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Police did turn up the next morning, and Jake was astonished at the coroner’s efficiency. He opened the door rather confidently only to find himself cuffed and carried away to the local department.
“She won’t talk while he’s there,” the anonymous informant had said on the phone. So the officers took him away.
“We’ve received reports of domestic violence at your address – numerous statements in fact,” said the investigator to Jake who was rubbing his wrists in the interrogation room.
He said again and again it was all hogwash, and could they please refrain from upsetting his beloved wife when they interrogated her about it.
“We heard that she would not dare speak against you.”
“Well that’s convenient,” snorted Jake.
“Please do not interrupt. You seem to have a bad rap in your community,” said the police chief.
“A community of venomous idiots! By god, my poor wife has just moved in to this bloody village and already so many issues. How will I look for recommending we settle there?!”
“You’re also due a visit regarding the untimely death of your farm hand, I take it?”
“Yes. Great timing for a wonderful succession of events,” said Jake dryly, resigning himself fully to the situation.
“We’ve no need for cheek here, Mr Sadler,” said the investigator quietly.
“No. Of course it’s not your fault I’m here. What good has cheek ever done anybody anyway? Go on, then. List the charges and let me sift through the nonsense, chief. I know you see plenty of us blokes every day, so I suppose it’s no use insisting on my innocence, though I really could not possibly be more innocent.”
“They say they have seen your wife with a bruise on her left shoulder, and another time round her left wrist.”
“Rough sex, officer.”
The chief was momentarily silenced.
“They say she looked away towards you when somebody remarked upon it, and did not explain it further.”
“She’s a timid girl, sir, unlikely to discuss our bedroom habits with the locals. Which is why I hope and ask again that your qualified men are treating her sensitively at this moment.”
“I dare say you are terribly confident, Mr Sadler.”
“My wife and I are dearly devoted to each other and I have no doubt whatever in my mind that she will support me under even the most strenuous interrogations. In fact I think she will be bewildered by the accusations.”
Jake put his head to his palms and added, “while we’re here, sir, why don’t we cover the whole farm hand disaster?”
“That’s… not my department, I’m afraid, sir.”
Again, this transition to “sir”, noted Jake.
He suppressed the inner boilings of anti-bureaucratic sentiment and said:
“Could you take down a statement, perhaps, and pass it on? Could you bring someone else in? I implore you, officer. It has been weighing on me for over a week. I need to put this accident behind me, take whatever punishment I deserve for not immediately taking out workplace accident insurance on the guy, and move on with my life.” Start perhaps by murdering the neighbours, he thought loudly.
The domestic violence investigator was moved by the man’s recent misfortunes, but refrained from trusting him too soon.
“How do you explain screams emitting from your property last night?”
“Rough sex, officer.”
No shame, no gain, thought the chief. Fair play.
“We’ll have to corroborate with with the lady’s version of
events before we let you off, Mr Sadler. As for your farm hand, the
relevant department is out of office at the moment. They’re due to
see you tomorrow. You can wait and see if they have any time for you
today but it could be a while.”
“No,” sighed Jake. “I
need to see Harry – that’s Harriet. My wife. Poor girl, she’ll
be so worried.”
The lovers reconvened in distress that evening, shocked at their neighbours’ behaviour and wondering whether their misfortunes would ever let up or would they have to move elsewhere. Jake felt horribly guilty for bringing Harriet into such a fraught environment, and so soon after their marriage. It was supposed to be perfect and yet their hazy dream life had been shaken apart in a matter of days.
Harriet’s questioning had cleared Jake of suspicion, as expected, though the wound cut deep. She was mortified that anybody should have heard her intimate noises and described them as “screams from a medieval torture chamber”. She was disgusted that her sexual bruises that been so keenly observed and misconstrued. Now everybody would know what those noises and injuries had been. So much for absolute freedom in a seemingly isolated haven of natural beauty! Clearly the elderly couple next door still had extremely sharp hearing, though their house stood nearly two hundred metres away.
“Darling, we’ll soundproof the bedroom. It does face their yard after all. We’ll make a few adjustments, have a couple of unpleasant conversations, and join Andy in his excursions outside town if we want to socialise!” Jake breathed reassuringly in her fretting ear.
