by Lee Child
“There’s a clock on the dashboard. I can see it from here. I’m practically sitting in your lap.”
Eight minutes later they saw a glow in the distance that turned out to be the pub’s spotlit sign. It was swinging in a gentle night breeze on a high gallows. The Bishop’s Arms. There was a blacktopped parking lot with five cars in it and then a row of lit windows. The windows looked warm and inviting. Beyond the dark outline of the building there was absolutely nothing at all. Just endless flatness under a vast night sky.
“Maybe it was a coaching inn,” Pauling said.
“Can’t have been,” Reacher said. “It’s not on the way to anywhere. It was for farm laborers.”
She turned in at the entrance of the parking lot and slotted the tiny car between a dirty Land Rover and a battered sedan of indeterminate make and age. Turned the motor off and dropped her hands off the wheel with a sigh. Silence rolled in, and with it came the smell of moist earth. The night air was cold. A little damp. Reacher carried Pauling’s bag to the pub’s door. There was a foyer inside, with a swaybacked staircase on the right and a low beamed ceiling and a patterned carpet and about ten thousand brass ornaments. Dead ahead was a hotel reception counter made from dark old wood varnished to an amazing shine. It was unattended. To the left was a doorway marked Saloon Bar. It led to a room that seemed to be empty. To the right beyond the stairs was a doorway marked Public Bar. Through it Reacher could see a bartender at work and the backs of four drinkers hunched on stools. In the far corner he could see the back of a man sitting alone at a table. All five customers were drinking from pint pots of ale.
Reacher stepped up to the empty reception counter and dinged the bell. A long moment later the bartender came in through a door behind the counter. He was about sixty, large and florid. Tired. He was wiping his hands on a towel.
“We need a room,” Reacher said to him.
“Tonight?” he said back.
“Yes, tonight.”
“It’ll cost you forty pounds. But that’s with breakfast included.”
“Sounds like a bargain.”
“Which room would you like?”
“Which would you recommend?”
“You want one with a bath?”
Pauling said, “Yes, a bath. That would be nice.”
“OK, then. That’s what you can have.”
She gave him four ten-pound notes and he gave her a brass key on a tasseled fob. Then he handed Reacher a ballpoint pen and squared a register in front of him. Reacher wrote J & L Bayswater on the Name line. Then he checked a box for Place of Business rather than Place of Residence and wrote Yankee Stadium’s street address on the next line. East 161st Street, Bronx, New York, USA. He wished that was his place of business. He always had. In a space labeled Make of Vehicle he scrawled Rolls-Royce. He guessed Registration Number meant license plate and he wrote R34-CHR. Then he asked the bartender, “Can we get a meal?”
“You’re a little too late for a meal, I’m afraid,” the bartender said. “But you could have sandwiches, if you like.”
“That would be fine,” Reacher said.
“You’re Americans, aren’t you? We get a lot of them here. They come to see the old airfields. Where they were stationed.”
“Before my time,” Reacher said.
The bartender nodded sagely and said, “Go on in and have a drink. Your sandwiches will be ready soon.”
Reacher left Pauling’s bag at the foot of the stairs and stepped in through the door to the public bar. Five heads turned. The four guys at the bar looked like farmers. Red weathered faces, thick hands, blank uninterested expressions.
The guy alone at the table in the corner was Taylor.
CHAPTER 60
Like the good soldier he was Taylor kept his eyes on Reacher long enough to assess the threat level. Pauling’s arrival behind Reacher’s shoulder seemed to reassure him. A well-dressed man, a refined woman, a couple, tourists. He looked away. Turned back to his beer. Beginning to end he had stared only a fraction of a second longer than any man would in a barroom situation. And actually shorter than the farmers. They were slow and ponderous and full of the kind of entitlement a regular patron shows to a stranger.
