Late of This Parish (19 page)

His thoughts were interrupted by a stumpy-legged Welsh corgi trotting fussily up to him and beginning to sniff around in an alert, foxy-faced way. Funny how fashions changed, even in dog-ownership. A few years ago you couldn't move without falling over corgis, but you didn't see so many around now, the fashion was all for big macho dogs that cost as much as a man to feed. A misunderstanding arose when Mayo, who should have known better, bent to pat the corgi, whereupon the ungrateful animal, apparently mistaking his motives, began to growl and snap at his ankles in a decidedly threatening way. He was hoping he wasn't going to have to boot it away when it was called to heel.

‘Here, Taff!' The owner was approaching, a man clad in green Barbour jacket and a red woolly hat with a pompom on it, assuring Mayo in the manner of all doting pet-owners that the dog was all right, it was his way of being friendly, wouldn't harm a fly, really, though not until it had been called to heel several times did it obey. ‘May I introduce myself?' he went on breezily. ‘I'm Denzil Thorne. I believe you're the detective i/c the case here.'

Mayo acknowledged that he was, meeting an eager, bright-eyed smile and an outstretched hand. ‘Dr Thorne. I was hoping to call and see you this afternoon.' He gave his own name and his hand was gripped hard.

‘I've been expecting someone to come round. Why don't we walk back together?'

‘If you wish.' Mayo turned in the direction he'd come.

‘Not that way.' Thorne indicated a track leading downwards. ‘This way's quicker and I can let Taff off the lead. It joins the path above the river bank and we can get into my garden from there. It's a bit muddy but we'll manage.' He strode off without waiting for a reply, rubber-booted, followed by Mayo, whose own gumboots were back in the car and who was annoyed to find himself having to pick his way around deep puddles like some latter-day Hercule Poirot.

The footpath itself, which joined a track leading from the school, was overgrown and Denzil Thorne shouted over his shoulder by way of explanation that it wasn't much used except by the residents of the houses on St Kenelm's Walk and Parson's Place, whose garden boundaries it skirted. As they progressed, Mayo saw that the gardens did not, as he had supposed, end at the river bank, but levelled out for some twenty or thirty yards before their boundary hedges which separated them from the river footpath. Then again, beyond the footpath was another stretch of ground, irregular in contour where the course of the river, several feet below it, had made erratic inroads into the soil, forming small scrub-covered islands and peninsulas. It was on one of these peninsulas, further downriver, he was presently to learn, that the badgers had their sett.

Mrs Thorne was weeding at the bottom of the garden, kneeling on the grass, clad in an anorak with her substantial rear end in the air and a trug full of tangled white roots beside her, attacking ground elder as though it were a personal enemy to be vanquished.

‘Got to root out every last little bit,' she announced, digging her fork in with venom. ‘Leave so much as an inch and it'll take advantage and start a dynasty before you can say Jack Robinson!' With obvious regret at having to abandon such an enjoyable task, she heaved herself to her feet. ‘I'll be right with you but excuse me for a minute, will you, I must take this little tyke and clean him up. He's too near the ground to keep clear of the mud. Heel, Taff!' With much more docility and obedience than he'd shown with his master, Taff obeyed.

‘No hurry, Mrs Thorne,' Mayo said. ‘I don't think there's anything more I want of you at the moment –'

‘It's my turn now for the old inquisition, eh?' interrupted Denzil brightly. The idea of being questioned seemed to amuse him, as if the activities of the real-life police were a parody of some detective novel or telly-drama, as if Mayo were some sort of stage policeman, and he the innocent victim. But it was an attitude Mayo had come across many times before and he took no notice.

‘If you'd be so kind, Dr Thorne,' he said patiently as Miriam Thorne, followed by the dog, disappeared through an archway cut into a clipped Leylandii hedge which led to the next, higher, part of the garden.

‘No problem about
my
whereabouts. I was at the Institute all day. Stayed until nearly eleven, in fact.'

‘A long day, sir.'

