know about that, lad, you’ll understand why I didn’t disagree
‘ ‘ > > o
with him about those Vernons. Did Helen tell you about that?’
‘Yes.’
‘She likes you. Will you be seeing each other? When this lot is over? You’d suit each other, I reckon.’
Fry shifted impatiently and gave Cooper a signal with her eyes. Keep quiet, it said. Don’t encourage him to wander off the subject. Obey instructions.
‘Stick to the subject of Laura Vernon, Mr Dickinson,’ she said.
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‘Aye well, Wilford kept his worst words for the lass. He called her all sorts. But she was as hard-faced as they come. It only provoked her to worse. You wouldn’t believe a young lass could be as foul-mouthed as that. She mocked Wilford. She saw him as a challenge, that’s what it was. She told him he was the only man who had been to die Mount that she hadn’t had sex
with. Can you believe that? A lass of fifteen?1 His eves hardened
j j
to black buttons. ‘But that was the way she was brought up.’
They waited while he sucked violently on his pipe, watching the cloud of smoke rise and drift towards the yellowed ceiling.
‘Then she met Wilford on the Baulk that day. And she mocked him again, worse than ever. She offered herself to him there and then, pulling down her clothes, taunting him like the little whore she was. And then she reached out and touched him …” Harry seemed to have trouble swallowing, shifting the stem of his pipe in his mouth with a faint crunch. ‘Wilford had these bursts of temper, you see. It was because of a thing that happened to him in the war. Did you know he was shot in the head? It did something to part of his brain, and now and then he got these rages. It was the right thing, you see. Wilford always did the right thing.’
‘The right tiling?’ Gwen had been keeping quiet, but now she turned on her husband.
‘That’s what I said.’
‘But he killed that little girl, didn’t he? Murdered her. Beat her to death down there in the woods. How can you talk about the right thing?’
Harry was silent for several moments, staring out of the window into the darkness, as if he was seeing the hills, as if he
‘ o ‘
was listening for the skylark and the distant rumble of blasting in the quarry. Perhaps he was tasting in his imagination the air and the earth, rolling on his tongue the lingering memories of an underground world, stifling and dark, where the only things you could ever trust were your own two hands and the man standing at your back.
‘It’s no good. You won’t ever understand,’ he said.
Gwen’s face crumpled into tears, and the detectives stood in the middle of the room, embarrassed.
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‘What happened during the war?’ asked Cooper.
‘Was it something to do with the French tarts7’ suggested
O O&
Fry, and Cooper raised his eyebrows.
‘Aye, those French girls,’ said Harry. ‘Did Sam tell you? It’s not something I’ve ever told Gwen. I never told her much about the war. Women only worry — they get everything out of proportion ‘
He nodded wisely at them. ‘We were lucky, me and Sam. But Wilford wasn’t so luckv. He was always a bit too upright. Didn’t approve, you know. But there was this lad he thought the world of—he was looking after him, like. And one day they came across this French lass standing in an alley. She wasn’t very old, and she gave them the come-on, hot and hard. Wilford didn’t want to know, of course, but the lad was excited. He went into this dark little house, and Wilford had to tag along, trying to talk him out of it all the way. The lad almost changed his mind, but the lass
-‘ o ‘
grabbed him and stuck his hand down her drawers. Well —’
o
Harry sucked his pipe, remembering.
‘There were two Jerry soldiers hiding in that house, waiting for the girl to tempt a Tommy in. They bayoneted the lad. When Wilford walked through the door, the lad’s guts were already spilled on the floor. Wilford had his bren gun ready, and he shot the Jerries. Then he shot the girl. But he got a Jerry bullet lodged in his skull, and they sent him home. He was never quite right after that, the old lad. His brain never healed somehow. You could never quite tell when he’d have these rages. He had one at the Mount, by all accounts. No wonder Vernon sacked him. And sometimes he’d get them with the animals, though it broke his heart to hurt them.’
Fry drew her breath in sharply. Cooper looked at her, sharing the memory. He saw a cloud of dark feathers drifting out of a hut, settling on Wilford Cutts’s shoulders and sticking in his hair. He remembered the van driver looking wild-eyed and frightened by whatever had happened inside the hut. And he remembered the hen dangling from Wilford’s hand, its wings broken, its eyes glazed with pain, waiting to be put out of its suffering.
Harry continued, unaware of their exchange of glances. ‘When the Vernon child tormented him, he couldn’t put up with it. It
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reminded him of France and the lad who left his <nits uii die flout
O
