The handle of Long John’s walking stick met its target with a loud crack. The ball soared away, speeding up and over the fence in a swift parabola, landing with a merry—but surprisingly light—thump on the ground beyond.
“Coo,” said Snipey. “Said you could do it, dint I?”
“Have another go,” begged the admiring Budge; and would immediately have scurried forth to gather the remaining balls visible against the grass, had he not been halted in his eager tracks by the unexpected sight of strangers emerging from the distant bushes and running towards the fence. Running towards the fallen golf ball ...
There was a flash of light as the first man to reach the ball bent and made severing motions with a pair of scissors as the second man fumbled with something in mid air above his head. Both men straightened and gave the thumbs-up signal.
Cutler merely straightened. While Budge and his friends had been watching the antics of the running men, he, too, had bent, fumbling once more with his shoelace. As the signal was given, he began to pull, repeatedly, hand over hand, at something none of the others could see ...
Not, that is, at first. But as his hands moved faster, Snipey, Budge, and Long John focused on the space between them and saw a faint, threadlike gleam stretching upwards. They looked down and saw that same gleam, a thread in ever-growing coils, spiralling to earth about his feet as he pulled—and pulled—and pulled.
“Blimey!” said Budge. He spoke for them all.
The gleam grew stronger: the thread had become a line. And still Cutler pulled, faster and faster; and the coils about his feet spread wider and wider. The line became a cord; the cord became a rope.
The rope became a ladder, knotted with handholds ...
And Cutler was away, climbing, up and over the fence, tumbling on the freedom side into the arms of the men who now, with him between them, ran even faster than before back to the bushes, from which came the sound of a car engine at full speed, and the sudden squeal of tyres, and the slamming of doors, and a triumphant pip-pip-pipping of a horn ...
And Cutler was gone.
chapter
~ 2 ~
IT WAS NOT altogether a happy new year.
For some people, of course, it could well have been one of the happiest mornings of their lives. For Major-General Sir George Colveden, KCB, DSO, JP, this was not, however, the case. He lay in bed with his eyes closed, listening to the rain as it lashed against the windows, and wincing; wincing also as he listened to the sadistic clatter of the little man who tapdanced just behind his eyeballs wearing metal-tipped, hobnailed boots.
The baronet essayed a groan. He ventured to open his eyes the merest fraction of a crack. The little man at once stopped dancing to produce from somewhere a miniature longbow and a quiver of red-hot arrows, which he proceeded to loose in distressingly accurate sequence towards the top of Sir George’s skull.
Sir George closed his eyes again. He sighed. He dragged a feeble hand from beneath the bedclothes and raised it weakly to his fevered brow. He managed another groan.
He received no response. He took a deep breath, forced his eyes farther open, and turned his head—very gently—in the direction of the neighbouring pillow, on which the soft, waving brown locks of his spouse should have been tumbled in sleep: or rather, in drowsy waking, in readiness to administer such sympathy as he required.
He blinked. Meg wasn’t there—must be later than he’d thought. Light showing through the curtains, come to think of it. Time to get up ...
“Ugh.”
Or maybe not. His eyelids drooped again. Hammer and tongs inside his head this morning. His own fault, he supposed, but New Year’s Eve only came around once every twelve months, dammit. Had to celebrate in style—proper toasts, and so on. Just seemed to have lost count, somehow ...
In the distance, he could hear the welcome clatter of a breakfast kitchen. His stomach lurched. Maybe, after all, not so welcome. Not breakfast, just black coffee. Strong. With sugar. Aspirin, too, perhaps. Meg would see him right: a few minutes more, and he’d feel a new man. Ready for anything, raring to go ...
Go? Where? The breakfast clatter was suddenly drowned out by a further onslaught of rain on glass: heavy, vicious drops, driven by the single-minded wind from the north, icy cold and splintered with hail. Sir George groaned again. Sort of rain they’d had every day for dashed near a whole week. Fields flooded—waterlogged, anyway. Impossible to plough, with the tractor up to its axles in mud as soon as it got through the gate. Could always do a spot of hedging, of course, but hedging was a skilled job: easier ditching, though with the ditches full of water that was no joke. Up to his knees or deeper, half the time. A wonder he wasn’t dead with pneumonia instead of ... well, half dead. With a hangover: call a spade a spade. Or—talk of ditch-clearing—a billhook ...
