His father’s fists clenched. He raised his arms then dropped them. “You’re as stubborn an ass as you were twenty years ago. As stupid as well.”
Colin shrugged.
“You have no choice now. You know that, don’t you? You’ve the whole sodding village in a quagmire over this wet fanny you’ve got such a fancy for.”
Colin’s own fist clenched. He forced himself to release it. “That’s it, Pa. Be on your way. As I recall, you’ve a fanny of your own waiting somewhere this evening.”
“You’re not too old to be beaten, boy.”
“True. But this time, you’d probably lose.”
“After what I did—”
“You didn’t need to do anything. I didn’t ask you to be here. I didn’t ask you to follow me round like a hound with a good scent of fox up his nose. I had it under control.”
His father gave a sharp, derisive nod. “Stubborn, stupid, and blind as well.” He left the kitchen and went to the front door where he battled his way into his jacket and shoved his left foot into one of his boots. “You’re lucky they’ve come.”
“I don’t need them. She did nothing.”
“Save poison the vicar.”
“By accident, Pa.”
His father jerked on the second boot and straightened up. “You’d better pray on that, son. Because there’s one hell of a cloud hanging over you now. In the village. In Clitheroe. All the way to Hutton-Preston. And the only way it’s about to clear off is if the Yard’s CID don’t smell something nasty in your lady friend’s bed.”
He fished his leather gloves from his pocket and began to pull them on. He didn’t speak again until he’d squashed his peaked cap on his head. Then he peered at his son sharply.
“You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you? You’ve done no holding back?”
“Pa—”
“Because if you’ve covered up for her, you’re through. You’re sacked. You’re indicted. That’s the number. You understand that, don’t you?”
Colin saw the anxiety in his father’s eyes and heard it beneath the anger in his voice. He knew there was a measure of paternal solicitude in it, but he also knew that beyond the reality that a cover-up would lead to an investigation and a trial, it was the complete incomprehensibility of the fact that he wasn’t hungry that picked at his father’s peace. He had never been restless. He didn’t yearn for a higher rank and the right to sit comfortably behind a desk. He was thirty-four years old and still a village constable and as far as his father was concerned, there had to be a good reason why.
And now, there was the potential humiliation of his son’s involvement in the cover-up of a crime. He’d rested easy when the coroner’s jury had reached their verdict. He’d be in a hornets’ nest of dread until Scotland Yard completed their investigation and verifi ed that there had been no crime.
“Colin,” his father said again. “You’ve been straight with me, haven’t you? Nothing held back?”
Colin met his gaze directly. He was proud he could do so. “Nothing held back,” he said.
It was only when he’d closed the door upon his father that Colin felt his legs weaken. He grasped onto the knob and leaned his forehead against the wood.
It was nothing to concern himself with. No one would ever need to know. He’d not even thought of it himself until the Scotland Yard DI had asked his question and triggered the memory of Juliet and the gun.
He’d gone to speak to her after receiving three angry phone calls from three frightened sets of parents whose sons had been out for a frolic on the grounds of Cotes Hall. She’d been living at the Hall in the caretaker’s cottage just a year then, a tall, angular woman who kept to herself, made her money from growing herbs and brewing up potions, hiked vigorously across the moors with her daughter, and seldom came into the village for anything. She bought groceries in Clitheroe.
She bought gardening supplies in Burnley. She examined crafts and sold plants and dried herbs in Laneshawbridge. She took her daughter on the occasional excursion, but her choices were always a margin off-beat, like the Lewis Textile Museum rather than Lancaster Castle, like Hoghton Tower’s collection of dolls’ houses rather than Blackpool’s diversions by the sea. But these were things he discovered later. At first, bucking down the rutted lane in his old Land Rover, he thought only of the idiocy of a woman who’d shoot into the darkness at three young boys making animal noises at the edge of the woods. And a shotgun at that. Anything could have happened.
The sun was filtering through the oak wood on that afternoon. Beads of green lined the branches of trees as a late winter day gave way to spring. He was rounding a bend in the blasted road that the Townley-Youngs had been refusing to repair for the better part of a decade when through the open window came the sharp scent of cut lavender and with it one of those stabbing memories of Annie. So blinding it was, so momentarily real that he trod on the brake, half expecting her to come at a run from the woods, there where the lavender had been planted thickly at the edge of the road more than one hundred years ago when Cotes Hall lay in readiness for its bridegroom who had never arrived.
They’d been out here a thousand times, he and Annie, and she usually plucked at the lavender bushes as she made her way along the lane, filling the air with the scent of both the flowers and the foliage, collecting the buds to use in sachets among the wools and the linens at home. He remembered those sachets as well, clumsy little gauze pouches tied with frayed purple ribbon. They always came apart within a week. He was always picking bits of lavender out of his socks and brushing them off the sheets. And despite his protest of “Come on, girl. What good do they do?” she kept industriously tucking the pouches into every corner of the house, even once into his shoes, saying, “Moths, Col. We can’t have moths, can we?”
After she died, he rid the house of them in an ineffective attempt to rid the house of her. Directly he swept her medicines from the bedside table, directly he pulled her clothes from their hangers and pushed her shoes into rubbish bags, directly he took her scent bottles into the rear garden and smashed them one by one with a hammer as if by that action he could smash away the rage, he went on a search for Annie’s sachets.
But the smell of lavender always thrust her before him. It was worse than at night when his dreams allowed him to see her, remember, and long for what she once had been. In the day, with only the scent to haunt him, she was just out of reach, like a whisper carried past him on the wind.
He thought
So he didn’t see Juliet Spence at once, and thus she had the initial advantage over him, which he sometimes thought she maintained to this day. She said, “Are you quite all right, Constable?” and he snapped his head to the open window to see that she had come out of the woods with a basket on her arm and the knees of her blue jeans crusted with mud.
It didn’t seem the least odd that Mrs. Spence should know who he was. The village was small. She would have seen him before now even though they had never been introduced. Beyond that, Townley-Young would have told her that he made periodic visits to the Hall as part of his evening rounds. She might even have noticed him on occasion from her cottage window when he rumbled through the courtyard and shone his torch here and there against the boarded windows of the mansion, checking to make sure that its crumble to ruin stayed in the hands of nature and was not usurped by man.
He ignored her question and got out of the Rover. He said, although he knew the answer already, “It’s Mrs. Spence, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
“Are you aware of the fact that last night you discharged your shotgun in the direction of three twelve-year- old boys? In the direction of children, Mrs. Spence?”
She had odd bits of greenery, roots, and twigs in her basket, along with a trowel and a pair of secateurs. She picked up the trowel, dislodged a heavy clod of mud from its tip, and rubbed her fingers along the side of her jeans. Her hands were large and dirty. Her fingernails were clipped. They looked like a man’s. She said, “Come to the cottage, Mr. Shepherd.”
She turned on her heel and walked back into the woods, leaving him to jostle and jolt the last half mile along
