ She seized my arm and gave it a little tug. ‘Please.’

I allowed her to draw me into the drive. ‘Why all the mystery?’

‘Not a mystery.’

She led me past the churchyard and into the grove of oaks. Instead of continuing down the drive towards the house, she turned right on to the footpath which led into the paddock we hoped to use for the fete’s car park. It was raining harder, now, and I suggested going back for an umbrella. But Rosemary urged me on.

On the far side of the paddock, the footpath split into two – one branch continuing north towards a cluster of council houses and the Jubilee Reservoir, the other cutting westwards across a patch of waste ground in a direction roughly parallel to the drive. The land had been part of the demesne of Roth Park, and was owned by the Cliffords.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

She looked back, her eyes gleaming and her face full of colour. ‘Carter’s Meadow. Look – there’s the way in.’

We followed the path to a five-bar gate made of rusting tubular steel, wired permanently closed. Rosemary and I climbed over. Nowadays Carter’s Meadow was a no man’s land sandwiched between the ruined formal gardens of Roth Park and the housing estate. Like so many places on the fringes of cities, it was permanently dirty: even the weeds were grubby.

Rosemary led me past an abandoned car to a small spinney, a self-seeded clump of straggly trees and saplings. A track zigzagged through ash and birch, brambles and nettles. She plunged into it. I wondered what she had been doing here. Smoking? Meeting a boy? The air smelled rank, as though the spinney were a large animal beginning to decay. We came out on the far side of it.

She stopped abruptly, wiping rain from her face. ‘There.’ She pointed to the ground beside a dead elder tree on the edge of the spinney. ‘Look at that.’

I followed the direction of her finger. An empty bottle leaned against the tree. The grass at the foot of the tree was stained a rusty brown.

‘
Look
,’ she repeated, stabbing the air with her finger. ‘Don’t you see what must have happened here?’

I hitched my trousers and crouched down. The grass was dry. The bottle had contained a cider called Autumn Gold. The label was fresh. The bottle might have been left there yesterday. Cigarette ends lay in various stages of decay between the blades of grass. There was sadness in this place.

‘It’s blood,’ Rosemary said. ‘Father, it’s blood, isn’t it?’

‘I think so.’

I picked up the bottle between finger and thumb. Underneath was a tuft of black hair.

‘This is where they did it,’ Rosemary said. ‘You can buy that cider in Malik’s Minimarket. Did you know?’

I wished she had not found this. It meant nothing but trouble. We could not be sure that the stain was dried blood, let alone that it and the fur came from Lord Peter. But I would have to tell the police, who would not want to hear. I would also have to tell Audrey, and the discovery would feed her forensic fantasies – and incidentally serve to confirm her belief that the youths from the council estate were responsible. And why did Rosemary have to be the one to find it?

‘What were you doing here?’ My voice was sharper than I had intended.

‘I wanted a walk.’

‘Here?’

‘If you follow the path you get to the river. It’s pretty.’

Pretty? I had not been this way for years. I had a vague memory of a tangle of trees on boggy ground, through which meandered the Rowan, scarcely more than a stream. But teenagers had different standards of beauty from adults. I looked at Rosemary and suddenly remembered my adolescent self finding a perverse satisfaction from reading Auden in the shell of a burned-out house: I had sat on a pile of rubble bright with rosebay willowherb and smoked illicit cigarettes.

I stood up. The rain was falling more heavily now. The trees gave us partial shelter but I did not want to stay here any longer than necessary. There was poison in this place, and I felt it seeping into me.

‘Do you think they cut up Lord Peter here?’ Rosemary asked.

‘It’s possible. But we mustn’t jump to conclusions.’

‘This is where Francis Youlgreave cut up a cat, isn’t it?’

‘So they say. Come on.’

‘But we’ll get soaked.’

I glanced at her. Her eyes met mine. Her face was calm and beautiful.
My daughter
. I wanted to believe that truth was beauty, and beauty truth. But what if Keats was wrong and beauty did not have a moral dimension? What if beauty told lies? Rosemary had told lies in the past. But she had been too young to know better. Children only gradually become moral beings. I pushed aside the memory.

I walked quickly away from the shelter of the trees. I felt better in the open. Rosemary followed me. Did she not feel the atmosphere of the place? There was a growl of thunder. The rain sluiced out of the sky. Water ran down my neck and soaked through the shoulders of my jacket.
Wash me clean.
Would it wash away the evidence – and, if so, was that a good thing, for fear of what the evidence might reveal?

Rosemary took my arm again – unusual for her, because she tended not to touch me very much. ‘Are you OK?’

‘Fine. We’d better go home and get dry.’

‘You’ll ring the police?’

‘Yes.’

She nuzzled against me, as if trying to push me into action. ‘If we cut through the Cliffords’ garden we can get up to the drive. It’ll be quicker than going back the way we came.’

I followed her. It was easier than arguing about whether or not we should trespass. In a way I was grateful that she had taken charge. I was not usually indecisive. Indeed, I tend to go the other way, sometimes to the point of arrogance. But at that moment I could no more make a choice than I could play a note on a violin with slackened strings. The poison under the trees was working at me, sapping my will.

