Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 104, Nos. 4 & 5. Whole Nos. 633 & 634, October 1994

The Passing of Mr. Toad by Jeffry Scott

© 1994 by Jeffry Scott

For many years pseudonymous author Jeffry Scott was a reporter for the London Daily Mail. These days, he’s a Daily Mail editor, and a very prolific short story writer as well. Mr. Scott has an eye to all that goes on in the mystery field, and in the book business generally, since one of his editorial responsibilities is to scout for books to be serialized in his newspaper...

The day was idyllic, almost uncannily perfect. That made what followed seem so much worse.

I remember standing with one foot up on the log, morning woodland scents blending with the aroma from a mug of coffee in my hand, and feeling a rare sense of awe and gratitude, my nearest approach to a religious response. Appropriate, since it was Sunday.

If you have no patience for ain’t-nature-grand and This-sceptred-isle stuff, skip the next bit. But be assured that it’s relevant...

My cottage being set among trees, a formal garden (any garden apart from spring bulbs in concrete tubs, replaced by bedding plants come summer) is a waste of time. There’s a patio, a ledge I hacked out of the hillside, with a tree trunk set at the edge to stop me strolling over the brink after the second or third sundowner. The ground falls away so steeply that standing out there is like riding in the basket of a hot-air balloon.

St. Mary’s is a ten-minute walk away but the little church’s steeple is only yards off in a straight line, and almost directly below my place; one looks down on the gilded weathercock instead of up at it. As for the surroundings... What do they boast about in Ireland, a hundred shades of green, a thousand? We have a mere fifty along the Drawbel Valley, but that’s enough. Trees and bushes, mainly rhododendrons run wild since the heyday of a landscaped and manicured Victorian estate. Some laurels, many pines, and at a widened turn of the zigzag track, a veteran cedar to shade the horses when carriages brought ladies to the house to execute anaemic watercolours on clement days, last century.

Admiring all that, I was half asleep, caused by being very late to bed, and up early. To, as the old joke goes, get home again. An ignoble part of my mind — men really are the limit, some of us, that is — was gloating. Nothing adds spice to an affair like conducting it in secrecy. My partner was unmarried, but she had an image to protect. As a bachelor with no image to speak of, I cared less about keeping village gossips in the dark. But she was the boss.

Out there on the patio, another side of me was enquiring what had happened to my scorn for no-future flings, and warned that any amount of issue-confronting and assessment of emotions lay ahead. Conscience nagged that I wasn’t a teenager. Nor, for that matter, was the lady.

But all that faded as I took another look across the valley. My end of the Drawbel is deep and narrow, the wound left by a titanic axe — how that simile made me wince in hindsight! As mist burned off, the landscape emerged like a photograph defining in developer fluid. Trees, the steeple, houses amid greenery on the far slopes were all fresh-minted, in that overture to a glorious summer day. Intellect insisted that Bristol, no small city, was only ten miles away, but it might as well have been a million.

“Dear God, it’s pretty,” I mumbled inadequately, and smacked my lips over the coffee, which had no chance of keeping me sleepless. Aching to get to bed yet too idle to move, I compromised by sitting on the fallen tree.

Right after the event I kept telling myself, “Nobody ought to die on a day like this.” It showed how shaken I was. Not the hardened man of semi-action (witnessed a lot, partaken of little) that vanity had suggested. Before lucking out with the novels, I was a trained observer — sounds better than reporter, don’t you think? — and had seen a fair amount of violence and carnage. Was shot at, arrested by the breed of police imposing force rather than upholding laws, survived an air raid: standard been-there-done-that experiences of most foreign correspondents.

None of that prepared me for what befell poor Ben Basgate...

Living on the edge of Petticoat Wood ought to have accustomed me to lethal violence. Stoats and weasels kill rabbits, foxes kill hens (and rabbits), magpies kill songbirds even before they hatch. The rabbits don’t get much of a look-in, but are known to kill their own young, not to mention endless vegetation, and so it goes, day and night on my doorstep. However, human beings count more in the scheme of things. Or so they believe.

But given the context of that cathedral hush and almost daunting beauty, death was unthinkable. When it struck, the impact was all the greater.

I must have dozed, surfacing with a stiff neck and clutching a mug of cold coffee, some of its spilt contents soaking my jeans. It was about nine o’clock, birds sang and there was the faintest whisper of traffic on distant, invisible roads, sounds giving the amphitheater added texture, somehow.

And gradually I became aware of another instrument in the orchestra, suggesting the rattle of a busy woodpecker, but slowed down and oddly close, though it could not be. Tock... tock... tock. Certain noises do float across the valley in still weather, possibly echoing off the slate tiles of St. Mary’s steeple to reach me so clearly.

The measured knocking aroused my curiosity. I knuckled my eyes and gazed around for the source.

A flash of pillar-box red drew my attention. Monks Farm was better than a quarter-mile away on the opposite side of the valley, its chimneys puncturing the froth of trees like masts poking from green clouds. The red fleck was a lot lower down, about the level of the farmhouse’s front lawn. My vision is less than hawklike, but I gathered that Ben Basgate was up and about.

The majority of local folk had no time for Ben, regarding him as a traitor of sorts. Village small-mindedness and envy shaped that opinion. It’s the classic can’t-win syndrome of country communities anywhere in the world — I have recognised the phenomenon from Australia to America, Vietnam to, well, England. Anyone leaving a village to better himself is scorned as a loser if he fails, a show-off if he comes back...

Ben Basgate was no loser. He quit school at fifteen, ran away to London, made money in advertising, and amassed more by selling out and going into the restaurant business. After his widowed father died, Ben came home to the valley to take over the farm.