Sir George managed a chuckle, and it didn’t hurt as much as—for one dreadful moment when it was too late to stop it—he’d been afraid it might. Heartened by the little man’s apparent loss of Terpsichorean fervour, he opened his eyes again. He gulped, and breathed deeply, but left them open. He raised his head from the pillow to gaze in the direction of the curtains, through which a grey, wintry light made its shadowy way. Yes ... time to get up.
“George, you made me jump.” Lady Colveden turned from the toaster to stare at her husband, who had eschewed his ordinary shoes for soft-soled, blessedly silent slippers. “Coffee or tea? And I’m making more toast, if you’d like it. Nigel and I have been awake for hours.”
“Minutes, she means.” Sir George’s son and heir popped his head through the serving hatch to grin at his honoured parent. “Happy New Year, Dad. Mother’s already told me how you saw the old year out in style at the admiral’s party.” Sir George tried to frame a suitable reply, and shuddered with the effort. Nigel’s grin mingled sympathy and amusement for the folly of his elders. “We enjoyed ourselves at the Young Farmers, too, thanks for asking. Er—shall I pop upstairs for the aspirin? I know just how mean a pink gin the Buzzard can mix.”
Sir George closed his eyes. Memories of the bartending skills of his friend, Rear Admiral Bernard “Buzzard” Leighton, were returning in horrid detail as the blood began to flow faster through his arteries and the supply of oxygen to his brain increased. He achieved a monosyllabic reply which Nigel interpreted as a vote of thanks, and shuddered again as he heard his son’s feet thunder along the hall and up the stairs to the bathroom overhead, where a series of bangs and rattles indicated that the future baronet was having trouble with a cupboard door.
Ten minutes later, Sir George was in his usual place at the head of the dining table, drinking his second cup of black coffee and venturing to nibble (warily) at a slice of unbuttered toast while he turned the pages (very gently) of Farmers Weekly. He had—as the undutiful Nigel pointed out—to get into the right physical and mental state for the rigours of the working day to come ...
“Though what else we can profitably do until the rain stops besides clear ditches and lay hedges, I’m not sure. Bang a few nails in the odd loose tile, I suppose, even if going up a ladder on a day like this isn’t exactly a bundle of laughs.” Nigel glanced at his mother as his father, who had endured hammering enough already that morning, winced.
“Of course, if we had a team of heavy horses, we could always clean the tack ...” Lady Colveden had more than once expressed a sentimental yearning for the days of jingling harness and plume-footed majesty working their way across freshly turned furrows. Her husband and son had always reminded her that horses were hard work, and they were running the farm for profit, not out of some misplaced sense of nostalgia; her ladyship had countered this argument with one of her own, that there was bound to be a profit in horses, if they only thought about it. In the end.
“From the end, you mean.” Nigel had choked over his coffee, while Sir George chuckled behind his newspaper. “Were you thinking simply of your herbaceous borders, Mother darling, or did you have some farsighted scheme to bag the stuff up and sell
it from door to door?”
“I don’t see why not,” returned his mother, pouring herself another cup without, unusually, offering to help either her son or her spouse. “Well rotted, of course, and I didn’t mean selling it, but using it for—oh, raffle prizes and things. You know how people are forever dropping by the forge with buckets when Dan Eggleden’s been shoeing. And it wouldn’t just be my borders, of course, but people used to spread it on their fields all the time in the old days—think of the saving on fertiliser. You know,” she added with a quick glance at the far end of the table, and the upheld broadsheet spread of a breakfast Times, “how your father’s always grumbling about bills.”
“Always grumbling, full stop,” came Nigel’s prompt revision. “Farmer’s privilege. Practically the first thing we were taught at Wye ...” But the alumnus of the celebrated agricultural college had an unusually thoughtful note in his voice as he spoke, and this thoughtfulness had continued, on and off, for some days afterwards.
“Horses,” he said now, “might be able to get over heavy ground rather more easily than a tractor, I suppose. There isn’t much chance of this rain letting up, never mind what the barometer says.”