The poison had other effects. Rosemary led the way – she seemed to know it, and I did not. We walked along the line of a straggling hedgerow towards a dark-green mass of trees and shrubs. The rain plastered her hair to her head and her clothes to her body. I could not see her face – just her figure, and the lilting sway of her bottom as she walked. I felt a stirring of desire, just as I had when I put my arms round Joanna the previous evening. But this was far worse. Rosemary was my daughter.
What is happening to me?
Nausea mingled with my desire. I stared at the ground. It was so long since Vanessa and I had made love.

‘Lord have mercy,’ I muttered. ‘Lord have mercy.’

She could not have heard me, but she turned. ‘I’m
soaking
,’ she said happily.

We came to a barbed-wire fence which separated the strip of wasteland from the belt of trees and bushes. The wire was rusting and some of the posts were either missing or leaning.

Rosemary picked up one of the posts, leaving a gap nearly three feet high between the ground and the lowest strand of wire. ‘I’ll hold it for you.’

I crawled underneath. It was clear that people had been through the fence at this point before, and I suspected that Rosemary had been one of them. I felt ridiculous: a middle-aged clergyman dragged back to adolescence. Rosemary scrambled after me. I had never been here before, but I guessed that we were in what had once been part of the garden of Roth Park. The belt of trees was dominated by a big copper beech. Among the tangle of seedlings were other, older plants – rhododendrons and laurels; the remains of a yew hedge; and the long carcass of a fallen Douglas fir.

‘This way,’ Rosemary urged, the rainwater streaming down her cheeks. She smiled brilliantly. ‘Follow me.’

We picked our way through the undergrowth and passed under the canopy of the copper beech. Despite the cover from the branches, the rain was still pounding down. Suddenly the trees thinned and the rain increased in intensity. I caught sight of the chimneys and upper windows of the house. I realized where we were.

A few paces ahead of me, Rosemary stopped. She turned back to me. The rain poured over her. ‘Oh
no
,’ she hissed. ‘How embarrassing.’

The ground shelved. Before us was what had once been a sunken rose garden surrounded by stone walls. Now it contained a kidney-shaped depression made of concrete, filled not with water but with dead leaves. A springboard still arched over what had once been the deep end, its coconut matting slimy with rain. A pavement of stone flags ran round the pool. There were benches set at intervals in the wall, and halfway down one of the longer sides was a wooden structure with a pitched roof and a little verandah running along the front. Sitting in a director’s chair on the verandah was Toby Clifford, smoking a long, white cigarette.

He saw us a few seconds after we saw him. He waved. ‘Come and get out of the rain,’ he called.

We picked our way round the edge of the pool towards the building, a combination of changing room and summer house. Toby was wearing jeans and a loose cotton top with embroidery around the neck, and his feet were bare; he looked more like a hippy than ever. He stubbed out his cigarette, even though it was only partly smoked, and threw it into the bushes. There was another chair on the verandah. He unfolded it with a flourish. Rosemary was first up the steps. He bowed from the waist, waving her into the chair.

‘I’m sorry,’ I began. ‘We were walking across Carter’s Meadow, and it began to rain hard.’

‘So you thought you’d look for shelter. Jolly good idea. Have a seat.’

‘I’m afraid we’re trespassing –’

‘You’re welcome.’ Toby perched on the rail. ‘I’ll run up to the house and get an umbrella and a couple of towels.’

‘There’s no need.’

‘You mustn’t catch cold.’

Rosemary said, ‘I’m not cold. I’m
boiling
.’

We both looked at her – sitting back in the chair, smiling – almost laughing – at us. She was bedraggled but as beautiful as ever, almost as if the rain had colluded with her and brought out another aspect of her beauty: nature meant her to be drenched and glistening. Her shirt was plastered to her body, marking the outlines of her thin bra, through which poked the outlines of her erect nipples. Now my emotions shifted to another mode, and I wanted to cover her up, to shield her body from the eyes of a strange man. There was a half smile on Toby’s face.

‘You mustn’t let us put you to any trouble,’ I said. ‘When the rain slackens off, we’ll be on our way.’

‘It’s no trouble. Nice to have an opportunity to return your hospitality. How’s Miss – Miss Oliphant, is it? Jo told me about the business with the cat.’

‘She’s taking it –’

‘That’s why we came out,’ Rosemary interrupted. ‘We found some blood.’

‘Blood?’ He stared at her. ‘Where?’

‘In Carter’s Meadow. You know, the field beyond your garden. It’s part of the park, isn’t it?’

‘Not exactly – but what do you mean, some blood?’

‘There’s a place under one of the trees … Father found some fur as well.’

Toby whistled.

‘It may be where they cut off the cat’s head,’ Rosemary said, her voice prim. ‘We shall have to tell the police.’

‘You can phone from here, if you like.’ Toby was talking to Rosemary, not me. ‘It’s nearer. And then I could run you home in the car.’

She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

‘Do you think the police will do anything about it?’

‘I don’t know. But one has to try. Poor Audrey.’

I noticed that at some point in the last few days Rosemary had stopped calling Audrey ‘Miss Oliphant’.

Toby stood up. ‘You stay there. I’ll fetch the umbrella.’

‘There’s no point,’ Rosemary said. ‘We’re both soaked as it is.’