Reacher led Pauling to a table on the other side of the room from Taylor and sat with his back to the wall and watched the farmers turn back to the bar. They did it one by one, slowly. Then the last one picked up his glass again and the atmosphere in the room settled back to what it had been before. A moment later the bartender reappeared. He picked up a towel and started wiping glasses.
Reacher said, “We should act normally. We should buy a drink.”
Pauling said, “I guess I’ll try the local beer. You know, when in Rome.”
So Reacher got up again and stepped over to the bar and tried to think back ten years to when he had last been in a similar situation. It was important to get the dialect right. He leaned between two of the farmers and put his knuckles on the bar and said, “A pint of best, please, and a half for the lady.” It was important to get the manners right too, so he turned left and right to the four farmers and added: “And will you gentlemen join us?” Then he glanced at the bartender and said: “And can I get yours?” Then the whole dynamic in the room funneled toward Taylor as the only patron as yet uninvited. Taylor turned and looked up from his table as if compelled to and Reacher mimed a drinking action and called, “What can I get you?”
Taylor looked back at him and said, “Thanks, but I’ve got to go.” A flat British accent, a little like Gregory’s. Calculation in his eyes. But nothing in his face. No suspicion. Maybe a little awkwardness. Maybe even a hint of dour amiability. A guileless half-smile, a flash of the bad teeth. Then he drained his glass and set it back on the table and got up and headed for the door.
“Goodnight,” he said, as he passed by.
The bartender pulled six and a half pints of best bitter and lined them up like sentries. Reacher paid for them and pushed them around a little as a gesture toward distribution. Then he picked his own up and said, “Cheers,” and took a sip. He carried Pauling’s half-sized glass over to her, and the four farmers and the bartender all turned toward their table and toasted them. Reacher thought: Instant social acceptance for less than thirty bucks. Cheap at twice the price. But he said, “I hope I didn’t offend that other fellow somehow.”
“Don’t know him,” one of the farmers said. “Never saw him before.”
“He’s at Grange Farm,” another farmer said. “Must be, because he was in Grange Farm’s Land Rover. I saw him drive up in it.”
“Is he a farmer?” Reacher asked.
“He don’t look like one,” the first farmer said. “I never saw him before.”
“Where’s Grange Farm?”
“Down the road apiece. There’s a family there now.”
“Ask Dave Kemp,” the third farmer said.
Reacher said, “Who’s Dave Kemp?”
“Dave Kemp in the shop,” the third farmer said, impatiently, like Reacher was an idiot. “In Bishops Pargeter. He’ll know. Dave Kemp knows everything, on account of the post office. Nosy bugger.”
“Is there a pub there? Why would someone from there drink here?”
“This is the only pub for miles, lad. Why else do you think it’s so crowded?”
Reacher didn’t answer that.
“They’re offcomers at Grange Farm,” the first farmer said, finally completing his earlier thought. “That family. Recent. From London, I reckon. Don’t know them. Organic, they are. Don’t hold with chemicals.”
And that information seemed to conclude what the farmers felt they owed in exchange for a pint of beer because they fell to talking among themselves about the advantages and disadvantages of organic farming. It felt like a well-worn argument. According to what Reacher overheard there was absolutely nothing in its favor except for the inexplicable willingness of townsfolk to pay over the odds for the resulting produce.
“You were right,” Pauling said
. “Taylor’s at the farm.”
“But will he stay there now?” Reacher said.
“I don’t see why not. Your big dumb generous American act was pretty convincing. You weren’t threatening. Maybe he thought we’re just tourists looking at where our dads were based. They get them all the time here. That guy said so.”
Reacher said nothing.
Pauling said, “I parked right next to him, didn’t I? That farmer said he was in a Land Rover and there was only one Land Rover in the lot.”
Reacher said, “I wish he hadn’t been in here.”
“This is probably one of the reasons he chose to come back. English beer.”
“You like it?”
“No, but I believe Englishmen do.”
