by Fay Sampson
What hidden forces of retribution had been at work here today? And how was Nick involved?
A muffled shout came from the other side of the tower.
‘Result!’
Millie sprang away from the unyielding door and went rushing round the corner of the tower. Suzie followed the sound of their voices.
She made out the dark outline of Tom in the starlight.
‘No glass in the windows. They’re pretty narrow, though. Think you can squeeze through there?’
‘I wish we had a torch,’ Millie said. Her voice was more subdued now. The childhood memory of terror was still haunting her as she faced the blackness inside.
Suzie knew she should be telling them to go no further. They shouldn’t be breaking into a scheduled monument. The police or the castle’s custodian would surely have found Nick if he was there. Yet she could not fight down the faint hope that she was wrong, that Nick might be there, bound and helpless, waiting for her to rescue him.
‘You don’t have to come,’ she told Millie.
‘I’m not waiting here on my own.’
Tom was already inside, feeling his way through the darkness.
‘Watch out for the steps,’ Suzie called in sudden alarm.
‘I’m not daft, Mum.’ His voice came back hollowly.
She squeezed herself into the embrasure in the two-metre-thick walls. A narrow window, and then she was dropping to the stone floor.
She tried to remember that long-ago visit to this jail. She did not think there had been any furniture, just the stern stone shell. But who knew what might have changed in the intervening years?
She felt her way around the walls.
‘Dad?’ Tom’s voice called, nearer now.
There was no answer. It was too much to hope that there might have been.
‘He could be gagged,’ Millie said behind her. ‘Or drugged.’
‘Steps here,’ Tom called back. ‘There’s a rail.’
She felt the iron railing under her hand. There were metal treads underfoot. The darkness became even more oppressive as she descended. The railing led her in a spiral down to the lower level. No starlight penetrated here. The heat of the summer’s day just gone seemed as though it had never entered this dark dungeon.
Suzie stopped at the foot of the metal staircase, unwilling to go further.
‘Move yourself, Mum,’ Millie said from the step above.
Suzie moved aside. She could hear the others shuffling around the darkened space.
‘Ow!’ Millie cried. Then, ‘No, it’s not him. It’s something hard.’
The sound of something more ominous – the clank of chains. Suzie struggled to remember if there had been chains in the stannary jail – or perhaps they were a recent introduction, to satisfy the expectations of visitors to a dungeon, especially ghoulish children.
It was almost a relief when the two had made their circuit of the dungeon in the dark and came back with nothing to report. Her disappointment was less because she had never really believed Nick would be here.
But there was a tremor in Millie’s voice as she said, ‘I really hoped …’
Suzie put her arm round her daughter’s shoulders. ‘Let’s go home.’
In spite of herself, her eyes were closing as Tom drove them north towards the dual carriageway. She felt exhausted.
Lights sprang out at them from the roundabout. The filling station must be open twenty-four hours. Beyond it lay the unlit café with a motel.
‘Stop!’ she said suddenly to Tom. ‘Pull over here.’
‘Why? Fuel’s OK.’
‘I’m just not happy about you driving. I’m sure the hire insurance on this car doesn’t cover a nineteen-year-old boy.’
‘Mum, you haven’t signed any papers,’ Millie reminded her from the back of the car. ‘Remember? Mike said you could pay him in the morning.’
‘All the same. We’ll get a few hours’ sleep here. They’ll be searching for Dad at daybreak.’
‘They won’t want you,’ Tom said, not unkindly. ‘Honestly, are you sure about this? I can have us home in half an hour.’
‘That’s just what worries me. The last thing I want right now is to be had up for breaking the speed limit with an uninsured driver at the wheel. Yes, I’m sure.’
He turned the car off the road and drew up at the lighted shop. Suzie got out. She feared the door might be locked, with a night safe for motorists to pay for their fuel, but she walked in to a jangling bell.
‘Have you got a room for the night? Three people,’ she asked the young woman at the till.
‘Bit late, isn’t it?’
Suzie declined to offer an explanation. The cashier reached behind her and took down a key.
‘One room or two?’
‘A family room, if you’ve got one.’
‘Number five.’ She pointed round the side of the darkened café next door.
‘No chance of a meal, I suppose?’ Tom crinkled his blue eyes at her.
The cashier was impervious to his charm. ‘Breakfast starts at six o’clock. There’s coffee and tea in your room.’
Tom shrugged and scanned the shelves for food. He gathered up packets of sandwiches and chocolate and placed them on the table.
‘Thanks, sunshine.’
‘You’re welcome.’
In the family room, Suzie nibbled at the chicken sandwich Tom handed to her, but it tasted like sawdust in her mouth. She swallowed more gratefully the coffee Millie poured for her.
She and Millie took the double bed, leaving Tom with the single.
‘This is crazy,’ he grumbled. ‘We could have been home by now.’
‘That’s not the point,’ Millie told him. ‘It will start to get light in a couple of hours. Mum wants to be close when they start to search the moor.’
Is it true? Suzie wondered. Is that what I’m doing here?
She was too exhausted to know.
