The Decoy

by Florrie Palmer

  Like a magnet, Mildred was at her feet, snorting and snuffling, expectant eyes popping, toad-like mouth grinning in the dark wrinkles of the short-muzzled face. Mildred was much spoiled and it was understood she was allowed a biscuit if she stayed on the floor. When younger, the children, who loved their grandmother, used as they were to the luxury of biscuits with chocolate coatings and cream middles, had also taken the occasional Rich Tea to please. While Annie wasn’t looking, most of them were hastily dispatched into the ever-obliging chops of Mildred. These days, they’d had enough of endurance and when offered, they simply said no, though always politely. Eliza slipped most of the biscuit to Mildred, whose eating habits did not make enjoyable viewing.

  “Like the kurta, Mum. Good colour.” Her mother was wearing a coral-pink top.

  “Thank you. Yes, rather cheerful, isn’t it? I got it in a sale last July and it’s proving very useful in this hot weather.”

  Annie was extremely fond of colour. Short of stature and well-covered, she tended to wear bright loose tunics, kaftans, kurtas or tops along with scarves of many varieties and long skirts or smart trousers. Her shoes were usually cheerful shades or, if duller, adorned with buttons, bows or buckles. She generally favoured medium heels to give her a bit of extra height. Today, her shoes were unusual flat slip-ons with thin, multi-coloured stripes.

  Her garden had a similar theme and was something of a clutter of colour. She mixed old-fashioned roses with flowering shrubs and herbaceous plants of every kind, accounting for all the seasons from yellow winter jasmine to autumn bulbs from bright pink nerines to red autumn dahlias. There was always something in bloom.

  Annie noticed how tired her daughter looked, but decided that to mention it would not be helpful. She settled back into her armchair and carefully avoided talking about the state of the company, instead directing the conversation to Juliet’s A-level exams and her choices of potential universities. Juliet was hoping to get into Bristol. She would finish her A-levels by mid-June.

  Having asked how Eliza was enjoying her sculpting course, Annie, unable to resist, let drop how strained Jay seemed. She knew a lot about the man’s history. His childhood had been difficult and had resulted in a reticence he had tried his hardest to contest as an adult. In this, he mostly succeeded, but his exterior generally hid an uneasiness that, despite his best efforts, would appear from time to time.

  It suddenly occurred to Annie that there was something helpful she could do. “Would it help if I slept at the farm to look after Juliet and Holly so you two can take a much-needed holiday?”

  “Thanks,” said Eliza. “Not at the moment. I wish he’d go off on his own for a while.”

  Annie wasn’t surprised by this response. The tension was showing in both their faces. The marriage had been a success until the recent debacle with the company had put excessive demands on it. Jay was proving to lack the emotional strength to deal with it.

  Annie prayed they would find a way through the current mess since both their lives were so tied up with the business. It was also much in her interest that they should. She wanted things to stay as they were. For if Jay and Eliza split up, what would become of Manor Farm? Planning rules meant that the house and the barn would have to be sold as a single property, so she would have to move if they did. After all, she had given them the property on the understanding that she would remain there until her death.

  Mother and daughter chatted for a while until Eliza stood up and said, “Juliet will be home, better go. Sunday lunch as usual?”

  She kissed her mother, adding, “Up to anything scandalous I should know about, Mother?”

  “If you call having Pam Sowerby for a drink at 6.30 scandalous, then scandalous I intend to be, which may include slugging down a bit of the hard stuff while playing chess.” Annie would go a long way for a game of chess.

  “Good on you, Mum. Give her my love.” Eliza blew her another kiss and left the barn with no idea that Sunday lunch would be very far from usual.

  2

  22 June

  If you had been waiting on the Liverpool Street station platform for the 11.44am train that day, you would definitely have noticed the black-haired forty-something woman in the tight-fitting blue dress, the floppy red straw hat and the highest pair of red heels. You might even have recognised Francesca Bianchi from her many appearances in TV dramas.