Their sandwiches were surprisingly good. Fresh crusty home-made bread, butter, rare roast beef, creamy horseradish sauce, farmhouse cheese on the side, with thin potato chips as a garnish. They ate them and finished their beers. Then they headed upstairs to their room. It was better than their suite in Bayswater. More spacious, partly due to the fact that the bed was a full, not a queen. Four feet six, not five feet. Not really a hardship, Reacher thought. Not under the circumstances. He set the alarm in his head for six in the morning. First light. Taylor will stay or Taylor will run, and either way we’ll watch him do it.
CHAPTER 61
The view out the window at six the next morning was one of infinite misty flatness. The land was level and gray-green all the way to the far horizon, interrupted only by straight ditches and occasional stands of trees. The trees had long thin supple trunks and round compact crowns to withstand the winds. Reacher could see them bending and tossing in the distance.
Outside it was very cold and their car was all misted over with dew. Reacher cleared the windows with the sleeve of his jacket. They climbed inside without saying much. Pauling backed out of the parking space and crunched into first gear and took off through the lot. Braked briefly and then joined the road, due east toward the morning sky. Five miles to Bishops Pargeter. Five miles to Grange Farm.
They found the farm before they found the village. It filled the upper left-hand square of the quadrant formed by the crossroad. They saw it first from the southwest. It was bounded by ditches, not fences. They were dug straight and crisp and deep. Then came flat fields, neatly plowed, dusted pale green with late crops recently planted. Then closer to the center were small stands of trees, almost decorative, like they had been artfully planted for effect. Then a large gray stone house. Larger than Reacher had imagined. Not a castle, not a stately home, but more impressive than a mere farmhouse had any right to be. Then in the distance to the north and the east of the house were five outbuildings. Barns, long, low, and tidy. Three of them made a three-sided square around some kind of a yard. Two stood alone.
The road they were driving on was flanked by the ditch that formed the farm’s southern boundary. With every yard they drove their perspective rotated and changed, like the farm was an exhibit on a turntable, on display. It was a big handsome establishment. The driveway crossed the boundary ditch on a small flat bridge and then ran north into the distance, beaten earth, neatly cambered. The house itself was end-on to the road, a half-mile in. The front door faced west and the back door faced east. The Land Rover was parked between the back of the house and one of the standalone barns, tiny in the distance, cold, inert, misted over.
“He’s still there,” Reacher said.
“Unless he has a car of his own.”
“If he had a car of his own he would have used it last night.”
Pauling slowed to a walk. There was no sign of activity around the house. None at all. There was thin smoke from a chimney, blown horizontal by the wind. A banked fire for a water heater, maybe. No lights in the windows.
Pauling said, “I thought farmers got up early.”
“I guess livestock farmers do,” Reacher said. “To milk the cows or whatever. But this place is all crops. Between plowing and harvesting I don’t see what they have to do. I guess they just sit back and let the stuff grow.”
“They need to spray it, don’t they? They should be out on tractors.”
“Not organic people. They don’t hold with chemicals. A little irrigation, maybe.”
“This is England. It rains all the time.”
“It hasn’t rained since we got here.”
“Eighteen hours,” Pauling said. “A new record. It rained all the time I was at Scotland Yard.”
She coasted to a halt and put the stick in neutral and buzzed her window down. Reacher did the same thing and cold damp air blew through the car. Outside was all silence and stillness. Just the hiss of wind in distant trees and the faint suggestion of morning shadows in the mist.
Pauling said, “I guess all the world looked like this once.”
“These were the north folk,” Reacher said. “Norfolk and Suffolk, the north folk and the south folk. Two ancient Celtic kingdoms, I think.”
Then the silence was shattered by a shotgun. A distant blast that rolled over the fields like an explosion. Enormously loud in the quiet. Reacher and Pauling both ducked instinctively. Then they scanned the horizon, looking for smoke. Looking for incoming fire.
Pauling said, “Taylor?”
