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

  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?’

  ‘Amelia said dad was drowned…’

  She nodded. ‘In the stream at the bottom of the lane.’ She indicated with a flick of her head in the vague direction.

  ‘What was he doing in the stream?’

  She shrugged. ‘You know your dad. Always up to something. Could never keep still. Ants in his pants, I used to say. I think he was clearing it of weeds. He had this thing about it being blocked. His heart chose that moment to give way and he collapsed face down into it. Drowned in eight inches of water, but that’s all it takes apparently, someone said.’

  ‘He had a weak heart?’

  ‘He was taking medication for three years after a minor stroke.’

  ‘A minor stroke – three years? Why didn’t anyone ever tell me?’

  ‘He was too proud a man. Didn’t want to worry anyone.’

  ‘Jesus, mum! You should have told me!’

  ‘Would that have made any difference?’

  He stared at her, his lips dropping open to respond. He clamped them shut again. ‘I’m going to make some tea,’ he said. ‘Do you want some?’

  She shook her head and he left her alone. His sister was in the kitchen. She gave him the cold shoulder as he filled the kettle. ‘Did you know about dad’s heart condition?’ he asked.

  She gave an abbreviated nod. ‘Sure.’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t anyone tell me?’

  ‘Guess we forgot,’ she said shortly.

  ‘Yeah, looks that way,’ he said, feeling anger take root and grow inside him. He jabbed at the switch to turn on the kettle. The small kitchen was filled with the hiss of the boiling water. It gave voice to his raging thoughts. But in the end he let it all out in a long sigh and grabbed a cup from the cupboard, throwing in a teabag. ‘Why do people round here always refer to Sylvia Tredwin as poor Sylvia Tredwin?’

  She snorted. ‘That’s just like you. You can expend emotion and concern on others, but you don’t give a damn about your own family!’

  ‘That’s not true…’

  ‘Leave poor Sylvia Tredwin out of this!’ she said and stormed out of the kitchen.

  6

  The Measure of Success

  He could still feel his presence. Isn’t that strange, he thought? It’s like the dead leave behind an impression in the world they inhabited, like a dent in the mattress of a vacated bed.

  It was morning. The noisy chirruping of birds scrabbling about in the eaves of the old cottage had woken him. George Lee wasn’t used to it. He looked at his bedside alarm and gave a dismayed groan on seeing it read 5:30 am. The light was already spearing in through the thin chintz curtains. He lay in bed watching them for a while, unable to fall back asleep; studied the way they gently ballooned with the breeze coming through the open window, like a flowery chest slowly inhaling and exhaling.

  This used to be his bedroom, he thought. Smaller than he always remembered it. Stuffier. Things had been left pretty much as they’d always been. His mother hadn’t thrown anything away. His old Beano and Dandy annuals, his childhood audio tapes of Superman, Batman and Spiderman still stuffed into one of the drawers that had been in his bedroom for as long as he could remember. Everything left intact as a kind of reminder to his mother of the son he’d once been. So far removed from the disappointing adult he’d become.

  And with the idle memories of childhood came the memory of his father standing at the door, admonishing him for sleeping in so late. Not a ‘good morning’ or a smile to greet the day, just another complaint.

  It was when he closed his eyes that he thought he could sense the old man in the room again.

  He shrugged the sensation off. Stayed in bed for a further half hour before rising, getting dressed and going downstairs to the bathroom, and then the kitchen. All was quiet, the curtains drawn. He instinctively grabbed the curtains to yank them open, but realised his mother wanted them to stay closed. A dated, outward expression of mourning. But his attention was pulled to someone sitting out in the garden in one of four rusted iron garden chairs. It was his mother.

  He should go to her, he thought. Offer some kind of support.

  He brou
ght the curtains together and shut her out, making a cup of tea instead. He dropped a slice of bread into the aged toaster, his usual breakfast, and leant against the kitchen sink thinking. The toast popped up and he didn’t know where the intervening minutes had gone. He couldn’t wait to get the funeral over and done with, he thought as he slapped a thick layer of butter onto his toast. Then he thought about his father’s heart condition, vaguely considered whether it could be hereditary and scraped off some of the butter.

  To have a heart condition it presupposed you had to have a heart, he thought bitterly. His father didn’t have one. Or at least he never revealed it to him.