“Oh but Jake, we shouldn’t have to start our life here as outcasts, we shouldn’t!” she cried.
“I’m joking darling. It will blow over. Besides, we can not give up now on all this work, all this glorious land.”
They had walked out to their little triangular field, one of two that had come with the house. The summer sun lay low in the sky and rippled its rays through the woodland at the borders. The freshly mown grass glistening in clean patterns created the image of an expansive green sea. The rays caught each blade with incredible definition so it really did look like ripples. Harriet could almost see them undulate, perhaps in the wind, perhaps in her mind. She stopped suddenly to look at a tiny black toad, the smallest anybody could have ever seen.
“It’s lost! How did it even avoid the mower’s blades!” she chirped, suddenly joyful. It hopped in the waves of green with difficulty.
“Why don’t we set it free in the stream?” said Jake, picking up the little creature. “Would you like to do it?”
Harriet put out her hands and with deep concentration in her face, took the tiny thing – it broke her heart with its sheer helplessness – she trudged through the heavy grass to the stream at the other end.
The creature hopped inside her palms from one hand to the other, getting lost in the creases of her creamy skin. It had subtle ridges on its skin just like a toad, only in unutterably delicate miniature. One small muscle movement could crush it, and the thought sunk her heart.
Jake came up behind her as she played with the frog by the very edge of the stream, worried that it might drown if she put it straight in. It seemed to walk away from the water when she put it on the edge. Jake picked up the rock it sat on and put that in a shallow section, from which point the frog, or toad, dove in and climbed among the wet rocks out of their sight. The two lovers looked at each other and at their unspeakably beautiful setting. Gold light bathed the clearing with its trickling stream amid the chirping of birds and crickets. The sea of grass behind them gleamed in sharp focus. Even flies looked like glitterbugs in the early evening light.
“I couldn’t bear to leave this behind, Jake. If I ever do feel down, I’ll come back here, even in the dark of night, and all will be well.”
“I wonder if that frog is going to grow any bigger,” said Jake absent-mindedly.
Harriet grasped his shoulders, kissing his grim, thoughtful face. He pulled her hair from the back, kissing her exposed throat. It really is all too beautiful to leave behind, he thought. Though he was used to it since early childhood, the country still had him firmly under its spell and now it had Harriet also.
The death of Willy Wurton had temporarily tarnished their home, but these fields and woods were untouchable by petty human affairs. Frogs, birds, flies and rabbits were king here, Jake and Harriet mere visitors to their land.
No, they would stay. They would enjoy their life here, no matter what the snooping fools thought of it.
The neighbours had already wasted the police department’s time with baseless accusations. The interrogations had ended with jovial jesting on all sides as Harriet served her investigator tea and cakes while Jake described Tamara’s odd fascination with neighbours’ children since his younger days.
“There’s always a batty one,” the officer had said good-naturedly. “It’s a pity she decided to turn them all on you Mr Sadler, though they clearly have a lot of care in their hearts for your lovely wife.”
“Care!” Jake nearly spat his tea in derision. “Care. All she wants is to sow misery, set wives against husbands, children against their mothers. I’ve no pity for that horrible woman,” in fact, I pity her husband, he added in thought, as it would not go down well to support a known wife-beater in this particular situation. The officer, noisily crunching on a biscuit, had not quite made out Jake’s last angry remark and felt too awkward to ask again. He nodded so vacantly Harriet had to stifle a giggle having observed the whole exchange.
Jake was busy recalling a screaming match between his mother and Tamara after the woman had been denied access to the boy for after-school activities she hosted at her home with all the other mothers and children. Jake’s mother, Rosemary, could not stand Tamara and had refused to come along.
She had then made the misjudgement of mowing her lawn on a Sunday morning during the service, which had irritated Tamara deeply. “How much disrespect can you possibly have for our little village? I understand that you think you’re better than us all, but to disrupt the service like that, well it’s just embarrassing for everybody,” she had said tersely, standing at the door. Jake was playing on the couch in the living room directly behind Rosemary, and he stopped to listen.
