Then Stan, repeating Tom Oates, asked, “What’re you doing here, Billy?”
“I saw it happen. Sort of. Heard him chopping away at that damned tree, you know how sound carries on a day like this. Heard it come down. Dashed over to act as umpire in case Pete Stuckey and his she-devil were giving Ben a hard time. And I found... this. Him.”
“Ah. Then you had better wait for PC Dennis, he’s the coroner’s officer.” Stan Ethrington gave the monkey puzzle and its victim a cursory examination. He sighed and shook his head. “Typical, eh? Mr. Basgate was a bit childish, for all his smart business ways. See-and-must-have kind of style, no foresight. Did you think he meant it about doing away with the old monkey puzzler? ’Course not. But the fancy took him, and that was it... My kids are just the same, but the oldest is six, so there’s some excuse.”
He wasn’t being snide, just expressing oblique regret for Ben. “Wouldn’t care to fell anything that was taller than me,” he continued. “Seems simple, but there’s more to it than you’d bargain for. Downright dangerous — shame he wasn’t much for stopping and thinking.”
“The trunk looks quite slim,” I agreed, “it must have seemed easy to deal with.” And then everybody arrived at once: the ambulance, the police surgeon in tennis whites and a brand-new Volvo, and the coroner’s officer, a kid looking hardly old enough to shave, aboard a motorbike.
The ambulance men could do nothing for Ben Basgate, but Tom Oates was in a pitiable state, shaking uncontrollably, so they bore him away to Barford General “just to be on the safe side.”
Cherubic PC Dennis took my statement, and he and Stan measured the tree and charted its position in relation to the body and the front of the house, with Dennis photographing everything for good measure.
Once I told them what little I could, there was — for me, at least — an awkward pause. PC Dennis and Stan Ethrington had to wait for County HQ to send a mobile crane, unlikely to appear swiftly on a Sunday. “If I don’t get some sleep soon,” I yawned, “I shall fall over. If you don’t need me any more...”
“Off you go, sir,” said PC Dennis. But I didn’t, for a minute. Illogically, it seemed wrong to slope off and leave Ben Basgate, tragic Mr. Toad, pinned there waiting to be tidied away. “That’s his cap, it’s how I spotted him,” I said. “I’m afraid I moved it, picked it up, don’t know why.”
“Not to worry,” said Stan. “Get home, Billy, you’ve done all you can.”
And so I had. Though not the way that either of us meant, let alone understood.
The inquest did not last long. Tom Oates, stilted and uneasy in his Sunday-best suit, gave evidence of identity, a pathologist stated that Benjamin Harold Basgate, a fifty-eight-year-old male, had died of multiple injuries. I gave my two-pennyworth about hearing the chopping noises and becoming aware of what Ben was doing.
PC Dennis was surprisingly authoritative, though even younger-looking in the courtroom. He produced photographs of the monkey puzzle’s severed trunk, and a chart showing the tree upright, with a large V-shaped notch a couple of feet from the ground and another smaller one on the opposite side. “Deceased obviously intended to throw the tree, make it fall, that is, away from the house. Apparently he misjudged the amount of wood to leave in place, stepped back to judge the direction the tree would topple, and was crushed when it fell the wrong way.”
Verdict: misadventure. Mr. Foster, the coroner, added a warning, “which I hope the press will promulgate” about the danger illustrated by the accident. It was a tragic reminder that tree felling was a task for professionals. The press, a girl trainee from the Drawbel Weekly News, blushed and nodded and scribbled away; some of us exchanged wry smiles. Charlie Foster’s son-in-law happens to run a landscape gardening business, timber felling a speciality. Still, the coroner’s point was valid...
The funeral at St. Mary’s was better attended than I expected, a cynical view being that certain Drawbel citizens were pleased to see the back of Ben. Talking of which, Peter Stuckey was there with Iris — nothing like a service for the dead to bring British hypocrisy to life. Waiting to enter, I fell into conversation with Stuckey, a big, grizzled fellow with a face like a turnip lantern.
Probably he guessed my thoughts about humbug, for he began defensively, “Never liked the chap, but nobody would have wished that on him. Bloody fool.” As with Stan Ethrington’s similar remark, Stuckey’s voice held more compassion than contempt.
“Ben would be alive today if me and the missus had been home,” he asserted. “Blimey, if you could hear him all the way over to Petticoat Wood, we wouldn’t have missed it. I’d have been round in two shakes to stop him. He was breaking the law, right? But our Jenny’s just had her baby, the missus was on fire to see the first grandson. We set off before it was light, to get back in time for evening milking.”
He’d solved a minor puzzle: why the busybody Stuckeys hadn’t intervened that morning. Then the roof of the hearse came into sight over the churchyard hedge, and we all trooped in.
My attention wandered during the service. I spent much of it admiring Selina Grace. Her designer suit might be a little too much for a country funeral, but then Selina ran a boutique in Bristol and always dressed to the nines.
The coffin stayed on trestles in the chancel when the service ended. Ben was to be cremated. Tom Oates and a trio of elderly strangers whom I took to be distant relatives left together. I fell into step beside Selina.
“Poor Tom,” she murmured, “he looks dreadful.”
“He’ll get over it.” He looked a damned sight better than he had last Sunday. But then so did I, no doubt.
“That’s you all over, offhand, shrugging everything off. Tom loved that man. It’s hard to think of Ben as fatherly, more of a big kid himself, but he was Tom’s uncle — and Tom lost his own parents when he was young.”
“True,” I agreed soothingly. And more quietly, “I must be responsible for every second message on your answering machine. We’ve got to talk.”
Frowning, Selina whispered, “You do pick your moments. I’ll phone when I’m ready. Not today, I’ve got to help Tom, those doddery third cousins or whatever expect a funeral tea.” She hurried after them, disclosing rather a lot of elegant thigh while getting into the funeral director’s boxy limo.
Trudging up the zigzag path through the trees, I loosened my black tie and undid the shirt collar. Tom Oates had invited me back to Monks Farm, too, but I’d lied about having to take a timed call from overseas. Funerals are bad enough, let alone the old-fashioned aftermath of tea and sandwiches and guarded jubilation over the mourners’ survival.
Selfishly, I consigned Mr. Toad to the past, concentrating on Selina Grace and the fact that despite appearances, we were more than casual friends. Was it a simple reflex — until recently I had been celibate for a long while — or something deeper? And what did she want or expect or dread from me?
Not for the first time, I decided that platonic relationships had a lot going for them. The drawback being that they are less fun... Half the trouble was that knowing myself best, I was deeply suspicious of my motives.
Selina was gorgeous, and “spoken for,” as this part of the world says when a couple aren’t officially engaged yet might marry some day. That made her doubly interesting, God forgive me. I can resist anything save temptation, and the lure of the forbidden runs it a close second. I liked her a lot, it could be love, but initially at least, Selina had represented a challenge.
I hadn’t chased her. We knew each other, that was all — for a time. Then the Arts Council sponsored a Year of Wessex Culture or some such nonsense. Selina and I found ourselves on a dim subcommittee charged with choosing a logo. I was Mr. Local Literature and she Ms. Fashion and Design. There’s nothing like shared dislike to foster intimacy, and the committee chairman was a pain’s pain. We got into the habit of adjourning to an Italian restaurant after suffering him, to slander the old fool.