  Although a pretty woman, Francesca turned heads more for her fame, her flamboyance and her curvaceous figure as she tottered along pulling a suitcase on wheels beside her. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, she had done a long stint on the soap opera, Castleton, in which she had played the much loved bar lady of the local pub. In a sense, she had been playing herself, although the part had not started out that way. As the scriptwriters had grown to know and love the actress, they had written the part to suit her natural outgoing, sexy, dramatic character.

  Francesca had spent the past three nights with her parents in London and was glad to be going home to Heronsford, to Smith’s Cottage and to Thai, her beloved Siamese cat. She was anticipating “tying a few on” in the pub that evening with some of her local pals. Well-loved in the village, her celebrity status made her the local star, a thing she much enjoyed.

  An Italian by birth, Francesca’s restaurateur parents had moved to the UK when she was a two-year-old in 1980. The following year they had opened Fredo’s in London’s South Kensington. The restaurant’s fame had grown until the place had been booked solid daily. The energetic little character of the pretty, funny, dark-haired child with almost black eyes had relished the attention of diners at the restaurant. To the amusement of Londoners unused to seeing young children in restaurants, she had been allowed the run of the place. Growing up an only child in such circumstances had led her first to enjoy, then to seek the limelight in her career. Fortunately, this quest had been coupled with a generous talent for acting at school. Having been taken under the wing of an eager drama teacher who had encouraged her in this direction, she had won a place at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. She had done well there and had picked up a few West End roles including two that had been starring, one receiving an Evening Standard award for best actress in a Shakespeare play.

  Francesca loved acting but aside from that, adult life had not been quite the sparkling event she had hoped for. A marriage at the age of twenty-three and a bad choice of husband had given her a discrete but powerful insecurity that life had hitherto spared her. A good-looking, wild young actor had turned out to be about as self-centred as a person can be. Constantly cheating on her with other women, Tom had finally ditched her for a richer one after only six years. He had left her with a deep resentment and a newly discovered jealous side.

  Blessed with a resourceful nature, Francesca had soon got back on her feet, but boyfriends had come and gone, partly as she never found a man she had loved enough, but partly as a result of her newly formed trust issues. In due course, she had resorted to help from the bottle and in spending more time at Smith’s Cottage, her little thatched number at the west end of Heronsford.

  The two-bedroomed cottage had a pretty garden and was in a one-way lane overlooking open fields to the back. When Tom had a role at the Cambridge Arts Theatre, Francesca had stayed with him in lodgings for the play’s pre-London run of two weeks. The couple had liked Cambridge and, in spite of, or because of its flatness, the area around it. In an impetuous moment when driving through a sprawling village about eight miles south of Cambridge, they had been entranced by Heronsford’s winding lanes and mix of houses from Tudor to Victorian, from ancient thatched cottages to modern estates. When they had seen tiny Smith’s Cottage for sale, explored some more to find a village shop, two pubs and a railway station, it was a done deal. They had bought the delightful cottage as a weekend getaway. Although it had been inexpensive, it had polished off any spare funds they had shared. For a while this had not mattered but when Tom had left, they had divided what was left. Tom had taken the sm
all London flat and she, the cottage. There was always room at her parents’ for when she was in London.

  Although she protested to the contrary, Francesca had a deep inner sadness that since then she had found no-one with whom to have children. When girlfriends suggested she became a single mother, she airily laughed it off saying that the time for such things had passed and that anyway, she was not prepared to give up her career to have a child. And this was true. She had now got so used to her independence that she had put the idea out of her mind.

  The yellow number this evening, she thought. Strongly tanned, she knew she looked especially desirable in that dress. Good-looking Patrick Ryan was going to be there and the two of them enjoyed a secret flirtation that might have led to an affair, had Francesca not been a good friend of his wife Louise. Still, that didn’t stop her adding an extra wiggle to her walk when Patrick was around and as a result of the secret Louise had recently let her in on, she was beginning to think that what had seemed unfeasible might now become a real possibility. And this excited her.