‘Not unusually so. The sort of work I do means I often stay late. I'd some important work to finish and I wanted to see an experiment through. I'd already lost time because of a top level meeting – which was actually with some of your own people, I might add. Because of the bomb we had there, you know. They seem to think our safety precautions have been slipping and need stepping up, though I have to say,' he added with a hint of umbrage, ‘it's what they themselves laid down in the first place.'

Mayo disregarded the invitation to comment on a situation with which he was only too familiar. It happened all the time. Tight security to begin with, everyone conscious of it, then familiarity and a gradual relaxing of vigilance. Finally, slackness and downright negligence ... until disaster occurred and too late, every stable door in spitting distance was being locked and barred within an inch of its life. Had he been in Denzil Thorne's position, responsible for an organization as vulnerable as that, he'd have kept quiet on the subject.

‘The meeting,' added Denzil, ‘was at half past four and lasted for a couple of hours.'

And you couldn't have a much better alibi than that, closeted with senior police officers.

‘So – that's all I can give you. Not much, but I hope it's been of help.'

Mayo said it had but there was one thing more which he'd like to know about the security at the Institute – Thorne looked wary – had he ever received threats of a personal nature?

‘From time to time, but nothing I couldn't handle.' His caution was obvious, in the same way, the previous evening, that his wife's had been. What, Mayo wondered, had made them so cagey?

‘One expects that from cranks,' Thorne continued, more easily. ‘And from people who just can't see straight – though they must think they have a legitimate point of view, I suppose,' he added, smiling his Boy Scout smile, striving so hard to be fair it must have hurt him. ‘But I don't understand what that has to do with Willard's death.'

Mayo was saved from explaining his theory about the connection between Willard and possible animal rights extremists by the return of Mrs Thorne who, having dealt with the dog, was now quite prepared to deal with the constabulary. ‘Well, what are you doing about finding Danny Lampeter, Mr Mayo?' she demanded as soon as she came through the gate. ‘I hear he's pushed off.'

The village grapevine hadn't been slow. Mayo murmured something non-committal about having no reason at the moment to try and find Lampeter.

‘No reason? Only that a pound to a penny he shot those badgers,' she returned, as though that immediately made him the prime suspect for smothering Willard, too.

‘Miriam, that's pure guesswork,' her husband protested, but mildly.

‘No use pussyfooting around! Everybody knows it must've been him. He's always been in trouble one way or another, even before he went into the army, and I've seen nothing to show that he's changed. Bad blood there, y'know. The father was the same – upped and left them when the mother was diagnosed as having multiple sclerosis. Didn't want the responsibility, not even for Danny. Left it all to Ruth.'

Mayo thought of what old Sam Biggs had said to him about Ruth Lampeter having had a rough time. Maybe he ought to look more kindly on that uptight young woman, it was beginning to sound as though maybe she had plenty of reason for being the way she was.

‘Why d'you think Lampeter would want to shoot the animals?'

‘Danny?' She laughed shortly. ‘People like him don't need a reason for causing trouble. They just enjoy mindless violence.'

This wildly outrageous generality, unsubstantiated by any evidence, needed no comment from him, Mayo felt. But there was a grain of truth in it. The shrinks might not agree – would certainly trump up some connection between Lampeter's anti-social behaviour and the missing father, he was sure. In his own opinion violence was as inbred in some men as blue eyes or short stature – bad blood, as Miriam Thorne had it. What she'd said threw a little more light on Lampeter's character – or at any rate his reputation. There was always at least one scapegoat family in any village and sometimes they actually were responsible for the things they were blamed for. It was interesting to speculate on, but of doubtful use in the present circumstances.

Unless Danny had misinterpreted Willard's wishes in wanting to be rid of the badgers in too zealous a manner ...

‘Have you seen the badger sett?' Mrs Thorne asked abruptly.

Mayo had to say he hadn't.

‘You should. Come on, I'll show you.' And zipping up her anorak to her chin, the lady opened the garden gate and prepared to set off down the path.

