FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) (7 page)

‘Tell you what, how about us ol’ pardners taking a few jars together? Phelps has a live band playing every Wednesday night at his pub. This Wednesday it’s a band called
The Mud-Puddle Frogs
– they do a sort-of American country and British folk mix. How about it?’

‘Sure, Uncle Gary. I need to drown my sorrows.’

‘Poor kid. Losing a dad can be hell,’ he said. ‘It was for us when we lost ours.’

George Lee wasn’t thinking about his dad, but he nodded his thanks all the same.
‘Sure, it can be hell,’ he said.

‘Did your mother ever find out any more about that woman?’

‘What woman?’

‘She hasn’t told you then?’

He shook his head. ‘What woman?’ he repeated.

‘Maybe it’s nothing, but your dad said there’d been a strange young woman hanging about near his house.
Never during the day but just as it’s starting to get dark. He saw her the evening before he died, too.’

‘What did she want?’ George asked.

Gary shrugged, the smell of engine oil coming off him as he did so. ‘I dunno. Some kind of nutter, I guess. He never got to speak to her. She’d just run off when he went to speak.’

‘Have you seen her?
’

‘Maybe. Dunno. I caught a glimpse of someone hanging around
the garage a couple of nights.’

‘A woman?’

‘Hell, I don’t know. It was too dark. I guess it looked like a woman, I can’t be certain. My eyes ain’t up to it these days. Look, it doesn’t matter. Like I said, probably some nutter up to no good. I told the cops, but useless swine that they are they said they’d look into it and never did. I’ve got good stock on the forecourt, I said. Sure, they said, and I could see the man was being sarcastic with his eyebrows. Clever bastards.’

George smiled. His Uncle Gary and the law had never been on good terms. ‘I’ll ask mum,’ he said.

Gary waved it all away. ‘Don’t make a big thing out of it. She’s got enough to worry about without some crazy bint stalking her. Just asking, that’s all. But if you see or hear of anybody strange hanging around let me know, eh? Your Uncle Robert is on the village Neighbourhood Watch committee and just loves all that vigilante kind of stuff. He wants to set up a Community Speedwatch thing, too. You know, those groups of no-good interfering nimbies in their hi-viz vests clocking you with speed cameras for the police? I told him straight, you do that and I’ll never talk to you again…’

‘Thanks for the car,’ said George, making a break for it before the man started on another of his rants.

‘Are you writing that stuff, still?’ his uncle asked as George made for the VW.

He nodded. ‘Y
eah. You still reading the second one I gave you?’

He grinned. ‘Nearly finished it.’

It had been nearly six years since he gave it to him. He got into the car, the inside sweltering. The electric windows didn’t work so he cranked open the sunroof to let a little air in.

‘All this Sylvia Tredwin stuff…’ said
Gary, leaning in at the window, his face deadpan.

‘Yeah?’

‘Just leave it alone, eh? Don’t go dragging things up. It’s a small place.’

A small place? What did that mean?

‘Yeah, no problem,’ George said. He waved goodbye to his uncle and drove off.

George Lee pulled up outside Adam Tredwin’s garden centre
as he made his way home, the wheezy old engine ticking over noisily as he put a finger to his lips in thought. In his head the plot for a new novel was beginning to play out. This could be the one, he thought. This could be his breakthrough book. He’d not been this excited about a new story for years.

He drove the car into the garden centre’s car park, the white dust from the gravel rising in a ghostly cloud to hover briefly like a forlorn apparition in the still air.

The heat of the day was already beginning to crank up. It drew off the scent of the many flowers that had been lined up in neat rows, looking like the colourful uniforms of Napoleonic soldiers arranged for battle, and wafted it over to him in intoxicating clouds. There was something pleasantly reassuring about the garden centre’s yard, an equal mixture of orderliness and the chaotic, with its array of lush greenery and terracotta plant pots and urns, its hanging baskets, and the battered galvanised watering can and wheelbarrow that had been recently used and abandoned in the middle of the brick path. George Lee wasn’t green fingered by any means – he could kill any houseplant within weeks – but, like so many people, he felt comforted in the presence of verdant earthiness. Back to basics. In touch with Mother Earth, all that New Age stuff. And the garden centre actually felt like a kind of oasis, set apart from the hum-drum of everyday life; still, quiet, heavily scented, a refuge of sorts.

The sort of place he’d expect a guy like Adam
Tredwin to have, really. As he tramped slowly up to the battered old entrance to the wooden building that made up the large shop, his mind travelled back to when he was a kid and first met Adam. On the banks of that stream, throwing grass into the water. Even then, he remembered, it was as if Adam Tredwin was one with the land about him. He noticed how tenderly he plucked the grass and how he paused before throwing each blade into the stream, as if performing a silent prayer. When he eventually got to play inside the Tredwins’ back garden, Adam showed him a patch where he was growing vegetables. He talked about them as if the rows of carrots were his children, and even then George found this a little odd. But, he guessed, a kid with no friends has to make friends somewhere, even if that was with vegetables, so he left it at that and got on with the more important business of playing their games.