“I am sorry for the bad timing. I had no intention of causing any disturbance to the service,” - she actively refrained from saying “your” service, which would indeed have seemed superior – and then, “is that all?”
“Is that all?” shrieked Tamara, stoked to a rage. “You have made no attempt to integrate into our community! We have had enough of you arrogant city folk, spitting on our very existence while profiting off our toil! You don’t know the things we do for you, for everybody… where do you suppose all your lovely bottled milk comes from? Our farmers are up before dawn, milking every day, or else their cows will die. And who ploughs the snow in winter from the roads? And your precious chard?!” She had watched Jake’s mother unload a shopping trip of rainbow chard from the local grocery a week ago. “We have been here for decades, centuries even. What has your city culture ever done for us?”
“Mrs. Fowler, I don’t need this. I find it disturbing that you watch me unload my groceries in such detail. I have apologied for my disrespectful behaviour, and I’ve nothing more to say to you.”
But Tamara was not ready to retreat. Her husband had left to get drunk immediately after the service and she knew he would return in one of his less agreeable moods - church never agreed with him – so she was raring for a fight. Rosemary sensed this.
“Mrs Fowler,” she affirmed sternly. “Have you been drinking? Why won’t you leave? You want my son this badly?” her voice trembled slightly at the wilful confrontation. The nerve that had been longing to be touched, had been snapped.
“Your son! You keep him away from our children in your ivory tower. What, you think we will make him ill? Pervert him? What kind of mother are you, has your husband abandoned you for your cold heart?”
“Just because I give you and your buddies nothing to gossip about, you despise me. You wish my son would come over and dish out some dirt, well, dream on. He’s not entering your sordid little circle of hyena women and neither am I. At least their fathers have some sense,” she said through gritted teeth, jaws flexing like Jake’s would so many years later, and mimed a slap up the back of an invisible head. She closed the door in Tamara’s shocked face and went calmly to join Jake who played alone with his toys every day.
“Why don’t you go and play in the garden, darling. I saw some rabbits out there earlier, you know. Could you find their hole for me?”
And so Jake had embarked on one more of his many solo adventures, having absorbed every word of the unfortunate exchange at the door without realising it until that day by the fire in his own home in the very same little town.
The young man’s antagonist now had a tuft of silver hair remaining from her luscious black locks of yore. It was neatly arranged into a bun and a set of black thick-rimmed glasses sat atop her thin-ridged nose. It was a rather lovely face, unmistakeably reminiscent of former beauty.
Andrew had picked her up at the little baking goods shop where she had worked part-time while studying to become a midwife. He had been on a drunken rampage through the village at the time. In her innocence she had fallen for the brute – he put on a good show when he needed to, and he certainly did need to when he landed in a quaint little shop full of fragile baking supplies and a cute young woman at the counter. Their romance lasted all of six weeks before marriage eroded the delusion in record time. At once Andrew realised he could barely stand to hear her talk, while she would not have any part of his tall, flabby body anywhere near her. This was hardly fertile ground for establishing a family, so Tamara began to adopt the village children by strategically befriending their mothers, having them around on a regular basis, offering to babysit, and before long her central position in the village was secured.
All she wanted was to make her mark on future generations, if God would not permit her to raise her own from scratch. After Andrew struck her once in an explosion of anger, she knew there was never to be any child brought up in that household. The grief was soon buried under the bustle of organising mothering groups and activities for all the nippers except for elusive little Jake, whom she so pitied for his lonely upbringing.
She would never be able to befriend Rosemary, and Jake was doomed to play with rabbit holes and stag beetles. He loved the company of local chickens, too – he would crouch by the fence of neighbouring broods and watch the hens gossip throughout the day, giggling to himself as they kicked at the dust.
Harriet was amusing the officer with spooky stories she had heard from the locals. The two newlyweds had a seventy-metre deep, four-hundred-year-old well inside their home concealed under a modern manhole in the old tack room which connected the stables with the courtyard.
They had long debated processing the water to make it drinkable and asked around town for advice. This had led to some disturbing stories from long-time residents.
