Bring Forth Your Dead by J. M. Gregson

her annoyance would have been real, her resentment of his work and his concentration upon it bitter. Now she said with a resignedness that was near to affection, ‘You’ve forgotten, haven’t you? Already.’
    Just too late for him to deny the accusation, it came back to him. ‘Would I ever? You mean the pregnancy tests. You think she’ll hear today?’ He hadn’t organised his thoughts enough to know what he wanted the outcome to be. He was not sure he was ready to be a grandfather yet, though he saw many of his contemporaries as perfectly suited to the role. He thought of Caroline upon his knee, earnestly watching a television serial at Sunday tea-time. So recently, it seemed. Could that happy child be now about to embark upon the long campaigns of parenthood?
    ‘She’ll give us a ring tonight, I’m sure, if there’s any news. I’m off to set up my classroom for my thirty-four little darlings. Just remember you’re a policeman and lock the doors, John. The French window was unlocked again when I came in yesterday.’
    I.ambert’s carelessness about security was a running joke in the family. He watched Christine reverse expertly out of the garage and through the gates, pondering upon his family and the stretching of it into another generation.
    Then the questions surrounding that other family, the Cravens, thrust themselves back into his thinking in a way that was all too familiar. He began to check through in his mind the timetable he had set himself for the day.
    *
    Outside its network of small towns, the Cotswolds can be a quiet place in November. There are few winter tourists; by nine-thirty the rural workers have long been at work and the office staff have poured sleepily into their various centres. The lanes which trace their way through the low hills and wooded valleys are then almost deserted.
    It was unusual at that time of day to see two cars arrive almost simultaneously on one of the most remote of these roads, an ancient highway which had carried the precious woolpacks which made first the monks and then the merchants of this area into medieval capitalists. A narrow road between hawthorn hedges, winding its way between the boundaries of farms which had guarded their independence jealously for centuries. The first car, a BMW, turned carefully off the lane into the cobbled area by a disused barn. Made superfluous by the spread of oil-seed rape over the English countryside in the ‘eighties, the building would no doubt become a desirable residence for someone with no connection with the land when in due course it became a ‘conversion’ in the ‘nineties. For the present, it made an ideal place for a meeting the participants wished to conceal. An aging Ford Cortina, arriving from the opposite direction, turned off the lane to join the BMW within two minutes.
    An observer might have presumed a lovers’ meeting. And indeed, the man who emerged from the first car and the woman from the second were obviously familiar with each other. Though they were muffled against the cold of a raw and sunless morning, it was not difficult to see that the woman was the younger of the two. They checked nervously to confirm they were not observed, then set off away from the cultivated land, on a path which ran, carpeted with leaves, through a wood which still held enough foliage to cut out the gloomy sky above them.
    They did not hold hands, though, this pair, even when they were secure from human gaze. Their talk was desultory and troubled, with long pauses between the exchanges. Their agony of mind was manifest; and understandable, for their theme was the darkest and oldest of crimes. A murder; and the murder of a father they remembered to have loved, whatever disagreements his latter days had brought to them.
    Angela Harrison said, ‘Does the discovery of murder now invalidate the will?’
    Her brother stole a sideways glance at the intense white face beside him. ‘No. The will stands, unless anyone can produce