FLINDER'S FIELD (a murder mystery and psychological thriller) (25 page)

It was Christian Phelps.

‘Oh my God!’ said George. ‘It’s true! It’s all true!’

The high-pitched scream behind him caused George’s heart to all but explode as he turned round to see Sylvia Tredwin bearing
down on him, a long metal pipe held above her head. George managed to raise his arm just in time as the stave came down hard upon him. He heard the crack of bone before he felt the pain that rushed in like water from a burst dam.

He yelled in fear and agony, staggering backing into the figure of Christian Phelps, tripping up over him and falling to the floor. He saw Sylvia Tredwin about to strike him again.

But it wasn’t Sylvia. It was Adam Tredwin, wearing a dress and a long black wig.

‘Adam!’ George yelled as Adam brought the stave up to its full height. ‘Adam, it’s me! It’s me
, George!’

But Adam Tredwin’s eyes were glazed,
unrecognising and feral in their intensity. He brought the stave down hard and it caught George’s head a glancing blow.

George Lee
slumped to the ground in a bright blaze of colour and expected to die.

His head felt like it was filled with a seething tornado of needles. He groaned, aware of something running into his right eye. He wiped it away, st
aring abstractedly at the dark patch on his hand. His mind eventually registered it as blood. It was then realisation flooded in and he gave a start, all pain momentarily stashed into a corner of his brain as panic set in, and he tried to raise himself onto his elbow.

The sight of bare legs and bare feet before him made him stop. He traced the legs up, a dress beginning at the knees, its hem filthy with dried mud and blood; his eyes continued upwards, halting at the sight of Adam Tredwin’s uncompromisingly severe and stony expression as he stared down hard at him. His face was partially hidden by the dark wig, strands of hair sitting stark against his pale skin
, his eyes and lips bearing traces of makeup. His breathing was steady, almost calm.

George’s pain returned with a vengeance.

‘Oh, Christ!’ he said, attempting to move his arm. He was stopped short by another fierce burst of agony. His eyes widened at the sight of his blood-soaked coat sleeve. ‘You’ve broken my arm!’ he hissed through gritted teeth. ‘You’ve broken my fucking arm!’

Adam Tredwin did not r
espond, except to drop the piece of metal pipe he carried. It clattered on the concrete floor, the noise causing George to get jumpy all over again.

‘I’ve gotta see a doctor,’ he gasped. But Adam’s features remained implacable.
‘Adam, it’s me, your friend George. Don’t you recognise me?’

‘Adam’s not here,’ he replied, his voice curiously altered, higher, attempting to be that of a woman’s.

‘Look, I know what happened to your mother, Adam. I know all about her, about your sister. I know why you’re acting like this…’

‘Adam’s not here!’ he retorted, his eyes burning.

George held up his hand, tried to get himself into a comfortable sitting position. ‘OK, OK, I get it. You’re Eva, right?’

‘How do you know my name?’

‘Let’s say it was a lucky guess. I’m not your enemy, Eva. I’m Adam’s friend. He told you all about me, right?’

Adam hesitated, then nodded. ‘He told me about you. How you were the only
friend he had when he was a young boy.’

‘So I’m not going to hurt you, am I?’

‘I guess not,’ he said, his attention wandering away, his restive eyes glancing up at the tall, domed roof of the silo. They could hear the scratching of the crows on the metal above.

‘You’ve got to let me out of here, Eva. I’m hurt. I could bleed to death.’

Adam shook his head. ‘Sorry, George, but I can’t do that. You’ll talk, tell people what I’ve done. I can’t have that. This beast Phelps deserves everything he gets. They both do. You’ll have to stay here for a while, until I’ve finished doing what I have to do.’

‘And what exactly is that, Eva?’

He nodded at Phelps’s fear-soaked eyes. ‘I’m making him suffer, the same way he made my mother suffer, in the very same place they kept her locked away. He’s going to know just how much he ruined our lives and then I’m going to kill him. The same thing he was going to do to our mother.’

Phelps gave a little squeak, struggled in vain against his bonds.

‘Look, I know what they did to her… But you can’t kill him. You’ve got to tell the police. Let him face justice.’

‘And when I’ve killed this swine I’m going to kill
Robert Cowper. I tried but I failed. But I won’t fail a second time.’