“Oh, that old thing? They didn’t tell you about that when you was buying the house did they, or you could have knocked off a chunk of the price I’m sure. Always ask for backstory, always,” one jolly geezer had said to her. Upon her refusal to entertain his mockery, the local man proceeded to describe the story, as it went:
“They say a family lived here back around a century ago. Good honest people, they kept the land well, in fact they’d taken it over from a right disaster of a farmer before them who’d drunk himself silly.
“The well was outdoors back then and they used it every day to get water for the milking herd. One day, they sent their little fella of about thirteen to get the bucket and – get this – he hauled up a skeleton! Half the skin still on, mind you. Well preserved down there in the cold. He was traumatised for life, of course. Not something you’d like to see, really. I heard it from the boy’s sister’s son meself.
“He went on to become as drunk as the farmer before them when he inherited the place, being the only boy in the family. Ran it into the grounds you know today.”
Harriet had just finished off the horror story when Jake startled himself out of his stupor of reminiscence.
“Apologies, officer. I’ve just thought of something. Any chance you might take down my statement regarding the accident we had here the other day, take that load off my mind?”
“Accident, you say?” asked the policeman, still shaken from Harriet’s tales.
“Yeah,” said Jake, and he explained his conversation with the coroner and the ensuing exchange at the police station earlier that day.
“Well sir, I’m afraid workplace accidents ain’t in my line of duty,” - Jake bristled - “Cor, mighty unfortunate you two lovebirds have been here, ain’t you? Maybe there’s something to that rude gentleman’s story, as regards the place being a bit rough,” he said sympathetically.
“We certainly will not be dealing with the ghosts in that well ourselves!” Harriet said brightly. “We will hire a plumber-cum-exorcist, of course. Plenty of them around.”
Jake lovingly, and somewhat heatedly, clasped his wife by the waist from where he sat. She gracefully stopped herself stumbling from the sudden movement, and settled sideways on the armrest. “Thanks anyway, officer. I’ll await the relevant, er, department.”
Their new acquaintance chuckled nervously, bowed to them with a raise of the cap which he recovered on his way out, and departed.
“Sex-crazed maniacs,” chortled the officer, who was called Paul, to his colleague John who had interrogated the suspect.
“I know, right? Enough to make your neighbours phone in? Blimey, he must be doing something right,” said John. “She was a looker, I suppose?”
“Oh, rarely see one like it. So timid, too. Desperate to get her man off the hook – but also desperate to stay discreet. I got the message, anyway. She’s no battered wife. Poor pair’s got enough on their plate now with these elderly vultures on their backs.”
“You say that. But who knows if the fella ain’t offed his farm hand?”
“Seems pretty unlikely, considering the mountain of work to do on that property, seems he’d need all the help he can get. Then again, maybe the guy was a dud, and the landlord has a temper,” mused Paul with a good-natured shrug.
“He’s more likely to off his neighbours at this rate, I’d say,” John said solemnly. “That woman calling up with all her phony witness statements. Clearly a troublemaker.”
Over the following days, Jake got off with a thousand-pound fine for failing to insure himself against workplace accidents and Willy Wurton was never to be heard of again.
His ashes were thrown in an unmarked grave outside town with those of the latest nameless nursing-home casualties.
Andrew was making his drunken way home that day after a night in the hedges. He stopped to heave himself over the cemetery gates while council undertakers did they tragic deeds for the local unknowns.
“What’s that you’re doing then?” asked Andrew in a gravelly voice thick with smoke. The undertaker explained under his breath, and Andrew headed home, duly depressed.
“Did you know what they do to some people who die?” he slurred at Tamara upon entering the hallway.
Tamara coldly instructed him to take off his muddy shoes, and said:
“they bury them. In an unmarked grave.” Kind of like what I'd do to
you, darling, were the words that whistled through her mind as she glowered at her life partner.
“They don’t even barely bother to separate ‘em! Say you die at the same time’s some bloke from the care home, well, your ashes and his ashes are all down there all mixed up together!” he blurted in childish horror.
“Then you go to hell as an amalgamation of the two.”
“Amalgamamala – why hell?”
Because you will go to hell, her mind screamed in his face. Could I think it any louder, you thick drunk?
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