Beneath the Soil

by Fay Sampson

  Would the police still be there when she arrived? They had no idea she was coming. They would certainly have told her to stay at home.

  ‘Keep your eyes peeled,’ she told Millie. ‘Somewhere along here there should be a signpost for Fullingford pointing to the right.’

  This narrower road was in total darkness. To their left, the moor climbed out of sight of the headlights. On the right there were hedges and stone walls marking the boundaries of fields. There were only rare clusters of houses or an isolated farm. Even then, lights rarely showed. They had not met a single vehicle since they left the dual carriageway.

  Suzie was aware how tired she was and that she was doing a foolish thing. Should she ask Tom to take over the driving? She suspected he might not be covered by the insurance.

  ‘There!’ Millie cried. ‘Damn. You’ve missed it.’

  Suzie slowed to a halt.

  ‘Sorry,’ Millie said. ‘The signpost was right on the junction. Couldn’t warn you.’

  Carefully Suzie reversed to the darkened turning and swung the car right.

  The lane was barely wide enough for two cars. At times, the hedges brushed the side of the Nissan. The road was taking them gently downhill. Suzie found herself leaning forward, looking for the bends in the lane and any sign that they were approaching habitation.

  The blank white wall of a cob barn glistened as they passed. There were more houses ahead. To her right she sensed a darkness more solid than the fields they had passed. The headlights picked out a sign at the entrance.

  ENGLISH HERITAGE

  FULLINGFORD CASTLE

  There were lights beyond it. Police cars. A glimpse of something that could be Nick’s white Mazda.

  Suzie stopped the car. She gripped the steering wheel hard to stop her hands trembling.

  ‘They’re still here. I thought they might have taken the car away by now.’

  Tom’s hand grasped her shoulder from the back seat. ‘Stay here. I’ll talk to them.’

  Suzie hardly heard him. Her eyes were fixed on the rear of Nick’s white car, caught in the cone of her headlights. The bodywork appeared undamaged. The tyres had been slashed.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  John Nosworthy’s words sounded through her head. ‘At least it was my tyres and not my throat.’ She clung to the desperate hope that that was true this time.

  She cut the engine and the headlights, but the scene was still brightly lit. The police had rigged up lights to illuminate the car. Uniformed officers were coming towards her.

  Millie was getting out of the car, pulling a fleece on over her thin jumper. Tom unfolded his longer legs and strode past her.

  Suzie followed more slowly, as if sleepwalking. Words surrounded her, concerned faces under police caps and helmets. She had not taken in what they were saying to her.

  ‘Where’s Nick? Have you found him?’

  ‘We’ve got a search out. But it’ll be easier in daylight. You’d have done better to wait at home,’ a burly sergeant was telling her.

  There were more lights in a large house next to the castle. She saw white walls hung with ghostly cascades of wisteria. A man not in police uniform came walking down the path from the open front door. Too short to be Nick, who was the only figure she wanted to see.

  ‘Mrs Fewings?’ There was mild consternation in his voice.

  Belatedly she recognized the goatee beard of DS Dudbridge.

  ‘I’m sorry. I just couldn’t sit at home doing nothing. I knew there was something your officers weren’t telling me. It’s the tyres, isn’t it? Someone’s slashed them.’

  ‘If it hadn’t been for your husband’s involvement in the Caseley case, we’d have assumed it was the work of joyriders. Drive the car until the gas runs out, then vandalize it. As it is, well … maybe it’s a warning?’

  ‘It’s the second time,’ Suzie told him. ‘I was with John Nosworthy today … sorry, yesterday. Eileen Caseley’s solicitor. When we came out of the pub, his tyres had been slashed, just like this.’

  A startled expression crossed the detective sergeant’s face. ‘You didn’t report that? You left me a message about that phone call from Clive Stroud to your husband’s office, but you didn’t say anything about this other car.’

  ‘I thought John Nosworthy would tell you himself. He told me to go home and stay out of it.’

  A woman’s voice called imperiously from the open front door of the house. ‘How much longer are you going to invade our privacy? We know nothing about this unfortunate Mr Fewings and his car. I have no idea why he left it outside our house. If you don’t mind, we should very much like to get to bed.’

