The Price of Butcher's Meat

13

Sergeant Jug Whitby was not a revolutionary. No way was he going to break out the flag of freedom and lead a charge against the monstrous regiment of Andy Dalziel. By rank, by personality, by sheer bulk, the Fat Man held him in thrall.

And yet he was carved from the same hard stone as the superintendent, he belonged in the same long tradition of independent bloody-mindedness, he looked at the world through the same dark-shaded spectacles. In short, he too was a Yorkshireman. Come to think of it, as a Whitby, he was probably a truer bluer Yorkshireman than the fat old sod. What sort of name was Dalziel anyway? Touch of the tartan there, hint of the whacky macs from over the Border.

So though he was never going to face up to the Fat Man and say Bugger off! with every yard he put between himself and the actual terrifying presence, his sense of what was due to him as keeper of the law here in Sandytown and district these twenty-five years reasserted itself.

Yes, he’d carry out the order, pointless and stupid though he reckoned it were. But he’d do it in his own time, at his own speed. First he’d assert his statutory right to refreshment by heading home to the Sunday joint cold cut plus bubble and squeak his wife prepared for him every Monday, regardless of season or weather. Then he’d exercise his statutory right to rest by taking his usual thirty-minute nap in his favorite armchair, followed by his statutory right to recreation by watching his favorite American cop show on the box.

And only then, refreshed and restored, would he go and take a look at Millstone Farm to confirm what he was certain of, that it was unoccupied by anything but rodents, bats, and spiders.

“You’re nivver gan out now?” his wife demanded as he began to pull his boots on about nine thirty.

“I told you. Got to take a look out at Millstone.”

“It’ll be pitch black by the time you get out there. Not a spot I’d want to be in the pitch black,” she said. “Won’t it keep till morning?”

After the long and outwardly visible internal debate necessary before any self-respecting Yorkshireman accepted female advice, he nodded and said, “Happen tha’s right. But if the phone rings, you answer it, and if it’s yon fat bastard, tell him I’m out!”

Upright, in the light and warmth of his sitting room, this boldness felt good. Prone in the dark of his bedroom, it soon began to feel foolhardy, and every time he woke during a restless night, it felt foolhardier.

Not long after dawn he rose, resolved to get the useless task out of the way before he was required to explain his dilatoriness.

It occurred to him as he drove slowly up the long, deep-rutted, weed-overgrown lane to Millstone Farm that the last time he’d made this journey, he’d been bringing the sad news of Hog Hollis’s death.

Hen, sole occupant of the house since his brother’s success had taken him to Sandytown Hall and the Lordship of the Hundred, hadn’t invited him in, notwithstanding it was a bitter day and a gusting wind was shooting volleys of sharp sleet against his unprotected back. So he’d wasted no words as he broke the news on the doorstep.

“Hog’s dead.”

“Dead,” said Hen.

There was no question mark but Jug had treated it as a request for confirmation.

“Aye,” he said. “Stroke. Pigs had started on him when they found him.”

“Right then.”

And the door had closed.

Maybe Hen Hollis had retreated to his kitchen and sat there recalling younger, happier days with his brother. Maybe he had wept.

More likely, according to local speculation, he had wandered round the house thinking, It’s all mine now!

If so, there were bigger shocks than his brother’s death to come.

The revelation that everything had been left to Hog’s relict had devastated Hen, but the local speculators weren’t short of explanation.

“Hog reckoned nowt to most of his family. He used to say young Alan were the only one as he’d trust to boil water. He knew what he wanted, in business or bed, and he went straight for it, and the thing about Daph Brereton were that she was usually on her way to meet him! Wife like that were a godsend to Hog, and he always paid his debts.”

But family was family, for all that, and the locals agreed that justice had been done by the clause which gave the widow only a life’s interest in Millstone, with the house reverting to Hen if he survived her.

So all he had to do was bide his time, continue to live in the family home, and mutter the odd prayer that fate or a high fence would bring his sister-in-law low sooner rather than later.

But though he lacked his half brother’s business acumen, he shared his impatience with delay. He took Daphne on in the courts and he lost. Then he took her on out of the courts, laying accusations of murder against her with the constabulary, the press, and anyone else who would listen. And here he lost also.

Everything, including his job and his home.

He’d tried to claim he was a sitting tenant, but as he’d never paid a penny’s rent this got him nowhere. He tried to claim residence at Millstone was part of his contract of employment with Hollis’s Ham, but as he’d walked out of his job of his own accord, that didn’t wash either.