  He heard his sister thumping about upstairs through the cottage’s low, thin ceilings, and, hearing the creak of the boards as she made her way to her bedroom door, beat a hasty retreat into the garden to avoid her when she came down. The lesser of two evils, he thought, walking slowly up to his mother, chewing on the toast.

  ‘Good morning, George,’ she said without turning.

  ‘How did you know it was me?’ he asked, coming to her side and pulling up a chair to sit beside her.

  ‘I know,’ she said vaguely. He saw a ghost of a smile flicker on her lips, but it vanished as fast as a fleeting shadow.

  The well-kept garden was small, mature trees crowding the edges, a tiny plot of grass that he hadn’t been allowed to play on as a kid. ‘Go play in the fields if you want grass,’ his father used to say. So he did. Fields bordered their house on all sides, so there was ample choice. It was on one such excursion into the fields that George came across Adam Tredwin.

  Nobody bothered with Adam at school. He had no friends. If you even thought about becoming a friend of his then the other boys would not be yours. The club that rallied against Adam Tredwin was a large and dominant one. George Lee never wanted to be friendless – he so wanted to be liked, to be accepted – so he avoided Adam Tredwin like the plague. He even joined in the constant bullying and cruel mind games played against Adam, a perverse disease that kids still enact on each other and will never go away. He never felt easy with it, in all honesty. But what could you do? Adam Tredwin and his family were weird, everyone knew that. And Adam could infect you with that weirdness if you got too close. It was a fact.

  So when George Lee was banished yet again from the garden to go play in the fields one weekend and he came across Adam Tredwin sitting by a stream, throwing blades of grass into it and watching them sail away like slender green canoes, he was on the verge of avoiding him and taking a different route.

  But something drew him to the lonely young boy’s side.

  ‘Hi, Adam,’ said George, shuffling in that expressive, self-conscious way some eight-year-old boys have about them.

  Adam Tredwin looked up from his reverie, his eyes suddenly fearful. He looked around to see if George had brought trouble with him. The boys could be mean within the confines of school, but if they caught Adam outside they could be doubly so. That’s why he rarely went out.

  ‘What do you want?’ said Adam, satisfied George was alone. He was slightly older than George, but not by much. Yet he appeared far older to George, in the way he looked at you, his prolonged thoughtful silences filled with meaning.

  ‘Don’t want anything,’ said George. He tentatively went to sit by Adam’s side, a discreet distance away. He plucked up blades of grass and tossed one or two into the stream. Adam watched his every move carefully. ‘What are you doing?’ George asked.

  Adam Tredwin regarded the crushed blades of grass in his delicate palm, at the green smudges. ‘This is the grass’s blood,’ he said quietly, holding up his palm for George to see.

  George hastily looked at his own hand to see if there was any green blood on them. There wasn’t. ‘Is it?’ he said.

  ‘Sure, everything bleeds. Even plants.’

  George nodded. It sounded profound to him, even then. But profundity in eight-year-olds is either accidental or fleeting, and George forgot the grass’s blood and smiled. ‘I’ll bet my boats can beat yours,’ he said, holding up a spiky sliver of grass.

  ‘I’ll bet it can’t,’ said Adam.

  And George Lee came close to the boy’s side and they raced grass stems in the clear, gurgling stream. He saw a lot more of Adam Tredwin that summer, secretly, because he didn’t want his friends at school to know. Then his mother found out and banned him from ever seeing Adam again, sending him to his room as punishment. He complained bitterly. He hadn’t done anything wrong, he defended. Adam is a nice boy!

  When his father got home he gave George a severe beating, dragging down his trousers and thrashing his bare backside with a slipper till it burnt a fiery red.

  A few weeks later Adam Tredwin and his entire family left the village of Petheram never to be seen or heard of again. Not till six months ago when the garden centre was opened up by Adam Tredwin.

  ‘Why’d you ban me from playing with Adam Tredwin?’ George Lee asked bluntly. He stared at his mother. She avoided looking at him.

  ‘I’m tired, George,’ she replied. ‘That was a long time ago. Leave it be. None of that matters now.’

  ‘My dad gave me a thrashing for playing with Adam,’ he said. ‘Remember?’

