Reginald Hill - The Price of Butcher

But if he were alone, then it was here on his own familiar hearth that he’d take his farewells.

So it was a cause for relief to find the kitchen empty.

You’re just letting this gloomy old place get to you, he admonished himself. I mean, why the hell would Hen choose the moment Daph Brereton’s death had so improved his life to decide to end it?

Mebbe after marking his recovery of the family home by a typically solitary celebration, he’d staggered upstairs and was lying senseless on his old dusty bed.

He shouted, “Hen! You there?”

Loud as he shouted, he couldn’t drown out the thought that Hen couldn’t have chosen to shoot himself because he didn’t have a shotgun.

This he knew because he himself had confiscated it the year after the eviction. In recent years, local police kept a very close check on gun ownership. When Hen hadn’t renewed his license, Whitby had visited him and, after listening to his catalog of grievances, had come away with the weapon.

So in the unlikely event he’d decided to kill himself, it wouldn’t have been by shooting.

And once again long experience of the traumas of rustic life projected images in the sergeant’s mind.

If not the gun, then the rope. A high-beamed barn was the favored site here. Most of these old low-ceilinged farmhouses didn’t have any vertical space deep enough for a grown man to drop into, but in some instances the situation of the stairs meant that a short rope carefully affixed to a beam across the landing would allow a determined man room to dangle into his own entrance hall.

But there was no reason for Hen to kill himself, not now, not here! his thoughts reiterated. No reason at all.

One way to be sure.

Slowly Jug Whitby lifted the latch on the inner door that opened into the hall. Slowly he pushed it open.

“Oh shit,” he said. “Oh shit shit shit shit shit!”

Andy Dalziel sat in the morning sunshine on the doorstep of Millstone Farm and read the note through the transparent plastic of an evidence bag.

It was written in pencil in a round, unjoined-up hand.

it were all an accident I only went there to help after Ollie had bother with the hog roast machnry and rang me to say could I give a hand.

Then Daph saw me there and we got into a row and she told me shed make sure I nivver set foot in Millstone again even if it meant she had to burn it down with her own hands and I ran at her and she fell over and banged her head and as she lay there looking up at me she laughed and said so what are you going to do now Hen Hollis? Strangle me? Everything went black in my head then and when it got light again I found Id done just that. Id strangled her. Ollie were in a right stew wanting to run for help. I said dont be daft they’ll do for us both. No one knows Ive been here. Let someone else find her theres plenty with good cause to want Daph Brereton dead like yon Ted Denham for one. Saying that made me wonder if there were any way I could point a finger at him. He always tret me like dirt.

Ollie said he thought hed gone off swimming with some kids and he knew where he left his clothes in the house. I sent him off there to fetch summat of Denhams we could leave around to fool the cops and while he were gone I dragged the body away from the hut. When Ollie came back with that fancy watch Denham wears I told him to bugger off and say he went to shelter somewhere away from the machnry because of the lightning. Then I snagged the watch on Lady Mucks clothes and headed off myself leaving her lying in the grass. How she got in the hog roast cage I don’t know unless Ollie sneaked back and put her there for some reason. But he said it werent him when I found him at Witch Cottage. I wanted to be sure hed stick to his story but the soft bugger had got himself in such a state he said he were going to see Whitby and tell him everything soon as Miss Lee got back and took the needles out. He said hed mek sure the police understood it had been an accident. I said you stupid sod how the fuck can you strangle some bugger by accident? And I felt the blackness coming over me again and I picked up one of them needles and stuck it right into his back. Didn’t mean to kill him like I didn’t really mean no harm to Daph Brereton not to start with anyway but I can see how its going to look.

All ive lived for these past years is to get Millstone back for myself and now Ive got it but for how long? They’ll lock me up for sure and mebbe they wont even let me keep Millstone if I live long enough to get out again. So fuck them all. If I cant live here at least I can die here.

Fuck you all

“Poor old sod,” said Dalziel.

Whitby looked at him in surprise, then nodded his head and repeated, “Aye, poor old sod. What do we do now, sir?”

He was in Dalziel’s hands. There’d been no thought of contacting anybody else till he’d spoken to the Fat Man.

Dragged from his bed, Dalziel’s sleep-slurred voice had said, “This had better be bad, Jug.”

But when he heard how bad it was, the slur had been replaced by a cold clarity.

“He’s dead?”

“Definite.”

“And there’s a note?”

“Aye. On the kitchen table under an empty whisky bottle.”

“Bag the note, get out of the house, wait for me.”

He’d borrowed Pet Sheldon’s car. Looking at his face, she hadn’t asked for an explanation. As he drove out of the Avalon gate, he’d met the local newsagent’s van coming in with the morning papers. He’d stopped him and helped himself.

One look at the front page of the Mid-York News was enough. Without actually stating that a formal charge had been made, Sammy Ruddlesdin was once more giving the impression that it was safe to walk the streets of Mid-Yorkshire again as DCI Pascoe, the county’s answer to Poirot, had got the titled perpetrator (and his accomplice) under lock and key.

“Oh, Pete, Pete,” groaned Dalziel. “I warned you. Ignore their shit and eventually it’ll drop off you. It’s the buggers’ praise you can never quite scrape away!”

The one good thing was that it was only the Mid-York News that had jumped the gun so dramatically and he didn’t doubt that the other papers would be only too glad of a chance to make one of their own look an arsehole. So there was still plenty of time for Pascoe to regroup. Arresting the Denhams was fine. They had, after all, admitted a serious offense. But with just a little shuffling of the facts-and Pete was a very fine shuffler! — it should be easy to present their transfer to HQ as a subtle ploy to divert the press from Sandytown so that the local man on the spot could follow his instructions and bring the case to a satisfactory conclusion. Dan Trimble would be delighted. Case solved, full confession, perp dead, no trial. What could be more satisfactory?

“What do we do now?” he echoed Jug Whitby. “You ring Mr. Pascoe.”

“Me? I though mebbe that you…”

“No. Your patch, Jug. Your local knowledge that brought you here. Any credit going should be thine. And Mr. Pascoe’s. You’ll tell the press that you were here following Mr. Pascoe’s instructions, right? And it is right, isn’t it? ’Cos he never told you to stop looking for Hen.”

“Aye, sir, but it was you-”

“I’ve not been here, Jug. I’m in bed fast asleep. I’m a convalescent invalid, remember?”

He rose from the step and stretched himself in the sunlight.

Pascoe would be up now, he didn’t doubt, eager to get back to the Denhams, hoping-believing! — that, with a little more pressure, a little more cunning, he could get the answers that would make the headlines he had probably just read with his breakfast come true.

The news about Hen Hollis would come as a shock, then as a relief.