by Rebecca King
“I didn’t trust Curtis,” Graham replied. “I told her to protect herself because Curtis was relatively unknown to us, and that farm is worth an absolute fortune. Her inheritance – the farm and her money - is looked after by me as head of the family. It has nothing to do with Curtis Bennion, even though he is her husband. There is a clause in her grandmother’s will that means the money can never be touched by her husband should she ever marry.”
“Is there much left? Money, I mean?” Justin asked.
“Enough to see her through to the end of her days,” Graham replied, naming an amount that made Justin look at him in surprise.
“Geraldine took my advice because of the reaction she had received at the solicitor’s office. She wasn’t married then, but so desperately wanted the farm that she was willing to do anything she could to get it.”
“So, she got you to help her purchase the farm, then she married Curtis,” Justin murmured thoughtfully.
“She only receives ownership of it when I die. Of course, we had hoped she would be a happily married woman by then, and it wouldn’t be a problem. We never anticipated something like this happening to her.”
“So, Curtis cannot take over ownership of the place, even though he is her husband?” Justin repeated.
Graham nodded.
“Why have you allowed him to stay at the farm then?” Justin asked.
“Because I don’t know if Geraldine is coming back,” Graham replied honestly. “If she doesn’t, we will have to get the solicitor to make Curtis leave and sell the farm. Until then, we are going to carry on as we were and hope she comes back at some point.”
Justin watched the old man shake his head sadly. “You suspected something like this was going to happen, didn’t you? Why did you give your blessing for the wedding then? Did the man not ask you for your daughter’s hand?”
“He did, and I told him I had my reservations. He promised me that he would take care of her, and meant to do right by her, but there was something in his manner that just didn’t ring true. During the interview, the man was belligerent, and had an attitude that would never have been allowed in the army. I warned Geraldine to be careful. The man’s family aren’t rich. He didn’t bring anything to the marriage other than his knowledge of farming. Now, two years later, having pestered Geraldine to sever her ties with us, and hand the rest of her fortune over to him because he is her husband and should be the one to control it, she suddenly vanishes. It’s too convenient, if you ask me. Now, there are rumours in the village that he is tupping that parlour maid of theirs.”
“Do you believe it?” Justin asked.
“Aye, I do. She is a sly one, that one, and wouldn’t shy away from selling herself to the highest bidder if it meant she could improve her standing.”
“Father, you mustn’t speak of people like that,” Vanessa gasped in shock.
“Well, I am not going to lie,” Graham snorted. “She would, and you know it.”
“Maybe so,” Vanessa replied looking hesitantly at Justin.
“You don’t mind me being frank with you, do you?” Graham asked.
Justin was pierced with a demanding look.
“Do you?” Graham squinted suspiciously while he waited for Justin to answer.
“No. I need you to be open and honest with me,” Justin replied, and watched the elderly man sit back in his seat with a satisfied nod. “I don’t get offended easily. I need to get to the truth, so the more brutally honest you can be the better we will get on and the faster results we will get.”
He asked them both several questions about Geraldine’s last meetings with them. When he had finished he too was starting to suspect they were right in thinking Geraldine’s husband was responsible for her disappearance. How he went about proving it, though, was going to be difficult without finding a body. That was something he had no intention of discussing with either of them but would mention it to his colleagues later that evening.
“Mr Silverton-”
“Justin,” he interrupted.
Vanessa’s gaze flew to his. Their eyes met. A flurry of awareness settled deep in the pit of her stomach. It was startling how swiftly it appeared out of nowhere and upended all her emotions.
“Justin,” she murmured softly.
It took her a moment to realise she was staring. When she did, she shifted uncomfortably and sucked in a huge, fortifying breath as she looked about for inspiration for something to say.
“Justin has several friends with him, Father,” she began. “They are all working to capture the kidnapper and are going to look into Geraldine’s disappearance while they are here.”
Vanessa had no idea why it was important to make a clear distinction between Geraldine’s disappearance and the recent spate of kidnappings, but it was – to her – important that everyone understood the circumstances were different.
“I have offered him – them – the use of next door should they need it. That isn’t a problem, is it?” Vanessa asked, inwardly relieved that her father seemed to like the tall, dapper gentleman who had shaken her world.
“Of course not,” Graham replied stoutly. “They can’t stay in the tavern because nobody will leave them alone. It wouldn’t do any good for them to stay with that damned fool Weeks either. Of course they can use next door.”
Vanessa nodded, and heaved a sigh of relief. “I will go and get the key.”
Taking this as his cue to leave, Justin rose and promised to keep Graham updated on what they found out. He told him how many Star Elite men there were and that they would be keeping a watch on the neighbourhood, fully armed, while they in the village. After securing a promise from Graham that if he saw anything he would report it to them at the first opportunity, Justin took the opportunity to leave.
Once at the door he paused and looked back at Vanessa’s father. “If you don’t mind my asking, what do you have against Weeks?”
Graham snorted with such disparaging affront Justin knew whatever Weeks had done was bad. Graham began to yank on the blanket and huffed a bit more before he belligerently glared at Justin.