So he’d been evicted and the house had stood unoccupied these many years. Here in the countryside nature is always waiting to reclaim what man has taken from her. A human presence, with its need for warmth and shelter and some degree of cleanliness, can establish a long truce, but drop your guard, withdraw even for a few months, and nature starts to retake possession. Whether out of meanness or malice, Hog’s widow hadn’t undertaken even the minimum maintenance necessary to keep weather and wildlife at bay. Slates blew off, window frames rotted, glass cracked, cladding was pierced, pipes froze, rats gnawed, rabbits burrowed, beetles tunneled, and not a thing was done to remedy or resist any of these depredations.

Not yet quite a ruin, it needed only another decade of neglect to render it so.

A man would have to be dafter even than Hen Hollis to spend a night here afore the builders had worked on the place for a long fortnight, thought Sergeant Whitby as he saw the cluster of house and shippens loom gothically out of the morning mist.

There was no knocker on the front door, just a darker oval to show where one had been fixed for a hundred years or so till the screws had worked loose in the rotting woodwork.

Whitby clenched his fist and brought it crashing down on the oak panel with a force that shook the door in its frame.

The noise of the blow seemed to reverberate a long time, as if winding its way around the interior room by room, seeking life to absorb it.

Finally, finding none, it died away of its own accord.

Satisfied he didn’t need to knock again, Whitby considered his next move. It might be fun to get fat Dalziel out of bed to tell him there was nowt to tell! But while he was debating if he had courage enough for that, he felt a powerful need to empty his bladder.

He unbuttoned, then, some old social inhibition making him reluctant to piss even on Hen Hollis’s ruinous doorstep, he stepped round the side of the house.

And there it was, hidden by the angle of the wall on his approach to the front door.

Hen’s ancient bike.

He postponed thinking about this till he’d hosed the ground.

A last shake, then it was time for action. One step at a time, no need to jump ahead to possible conclusions, that was for poncey CID kids like Pascoe.

First another thunderous blow on the front door accompanied by a cry of, “Hen! You in there? It’s Jug Whitby! Don’t muck about!”

Again only the echo of emptiness.

He walked round the house, peering in the small-framed, small-paned windows, but even where the sun shone full upon them, they were too dusty and weather grimed to let him see beyond.

The back door was a simple piece of kit. No lock, just a latch. And of course a couple of hefty bolts inside, so’s an untrusting Yorkshire farmer could sleep secure in his bed.

He lifted the latch. There was no resistance. The door creaked open.

Now even a hardheaded, aging Yorkshire sergeant couldn’t stop his mind taking a couple of steps to a most unwelcome conclusion.

He entered the big farmhouse kitchen.

This would have been the center of life in the days when the Hollis family lived at Millstone. There was the old range where old Ma Hollis would have cooked the family meals, there was the long scarred table where the men would have sat to eat them, there was the great arched fireplace before which they would have crowded to dry themselves after a day in the thin cold rain or sat to stare at their futures in the glowing embers during the cold winter evenings.

At a corner of the table stood an overflowing ashtray. Alongside it a glass tumbler, turned upside down. And dead in the center, an empty whisky bottle weighing down a sheet of paper.

Jug ignored it. Time enough to read when he was certain that reading was all that was left to do.

He knew from long experience that when a farmer came to the end of his tether, if there were family around, he’d take himself to the barn or byre where only the beasts would see him set the shotgun barrel under his chin.

But if he were alone, then it was here on his own familiar hearth that he’d take his farewells.

So it was a cause for relief to find the kitchen empty.

You’re just letting this gloomy old place get to you, he admonished himself. I mean, why the hell would Hen choose the moment Daph Brereton’s death had so improved his life to decide to end it?

Mebbe after marking his recovery of the family home by a typically solitary celebration, he’d staggered upstairs and was lying senseless on his old dusty bed.

He shouted, “Hen! You there?”

Loud as he shouted, he couldn’t drown out the thought that Hen couldn’t have chosen to shoot himself because he didn’t have a shotgun.

This he knew because he himself had confiscated it the year after the eviction. In recent years, local police kept a very close check on gun ownership. When Hen hadn’t renewed his license, Whitby had visited him and, after listening to his catalog of grievances, had come away with the weapon.

So in the unlikely event he’d decided to kill himself, it wouldn’t have been by shooting.

And once again long experience of the traumas of rustic life projected images in the sergeant’s mind.

If not the gun, then the rope. A high-beamed barn was the favored site here. Most of these old low-ceilinged farmhouses didn’t have any vertical space deep enough for a grown man to drop into, but in some instances the situation of the stairs meant that a short rope carefully affixed to a beam across the landing would allow a determined man room to dangle into his own entrance hall.

But there was no reason for Hen to kill himself, not now, not here! his thoughts reiterated. No reason at all.

One way to be sure.

Slowly Jug Whitby lifted the latch on the inner door that opened into the hall. Slowly he pushed it open.

“Oh shit,” he said. “Oh shit shit shit shit shit!”