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The old lady began to weep. Robin, who felt desperately sorry for her, glanced around the room for a sign of a tissue.
‘Tumour,’ sobbed Sheila. ‘That’s what he had. They opened him up to find out what it was. Tumour.’
She wiped her nose on the back of her hand.
‘Let me…’ said Robin, getting up and leaving the room. In the small bathroom off the hall, which had an old pink sink and bath, she pulled off a length of toilet roll and hurried back to the sitting room to give it to Sheila.
‘Thanks,’ said Sheila, wiping her eyes and blowing her nose as Robin sat back down on the sofa.
‘Is that when you left for good, Sheila?’ Robin asked. ‘After Brian died?’
Sheila nodded, tears still trickling out from behind the bifocals.
‘And they threatened me, trying to stop me going. They said I was a bad person and they’d tell everyone I’d been cruel to Brian, and they said they knew I’d taken money, and they’d seen me hurting the animals on the farm… I never hurt an animal, I never did…
‘Wicked,’ she said, with a sob. ‘Wicked, they are. I thought he was so good, Jonathan. He said to me, “Brian was nearly better, Sheila, but he wasn’t pure spirit yet, and that’s why he died. You stopped him being pure spirit, shouting at him and not being a good wife.” He wasn’t nearly better,’ said Sheila, with another sob. ‘He wasn’t. He couldn’t see properly and he couldn’t walk right, and they did terrible things to him and then they were yelling at him because he hadn’t collected enough money on the street.’
‘I’m so sorry, Sheila,’ said Robin quietly. ‘I really am. I’m so sorry.’
A loud mew pierced the silence. Smoky the cat had reappeared.
‘He’s after food,’ said Sheila tearfully. ‘It isn’t time,’ she told the cat. ‘You’ll have me in trouble with Next Door if I start giving you lunch.’
Sheila seemed exhausted. Robin, who didn’t want to leave her in this state, turned the conversation gently to cats and their vagrant habits. After ten minutes or so, Sheila had regained her composure sufficiently to talk about her own cat, who’d been run over in the street outside, but Robin could tell her distress still lay close to the surface and felt it would be cruel to press for further reminiscences.
‘Thank you so much for talking to me, Sheila,’ she said at last. ‘Just one last question, if you don’t mind. Do you know when Cherie Gittins left Chapman Farm? Would you have any idea where she is now?’
‘She left not long after Brian died. I don’t know where she went. It was her fault it all happened!’ she said, with a resurgence of anger. ‘It was all her fault!’
‘Is there anything I can do for you, before I go?’ asked Robin, returning her notebook to her bag. ‘Maybe call your neighbour? It might be good to have some company.’
‘Are you going to stop them?’ asked Sheila tearfully, ignoring Robin’s suggestion.
‘We’re going to try,’ said Robin.
‘You need to stop them,’ said Sheila fiercely. ‘We were hippies, Brian and me, that’s all. Hippies. We never knew what it was all going to turn into.’
17
For youthful folly it is the most hopeless thing to entangle itself in empty imaginings.
The more obstinately it clings to such unreal fantasies, the more certainly will humiliation overtake it.
The I Ching or Book of Changes
‘You got a hell of a lot out of her,’ said Strike. ‘Excellent work.’
Robin, who was sitting in the parked Land Rover eating a tuna sandwich she’d bought from a nearby café, hadn’t been able to resist calling Strike after leaving Sheila. He sounded considerably less grumpy than the last time they’d spoken.
‘Awful, though, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Nobody getting her poor husband any medical help.’
‘Yeah, it is. Trouble is, he made the choice not to go to hospital, didn’t he? So it’d be very hard to make a criminal charge stick. It’s not like Margaret Cathcart-Bryce, who was actively asking for a doctor.’
‘Allegedly asking,’ said Robin. ‘We’ve got no corroboration for that.’
‘Yeah, that’s the problem,’ said Strike, who was currently standing in the street outside the Frank brothers’ block of flats. ‘What we really need is something criminal that had multiple eyewitnesses who’re prepared to stand up in court and talk, which I’m starting to think is going to be a bloody tall order.’
‘I know,’ said Robin. ‘I can’t see Sheila’s accounts of beatings and whippings being believed after all this time without corroboration. I’ll start looking for Paul Draper and Jordan Reaney, though.’
