Beneath the Soil by Fay Sampson Page B

into trouble and you wanted to be there to stop a diplomatic incident. That’s over and above the call of duty, Mum.’ He gave her that bewitching smile.
    â€˜Well, partly. But I have to admit I was curious myself. I know we didn’t have much to go on, but I couldn’t bear the thought that they might pin it on an innocent man because we hadn’t said anything.’
    â€˜You’re forgetting something,’ Dave said morosely. ‘Ballistics. They must know by now whether she was killed with Philip Caseley’s gun.’
    Tom and Suzie stopped dead in the middle of the police station car park. A cold hand closed over Suzie’s heart. How could she not have thought of that? She had an instant vivid picture of Philip Caseley emerging from the footpath at the side of the track, gripping his shotgun. Of the shot that had echoed through the still country air only moments earlier. What, or whom, had the farmer been firing at then? Had Eileen Caseley been killed with that same gun, with the sort of lead shot you would use on a pheasant or rabbit? Or could a shotgun fire a single bullet? Did Philip Caseley have another weapon – a rifle, perhaps? And could she honestly tell the difference?
    She knew an intense frustration that these were questions she could not ask the police.
    It was, DCI Brewer had made abundantly clear, nothing to do with her.
    And yet she felt that it was. She had met a frightened woman in that farmyard. Instead of trying harder to find out what was wrong, she had asked her trivial questions about family history. She had encroached on the hospitality of a woman who clearly had little time or money to spare. Her thoughts had been in the past, and she had allowed herself to close her mind to what was happening in the present, to tell herself precisely what Chief Inspector Brewer thought: that it was none of her business.
    And yet … Was it only that feeling of instinctive alarm for her personal safety that had changed her mind? That crack of dead wood from the trees around the clearing? That sense of someone watching her unseen?
    Still, when she had made that first phone call to the police on Saturday evening, it had certainly been domestic violence she had been afraid of – the apparently obvious conclusion that Eileen Caseley had been threatened by her husband.
    A tiny voice reminded her of that old newspaper report about Richard Day finding his neighbour’s wife dead on the kitchen floor. Her fleeting thought that he might have been in some way involved. She pushed the thought away.
    If Philip Caseley had been opposing someone who was prospecting for minerals, that might make him a target. But that was very far-fetched. And why should it put Eileen in danger? Dave was right; if the police were still holding Philip Caseley, it must be because they knew she had been shot with his gun.
    She shook herself back to the present.
    â€˜Sorry, folks. I’ve got to fly. I’m an hour late for work already.’

EIGHT
    T hree weeks later, Millie looked up from leafing through the local paper.
    â€˜Here, Mum, this’ll interest you. There’s an announcement of the funeral of that woman who was shot.’
    She passed the paper over, pointing to the place on the page.
    Suzie read the brief details. Two p.m. at the church of St Michael in Moortown. No flowers. Donations to the Royal Agricultural Benevolent Institution. There was no mention of the dramatic way Eileen Caseley had met her death.
    There was a sad finality about it. It was as though all the phone calls and the statements to the police, that search in Saddlers Wood, had been an attempt to stave off the reality of what had happened. As though they could discover something that would reverse the terrible truth.
    But holding the paper in her hand, looking at the black-and-white notice of the funeral, brought it home in all its inevitability. Eileen Caseley was dead. Murdered. They would never again see