Page 49 of His Worst Crime

“Davey wouldn’t have anything to do with it. I was going to do it alone. But Dad woke up and surprised me. I only meant to give him a tap to the head, but he went down like he was dead. And Davey was there in the doorway just as Dad went down. So he saw Davey plain as day. I was wearing a balaclava and gloves, though Dad still suspected it was me. That’s what he claimed later, anyway. But Davey wasn’t wearing gloves. He grabbed the bar off me and threw it out into the paddock. And then he just panicked, grabbed a pack, stuffed some clothes into it, his passport, and left. I told him not to, it’d make him look guilty as hell, but he wouldn’t listen. So, I kept going with my plan. Dad had changed the combination though, and I couldn’t get into the safe. Then I got rid of the gloves and balaclava as I’d planned…”

“How?”

“I dumped them in a tub of oil out in the shed, weighted down with a stone. Then I rang the ambulance and the police, and played stupid. No one accused me. Dad was unconscious. They took him to hospital. Once I was alone, I fished out the gloves and balaclava and burnt them in the incinerator. And that was that. But when Dad got back from hospital, he still knew. He told me he didn’t want to ever see my face on the farm again.

“Davey was never really a suspect, but because he scarpered, it made him look guilty as hell. And when they found the bar with his fingerprints on it, he became a ‘person of interest’ in the case. So I just kept my mouth shut, thought if he’d got safe away in Europe, there was no need for me to go around confessing.”

“You’d let your own brother go to jail for your crime?”

“No, he was free. He’d escaped to Europe.”

“He wasn’t free. He was running from the law.”

“Freer than I am here. Everyone thinks I’m guilty of beating up our Dad.”

“You are.”

Owen said nothing for a while, almost as if he’d convinced himself that he had nothing to do with the crime, and was about to protest his innocence, despite having just confessed. But finally he nodded.

Then a figure darkened the pub’s low doorway, and a uniformed policeman entered. The woman at the bar nodded him over to their table.

Constable Clive Beaton was a portly gray-whiskered man with a red face.

“Ah, I see you’ve met one of our local characters,” he said in a marked Scottish accent, as soon as the introductions were over.

Ramon nodded. “He’s just confessed to the crime out at Ravenscragg Stud,” Ramon said.

Constable Beaton puffed out a huge breath. “Finally, Owen! How long has it taken us to get here, eh?”

Owen said nothing, continuing to stare at his beer with a fixed intensity..

“Finish it,” Constable Beaton said. “There’ll be none of that where you’re going for a while.”

Owen scowled, but shook his head. Instead he pushed the untouched pint of Raven’s Doom across to Jaume. “Here, you are,” he said. “Try it. It’s our local ale, the best in the UK.”

“OK, Owen, let’s go,” Beaton said. “We’ll go over all of that down the station, and get it on paper. And we’ll get you a lawyer. No one you can call to post bail?”

“Only Dad,” Owen said with a sarcastic smirk.

“Well, we’ll see what we can do,” Beaton mused as he ferried Owen out of the pub, one hand on his shoulder.

After they had left, Jaume and Ramon looked at each other.

“So are we finally off duty?” Jaume asked.

At Ramon’s nod, Jaume reached for the pint.

As they were boarding for the flight back, filing to their seats, Ramon came across a pale but sober Simon Howard buckled into a preferential-class seat at the front of the plane. Compared to the last time they had seen him, he looked surprisingly well groomed, his graying hair combed over with product, wearing a white-and-beige check business shirt and brown corduroy chinos. They shook hands.

“See you when we land. We’ll give you a lift to the hospital.”

The older Howard just nodded brusquely, before turning his head to stare out of the window. Ramon and Jaume continued on toward their seats in the economy section.

“Feels like your theory has legs,” Jaume commented, buckling himself into his own seat, after stashing a bag of Cornish pasties he’d bought at the airport into his seat pocket.

“What theory?”

“That your stable boy’s one hundred percent innocent.”