The Mammoth Book of Best British Mysteries 6

ROSEHIP SUMMER by Roz Southey

It was thirty years and more ago. I remember it as the hottest of years. The valley was ripe with summer; rowan berries flamed in the hedges, heather set fire to the mountain-sides. In the overgrown hedges on either side of the lanes, rosehips flared, inviting the children to go picking. Six pence a pound you could earn from the firm that made rosehip syrup and there was eager competition to collect the most.

All the children picked rosehips except me. I stayed in, because mam told me it would do me good to get out, and because Janey was so good at picking. From my room upstairs, illicitly using our dead father’s binoculars, I could watch her striding across the fields, milk cans swinging; in front of her rabbits stiffened, then went bounding away.

Janey and me competed for who could annoy mam the most. We infuriated her by thwarting her prejudices; girls should look good, boys should be stoical. Janey hunted out odd socks and holed cardigans; I moaned and said the sun made me ill, or that my tummy felt queasy. Mam shouted, and the more she shouted, the more we taunted her. Janey was best and usually won, to my annoyance and her triumph. I felt she somehow had an unfair advantage, that she knew things I didn’t, and wasn’t letting on. I tried to get them out of her but couldn’t. Janey never told me anything she didn’t have to – we hated each other. But we hated mam more.

That was all right, because she hated us too. We reminded her too much of dad.

As Janey crossed the fields, she carried a huge walking stick. Fred Hudson, who saw her pass, said later he’d had a laugh – she was so small that when she went behind the hedge, all he could see was the top of the walking stick, bobbing up and down. Only when she reached the gap in the hedge could he see her properly – a skinny child, over-burdened with the stick and with milk cans heavy with rosehips.

Annie Graham saw her maybe half an hour later; Janey was scrambling across a wall, sending a scatter of stones down to the ground. Annie came straight down to mam’s to complain. “Bloody kids, breaking down the wall like that. What if the sheep get out? No sense, kids these days.” Mam set her lips hard and waited till Annie was gone before screaming at me and sending me to my room. I went, both exultant and angry. Exultant because we’d infuriated mam again, annoyed because it was Janey who’d done it not me.

Halfway through the afternoon, the vicar spotted Janey crossing the field at the foot of the long fell. He was using his binoculars because he thought he’d spotted a hawk and when he swung the glasses round, he caught Janey jumping from tuft to tuft over the boggy ground.

“Aye,” mam said. “And we all know what he was looking at, don’t we?”

I was only hazily aware of what was so important about Janey’s brown legs and the rucking up of her old skirt, but I knew mam was sneering at the vicar and I didn’t like that. He was a nice man, full of sweets and titbits of information. And I never believed anything mam said about people anyway, not after the fibs she’d told about dad. And when he wasn’t there to answer back too.

After the vicar saw Janey, she must have walked along the edge of the fell, working her way up the line of hedges near the old ruined farmhouse. Joe Edwards spotted her as he brought his sheep down from the fell; she was waiting to cross the track he was using. Both cans were full of rosehips by then; they looked heavy to Joe. “Need a cart to carry that lot,” he joked. Janey stared at him blankly, he said afterwards.

At teatime, mam looked out of the back door of the farmhouse, saw no sign of Janey, and swore. She slammed the teapot down on the table and starting buttering her bread with one of the ivory-handled knife-set that had been a wedding present. The two of us sat silently over bread and jam. I’d been asking the vicar about dad’s accident, but he wouldn’t say anything except it was “very sad”. Funny how everyone thinks that if they say nothing, children’ll think there’s nothing to say. I looked at mam, as her jaw worked over the bread. In a way I didn’t want to know what had happened to dad; imagining was better. And imagining how to get back at mam for the accident was even better.

Alice Robinson, driving carefully around the lanes on her way home, saw Janey just after teatime. Janey was hesitating by a milk stand, staring at the solitary battered milk churn on it. Alice stopped to have a word. “Been lucky, have you?” she asked, nodding at the two heavy cans Janey had set by the roadside while she rested. Janey nodded indifferently.

“Bring you in a tidy sum of pocket money,” Alice said.

Another nod. Alice waited a moment, could think of nothing more to say except to be careful Janey didn’t get run over, and drove on home.

I saw Alice ten minutes later as she drove into her garage; she called out to say how well Janey was doing. I went down to the milk churn and peered into it. The cans were sitting inside, brim-full of rosehips; Janey must have left them there for safe keeping so no other kid could pinch them. I wanted to tip out all the hips onto the ground and trample on them, because otherwise Janey would get loads of money for them, and I’d have none. But then she was going to really annoy mam if she didn’t come home before dark, so it was only fair she got some reward. Anyway I couldn’t reach far enough inside the churn to get the cans.

Janey didn’t come home. I kept making dark hints, like -she’d fallen down a rabbit hole, or twisted an ankle, or run away. All the worst things I knew how to imagine at the time. At midnight, Mam sent me to bed and called the police.