Mayo felt he'd already been told more about badgers than he wanted to know, and that he'd better things to do – like solving a murder – than spending all his time on Sunday afternoon walks. Further, he didn't want to be bossed around by Miriam Thorne. Still, at the back of his mind the thought persisted that in some way as yet unfathomable, the truth about Willard's death might lie in clearing up the mystery of the badger-shooting. If nothing else, it would eliminate at least one useless line of inquiry. Meekly, he followed the determined figure and carrotty head of Miriam Thorne along the river bank, with her husband bringing up the rear.

The sett was in a sheltered beech coppice about a hundred yards downriver from the houses in Parson's Place, where the high plateau on which Wyvering stood gave way to rocky slopes and the river began to swing out. There was little to see, however, except a criss-cross of well-worn tracks in the soft red earth, wandering between low scrub and bracken and a great spread of yellow gorse. The water was so clear you could see the pebbles lying in the shallows and watch the minnows darting. Blue dragonflies skimmed the surface and a moorhen paddled quietly across to the far bank. In the soft haze of the day it was very quiet, with a slight melancholy hanging over the place, like some sentimental Victorian painting.

Denzil Thorne pointed to a thick clump of holly and thorn growing at the foot of an old beech tree. ‘See that?' he asked, lowering his voice to a sibilant stage whisper. ‘It completely obscures the entrance to the sett. You have to know where to look, but I don't think we should go any further in case they catch our scent. It's not right to disturb them.'

The footpath, though considerably less muddy here than the first stretch, had degenerated first of all into a mere track and had now disappeared altogether, and Mayo was not averse to the suggestion of calling a halt. ‘So anyone wanting to get to the sett would have to come from Wyvering,' he commented.

‘That's right. The river's not navigable from here. Much too shallow and weedy.'

‘Unless they walked up from that direction?' Mayo waved towards a church spire which could be seen in the distance.

‘From Stapley? No way! It's a good four or five miles and no proper path. You'd be mud to the eyes.' Returning to his theme, Thorne said, ‘It was just here, outside the sett, where they found the bodies of the badgers.'

‘They? Who were they?'

‘Couple of ten-year-olds. Cycled down that track over there.'

‘Cycled?' Mayo looked back, following Thorne's pointing finger to a track that was steep as a house-side and slippery with loose red earth and stones, recognizing it immediately as the one leading from Parson's Place and seeing its appeal to small boys.

‘Well might you ask!' Miriam said. ‘We – the parish council, that is – put a gate across the top and a notice forbidding entry, but that doesn't stop the kids. They dare one another to ride down on their bikes and I can't tell you the number of broken arms and legs we've had, not to mention one concussion. Good job he didn't end up in the river, which I might say one or two of the little monsters have nearly done. We can't keep it locked, it's a right of way.'

And a useful rubbish tip, thought Mayo, recalling the propped-open gate.

‘All the same,' said Denzil, ‘those lads knew it was illegal to kill badgers from all these wildlife programmes they watch and went back and told Jack Wainwright straight away. There's a lot of talk about kids watching too much television but I'm all for it if they understand that sort of thing.'

'I could see Willard's point,' Miriam said as they trudged back along the river bank, having seen all there was to see and leaving the badgers sleeping in their dark secret world under the earth. ‘Much as I disagreed with him. Must've been infuriating that his garden – and old Mrs Crawshaw's next door to him – are the only ones affected. The badgers have never dug anyone else's lawn up, but you can't expect the poor creatures to tell the difference – it's their instinct to go where they know they'll get food. You couldn't tell him that, though. Couldn't tell him anything in fact, he never listened to a word anyone else said, once he'd made up his mind.'

‘He should've put food out for them like Catherine Oliver does,' Thorne said, ‘then they mightn't have bothered with his lawn.'

‘Oh, phooey!'

‘I don't know that's so crazy. But as a matter of fact,' he said to Mayo, ‘I've got a bit of a conscience about this business. For suggesting it to Willard, I mean. The thing is, he hadn't known what Mrs Oliver was doing until I told him, though of course I hadn't realized that. Mentioned it quite casually in conversation and he nearly hit the roof. Called her a sentimental fool of a woman and sent her a very stiff note, then complained to Constable Wainwright and caused no end of fuss. Poor Catherine was very upset about it. Better to have kept my mouth shut.'