Once in bed, Millie and Tom fell instantly asleep, with the abandon of healthy teenagers. For all her weariness, Suzie found she could not sleep. Her mind kept playing over all the possible scenarios. Nick, pursuing some dangerous line of enquiry he had not wanted to tell her about. Nick, bound and imprisoned in something like the dungeon of Fullingford Castle. Nick, face down in a moorland stream in the dark, like Bernard Summers.
Nothing made sense. Why, out of all the people investigating Eileen Caseley’s murder, should Nick Fewings be the one to be singled out as a victim?
She woke suddenly, with a stale taste in her mouth. Daylight was flooding the room. She must have slept at last, and far later than she had meant to.
Millie was wriggling into the jeans she had removed for the night. There were sounds from the bathroom which must be Tom. Suzie hurriedly got out of bed with a conviction of guilt.
‘Don’t panic,’ Millie said. ‘It’s only seven o’clock.’
‘I meant to be up at daybreak.’
‘It’s not going to help anyone if you run yourself into the ground.’
All the same, it was unlike Millie to be dressed and wide awake at this hour of the morning.
Tom came out of the bathroom rubbing his wet hair with a towel.
‘All yours. Sleep well, Mum?’
‘Not for ages. And now I’ve overslept.’
‘Get yourself a shower,’ Millie ordered. ‘You’ll feel better.’
Suzie would have gone straight to the car, but the children herded her into the café.
‘You’re not going anywhere till you’ve got some food inside you,’ Tom ordered. ‘And I’m certainly not.’
To her surprise, she was able to manage a poached egg on toast, but she hardly noticed what she was eating. Her mind was racing through the possibilities for the day ahead.
She checked her phone, in the vain hope that there would be a message from Nick or the police. Nothing.
‘We’ll go back down the Fullingford road, just in case there’s something.’
‘I don’t
think that’s one of your better ideas,’ Millie said over her mug of hot chocolate. ‘You weren’t exactly flavour of the month with the Strouds. What you told them sounded to me like grounds for divorce.’
‘Not them. I need to know what the police are doing.’
‘Whatever it is, they won’t want us in the way,’ Tom said.
But in spite of their arguments, she drove back down the B road from the roundabout. A thin morning haze was lifting off the moor as the sun strengthened. It promised to be another fine day.
At the turning to Fullingford, Suzie stopped the car. ‘You’re right. There’s no point in going back to the castle or the Strouds’ house. But if Nick left the car there, he can’t be far away.’
‘Unless someone else dropped him off before, and drove the car on to Fullingford,’ Millie said darkly.
Suzie did not want to think about that.
On the opposite side from the Fullingford lane, the moor rose in its summer hues of golden gorse and purple heather. She could make out the grey bulk of a granite tor on the skyline.
‘I’m going up there. I need to see what they’re doing.’
She saw the look that passed between Tom and Millie, but she ignored it.
The climb was longer than it had looked from the road. Every time they crested a rise, another one unrolled in front of them. At times, the tor itself was hidden by the folds of the land.
Once they plunged down into a deep, stony trough, overgrown with gorse and stunted rowan trees.
‘What’s this?’ complained Millie. ‘World War Two defences?’
‘It’s called a rake. The tinners gouged it out.’
‘I thought a tin mine was a hole in the ground.’
‘Not always.’
They struggled up out of the gulley. At last they were mounting the final grassy track through the heather.
The giant boulders of the tor rose like the walls of a fortress, with a narrow gap between them. It was the kind of place that the children had loved to play in when they were younger. The rocks could easily become a beleaguered castle, a Wild West fort, or the entrance to an underground kingdom through the shadowy crevices under the boulders.
Now Suzie had one objective. She hardly turned to survey the view before starting to clamber up the sloping faces of the rocks.
At last she stood on the highest slab. The moor sprang into view all around her. Nothing moved in the wilderness except the occasional moorland pony. But when she turned to look behind her, she caught her breath.
A line of figures in black uniforms or blue overalls was fanning out across the hillside. Others were combing the fields on the far side of the road. In that direction she could see the square bulk of the old stannary jail, and a glimpse of white beside it which must be Clive Stroud’s house.
So DCI Brewer was taking seriously the probability that Nick was no longer in control of the chain of events since that phone call yesterday afternoon. There was a very real possibility he was lying somewhere helpless under a hedge or in the high wilderness that was the moor.
Suzie shivered, knowing what an immensity it would be to search.
Tom put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Mum. Let them get on with it. They know what they’re doing. Let’s go home.’
Numbly, she let him steer her off the summit and help her down the pile of boulders to the base of the tor.
‘It wasn’t Clive Stroud,’ she said, breaking the silence suddenly. ‘He makes me shudder, but I can’t see him slashing those car tyres. It’s not his style.’
‘Elizabeth?’ Tom suggested. ‘She was pretty mad with him. And it sounds as if he’d earned it.’
‘But why Nick’s tyres? It doesn’t make sense. And it has to be the person who did the same thing to John Nosworthy’s car.’
The words she had spoken on the morning air caught up with her.
‘Of course! He said things had been fraught between them. It has to be her!’
