The Drowning Ground: A Novel Page 4

  Silence.

  ‘Because he’ll be reporting back to me. Now Graves will fill you all in properly later. But for now we’re looking for dog-walkers,’ he said. ‘Looks like half the village uses that field to walk their dogs. And there could be others too. From further afield. We’ll need to find them and interview them as well. But we need to know if anyone saw anything up on that hill. Anyone leaving the village in a hurry. Any strangers hanging about. People usually notice in a small place like this, as you all well know. And ask about a white van. It looks like there was one parked near the bottom of the hill. And a man was seen having some kind of argument with Hurst up there: a couple saw them. Sometime in the afternoon, we think. Around 3.00. We don’t have a good description of him yet. And we don’t know what they were arguing about. So far, that’s all we’ve got.’

  Graves listened, but he was still really thinking about the pitchfork and the dead man on the hill. It wasn’t his first dead body by a long shot. But the poor man’s neck. It had looked like some animal had got to him and literally tried to tear out his throat. The image of the body, lying pale in the wet field, blazed vividly before him.

  He shifted in the snow and gazed over the shoulders of the other policemen, who were all listening intently to what Downes had to say. When Downes spoke, he was somehow more animated and involved than other policemen of the same rank, and this made him seem energetic, younger even. His hands moved up and down as if of their own free will, and sometimes when he appeared unhappy or dissatisfied his shoulders would draw in and he would point to himself with the tips of his thumbs touching the tips of his index fingers and the wrists of both hands angled towards his chest. It was a disconcerting gesture, and, though the men seemed to expect it, they nonetheless shrank from it.

  Downes finished, nodded curtly in Graves’s direction and turned away. As the men looked on, Graves marched up to his car and pulled a map from the front seat, then closed the door. He laid it on the bonnet of his car and carefully placed a stone on each corner to stop it flapping in the wind. The men at once huddled around him.

  Graves had just had time to scout out the village, along with Douglas and Irwin; and with their help he had drawn this rough map of the village and where he wanted the men to start conducting interviews. He’d also got an Ordinance Survey map of some of the nearby villages: there were an awful lot of them dotted about, some barely more than a bunch of houses lining a road. And they had strange, ancient-sounding names.

  Graves began to divide the men up into pairs, and when a few moments later he looked up, Downes was gone.

  6

  Standing outside in the late-afternoon dark, snow falling heavily all around me, I stamped my feet and checked my notes, just to make sure that I had the right address. I pressed the doorbell again and waited; a light flicked on, a figure shuffled towards the glass porch, slowly fiddled with the locks and began to undo the latch. The door opened as far as the chain would allow, and an old man’s face was suddenly glaring out at me through the crack.

  ‘Yes?’ the man said.

  ‘Mr Fernsby?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m here to talk to you about Frank Hurst,’ I said. ‘You saw him yesterday out on Meon Hill, I hear.’

  Fernsby, without saying another word, nodded, closed the door and began to unlatch it. We walked through the glass porch and the hall, emerging into the stifling heat of his living room. He picked up the remote control from the coffee table and snapped off the TV in a childishly exaggerated gesture before lowering himself fussily into his armchair.

  Fernsby’s living room was immaculate, but it did smell faintly of Vicks, wet dog and stale cigarette smoke. Lying sprawled out in front of the red bars of the electric fire was the fattest golden retriever I had ever seen in my life. I sniffed the air and frowned when I got an unpleasant smell of burning. The dog seemed to get a whiff of it too, and it lifted its head off its huge paws and leisurely sniffed the air, unaware that a coiling plume of bluish smoke was now rising from its fur. Fernsby saw the smoke as well, but it did not seem to surprise him. He sighed, pulled himself out of his chair, grabbed the dog by the collar and dragged it roughly across the rug.

  ‘He keeps on doing that,’ he said, patting at the fur.

  I noticed that tied around the palm of Fernsby’s left hand was a bandage. It looked fairly new. And wrapped around his neck was a grey scarf, despite the heat. For some reason Fernsby, looking at me through thick black spectacles, reminded me of a cartoon turtle. The thin scarf exaggerated the length of his wrinkled neck; the bald head; the sunken chin.