“The damned idiot was in the navy, for God’s sakes.”
Justin, lips twitching, nodded his understanding, and stepped back to allow Vanessa to precede him out of the room and to the front door.
“Sorry about that,” Vanessa felt compelled to murmur once they were in the hallway.
“Don’t worry about it,” Justin replied with a smile. “He is a character, isn’t he?”
“He is bull-headed, strong willed, can be exceptionally grumpy at times, and is as stubborn as a mule but he is always open and honest. Almost too open, if you know what I mean?”
“Is Geraldine like that?” Justin asked.
Vanessa nodded.
“Does it trouble you? The arrangements with the farm, that is?” Justin asked curiously.
“No, it doesn’t.” Vanessa felt him staring at her and heaved a sigh. “I just need to find out if there is anything else he hasn’t told me.”
“If there is let me know,” Justin murmured. “Meantime, stay away from the farm, just in case Curtis is the kidnapper.”
Vanessa sighed but didn’t argue with him. There was no point telling the man she had no intention of following orders from anybody, including him.
Justin looked at her sharply when she fell suspiciously quiet. He wanted to issue her a few last words of caution but was drawn to just how confined the hallway had become. Its walls seemed to have enveloped them in an intimate silence that removed the outside world and left the two of them alone, together, in a confined space. His gaze fell to her lips. His thoughts stumbled to a halt. Words failed him.
“Are you all right?” Vanessa asked when he kept staring at her blankly, as though he had never seen her before in his life.
Justin jerked. It took a few moments before he could remember what he had been doing before she had hijacked his thoughts.
Eager to be away from the emotions she made him feel,
Justin yanked the door open.
“Let me know if you find anything out,” he ordered with a stern air of command that made her staring at him in surprise.
“Mr Silverton?” Vanessa called after him, wondering what had brought about such a swift change in his demeanour.
Justin reluctantly stopped beside the front gate and turned to face her. He was immediately hit with the vision of her standing in the doorway as she waved him off to work. It brought forth a flood of thoughts and, yes, a yearning that shocked him.
“You forgot the key,” she informed him quietly.
“Thank you,” he grunted when he took it off her. He turned around and began to walk away only to stop and turn to face her one last time.
“Stay safe,” he murmured quietly.
Vanessa watched him stomp off as though the Hounds from Hell were nipping at his heels and wondered what he knew that she didn’t.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Vanessa watched the sunrise chase away the darkness of the night and braced herself for what lay ahead. She visibly shook with nerves but refused to allow it to dissuade her. She had to go to the farm and search it. All right, so Justin and the men from the Star Elite had said they would do it but she really didn’t believe they had meant what they had said or understood the urgency. Today was Thursday – market day – the day when Curtis went to market and on to the tavern where he would drink until closing time. There would be no other opportunity to search the farm for another week. Vanessa knew she would go quietly out of her mind if she had to wait another few days to find answers to her questions.
“If it is devoid of your belongings, Geraldine, Curtis has to have had something to do with your disappearance. He will have to face justice,” she whispered. “I have to find some way to prove his guilt but will cross that bridge when I come to it.”
Quietly, she let herself out of the house. She paused and looked about the empty garden. Her heart began to hammer in her chest. She wasn’t usually afraid of the dark, but after the kidnappings she wasn’t at all comfortable being outside, all alone, in the quiet of the early morning. Even the presence of several burly men next door did little to quell her rising fear as she began to make her way across the garden. She wished now she had thought to carry a weapon of some sort with her – just in case. But it was too late to turn back now.
If I do, I might not leave the house again, she thought with a shiver.
To keep her mind off what she was doing, Vanessa allowed her thoughts to wander. She swiftly wished she hadn’t when they instinctively turned to Justin.
“He doesn’t belong here,” she whispered into the cold, night air. “As long as I remember he will leave just as soon as they have caught the kidnapper there should be no problem. He can go his way and I can go mine. Simple.”
Deep inside where it mattered, though, she knew it wasn’t simple at all. It was very, very complicated.
Justin yawned widely and heaved a sigh. He had never been so bored in his life. Bored. Tired, and thoroughly confused. If there was one thing he loved in life it was a good mystery. If there was one thing he absolutely hated, it was being forced to consider making changes to his life that he didn’t want. In particular, changes like moving home and relocating to a new area or being forced to undertake jobs for the Star Elite he really didn’t want to do, like spending a sleepless night keeping watch over a deathly silent village where absolutely nothing happened.
He had to wonder, somewhat cynically, whether the people who had been kidnapped hadn’t actually been kidnapped at all but had left of their own accord because they couldn’t stand the silence anymore. Festering away in a quiet little nothing sort of place like this was something he was never going to do. The mental image of Graham Clarkson was more than enough to give him the chills. While the man was nice and friendly, he had reduced his life to existing, not living. It was not something Justin would ever allow himself to be reduced to.
“Not while I draw breath,” he promised himself devoutly.