‘Who?’ asked Millie and Tom together.
‘Frances Nosworthy. His cousin. If anyone has a reason to keep quiet about anything which could damage Philip Caseley, it’s her.’
‘The solicitor?’ Millie asked. ‘The one you were so pally with over a cream tea?’
‘She changed,’ Suzie said. ‘She choked me off. I thought she was doing it under duress, that Clive Stroud might be breathing down her neck. But what if she wasn’t? What if she’s falling over backwards to make sure the Fewings keep their mouths shut about just what Philip stood to lose from that new will? I’m going to see her!’
‘Mum!’ Millie protested.
Tom shrugged. ‘If it makes her feel any better, why not? Either the police will find Dad, or we will.’
Suzie was already racing ahead of them, down the steep slope to the road.
THIRTY
Suzie drove through the hazy sunshine of the slowly unfolding morning. No one spoke much. She sensed that the reality of Nick’s disappearance was slowly coming home to the teenagers. She thought of the forlorn lines of police officers, combing the ground either side of the road. She had a growing feeling that Nick would not be there, that whatever had happened to him had nothing to do with the Strouds. Someone could have left his car there, with the tyres slashed, to divert attention to the MP from himself – or herself.
Was she just trying to keep hope alive by persuading herself that the key lay in Moortown, perhaps with Frances Nosworthy?
This time, she took a smaller road that cut directly across the open moor. It was still too early for there to be much traffic. Sheep stirred reluctantly from their resting places on the sun-warmed tarmac. A herd of ponies with foals sauntered across the road ahead of her. It should have been idyllic.
When they passed the lone grey inn at the halfway point, she remembered the Young Farmers dragging their red tractor over this road. That was the day when the Fewings’ involvement in the Caseley case had taken a new and more sinister turn.
They crested the last rise and the rest of the county lay spread before them. She picked out the tower of Moortown’s church. Then they were heading down the long steep hill into farmland and the first houses.
Suzie fought back the coldly creeping doubt about what she was proposing to do.
As if he read her thoughts, Tom asked, ‘How exactly are you planning to go about this? Do you just walk into her office and say, “Did you abduct my husband?”’
‘I’m not sure,’ Suzie said. ‘I’ll have to play it by ear.’
The little town was stirring with shoppers inspecting the local produce set out on the pavement in front of the shops. Walkers in hiking boots were getting ready to make the most of a fine day. Suzie parked the car at the roadside.
She found Frances’s card in her shoulder bag and studied the address. Eleven Chapel Road. That should be easy enough to find.
‘Stay here,’ she told the children. ‘It’ll be better without a family deputation.’
‘No way,’ said Tom. ‘OK, we don’t come inside, but I’m going to be right out there on the pavement. Yell if you need help.’
Suzie tried to imagine the formally dressed solicitor attacking her physically. It seemed unlikely, but that was precisely what she was accusing Frances of having done to Nick. Though it would have to have been more subtle than that – a spiked drink, perhaps. But she would still have had to bundle his tall form into the car on her own. Or did she have an accomplice?
Was it possible that it was her gently spoken cousin John? Had they fallen out afterwards over just this?
She struggled to put together the sequence of events. No. Leila had said nothing about Nick leaving the office early. He would still have been at work yesterday afternoon, when John had met Suzie at the pub beside the priory.
The three of them threaded the streets and turned into Chapel Road. The granite Methodist church was prominent halfway along. Moortown had always been a hotbed of dissent. Religiously non-conformist; Parliamentarian in the Civil War, when all around them wer
e Royalists.
Number Eleven was two houses before the Methodist church. A pewter and black plaque on the door read: Frances Nosworthy, Solicitor.
‘Hey! Look at this!’ Tom called from the house next door. ‘A double act.’
Number Thirteen had a more old-fashioned look. Gold lettering in a cursive script on the downstairs window announced: Thomas Nosworthy and son, solicitors.
‘That must be John’s office.’
Thomas, Suzie guessed, must be either John’s father, or the grandfather of both John and Frances. Hadn’t Frances said something about the Nosworthys being the Caseleys’ solicitors for generations?
She turned back to Number Eleven and drew a sharp breath. ‘Wait here. I don’t even know if she’s in, or if she’ll see me.’
A secretary sat in the front downstairs room behind a computer – a plump, middle-aged woman with greying hair. She looked too motherly to be the front woman for anything sinister.
‘Excuse me. I need to talk to Frances Nosworthy. She gave me her card and told me to get in touch with her if I had any new information about a case she’s interested in. Is she in?’
It was a half truth. That had been Frances’s original request. It was only later that she had made that phone call choking Suzie off.
‘Your name?’
Suzie swallowed. ‘Suzie Fewings.’ What reaction would her name provoke when Frances heard it?
‘There’s nobody with her at the moment. I’ll ask if she’ll see you.’
The woman hurried away upstairs, her heels clattering on the bare polished boards. There was a telephone on the desk, but she had not chosen to ring through to Frances’s office.
In a few moments she was back.
‘Go up. It’s the first on your left.’ Suzie felt that the woman gave her a strange look before she resumed her seat.