Read Online Tainted Ground by Margaret Duffy - Free Book Online

suspicious death. Rather more than coincidences, in the light of what’s happened, wouldn’t you say?’
    Stonelake shrugged dismissively, not meeting Patrick’s gaze. ‘I heard about those but they were bloody years ago. Mum used to talk about it after she’d done some research in Bath library for something she wrote in the parish rag. Dad told her she musn’t have enough to do at home if she was bothering with it, and I certainly wasn’t interested.’
    Patrick said, ‘The murder victims were hanging by their heels and had been butchered like animals. Their throats were cut and two of them had had their heads almost severed. Have you ever employed anyone who had worked in a slaughterhouse? Anyone like that who might have a grudge against you and would try to implicate you in a violent crime?’
    This was more like it, I thought, the questioner giving the impression that if no useful response was forthcoming then the man he was talking to might suddenly find himself dangling upside down from the ceiling.
    â€˜There was Shaun Brown,’ Stonelake said, ‘but that was a while back now. He helped me a couple of winters ago, with the cattle. He’d worked at one time for a meat-packing plant at Warminster, killing pigs, but I had no problems with the bloke. He wasn’t strange in the head or anything like that. Not knife-happy or likely to go off and kill folk. Why should he be? It’s an honest living.’
    â€˜You parted on good terms, then?’
    â€˜Well, no, not really. I had an idea he’d helped himself to some diesel – you know the red diesel farmers use? – for his van and we had words. He went off in a paddy and I never saw him again. Heard he was back at the meat plant.’
    Patrick glanced at me and I wondered if he was thinking the same, that we had probably heard only an edited version of what had happened. Had Stonelake withheld wages to pay for the alleged theft?
    â€˜Oh, come to think about it I do know about the body that was found back in the sixties,’ Stonelake went on, almost eagerly. ‘I’d left school by then and was helping the old man. He found it, a bloke who was missing from home in Bristol. He’d been a real no-gooder by all accounts and had got into dealing drugs. Done time for it. There wasn’t a mark on him and I seem to remember they ended up not knowing how he’d died. It was freezing that weekend and he was a scraggy little git so perhaps the cold got him.’
    â€˜Did you see the body?’ I asked.
    â€˜Yes, I ran in the barn when I heard Dad shout. He was lying there all stiff like one of those things in shop windows.’
    â€˜And you?’ Patrick said. ‘You have a criminal record as well?’
    I had an idea he was ready in case the other vented any fury on the hapless dog but Stonelake remained where he was, staring at the window behind Patrick’s head.
    â€˜A driving ban for a year when I was a lot younger,’ he finally admitted. ‘You know … young and hot-headed.’
    â€˜Anything else?’ Patrick enquired.
    â€˜No. You lot once tried to pin thieving fence posts on me but you couldn’t make it stick.’
    â€˜I see. So you didn’t once blast someone you thought might be a poacher with a shotgun.’
    At this Stonelake did see red. ‘That was gossip! Hearsay! The police never became involved with that. How did you hear about it?’
    â€˜Well, seeing as you’ve asked I’ll tell you. It was me you took the shot at.’
    â€˜You!’ Stonelake’s face assumed a rather ghastly pallor.
    â€˜Yes, I was taking a short cut one evening through the woods down by the river. Fortunately only half a dozen pellets actually landed and I didn’t get much sympathy at home as I’d been warned that both you and your father were trigger-happy.’
    â€˜We were always having people breaking down the fences