Death of a Dormouse

Trudi had not mentioned money, and now she reacted against the imputation of a merely mercenary motive.

‘I just want the truth, Mrs Brightshaw,’ she said firmly.

‘Truth! Aye. That,’ said the woman. ‘Did he leave you all right, your man?’

Belatedly, Trudi realized this was the key to whatever the woman could tell her. Shared grief could not bring them together; shared poverty might!

‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘He left very little. I’ve taken a job again after twenty-five years.’

‘Oh yes?’ said the woman with a slight sneer. ‘That’d be hard for you!’

‘Yes,’ said Trudi seriously. ‘Not working, but finding work, that’s what’s hard. At my age, in these days.’

The farmer’s widow nodded as if she had at last heard a potent argument. Then she blew her nose, picked up a poker, stirred the tiny fire.

Finally she said, ‘Well, you needn’t worry. He was parked proper all right. As tight up against the hedge as you could ask.’

Trudi found herself as much puzzled as pleased by her emphasis.

‘You’re certain?’ she asked. ‘Your husband told you that?’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He did.’

‘And would you make a statement to that effect?’ asked Trudi. ‘In writing I mean.’

Mrs Brightshaw looked suddenly uneasy.

‘Would I have to go to court?’

‘I don’t know,’ Trudi said. ‘To be quite frank, Mrs Brightshaw, I’m not really sure about the law as it applies here. But it would be a great help to me personally, that’s quite certain.’

The woman continued to look so doubtful that Trudi’s surprise began to turn to suspicion.

‘You are quite certain that’s what your husband told you?’ she asked.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t like to think you were just trying to cheer me up,’ said Trudi hesitantly. ‘And …’

‘And, come to think of it,’ said Trudi in a rush, ‘it does sound rather an odd thing for Mr Brightshaw to have been so emphatic about, particularly as he doesn’t seem to have felt it was worth mentioning in his statement.’

The old woman nodded and said, ‘That’s the kind of thing them fancy lawyers would say, isn’t it?’

‘I suppose so. If it came to questioning.’

‘I don’t doubt it would,’ she said fiercely. ‘And I’d have to take an oath?’

‘In court, yes,’ said Trudi, bewildered and by now a trifle uneasy.

‘Then you’d better hear what I would have to tell them, Mrs Adamson,’ she said with an air of decision. ‘Then you can make up your mind. What my husband told me wasn’t what he told the police. Don’t misunderstand me, he didn’t lie, he just kept it simple. He told them he’d no idea how long your man’s car had been stopped on the road when he noticed it. And the crash happened shortly after.’

Trudi’s uneasiness was now a constricting pain beneath her breast bone.

‘Truth was,’ Mrs Brightshaw continued, ‘he’d noticed the car arrive twenty, thirty minutes earlier. Then another car came and stopped behind it. He heard doors slamming. Then he saw someone move from the second car to the first. It was a woman. Harold was working with his tractor you understand, not just standing gawking. But a bit later on, he saw the second car move off. And it wasn’t long after that that the accident happened.’

Trudi made two false starts before she could speak.

‘Why didn’t he say anything about this in his statement?’ she managed in the end.

‘He was a kind man, my Harold,’ said the older woman softly. ‘He reckoned that if there was nothing in it, the other driver would come forward soon enough. But if it was what it looked like, there was no point in adding to your troubles by letting all and sundry know your husband was parked out in the countryside to meet his fancy woman.’

She raised her eyes and regarded the younger woman steadily.

‘But there’s one thing for sure,’ she said. ‘A man doing that doesn’t leave his car lying halfway across the road.’

Trudi took a deep breath. She was almost too bewildered to be distressed. She heard herself saying wretchedly, ‘It was definitely a woman, was it?’

‘It was,’ said Mrs Brightshaw. ‘He told me he could see her head clearly above the hedge. She must have been a tall lass. Blonde hair he said, I remember that. Bright blonde.’

A tall lass. Bright blonde hair. Trudi felt the information register. Then she asked, ‘And her car? Did he say anything about that?’

‘Yes, he did, as a matter of fact. He said it was a little red thing with a kind of flag on its aerial. He mentioned how small it was, particular, because that seemed likely the reason this blonde lass went to the other, which was bigger. More room for that sort of meeting. He wasn’t making a joke, just giving me his reason for keeping mum. When the police came for his statement, he asked if there was a wife and when they told him yes, that made up his mind. He thought you’d be hurt enough. Like I say, he was a kind man.’

‘Yes, yes, he sounds like a kind man,’ Trudi echoed, rising. She now felt surprisingly calm. ‘How will you manage now that you’re by yourself?’ she heard herself asking, calm and concerned as the vicar’s wife on a parochial visit.

Mrs Brightshaw let the question hang, smelling more patronizing by the second, till she had shown Trudi to the door.

‘I’ve been managing ever since Harold took his stroke,’ she said finally. ‘Managing’s easy. It’s wanting to manage that’s the hard bit. But you’ll have found that out yourself, I daresay.’

The door closed behind Trudi and the bolt rattled home.

Slowly she returned to the car, moving in time to the childish jingle which had risen unsummoned into her head.

Three blind mice … see how they run … they all ran after the farmer’s wife … she cut off their tails with a carving knife …

‘OK?’ said Janet, compressing a whole catechism into the question.

‘Fine,’ said Trudi. ‘I’m fine.’

‘You don’t look fine. You look terrible,’ said Janet. ‘Come on, what do you really feel like?’

‘I feel like a widow,’ said Trudi savagely. ‘I feel like a fucking widow!’

4 (#ulink_57353631-10f7-521e-9fed-324a471a5ff0)

Trudi told Janet nothing of her discovery about Astrid Fischer till they got drunk together on Boxing Day.

She had made a token protest when Janet invited her to spend Christmas in Oldham.