The Devil`s Feather (43 page)

With my love and thanks,

Connie

23

I
DIDN’T KNOW THEN
if Madeleine kept her appointment with Inspector Bagley. If she did, he never referred to it. He fell into the habit of dropping in unexpectedly, both at Barton House and Barton Farm, sometimes making two or three visits in a day. He usually found me working at my computer, but invariably missed Jess, who was out in her fields, bringing in a late harvest after one of the wettest summers for years.

On several occasions she discovered his car in her drive and the man himself poking around in her outhouses, but she took it all in good part, even though he didn’t have a search warrant. She told him he was welcome any time, and suggested he keep checking the back garden so that he could satisfy himself the only bones there were beef bones. Her dogs lost their suspicion of him once they learnt the sound of his engine, but he never lost his suspicion of them.

I, too, remained wary around them. Some phobias aren’t susceptible to logic. I could cope with one dog at a time but the four en masse still alarmed me. It was clear they missed Bertie. Outside, they patrolled their wire enclosure looking for him, and, inside, sat by doors, watching for his return. Jess said they’d do it for a month before they forgot him, but Bagley didn’t believe her.

“They’re not waiting for the other dog to return,” he told me one morning, “they’re trying to get out.” He was standing behind me, reading what was on my computer screen, a complicated paragraph on post-traumatic stress statistics. “You haven’t got very far with that, Ms. Burns. You’ve only added one sentence since last night.”

I clicked “save” and pushed my chair back, narrowly missing his foot. “It would go a lot faster if you didn’t keep coming in and breaking my train of thought,” I told him mildly. “Can’t you ring the doorbell once in a while? At least give me a chance to pretend I’m out.”

“You said I could walk in whenever I felt like it.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to take up residence here.”

“Then shut your back door, Ms. Burns. It’s an open invitation to anyone to enter.” He offered me a cigarette. “After what happened, I’m surprised you’re so unconcerned about unwanted visitors.”

It was a variation on a question he’d asked a hundred times already. I accepted a light. “I’m not unconcerned,” I answered patiently, “but the alternative is to turn this place into a prison. Is that what you want me to do? I thought modern policing was all about persuading victims to get back to normal as fast as possible.”

“But this isn’t normality for you, Ms. Burns. Normality was checking the locks on the doors and windows every two hours.”

“And a fat lot of good it did me,” I pointed out. “It raised my stress levels, and MacKenzie got in anyway.” I fingered the panic alarm round my neck. “In any case, I now have this. It’s given me confidence that the cavalry will turn up…which was the intention, wasn’t it?”

He smiled rather sourly as he dropped into the armchair beside the desk. “Indeed, but I suspect it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. Are you ever going to use it? Ms. Derbyshire refuses to wear hers.”

“There’s no point when she’s out in the fields. It needs a landline or a telephone signal to work.”

He cast his usual glance around the office as if something would suddenly show itself to him. “I had a word with Alan Collins last night. He said you’re too clever for me, and I might as well give up now. He also said he won’t be shedding any tears if MacKenzie’s never heard of again. If anyone deserves what he gets, it’s your attacker.”

I doubted Alan had said anything so crass, particularly to an opposite number in a different county. “Really?” I asked in surprise. “I’ve always thought of him as such a stickler for the rule of law. I can’t imagine him ever going on record with favourable views about summary justice and vigilantism.”

“It wasn’t on record,” Bagley said. “It was a private conversation.”

“Still…will he repeat those remarks to me, do you think? I like the one about my being too clever for you. If I were to broaden that out into a general piece, contrasting IQ levels among the police with those of prison inmates—” I raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

“That you’re probably the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” he said grimly. “Why doesn’t it worry you to be interviewed, Ms. Burns? Why doesn’t it make you angry? Why don’t you have a solicitor? Why isn’t he arguing police harassment?”

“
He?
If I had one, don’t you think he’d be a
she
?”

Bagley flicked ash irritably into the ashtray on the desk. “There you go again. Everything has to be turned into a joke.”

“But I enjoy your visits,” I said. “Winterbourne Barton’s a black hole as far as social interaction’s concerned.”

“I’m not here to entertain you.”

“But you do,” I assured him. “I love watching you poke around the garden looking for clues. Have you found anything yet? Jess says you keep going back to her granary, so presumably you’re wondering if we buried MacKenzie under a ton of wheat? It wouldn’t have been easy, you know. Grain’s like quicksand. We’d have had trouble lugging a corpse on to the heap without sinking in ourselves.”

“She’s added another ton in the last couple of weeks.”

“And it’s all about to be shifted to a commercial grain store. Don’t you think someone will notice if a body tumbles out?” I watched his mouth turn down. “I don’t understand why you can’t accept that he freed himself and took to his heels. Is it because
you’d
have killed him if you’d been in our shoes?”

He took a thoughtful drag of his cigarette. “I’m sure you dreamt of revenge.”

“All the time,” I said with a small laugh, “but it did me even less good than checking the window locks. I lost so much weight over it that I feel like an old hen about to drop off her perch. Look.” I extended a bony right arm. “If there’s any useful meat on me you’d need a microscope to find it. How could
that
”—I cocked my left forefinger at a grape-sized bicep—“vanish a corpse in thirty minutes?”

He smiled reluctantly. “I’ve no idea. Would you like to tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell, but even if there were you wouldn’t be able to use it. You’re on your own and there’s no recorder. Anything I said would be inadmissible as evidence.”