George swallowed back his pain,
and the nausea it was bringing on. ‘It was you that set fire to my uncles’ garage, wasn’t it?’

‘I
should have had more petrol. Robert Cowper would be dead right now if I’d been better prepared. But with this one I’ll not make the same mistake.’

Adam Tredwin went over to a pile of debris and came back with a red plastic petrol can.

‘Jesus – what are you going to do with that?’

Adam ignored him and went to stand in front of Phelps. ‘I’d move away from here if I were you, George, unless you want to get burnt.’

Phelps started to utter pathetic, muffled screams, and jerked frantically at his roped hands. The chair was in danger of falling over.

‘You can’t do that!’ said George, horrified.

‘Really?’ Adam bent down to Phelps as George scuttled across the floor, rising awkwardly to his feet, his legs shaking uncontrollably. ‘Did you think it was funny, getting that band to play
The Ballad of Sylvia Tredwin
, Phelps? That was so cruel of you. You knew how it would affect my brother Adam. And attacking his shop like you did, smashing the glass and setting fire to his van – was that designed to scare him away from the village? What else had you got planned for him, eh?’ Adam cocked his head, brushed the long hair from his eyes. ‘Well I’m not as sensitive as my brother. I take things into my own hands.’ He gave an icy chuckle. ‘I’ll bet you thought you’d gotten away with it. After all, it was so long ago, wasn’t it? Our mother simply a mad woman that no one would listen to. Do you know how that affected us all? Do you know what it’s like living with a woman haunted by unspeakable things that happened to her and being helpless in the face of it, unable to do anything about it? But we found out what really happened in Flinder’s Field, didn’t we? We discovered the truth…’ Adam turned to George. ‘And it was all thanks to your father, George.’

‘My father?’ he said. ‘I don’t understand…’

‘He contacted Adam shortly before he died. He wrote him a letter. A very long and detailed letter.’ As he spoke he unscrewed the cap from the petrol can and splashed the fuel over Phelps’s bare legs. The man shrank back in terror, his head shaking wildly. His muffled screams grew in urgency and intent.

‘Wait – stop that,’ said George. ‘Put the can down.’ But Adam didn’t. ‘OK, tell me about the letter,’ he said. ‘Adam, please stop that and tell me about the letter…’

Thankfully, Adam hesitated and the hand holding the can dropped to his side. ‘Did you know that it was your mother who begged your Uncle Robert to do something about Sylvia?’

‘What are you saying?’

‘She demanded he teach her a lesson. She wanted my mother to disappear. Forever.’

‘That’s not true,’ he defended.

Adam raised a brow. ‘She was eaten by jealousy of my unsuspecting mother. All she needed was an excuse. The affair was that excuse.’ His eyes looked to the ground. ‘Except it wasn’t an affair, was it? Your father told Adam that he was simply teaching her to read. When she went missing he had no idea, like everyone else, what had happened to her. He attended the search parties, did his best to find her. He liked her, you see, but not in the way your mother thought. They’d become friends. And mother didn’t have any friends in Petheram. But we all know what happened after my mother was discovered, her emotional instability, the tales she began spinning about alien abduction. Adam and our father lived with that for years, never knowing what really happened to poor Sylvia Tredwin, as everyone took to calling her; they were only aware of the impact it was having on the family, what with her in and out of hospital, the panic attacks, the tantrums, the attempted suicides. Oh, didn’t they tell you about those? There were a few. But she seemed to get better – well, as much as she ever could.

‘But rumours have a habit of growing, refusing to die down.
Rumours started to circulate around the village about an affair between my mother and your father. My dad got wind of it, but there was no real evidence, and that’s when he started to first distrust and then openly despise your father. He was blind to reason, and wouldn’t hear your father’s explanations. But our father was so incensed and proud he was having none of it. Adam told me about the time when you were kids and he invited you round to our house. Remember how father reacted to you? Now perhaps you can understand he didn’t want you there.

‘
Then one day – somehow – your father finds out that your mother’s jealousies and desire for revenge prompted my mother’s disappearance. He intimated it came out in some kind of argument, your mother inadvertently admitting the truth. He said he was horrified by the discovery. But he could not keep the information to himself. He met with my father and told him…’ He began sloshing petrol all over Phelps again. ‘That’s why my father was killed,’ he said bitterly.

