Blood had spread out across the snow from the young man’s head. Rich wine red on the dazzling white. The wind whipped up little eddies of ice while the four children, noticing his face, twisted in a rictus of pain. His hands were bound, as were his bare feet. The snow had fallen heavily overnight, covering any footprints that might have been left by his assailants.
The children walked down the hill to the village to tell their parents. The fathers gathered, with the village doctor and the Major, who stood in place of a village squire at high days and holy days. Even days such as this. We stood in the snow on the hilltop, our feet placed over the children’s prints. It was a pity the children had found him. A few more days, and the body would have been covered with snow. It could have lain there for weeks, soaking in the melting ice water, being eaten by animals. Changing into something unrecognisable. But it had happened, he had been found, and we had to deal with it. We carried him down to the village on a hurdle, covered with a tattered piece of tarpaulin. Our representative of law and order, a dour, stalwart policeman, obligingly looked away, seemingly transfixed by a solitary rose that bloomed in his garden, in the snow.
We took the body into the coldest place we knew, the crypt underneath the church. The vicar protested, but it was a token, nothing more than a gesture to his vocation. He knew that frozen, twisted face, as did we all. We had a discussion in the school that evening. Every adult in the village gathered in the dark schoolroom while the wind whispered against the windows. All light was extinguished to give anonymity, so any supressed consciences would be prevented from rising to the surface and condemning all of us. But there was nothing to fear as our decision was unanimous, with not one abstention or protest.
In the morning several people kept our village policeman busy. A lost dog was invented and he happily went along with the ruse, even while the dog could be heard barking inside its house. A group of us, all fathers, went into the cold crypt to carry out our plan. The body was stripped and carefully washed. Just as though he had been someone who was cared for, missed, mourned, or regretted. We wrapped him in a winding sheet, taken from the store cupboard in the vicarage. Then carefully, even reverently, we laid him in one of the ancient stone coffins. We placed him on top of the crumbling bones of a long-forgotten squire of the parish and replaced the heavy cover stone over them both. His clothes were burned in a brazier in the Major’s garden. Every scrap that could identify him was destroyed.
If the vicar preached a sermon of forgiveness and forbearance, we could forgive him. He saw the same image when he closed his eyes at night, as we all did. Three children. The vicar’s precious, delicate daughter. A farmer’s eldest son, who would have inherited all. And the only child of a widow, her son, her comfort. Hanging by the neck until they were dead from a beam in the old mill, and left there, dangling, for us to find. We knew who had done the terrible thing. Without proof or evidence no one could denounce him. But we knew, the village knew, and we take care of our own. Even those who live among us all their lives and take our children and destroy them. Even they should have some kind of justice, albeit a rough kind Even they.