Ronnie set about filling the kettle, watching as his father, on the tractor, drove through an open gate and into the field beyond. He looked, Clement thought, as if he wished he was with him.
‘We just have a few follow-up questions about David,’ Clement said when, tea steaming away in mugs in front of them, they were all seated around the scrubbed kitchen table.
‘Huh-huh,’ Ronnie said, bobbing his head and taking a sip of the hot tea. He winced slightly as it burned his tongue.
‘We understand he kept a diary,’ Trudy put in abruptly, presenting it as a fact rather than a question and watching him closely for his reaction.
He tensed visibly then frowned. ‘A diary? David?’ Ronnie said slowly. ‘That’s news to me.’
‘Are you saying he didn’t keep a journal?’ Clement asked, something just a little sharp and formal in his voice causing the younger man to look anxious. He opened his mouth, thought better of giving a spontaneous reply, and chose instead to take another sip of too-hot tea.
He made a show of wincing again, then blew on the top of the mug’s surface. Finally, he shrugged. ‘I’m not saying he didn’t have a diary. Just that I never knew about it. It’s not the sort of thing you share, really, is it? Not with a mate. Anyway, David was always more at home with books and learning and all that stuff than I was. I liked to read adventure stories and what-not, but I wouldn’t have ever thought about writing stuff down.’
He made a show of shrugging and looking around at the not-particularly-clean farmhouse kitchen. ‘I mean, what would I write? Six a.m., milked the cows. Seven a.m. mended some barbed wire fencing …’ He laughed. ‘But I suppose David might have had more interesting stuff to write about – leaving the village, going to university …’ He hesitated visibly, then said, ‘And about Iris, and stuff like that. But if he did write it down, I never saw him do it.’
‘And he never mentioned keeping a journal?’ Clement pressed.
‘Not to me,’ Ronnie said adamantly.
Clement nodded. ‘Well, thanks. You’ve been very helpful.’ He started to rise, then stopped. ‘Oh … just supposing he did keep a journal, you wouldn’t have any idea where he might have kept it, would you?’
Ronnie, who’d just begun to think the ordeal was over, blinked, then looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
‘We didn’t find it amongst his personal effects,’ Clement explained patiently. As yet, they hadn’t asked the Finch family if they’d come across any such item at the family home, but it seemed unlikely they had. Had the boy’s father found it, he would have produced it at the inquest, especially if, as they suspected, David had been using it to jot down information about his investigations.
‘Did David have a favourite hiding place when you were boys?’ Trudy put in helpfully. ‘You know, in a hole in a tree, or under a large stone, or hidden somewhere here, on the farm?’
‘Oh, I see what you mean,’ Ronnie said, already shaking his head. ‘To be honest, I never did like that hiding game as a kid. We made the usual “dens” in the woods, and there’s an old abandoned pigsty that we used to pretend was a Roman fort – but it would be too open to the elements to hide something made out of paper.’
After they made their farewells, Ronnie watched the car drive away, biting his lower lip nervously.
Was it possible David had kept a journal?
He felt the sweat begin to prickle on his forehead and on his palms and he began to feel physically sick.
If he had been keeping a record of what had been happening in his life in the past few months … what the hell might he have he written down in it?
Chapter 23
Janet Baines felt both surprised and worried when Trudy and Clement pushed open the gate to her front garden and started up the path. Luckily, she’d been sitting in the window seat overlooking the small garden that fronted the house, and was thus able to bolt out into the hallway and open the door before they had a chance to ring the bell.
She had hoped that they’d been satisfied with what she’d had to say the last time, and that she wouldn’t have to go through it all over again, and she felt a flash of anger shoot through her, that she quickly suppressed.
As she stepped outside, she was careful to close the door behind her, preventing them from entering the house and surprising Trudy by the hostility implied in the action.
Then she smiled uncertainly and said, ‘Mum’s in the kitchen preparing our lunch. Hope you don’t mind, but I’d rather we didn’t disturb her. She can get … well, rather emotional about things sometimes. I don’t want to get her upset if we can avoid it.’
Trudy nodded, at once seeing Janet’s point of view. It was hardly surprising that she was anxious to keep her mother out of her business; who could blame her? After only having met the woman once, she had had no doubts that she was the kind of woman who liked to know where her daughter was, and what she was doing, every minute of the day. And that must surely be very wearing on a person’s nerves. ‘That sounds like a good idea. Is there somewhere private we could talk?’ she asked with a conspiratorial smile.
Janet nodded, casting a quick glance nervously over her shoulder. ‘We can go around the side of the house and sit under the apple tree.’
She led them through the large and well-maintained garden, blooming with columbines and forget-me-nots, wine-red peonies and a rather magnificent double lilac in full and fragrant bloom, to a spot under a blossoming fruit tree. Clement fastidiously brushed aside a few stray twigs and leaves before
