Chapter 52
FIFTY-TWO
The next morning, she was making the children’s breakfast when she heard several loud thumps on the front door, like the sound a rubber mallet would make.
For a moment, she froze. But ignoring it wasn’t an option – the children would be leaving through that door soon, and if it was something unpleasant, she’d need to get it out of the way.
She pulled the door open. ‘Oh, Jesus,’ she said aloud.
It was another dead pheasant. But, unlike the brace that had been slung over her knocker that time, this one was actually nailed to the door – two nails, great big steel things with oversized square heads, had been hammered through its spreadeagled wings into the oak.
It made the dead bird look eerily like a crucified angel, its head drooping on to one shoulder, those splayed wings ridiculously beautiful, running the gamut of colours from conker-brown to grey, with a pattern inside them like a myriad of overlapping eyes.
She was about to go and find some pliers, to pull the nails out, when she remembered Sergeant Dickinson’s advice: Document everything. Pulling out her phone, she snapped a picture first, and only then went in search of tools.
The tradesmen arrived soon after, filling the house and garden with their reassuring presence. The drainage contractor, Mick, had brought a tanker.
‘The test results from the pond came back,’ he told her. ‘It’s not good, unfortunately – it needs draining.’
More expense. She nodded. ‘OK. Best get on with it.’
On an impulse, she took the nails from her pocket and showed him. ‘Incidentally, do you know what these are? I haven’t seen ones like this before.’
He peered at them. ‘Nor me.’ He looked around. ‘Dougie – know what these are?’
The man he’d called came over. ‘Horseshoe nails,’ he said confidently. ‘Farriers use them. Sometimes they fall out of the shoe, but then they’re dirty. Those ones you’ve got there are brand new.’
‘Thanks,’ she said, making a mental note to add that information to the incident log. Even in the countryside, she suspected, horseshoe nails weren’t something that everybody had to hand.
The tanker driver was still laying hoses to the pond when a car drove up and two men got out. She recognised one as Oliver Wray, the coroner’s officer. He came over to speak to her.
‘I’d like to carry out an acoustic test,’ he said. ‘I’m still trying to get to the bottom of whether the man on the scaffolding heard two bangs or not.’
‘I guess that’s fine,’ she said, a little flustered. ‘I’ll go and tell everyone to be quiet—’
He stopped her. ‘Actually, I’d like anyone who was operating machinery the day it happened to operate it again. That way, the ambient noise will be similar.’
The other man was taking a gun bag out of the car’s boot. ‘Before we start, can you confirm this was the gun you saw next to Mr Finch’s body?’ Oliver Wray asked her formally.
The man slid the gun halfway out of the bag to show her, and she nodded, feeling slightly sick at the sight of Paul’s .410. ‘Yes.’
‘I’ll take it over to The Old Tennis Court,’ the second man said. He glanced at her. ‘We’ll run the test at least twice, so don’t be alarmed if you hear more than one shot.’
As the man drove off, Oliver Wray made a phone call, and one of the roofers came down the scaffolding to speak to him. That must be the person who thought he’d heard two bangs, she guessed.
She was asked to go to the room she’d been painting on the day of Paul’s death and open the window. She did as she was instructed, feeling strangely nervous. A little later, a loud bang came from the direction of The Old Tennis Court, followed immediately by the echo from the woods.
She stayed where she was. A minute or so after the first gunshot, there was a second bang and another loud, rolling echo.
A little later, Oliver Wray knocked on the front door. ‘Could I have a few more minutes of your time?’
‘Of course.’ She led him to the kitchen.
‘So you’ve heard the echo for yourself, now,’ she said as they sat down. ‘It’s quite pronounced, isn’t it?’
‘Very.’ He hesitated. ‘Actually, so pronounced that it raises another question.’
‘What’s that?’
‘That second test . . . How many shots would you say were fired?’
She shrugged. ‘Well – there was just the one bang, I think.’
He shook his head. ‘There were two shots that time, a second apart. The echo of the first one coincided with the second barrel being fired. It must have masked the sound, slightly.’
‘But that’s impossible—’ she began.
He started to explain, and she added, ‘No – I’m sure your test is accurate. It’s what you’re implying that’s impossible. There’s no way Rosemary killed her own husband.’
There was a short silence before Oliver Wray said, ‘She was trying to care for him on her own, I understand.’
‘She could easily have afforded help, if she’d wanted it. We only bought this place off them earlier this year, and, believe me, it wasn’t cheap.’
After a moment, he nodded. ‘I’m sorry to have to raise it. But it’s important these questions are asked.’
‘For what it’s worth,’ Kate added, ‘I found her in the church, about a week after he died, crying. She said, quite apart from anything else, why wait until he’d moved out of here to do it?
’ She felt disloyal telling Oliver Wray about that private conversation with Rosemary, but it did show how absurd it was to think she might have been involved.