“For my own satisfaction then.”

I glanced towards the hall. “I
wanted
to kill him,” I admitted. “I would have done if I’d been a better shot. I was aiming for his head when I hit his fingers…and the only reason I didn’t take another swipe was because it felt as if I’d been electrocuted when the axe slammed on to the flagstones. I had judders all the way up my arms and into the base of my neck. That’s when I decided it would be better to tie him up.”

I squashed my fag end into the ashtray. “Jess wanted to kill him, too—she was devastated about Bertie—but we couldn’t see how to do it. Peter had already left and there wasn’t time to work anything out. I suggested we untie MacKenzie and argue self-defence, but Jess said we’d have to corner him to do it”—I sighed—“and I had this sudden picture of the women in Sierra Leone…all huddled against walls because there was nowhere else to go.” I fell silent.

“Did Ms. Derbyshire agree with you?”

“Yes. She said it might have been different if he’d been blindfolded but it wasn’t possible after she’d seen into his eyes.” I pulled a wry smile. “I don’t think it’s easy killing people. I don’t think it’s easy killing
animals.
I couldn’t kill a rat if it looked at me the way MacKenzie did. I can’t even kill woodlice. There’s a nest in some of the rotten wood in Lily’s drawing-room and the only way I can deal with them is to hoover them up and chuck them outside…”

H. L. M
ENCKEN ONCE SAID:
“It’s hard to believe a man is telling the truth when you know you would lie if you were in his place.” If I’d realized earlier that Bagley shied away from killing animals, I’d have introduced rats and woodlice at the beginning. His views on psychopaths and sadists were extreme—they should all be hanged—but he empathized strongly with my inability to crush the life out of vermin. I’m not sure I ever fully understood the logic of his argument, but apparently my clear reluctance to kill anything was more convincing than repeated denials that I’d killed MacKenzie.

In a shameless PR exercise to encourage complete exoneration, I persuaded Jess to release her dogs in front of him. As she predicted, they headed straight up the field for Bertie’s grave and began a mournful howling around it. Bagley asked how they knew he was there and Jess said they’d attended the first funeral. Like elephants, they never forgot. Whether he believed that, I don’t know, but he declined her invitation to dig poor Bertie out a second time. The remaining dogs showed no inclination to go anywhere else in the valley, and had to be dragged away from the grave on leashes.

After that, Bagley left us in peace. Alan was amused by the motives I ascribed to this sudden end to suspicion, saying it had more to do with an absence of evidence than Bagley being unable to kill woodlice, but I still feel I showed my best side as a woman when I mentioned the hoover.

T
HE SECOND WEEK
of September saw the arrival of my parents and the beginnings of an Indian summer after the rains of July and August. Jess took to them immediately, and in no time at all my father was up at the farm, lending a hand. My mother worried that he was over-exerting himself after his injuries, but Jess assured us he was only driving a tractor and helping Harry feed the livestock.

The subject of MacKenzie was taboo. None of us wanted to talk about him or what had happened. For all of us, it was done and dusted, and there was nothing to be gained by conducting a ghoulish post-mortem on who had suffered the most. Nevertheless, within a few of days of her arrival, my mother read some signals that were invisible to me and sought out Peter for a long chat.

I’d hardly had any contact with him since the incident, but I assumed he was still making regular visits to Jess. She’d mentioned his attendance at Bertie’s exhumation, and defended him for some of the information he’d given Bagley, but, bar a phone call one evening to ask if I was all right, he hadn’t been near me. I remember cutting the conversation short when he insisted on beating himself up for sins of omission and commission, but as Bagley arrived shortly afterwards Peter dropped out of focus again.

My mother gave me a hard time over it. I, more than anyone, should have understood how crippling it was to feel a failure. It was worse for men. They were expected to be courageous, and it destroyed their confidence to realize they weren’t. Tongue in cheek, I asked her if it would have been better for Peter if Jess and I had failed the bravery test as well, and she echoed Bagley’s statement about finding me deeply annoying.

“I don’t like to see you gloating, Connie.”

“I’m not gloating.”

“I don’t like to see your father gloating either.”

“He’s having fun,” I protested mildly. “Ploughing Jess’s fields is a lot more exciting than sitting at a desk all day.”

“He’s been cock-a-hoop since you phoned him in hospital,” she said accusingly. “What did you say to him?”

The demons are dead and buried…
“Nothing much. Just that we’d all survived and MacKenzie had run away with his tail between his legs.”

Mum was peeling some potatoes at the sink. “Why should that please him? He wanted the beastly man dead or behind bars, not free to do the same thing to someone else. I can’t understand why you’re all so unconcerned about him getting away. Aren’t you worried that he’ll murder some other poor woman?”

I watched her busy hands and debated the merit of truth over lies. “Not really,” I said honestly. “It’s the age of the global village. The story’s gone round the world with his photograph, so he’ll be found very quickly if he’s alive. There are too many people looking for him.”

She turned to look at me. “If?”

“Wishful thinking,” I said.

“Mmm.” A pause. “Perhaps that explains your father. He’s behaving like a schoolboy at the moment.”

“Being on a farm reminds him of home.”

“Except the last time he operated a tractor was twenty years ago,” she said. “We employed a workforce for ploughing…Dad was the boss man who drove a four-by-four and checked the furrows were straight.” She held my gaze for a moment before returning to the potatoes. “But I’m sure you’re right. The simplest explanation is usually the correct one.”