  Dudbridge made a wry grimace at Suzie. ‘I suppose I’d better introduce you.’

  He ushered her through the gate. Millie and Tom followed. In the light of the porch Suzie saw a tall woman with long dark hair caught at the nape of her neck. Her checked silk shirt and green trousers had a look of casual elegance.

  ‘Mrs Stroud, may I introduce Suzie Fewings? It’s her husband who’s missing. Mrs Fewings, this is Elizabeth Stroud. Her husband is the MP for Moortown.’

  ‘Clive Stroud?’ The gasp escaped Suzie before she could check it. She stopped dead on the path.

  She felt the detective sergeant’s hand steadying her elbow. ‘It’s all right. Clive Stroud was in London today. He came down on the train this evening. It doesn’t look as if he can have had anything to do with your husband’s disappearance.’

  ‘He’s in there?’

  ‘Yes. But as I said, there’s nothing to be afraid of.’

  The world was spinning slowly around Suzie. Nick was missing. Had been missing for hours on end. And here was his car, not outside Fullingford Castle, but outside the house of Clive Stroud, who had pressed her hand with such sinister significance as he told her she would have no more business in Moortown. DS Dudbridge’s reassurances meant nothing to her. The lighted porch swam with shoals of dark fragments. She felt consciousness slipping away from her as she fell into oblivion.

  She came to on a well-upholstered sofa. The large sitting room was full of the buzz of concerned voices. Tall Elizabeth Stroud was coming towards her with what looked like a brandy glass.

  ‘Hot sugared tea be damned. Get this inside you.’

  Suzie struggled to sit up. She registered Tom and Millie over by the window. Millie looked small and scared.

  The room seemed to be full of people. Suzie recognized DCI Brewer, taller and thinner even than Elizabeth Stroud. She closed her eyes again, wanting to shut out what she was sure would be the Chief Inspector’s disapproval. She was frighteningly conscious of another presence behind her. She had momentarily glimpsed him when she took the glass from his wife’s hand. Clive Stroud. Despite what DS Dudbridge had said, she had an urge to jump off the sofa and run.

  She felt trapped.

  Detective Chief Inspector Brewer was leading him forward now, so that he stood in front of the sofa where she sat helpless. He leaned forward and fixed her with his gaze.

  ‘My dear Mrs Fewings, I’m so sorry if we’ve given you a shock. Believe me, I’ve no more idea than you have why your husband’s car is outside my house. I can assure you I haven’t seen or spoken to him today. Or at any other time, come to that. It was only your delightful self I met in Moortown.’

  ‘But the phone call?’ she managed. ‘You rang his office and asked to speak to him.’

  ‘So the detective sergeant has informed me. But I’ve assured him I did no such thing.’

  ‘But I asked Leila Mahfouz, his PA. She said someone from your office rang to put you through.’

  Clive Stroud’s eyes narrowed. ‘My office? At the House of Commons, or my constituency office in Moortown?’

  Suzie blinked and swallowed a gulp of brandy. ‘She didn’t say. I assumed it was the local one. Parliament’s in recess, isn’t it?’

  ‘My dear lady, an MP’s job is not confined to constituency matters, even in the summer. I frequently have work which takes
me to London. Committees, boards of directors. No rest for the wicked.’

  ‘What he means is any excuse to spend as little time at the marital home as he decently can. He just needs a decorative wife at his elbow for the photograph on his election leaflet,’ Elizabeth Stroud said waspishly. ‘He spends more time with his agent than he does with me.’

  Suzie remembered the frizzy-haired woman who had been so possessive of her MP at the tractor pull. Surely the devotion she had shown him couldn’t be mutual?

  Elizabeth Stroud had said nothing about the far more serious affair between Eileen Caseley and her husband. Suzie glanced between the two of them. Would Elizabeth have known about that? Had they quarrelled? It occurred to her that here was a woman who might have had an obvious motive to wish Eileen Caseley dead.

  And if she didn’t know, how would she feel when she found the dead woman had left Clive Stroud a gold mine?

  A mobile phone rang, shattering the tension in the room like broken glass.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Detective Sergeant Dudbridge said. ‘I need to take this outside.’