His idea of agriculture disgusted Drawbel’s opinion makers. In their eyes he let the holding go to rack and ruin, compounding the sin by getting paid for it because Common Market regulations encourage farmers to leave their fields fallow. Set-aside subsidies was the name of the game, and didn’t it put local noses out of joint when Ben Basgate cashed in.

He ran a pop festival on his derelict acres — the village loved that three-day ordeal and the mess left in its wake — to turn a supposedly tax-free profit. Ben opened a “farm shop” stocked with stuff bought at city cash-and-carry outlets, passing it off as organically raised on the premises... until county council snoops closed it down.

There was no harm in him, but then I didn’t live near Monks Farm, except as the crow flies. Half his larks were dreamed up to annoy the natives, simple as that. We got on fine; my secret nickname for Ben Basgate was Mr. Toad, he had that Wind in the Willows air of self-importance and innocent glee at being himself. A hairless head, bulging eyes, and wide mouth endorsed my label.

The one I felt sorry for was his nephew, Tom Oates. Tom had always wanted to be a farmer. So when Ben went off to seek his fortune and his dad got doddery, there was Tom Oates to act as proxy son and work the place for him. In an ideal world he would have inherited Monks Farm. As it was, Ben kept him on as manager, though precious little remained to manage. All credit to him, Tom stood up for his uncle, though privately he must have agonised over Ben’s misuse of prime land.

Anyway, I lounged on my log, emulating the proverbial bump, watching a speck of red and wondering what the man wearing it might be doing. Ben never went outdoors without that baseball cap. All I could make out was the spot of color, but it seemed to be bobbing to and fro. Every now and then came a silver flash... And that tock would stammer across the valley.

It took minutes for the message to sink in. Then I jumped up and, ludicrously, shouted, “Oi, stop it! Ben, stop that!” My voice sounded hoarse and feeble, as well it might.

The cheek, the nerve, the... sheer Mr. Toadness going on over there, appalled me.

Of course the vandal had got up early. Of course the red cap was moving in an arc with the rest of Ben Basgate. Of course steel caught the sun from time to time.

To explain: Monks Farm was rather grand, in its mid-Victorian, box-of-nursery-bricks way. Three floors, a pillared porch, gravel drive — and in the center of the lawn, soaring thirty feet or so, one of the finest monkey-puzzle trees in the county. Ben Basgate claimed that it was an eyesore, darkening his lounge. He had threatened to cut it down (largely to annoy his neighbours, whom he taunted as stick-in-the-muds). They, as inimical neighbours will, whispered in councillors’ ears, and as councils will, ours slapped a preservation order on the monkey puzzle. An Englishman’s home is his castle, but only while council planners aren’t looking.

Now Mr. Toad was having the last word by chopping the thing down. The worst that could occur was a fine of a few hundred pounds. Knowing Ben Basgate, he’d consider it money well spent. The subsequent row, daunting to most people, would strike him as a bonus...

The axe swung, and an instant later the sound of steel on timber bounced off the spire below me. Tock, pause, tock. Evidently he was tiring. Ben was no lumberjack, but a bald, podgy amateur.

Dithering, first I made for the cottage, meaning to phone him. Then I changed direction to the garage. He might ignore the phone, always supposing he heard it out there, but a visitor couldn’t be overlooked. Only it would take me a quarter-hour to drive down the zigzag track — very slowly if I wanted the muffler in place on reaching the road — and get to Monks Farm. So maybe the phone was a better idea after all, though the chances were that the monkey puzzle was past saving, either way.

Confirming my pessimism, a creaking, tearing noise rippled through still air, followed by a faint crash from over there. A scribble of birds defaced the sky over Monks Farm, danced briefly, and erased itself. I stood still, caught between cursing and laughter.

Mr. Toad had been and gone and done it, my word he had.

If it’s not labouring the point, we had plenty more trees around Drawbel. And I have never been fond of monkey puzzles with their multiple “tails” of branches; for my money they’re grotesquely ornate unless it’s ornately grotesque, like so many ugly examples of Victoriana.

All the same, I got the car out and set off to see Ben. The man was a fool to himself, and needed to be reminded of it before the lynch mob arrived. Not a real necktie party, but Peter Stuckey and his shrewish wife were probably phoning round the village by now, stirring up trouble for Ben. The Stuckeys were “proper farmers,” Ben Basgate’s nearest neighbors, and they detested him. He was quite likely to jeer when they turned up to protest, and that might well increase the amount of his fine when the inevitable case came to court and they gave evidence. Ben could spare whatever the magistrates decreed — on the other hand, I was the nearest thing he had to a friend, and owed him advice. The fact that Mr. Toad would ignore it was another matter...

“Idiot!” I said out loud.

It didn’t take long to reach Monks Farm, once out of Petticoat Wood. You go half a mile in the opposite direction, then up the dogleg of lane to Ben Basgate’s home, the Stuckeys’ place, and a few other dwellings.

Gravel sputtered under my tires and suddenly the car was skidding across Ben’s drive because I’d tramped on the brakes. I jerked forward and stalled with a nasty, expensive sound which I forgot about until the following day.

The monkey puzzle was down all right, its tip spearing across the lawn. About halfway along the trunk, a foot and a hand were visible under the tangle of bottle-brush tails of foliage. I got out, mouth dry, fighting that underwater-walking sensation of nightmares.

Gross, heartless humour is a blessing at such times. It’s a form of anaesthetic. Going down on one knee, I pawed among the leafy monkey tails, telling myself that if Ben Basgate wasn’t dead, then he had found a way of surviving with his head and chest smashed flat. As a matter of form I tried for a pulse in his wrist, and of course there was none.

“What the hell are you playing at?”

