perhaps unconvinced. So she touched her mother lightly on the shoulder to reassure her. She had seen adults do that and it seemed to work. But here it was a silent promise. A child’s promise.
And now, seven years later, 17-year-old Iris Dawson tried to put the memory to the back of her mind as she walked towards the church in the middle of Helmstead. She didn’t realise that sometimes you get a second chance in life. Sometimes you get a chance to put things right.
It was a bright, sunny day when they buried Walter Storey.
The good and the great of Helmstead put on their finest clothes and trudged dutifully to the church to pay their respects to the young man. A man who had been taken too soon. Talking in hushed tones, they moved slowly down the paved pathway, their faces dappled with sun from above the oak trees lining the graveyard. The Reverend Henry Jameson, dressed in full ministerial regalia, was there to greet them and offer them comforting words as they filed into the church.
Iris Dawson stopped by the church gate. She was an eager-to-please and enthusiastic young woman with pale, flawless skin, large blue eyes and a shock of curly red hair that fell in natural ringlets. Currently her face was etched with a deep sense of foreboding, a chill spreading up her spine, as if it was being caressed by icy fingers. After everything that had happened she would rather be anywhere else in the world right now. She certainly didn’t want to go inside. But she knew it would be frowned upon if she didn’t show her face. She opened her small handbag and, being careful so that no one would see, removed a tiny rag doll. It was no more than two inches high, adorned in a battered red-checked dress, one of its eyes missing. A threadbare totem from childhood that had been there through everything. Iris gripped it tightly in her hand, knowing it wouldn’t be visible. She took a deep breath and, without enthusiasm, walked slowly towards the church, offering a tight smile to the reverend as she passed. She hesitated on the threshold, took a deep breath, and stepped inside, her footsteps echoing on the stone floor. Beyond the rapidly filling pews, she could see the coffin, positioned in the central aisle. She edged away from it and found a seat, stoically looking at the stained- glass window ahead rather than the coffin. Thinking about the body would bring the traumatic events of the last few days flooding back into her mind, and she was struggling enough to hold things together without that. She had to focus on the window.
Walter had been Vernon Storey’s eldest son. Vernon was not a well-liked man in the village. His grasping and suspicious demeanour might have made him unpleasant company, but it was his streak of callousness that really made people uneasy. There was something, a strange and intangible something, that festered in him. A dark heart. But most people had liked Walter. Displaying different traits to his father, he was a strong, principled boy, who seemed ready to blossom. Desperate to fight in the war, Walter felt constrained by his reserved-occupation status, which meant he had to stay on the home front. He wanted to ‘do his bit’ for king and country, but had to resign himself to running Shallow Brook Farm with his father. The two of them, with their personalities often at odds, found living and working together a stressful, combative experience. And frankly, given his parental influence, it was a surprise that Walter had turned out as decently as he had. Iris remembered that Walter felt conflicted and uneasy about helping Vernon do certain things that were not morally right; the petty scams and fiddles that he wanted him to take part in. But feeling duty-bound and with his father’s taunts of ‘blood being thicker than water’ he would do them with gritted teeth. The ties of blood were important to Walter, innately enshrined in his conscience. Perhaps unable to see his father’s faults, he strove for validation and praise from the older man. For his part, Vernon recognised this need in his son. But to Vernon it was just another weapon to use to get Walter to do what he wanted.
The crowd settled into the pews, every seat taken, much to the reverend’s surprise. But then this wasn’t quite an ordinary funeral. There were mourners present who hadn’t just come to pay their respects. They knew that Walter had been murdered. They knew a man had been arrested for the crime and was locked up in the sole cell in the nearby police station. That added a frisson to the funeral service that that didn’t usually happen when someone just died of old age. Iris calculated that half of the mourners were present for genuine reasons of sharing a loss, and half were present for the potential spectacle. Murder was unusual in such a small, sleepy village.
Iris sat in the church and listened to Vernon’s tearful eulogy to his son. All the gathered people had their eyes opened to a level of paternal love that they had never suspected before. Apparently Walter had been the perfect son. A clever boy, who had worked hard to make Shallow Brook Farm a success. A friend who had kept Vernon company in the long days since his wife’s passing. Many in the church had to stifle their surprise at hearing such warm words. During Walter’s life, Vernon had rarely offered so much as the smallest compliment, preferring to default to criticism and ridicule to get what he wanted from the boy. But in death, the eulogy of previously unspoken and unguessed words was fulsome. Frederick Finch threw Iris a subtle look of surprise. Were they hearing this right? They both knew that Vernon was the sort of man who would clip his son around the ear rather than say something nice.
But, perhaps predictably, Vernon couldn’t maintain the kind words. The eulogy slowly turned from a glowing tribute to a desire for justice for the man who had killed his son. Iris shifted uneasily in her pew. For Iris, this was a great time of torment. Not because she was particularly close to Walter; in fact, if anything, she hadn’t liked him for the way he would continually needle her and her friend Frank Tucker, the good-natured and kind handyman at Pasture Farm. No, Iris’s torment stemmed from the fact that everyone thought Frank had been the man who’d killed him. It had been a war of words, and then fists, which had escalated between Tucker and the Storeys. Iris wondered if it stemmed from some historical rivalry between the two families, but the last few weeks had seen things get worse. Much worse. And Iris had been caught in the middle of things. She tried to talk reason into Walter. She tried to calm down Frank and stop him retaliating. But she hadn’t been able to stop them. Things had spiralled out of control. Typical men!
On the fateful day that Walter Storey died, Iris had been working on a tractor in a nearby field. She was alarmed to see Frank moving away from the barn, staggering, with cuts and bruises around his face. She could see the state of him. She’d called his name and he’d given her the smallest of glances before hurrying away. Iris couldn’t leave the tractor until she had finished operating the plough, but a few minutes later she’d noticed that Walter was staggering away from the barn. He’d looked battered and bloodied. There was no doubting that a vicious fight had taken place inside. Iris had known she had to check on Frank and see how he was.
Fearing the worst, Iris had finished her work and then ran to Frank’s shed. His sanctuary. She’d been relieved to find Frank sitting down. His brow had been beaded with sweat and there was bruising on one of his cheeks, but apart from that he hadn’t looked particularly injured. It had seemed that Walter had come out worse.
“Are you all right?” Iris had asked.
Frank nodded. “Hope that will be the end of it. That’ll teach him never to creep up on a poacher.” Whereas some men would be full of bravado at winning a fight, he looked ashamed that it had come to this. A quiet, kind man, Frank Tucker would only use violence as a final resort.
But Frank’s hope that the spiral of events might have ended was quashed later that day, when Walter’s body had been found in the barn. Vernon said that he had come searching for his son when he hadn’t returned home and he had made the horrific discovery. He raised the alarm and soon everyone from Pasture Farm was gathered around the barn, trying to console the distraught man. Iris had been there with the other Land Girls, numb and confused. But she couldn’t understand. Why was Walter here? Why was he dead? She’d seen him leave the barn. Maybe he had returned for a rematch and Frank had accidentally killed him. But that didn’t make sense to her. So while the accusations started to fly and people started to wonder where Frank was, Iris knew, with total certainty, that she had seen Walter walk away from the fight. She tried to calm things down and said she’d ask Frank why another fight had taken place. She felt disappointed that Frank would have stooped to physical violence again. It didn’t seem likely.
“Well, it looks as if he did,” Esther said,