The inside of the shop was far cooler than the outside. An electric fan had already been set in motion
over by the counter. There was the familiar smell of compost and hay in the air. There were racks filled with gardening implements, and another with outdoor clothing and Wellington boots, and still more crammed with colourful packets of seeds. He heard a chirruping from his left and went to investigate. Around the corner of the central aisle he came across pet birds for sale in large cages, and beside these hamsters and rats.

‘Good morning,’ he said to the hamsters, poking his finger through the thin metal bars and wiggling it.

‘Good morning,’ came the reply, which almost made him start.

He turned round to see a tall, slender man standing behind him with a large bag of dog feed in his delicate hands.

George could tell straight away that this was Adam Tredwin. He could instantly see the young kid beneath the thick veneer of adulthood. He still had that attractive, almost feminine face; pale, smooth-skinned, high-cheeked, full-lipped, and the years had been far kinder to him than to me, thought George. Adam’s head of thick dark hair – looking like it needed a good comb – had traces of grey hair in it, the only major concession to being in his late thirties. As far as George could tell, the man had an enviably flat stomach, unlike his own which had started to balloon with a tad too much good living (if you can call a high-fat, low-fibre, alcohol-soused diet a good living), slender, though surprisingly muscular, arms poking from a T-shirt, and long athletic legs encased in a pair of dirty jeans and disappearing into a pair of grubby Wellingtons.

Staring into Adam’s face, George immediately saw the ghost of Sylvia Tredwin. As if her spirit had risen from the deep recesses of his faded memory to haunt him again. For a moment he was speec
hless. He had no idea that the sudden recollections of his childhood past prompted by seeing Adam would be so powerful, or indeed filled with such indescribable meaning. He had long ago consigned the memories to what he termed his brain’s dustbin.

‘Looking for something in particular?’
said Adam Tredwin pleasantly, heaving the sack of feed into a more comfortable position.

‘Actually, I wasn’t looking for anything…’ he replied. ‘Well, I was…’ he said uncertainly.

Adam frowned. ‘George?’ he asked tentatively. ‘George Lee?’

George smiled. ‘Yeah, that’s me. George. You remembered me.’

He put the bag down and held out his hand to shake. ‘Of course I remember you. You haven’t changed a bit.’

George shook his hand. ‘You’re a good liar, Adam. I know I’ve changed a lot. But you…’ Adam’s grip was gentle, faltering, and quick to let go. ‘I recognised you straight away. I like what you’ve done to the old place,’ he said, making an effort to look around him, even up at the ceiling.

‘Yes,’ said Adam proudly. ‘I came into a good sum of money, and I always wanted to set up my own garden centre, so here it is…’ He gestured with open hands at the shop. ‘Not much to look at yet, but I’ve got big plans for the place.’

George nodded. ‘So why here? Why Petheram?’ he asked.

Adam blinked thoughtfully, as if trying to get behind the significance in George’s words. ‘Why not? I was born here after all.’

George was aware he’d got off to a potential bad start, touching some kind of raw nerve, though Adam covered it up well enough. ‘I meant
Petheram is a little out of the way, you know, for a business.’

‘Not these days, not with the internet. I’ve got a mail-order service as well. It’s in its infancy but I’m doing OK so far. I’ve only been here six months so we’ll just have to wait and see whether I’ve made the right choice or not in coming back to Petheram.’

‘I’m sure it’s good for the village, keeping it alive when so many are losing their shops and stores, pubs even. I didn’t mean to offend…’ George said.

Adam smiled warmly. ‘None taken. It’s good to see you, George.
How are you?’

‘Surviving,’ he said vaguely.

‘Look, I’m going to make a brew. There’s no one here at the moment. Fancy a cuppa? I was about to take a break anyhow. Been here since five this morning.’

It never ceased to amaze George how the second thing people in
Britain ask you after asking after your health is an invite to share a cup of tea. He accepted and was asked to come round the counter to a poky little office at the back where Adam had a kettle perched on a filing cabinet. There was a small desk, all but empty but for a computer, and potted plants everywhere. A window looked out onto the shop’s rear yard, a veritable fence of old trees marking the yard’s sizable boundary. The sun was slanting in through the cobwebbed window, giving the room a warm, cheery aspect in spite of its compactness.

As the kettle began to his
s asthmatically, George said, ‘It’s been a long time…’

‘Certainly has. I was about nine when we left the village. Milk and sugar?’
George said yes to both. ‘I’m sorry to hear about the death of your father,’ Adam said without turning round.

‘It happens,’ said George. ‘He was getting on, I suppose.’

‘People live into their eighties and nineties these days,’ he replied. ‘If they’re lucky.’

‘Yeah,
if they’re lucky,’ said George absently, wondering how to get round to the subject of Adam’s mother, the real reason he was here.

‘Are you still writing?’ Adam asked out of the blue.

‘You know about that?’

‘Cameron Slade, isn’t it?’

