“No, he wasn’t. I’d have remembered, you know, with the Pole being there.”
“So where was he?”
“Must have been in someone’s house. It wasn’t the day to be hanging around outside.” She looked at Tabitha suspiciously. “What are you saying?”
“I’m just trying to work out where everyone was on that day.”
“You should just ask him.”
“I did. He won’t come.”
“He’s moody like that.”
“Can you do me a favor?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve tried ringing Shona. She’s one of my friends in the village. Can you ask her to get in touch?”
“She’s on holiday.”
“Holiday?”
“Gone to the Canaries, lucky thing. For a week. She should be back any day. I’ll tell her when I see her.”
“Oh. All right.”
Tabitha always saved the difficult questions till last. “Terry, could you do me one more favor?”
“Of course.”
“You know more about the village than anyone. What do they think of me?”
For the first time, Terry looked awkward, ill at ease, evasive. “I don’t quite know what to say.”
“You don’t need to be polite.” Tabitha laughed. “Look at me. I’m in prison. Things can’t get worse. I just want to know the truth.”
“Well, I mean . . .” Terry hesitated, her eyes flickering round the room. “You keep yourself to yourself.”
“Yes.”
“You don’t quite fit in. You’re not a joiner-in. You know how people are. They get suspicious. They don’t see you as . . .” She seemed to be struggling to find the words. “Your normal kind of . . . you know.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Like that time you refused to buy a poppy on Remembrance Day?”
“I did?”
“You’d only just arrived then. I’m sure you didn’t mean it. Or when Pauline Leavitt took you for a young man when she first met you and then apologized, but you asked her what was wrong with looking like a man.”
“And?”
“What?”
“What is?”
“Oh. I mean, if it was just up to me—”
“It’s all right. And do they think I did it?”
“Well, you know, people have their own thoughts.”
“And what are those thoughts?”
“I don’t know, that the police wouldn’t do all this for nothing. That’s not my thoughts, of course.”
“Thank you, Terry. This has been interesting.”
“Interesting?” said Terry. She looked momentarily confused, as if she had just watched a film and been told that she’d missed the good bit.
Forty
Tabitha had always loved the spring. In prison, she had missed the snowdrops, the winter aconites, the daffodils and crocuses. Soon she would have missed the last of the tulips and the bluebells that grew in the woods above Okeham. She would have missed the birds building their nests, the swallows returning. But even in prison, spring showed itself: the sky through her small cell window was often blue and the days were longer. From the library she could see trees in blossom and new leaf. And she no longer needed to wear layers of tee shirts, sweaters and socks at night.
Spring didn’t necessarily mean hope in Crow Grange. A fifty-year-old woman who had killed her abusive husband hanged herself; a twenty-two-year-old woman who had smuggled drugs cut herself so badly that everyone thought she would die; Vera started attacking wardens and sometimes she would stand in the hall and tear her precious sheets of paper into tiny fragments, tears streaming down her old face.
“That’s bad,” said Michaela when Tabitha told her this. Her smooth face darkened.
“You look well, though.”
“I’m OK. I did what you asked.”
“You’ve been to see Rob Coombe?”
“Yes.”
“And you said you were a journalist?”
“Yes. I don’t really know what journalists are like, but I know they don’t look like me and they don’t sound like me.”
“So he didn’t believe you?”
“You never told me how cool it was there.”
Tabitha had never really told Michaela anything. They’d lived side by side for those weeks in silence.
“Well,” she said now, “I guess I’m used to it.”
“I sat in the car for a long time, just looking.” Michaela’s eyes were dark, her expression unreadable. “But then I found your farmer, on the top of the cliff with all the mud and the machines.”
“Rob.”
“Not a very friendly character, is he? I’d bought a notebook and a pen and I got out of the car. It was windy enough to sweep you right off the cliff top. I knocked at the door and nobody answered and then I saw him coming toward me out of this barn. I said I was a journalist and he asked where I was from and I said I was from the Enquirer.”
Tabitha wasn’t used to Michaela talking in long connected sentences.
“It’s OK. He didn’t ask to see my ID or even what my name was. I said I was writing a story about the murder and he said I should fuck off.”
“That’s him. Sorry about that.”
“I didn’t pay him any attention,” continued Michaela calmly. “I said I’d heard he’d accused you of threatening Stuart and he asked who I’d heard that from. I said I couldn’t tell him, but was it true?”
“And?”
“He told me to get off his land. His wife came back then and parked next to us and asked what was going on. I told her I was a reporter come to ask them questions about the murder and she glared at the farmer like it was his fault I was there. Then she pointed a finger at me and told me I was trespassing.”
“And you left?”
“Yes. Though there was a great dumper truck blocking my way so I had to sit there while they watched me.”
“Thanks for trying.”
“Are you going to ask me if I drove straight home?”
“Did you drive straight home?”
“No. I went to your village.”
“Okeham.”
“I parked near the hotel and I wandered around. I went into the village shop and I told the woman working there that I was a reporter from the Enquirer and she was much friendlier than the farmer.”
“I bet.”
“She told me how the village was in trauma.” Michaela’s brow furrowed a bit. “She said that she would prefer not to be named, but that everyone had always thought there was something fishy about you.”
“Fishy.”
“I think that was the word.