  3

  22 June

  “I’m meeting the usual suspects in the Old Cock this evening.” Bob McKenzie looked directly into his wife’s eyes. “Don’t suppose you want to come, do you, Stella?”

  This was his method of putting words in her mouth, so she had no need to say much except that she’d rather not go. She would just have to sit there as usual while Bob flirted with other women. For Bob, it didn’t matter much since he would do his own thing whether Stella was with him or not. But he would prefer not to have her with him.

  A solid, chunky man who stood around five foot seven with grey eyes and thick mousey-blond hair that curled over his collars and was balding in the middle, Bob had a broad fleshy face, a firm square jaw and above it a wide, thick-lipped, almost effeminate mouth. “Bonker Bob”, as he had been dubbed by amused friends who had watched him seduce woman after woman, had been a mover and shaker on the Cambridge social scene and to a lesser degree in London until he had hit forty years old.

  Then he had bought Heronsford Manor, a beautiful eight-bedroom red brick house built in early Georgian times. When the house had been given to McKenzie’s to market, Bob had immediately snapped it up at a deliberately undervalued price.

  He had put in an indoor heated swimming pool in what was once the conservatory while the room next door had a movie screen on the wall with twenty cinema seats installed. The billiards room still housed a full-size table. There was even a gym installed in one of the old outbuildings. The estate retained two crop-growing fields and a large amount of woodland that encircled the house. Bob loved shooting and was even a fair shot. He had his own winter shoot in the estate-owned Newman’s Wood where the gamekeeper raised pheasants.

  Having bought the manor, Bob had needed a woman to both run the house and to adorn it. Not being one for halves, he had got himself two. A highly efficient live-in housekeeper-cook was soon followed by the ravishing Stella who he moved in to share his “life of a gentleman”. He had met her one evening in a famous London West End nightclub. She was the girl so many men wanted. Using the charm and flashing the money that many females found irresistible, he had wooed and beguiled the inexperienced twenty-one-year-old into falling for him.

  Tall, blonde and a beautiful young Swedish model, Stella had a body that left most men dumbstruck. A stereotype maybe, but a dream one as far as men were concerned.

  Although Stella played the role of adoring, dutiful wife, she had been brought up in a large noisy family and she missed them. But she hadn’t so much fallen as tripped headlong for Bob, and if you fell for him, it was clear you had to accept all that came with him. He was charismatic, charming, cool under pressure, focused, energetic, impulsive and had a hard-nosed toughness along with a natural gift for leadership.

  Stella understood all this as well as being very aware of his possessive, adoring, controlling nature when it came to her. She knew that her husband’s voracious appetite for sex and his love of women might encompass others beside herself, but it was a subject she avoided talking to Bob about. And as for the other women in the village, well, they seemed to have closed ranks against her.

  4

  22 June

  Katie Nicholson stepped into the shower. She turned the taps until the water spouted lukewarm. Why, oh blooming why, she asked herself as it splashed over her dark blonde bob and down her back, does this keep happening? She had been so careful all week to have no more than a glass of red with her evening meal and hadn’t broken her promise to herself except once. But here she was, yet again letting herself down.

  If you had met her you would have understood that for Katie to attempt to keep up with her husband Hamish’s bon vivant enjoyment of food and drink, was daft. His large six foot three inch frame was considerably better able to hold its alcohol than Katie’s five foot three inches. But then, Katie wasn’t the world’s brightest. She made up for this in many respects by finding most things funny, by being an accommodating, loving wife, a good cook and fun to be with. You would call her an outgoing personality and to back this up, she was a great thrower of parties. But deep inside herself, she knew perfectly well why sometimes she drank to excess. She knew too that others thought her a bit thick. She did in fact have a much higher intelligence than she was given credit for, but for her own reasons, found it easier if people didn’t notice. It did, after all, encourage a lack of expectation from others and this helped smooth her path through life.

