his shoulder, and walked to the wall. Then he picked up two clumps of weeds with balls of dry earth sticking to their roots. He hurled them one after the other at the geese, shouting at the top of his voice.
shee thought the sounds he was making could easilv be some
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local dialect descended directly from the Ancient Scandinavian of the Viking invaders. But probably they were just noises. The geese, at least, understood him, and turner! and waddled away back down the track to wait for the next intruder. Without the geese, it was quieter, but not silent. There was a continual background clucking and muttering of poultry, a dog
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barking, the grunting of a pig. And, not far away, the yelling of the goat.
‘I’m Wilford Cutts. This is my place. Over there’s my pal Sam.’
Sam waved the knife again and slashed at another stem. It
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severed in one clean blow, and the trimmed cabbage was dropped into a bucket.
‘Sam Beeley,’ he called.
‘Are you police? I suppose you’re asking about that lass,’ said Wilford. ‘The Mount girl.’
‘Laura Vernon, yes.’
‘I saw the lass about sometimes, I suppose. Is that what you want to know?’
‘Were you in the vicinity of the Baulk on Saturday night or Sunday morning?’
‘Ah. Sam’ll have to tell you what I did Saturday night. I can’t rightly remember.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I’m quite fond of a drink, you see. At my age, it only takes a couple of pints and the old brain goes a bit. Do you know what I mean? Ah, probably not.’
‘Where do you go drinking?’
‘Where? There’s only one place round here, lass. The Drover. As for Sunday morning, well, I’m always here. All this lot to see to, you know. It takes a while.’
‘Feeding the animals.’
‘That’s it.’
‘Do you live here alone, Mr Cutts?’
‘Alone? Well, you’d hardly call it that, would you?’ he said, turning to look across the jumble of buildings, where any sort of animal could have been lurking for all Fry knew.
She turned at the sound of an engine, and saw a battered blue Transit van struggling up the track. As it reached the gateway, a bent little man in a tweed jacket and a cloth cap got out of the driver’s seat to wrestle with the gate. He, too, took no notice of the geese.
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‘I’ll have to leave you to it for a bit,’ said Wilford. ‘I’ve got a customer.’
He walked off, waving to the driver of the van until they had manoeuvred the vehicle against the end of one of the wooden
o
hen huts. Both men went into the hut with bundles of sacks from the van.
‘Stop and have a chat, lass,’ said Sam. ‘It’ll make a change.
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Wilford can get to be a bit of a boring old bugger after a while.’
‘Have you known Mr Cutts for long?’ she asked.
‘As long as I can remember. Mind you, my memory’s not what it was, so he could be a complete stranger.’
Sam began to laugh, his chest wheezing painfully and his false teeth clicking. Fry winced as he raised a thin hand to straighten his cap and the blade of the knife came dangerously close to his eyes.
‘My family came down from Yorkshire when I was very small,’ he said, when a fit of coughing had passed. ‘We went to live at
Evam. My old dad went to work in the lead mines, and I followed
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him down there, as lads did in those days. Wilford was the son of one of my dad’s mates. We worked on the picking table together with a few other lads, then moved on to be jig operators. That’s the way it went in those days, you knowr. You moved in small circles, just a few families and people that you knew. None of this wandering about that everyone seems to do now.’
Fry’s attention strayed around the smallholding, her eves wide in amazement at the ramshackle constructions and makeshift fencing. She was wondering whether the way the animals were kept was strictly legal. She made a mental note to look up the appropriate regulations when she got back to the station.
‘You’ve been friends an awfully long time then,’ she said vaguelv.
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