They found the rosehips in the milk churn – Alice told them about those – and pieced together Janey’s trip from the witnesses, then they sent out the dogs. The farmers turned out and stomped the fields in stolid silence, and police cars were parked at every farm-track. I stayed at home and asked innocent questions. Did they think Janey was hurt? Did they think she had run away because of that argument with mam? The policemen exchanged glances, took me into the kitchen and offered me chocolate cake to tell them all about it. I told them every story I could think of, all the times mam had slapped Janey or me, or shouted at us. All true, all innocuous – and all capable of misinterpretation.

They found nothing. The dogs were called off and the police moved away to talk to people at railway stations and motorway cafes. I waited until they were all gone then, on the fourth day after Janey disappeared, I took an old milk can from the pantry, broke a stick off a tree and went out.

I’d heard enough of the talking to be able to reconstruct Janey’s route and I walked it, throwing scarlet rosehips into my can as an excuse and looking for her body. I knew she must be dead. Janey would never have run away – not when she could spite mam more by staying at home. But I wanted to see her body, to be certain. After all, if Janey was dead, baiting mam was all up to me, wasn’t it?

I found the body after a few hours. She’d gone into a wood, probably to get at a particularly heavily-laden rosebush; she must have tried to snag it with the hook of her stick then overbalanced. What she didn’t know was that the bush overhung an old quarry, used hundreds of years ago to build that ruined farmhouse. I spotted a broken branch, or thought I did, and parted the foliage to see the crumpled body below. God knows why the police dogs hadn’t found her.

I looked long and hard so I’d not forget any detail of it, then I went home.

The police came back, to question mam again, and I told them she’d been so annoyed by their last visit she’d hit me and knocked me over. I had a scrape on my knee to prove it. I don’t know whether they believed me, but they kept coming back.

They never found Janey, and after a while the whole thing was dropped. Except for the neighbours. Neighbours don’t allow anything to drop. They kept nipping in to “make sure I was all right”; they’d murmur careless questions about Janey and mam, and I’d tell innocent stories which made them look significantly at each other. Mam got madder and madder, and I made her worse by musing aloud on what had happened to Janey. I’ve often wondered why she didn’t hit me, but I suppose she didn’t dare – the neighbours would have called the police at the first sign of bruises. Then she said she couldn’t stand it any more so we went off to a town half a country away, where I got laughed at in school for my accent and added that to the list of things I hated mam for. That, and the day I came home and found she’d skipped out.

I had to go and live with a friend, which was all right, but I made sure they all knew how mam hated me. I said I looked just like my dad and hinted that there was something odd about his accident which there was. If only the vicar had told me, if only I’d had real evidence.

I hunted her down and bombarded her with pitiful letters pleading for her to come home. She kept moving. I kept finding her.

Then someone called to say that she was in hospital with cancer. I went to see her and found her surrounded by businesslike nurses. I let drop the fact that my dad had been killed in a freak accident when I was two years old and told them that Janey had disappeared under mysterious circumstances, that she and mam had “never got on”. On her last day, Mam tried to win the day by confiding her fear that one of the knives had gone missing the day Janey had disappeared. The nurse soothed her and murmured the word “delirious” but I was left with an odd sense of anti-climax. She even contrived to die when I was out of the room.

I’ve never really recovered from that feeling of dissatisfaction. Now mam’s dead, I can’t quite get interested in anything any more. I feel aimless. I wanted another glimpse of the old excitement Janey and I felt when we taunted mam. So I came back, thirty years to the day Janey died. I climbed the fell again, on a chill day that seemed to mock that long hot summer and found the wood, though the quarry was harder to discover. The trees had spread and covered the ruined farmhouse, clawing at its walls with thick roots; branches trailed across old paths. In the end, I stumbled into the quarry from below and crashed through shrubs and bushes to where I thought Janey must have fallen. A tangle of wild roses, just going over, marked the place; they must have sprung from the hips in her can when she fell.

The first thing I found was the can, crushed and half-buried in humus. Then a hint of bone – I drew my fingers through the soil and found the long outline of it. Then-

My fingers brushed something metal.

I dug into the chill soil, heart beating faster, wondering suddenly what I’d missed, all those years ago. Having a premonition of what it must be, knowing that I ought to have come down here to Janey’s body, thirty years ago. I would have seen it then, sticking from her back, maybe.

A knife. An old, ivory-handled knife.

I remembered tea that day. Mam spreading blackcurrant jam on white bread with one of a set of knives. Wedding presents cast haphazardly into a drawer in a whole range of different sizes and shapes. One would not have been missed.

Sitting back on my haunches, I tried to reconstruct that afternoon. I’d been in my room doing homework and stopped to watch Janey from my window with dad’s binoculars. I’d heard mam below in the kitchen. Hadn’t I?

If only I’d kept watching Janey, instead of going back to my homework. If I’d watched all the time I might have seen mam. I might have seen her kill Janey. All those years, I’d been satisfied with hints and innuendos. And she must have been laughing all the time, knowing I could have had evidence, but didn’t.

Crouching there, holding the dirt-encrusted knife in my hand, fuming at my impotence, I knew one thing.

Mam had won and there was nothing I could do about it.