The Price of Butcher's Meat (61 page)

“I told you. Got to take a look out at Millstone.”

“It’ll be pitch black by the time you get out there. Not a spot I’d want to be in the pitch black,” she said. “Won’t it keep till morning?”

After the long and outwardly visible internal debate necessary before any self-respecting Yorkshireman accepted female advice, he nodded and said, “Happen tha’s right. But if the phone rings, you answer it, and if it’s yon fat bastard, tell him I’m out!”

Upright, in the light and warmth of his sitting room, this boldness felt good. Prone in the dark of his bedroom, it soon began to feel foolhardy, and every time he woke during a restless night, it felt foolhardier.

Not long after dawn he rose, resolved to get the useless task out of the way before he was required to explain his dilatoriness.

It occurred to him as he drove slowly up the long, deep- rutted, weed-overgrown lane to Millstone Farm that the last time he’d made this journey, he’d been bringing the sad news of Hog Hollis’s death.

Hen, sole occupant of the house since his brother’s success had taken him to Sandytown Hall and the Lordship of the Hundred, hadn’t invited him in, notwithstanding it was a bitter day and a gusting wind was shooting volleys of sharp sleet against his unprotected back. So he’d wasted no words as he broke the news on the doorstep.

“Hog’s dead.”

“Dead,” said Hen.

There was no question mark but Jug had treated it as a request for confi rmation.

“Aye,” he said. “Stroke. Pigs had started on him when they found him.”

“Right then.”

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R E G I N A L D H I L L

And the door had closed.

Maybe Hen Hollis had retreated to his kitchen and sat there recalling younger, happier days with his brother. Maybe he had wept.

More likely, according to local speculation, he had wandered round the house thinking, It’s all mine now!

If so, there were bigger shocks than his brother’s death to come.

The revelation that everything had been left to Hog’s relict had devastated Hen, but the local speculators weren’t short of explanation.

“Hog reckoned nowt to most of his family. He used to say young Alan were the only one as he’d trust to boil water. He knew what he wanted, in business or bed, and he went straight for it, and the thing about Daph Brereton were that she was usually on her way to meet him! Wife like that were a godsend to Hog, and he always paid his debts.”

But family was family, for all that, and the locals agreed that justice had been done by the clause which gave the widow only a life’s interest in Millstone, with the house reverting to Hen if he survived her.

So all he had to do was bide his time, continue to live in the family home, and mutter the odd prayer that fate or a high fence would bring his sister-in-law low sooner rather than later.

But though he lacked his half brother’s business acumen, he shared his impatience with delay. He took Daphne on in the courts and he lost. Then he took her on out of the courts, laying accusations of murder against her with the constabulary, the press, and anyone else who would listen. And here he lost also.

Everything, including his job and his home.

He’d tried to claim he was a sitting tenant, but as he’d never paid a penny’s rent this got him nowhere. He tried to claim residence at Millstone was part of his contract of employment with Hollis’s Ham, but as he’d walked out of his job of his own accord, that didn’t wash either.

So he’d been evicted and the house had stood unoccupied these T H E P R I C E O F B U T C H E R ’ S M E AT 4 6 5

many years. Here in the countryside nature is always waiting to re-claim what man has taken from her. A human presence, with its need for warmth and shelter and some degree of cleanliness, can establish a long truce, but drop your guard, withdraw even for a few months, and nature starts to retake possession. Whether out of meanness or malice, Hog’s widow hadn’t undertaken even the minimum maintenance necessary to keep weather and wildlife at bay.

Slates blew off, window frames rotted, glass cracked, cladding was pierced, pipes froze, rats gnawed, rabbits burrowed, beetles tunneled, and not a thing was done to remedy or resist any of these depredations.

Not yet quite a ruin, it needed only another decade of neglect to render it so.

A man would have to be dafter even than Hen Hollis to spend a night here afore the builders had worked on the place for a long fortnight, thought Sergeant Whitby as he saw the cluster of house and shippens loom gothically out of the morning mist.