‘God, yes.’ He was pleasantly surprised. ‘How’d you know?’

Adam Tredwin went across the room and opened a cupboard, took out three dog-eared paperbacks. ‘
The Red Carpet Murders
;
The Revenge of the Underdog
;
Dirty Like a Fallen Angel
… by Cameron Slade,’ he said.

‘You’ve read them?’ George said.

‘All of them. I’ve read
Fallen Angel
twice.’

‘I’m surprised. I don’t sell that many. I’m hardly known.
How’d you find out about my writing?’

‘Oh, easy really,’ he said, but didn’t elaborate. ‘I like them,’ he added.

‘You do?’ George Lee felt a warm spring of pride well up inside him.

‘Don’t you?’ said Adam, picking up on George’s tone.

He offered a non-committal shrug. ‘A writer hates everything he does, I guess.’

Adam put the books on the desk
and picked up a pen. ‘Would you sign them for me?’ he said, holding up the pen. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

George took it. ‘No, of course not!’ He’d never signed a single copy of his books. He
opened the first paperback and stared at the page, wondering how he should dedicate it.
To an old friend
, he wrote.
Cameron Slade
. He slid it back to Adam, who looked at it with pleasure and then pushed over the other two volumes. He watched as Adam put the signed books carefully back into the cupboard.

Handed a hot cup of tea, George Lee studied the lithe man before him. He appeared pleasant enough, but there was something beneath the surface that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Like a shadow that moved under his flawless skin; the shadow of another
, altogether darker side to Adam Tredwin. Or maybe that was his imagination at play.

‘Are you working on another book?’ Adam asked from across the desk, a cup of tea to his lips.

‘Sort of,’ George replied.

Adam nodded. ‘I really appreciated it, you know…’ he said.

George waved it away. ‘I didn’t mind. Anytime,’ he said.

‘Not
the signing of the books – though I do appreciate that as well,’ said Adam. ‘I mean about you being the only boy in the village who ever bothered with me. You were my only friend.’

George felt slightly embarrassed, even uncomfortable, with the comment, with Adam opening up straight away like that. ‘It was nothing,’ he said.

‘It most certainly was something,’ Adam returned. ‘It meant a great deal to me at the time. I was desperately lonely till you came along. It’s a shame we only had a short time to spend with each other before we left the village.’

‘Yeah,’ sai
d George. He saw his opening. ‘I heard you had a sister too, didn’t you?’

‘That’s right.
Eva.’

Adam and
Eva, thought George. Was that some kind of family in-joke? ‘I never saw her,’ George admitted. ‘I never knew you had a sister.’

‘We left when she was just a week or so old.’

‘I heard she’s come back to Petheram with you?’

Adam regarded George carefully.
Sipped hot tea. ‘You heard, eh?’

‘It’s a small place,’ said George, recycling his uncle’s words. ‘News gets about fast. So where is
Eva?’

‘She lives at my parents’ old place.’

‘I thought it was dilapidated,’ said George.

‘It was never sold and it has been allowed to fall into some disrepair, but I’m throwing money at it to renovate the old thing. There are only limited rooms which are serviceable, so we agreed
Eva would have use of the house for now. I live here, above the shop.’

‘She lives all on her own?’ George asked, wondering if she looked at all like Adam’s mother. ‘Doesn’t she get lonely? The house is a bit isolated.’

He shook his head. ‘Eva likes to be alone. She doesn’t go out much. I take her all her shopping. See to her needs.’

Needs? George was intrigued, but held himself in check and decided not to pursue it, not on a first meeting. But he needn’t have worried; Adam was quick to explain.

‘She’s not well. She has problems engaging with people. It’s an illness. I’m looking after her.’

‘Oh,’ said George, nodding. Maybe it was true. Maybe something in the Tredwin gene pool didn’t make for perfectly adjusted children. But Adam looked fine, he thought. More than fine. He made George feel positively inadequate by comparison. Gentle, calm, good looking and with his sights set firmly on a business goal. George felt every bit
the antithesis, and the curious and unexpected sensation of feeling uncomfortable crept over him. ‘How’s your mother?’ he blurted suddenly.

After only the briefest of pauses, Adam said, ‘She’s fine. Still living in
Manchester.’

George needed to press further, but didn’t know how. Maybe he should leave it at that for now, he thought. His uncle’s invite to the pub to see the live band sprang to his mind. ‘Look, I’ve got to be going soon, but how do you fancy meeting up at the pub for a beer? There’s a live band
playing –
The Muddy Frogs
or something – that are supposed to be good. We could catch up on things over a few drinks.’

‘I don’t drink,’ said Adam.

‘Not at all?’ he asked, surprised.

‘Not even wine gums.’

‘Oh,’ said George. ‘Still, they have lemonade…’ he said hopefully.

‘I think that would be good,’ said Adam
after giving it some thought. ‘I haven’t been out since getting here, what with getting the garden centre up and running taking all my time. Yes, I think I’d like that very much. It’ll do me good to see an old friend,’ he said.