The angry shout made me gasp and topple sideways, heart hammering. Tom Oates barged past, only to recoil, a hand clamped over his mouth. “God... it’s Uncle Ben.”

“Come away,” I gabbled, “we can’t do anything.” Tom looked terrible, as well he might — pallor startling in contrast to all that blue-black hair, shiny with grease.

“We’ve got to get him out,” Tom whimpered. He was thirty-five, a stolid, sturdy, thoroughly capable man, but shock had reduced him to a faltering youngster. He started wrenching at the nearest branches, teeth bared, a vein rising on his forehead; I had to wrestle him back.

“Tom! He’s past help. Use your head, they’ll need lifting gear to shift this thing.” I cleared my throat. “I think we’re supposed to leave everything as it is. For the police.”

Not appearing to take that in, he demanded, “What’s been going on here?”

“What does it look like? You must have heard the tree come down.” Tom lived in a bungalow a few hundred yards along the lane.

He blinked at me, working things out. “Yes... it would have made a right racket. I was cleaning house, it’s my day for it. Had the music on.” He was wearing jeans and T-shirt, and now I noticed the Walkman clipped to his belt with the earphones slung round his neck, stethoscope fashion. “Saw you drive past like a madman, thought there might be a fire here or something,” Tom explained.

“You’d better ring for... well, an ambulance, I guess. And the police.”

Tom didn’t move. Face twisting, he muttered, “Uncle, Uncle, what did you think you were doing?” Gently I drew him away. In the end I had to make the calls. Doglike, Tom simply refused to leave the body.

I sat on the doorstep, wishing I hadn’t given up smoking. The next twenty minutes were interminable. After ten of them, I badgered him into going indoors and making us a cup of tea. He needed distraction.

Swept off his head by a flying branch, Ben’s baseball cap caught my eye. Automatically I picked it up and set the thing on a window ledge, wiping my fingers afterwards. Dismiss it as squeamishness, but while I can handle blood, literally or metaphorically, there was something uncommonly disturbing about the momentary touch of a dead man’s sweat...

Stan Ethrington beat the ambulance to the scene. We don’t have a village bobby anymore, but PC Ethrington lives in the area, so we see more of him than his colleagues. He was in gardening togs, grass-stained flannels and green rubber boots. “The coroner’s office will be along soon, but County HQ gave me a bell, seeing as I’m nearest.”

Then Stan, repeating Tom Oates, asked, “What’re you doing here, Billy?”

“I saw it happen. Sort of. Heard him chopping away at that damned tree, you know how sound carries on a day like this. Heard it come down. Dashed over to act as umpire in case Pete Stuckey and his she-devil were giving Ben a hard time. And I found... this. Him.”

“Ah. Then you had better wait for PC Dennis, he’s the coroner’s officer.” Stan Ethrington gave the monkey puzzle and its victim a cursory examination. He sighed and shook his head. “Typical, eh? Mr. Basgate was a bit childish, for all his smart business ways. See-and-must-have kind of style, no foresight. Did you think he meant it about doing away with the old monkey puzzler? ’Course not. But the fancy took him, and that was it... My kids are just the same, but the oldest is six, so there’s some excuse.”

He wasn’t being snide, just expressing oblique regret for Ben. “Wouldn’t care to fell anything that was taller than me,” he continued. “Seems simple, but there’s more to it than you’d bargain for. Downright dangerous — shame he wasn’t much for stopping and thinking.”

“The trunk looks quite slim,” I agreed, “it must have seemed easy to deal with.” And then everybody arrived at once: the ambulance, the police surgeon in tennis whites and a brand-new Volvo, and the coroner’s officer, a kid looking hardly old enough to shave, aboard a motorbike.

The ambulance men could do nothing for Ben Basgate, but Tom Oates was in a pitiable state, shaking uncontrollably, so they bore him away to Barford General “just to be on the safe side.”

Cherubic PC Dennis took my statement, and he and Stan measured the tree and charted its position in relation to the body and the front of the house, with Dennis photographing everything for good measure.

Once I told them what little I could, there was — for me, at least — an awkward pause. PC Dennis and Stan Ethrington had to wait for County HQ to send a mobile crane, unlikely to appear swiftly on a Sunday. “If I don’t get some sleep soon,” I yawned, “I shall fall over. If you don’t need me any more...”

“Off you go, sir,” said PC Dennis. But I didn’t, for a minute. Illogically, it seemed wrong to slope off and leave Ben Basgate, tragic Mr. Toad, pinned there waiting to be tidied away. “That’s his cap, it’s how I spotted him,” I said. “I’m afraid I moved it, picked it up, don’t know why.”

“Not to worry,” said Stan. “Get home, Billy, you’ve done all you can.”

And so I had. Though not the way that either of us meant, let alone understood.

The inquest did not last long. Tom Oates, stilted and uneasy in his Sunday-best suit, gave evidence of identity, a pathologist stated that Benjamin Harold Basgate, a fifty-eight-year-old male, had died of multiple injuries. I gave my two-pennyworth about hearing the chopping noises and becoming aware of what Ben was doing.

PC Dennis was surprisingly authoritative, though even younger-looking in the courtroom. He produced photographs of the monkey puzzle’s severed trunk, and a chart showing the tree upright, with a large V-shaped notch a couple of feet from the ground and another smaller one on the opposite side. “Deceased obviously intended to throw the tree, make it fall, that is, away from the house. Apparently he misjudged the amount of wood to leave in place, stepped back to judge the direction the tree would topple, and was crushed when it fell the wrong way.”