  ‘Would you like a tea or anything?’ Fernsby said halfheartedly. ‘A coffee perhaps?’

  I shook my head as I took off my overcoat and put it in my lap. I had been politely refusing cups of tea all day. Just as all day I had been intruding upon the carefully maintained rituals of the elderly. I glanced outside: it was completely dark now, and the cul-de-sac was very quiet. Hard to believe that only a few streets away policemen were still banging on every door amongst the worried, peering faces. Like an occupying army under the command of my sergeant, the uniformed mobs had swept through the village. They were trampling over the village green and the flowerbeds, and rapping loudly on windows when there was no reply, while their radios cracked and shrieked in the gathering cold. But here, at least, the invasion seemed far away, and in its place was a strange hush, now made deeper by the falling snow.

  ‘So what’s going on?’ Fernsby demanded, before primly straightening out the creases in his trousers.

  According to Graves’s notes, Alistair Fernsby used to be a teacher at the local prep school in Stratford, and there was still something of the querulous schoolmaster about him as he waited almost crossly for me to get on with it and state my business.

  ‘You told one of my constables that you saw Frank Hurst yesterday evening – is that right?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And?’

  ‘And he’s dead,’ I said simply. ‘Murdered, actually.’

  Fernsby leant forward in his chair, reaching for a cigarette. He didn’t seem all that surprised. Of course, word had got round hours ago.

  ‘Murdered. Murdered how?’ he said cautiously.

  I ignored him. ‘You told the police constable that you arrived in the field on Meon Hill at around 4.30 – is that right?’

  ‘Yes, around that time, yes.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes, of course I’m sure. I’m almost always the last up there. Jumbo isn’t all that keen on other dogs. He’s got a nasty tendency to go for them,’ Fernsby said, looking fondly at his dog. ‘Don’t you, Jumbo, you big ugly sod.’

  Jumbo, on hearing his name, wearily lifted his head with a pained expression, then promptly seemed to go to sleep.

  ‘I have to keep him on the lead,’ Fernsby explained almost guiltily. ‘If there are other dogs on the hill. Not much fun for him if he can’t run about, so I’m almost always the last one up there. Just before it gets dark. That way I can let him off the lead, and he can have a nice long run. We don’t bother anyone else that way. But Frank was there with his dog, so I couldn’t very well let Jumbo off. We weren’t there for long. Felt like I was trespassing with him up – although’ – Fernsby wagged his finger in the air at me as if I were about to contradict him – ‘Frank’s got absolutely no right to stop us walking on that hill.’

  For some reason Fernsby started to laugh. It was a hearty laugh, or at least it was to begin with. But it brought on an alarming and drawn-out coughing fit, which ended in an ominously wet rattle. When it was all over, Fernsby, somewhat defiantly, lit his cigarette with a plastic lighter, breathed in and let it hang jauntily from his lower lip.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘I did make sure I stuck to the path. You saw that charming sign he put up, I suppose?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘pretty hard to miss.’

  ‘He absolutely hated our walking on his field. Resented it. He tried for years to keep us
off. Ploughed over the footpath. Padlocked the gate shut. Knocked down the stile one year, even put a bull in another year to scare us off. Mean bugger it was too,’ Fernsby said with some admiration before adding, ‘Didn’t do him an ounce of good, though. Public right of way on Meon Hill, and the people round here know it. We set the council on him in the end.’ Fernsby said this almost as if he regretted it.

  ‘And you saw nobody else? No other dog-walkers. Nobody at all in the field? It was just you and Frank Hurst?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when you went first into the field – when you crossed the stile – did you see a van parked out there? A white van?’

  Fernsby shook his head. ‘A white van. Why?’

  ‘A man was seen arguing with Hurst up on the field. Around 3.00, we think. But you’re saying that by the time you walked into the field the man was gone? And there was no sign of this van?’

  ‘There was no van,’ Fernsby said firmly. ‘And there was nobody else up there either. It was just Frank up there. And me.’

  ‘All right, so when you saw him up there working, did you give him a wave perhaps? Go to say hello?’

