Chapter 4: Paint Seals
Callum had the feed figures out by a factor of ten.
"That's tonnes," Gill said. "Not kilos. You'd have had them dead of bloat by Thursday."
"It doesn't say tonnes."
"It's your grandad's writing, my lover. Nothing in his writing says what it means." She took the clipboard off the nail in the dairy and turned it to the strip light. Derek's capitals, in carpenter's pencil, ration by ration for every pen, the columns ruled with the edge of something. At the bottom, in the same pencil: P. NOT TO CHANGE THIS. "There you are. That's what he thought of the pair of you."
Callum laughed, and then looked appalled that he had, and then laughed again with his face in his sleeve.
They did the cattle together in the half dark, the South Devons shoving and blowing at the barriers and the steam coming off the silage clamp in the cold. Gill had grown up at a forge, not a farm, but she'd done this as a girl on wet Saturdays for pocket money, for Derek, who'd paid her in eggs. Her hands still knew where the barriers stuck.
"Ray says it was the best he ever rang her," Callum said, forking. "His goodnight. On Saturday."
"Ray's deaf as a post."
"That's what I said." The boy stopped. "I wasn't listening. I was on my phone, telling Josh we'd won. I'll never hear him do it again and I wasn't even listening."
Gill took the fork off him and finished the pen herself.
They released Philip at two that afternoon. Released under investigation, the police said, which is a phrase that means nothing, and in Upcott it meant he'd done it.
"I don't do ladders," said Detective Sergeant Ponsford, at the foot of the ladder.
"Then you'll want to go up it facing it," said Gill, "and don't look down, and don't stop. Stopping's what does it."
The DS went up facing it and didn't look down and didn't stop, and swore all the way, quietly and with great range, and at the top she sat on the clock-chamber floor beside the ticking clock with her eyes shut.
"This is the one he fell off?"
"The one below. This one's the bells."
"Christ alive."
Gill went up first into the bell chamber and gave the DS her hand at the trap and pulled her up through it, and the DS knelt on the boards among the jackdaw sticks with the eight bells hanging round her like something in a cave, and said nothing at all for a moment, which Gill liked her for. Most people say they're bigger than they thought.
"Right then," said Gill.
She'd shown her the ropes on the way up, eight tail ends lifted off their hooks in the ringing chamber, the green wool in every one, and the DS had said, "Unless they were yours and you forgot the wool," and Gill had said, "I've done that wool since 1996, thirty-one colours, I've a book," and the DS had said, "Everyone forgets something," and Gill had said, "I don't forget the wool," and that had been that.
Now she knelt by the tenor's bearing and put her torch on the bolts. Brunswick green, every one, the paint lying in the threads like icing in a tin. "Your stub says these were serviced in 2023. You can't service a bearing without undoing these."
"I can't tell what I'm looking at."
"I know. Watch." Gill took a ring spanner from her belt and put it on a bolt on the fifth's bearing, which she'd be replacing in the autumn anyway, and leant on it. The nut turned a quarter, stiff, and the paint went, a fine bright crack all round the thread and a flake lifting off the washer. "That's what it looks like when someone's been at them. Now look at all the others."
The DS looked at all the others. She had a torch of her own now, a little police one, and she went round the frame on her knees, pit by pit, and Gill let her, and didn't say anything. It took twenty minutes. The DS's suit trousers would never be the same.
"Your firm didn't do any of it," the DS said at last. "That's what you're telling me."
"Nobody did any of it. There was no work. There's nineteen thousand pounds of nothing."
"So it went somewhere and it didn't go to you."
"It went to whoever cashed the cheques."
"Mrs Leaman says Derek Coaker cashed them. On market days." The DS sat back on her heels. "The bank's going through it. Twelve cheques over two years at three branches, and they've got to find someone in a cupboard in Leeds who knows how. It'll be a fortnight. And we're looking at Westaway. He'd a temper on him and a protest he didn't want lodged, and a Hilux can turn round in a gateway as well as anything."
"A fortnight."
"Banks," said the DS, with the first real feeling Gill had heard from her.
