If he leaves right now, it will be rush hour. So Chris closes the Tony Curran file and opens up the Ventham file. If he can solve one murder, he can surely solve two more. What has he missed? Who has he missed?
108.
They make their way along the corridor, Elizabeth and Ibrahim, with Ron carrying a couple of extra chairs. A job to do.
Behind them, double doors swing open, and Joyce hurries after her friends.
“Sorry I’m late. The beeper was going off on my oven, and I couldn’t work out why.”
“Sometimes it can be a very brief power outage. Then the clock tries to reset itself,” says Ibrahim.
Joyce nods. Without thinking, she takes Ibrahim’s hand. Ahead of them Elizabeth has taken Ron’s hand too, and they walk in silence until they reach the door.
Despite the circumstances, Elizabeth knocks, as she always does.
She opens the door and there he is. The man whom Karen Playfair had recognized after all those years. The picture of him next to Ron, holding the fox he had saved.
The same old book is open at the same old page. He looks up and seems unsurprised to see the four of them.
“Ah, the gang’s all here.”
“The gang’s all here, John,” confirms Elizabeth. “Do you mind if we sit?”
John gestures his consent. He puts down his book and pinches the bridge of his nose. Ron looks over at Penny, comatose on the bed. Nothing left of her, really, he thinks. Gone. Why hasn’t he been to see her? Why had it taken this?
“How shall we do this, John?” asks Elizabeth.
“Up to you, Elizabeth,” replies John. “I’ve been waiting for that knocksince the moment I did it. Just took each day as a bonus. I do wish you’d taken a bit longer, though. What was it in the end?”
“Karen Playfair recognized you,” said Ibrahim.
John nods, smiling to himself. “Did she? Little Karen. Goodness.”
“You put her dog to sleep when she was six, John,” says Joyce. “She says she would never forget your kind eyes.”
Elizabeth is in her customary seat at the foot of Penny’s bed. “Do you want to start, John? Or shall we?”
“Shall I?” John shuts his eyes. “I’ve been over it so many times in my head.”
“Who is the body in the grave, John? Whose bones are they?”
Eyes still shut, John looks up to the heavens, lets out a sigh from the ages, and begins.
“It would have been the early seventies, maybe ten miles from here. Greyscott, one of the sheep farms. There used to be any number around here, you know? Long time ago now. I think I’d started in nineteen sixty-seven—Penny would remember for sure, but around then, anyway. The farmer was an old boy called Matheson, and I knew him well enough by that point. I’d go out there every now and again. You know, something would happen. This time around, he’d had a mare just given birth. The foal had died, and the mare was in distress. She was in such pain, screaming, and he hadn’t wanted to shoot her, which I understood, so I gave her an injection, and that was that. Done it many times, before and since. Some farmers will just shoot them, some vets will too, but not Matheson, and not me. Anyway, he made me a cup of tea and we got chatting. I was always in a hurry, but I think he was a very lonely man. There was no family, no one to help him on the farm, money running out, so I think he welcomed the company. It was very bleak up there; that’s how it seemed to me that day. I had to be on my way, but he didn’t want me to leave. You will judge me, I know, or perhaps you won’t, but suddenly something seemed clear as day to me. He was in distress, great distress. If Matheson had been an animal he would have beenscreaming. You have to believe that. And so, I reached into my bag and I offered him a flu shot, you know, see him through the winter and all that. He was glad of the offer. He rolled up his sleeve and I gave him his shot. The same shot I’d just given the mare. And that was the end of the screaming, and the end of the pain.”
“You put him out of his misery, John?” asks Joyce.
“That’s how I saw it. Then and now. If I’d had my wits about me I would have conjured up some clever little concoction, something that wouldn’t show up in a postmortem, and left him there to be found by the postman, or the milkman, or whoever knocked there next. But it was spur-of-the-moment, so there he was, pumped full of pentobarbital, and I couldn’t take the risk that someone might look into it.”
“So you had to bury him? This Matheson?” asks Elizabeth.
“Quite so. I would have buried him there and then, but you’ll remember they were buying up farmland left, right, and center those days, building houses everywhere, and I thought it’d be just my luck to bury him, then have him dug up by builders a month later. And that’s when I remembered.”
“The graveyard,” says Ron.
“It was perfect. I knew it from visiting Gordon Playfair. It wasn’t on farmland, and no one was going to be buying a convent, for heaven’s sake. I knew how quiet it was; I knew no one visited. So I drove up one night, a couple of days later, lights off. Picked up my spade and did the deed. And that was that, until one day, forty years later, I saw an advert for this place.”
“And here we all are,” says Elizabeth.