Verdict: misadventure. Mr. Foster, the coroner, added a warning, “which I hope the press will promulgate” about the danger illustrated by the accident. It was a tragic reminder that tree felling was a task for professionals. The press, a girl trainee from the Drawbel Weekly News, blushed and nodded and scribbled away; some of us exchanged wry smiles. Charlie Foster’s son-in-law happens to run a landscape gardening business, timber felling a speciality. Still, the coroner’s point was valid...

The funeral at St. Mary’s was better attended than I expected, a cynical view being that certain Drawbel citizens were pleased to see the back of Ben. Talking of which, Peter Stuckey was there with Iris — nothing like a service for the dead to bring British hypocrisy to life. Waiting to enter, I fell into conversation with Stuckey, a big, grizzled fellow with a face like a turnip lantern.

Probably he guessed my thoughts about humbug, for he began defensively, “Never liked the chap, but nobody would have wished that on him. Bloody fool.” As with Stan Ethrington’s similar remark, Stuckey’s voice held more compassion than contempt.

“Ben would be alive today if me and the missus had been home,” he asserted. “Blimey, if you could hear him all the way over to Petticoat Wood, we wouldn’t have missed it. I’d have been round in two shakes to stop him. He was breaking the law, right? But our Jenny’s just had her baby, the missus was on fire to see the first grandson. We set off before it was light, to get back in time for evening milking.”

He’d solved a minor puzzle: why the busybody Stuckeys hadn’t intervened that morning. Then the roof of the hearse came into sight over the churchyard hedge, and we all trooped in.

My attention wandered during the service. I spent much of it admiring Selina Grace. Her designer suit might be a little too much for a country funeral, but then Selina ran a boutique in Bristol and always dressed to the nines.

The coffin stayed on trestles in the chancel when the service ended. Ben was to be cremated. Tom Oates and a trio of elderly strangers whom I took to be distant relatives left together. I fell into step beside Selina.

“Poor Tom,” she murmured, “he looks dreadful.”

“He’ll get over it.” He looked a damned sight better than he had last Sunday. But then so did I, no doubt.

“That’s you all over, offhand, shrugging everything off. Tom loved that man. It’s hard to think of Ben as fatherly, more of a big kid himself, but he was Tom’s uncle — and Tom lost his own parents when he was young.”

“True,” I agreed soothingly. And more quietly, “I must be responsible for every second message on your answering machine. We’ve got to talk.”

Frowning, Selina whispered, “You do pick your moments. I’ll phone when I’m ready. Not today, I’ve got to help Tom, those doddery third cousins or whatever expect a funeral tea.” She hurried after them, disclosing rather a lot of elegant thigh while getting into the funeral director’s boxy limo.

Trudging up the zigzag path through the trees, I loosened my black tie and undid the shirt collar. Tom Oates had invited me back to Monks Farm, too, but I’d lied about having to take a timed call from overseas. Funerals are bad enough, let alone the old-fashioned aftermath of tea and sandwiches and guarded jubilation over the mourners’ survival.

Selfishly, I consigned Mr. Toad to the past, concentrating on Selina Grace and the fact that despite appearances, we were more than casual friends. Was it a simple reflex — until recently I had been celibate for a long while — or something deeper? And what did she want or expect or dread from me?

Not for the first time, I decided that platonic relationships had a lot going for them. The drawback being that they are less fun... Half the trouble was that knowing myself best, I was deeply suspicious of my motives.

Selina was gorgeous, and “spoken for,” as this part of the world says when a couple aren’t officially engaged yet might marry some day. That made her doubly interesting, God forgive me. I can resist anything save temptation, and the lure of the forbidden runs it a close second. I liked her a lot, it could be love, but initially at least, Selina had represented a challenge.

I hadn’t chased her. We knew each other, that was all — for a time. Then the Arts Council sponsored a Year of Wessex Culture or some such nonsense. Selina and I found ourselves on a dim subcommittee charged with choosing a logo. I was Mr. Local Literature and she Ms. Fashion and Design. There’s nothing like shared dislike to foster intimacy, and the committee chairman was a pain’s pain. We got into the habit of adjourning to an Italian restaurant after suffering him, to slander the old fool.

Committee meetings were held in Bristol. One evening I forgot about having to drive home and drank too much. Selina whisked me to her boutique in Park Street to sober me up with black coffee. The upshot being that neither of us got back to Drawbel that night.

Since then there had been four or five discreet meetings at a motel on the far side of Bristol. We’d have a hell of a good time, then ruefully agree it was silly and pointless, and from Selina’s standpoint, a menace to her stable future. All very immature for thirty-mumble year olds. On the other hand, there was the chemistry... Both of us kept saying it couldn’t go on like this; but it and we did.

The most frustrating feeling in the world is to worry about something indefinable.

Days passed and Selina didn’t ring back. I fretted: an obvious diagnosis was bruised ego. However, I’ve lost count of attractive women who have tired of and dropped me; such treatment is not a male monopoly. So it wasn’t hurt feelings, sprained pride, or not only that. My malaise might have nothing to do with her.

Imagine trying to grasp soap when your hands are wet. I kept getting flashes of that horrible Sunday morning, a mad montage of images: Mr. Toad partially visible under the tree, Tom Oates’s damaged hands after he strove to shift several times his own weight, and Ben’s pathetic cap resting on the windowsill. Somewhere in there was a message I could not get straight.

The tragedy had got to me. Belatedly it registered that if I had been one of Mr. Toad’s few friends, the reverse was true. Acquaintances far outnumber my friends, and none of them spends much time around Drawbel.

Clearly what I needed was a holiday. My agent pestered me to go sailing in the Grenadines, a berth was going begging on the schooner he’d chartered, all it would cost was the fare to Barbados and a few pounds a day towards food and drink... I was all set until a producer friend offered an obscene amount of money to script-doctor a pilot show, so the vacation fell through. I’m still unsure whether I am glad or sorry about that. Because if the trip had been made, then Solly might never have confided in me...

