31

‘Tell me,’ Neesham said, ‘from the beginning.’

I was laid out on the couch in the drawing room. I tried to raise my hand to my head, but handcuffs cut off my movement. I pulled myself up to a sitting position, intending to stand, but the room spun alarmingly.

Neesham sat on the opposite couch, where Kate had sat the last time I’d been here. He looked tired.

‘How did you get here so quickly?’ I asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The murders took place about five minutes before I got here. You got here five minutes after me. You were on your way already.’

‘I don’t have to explain my methods to you, Cook.’

My head was pounding. I closed my eyes.

‘You’re not the law, John,’ Neesham said. ‘Let the rest of us have a chance. Some of us might surprise you.’

I didn’t respond to Neesham, but I could feel his satisfaction in the silence. Since our days together at school, he’d always been in my shadow. Since I’d come back from the war we hadn’t crossed paths much, but I knew how he thought of me. Cook, the man who’d lost his mind and stayed in the army after the war. Seen so much killing he couldn’t come home. Damaged goods.

‘Tell me again,’ he said.

I told him about taking Mrs Leckie home from the station. About her and Stan being bruised, threatened and evicted. I told him about coming to see Kate, and her promise to leave the Leckies alone.

‘I was back there yesterday and I heard shots. I was too far away to be useful.’

I didn’t tell Neesham about Kate’s last words. Your fault. That was between her and me.

‘What were you hoping to achieve coming here?’ Neesham asked.

‘I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.’

‘You wanted revenge.’

He was right, of course, but it wasn’t just revenge.

‘She killed the Leckies,’ I said. ‘Even if it wasn’t either of her sons pulling the trigger, she was behind it. I wanted to put it to her. See what she said.’

Neesham wrote on his pad. He looked at me, thinking carefully about his next question.

‘I assume the soldier was dead when you arrived.’

I didn’t answer. It hadn’t sounded like a question.

‘What’s his connection to the Leckies?’ he asked.

‘He was a deserter,’ I said. ‘I found him lying low in my woods with a couple of others.’

‘He’s not from Dunkirk,’ Neesham said.

‘How can you tell?’

‘Orders from the top. The absolute top. We’re not going to find any of our returning heroes committing any crimes, least of all deserting. These are all gallant young men who can’t wait to get back into the fray and give Jerry what-for.’

‘So they get a free pass on anything they decide to get up to?’

‘If we catch anyone in the act, we hand them over to the military police. Let them worry about it. But if it’s a report of a crime, we file it at the bottom of the in-tray. Leave it there for a year until this is all over.’

The last thing the country needed was stories of Tommies misbehaving. One of the advantages of conducting wars overseas was that the public could be kept unaware of the various realities of forcing young men to put themselves in harm’s way.

Neesham looked up as another car pulled up in front of the house. We listened to the door opening and closing, footsteps.

Doc Graham carried his medical bag. He looked at the two of us, on our opposite couches. Me in handcuffs, Neesham with his notebook. He didn’t comment. He knelt by Kate’s body.

‘Nasty,’ he said.

‘That’s your medical opinion?’ I asked. Doc and I were old friends. The three of us, Neesham included, had gone to school together. Small-town stuff.

‘In medical parlance, she’s deceased.’

It wasn’t like Doc to be so flippant. He was a precise man, in words and in action. Something was wrong. More wrong than walking in on a dead body and two of his old schoolmates at loggerheads, one of them in handcuffs.

‘There’s a couple more in the kitchen,’ Neesham said.

*

Doc went through his checks on the soldier while Neesham paced. I sat on a kitchen chair, next to the son, or what -remained of him. Neesham had let me out of the handcuffs, grudgingly.

‘Well?’ Neesham asked. Doc was crouched on the floor, he looked up at Neesham and shook his head. He’d been feeling the man’s ankles. Rolled his trouser legs back down. He shuffled along, repositioning, and unbuttoned the shirt. The soldier’s neck was destroyed, the frying pan had done its job. Doc examined the man’s chest, and looked under the arms. Once again, he looked up at Neesham and shook his head.

‘One less thing,’ Neesham said.

‘What are you looking for?’ I asked.

‘You were saying something earlier about a parachutist,’ Neesham said.

‘I saw one come down on the Forest,’ I replied. ‘Vaughn Matheson said he’d call it in. I told him to ask for you.’

Neesham shook his head. Apparently the message hadn’t got through.

Doc felt inside the man’s jacket, and produced a crumpled wad of paper. He unfolded it. Two twenty-pound notes, blood leaching into the paper, and a map. He unfolded the map and looked at it. When he looked up, he didn’t look at Neesham, but at me.

‘What?’ I asked.

Doc spread the map out on the kitchen table. Uckfield and Ashdown Forest. Standard Ordnance Survey, one to twenty-five thousand. Sheet TQ 42. You’d find a copy in every house in the district, scuffed at the corners, coming apart at the folds.

A cross, crudely made with thick pencil, showed our -current position.

‘Someone gave him this and the money,’ Neesham said. ‘Gave him his marching orders.’

‘This is the Leckies,’ I said, pointing at another cross, at the end of Palehouse Lane, stuck out like an island in the middle of the open space of the Forest.

I’d been wrong about Kate. She hadn’t hired this man. Why would you hire a killer and put yourself on his list?

‘Cook,’ Doc said. His earlier flippancy was gone. Doc was my oldest friend. My only friend. He wasn’t a man who wore his emotions on his sleeve, but in that one word, there was fear, and urgency.

Doc pointed to another point on the map. A third cross, crudely drawn with thick pencil. A job to be done. Forty pounds up front. A year’s pay. Probably more to come on completion.

My vision blurred and I couldn’t focus on the map. I didn’t need to. I knew every lane, every hedgerow, every contour. I knew what was hidden beneath the thick cross. A farmhouse. Outbuildings. Barns. Sitting alone and vulnerable at the end of a half-mile-long country lane, a mile west of Uckfield.

My farm.