  Fernsby snorted as if I had said something ridiculous. ‘No, I certainly did not.’

  That was about right. Hurst had kept pretty much to himself. I couldn’t say that I blamed him. The majority of people who had seen him working in his field yesterday afternoon had taken him for some lowly odd-job man sent by the council to clean the place up on their behalf. Almost all of the dog-walkers who regularly used Meon Hill, and there were a surprisingly large number of them, had a strange tendency to talk about the place as if they owned it or as if it were part of a state-run park and not just a right of way through someone else’s private property. All day I had rather pointlessly, I realized, been feeling increasingly indignant on the dead man’s behalf.

  Fernsby was watching me with a sly smile, as if he had just remembered something amusing. ‘You ever meet him?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘Yes, I met him. Around five years ago.’

  ‘So you’ll know all about his wife. It was the second one he buried, you know?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said quickly. ‘I know all about that.’

  Fernsby was still smiling at me; I wondered if he expected me to go into all the grisly details for him. His sudden streak of cheery sadism was unexpected and unsettling. ‘I know exactly what happened to his second wife, Mr Fernsby, and to his first one too,’ I said coldly. ‘But how did Frank Hurst look to you yesterday?’

  Fernsby’s smile vanished. ‘What do you mean, how did he look?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘did he look nervous, perhaps, or anxious? Did he seem to be looking for someone, or did he seem to be waiting for someone?’

  Fernsby thought it over. ‘It was a bit of a surprise to see him there, actually. I hadn’t seen him for years. I don’t know’ – Fernsby stared at the floor – ‘two years. Maybe more. And I can’t even remember where that was. He didn’t go out much, you know. Who could blame him, after what happened? But I used to see him from time to time in the village shop, getting his groceries, bombing about in his jeep, driving too fast down the road. Mostly, he kept to himself up in that big old house of his. Yesterday, he looked’ – Fernsby paused, searching for the right word – ‘he looked grim.’ Fernsby’s face fell, dissatisfied. ‘But then, of course, he always looked grim. Not speaking to anyone. Glaring at people with their dogs all afternoon, because he hadn’t anything better to do.

  ‘But there is something else,’ he said finally. ‘It was more than that.’ He put out his cigarette.

  I waited.

  ‘He looked … well, to be perfectly honest, he didn’t look quite all there. He was talking to himself, for one thing. I thought he was talking to the dog at first. The dog was tied to one of the trees. I couldn’t really hear what he was saying, but it sounded like silly stuff. Stuff like what he had to do when he got back home. Odd jobs he had to do. What he was going to have for his tea. Felt a bit sorry for him, really. But then I had always felt a bit sorry for him. He never seemed to get over it. You know, after what happened to his wife.’

  ‘His wife drowned, didn’t she?’ I said, finally giving in.

  ‘That’s right,’ Fernsby said, quite cheerful again. ‘Cracked her head against the side of her swimming pool and drowned. Lot of nasty gossip about it at the time, as I’m sure you’re aware.’

  I nodded. I had believed some of it at the time. I folded my coat tighter on my lap, remembering.

  ‘God, he was a stubborn sod,’ Fernsby said. ‘Anyone else would have shut up shop, sold the place and never come back, but not Hurst. You been up there? To the house?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  Fernsby shook his head in disgust. ‘Let the whole place go, by the looks of it. His daughter walked out on him. Can’t say I blame her.’

  ‘Actually,’ I said, ‘I wanted to ask you about her. We’ve been trying to reach her all day. She went away years ago, that’s what we’re hearing.’

  ‘Rebecca,’ Fernsby said. ‘Rebecca Hurst. She moved. But don’t ask me where. Ran off with some fella.’ Fernsby now looked taken aback. ‘Hold on. So you didn’t find him in his house?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘we didn’t. We think he was killed around 5.00 yesterday afternoon. And near the place where you said you were out walking your dog. In fact,’ I added a little cruelly, ‘you may well have been the last one to see him alive.’

  I had not really intended to shock the old man or worry him all that much. He seemed far too self-assured for that anyway. But my words seemed to shake him. He started feeling along the bandage on his hand.