There was no knocker on the front door, just a darker oval to show where one had been fixed for a hundred years or so till the screws had worked loose in the rotting woodwork.

Whitby clenched his fist and brought it crashing down on the oak panel with a force that shook the door in its frame.

The noise of the blow seemed to reverberate a long time, as if winding its way around the interior room by room, seeking life to ab-sorb it.

Finally, finding none, it died away of its own accord.

Satisfied he didn’t need to knock again, Whitby considered his next move. It might be fun to get fat Dalziel out of bed to tell him there was nowt to tell! But while he was debating if he had courage enough for that, he felt a powerful need to empty his bladder.

He unbuttoned, then, some old social inhibition making him reluctant to piss even on Hen Hollis’s ruinous doorstep, he stepped round the side of the house.

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R E G I N A L D H I L L

And there it was, hidden by the angle of the wall on his approach to the front door.

Hen’s ancient bike.

He postponed thinking about this till he’d hosed the ground.

A last shake, then it was time for action. One step at a time, no need to jump ahead to possible conclusions, that was for poncey CID

kids like Pascoe.

First another thunderous blow on the front door accompanied by a cry of, “Hen! You in there? It’s Jug Whitby! Don’t muck about!”

Again only the echo of emptiness.

He walked round the house, peering in the small-framed, small-paned windows, but even where the sun shone full upon them, they were too dusty and weather grimed to let him see beyond.

The back door was a simple piece of kit. No lock, just a latch. And of course a couple of hefty bolts inside, so’s an untrusting Yorkshire farmer could sleep secure in his bed.

He lifted the latch. There was no resis tance. The door creaked open.

Now even a hardheaded, aging Yorkshire sergeant couldn’t stop his mind taking a couple of steps to a most unwelcome conclusion.

He entered the big farmhouse kitchen.

This would have been the center of life in the days when the Hollis family lived at Millstone. There was the old range where old Ma Hollis would have cooked the family meals, there was the long scarred table where the men would have sat to eat them, there was the great arched fi replace before which they would have crowded to dry themselves after a day in the thin cold rain or sat to stare at their futures in the glowing embers during the cold winter evenings.

At a corner of the table stood an overfl owing ashtray. Alongside it a glass tumbler, turned upside down. And dead in the center, an empty whisky bottle weighing down a sheet of paper.

Jug ignored it. Time enough to read when he was certain that reading was all that was left to do.

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He knew from long experience that when a farmer came to the end of his tether, if there were family around, he’d take himself to the barn or byre where only the beasts would see him set the shotgun barrel under his chin.

But if he were alone, then it was here on his own familiar hearth that he’d take his farewells.

So it was a cause for relief to find the kitchen empty.

You’re just letting this gloomy old place get to you, he admonished himself. I mean, why the hell would Hen choose the moment Daph Brereton’s death had so improved his life to decide to end it?

Mebbe after marking his recovery of the family home by a typically solitary celebration, he’d staggered upstairs and was lying sense-less on his old dusty bed.

He shouted, “Hen! You there?”

Loud as he shouted, he couldn’t drown out the thought that Hen couldn’t have chosen to shoot himself because he didn’t have a shotgun.

This he knew because he himself had confiscated it the year after the eviction. In recent years, local police kept a very close check on gun ownership. When Hen hadn’t renewed his license, Whitby had visited him and, after listening to his catalog of grievances, had come away with the weapon.

So in the unlikely event he’d decided to kill himself, it wouldn’t have been by shooting.

And once again long experience of the traumas of rustic life projected images in the sergeant’s mind.

If not the gun, then the rope. A high-beamed barn was the favored site here. Most of these old low-ceilinged farmhouses didn’t have any vertical space deep enough for a grown man to drop into, but in some instances the situation of the stairs meant that a short rope carefully affixed to a beam across the landing would allow a determined man room to dangle into his own entrance hall.

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But there was no reason for Hen to kill himself, not now, not here!

his thoughts reiterated. No reason at all.

One way to be sure.

Slowly Jug Whitby lifted the latch on the inner door that opened into the hall. Slowly he pushed it open.