Three weeks after Ben Basgate’s funeral, I was still up there on my hillside, and the camping-gas ran out. The cottage has mains water and drainage but wood fires provide the heating and my cooking stove runs on butane gas.

I keep running out because — this makes weird sense, if only to me — Solly Purchis keeps nagging me about always running out. He has a vulturine air, most appropriately. Solly urged me to keep a reserve cylinder, a spare. When the stove’s flame dwindled, I could hook up the reserve and get the empty one refilled.

However, that involved buying a second cylinder. From Solly. He loves money so much that malicious pleasure is gained from refusing to listen to him. Local lore proclaims that he ran one and a half miles after a tourist in a sports car, having given him one penny too much in change for a road map. Solly sputters, “People round here will say anything — that feller went off with ten pence of mine.” (In Britain a ten-penny coin will not buy the cheapest postage stamp.) “And I only went to the crossroads, never no one and a half miles.”

That afternoon I hefted the empty gas cylinder and pushed through the door of the lean-to beside the filling station, gritting my teeth at the prospect of Solly’s invariable sermon. He wrong-footed me by accepting the cylinder in silence, before rolling a fresh one out from behind the counter. It’s not a store, or doesn’t look it, that lean-to. More of a barn and workshop where he repairs garden tools and sharpens mowers.

I was thankful for the truce. Solly Purchis broke it by grumbling, “I suppose you’re another as doesn’t want a chain saw.” He sounded bitterly resigned. One had to smile: such a novel pitch that I filed it away for a possible sketch about an anti-salesman desperate to be turned down.

“That’s right,” I agreed, poker-faced. “Top marks, Solly.”

“Daft, living in a wood and buying logs by the half-ton.” His voice trailed away. My logs are bought from Solly Purchis. He decided to plunge for a profit in the hand rather than several, come winter. “Top-of-the-line saw, Japanese, can’t say fairer nor that. Cut your own logs, eh? Let you have it at discount, fi — um, two and a half percent off.”

For obvious reasons, not many customers chat to Solly. They get out in a hurry while their wallets are still in one piece. But I find him good value... “Not like you, keeping inventory on spec,” I teased. He is notorious for selling from catalogs before ordering the goods, sooner than have costly merchandise on his shelves.

“Customer let me down. Speak no ill of the dead, but Mr. Basgate let me down good and proper. Ordered that saw, he did. My own fault, showing a bit of initiative, see. When there was all that fuss about his ruddy tree, him wanting it down, ol’ Pete Stuckey swearing he’d take him to court if he touched it... I sort of mentioned a chain saw was what he needed.

“Should have kept my trap shut. He wasted hours of my good time, fiddle-faddling over which one to get. Wanted it light. Great paunch on him and arms like wet string, ’course it had to be light. Had to be powerful, though, to get the job done quick. I never asked for a deposit, more fool me. Trusting, I am. Never again.”

“You should have been quicker off the mark. In fact, you probably got the poor devil killed,” I accused, half seriously. “He got sick of waiting and took an axe to the thing. Might be alive today if you hadn’t kept him waiting.”

Solly’s face darkened. “There wasn’t no wait! Chap who delivers my paraffin, his brother works at a wholesale place down Yeovil, he could get me what Basgate wanted. I give him the cash the same day Mr. Basgate made his mind up. My driver brought it two days later. I phoned right away, that was the Saturday. ‘I’m busy now,’ he says, ‘and you don’t open Sundays. Tell you what, I shall be in first thing Monday.’ Fat chance, with what happened! Now I’m stuck with the ruddy thing.”

Follow the impulse to tell Solly Purchis he was the most selfish, quietly despicable character to be found in a long day’s march, and he would be indignant. So I confirmed that I could get by without a chain saw and went home.

You will think me remarkably dense, but hours passed before I asked myself why Ben Basgate had gone to all the trouble of chopping down the hated monkey puzzle when by waiting a day he could have let a machine do the work for him. A machine, moreover, that he had ordered for that purpose.

All right, he was Mr. Toad, impatient, volatile, capricious. Yet as Solly Purchis had pointed out, he wasn’t a strong man. It had taken time to hack those notches into the trunk, and knowing Ben, his enthusiasm would have wilted after a few strokes and vanished once he began sweating.

I had a drink, and another. Between one sip and the next, all those flashbacks assumed significance as never before.

It was like staring at an overtly senseless pattern, nagged by a hunch that it is nothing of the kind — and then somebody turns the sheet of paper forty-five degrees and you marvel at not having recognised the picture of a faucet or a sleeping cat.

The chat with Solly did that for me.

Doubt over Ben wanting or even needing to take an axe to the monkey puzzle brought a replay of what I had seen. Okay, memory is treacherous, and I tend to embroider and adjust as time passes. It’s part of being a writer. But those pictures were branded into my mind by mental and emotional trauma.

Start with Ben’s baseball cap, Mr. Toad’s headgear. Something made me grimace and wipe my fingers after picking it up off the ground. Now I fancied that I could feel the texture on my skin again: the strip of fabric inside the cap, where the brim met the rest of it, had been faintly greasy. Not sweat, since it wasn’t damp, exactly. I had touched hair oil.

Ben was totally bald, so he didn’t use anything of that kind. Tom Oates, by contrast, soaked his hair in the stuff.

Another snapshot from that Sunday morning: Tom’s hands after he had struggled with the tree and I dragged him away. They were scratched, bleeding, one knuckle raw. Unwarranted damage, I realised, for a few seconds’ exposure to abrasive bark and leaves.