  ‘What?’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Well, it was his dog,’ Fernsby said. ‘I told you he had tied it to a tree. I think it might have even been asleep.’ Fernsby paused. ‘Can’t really remember now. Sorry. But as we were on our way back across the field towards home, it started barking. I thought it might have been at us to begin with. But it definitely wasn’t us it was interested in. It was something on the other side of the hill. A fox or a rabbit, I suppose. It seemed to want to go after it, but of course it couldn’t. It just ran along the lead – back and forth, barking.’

  ‘Barking towards the house – in the direction of Hurst’s house? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Fernsby folded his arms over his chest and nodded. ‘Yes.’

  I leant forward in my chair. ‘And did you see what the dog was barking at, Mr Fernsby? Did you see anyone cutting across the back of the hill? Not a dog-walker – someone else?’

  Fernsby paused, thinking. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Perhaps you remember something else?’ I asked. ‘Anything at all? Doesn’t matter if it seems of no consequence. Like the dog. When did it start barking? Can you remember? Are you sure it only started to bark later?’

  Fernsby’s eyes dimmed, and he sat back, thinking harder, worrying at the edges of his memory. ‘No, it was definitely later,’ Fernsby said finally. ‘As I was on my way back across the field – on my way back home. Frank lost his patience with it. He started shouting and gave it a wallop. But it didn’t seem to do any good. The dog just got more and more worked up.’ Fernsby pushed himself further back in his chair.

  ‘But there’s something else, though, isn’t there?’ I said, pushing him, albeit gently for now. ‘Something was wrong, wasn’t there? There was something else you didn’t like about yesterday’s walk.’

  Fernsby nodded reluctantly. He reached for another cigarette, thought better of it and closed his eyes for a moment. ‘Well, as I was nearing the end of the walk … it was funny, I kept on looking up at Hurst, because I was sure he was staring at me. You know I could feel … well, it was like I could feel him staring at me. But he wasn’t: he was bent over, working. He wasn’t paying attention to me at all. It’s silly but…’ Fernsby shrugged, too embarrassed to go on.

  ‘You felt as if you were being watched,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you?
’

  ‘Yes – I suppose that’s it,’ Fernsby said, relieved that I had said it for him. ‘You have to try to understand,’ he said. ‘It was getting dark and … well … I suppose I got a bit jumpy. Jumbo seemed to want to go home as well. It was like he was dragging me away from there – probably just desperate for his tea – practically pulled me out of that field, didn’t you, Jumbo?’

  Jumbo, I noticed, had moved much closer to the fire and was on the verge of once more setting himself alight. But maybe Jumbo wasn’t quite as dumb as he looked.

  ‘I could hear Frank raving to himself on the top of the hill, talking to himself. That, and his dog barking like mad. It was getting dark after all, so I suppose I was really glad to get out of there.’ Fernsby laughed half-heartedly. ‘Fell over when I climbed over the stile,’ he said, lifting up his bandaged hand and showing it to me.

  Yes, I could just imagine Fernsby and his dog moving through the growing darkness, the animal pulling his master’s frail frame along the path and towards the gate. An old man made worried by the sudden eeriness of the hill, but not really wanting to admit it to himself. And, once back amongst the reassuring lights of the village, Fernsby would have no doubt reprimanded himself for having got all worked up over nothing. Finally in the safety of his home. On goes the latch.

  The sound of the wind blowing through the trees on Meon Hill came back to me, and with it a memory of the damp, used-up smell of Hurst’s corpse. I imagined someone moving quickly and silently towards Frank Hurst as he worked in his field. I thought of the hill; imagined a blurred shadow peeling itself away from the darkness of the trees. For a moment, in the darkening light, I seemed to see Hurst’s hunched-over back, and then his panic-stricken face as he turned.

  I looked up. The old boy was staring at me again. Another cigarette in his mouth.

  ‘Downes,’ Fernsby said thoughtfully. ‘The name – it’s English, isn’t it? But you’re not from here, are you?’

  I sighed and stood up. I get this a lot. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I’m not.’