On the way down Gill stopped at the peg by the ringing-chamber door. Derek's tweed jacket was still hanging there. Nobody had wanted to touch it.
"Can I take that down? For Philip."
"We've had his wallet and his phone. Go on."
It was heavier than it looked. Tweed always is. In the inside pocket, folded to the size of a beer mat, soft at the edges from being taken out and put back, was her quote. She unfolded it on the bench under the peal boards. The pencil marks down every margin. And the line on the second page he'd underlined so hard the paper had torn:
Existing ropes: 2017 set (Vosper), serviceable. Recommend renewal with rehang.
Beside it, in the margin, in carpenter's pencil: 4200 ??
The DS read it over her shoulder.
"He read my quote on Thursday night," Gill said. "And he saw I'd written that the ropes were nine years old. And he remembered signing a cheque for new ones."
"Or," said the DS, "he read your quote on Thursday night and saw the bellhanger had written down the one thing that'd sink him, and that the PCC would read it at the meeting on Monday. And on Friday he went to the bank and put nineteen thousand back from the farm before anyone could add it up." She held out her hand for the quote, and Gill gave it to her, and she put it in a bag. "It's a good find, Gill. I don't know yet which way it cuts."
By the following week the village had decided.
It doesn't take long. Somebody in the Oak says it, and somebody at the school gate says it back, and by the time it gets to the shop it's been said so often that it's been agreed. Derek Coaker had been taking the bell money for two years, and he'd been found out, and he'd paid it back out of the farm, out of Philip's TB money, and Philip had gone up that tower and done for him. The Moorcombe lot were saying worse. Someone had taken a biro to the competition poster in the bus shelter and put a line through UPCOTT PETROCK under WINNERS, and written underneath it, in capitals, THIEVES.
Gill went in the shop for milk on the Wednesday because she'd been asked to look at the clock again and couldn't think of a reason not to buy milk. The bell over the door went. There was a queue of three for the post office counter, and they stopped talking when she came in, and started again about something else.
Mandy was behind the counter with her hair up and her reading glasses on a chain, weighing a parcel for a woman with a pushchair, and she looked as if she'd had a fortnight's sleep in the last fortnight.
"Gill. Love." She rang the parcel through. "Have a paper."
"I'll pay for it."
"You will not. Derek never paid for his, and you can't either, not this week. I've decided." She put the Okehampton Times on the counter, in that morning. The front page was about a planning row over the bypass. Page five, a small headline: ARREST AFTER TOWER DEATH. "They've not put his name. They don't have to, do they? Everyone knows."
"How is he?"
"Philip? I took him a pie. He didn't come to the door. Callum took it in." Mandy lowered her voice. "I found that invoice. For the ropes. It was in the file at the back with all the fund things. I gave it to the detective." She shook her head. "It had your name on the top, Gill. Your proper letters, the bell and that. I'd never have known it wasn't you."
"Could I see a copy?"
"She's got it. I didn't think to keep one." Mandy took off her glasses and let them hang. "I never did anything without him saying. You know what he was."
Gill knew what he was. She went out with the milk and the paper she hadn't paid for and stood in the square, and thought about her own letterhead, the little drawing of a bell she'd done herself in 2009 that a printer in Tiverton had made worse. It was on every invoice she'd ever sent this tower. They'd all be in the file at the back of the shop. Anyone who had the file could have copied one.
Derek Coaker had never used a computer in his life. He'd thought email was a kind of fax.
She stood in the square with that. A woman she half knew from the ringing went past her and said good morning to the lychgate.
So somebody else had made that invoice, somebody with the file and a printer. Whoever it was, it was money. Money isn't a ladder. At ten past five on the thirteenth the whole village had heard Derek Coaker alive on the end of a rope, and Mandy had been in the shop putting her code in wrong, and Leanne had looked at the clock at eighteen minutes past because she was cross.
Tony Westaway's Hilux was parked across the front of the unit when she got back to Tiverton that afternoon, with Tony in it, and he got out before she'd turned the engine off.
"They've had me in," he said. "Twice. Exeter. In a room with a box of tissues on the table, as if I'm going to cry."