  ‘Oh, no you don’t!’ Tom’s outraged cry brought all eyes to him. He erupted from the window seat, where he had been sitting with Millie, while the drama of Suzie’s faint played itself out centre stage. Now he strode forward, his own mobile phone in his hand. ‘I’ve just tried ringing Dad again. That’s his phone you’re holding, isn’t it? You’ve had it all along. Every time we’ve tried to contact him, it’s you we’ve been getting.’

  Suzie sat bolt upright. ‘When I tried to get him earlier, his phone was switched off. And then, this evening, it rang, only I still couldn’t get an answer. I really thought, if he’d switched it on, he must be there. And all the time it was you, just checking to find out who’s ringing him?’

  Detective Sergeant Dudbridge coloured. ‘We found his phone on the back seat of the car, yes. I switched it back on, in the hopes that he might get a call from someone who would lead us to where he is. I can assure you we want to find your husband as much as you do.’

  ‘I doubt that,’ Tom scoffed. ‘But a nice try.’

  ‘Look,’ Clive Stroud put in. ‘I really don’t know what you’re all doing here. I’ve answered your questions. I have not the faintest idea why Nicholas Fewings has left his car outside my house, but I can promise you it has nothing to do with me. You can search the house if you like. You won’t find anything here.’

  ‘It matters,’ Suzie snapped back at him, ‘because Eileen Caseley left you a piece of land in her will on which there is almost certainly gold. Very few people know about it. But Bernard Summers did, because he found it, and now he’s dead. He told Nick, and now Nick is missing. So don’t tell me you’re not involved.’

  The news dropped into the room like a grenade. DCI Brewer had taken a long-legged stride across the room in an effort to stop Suzie, as soon as she saw where this was going. There was fury in her face.

  Clive Stroud’s complexion turned a dull shade of purple. Elizabeth stood staring at him in outrage and horror.

  Suzie caught Tom and Millie’s eyes going rapidly from one player to another. Millie too had risen from the window seat where she had been sitting alongside Tom.

  Clive Stroud looked round him somewhat wildly. ‘I didn’t know anything about this until John Nosworthy told me. About the legacy, I mean. I wondered then why. Why that particular piece of land, and why me? I assumed she thought I might find a use for it for one of my charities. But gold? No one said anything to me about that!’

  Is it true? Suzie wondered, watching him carefully. Did Eileen really not tell him? Either about the codicil to her will or what lay under Puck’s Acre? If not, then he’s certainly a good actor.

  But his wife could barely contain her anger. ‘All this time! I’ve known for years you’ve been playing me along. The obligatory constituency wife. Opening bazaars, attending tea parties, sitting through hour after hour of excruciatingly boring speeches. And all to flatter your vanity and get you a safe seat. God knows why I’ve put up with it all these years.’

  ‘Because you’ve done very well out of the proceeds,’ Clive snarled back at her.

  ‘But never in my wildest nightmares did I think you were mixed up in a murder case. That farmer’s wife everyone thinks was shot by her husband? You and her? She left you a fortune in her will? For heaven’s sake! Did she know she was going to die?’

  Her husband was visibly shrinking back before her fury. He held up his hands placatingly.

  ‘As God’s my witness, Liz, I didn’t know about this.’

  ‘And what has this got to do with Mr Fewings?’

  ‘Nothing! Poor Suzie’s understandably upset, but to suggest I bumped off that geologist fellow because he knew about the gold … I didn’t know myself before tonight. And what did I have to gain by removing him?’

  He could be telling the truth, Suzie thought. I only told John Nosworthy this afternoon … no, yesterday afternoon. He might have rung Clive Stroud to tell him, but it seems unlikely.

  DCI Brewer came between Clive and Elizabeth to take control. She scowled at Suzie, tight-lipped. ‘I very much wish you had kept out of this, Mrs Fewings. You had no right to come here and interfere with a criminal investigation. What you’ve done could seriously prejudice police enquiries. I suggest you get back in your car right now and go home.’

  ‘Are you fit to drive?’ Dudbridge asked, more sympathetically.

  ‘Yes,’ said Suzie, swinging her feet to the ground.

  ‘You’ve just had a stiff glass of brandy.’

  Suzie said nothing about the whisky earlier.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ said Tom, holding out his hand as if for the key.

