Cold Blood Jane Heafield (the little red hen ebook TXT) 📖

dropped connection, and told what he knew. The phone was still in his hand, awaiting that move.

He didn’t make it. With shaking hands, he removed the battery and SIM card from his phone, so nobody knew where he was.

Or, more important, where he was going.

53

The land around was quiet, the field and sky black. The only illumination apart from the moon came from a porch light attached to the nearby building. The only building out here. Where he had business tonight. It was just past midnight.

The moonlight bounced off something metal in the dirt, which he picked up and examined. He approached the building and tried the front door. Surprisingly, it was unlocked. He slipped in and waited for his eyes to adapt to the darkness. The house was silent. Ahead was another door, open, and his eyes picked out the dark hollows of doorways. But he ignored them and turned to the stacked horizontal lines of a staircase. Slowly, he climbed, heading for the owner’s bedroom. Where he had business tonight.

Three doors on the upper landing, two shut. He crept through the open door, into a bedroom. He saw the square of a double bed, and a single figure lying on one side of it. He flicked on the light, and watched the sleeping figure slowly rouse, trying to shield its eyes against the sudden brightness. Then, when the man in the bed saw the man in the doorway, he yelled in shock.

‘Ronald Crabtree, I am arresting you for the murders of Francis Overeem, John Crickmer, Betty Crute, and Lorraine Cross, on or about the 19th of January.’

Still squinting against the light, Crabtree looked around, as if for help, or a weapon, or just because his brain had been jolted awake and was still working out what the hell was going on. ‘What? How did you get in here?’

Bennet slammed the door behind him, and the thunderous bang seem to whack the final remnants of sleep from the farmer. ‘That’s how you honour your wife’s memory, is it? The brutal slaying of four people in her shack?’

‘No, no, the police searched it. I didn’t do anything like that. Look, you can’t just bust into my home–’

‘Don’t lie to me,’ Bennet yelled. ‘That shack is the last place their phones were active. You scrubbed it clean and burned their belongings. The police searched it again and found blood traces.’

That was a lie, but it seemed to work. Crabtree said nothing for a few moments. He clutched a pillow like a baby comforted by a teddy.

‘You buried their bodies, right here on your land.’

Crabtree shook his head. Bennet walked to the foot of the bed. ‘You panicked when I turned up, asking questions. You dug those bodies up to go dump them somewhere else.’

Crabtree made no movement this time, and said nothing. He just stared.

‘You used your tractor loader. Oh, it came in very handy. It scooped those bodies out of the ground. Admit it.’

Crabtree’s eyes dropped to the garden fork tine Bennet wielded, found in the dirt outside. They were loaded with fear. There was a long pause, as if the farmer weighed up his options here. But his muscles weren’t tense; this wasn’t the tension of a nervous system debating fight or flight. A more calculated, conscious analysis: trial or funeral? Coffin or cell?

Crabtree seemed to deflate a little. Bennet had seen killers react like this upon finally confessing: the sudden unburdening of all the massive tension that came with holding a terrible secret; with ceaselessly fearing capture. But this was different. Crabtree’s sudden calm was that of a man released from the gallows at the eleventh hour. Bennet was appalled by the weapon in his hand and he dropped it. But the anger persisted: Crabtree had admitted nothing.

‘And at Lake Stanton that tractor came in very handy. You used it to push that motorhome down the slipway, into the lake.’

Crabtree had seen the weapon fall. But the threat was still in Bennet’s face, so it changed nothing: the farmer just watched him. Still, he had not admitted a thing.

‘You knew about the ledge in the lake and the deep drop, perfect for making a vehicle disappear. You knew about it because you’d killed and disposed of Sally Jenkins there ten years before.’

‘NO,’ Crabtree yelled, instantly out of his subdued state and into rage. He jumped out of the bed, fists clenched, and the shock and speed of it made Bennet take a step back. ‘Don’t you dare blame that on me. I had nothing to do with Sally. I don’t know anything about Sally. I was as shocked as everyone to hear she’d been found in that lake.’

‘That’s the only thing you deny? Sally?’

Crabtree sat on the bed, suddenly breathing heavily, as if his adrenaline burst had exhausted him. ‘It makes me sick to think I was there, just metres from her body.’

Those words, a backroad admission, hit Bennet like a punch. Now it was real. Here, before him, stood the man who snatched Lorraine away from Joe, and parted them forever. Bennet kicked the rusty fork tine under the bed before he crossed a line there was no way back from.

‘But we didn’t kill those people,’ Crabtree said. ‘We went there to give them grief, but there was no need. They were already dead.’

54

Crabtree had said, ‘I know you won’t believe my words right now, under accusation. So try my words from back a way.’

It was intriguing enough to give Bennet pause, and to trust the man. Bennet followed him downstairs, where Crabtree flicked the living room light on and went to a desk for his laptop. Bennet noted how ancient and dirty the room looked, as if Crabtree hadn’t tended to it since his wife died. The grey wig he’d seen the other day, along with a dress fit for an old lady, lay on the armchair. Where Bennet had seen a prostitute sitting.

Seeing Bennet stare, Crabtree called out, ‘You’re here to see this,