“So I noticed.” We had reached the cruiser, where Morrison waited in the driver’s seat, looking a little green. Good. The road had done its worst.
“I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go in the back,” Becker said. He opened the door for me, and I half expected him to put his hand on my head as I climbed in, like they do in the movies to protect the prisoner from getting bumped. It was not a pleasant feeling back there. There were no handles on the inside of the doors.
Morrison grinned at me in the rear-view. “You want to cuff her too, Becker?” he said.
Becker was no more amused than I was. He turned around in his seat to talk to me, his face distorted by the mesh separating us. I leaned forward to remove myself from Morrison’s view. Our faces were very close.
“Tell me about Francy and John Travers,” he said.
Four
The foam-choked howls of starving wolves
are background music—nothing more
when weighed against that drunken man
who staggers past my flimsy door.
—Shepherd’s Pie
“I met Francy and John two years ago at the Shepherd’s Pie barn dance in the village,” I said. I didn’t have to explain about the dance. It was an annual event, a local tradition. The Laingford cop shop always sent a couple of guys out our way on account of it, just to keep an eye on things. Becker had most likely been there himself at some point. Everybody went.
Ruth Glass and Rose Shelley are the lead musicians for Shepherd’s Pie, the folk band that’s been getting so much press lately. I’ve known Ruth since public school, when we were both considered a little strange. I wrote a lot of poetry back then, and Ruth started setting my stuff to music. When it began to pay off, Ruth hired me as her lyricist. I don’t write as many songs for her as I used to, but I like to keep my hand in, because the money’s good and it gives me a kind of secondhand glamour.
The band spends a fair amount of time on the road, touring, but every year around harvest time, Ruth and Rose throw a big party, opening up their barn and roasting a side of beef. They always bring in a couple of kegs of ale from the Sikwan Brewery and lots of people bring their own mickey of sipping whiskey. It gets pretty rowdy, sometimes, but it’s Ruth and Rose’s way of keeping in touch with the community and avoiding what they call the “uppity star syndrome”. It works.
“I had only been there for half an hour or so,” I said to Becker. “It was around eleven o’clock and the party was only just starting to cook. Shepherd’s Pie usually plays a set after midnight, but before that all the local musicians take turns getting up on the platform to jam. Rico Amato was up there playing old fiddle music and there was a crazy square-dance happening, except that nobody around here knows how to do it and nobody was calling it so there was a lot of milling around. It should have been really good energy, but something was wrong.”
“What do you mean?” Becker said.
“Well, you know how a crowd can turn ugly in a second? Like one moment everyone’s best friends and the next moment there’s a fight?”
“Been there. Done that,” Becker said.
“Well, it was like I was watching it change in slow motion. I got there right at the crucial moment when things were okay, then a tension rose in the air, like a smell, near the back door. So I went over to see what was going on.”
“Everybody loves a fight,” Morrison said.
“It wasn’t that,” I snapped, although it had been, a bit. We’ve all got that morbid curiosity gene that makes us slow down when we drive past a road accident, even if we hate ourselves for doing it. Some people keep it in check, but most don’t, including me. But I wasn’t about to admit that to Morrison.
“I went to see if there was anything I could do.”
“Like you’ve got a black belt, maybe?” Morrison said.
“Let her tell the story, Morrison,” Becker said.
“We’ll be here all day,” Morrison said. Becker ignored him and so did I, although I took the hint and got to the point, describing the scene as best I could.
John Travers had been drunk. Really drunk, the blind, dangerous kind that makes some men seem twice as big as they really are. He was staggering around bumping into people, and some guy he’d bumped into had pushed him back. They were getting loud and people were starting to edge away, looking nervous.
I had seen John around—in the hardware store and the A&P, but I’d never spoken to him. He was very good-looking, sort of sulky and sexy at the same time, with a crazy, doanything glint in his eye. I didn’t know Francy then, but I’d heard of her. She was hovering in the background like a palefaced angel, telling him to calm down, to get normal.
She was one of those women you can’t help noticing. She had long, frizzy, white-blonde hair which bushed out from the top of a tiny, fine-boned body, and her skin was perfectly white, like wax. She wore a small diamond stud in her nose. But once you took a look at her, you sort of looked away and then looked back, because the whole left side of her face was a mass of burn scars. Once you see that, it’s hard not to stare.
Everybody knew that something was about to happen.
“Stay back,” some guy said to the people near me. “John’s gonna snap.”
John took a swing at the other guy, throwing himself off balance. He staggered and to make up for it, started roaring like a moose in heat.
The other guy hit back, clipping him on the chin and John went berserk. There was a screech like the sound a cat makes when you step on its tail, and then Francy was in there, clinging to his back and screaming at him to stop.
John acted like he was being bothered by a horse-fly. He shook himself, once, which made her lose her grip. Then he turned around, looked her right in the eye and belted her.
“I’ll never forget it,” I said. “It was the most gut wrenching thing I’ve ever seen. It was as natural to him as breathing. His fist just came round and whacked her. I stopped being scared because I got really, really mad.”
“You waded in, huh?” Morrison said.
“Not really,” I said. “I’m not the fighting type, but when John hit Francy, everyone kind of surged forward. Most people around here, if they see a couple of guys duking it out, they’ll just move back and watch, but if a woman gets hit, they get angry.
“Suddenly I was next to Francy,” I said. “I grabbed her arm and dragged her out of the way just as three guys jumped John. Her lip was bleeding. I asked her if she wanted me to call the—you guys, but she said there was no point. She said she never had the heart to charge him with anything.”
“So this was not an isolated incident,” Becker said.
“Nope. It happened all the time.”
Francy had always been very tough about it. Stoic. I’d tried to do the caring-woman-friend number on her, but she wasn’t interested. She insisted that she could handle it. She hated me butting in.
“So,” I said, “she took me by the hand like a little girl and said ‘let’s get a beer.’ But she stopped to tap some guy on the shoulder and say ‘Don’t hurt him much, just knock him out.’ They did.”
“Jesus,” Becker said.
“I ended up driving them home. John was still passed out, so some helpful guys loaded him into the back of George’s pickup, because the keys to John’s truck had disappeared. Turns out that one of his buddies confiscated them because John was too drunk to drive. He meant to give them to Francy, but he forgot and left.”