Field of Thirteen - Dick Francis [28]
Probate completed, Cassidy had duly given all Mona’s ‘bits and pieces’ (including the pearl brooch and the bicycle) to the hair-curlered neighbour who lovingly took them in, and it was only occasionally that either of the Bolingbrokes wondered what Joanie had so urgently sought on the morning her mother died.
‘You know,’ Cassidy said over the mushroom omelettes, ‘that old box Mona brought with pictures of Joanie in her ball-gowns… there were pictures of us in it, too.’
Oliver lifted down the neglected box from a high shelf on a dresser and emptied it onto the table.
Under the clippings of Joanie and themselves they found two folded pages of a Welsh country town newspaper, now extinct; old, fragile and brown round the edges.
Oliver cautiously unfolded them, careful not to tear them, and both of the Bolingbrokes learned what Joanie Vine had been frantic to conceal.
Centre front page on the first sheet was a picture of a group of three people: a younger Mona, a child recognisably Joanie, and a short unsmiling man. Alongside, a headline read: ‘Local man pleads guilty to child rape, sentenced to ten years.’
Idris Watkins, stable-lad, husband of Mona, and father of Joan, confessed to the crime and has been sentenced without trial.
The second brown-edged fragile page ran a story but no pictures:
‘Stable-lad killed in a fall on gallops.
Idris Watkins, recently freed after serving six years of a ten-year sentence for child rape, died of a fractured skull, Thursday. He leaves a widow, Mona, and a daughter, Joan, 13.’
After a silence, Oliver said ‘It explains a lot, I suppose.’
He made photocopies of the old pages and sent the copies to Joanie.
Cassidy, nodding, said, ‘Let her worry that we’ll publish her secret and ruin her social-climbing life.’
They didn’t publish, though.
Mona wouldn’t have liked it.
BRIGHT WHITE STAR
A country magazine, Cheshire Life, sent me a letter.
‘Write us a story,’ they said.
I asked, ‘What about?’
‘About three thousand words,’ they replied.
It was winter at the time, and by car I drove frequently up and down a hill where a tramp had once lived in a hollow. So I wrote about a tramp in winter.
This story describes how to steal a horse from an auction.
Don’t do it!
The tramp was cold to his bones.
The air and the ground stood at freezing point, and a heavy layer of yellowish snow-cloud hung like a threat over the afternoon. Black boughs of stark trees creaked in the wind, and the rutted fields lay bare and dark, waiting.
Shambling down a narrow road the tramp was cold and hungry and filled with an intense unfocused resentment. By this stage of the winter he liked to be deep in a nest, sheltered in a hollow in the ground in the lee of a wooded hill, roofed by a lavish thatch of criss-crossed branches and thick brown cardboard, lying on a warm comfortable bed of dry dead leaves and polythene sheeting and sacks. He liked to have his wood-fire burning all day near his threshold, with the ashes glowing red all night. He liked to live snug through the frost and the snows and the driving rains, and kick the whole thing to pieces when he moved on in the spring.
What he did not like was having someone else kick his nest in as they had done on that morning. Three of them – the man who owned the land where he had settled, and two people from the local council, a hard-eyed middle-aged man and a prim bossy woman with a clip-board. Their loud voices, their stupid remarks, echoed and fed the anger in his mind.
‘I’ve told him every day for the past week that I want him off my land…’
‘This structure constitutes a permanent dwelling and as such requires planning permission…’
‘In the town there is a hostel where vagrants can sleep in a dormitory on a one-night basis…’
The council man had begun pulling his branch-and-cardboard roof to pieces, and the other two had joined in. He saw from their faces that his smell offended them, and he saw from the finicky