  ‘But what about Dad?’ put in Millie. ‘Where is he?’

  A blank silence fell over the room.

  ‘We’ll get your father’s car taken back to police HQ,’ DS Dudbridge said. ‘Do a real forensic job on it. Don’t worry. If anyone’s been in the car before abducting him they’ll have left traces.’

  ‘You think he’s been kidnapped?’ Millie was wide-eyed.

  DCI Brewer cut in. ‘We’re not saying that. If he got a phone call and left a message for your mother, then he clearly had an assignation to meet someone. As far as we know, he did so of his own free will. There’s no reason to suppose the worst.’

  ‘Except that it’s two o’clock in the morning and he still hasn’t contacted us,’ Tom objected.

  ‘He left his phone in the car,’ the detective sergeant pointed out.

  ‘So what are you saying?’ Millie demanded. ‘That he went for a walk on the moor in the middle of the night?’

  ‘We’re doing everything we can to find him,’ DCI Brewer told her more kindly. ‘We’ll set up a fuller search as soon as it’s daylight.’

  ‘Would somebody please tell me,’ Clive Stroud pleaded, ‘why whoever is at the bottom of this used my name to make that appointment and left Mr Fewings’ car outside my house with the tyres slashed?’

  There was no answer to that.

  TWENTY-NINE

  The lights of the police vehicles made the night around them seem darker. Nick’s car had been covered with a green sheet. A recovery truck was getting ready to load it on board.

  Suzie felt a pang of bereavement. As long as the car was there, where Nick had apparently left it with his mobile on the back seat, she could believe that he would come striding out of the darkness to reclaim it. There would be hugs and exclamations of joy. Nick would have a simple explanation for why he was here and why he had walked off without a word. She could not imagine what that harmless explanation would be. She had to believe that there was one.

  Now there was an ominous finality about seeing the hook of the crane hovering over the car, the driver waiting to winch it on board. Soon it would be gone. Just the imprint of its tyres fading when daylight broke.

  And Nick would have vanished without trace.

  Tom’s hand was on her arm, urging her forward to
where the smaller hire car stood waiting.

  ‘Key?’ he asked.

  She handed it over.

  She was about to slip into the passenger seat, too numb to listen to what Tom was saying. Then her unfocussed eyes became aware that Millie was walking on past the car. For a puzzled moment she watched her daughter move out of the range of the lights, so that she was only a pale ghost of a figure approaching the wooden gate to Fullingford Castle. Millie tried the latch, but it was evidently locked.

  Tom strode after her. ‘Just what are you doing?’

  His sister turned to face him. ‘When the police came to our house, they said they’d found Dad’s car outside Fullingford Castle. It was only when we got here that we found everybody was assuming it must really be outside Clive Stroud’s house, because he lives next door. But what if it wasn’t? What if he really is here?’

  Wearily, Suzie joined them. Beyond the lights, the darkness was not as complete as she had thought. She looked up the grass-grown mound to where the square tower blocked out the stars.

  ‘I’m sure the police will have thought of that first, before they knew about Clive Stroud. They’ll have assumed Dad stopped here to visit the jail. Maybe slipped and had an accident. They’ll have been to look.’

  Millie, undeterred, was climbing the gate. Tom vaulted after her.

  ‘Can’t do any harm to check it out.’

  Suzie sensed the need in them to be doing something positive, not just spectators to the drama which had played itself out in the Strouds’ house.

  The teenagers were already climbing the mound. Suzie followed them.

  She caught them up at the base of the tower. Millie was struggling with the door.

  ‘Told you,’ Tom said. ‘They’re not going to leave it open, are they?’

  ‘I keep remembering that horrible dungeon where we were when that thunderstorm struck. What if Dad’s down there?’

  Suzie put her hand on the stones beside her. They felt faintly damp and colder than she expected. Was it just the early morning dew, or was she remembering too vividly the history of this place? She thought of those ancestors of hers who might have sat in the stannary court and condemned wrongdoers to imprisonment here in the tinners’ jail. It had been a strangely independent system of justice which had operated outside the normal courts of the country. The tinners’ laws had been notoriously harsh. She remembered the punishment for adulterating tin: spoonfuls of molten tin being poured down the miscreant’s throat. She shuddered.