‘Not Bronya. She’s kept out of it. She might even have called the police herself, for all we know.’
‘Don’t talk rubbish. She’s got more sense than that. Still – I don’t like it, not knowing what this fresh evidence might be. Best thing we can do is keep our heads down and co-operate for all we’re worth. Salt of the earth, remember – that’s us. Hard done by, but bearing it meekly, because they’re the lords and we’re the peasants. They’ve only got to look at that bloody fence to understand how we’ve been expected to live. That’s our line – best you remember that. Looks to me as if they’ve worked out that our friend Rufus did not die accidentally. That’s shocking news – right? Got to be some Mafia-style character got the wrong side of the man. All that wheeler-dealing he did, making money hand over fist, bound to upset some people along the way. Isn’t that right?’ Digby looked hard at his bewildered son. ‘Isn’t it?’ he repeated with some force.
‘Er … I guess so, yes. But they never said it was murder, did they? Aren’t you jumping the gun a bit?’
‘Could be,’ Digby acknowledged. ‘Trust me to make two and two equal five, eh? Silly old sausage, getting all ahead of myself. So, we just sit tight and wait and see, that’s the best thing. And if your mother shows up, don’t you rush in with a whole lot of half-baked ideas. Let’s just give her time to settle down again first.’
‘You think she intends to settle down? That’s not how she sounded to me.’
Digby wriggled his shoulders. ‘We’ll have to see, won’t we? She’ll be surprised we made such a fine job of that goose.’
There was something rather pathetic in this, to Ant’s eyes. His father was clutching at straws, trying to salvage something that Ant had not until then understood was probably beyond repair. Something had happened over recent days, right under his nose, and he had been blissfully unaware of it. There had to have been clues he had missed, comments he had overlooked. But perhaps it had all been so gradual that the final straw had been some tiny word or event that nobody could be expected to notice. And perhaps it was all entirely separate from the death of Rufus Blackwood. Perhaps there was absolutely no connection at all.
Still he had two burning questions to ask his mother, and nothing was going to stop him confronting her with them, the moment she came home.
‘She has a bit of explaining to do,’ he said mildly. ‘Assuming she really does come back.’
‘Oh, she’ll come back. She won’t be able to help herself. Never was much good on her own, you know. Talks a blue streak about being her own woman and wanting her independence, but mostly she lets other people make the running. She’s broken all records this time, staying out all this long while.’ The bravado was evidently boosting Digby’s self-esteem, as he convinced himself of the truth of his own words. He was not going to lie down without a struggle.
Again, Ant found himself wondering about his parents’ marriage in more detail than he had done for years. Maybe he never had thought about it as he did now, when it might be too late. Digby was not speaking fondly of his wife – more like sarcastically, and definitely critically. Ant could not remember any real demonstrations of affection in either direction, since he was about ten. When Digby had given up the farm work, Beverley had made some rules concerning the running of the house. Obvious things like making him do some of the shopping and cleaning, and learning how to work the washing machine. As far as Ant could see, there had been very little friction as a result. ‘You do want her back, don’t you?’ he asked, rather shakily. It felt like a moment in which most of his lifelong assumptions could find themselves shaken and even destroyed.
He could see his father wavering between a careless dismissal of such a question, and a rare moment of honest reply. ‘That’s a bit of a facer,’ he said, putting on a mock accent, as he so often did. ‘As they used to say,’ he added. But then, when Ant said nothing, he gave a defeated sort of sigh and said, ‘She went off me years ago, you know. Never forgave me for something I said in about nineteen ninety-one, and since then everything’s been pretty much my fault. I should have earned more money, so we could have bought a place to live before it was too late. I should have listened to her better, and understood her feelings without having to be told everything twenty times. All the usual stuff that comes with being married, in a nutshell. The thing is – your mother cares about everything a lot more than I do. It doesn’t bother me so much that we’ve got a dirty great fence all round us. At least …’ He tailed off, shaking his head.
‘You care every bit as much as Mum does,’ Ant corrected him. ‘It’s probably more humiliating for you than it is for any of us. You used to work here. You were the manager, for God’s sake. Then a new bloke moves in, who never knew you in those days, and who thinks you’re just a poverty-stricken tinker who’s determined to embarrass him. On top of that, he does his best to make our lives difficult in any number of nasty little ways. And the final straw is when he marries some Russian psychopath who gets him to turn the whole property into Fort Knox.’
‘All right. But I never got into direct battles with him, unlike your mother. It’s still a pretty good place to live, compared to what we’d have ever managed to find somewhere else. The rent here is laughable, thanks to the decrepit state of the