He was a man of action. A man who had spent his life skirting close to death on more than one occasion and revelled in it. Justin rose to the challenge called life and had no qualms about what he needed to do to succeed. It hadn’t done him any harm either. He was financially well off, and could afford, well, whatever he wanted. He had a nice, fairly large house all to himself; a space to call his own he could do what he liked with. Not only that but he had a good job that allowed him to travel, often for days at a time, and an excellent group of friends he would, and often did, trust with his life. The only thing he was missing was a wife, and a family, but he had no interest in either of those, so it was hardly any great loss.
“One never misses what one never has,” he murmured.
As far as he was concerned, his life was just the way he liked it. He was happy to spend the rest of his days as he was. There was no need to change or relocate to a dratted little nowhere sort of place like this, and no reason for him to consider that anything might be missing from his life.
But he was.
He had spent the long and painfully empty hours of the night contemplating what it might be like to finish a job like the one, so he could go home, to his house occupied by a wife and maybe a child or two. While it was something he knew he didn’t want, he hadn’t been able to get the thought out of his mind. It had started to haunt him – to the point he was now crabby, out of sorts, and ready to tear out his own hair.
Silently, he paced through the empty house. It was so very quiet he wondered if he was the only person left in the village. Not a sound could be heard. Even the floor boards beneath his boots didn’t creak. It was unnerving, even for him. He wandered aimlessly from one room to another until he reached the back of the house. Once there, he paced restlessly around the empty room, purposely keeping his gaze averted from the house next door or trying to. Inevitably, as it had done throughout the long, long night, he was drawn to it anyway.
That one glance made him pause. He frowned. Stepping back a little so he was hidden by the half-open shutter, Justin studied Vanessa’s garden carefully. Had he just imagined that slight movement of shadows beside the outbuilding? His heart lurched when he saw the tell-tale shape of a hooded figure dart along the privet hedge, away from the house and toward the end of the garden.
“Now, who are you?” he murmured aloud.
Wasting no time, Justin swivelled around and raced to the door. He didn’t stop to notify the others he was going. He had his gun and could use a shot to alert them if he encountered a problem, but it would have to be a big problem for him not to be able to deal with the night-time intruder on his own.
“Damn it,” Justin growled, yanking the door open and slipping out into the night.
He hated the fact that the intruder had gotten so close to the house while he had been on watch, and he hadn’t seen a damned thing. He could only hope the intruder hadn’t managed to get into Vanessa’s home.
Determined to find out for himself, Justin lengthened his stride. Circumnavigating the garden posed no problem whatsoever, but he hunkered as low as possible anyway so that nobody would see him. Everything was eerily still and silent as he made his way toward the small, open field at the end of the garden. Once there, he paused and scoured the area. At first, he couldn’t see anything, but then the shadows shifted again.
When he watched the cloaked figure dart into the trees in the far corner of the field, Justin began to jog. With one last thoughtful look at the houses, he began to plot how he was going to take the man down, and what he was going to do with the man when he did.
Vanessa’s heart was pounding by the time she reached the hillock overlooking the farm. At first glance, all was still and quiet; a bit like the night really. But it was almost too quiet. Every scuffle of movement seemed a thousand times louder than it truly was; each crackle of a breaking twig like gunfire in the cold, night air. As a result, her nerves were frayed, and her worry had continued to grow so much that it was all sh
e could do to stay where she was and not turn around and run straight home.
“I have come this far,” she whispered, somewhat relieved to realise that dawn had continued to edge its way across the horizon, and now cast everything in a greyish haze.
Focus on what you are here to do, Vanessa. There is no reason for you to be afraid, she reminded herself, firmly ignoring the nagging voice of reason that warned her nobody knew where she was. If anything did happen to her nobody would have any idea where to start to look for her.
A bit like Geraldine, really, Vanessa thought. It forced chills down her spine.
She paused for a moment and made herself focus all her attention on the farmhouse nestled to the left of the small group of buildings before her. The tiny yard at the back of the property stood empty, surrounded in a low stone wall which widened as it extended beyond the yard and to the back of the stable-block which ran to the south-west of the property. The stable-block formed one wall of a courtyard, the buildings of which formed a square in the middle of which stood an old hay cart. From a distance, the place looked unkempt and unlived in. For a moment, and not for the first time, Vanessa had to wonder why her sister had loved the place so. It was remote, isolated, and had nothing going for it whatsoever other than its distance to the local villages. But Geraldine had loved the small house she had called home.
“She just hadn’t loved the man she had shared it with,” Vanessa murmured aloud.
Although Geraldine had never said as much, Vanessa suspected that her sister had never truly cared for the man she had called her husband. He was someone who could run the farm she wanted to live on. Geraldine had needed Curtis’s expertise, for what it was, to help her. She just hadn’t wanted him. As far as Vanessa was concerned, that had been Geraldine’s downfall, and had ultimately led to her disappearance.
It was enough to reinforce Vanessa’s own belief that she would truly be better off if she didn’t have a man in her life; a man like Justin. He was trouble with a capital T, she knew it. He could easily upset one’s train of thought, as he had when she had first met him in Weeks’ study. The last thing she wanted was for him to do such a thing on a regular basis. It would undoubtedly lead her to the same situation Geraldine had been in; stuck in an unhappy marriage with a man who didn’t care about her.