Reacher said, “I don’t see him.”
“Who else would it be?”
“He was too far away to be effective.”
“Hunters?”
“Turn the motor off,” Reacher said. He listened hard. Heard nothing more. No movement, no reload.
“I think it was a bird scarer,” he said. “They just planted a winter crop. They don’t want the crows to eat the seeds. I think they have machines that fire blanks all day at random.”
“I hope that’s all it was.”
“We’ll come back,” Reacher said. “Let’s go find Dave Kemp in the shop.”
Pauling fired the engine up and took off again and Reacher twisted in his seat and watched the eastern half of the farm go by. It looked exactly the same as the western half. But in reverse. Trees near the house, then wide flat fields, then a ditch on the boundary. Then came the northern leg of the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then the hamlet itself, which was little more than an ancient stone church standing alone in the upper right-hand quadrant and a fifty-yard string of buildings along the shoulder of the road opposite. Most of the buildings seemed to be residential cottages but one of them was a long low multi-purpose store. It was a newspaper shop, and a grocery, and a post office. Because it sold newspapers and breakfast requisites it was already open.
“The direct approach?” Pauling asked.
“A variant,” Reacher said.
She parked opposite the store where the shoulder was graveled near the entrance to the churchyard. They got out of the car into a stiff wind that blew strong and steady out of the east. Reacher said, “Guys I knew who served here swore it blew all the way from Siberia without anything getting in its way.” The village store felt warm and snug by comparison. There was some kind of a gas heater going that put warm moisture into the air. There was a shuttered post office window and a central section that sold food and a newspaper counter at the far end. There was an old guy behind the counter. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and a muffler. He was sorting newspapers, and his fingers were gray with ink.
“Are you Dave Kemp?” Reacher asked.
“That’s my name,” the old guy said.
“We were told you’re the man to ask.”
“About what?”
“We’re here on a mission,” Reacher said.
“You’re certainly here early.”
“First come first served,” Reacher said, because the London guy had, and therefore it might sound authentic.
“What do you want?”
“We’re here to buy farms.”
“You’re Americans, aren’t you?”
“We represent a large agricultural corporation in the United States, yes. We’re looking to make investments. And we c
an offer very generous finders’ fees.”
The direct approach. A variant.
“How much?” Kemp asked.
“It’s usually a percentage.”
“What farms?” Kemp asked.
“You tell us. Generally we look for tidy well-run places that might have issues with ownership stability.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“It means we want good places that were recently bought up by amateurs. But we want them quick, before they’re ruined.”
“Grange Farm,” Kemp said. “They’re bloody amateurs. They’ve gone organic.”
“We heard that name.”
“It should be top of your list. It’s exactly what you said. They’ve bitten off more than they can chew there. And that’s when they’re both at home. Which they aren’t always. Just now the chap was left alone there for a few days. It’s far too much for one man to run. Especially a bloody amateur. And they’ve got too many trees. You can’t make money growing trees.”
“Grange Farm sounds like a good prospect,” Reacher said. “But we heard that someone else is snooping around there, too. He’s been seen, recently. On the property. A rival, maybe.”
“Really?” Kemp said, excited, conflict in the offing. Then his face fell, deflated. “No, I know who you mean. That’s not a bloody rival. That’s the woman’s brother. He’s moved in with them.”
“Are you sure about that? Because it makes a difference to us, how many people we have to relocate.”
Kemp nodded. “The chap came in here and introduced himself. Said he was back from somewhere or other and his wandering days were over. He was posting a packet to America. Airmail. We don’t get much of that here. We had quite a nice chat.”
“So you’re sure he’s going to be a long-term resident? Because it makes a difference.”
“That’s what he said.”
Pauling asked, “What did he post to America?”
“He didn’t tell me what it was. It was going to a hotel in New York. Addressed to a room, not a person, which I thought was strange.”
Reacher asked, “Did you guess what it was?”