Hands... I tried to remember what Ben’s right hand looked like when I had made that futile check for a pulse. But I was looking away, eyes shut while my fingers rested on his wrist. Ben had been cremated, so there was no way of proving my new certainty that his palm would have been soft, unmarked, free of dirt or blisters.

It was such a weird feeling to see Tom as a killer. As if he had suddenly sprouted an extra head while we played darts at the Huntsman. I knew he had killed Ben Basgate and yet part of me couldn’t believe that.

He had, though.

He’d killed his uncle and seen the trouble he was in and thought fast, improvised feverishly. Ben’s bluster about felling that tree had provided Tom with the seed of his plan.

Just as I and every other local was aware, he knew that in the country, somebody is always watching. Only in cities can you count on being unseen. He had to work outdoors, and though Monks Farm is remote and secluded, there was always the chance of an early-morning poacher or hiker, a sharp-eyed shepherd or wandering child witnessing what he was up to. At the time they might think nothing of it, but once news of the “accident” got out, they would remember...

So he’d jammed the trademark red baseball cap on his head. Anyone sighting him from a distance would assume they were watching the master of the house. If they came right up to the house while he toiled to stage the accident, then he was finished anyway, so a perfunctory disguise had been sufficient...

Tom had felled the tree on top of a newly dead man, tossing the axe in beside him at the last moment. Then he’d thrown Ben’s cap down and slipped back to his bungalow. It need not have taken more than a quarter of an hour, start to finish — Tom Oates was strong and adept, unlike poor Mr. Toad.

And he’d had an unwitting accomplice in me.

That was not the nastiest insight while I swirled scotch in the glass, unable to drink because I felt so sick. The worst part was that I couldn’t prove a thing.

Toward dawn the following day, sleep out of the question, I crammed a few things into an overnight bag and fled to London.

I must have been operating on automatic pilot along the M4 motorway, since I rolled past Hyde Park some hours later with no recollection of events since bumping down the track into Drawbel Valley.

Tom? Tom Oates? He couldn’t have. But he did, and you know it. Round and round went the arguments.

Tom had been distraught, that wasn’t acting. Or not wholly. And ever since, he had behaved like a man in shell shock. Selina Grace had been right, at the funeral, saying that he loved Ben Basgate. Old farmer Basgate, Ben’s dad, had taken orphan Tom in, but Ben was older brother and father figure rolled into one.

The killer had lied and deceived, yet his grief was sincere: because he hadn’t planned to do away with Ben and had not wanted to. Somewhere on the Avon-Wiltshire border, zombie-driving over those undulating, ocean-roller hills, it came to me that not being able to make a case against Tom might be a good thing.

Instinct told me that he was a killer but not a murderer. He did not belong in jail and he would punish himself harder than any court could decree.

The only sane explanation was that for some reason he had snapped, lashing out at Ben — hence the skinned knuckle. Lost his temper in a flash (now I retrieved hazy memories of Tom having a hell of a temper as a kid) and been aghast at the result. They’d been out in the garden, Ben had been more than usually exasperating...

I could even divine why Tom had covered up for himself. It wasn’t fear of prison, but a killer cannot benefit by his crime, and Tom Oates could not bear the prospect of Monks Farm being sold to strangers and barred to him forever.

Ironically, he had not killed for gain — it wasn’t in him — but that was the outcome.

In London I crashed with friends and must have proved poor company, constantly preoccupied. Still half incredulous over my conclusions, wanting them to be wrong. I even played devil’s advocate, seeking to disprove what I’d worked out.

Was I mistaken about the grease inside Ben’s cap? No, the slippery touch on my fingers had revolted me, making me wipe them on my trousers, though I was too shaken at the time to identify what upset me. Not perspiration, but oil or hair cream.

There had been an autopsy on Ben Basgate. Surely the pathologist must have discovered that Ben’s death occurred before massive injuries were inflicted, if only by a few minutes? Had he checked Ben’s hands for confirmation that a sedentary man had been swinging an axe for a long while? Obviously not. There was no suggestion of foul play — partly due to my input. The pathologist was presented with the victim of a typical country accident, and he had accepted that version.

Very well, what about Solly Purchis? Could I be the only villager told about Ben’s purchase of the chain saw? Others might have added two and two, shared doubts with the police, and had them dispelled. A hopeful line — I so wanted to be wrong — but it did not last. I may not have friends in Drawbel (Selina didn’t count, she was more than that, and a secret besides), but people do tend to confide in me. It was likely that Solly had tried to get rid of the saw without going into details; probable, indeed, since admitting that he was stuck with the item rather than just having it in stock would invite them to haggle...

Turn and twist as I might, it all came back to a certainty impossible to prove.

One... accepts things. Ridiculous to exile myself on the strength of intuition and clues perceptible only to me — the material ones no longer available. To my hosts’ barely disguised jubilation, I went home to Drawbel.

Naturally the great bugbear was encountering Tom Oates. Naturally he was just about the first man I met; he came into the post office shop for cigarettes while I was stocking up on groceries. I looked away, mumbling for him to go ahead, I had a stack of stuff to pay for. Tom grunted thanks and was on his way again within a minute.

“Poor chap,” sighed Betty Higgs, misunderstanding my flinching from him. “Ghost of hisself, these days. Those shadows round his eyes... Gives my hubby the creeps, puts him in mind of them Nazi prison camps, he says.”

I couldn’t follow that. Betty said, “Well, the weight Tom’s lost, clothes hanging off him like a starving man. Never known a fellow grieve so. Tisn’t as if his precious uncle did him many favours, but he thought the world of him. What Tom needs is to get married.” She regards matrimony as Jewish mothers regard chicken soup.

