The Beast Must Die Read Free

haystack, I’d hide it in a heap of needles. Now then: Elder was pretty definite that the impact of the collision must have caused some damage to the front of the car, even though Martie was only a featherweight. The best way to conceal damage is to cause more damage in the same place. If I’d knocked a child down and dented a wing, say, and wanted to cover it up, I’d fake an accident – run the car into a gate or a tree or something. That would cover up all traces of the previous collision.
    What we’ve got to do is find out whether any cars were piled up in this way that night. I’ll ring up Elder in the morning and ask him.

25 June
    NBG. THE POLICE had already thought of that one. Elder’s respect for the bereaved was severely tried, judging by his tone over the telephone. He made it politely plain that the police don’t need to be taught their job by any outsider. All accidents in the neighbourhood were investigated, to establish their ‘bona fides’, as he put it – the pompous oaf.
    It’s bewildering, maddening. I don’t know where to start. How did I ever come to think that I’d only to stretch out my hand and lay it upon the man I want? Must have been the first stage of murderer’s megalomania. After my telephone conversation with Elder this morning, I felt irritable and disheartened. Nothing to do but potter about in the garden, everything reminding me of Martie, not least this silly business of the roses.
    When Martie was a toddler, he used to follow me about the garden as I cut flowers for the table. One day I found he’d cut the heads off two dozen prize roses which I was keeping for the show – that superb dark red bloom, ‘Night’. I was furious with him, though I realised even at the time that he had thought he was helping me. A bestial performance on my part. He wouldn’t be comforted for hours afterwards. That is the way trust and innocence are destroyed. Now he’s dead, and it doesn’t much matter I suppose, but I wish I’d not lost my temper with him that day – it must have been like the end of the world for him. Oh hell, now I’m getting maudlin. I shall start making a catalogue of his babyish sayings next. Well, why not? Why not? Looking out on the lawn now, I remember how he saw two halves of a worm that had been cut in half by the lawnmower, trying to wriggle together, and he said, ‘Look, Daddy, there’s a worm shunting.’ I thought that was pretty bright. He might have made a poet, with that gift for metaphor.
    But what started this sentimental train of thought was my walking out into the garden this morning and finding that the top of every single rose had been cut off. My heart stood still (as I phrase it in my thrillers). For a moment I thought all the last six months had been a nightmare, and Martie was alive still. Some kid in the village up to a silly bit of mischief, no doubt. But it got me down, made me feel as if everything was against me. A just and merciful Providence might at least have spared me a few roses. I suppose I ought to report this ‘act of vandalism’ to Elder, but I just can’t be bothered.
    There’s something intolerably theatrical about the sound of one’s own sobbing. I hope Mrs Teague didn’t hear me.
    I’ll do a pub crawl tomorrow evening, and see if there’s any information to be picked up. I can’t go on glooming around in the cottage for ever. Think I’ll drop in on Peters for a drink now, before I go to bed.

26 June
    THERE’S A CERTAIN unique thrill about dissembling, the sensation of that man in some story or other who carried an explosive in his breast pocket, and in his trouser pocket a bulb which he only had to press and blow himself and everything within twenty yards to glory. I felt it when I was secretly engaged to Tessa – the dangerous, lovely, dynamite secret in the breast, and I felt it again last night talking to Peters. He’s a good sort, but I don’t suppose he’s ever come up against anything more