A Fatal Affair by Faith Martin (top e book reader TXT) 📕

is it,’ he said with a final shake of his head. ‘Anyway, if you’ve finished, I got work to do.’

‘Have some porridge,’ his father said half-heartedly, but the younger Dewberry simply shook his head and stumped out of the house.

‘You ain’t gotta take anythin’ the boy says to heart,’ his father said heavily. ‘Things ain’t been the same around here since I found young David … well, since I found him.’

‘We’re sorry to intrude, Mr Dewberry,’ Trudy said quietly. ‘Thank you for speaking to us. We’d appreciate it if you didn’t spread it around the village that we’re here tying up some lose ends,’ she added, thinking of Duncan Gillingham. ‘There are still reporters lurking about …’

But Ray Dewberry snorted disdainfully. ‘Don’t have no truck with the likes of them!’ he promised. And for that, Trudy could only feel very grateful.

Chapter 13

Once outside, Trudy and Clement walked thoughtfully towards the Rover. ‘So what do you think?’ Trudy mused. ‘Is it a case of “methinks the young man doth protest too much” or do you think he genuinely didn’t like her?’

Clement smiled. ‘Hard to say. But I think we can be sure, for some reason or other, that he definitely wasn’t indifferent to Iris. But whether or not he disliked her as much as he claimed, or whether he was secretly pining after her …’ He shrugged. ‘We’ll probably never know.’

‘But if he was smitten with her, and was even seeing Iris behind his best friend’s back,’ Trudy persisted, ‘does that give him motive to kill either Iris or David? I mean, let’s just say for argument’s sake that he had a great passion for Iris – he might have killed her if she turned him down. Or if she didn’t turn him down, and they’d been seeing each other, what if he found out that she was two-timing both himself and David? We keep hearing how Iris was popular with practically all the male population of the village, after all.’ Trudy paused and took a much-needed breath, then frowned. ‘But why then would he turn around after killing Iris and kill David? That doesn’t make sense, does it?’

She slipped into the passenger seat and waited for Clement to settle behind the wheel before she was off and running again. ‘And if he didn’t kill Iris, but secretly loved her, could it be that he believed David murdered her, and killed David in revenge?’

Clement grunted, amused by all the eager speculation, and reached into his pocket to pull out the car keys. As he did so, he felt his hand begin to tremble and twitch. He knew he couldn’t fit the keys into the ignition right then without drawing attention to his most recent fit of ‘the shakes’ so he sat back instead, waiting for it to pass. At least, with his young friend in such a talkative mood, he wouldn’t be pressed for something to keep her distracted!

‘That’s a lot of speculation,’ he said slowly. ‘Let’s take it a step at a time and see if we can’t sort it out.’ He glanced out of the window as a black and white sheepdog darted across the farmyard and slipped into one of the outhouses. ‘If – and that’s a big “if” by the way – we say that Ronnie is the killer, are we saying that Ronnie lured David to the barn and killed him in cold blood?’

Trudy stared thoughtfully out of the window. ‘Well, it’s a starting point, isn’t it? I mean, why did David die in the barn at all? If he committed suicide he could have done it anywhere. He could have slit his wrists in the bath at his home, or taken pills with alcohol on the village green, where Iris died. Or …’

Clement couldn’t help but grin. ‘All right, I get the picture. But don’t forget that if he did kill himself, and his preferred method was hanging, then the barn would make perfect sense to him. He knew it well, remember, because he played there as a kid. He would have known about the handy rafters, and the rope lying around.’

‘Yes, but all of that goes equally well for Ronnie too, if he was the killer,’ Trudy pointed out reasonably. ‘He could have asked David to meet him at the barn – I don’t know, telling him he’d found something out about Iris or what-have-you. And once he was there, he offered him a drink laced with the sleeping pills. And then, when he was feeling woozy, put the rope around his neck and hauled him up.’ She stopped abruptly at that, suddenly appalled by the image that swept into her head. ‘That’s awful. To be betrayed and killed by your best friend.’

‘If it happened at all,’ Clement reminded her steadily, glancing down unobtrusively to check his hand. It was fluttering gently now, down between the door panel and the side of his leg, but it wasn’t trembling quite as much as it had been. ‘We still don’t know if suicide can be ruled out. Has your DI Jennings done anything about checking out the condition of the stepladder that he supposedly used?’

Trudy nodded. ‘Yes, he’s got some expert on woodwork looking at it. He expects to have a report soon.’

Clement sighed. ‘Well, until we have something evidentiary to go on, it seems to me we have far too much to contend with. Did David kill Iris, or didn’t he? Did David commit suicide, or didn’t he? If he did neither, did the same person who killed Iris kill David? It’s possible – but not likely, I admit – that one person could have killed Iris, and someone else killed David! If we’re not careful, we’ll start running around like headless chickens.’

Trudy sighed, but she knew the coroner was right.

‘We need to keep our focus on one thing – and that’s David,’ Clement reminded her firmly. ‘His state of mind before he died. What he was doing, who he was seeing, what