Gradually I eased back into the village rut. Staying out of Tom’s way was easy enough, neither of us being overly gregarious. After a month or so I was having supper in the Huntsman when he appeared. We nodded to each other. I shut my brain down and still contrived to talk soccer to Albert behind the bar.

Studying his reflection in a copper warming pan on the wall, I saw that Mrs. Higgs and her hubby had been exaggerating, but not much. Tom was less trim than stringy, gaunt, and that oily black hair was frosted with grey. When he spoke to me, some casual remark, I answered quite naturally.

There, that wasn’t so bad, I thought, walking up to the cottage through twilight trees. Crazily, I felt... not obligation or guilt, though there were cobweb-fine tendrils similar to them, but an ambivalent sense of reluctance to let Tom Oates know that I knew. Extraordinarily, embarrassment and self-consciousness outweighed human aversion to a taker of life.

Later that night I heard a car labour up the track, headlights swept across my sitting-room window, and for no good reason, I expected the caller to be Tom.

It was Selina. “I won’t come in,” she called when I opened the front door. She leaned out of the car window. “What happened to you? I rang here for weeks, then gave up on you.”

“Must be your turn, now you know how it feels.”

“Touché.” She hesitated, then blurted, “I’m getting married.”

“Nothing more to be said, then,” I replied woodenly.

“You don’t seem broken up.”

“Do you want me to be?”

“I think I do, isn’t that awful.” She smiled sheepishly. “You might at least look shattered.”

I reached in and touched her hand. “I’m not making much sense to myself these days, not tracking properly. We had lovely times, Sel’, and I’ll never forget them. Best wishes, goes without saying.”

“Thanks. Come to the wedding, promise.” The sheepish look returned. She didn’t want to add that having known the bridegroom since he was in short pants, and being a casual friend of hers, I would start tongues wagging if I stayed away.

“If I’m in-country, I’ll throw rice and toast the pair of you,” I replied, thankful for darkness to blur a smile produced by willpower.

That ought to have been the end of it, but these things never end.

When Selina walked up the aisle of St. Mary’s, I was better than four thousand miles away, appearing on a TV chat show in New York. The host got my name nearly right and mentioned the latest book twice. In Chicago the name came out right during radio interviews, but one muttonhead forgot to ask about the book and another left listeners with the firm impression that I was peddling a whodunit while I was hyping a historical novel. In New Orleans, final stop, a charming guy got all the facts straight, allowing me to quit while ahead.

Tom Oates has gone fully grey now, his face drawn and furrowed, but the weight is back on and he’s a healthier colour. Predictably, Ben left Monks Farm to him. Tom has gone in for organic farming. There’s a good market for naturally grown vegetables and Ben’s neglect left the fields fallow long enough for chemical fertilizers to leech out. Tom breaks even, which is all he need do, thanks to money inherited along with the estate.

Not long ago I stumbled on the last pointer to his guilt: the motive. I was lecturing at a weekend creative writing school — love hearing myself talk, even without a fee. Over dinner, one student explained that he ran a property development company (“You’ve heard of Sunday painters, I’m a Sunday scribbler, ha-ha-ha”). Oddly enough, his work, right down to its dense thickets of syntax, read eerily like a less genteel Henry James who knew far too much about bribery over zoning matters.

When I mentioned living at Drawbel, Don Maxwell went into a boisterous pantomime, holding his index fingers towards me in a cross, vampire-defying fashion. Steadying our bottle of excellent wine, I said mildly, “It’s a nice part of the world and they gave up burning witches and eating babies... oh, ages ago, hasn’t happened since nineteen fifty-five.”

Maxwell chuckled inordinately, he was pretty high by then. “Drawbel Valley is written on my heart like Calais on Queen Mary’s. Lost a fortune there. Could have made one, leastways, and didn’t. Pal o’ mine retired there, asked me down. You know how it is, ‘If you’re ever in the area,’ and I stuck his address in the Filofax. Lo and behold, not a month later I went to an auction in Bath; Ben’s place was an hour down the road by Jag’, so I took him up on the invite.

“Well, he had this farm he didn’t know what to do with and the minute I set eyes on it — golf course, I go. Golf course. Knock the house down or extend it, whichever keeps the planners happy, and there you are, clubhouse and pro shop. We shook hands on the deal, and no sooner have I set up legal meetings than the silly beggar snuffs it. Left the place to a man who carried on alarming when I said the king was dead, long live the king, let’s make a cartload of money. No sale, no dice, no golf course and trimmings.”

So that was the long-ago trigger. Ben had broken the news to Tom one fine Sunday morning, and died in the subsequent explosion.

Maxwell frowned concernedly. “You all right, mate? Look like you had a bad oyster.”

But even that, more’s the pity, was not the finish.

Not long after dinner with my rich friend I was strolling up Park Street towards Bristol University to collect some research material. And I started assessing, in a chauvinist pig’s window-shopping manner, a very short skirt and long legs.

Then she glanced back and it was Selina. Fortunately my face is naturally impassive. I hadn’t seen her close-to in several years. It was not that she had aged, but there were elements of hardness and dryness, an aura as much as a look. Makeup more emphatic than before, a discontented pucker to her mouth. “Billy! Are you following me?” Big smile, wet kiss.

Like a fool, effusive through guilt at being disappointed in her, I asked Selina to lunch. “Lovely! I’ll just tell my manageress...” Truly, it had slipped my mind that her boutique was in Park Street.

Once we had ordered, Selina burbled that she only looked in at the shop twice a week now and as for me, I was a recluse, what were the odds against the two of us, etcetera and so forth. Pleased to a borderline nerve-wracking extent.