‘Interesting,’ Oliver said, making a note. ‘But there are other possible scenarios to consider, too. An assisted suicide, for example.’
Kate had a sudden memory of Rosemary snapping the neck of that injured duck.
I’m afraid the only option is to put the poor thing out of its misery.
And then, just before she chucked its body in the skip: Poor old chap.
It happens to them all, in the end. But putting a duck out of its pain was very different from killing a human being.
Even so, she decided not to tell Oliver about that particular incident.
‘How quickly would you say you got there, after you heard the shot?’ he asked.
‘Very quickly. That is, it probably took me about thirty seconds to go outside, then about ten seconds to realise what had happened, then I ran down to that hedge, there – there’s a door into The Old Tennis Court’s garden. I was probably inside their house within a minute.’
‘Did anyone see you?’
She shrugged. ‘I assume so. The garden was full of contractors, and there were men on the roof as well. None of them seemed to have heard the bang, but they probably noticed me running. You could ask them.’
‘I already have.’ He paused. ‘So far, nobody I’ve spoken to did see you.’
She didn’t understand what he was saying. ‘But I was there.’
‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘The point is, I can’t actually prove whether you were there just after Mr Finch’s death. Or just before.’
She frowned. ‘What? You cannot think—’
‘I don’t think anything,’ he interrupted. ‘I just have to examine all the possibilities.’
He let that sink in, then added, ‘Mrs Finch says she remembers being in the kitchen when she heard the shot. She then went into the wet room and found him. As she did that, she noticed the side door was open – the one nearest the garden. And I gather you were in the habit of coming in that way.’
Kate stared at him mutely, aghast at where he was going with this.
‘And then Mrs Finch had, she says, a minute or so of panic when she couldn’t operate her phone to call the emergency services, because her hands were wet with blood. She had to go back to the kitchen to clean herself up.’
‘Yes,’ Kate said. ‘That’s when I arrived. She said she’d just called them.’
‘She doesn’t actually recall seeing you come up the garden, though. The sink in the kitchen overlooks the back lawn, so that’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘She’d just found her husband dead!’
‘Yes,’ Oliver Wray agreed. ‘But I think she’d have noticed you, the first person on the scene. Instead, she says the first time she saw you was at the open door.’
‘I can only assume,’ Kate said desperately, ‘that she was concentrating on trying to make that call.’ She remembered something else.
‘She takes her glasses off to use her phone – she has to bring the screen close to her face to see it properly. So anything in the garden would probably be out of focus.’
He made a note. ‘You’ve been having some disagreements with your neighbours, I gather.’
‘We’ve been subjected to a campaign of harassment,’ she retorted, ‘ever since the Finches asked if their son could buy our house back.’
The coroner’s officer nodded. ‘He grew up here, as I understand it.’
‘That doesn’t give him the right to walk in and take it from us!’
‘Indeed not . . . So things got unpleasant, would you say?’
‘Very. I’ve kept a log, actually. The reason that tanker’s having to drain the pond, for example, is because we had human slurry dumped on our drive. And, just this morning, I found this.’
She showed him the photo she’d taken of the pheasant nailed to the front door. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Could you send me this?’
‘Of course.’
‘I’ve also been sent this video of the planning committee meeting.
’ He got his own phone out and showed her.
It was a clip of Kate making her speech: ‘When Mr Finch says it isn’t personal, that isn’t true .
. .’ She looked so fearless, she thought – that moment of clarity and purpose when she’d realised what reading out those offers would prove.
‘He’s using this committee as part of his private vendetta . . .’
‘Vendetta,’ Oliver repeated, pausing the clip. ‘That’s a strong word.’
She shrugged. ‘I was angry.’
He made another note. She wondered what on earth Jamie thought he stood to gain by sending him that video. Then she realised.
‘You’ve spoken to Jamie Finch, haven’t you?’ she said slowly.
Oliver Wray looked up. ‘I’ve interviewed the deceased’s son, yes.’
‘And he, no doubt, told you that I killed his father. Either figuratively or literally. Because of our so-called vendetta.’ If it weren’t so serious, she could almost laugh out loud at the sheer audacity of it.
If it was suicide, it must be Kate and Matt’s fault for not giving in to the pressure to sell; but if by any chance it could be construed as an actual murder – well, that must be Kate as well, snapping under the strain.
The coroner’s officer looked at her steadily. ‘Did you?’
She took a deep breath. ‘Paul was like a grandfather to my son. I like Rosemary. I’ve never even held a shotgun, let alone fired one.
And Paul had a terminal illness, for goodness’ sake – he told me himself, the doctors had given him no more than two years to live.
And, yes, perhaps discovering that his plan to force us out and spend his last months surrounded by his family had come to nothing – perhaps that was part of it, too.
But this community trying to somehow pin it all on me – that’s just madness. ’