  When she was six, while she had been sitting in the back of the car, her mother and father had both died in a hideous accident in a motorway pile-up.

  Only mildly injured but in deep shock, Katie had been rescued from the car and taken to hospital to recover. Her grandparents had come to her side and she had ended up living with them for the rest of her unusual childhood. While she had felt loved, she had also felt she had been cheated and had missed out. When her grandfather had died too, she had been certain that death was out to haunt her for the rest of her life, and no amount of counselling once she was older had helped dispel her feeling of doom.

  Her rich grandmother had done everything she could for her, and Katie had never wanted for any material thing. She had been sent to boarding school because her grandmother had the sense to understand that, much as Katie needed her, she also needed to get away from her and learn independence.

  When Katie left school, she had done a cookery course at an expensive cookery school in London while she had shared a flat with some other friends from school.

  There she had met and fallen in love with Hamish. They had fallen into an on and off relationship. The off times had been when Hamish had felt mildly panicked about committing himself to remain faithful to one girl for evermore. He was, after all, a man who loved the girls, and at those times there had seemed just too many lovely ones to have to choose one alone.

  Their fate had been settled when Katie had become pregnant. Whether or not by mistake, no-one was sure. But that she adored Hamish was not in doubt. That he had loved her was not either.

  Anyway, for a good egg like Hamish who could always be relied on and who loved children, it had been a no brainer. They had decided to bring up their child (and hopefully future children) in as rural an environment as they could find. Coming across Wood Farm for sale with McKenzie’s, they had fallen in love with it straightaway. Originally, the smallholding had been part of the Heronsford Manor Estate where Eliza’s ancestor Berkeleys had lived. In Victorian times, her great-great grandfather who had been brought up to expect to take over running the estate, had decided he much preferred landscape painting and collecting butterflies. His failure to keep an eye on the management of the large amount of land had meant that, before long, the family had fallen on what they would have called “hard times”. This had forced the Berkeleys to sell off most of the thousand acres of land and the big house, retaining Manor Farm for the family to live in, along with about sixty acres. The Manor had changed hands a few times sin
ce then and when Bob McKenzie had bought it, he in turn had sold off the Gate Lodge, Wood Farm and most of the remaining acreage at a good profit.

  A narrow dead-end lane, Wood Lane led to the old rear lodge house and beyond it to Wood Farm. This was all the better as far as Hamish and Katie Nicholson were concerned, since they loved being away from people and close to nature. Hamish was a Scotsman who had been brought up in the highlands, so a love of the countryside ran deep through his veins. As its name suggested, the house was surrounded by woodland on three sides. This had been neglected for years and gradually encroached on what had once been the farmyard of the smallholding. When the Nicholsons bought it, they cleared enough of it to make a large garden, a small paddock, and for the sun to reach the house.

  The woods behind them ended at a narrow crop field. On the opposite edge of which was the back of Rooks Wood that was part of Manor Farm. The Nicholsons kept chickens and Hamish had dug a pond on which wild ducks and moorhens had taken up residence. Their ever-growing vegetable garden with two greenhouses was his pride. The couple both loved cooking and experimented with home-made sauces, jams, chutneys and Katie became brilliant at home-made ice creams. Hamish produced delicious fruited gins and vodkas, always popular with their pals. They had even experimented with old-fashioned home-made wines such as parsnip and elderflower, Hamish’s most recent being beetroot. Contrary to what you might assume from where they had chosen to live, they were social beings and often invited friends to stay for weekends as well as befriending others from the neighbourhood.

  Hamish had played rugby for his school and then been to Loughborough University. On the rugby pitch he had been renowned for his courage – thought by some to err on the edge of foolishness – and but for a shoulder injury, he had been tipped to go on to play for Saracens or one of the other big clubs in the rugby premiership league.