George said,
‘By my Uncle Robert? The hit-and-run? He was driving the car?’

Adam grinned, but it was devoid of humour. ‘Is that what you think?
Then you’d be wrong. Your dad came back home and told your mother what he’d done, and so your mother panicked. She said she would drive to our house, try and persuade my father not to make the call, to offer some other kind of flimsy excuse no doubt. My father was on his way to phone the police, walking to the phone box at the end of the lane, when your mother came rushing down the road in her car. But on seeing him something snapped, and she kept her foot on the accelerator and ploughed straight into him. You know the rest.’

‘No, I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it! Not my mother…’

But it all started to make sense now.

‘Your mother arrived home, the car’s wing dented from where she’d hit my father. Your father soon worked out what h
ad happened. He said your Uncle Robert came round to the house and threatened to kill him if he so much as breathed a single word about the hit-and-run – then when that didn’t seem to be working, he threatened to kill Amelia and you. You were a kid, an eight-year-old at the time. Your father knew he meant it. Your Uncle Gary came round to the house later in the evening. He saw something was wrong, and they told him about how Bruce Tredwin had been knocked down by your mother, but that it was a tragic accident. He believed them. Your Uncle Gary agreed to fix the wing and keep quiet about it.’

George’s eyes narrowed. ‘Was
Gary involved in Sylvia’s disappearance?’

Adam shook his head. ‘No. He was
unaware of what his brother and sister had done. But he was guilty of covering up the hit-and-run. He should have gone to the police. But I guess the pull of Cowper family ties extend beyond the law.

‘
So your father, afraid for his children’s safety, kept the secret to himself all this time, staying with his wife and keeping quiet to protect you. Except he couldn’t entirely dismiss Sylvia Tredwin and her two children from his mind, even when they left the village following Bruce Tredwin’s death. He wrote in his letter that he felt guilty and ashamed that he did not have the courage to say anything, either about the true nature of my mother’s disappearance or the death of my father. So he found out where we lived and set up a separate bank account into which he paid regular money, to help support my mother and her children. I guess it helped assuage the guilt, but we never knew where the money came from. We assumed it was the result of some kind of dividend payments from shares or something that dad had once owned. Mother was in no fit state to explain things to us. When mother died the money kept coming in, and then, a few months ago Adam gets a huge windfall of £30,000 and the letter from your father. He started by saying he’d got a serious heart condition, didn’t think he’d have much time left to him, and that it was time to come clean on what really happened to our mother and father.

‘That’s why we came back to Petheram, to seek justice
. So Adam used the money to set up in his garden centre business. He wanted to go to the police, but I persuaded him otherwise. I wanted justice to be of the eye-for-an-eye variety. He always does as I say.’

Adam emptied the last of the petrol over Phelps’ head. The stricken man screwed up his eyes against the stinging fuel.

‘Listen, Eva, you don’t have to do this. You can still go to the police.’

‘Now you sound like Adam,’ she said.

‘Maybe Adam knows best,’ George said.

The petrol can was tossed away. ‘We love each other, Adam and me. We only have each other.’ His eyes began to fill up. ‘We have no one else in the entire world. We never did have…’

‘I know,’ sympathised George, holding out a hand. ‘I know, trust me. You and me, we’re so alike…’

Adam’s watery eyes studied George’s face. ‘We are?’

‘Sure we are. I never had anyone either. People don’t understand us, do they?’

Adam shook his head slowly. ‘No, they don’t.’

‘I understand you better than you think you do,’ George said. He watched as Adam searched for something. It became clear what he was looking for when his eyes landed on a small plastic cigarette lighter standing on the remains of a wooden crate. His slender fingers scooped it up. ‘Adam, Eva is dead…’ he said.

Adam frowned. ‘I’m Eva,’ he said.

‘No, that’s not true, is it?’ George said, looking nervously at the lighter, Adam’s thumb playing with the metal wheel. A tiny spark flew out. ‘Eva died. Your mother killed her, as she killed your stepfather. As she tried to kill you. But you survived, didn’t you?’

‘That’s ridiculous!’ Adam said. ‘I’m Eva!’

‘So where is Adam now?’

‘Home,’ he said.

‘Look, I have someone, a friend I call Cameron. He’s in my head, too. He’s every bit a part of me as Eva is to you.’