"Are you?"
"Because I drove off. Because Roy Knapman can't sit in a car for two hours without writing down the registration of everything that goes past him." Tony had his hands in his jacket pockets and his shoulders up round his ears. He was fifty-eight and had been beaten by Upcott every summer since 2019. "They want to know where I went."
"Where did you go?"
"That's my business."
"Tony."
"I drove off because if I'd stood on that stair another minute I'd have put him down it." He heard it a second too late, as everyone in Upcott did that week. "I didn't. I want that understood. I went somewhere and I sat down and I didn't go back. That's all you're getting and it's all they got."
He got back in the truck. Before he shut the door he leant out.
"He was right, you know. About my sister's boy. He's no more Moorcombe than you are. I'd have lost the protest." He shut the door, wound the window down. "I'll tell you something else. That old sod rang the best goodnight of his life the day he died, and I had to hear it going up the lane. I could have wept."
He reversed out over the hot-tub man's kerb and was gone.
Ray Northcott was in the churchyard on the Thursday evening, as he was every evening, with a pair of shears, cutting the grass round June's stone with the attention of a man doing surgery. Gill had come up to see to the clock. She went and stood by him instead.
"Funeral's Saturday," he said, without looking up. "Coroner's let him go. Half-muffled, Mandy says. She's done the order of service. She's done everything." He snipped. "She asked would you do the muffles, tomorrow night. She'll come and hand them up to you. She'll not go up there herself."
"She never has."
"No. Frightened of them." Snip. "Funny thing to be frightened of, a bell. It's only doing what you tell it." He sat back on his heels. "I'll ring the six for him. If they'll let me. If anyone'll ring with a Coaker now."
"They'll ring."
"Will they?" Ray looked at the tower. "That goodnight. I keep hearing it. I was on the hall step with a cigarette I'm not supposed to have, and there she was going up, and I thought, he's never rung her that sweet in his life, the old sod. I thought, he's happy. He's won and he's happy." His face folded. "Best he ever rang her, Gill. And then he goes up that ladder."
Martin's study at the Old Rectory had two monitors and a pair of speakers on stands the height of a child, and a framed print of the Whitechapel foundry on the wall, which had closed in 2017 and which Martin talked about as if it were a death in the family. He'd made her a coffee in a machine that took four minutes and sounded like a tractor starting.
"I don't know what you want it for," he said. "I'm not refusing. I just don't know."
"Nor do I."
"With respect, that's not a reason."
"It's the only one I've got."
He found it. A long waveform across the screen like a hedge seen from a train, the whole of Saturday from two o'clock to six: the service muffled through the church wall, the five peals, Moorcombe's fall coming down in a heap at the bottom, a car going up the lane too fast. Then quiet, the blackbirds, a long time of blackbirds. Then, at eight minutes past five, a single bell.
"There," said Martin, softly. He'd listened after all. She could see it in his face.
"Have you got another one? An old one. Of his goodnight."
He looked at her. "I've got last year's. After the competition at Chagford, he came back and did it here. And Christmas Eve." He clicked. "I've got everything. I told you."
"Play me last year's. Then Saturday's."
He played last year's. She shut her eyes. The tenor going up alone in the long light of a June evening twelve months ago, Derek's hands on her. You couldn't mistake it. At every handstroke he held her up, the long wait at the balance, the bell hanging up there at the top of her swing a hair longer than she needed to, as if she was waiting to be told, and then the blow, late, enormous, absolutely him. She'd marked that blow for forty-five years. She could have picked it out of a hundred.
"Now Saturday."
He played Saturday.
The same bell. The same tower, the same blackbirds. She went up the same, slower or faster, Gill couldn't have said. But at handstroke there was no wait. None. The blow came in early, every time, pulled down before the bell had got to the top of herself. Hurried. Snatched.
"Again," said Gill.
He played it again. Then again. The fourth time she opened her eyes and was standing up, and didn't remember doing it, and had her own right hand shut tight over the old scar.
"Gill?" said Martin.
"That's not Derek."