‘Everything!’ He sniffed, then pinched his nose between finger and thumb. ‘First, Trevor and Annabel weren’t that bad. They were incomers and that was always going to lead to trouble in a place like Moxham. You know the trouble with this part of the world? It’s full of retired bankers and lawyers with too much time on their hands. People who used to be important but now they’ve got nothing to do, so they just get busy blowing everything out of proportion. You know about all those disagreements she put in her book? The way she described them, they could have been the start of a third world war. But they didn’t amount to much at the time.
‘I mean, let’s start with the village fête. If Mr Longhurst didn’t want it on his front lawn just a few months after he’d moved in, that was his business. He’d have come round in time if they’d only sat down and talked about it. And the footpath! You could see right into the swimming pool, and Mrs Longhurst, she liked to go skinny-dipping first thing in the morning. Hardly surprising she wanted to divert the footpath – but she was only asking for it to be moved a few metres. She wasn’t trying to redraw the map! If the two of them had a fault, it was just that they were in too much of a hurry, but then they were Londoners. Everyone does everything at the double in London. You have to slow down if you want to get used to the country way.
‘As for the villagers, you read Throsby’s book, you’d think they’d all banded together with flaming torches and pitchforks and come round here to burn down the house. It wasn’t like that either. There were a few mutterings at The Bridge – the local pub – and at the golf club. The Longhursts weren’t the most popular people in the county. They were rich and they were a bit brash, so of course there were some who were jealous. But I said this to the Throsby woman. You choose any village you want, you’re going to get your moaners. People need something to complain about. But come the weekend, it’s all forgotten. It comes and goes with the wind.’
‘Tell us about Stephen Longhurst.’
‘Well, that was the worst of it. Why didn’t she listen to me? I told her the long and the short of it – about him and Wayne – but I was wasting my breath. When I finally saw that book of hers, I couldn’t believe what she’d written, and there was my name on the acknowledgements page at the back, as if I was the one who’d made it all up. I wanted to tell her publishers to take it right out again. My wife told me to forget about it, but I never have. It was a disgrace.’
He drew a breath.
‘She got it completely arse about face. You say you haven’t read the whole book, so I’ll tell you. The way she described it, Stephen was the innocent little kid who was corrupted by Wayne. He didn’t know what he was doing. Of course, that didn’t mean she had to like him. She said he was spoilt. She described that business with Lisa when she got pushed into a barbed-wire fence – although that was really just an accident, not like what she said at all.
‘But the biggest lie she told was that Wayne was the one in charge. You’ve only got to look at this place to know that’s not true. I mean, you tell me! A kid with all the privilege in the world goes over to an estate near Chippenham and ends up hero-worshipping some eleven-year-old whose dad’s been in jail and who lives in three tiny rooms surrounded by unwashed dishes and garbage? Give me a break! It was the other way round! I was here and I saw it. Wayne was just an ordinary kid. He came to this house and he thought he’d died and gone to heaven. The swimming pool. The sauna. The private cinema. Fridges full of food the likes of which he’d never seen before. Horses and dogs …
‘Wayne was the one in awe of Stephen. Stephen was a year younger, but he knew exactly what he was doing. I’m not saying he was bad either. But he was bored and he was angry that his parents had brought him here. He’d spent most of his life in the city and that was where his friends were. What was he meant to do out in the sticks? There are only so many times you can swim in a pool or bounce on a trampoline. If you want my opinion – and this is what I told the Throsby woman – he wanted revenge on his parents and on the world and it was the older boy who provided him with the opportunity. Stephen changed once he got here. I saw it for myself. Trespassing, shoplifting, little acts of vandalism. It was Stephen who decided what they were going to do. Wayne may have agreed to go along with it, but he was always two steps behind.’
‘What about the cruelty to animals?’ I asked. That was something I’d read in the book.
Lamprey dismissed the accusation. ‘The two of them went on the quad bikes and they ran over a sheep. It was an accident! That was just one of a million things she got wrong. Lisa was from Melbourne, not Sydney. This house was built in the nineteenth century. Stephen rode an American Quarter Horse and its name was Bree with two e’s – not like the cheese. And he didn’t fall off it – that was Wayne! Maybe that will tell you something about the two of them. Wayne had never sat on a horse in his life, but Stephen made him do it – and the next thing you know, he’s come off, flat on his face. I remember him sitting over by the fire, blood streaming out of his nose, crying his head off like any other eleven-year-old. He ended up in hospital after that one! He only did it because he didn’t want to lose face, and I’m sure the same thing was true when they did that silly trick with Major Alden. The family managed to persuade the judge that Wayne was the one in control and he ended up with twice the sentence of the other lad. But that wasn’t the case.’
‘Did you tell this to the police at the time?’ Hawthorne asked.
Lamprey shook his head. ‘It wasn’t my place. I was just the gardener. Anyway, nobody asked.’
He’d had enough. When he spoke again, there was a sheen of some distant memory in his eyes.
‘Neither of them were bad boys,’ he said. ‘I’m not saying they were perfect. But they were kids! They needed each other. I used to watch them chasing each other around the garden or sitting together, plotting and scheming, out by the old lion. That was their secret place. And I saw it with my own eyes. They loved each other in the way that only kids can. I was talking to my wife about it once and you know what she said? They were saving each other from themselves. That’s what she said, and she more or less got it right. They were both on their own, both of them abandoned. One of them was rich. One of them was poor. But when they were together, they were happy. I can still hear them laughing and shouting and just being kids.
‘At least, I used to hear them. Not any more. That’s what Harriet Throsby took away with that book of hers. She made them into the bad boys they never were and I’ll never forgive her for that. It was a wicked thing to do.’
He showed us to the door. The taxi was still waiting for us and we set off back down the driveway. As we turned the corner, I looked back and saw John Lamprey still standing there, the great sprawl of the house lifeless and empty behind him.
19
Long Shadows
Once we’d arrived at the centre of Moxham Heath, Hawthorne asked the driver to stop and we got out and continued on foot. Neither of us spoke. Maybe Hawthorne was trying to absorb the atmosphere of the village, imagining what it must have been like for the Longhursts as they adapted, unsuccessfully, to their new home. Or perhaps his mind was dwelling on what John Lamprey had told us. Mine certainly was.
For somewhere that had been the cause of so much sadness, Moxham was strikingly beautiful, the sort of place that turns up in jigsaw puzzles or Harry Potter films. In the summer it might be crowded with visitors, but on this bright April day – not quite the weekend yet – it seemed completely authentic; less a tourist attraction, more somewhere to live. We had been dropped off at the bridge, which formed the centre point of the community, its two stone arches spanning a stream doing its best to pretend it was a river. The houses and shops on either side were constructed out of Bath stone, with that warm glow no other building material has ever replicated, and one by one my eye picked out the little details: the ivy, the mullioned windows, the chimneys, the stone urns with their spring flowers bursting through, the original lamp posts, the war monument and the stone trough for horses. I could imagine the Longhursts arriving here for the first time and seeing the gurgling water, the church spire in the distance. Perhaps it wasn’t so surprising that they had decided to stay. It was hard to believe that Chippenham, with its ring roads and business parks, and the six-lane M4 motorway to London were just a few miles away.