“I can’t think what’s got into the wretched thing.” Her ladyship shook her head. “If it was human, I might have said it was suffering from—from the same as your father,” she amended hastily, as Farmers Weekly rustled with indignation.
“Decidedly under the weather,” came Nigel’s ambiguous gurgle. “It’s been set fair,” he went on quickly, “for the last week, at least. Do you suppose someone’s dropped an atom bomb somewhere?”
Farmers Weekly came down with an exasperated scrunch. Sir George rolled his eyes and groaned. Her ladyship shuddered.
“Nigel, don’t joke about such things.” Bombs, atomic or otherwise, were currently a sore point with Lady Colveden. Her nerves, she maintained, were still quivering from the recent shock of having a chance-disturbed World War II hand grenade blow up the oldest oak on the Rytham Hall estate. “It’s far more likely to be statistics.” Her menfolk blinked in startled unison. She ignored them. “The earliest frost, you know, or the hottest day, or the heaviest rainfall. Half the time you feel nobody would notice if the radio and television didn’t make such a fuss.”
“They would,” said Nigel, “if they had their living to earn out of doors.”
“They do,” said his father grimly, forgetting to wince. “I do. Set fair, indeed. Blasted thing ought to be in parliament.”
More than a quarter century of marriage assisted Lady Colveden to interpret this remark after only a moment’s hesitation. “Being, um, economical with the truth, you mean? That’s rather unkind. I’m sure it’s doing its best.”
“Not good enough.” Her husband huffed irritably through his moustache. “Tapped it on the way to breakfast. Damned thing didn’t even wobble.”
Lady Colveden began to gather plates and cups. “Do be fair, George. I shouldn’t imagine you could have tapped it very hard. Not before your aspirin, I mean. It’s probably just stuck.”
“Stuck?” Irritation huffed again. “Be suggesting a drop of oil next, I dare say. Stuck!” And he pushed back his chair with an ear-splitting squeal of solid carpentry on polished board. “Stuck ...”
Nigel, knives and forks in his hand, looked across at his mother as his father stumped out of the room. “I think we may assume he’s over the worst.” He cocked his head to one side, listening. Sir George’s slippered footsteps had soon become inaudible on their way down the hall. “But he’s not his usual sunny self just yet, by any means. Should we slip out to watch the fun?”
“It was a wedding present,” said Lady Colveden, made suddenly nervous by the gleam in the dancing eyes—Nigel and his father so often thought the same way about things—on the opposite side of the table. “It’s never gone wrong before—at least, not that I’ve noticed anyway ...”
By unspoken mutual consent, mother and son set down their spoons and crockery on the white cloth and hurried from the dining room. Whatever fate might befall the hapless oak-mounted weather forecaster, it surely behoved the entire family of its owners to bear witness to that fate.
What they witnessed was the family’s infuriated head, standing by the front door, glaring at the wall, reaching out to tap, and to tap again, the glass face of the barometer, the whole time muttering under his breath. “Set fair, indeed! Tell the truth for once, you devil—every damned day this week the same!”
Sir George gave one final, definitive tap, stepped back, and fixed the barometer with an eye which—even from the far end of the hall—was baleful in the extreme. “Still set fair, you idiot? Well, be damned to you!”
He darted to the front door, wrenched it open, leaped back to the barometer, and snatched it from the wall.
“George!” cried Lady Colveden: but too late.
“Go and see for yourself, you blasted fool!” thundered the beleaguered baronet; and he hurled the offending barometer as far as it would go, out into the torrential rain.
chapter
~ 3 ~
SIR GEORGE COLVEDEN, Justice of the Peace, was not the only arbiter of the law to be feeling more than slightly fragile that New Year’s morning. In Ashford police station, headquarters of the local force, Superintendent Brinton sat at his desk with his head in his hands, very much the worse for wear. Mrs. Brinton was ten years her loving spouse’s junior, and on close terms with her brother, a hard-drinking young man whose succession of blond lady-friends was a source of constant wonder—and secret envy—to the husband of his sister. The latest in this glamorous succession had been brought round to the Brintons’ last night to see out the old year with a bang ...