  She blinked slowly. ‘No. You’re imagining it. He’d never do that. Perhaps it was for something else. You were always getting into trouble.’

  ‘It was for playing with Adam,’ he persisted. Long time ago or no, the memory still caused George Lee anxiety. It was as relevant to him now as all those years ago.

  ‘Your father was a good man, George. A kind man. If he beat you it was for your own good.’

  ‘My own good?’ he said, scoffing. ‘If I ever had a kid I wouldn’t take a slipper to his backside, no matter what he did.’

  ‘Times were different back then. Parenting has changed so much.’

  ‘Bollocks,’ he said, then, of course, regretted it.

  ‘But it appears you shall never be having children of your own, will you George? It is easy to be critical of the dead and their shortcomings, when the living have plenty of their own to contend with, do they not?’ Her eyes met his. They were cold, unblinking. ‘My husband, your father, is dead. Must we have this selfishness from you again, especially at this sad time?’

  Like a berated kid he slumped in his chair, studying his dusty shoes. His dad used to slap him around the head for having dusty shoes. Every Sunday night he had to polish everyone’s shoes, including his own, till he was satisfied he could see his reflection in them. It was a habit that George could not drop. It unnerved him to see his shoes all dusty like that. He had to force himself to look away from them.

  ‘Just saying, that’s all,’ he said sullenly.

  He heard the clatter of breakfast pots as his sister Amelia prepared breakfast. Hearty porridge oats, no sugar. Her insides as virtuous as her outside. She could do no wrong, thought George as he downed the last of his buttered toast, licking the fat off his fingers.

  ‘Your Uncle Gary rung from the garage last night when you’d gone to bed,’ she said flatly. ‘He says your car’s buggered and that he has an old VW Golf that he uses as a courtesy car, which you can use in the meantime till you sort things out.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said George.

  ‘So now you won’t have to be stuck here with us all the time,’ she said.

  He rose from his seat. ‘I’ll pick it up today,’ he murmured, walking away.

  He placed the stepladders under the trapdoor to the loft and climbed them. They were old rickety wooden things. His dad had always been reluctant to buy new things, and the ladders were a prime example. They were dangerous, George Lee thought as he wobbled at their top and pushed up the trapdoor. He clambered up into the loft space, searching for the light switch.

  The low-wattage bulb revealed a small space crammed with boxes of all shapes and sizes and heaps of black bin bags. There was a desk tucked against one wall, a phone on it, and piles of files and boxes looking to push it over the edge. He saw a sta
ck of fishing magazines in one corner that had caused concern for the safety of the ceiling. Yes, they had to go, he thought, or they’d let themselves out – straight down.

  He was still ruminating over what had passed between his mother and himself, and inside was fuming and repentant all at once. His act of offering to tidy out his dad’s crap was to help ameliorate the growing antipathy towards him.

  ‘There’s nothing valuable up there you can sell online,’ said Amelia tartly as she squeezed past the ladder to go to her room.

  Fuck you, he thought as he sorted through boxes. But his heart just wasn’t in it. He gave up after an hour and decided he’d take a walk to the garage as an excuse to get out of the house. The atmosphere was grim and suffocating, he thought, more so than usual.

  It was still early morning. He nodded a greeting at a lone dog walker as he strolled down the main road trough the village, heading for his uncle’s garage on the edge of town. His route took him straight past Adam Tredwin’s garden centre. He paused outside the gates. There were no cars parked inside yet, but the store was clearly open. A strong smell of roses washed over to him from a line of rose bushes in pots by the gates.

  He was tempted to go in and see if Adam was around. But it felt awkward. After all, they’d not seen each other since they were eight years old and Adam might not remember the boy who played with him that one summer all those years ago. George Lee gave a wry smile. Adam was the one who never had any friends, and now it was George’s turn. Now he knew what it felt like to have no one. Every one of his so-called friends deserted him when they’d used up whatever part they wanted of him. In wanting to be popular, George had offered himself freely, to all and sundry, without restraint and without being selective; and he’d only succeeded in attracting those who offered superficial friendship. And in spending so much energy fostering false friends and false ambitions designed to reach fame and still more friends, he had lost the one woman who had showed him real love. Now he was completely alone. He and Adam Tredwin had a lot in common.