“Oh shit,” he said. “Oh shit shit shit shit shit!”

14

Andy Dalziel sat in the morning sunshine on the doorstep of Millstone Farm and read the note through the transparent plastic of an evidence bag.

It was written in pencil in a round, unjoined-up hand.

it were all an accident I only went there to help after Ollie had bother with the hog roast machnry and rang me to say could I give a hand.

T hen Daph saw me there and we got into a row and she told me shed make sure I nivver set foot in Millstone again even if it meant she had to burn it down with her own hands and I ran at her and she fell over and banged her head and as she lay there looking up at me she laughed and said so what are you going to do now Hen Hollis? Strangle me? Everything went black in my head then and when it got light again I found Id done just that. Id strangled her. Ollie were in a right stew wanting to run for help. I said dont be daft they’ll do for us both. No one knows Ive been here. Let someone else find her theres plenty with good cause to want Daph Brereton dead like yon Ted Denham for one. Saying that made me wonder if there were any way I could point a finger at him. He always tret me like dirt.

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R E G I N A L D H I L L

Ollie said he thought hed gone off swimming with some kids and he knew where he left his clothes in the house. I sent him off there to fetch summat of Denhams we could leave around to fool the cops and while he were gone I dragged the body away from the hut. When Ollie came back with that fancy watch Denham wears I told him to bugger off and say he went to shelter somewhere away from the machnry because of the lightning. T hen I snagged the watch on Lady Mucks clothes and headed off myself leaving her lying in the grass. How she got in the hog roast cage I don’t know unless Ollie sneaked back and put her there for some reason. But he said it werent him when I found him at Witch Cottage. I wanted to be sure hed stick to his story but the soft bugger had got himself in such a state he said he were going to see Whitby and tell him everything soon as Miss Lee got back and took the needles out. He said hed mek sure the police understood it had been an accident. I said you stupid sod how the fuck can you strangle some bugger by accident? And I felt the blackness coming over me again and I picked up one of them needles and stuck it right into his back.

Didn’t mean to kill him like I didn’t really mean no harm to Daph Brereton not to start with anyway but I can see how its going to look.

All ive lived for these past years is to get Millstone back for myself and now Ive got it but for how long? They’ll lock me up for sure and mebbe they wont even let me keep Millstone if I live long T H E P R I C E O F B U T C H E R ’ S M E AT 4 7 1

enough to get out again. So fuck them all. If I cant live here at least I can die here.

Fuck you all

“Poor old sod,” said Dalziel.

Whitby looked at him in surprise, then nodded his head and repeated, “Aye, poor old sod. What do we do now, sir?”

He was in Dalziel’s hands. There’d been no thought of contacting anybody else till he’d spoken to the Fat Man.

Dragged from his bed, Dalziel’s sleep-slurred voice had said, “This had better be bad, Jug.”

But when he heard how bad it was, the slur had been replaced by a cold clarity.

“He’s dead?”

“Defi nite.”

“And there’s a note?”

“Aye. On the kitchen table under an empty whisky bottle.”

“Bag the note, get out of the house, wait for me.”

He’d borrowed Pet Sheldon’s car. Looking at his face, she hadn’t asked for an explanation. As he drove out of the Avalon gate, he’d met the local newsagent’s van coming in with the morning papers. He’d stopped him and helped himself.

One look at the front page of the
Mid-York News
was enough.

Without actually stating that a formal charge had been made, Sammy Ruddlesdin was once more giving the impression that it was safe to walk the streets of Mid-Yorkshire again as DCI Pascoe, the county’s answer to Poirot, had got the titled perpetrator (and his accomplice) under lock and key.

“Oh, Pete, Pete,” groaned Dalziel. “I warned you. Ignore their shit and eventually it’ll drop off you. It’s the buggers’ praise you can never quite scrape away!”

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The one good thing was that it was only the
Mid-York News
that had jumped the gun so dramatically and he didn’t doubt that the other papers would be only too glad of a chance to make one of their own look an arsehole. So there was still plenty of time for Pascoe to regroup.