“Ugh.” The very idea of noise made the superintendent squirm. Someone was letting off fireworks—neon-bright fireworks, with needle-sharp sparks—inside his tortured eyeballs. His ears were ringing with the banshee howl of rockets, and his mouth was filled with cayenne pepper, mixed in equal parts with gunpowder and with sand from a very salty beach.
“Ugh ...” It was a judgement on him for having allowed his fancy for fair hair to become rather too apparent to the redheaded wife of his bosom. Mrs. Brinton’s temper matched her fiery locks. Having blown up at her husband last thing last night, she’d gone through a repeat performance first thing this morning, and thrown him out of the house without breakfast—not that he could’ve faced breakfast, feeling the way he did. “Ugh ...”
“Cup of tea, sir? Or would you prefer a peppermint?” Detective Constable Foxon, irrepressibly chirpy and the bane of Brinton’s life, bounced up from his corner of the office with nothing but benevolence in his tone. Foxon had joined Nigel Colveden and his colleagues at the Young Farmers’ New Year jamboree, and the younger men had proved wiser in the ways of alcohol than their elders. Still, there had been times ... And Foxon spoke with genuine sympathy, tinged with not even the least hint of schadenfreude.
“A cup of tea, sir,” he coaxed his suffering superior. “Two spoons of sugar, and no milk—you’ll be a new man before you know it.”
Brinton raised despairing eyes to the bright face above his own, and issued a mute appeal for understanding and assistance. Foxon, detective constable, deduced immediately what was required.
“Coffee, not tea—right you are, sir. Be with you in two shakes of a brand-new truncheon.”
He was gone; he was back, bearing a tray on which stood two steaming mugs and—Brinton averted his gaze with a groan—one loaded plate. “Didn’t have time for a proper breakfast, sir, sorry.” And Foxon deposited his chief’s caffeine fix on the blotter in front of him before retiring to his own desk to lament the late waking that had deprived him of his porridge, bacon, eggs, and marmaladed toast. Iced buns from the canteen just weren’t the same somehow.
He munched warily, with one eye on Brinton and the other on the paperwork he’d made it his new-year resolution to clear out of the way. Part of the way. Well, to the other side of the desk, maybe ...
“Must you make such a noise?” Brinton’s voice broke in on Foxon’s careful study of an accident report which might or might not hint at darker doings. The young constable looked up, blinked, and swallowed hastily.
“Er—was I munching my bun too loudly for you, sir? Sorry, but—”
“Blast your bun—and you, too, for being as half-baked as that—that chunk of canteen concrete! You know very well I was asking why you had to rattle every damned piece of paper as if it was one of those hellish thunder-sheets you wanted to use the other week ...” For Foxon had been an enthusiastic cast member of Plummergen’s recent Christmas pantomime, waxing eloquent around the office on the subject of props and effects even as he attempted to persuade Brinton to buy tickets.
“Sorry, sir.” Foxon’s reply was barely above a whisper. With exaggerated care, he slipped the sheet he held into its folder before laying it cautiously to one side.
Brinton glared at him over his coffee and took a deep, defiant swig. His internal fireworks flared up, flickered—and went out, as triple-strength caffeine knocked his hangover for six. He took another swig and sighed.
“I’d never dream of stopping you working, laddie—if only you didn’t make so much of a song and dance about it!” He shuddered. “I’d gag you myself, if I had the strength. When you’ve finished over there, you can come and have a go at my bumf, too. I’ll watch you with the greatest pleasure. I fancy a clean desk, for once.”
“Don’t we all?” Foxon peered at a slip of paper jotted with indecipherable telephone numbers, frowned, and threw it in the wastepaper basket. “Chance’d be a fine thing, sir. I know the villains enjoy a holiday as much as anyone else, but for all things’ve been reasonably quiet over Christmas—thank heaven—I could work my trousers to the bone—you too, for that matter—and it wouldn’t make any real difference, would it? There’s a sight too much being carried over from last year for us to have much hope of seeing the bare wood this side of next new year, if you ask me.”
Sold to Miss Seeton (A Miss Seeton Mystery Book 19) Page 2