A Fatal Affair Faith Martin (read dune .TXT) 📖

bound her to it with the ribbons. Only she didn’t look so beautiful then, did she? All that golden perfection …’

Again, for a moment, there was utter silence.

Janet and Ronnie stared at him, appalled.

Aware of their distress, Ray scowled at them and shook his head. ‘What? What else could I have done?’ he demanded harshly.

‘And David?’ Ronnie finally plucked up the nerve to say. ‘Did you kill David too?’

At this, Ray’s sighed heavily. ‘I had to do that,’ he admitted grimly. ‘I didn’t want to!’ he added, sounding almost indignant now. ‘But he called me one night, from the phone box in the village. I wish now I’d never had the phone line put in to the old place,’ he added, giving a nod towards the farmhouse. ‘Not that it would have mattered, in the end, I suppose,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘He’d have just come in person, wouldn’t he?’ He cocked his head a little to one side, as if actually considering the utterly irrelevant question.

It was only then that Trudy began to wonder if Ray Dewberry was actually sane.

Clement risked a quick glance around to see if there was something lying around that he could use as a weapon. This was a farmyard, wasn’t it? Where were all the sharp-pronged things – rakes, plough blades, pitchforks, anything…

‘He said on the phone that he needed to speak to me, alone. He was so insistent that Ronnie not be there, that I knew … I just knew …’ For a moment Ray shook his head. ‘I didn’t know how he knew about me and Iris, I just knew that he did. So I said I’d meet him at the barn the next day.’

‘How did you do it?’ Ronnie asked, his voice tight with pain. Although he knew, late at night and lying in his bed, that his father had killed Iris, he’d never, ever, let himself even contemplate that he had also killed David. David, he’d convinced himself, had killed himself for love of Iris. But now he could no longer hold on to even that comforting fantasy.

‘I crushed up some of your mum’s old pills and melted them in boiling water. Then I put some whisky in that old hip flask of your granddad’s. Took it with me when I went to the barn. It was funny,’ Ray said softly, his face softening as he remembered back to that evening. ‘He came in and found me sitting on a bale of hay. I nodded at him, friendly-like, and took out the hip flask and pretended to drink from it. And he just asked me flat out if I was seeing his Iris.’

Ray grunted a soft laugh. ‘His Iris. The silly little pup. He was nothing more to her than a cat’s paw! I wanted to rant at him then and there, tell him that she’d been mine, damn it! Mine. But of course, I didn’t. Instead I just looked at him, and said, “Bloody hell boy, that’s a bit of an accusation,” and I pretended to take another swig. Then I held out the flask to him and said, “If we’re gonna have that sort of a talk, we should do it proper. Have a belt – it’s the best whisky money can buy.” And he took it.’

Ray again gave a soft laugh. ‘I wasn’t sure if he would or not. If he hadn’t, I’d have just had to do it the hard way … But he took a sip, and then I nodded at the bale of hay I’d set up by mine and told him to take a pew.’

Trudy could almost picture the scene. The young man, desperate to learn the truth, but still so naïve and trusting and so unaware of the sheer ferocity and danger that could lurk in the hearts of men such as Ray Dewberry. Had he secretly not really been able to believe that a man he’d known all his life – his best friend’s father, for Pete’s sake – had killed the girl he loved? Had he gone to that barn more than half-hoping, maybe even half-expecting, that Ray Dewberry would be able to convince him that he hadn’t?

‘He told me that he’d recognised a necklace that Iris had begun to wear as one belonging to my wife,’ Ray went on.

‘What? You gave her Mum’s jewellery?’ Ronnie squawked, but his father merely ignored him, too deep in his memories, probably, to have even heard him.

‘O’course, I denied it,’ Ray said, almost placidly. ‘Said necklaces sometimes looked alike. I asked him for the flask back, pretended to take another sip, all casual-like, then handed it back to him. Told him that he was letting his imagination run wild. He sort of nodded, like, as if he took my point, then had another swallow and said that wasn’t all. Iris had been seen by several people in the village walking this way.’

Ray glanced up and around the fields. ‘I told him so what? The girl was free to take a walk in the countryside, wasn’t she? Then I crooked my finger, and he passed the flask back. By now I could see he was beginning to look a bit tired. I took another pass at the flask, then handed it back. He said Iris had teased him about me – saying I was the handsomest man in the village. He was beginning to slur his words now. I laughed, and said I was flattered, but she was just trying to get his goat, and make him jealous. “Young girls are like that,” I said to him. “Don’t you know that, boy? Courting’s a bit of a game see. Don’t mean nothing.” And so it went on. Chatting, all friendly like, both of us drinking from the flask – well, me just pretending, like. And then, when his head began to actually nod, I just, quietly like, got the rope that I’d already tied off to the plough and with noose already made and everything,