I don’t like the sound of this, whined the base, self-serving swine at the back of my mind. Married women have always been off-limits to me, less from concern over adultery than simple prudence. Affairs of that brand generally end in tears before bedtime; afterwards, actually, and because of.

Cue for tepid, neutral small talk, how was the boutique faring, what were her holiday plans... er, this Turner exhibition due to open at Bristol art gallery next month, wouldn’t that be a treat.

The smoked salmon couldn’t be ignored any longer. As soon as I paused for the first mouthful, Selina jumped in with, “I made a terrible mistake, you know.” And it all poured out: husband a morose workaholic, jealous, possessive, yet unwilling to spend much time with her. “Any attention he spares is the wrong kind, checking on me. I have to keep an eye on the business, but every time I come here, there’s a scene. He’s probably ringing the shop right now; I told Mandy to say I’m out looking at fabrics.”

“No need for that,” I said firmly. “We’re just having lunch, probably won’t happen again for years.”

“You’ve always been a friend,” said Selina, deaf to that warning shot. “Let’s not lose touch again, Billy.” Which was rich, considering she had kept me uncertain and distanced in the past, dates refused, calls unanswered as often as returned, and our liaison ended without discussion.

The pattern was depressingly familiar: damned if I did, damned if I didn’t, a rat either way. I could snub Selina right now, reminding her that then was then, and she was married now. Or I could stand by her, leading to meetings on the sly. I’d make a pass, it’s the way I am, and the overwhelming probability was that Selina would respond, that being the way she was.

Tucking my feet under the chair to avoid knee contact, unplanned or otherwise, I thought about a friend of mine in the Metropolitan Police, a murder investigator.

He says there are two tribes of killers, and there is no point in punishing one sort, because having taken a life, they would kill themselves sooner than do it again. The downside, according to this expert, is that for some of the other tribe, murder gets easier with practice.

“I’m not talking serial killers,” he explains, “just your outwardly normal citizen, driven to violence. A few degenerate into being capable of knifing the bloke who beats ’em to a parking space or compliments their girlfriend on her hairdo.”

Tom Oates belonged to the never-again tribe. Ben Basgate told him that the place to which Tom had devoted all his adult life was doomed to become a golf course, and — detonation. A freak event, an unrepeatable anomaly. I was utterly sure of that... but not utterly enough to bet my life.

And Selina, as you will have guessed by now, wasn’t just any old wife. She was Mrs. Tom Oates.

Even if I didn’t make a pass (Tom represented an inhibiting factor powerful enough to discourage that), the danger was that sooner or later I would be tempted to tell Selina why her husband was morose. Then... who knows? The best possible prediction was one hell of a mess.

Say I kept my mouth shut and my hands to myself. Selina wanted a male admirer to share her woes and provide implicit assurance that her company was valued. Jealous husbands resent such males. Somebody was bound to see us together, or merely intercept and interpret a look between us, generating gossip until...

Until, for the sake of argument, I had an accident.

So — I reflected as duckling in orange sauce was served and she said what a pretty restaurant this was, I’d always known places she would like — the only solution was polite but firm rejection.

“Selina,” I began, and she asked, “Yes?” on a rising note. The light was flattering in there, but I noticed the lipstick on her wineglass and the way her hands looked older than the rest of her. And, heart twisting, I chickened out.

“Just Selina,” I lied. “Good to see you again.”

From the way she tucked in, the cuisine was good. I couldn’t taste the food.

Before the year was out my phone would ring and a familiar voice would ask if I was alone in the cottage because she needed a friendly ear. Or she’d be walking her dog — well after dark, of course — and just happen to drop in. For the first time in my fairly disgraceful life, the prospect was deeply repugnant.

Again I opened my mouth. Again I could not bring myself to tell Selina to grow up and get lost, in whichever order she preferred.

Painted into a comer, I did what any upright country gentleman would have done.

Two or three times a year I go to London for a council of war with my agent, Hal Maitland. Needless get-togethers in this era of phone, fax, and computer, but we eat and drink tax-deductibly, spinning yarns about the good old days (good because they’re behind us) when he was a publisher’s PR man and I a persecuted hack on the Daily Excess. We invariably pronounce a solemn curse on that dreadful rag; and still read the thing every day.

Hal and I were in the Groucho Club a few days after that distressing reunion with Selina. He’d outlined sundry interesting possibilities, then guffawed. “Nearly forgot... There’s this idealist at a tiny little West Coast college who thinks you’re a loss to academe and wants to do something about it.”

“Whereabouts on the West Coast — Dorset, Devon, Cornwall?”

“California, you dolt. Head of English department at this place has gone overboard about Wails and Whispers. According to the professor, and she should know, it’s a—” Hal squinted in an effort of memory, and recited “ ‘an allegory of Britain’s vanishing class structure, at once elegiac and profoundly pessimistic.’ ”

We looked at each other. Wails began as an entry for a BBC-TV drama anthology of social comedy. The Beeb said they didn’t want vulgar farce, thanks all the same. Waste not, want not: I turned it into prose, cut the custard pies, added copious French quotations and Latin tags, and Hal found a publisher who believed what agents told him. It sold all of two hundred and fifty copies — fifty of those bought at special rates and entombed in a carton at the back of my garage.

When he’d wiped his eyes, not to mention evidence of Caesar salad off his tie, I asked Hal for more details.

He snorted dismissively. “Left the letter at the office, nearly put it in the round file, my wastebasket. One of those writer-in-residence deals. Nothing there for you, chum. They’ll spring for a round-trip air ticket and provide an apartment on campus, but the place is at the back end of nowhere and they wanted you there by the end of next week when whatsit, semester, starts. Far too short notice.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I’m on my way.”