by Rebecca Tope
Thea wakened from her moment of catatonia. ‘No!’ she shouted, as she lurched forward to prevent the man from striking again. She hardly need have bothered. He wobbled as his damaged hip took his weight, and then shifted rapidly back to his previous position, with a moan. As Thea reached him, he began to list, his balance gone, and she caught him with difficulty. The hook fell from his hand. She realised that he was weeping.
‘She did it,’ he babbled. ‘It was her, the sly little bitch.’
Susanna made no attempt to regain her feet, but watched Thea’s face with narrowed eyes. Her bloody hand went to her mouth. She was an animal at bay, dangerous and unpredictable.
Hampered by the old man leaning most of his weight on her, Thea began to worry. The shearers couldn’t hear or see them, in this angle between yard and house. The sharp hook was on the ground within Susanna’s reach. Sliced laterally, it could do immense damage to a human body. Thea trembled for her own vulnerable throat or thigh or calf.
But Susanna made no move towards the implement. Instead she reached across her own body with her left hand, and fumbled something out of her trouser pocket.
‘Watch her. That’s a knife!’ Lionel’s mind was obviously less incapacitated than his body. ‘The one she used to kill Joel.’
‘Shut up,’ Susanna snarled. ‘You stupid man.’
Stupidity didn’t seem an adequate explanation for such ferocity, Thea thought. Surely he’d committed some far greater sin in Susanna’s eyes than that?
‘What’s he done to you?’ she asked, her curiosity so strong that the question came out with laughable normality. They could be sitting in Brook View’s living room.
Susanna merely shook her head, and flicked out the blade of the knife. Thea wrestled for rational thought. ‘You won’t use that,’ she said. ‘The place is full of people. They’ll stop you.’
‘She’ll use it all right,’ said Lionel, unhelpfully. Thea felt her sympathy for him evaporating.
‘He started it,’ Susanna snarled. ‘I came over here to help with the sheep. June asked me to. I couldn’t very well refuse.’
This went beyond normality. If Thea’s grasp of events was correct, the killer of the farmer’s sons had casually turned up as requested, to assist with the shearing. ‘What went wrong?’ she asked.
‘The gun cloth,’ said Lionel. ‘She’s got the gun cloth.’
Thea blinked, letting the neural connections work their lightning magic. ‘She took it! When she came to tell me about the funeral. It never occurred to me. But why?’
‘It was Paul’s. She shot him with his own gun, and cleaned it afterwards.’
‘I buried it in the hedge. How did you find it, you bloody pest?’ Susanna glared at Thea, with genuine curiosity. Even in this moment of potential cataclysm the detail seemed important to her.
‘The dog dug it out,’ Thea said, hoping for a moment that an ordinary explanation might calm things down.
‘I never thought –,’ Lionel choked on his words. ‘Paul and Joel. I knew you weren’t right, but I never thought – Not until I saw you with the cloth.’
The old man’s deductions seemed to have come too quickly to be credible. There had to be more than a bit of material. ‘You mean you recognised it just now?’ she asked him.
‘She was trying to hide it over there.’ He lifted his chin towards a scruffy corner strewn with rusty buckets and misshapen lumps of concrete.
Susanna’s gaze flickered between her antagonists, waiting for them to finish speaking. Thea thought she looked much less certain of her next move than she had a minute earlier.
‘And you took that to prove she killed Paul?’
‘Why else would she be doing it? And I saw her face, like a cunning vixen. The same look she had when she was running off with that Clive, behind his wife’s back. I saw her then, too.’
‘You told Joel,’ Susanna said, as if that explained everything. ‘And he told Jennifer. It was all down to you, you old bastard.’
Lionel’s eyes bulged and his hand on Thea’s arm was like a claw.
She did not follow up anything he had said. There were more pressing considerations. Susanna’s failure to deny the charge demonstrated guilt beyond further doubt. The immediate goal was to get out of this mess without injury.
‘Look,’ she said, trying to keep the quiver out of her voice. ‘You’d better be sensible and put the knife away. We can go in the house and…’ And what? Get Lionel into a chair, for a start. His weight was pushing her over, and she staggered a little.
‘Shut up!’ Susanna flashed the knife across Thea’s face, three inches away. ‘I could cut your pretty looks to ribbons, just like that, if I wanted. Why not? What have I got to lose?’
‘What would be the point?’
‘I like it, that’s the point. It feels good. Blood spurting out, people dying at my feet. I like it.’
‘But that isn’t why you do it. You’re not completely insane. I haven’t done anything to you.’
‘You have. You’re taking his side. You had Joel running over to meet you two minutes after getting here. You stuck your nose in. You talked to Helen and Lindy about me. You crashed your car into me.’
Thea said nothing. There was an acute risk of bursting into uncontrolled laughter if she opened her mouth.
It felt as if the three of them had been there for hours, ignored by the world carrying on a few feet away. Something had to give. Lionel seemed to feel the same. He eased himself back onto his good leg, and then slowly tested the bad one. Thea felt suddenly unburdened again, free to move. It didn’t appear that Susanna had noticed the adjustment.
‘Put the knife away,’ Thea ordered more firmly. ‘It’s not doing you any good.’
‘It’s scaring you, isn’t it? Both of you?’
‘Not really.’ Something shifted inside Thea, and she swiftly bent for the hook, snatching it by the greasy wooden handle. As she’d hoped, Susanna was too startled to react. Pushing Lionel aside, Thea swung the curved blade towards Susanna, who was still not fully upright. For a ghastly second, Thea feared she was about to cut the younger woman’s head off. That hadn’t been her intention, although the sudden bloodlust was shockingly intense. She hadn’t known she was capable of such rage.
Susanna rocked back, out of reach, and then scrambled to her feet. The ensuing duel was clumsy and inconclusive, thanks in part to Susanna having to use her left hand. The knife was much less threatening once Thea understood the problem. But damage might well have been inflicted if rescue hadn’t finally arrived.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Rescue in the shape of a flurry of black and white, at knee level, which did not initially do anything constructive to help. Hepzibah was jumping up at her mistress, distracting her from the immediate task, and causing stunned confusion in both combatants. Then Susanna saw what was happening, and made another more businesslike lunge with her knife. It caught the dog somewhere in the ribs, powerful enough to penetrate hair and skin, and wrench the weapon out of the woman’s hand.
Thea blindly lashed again with the hook, before letting it go and grabbing the spaniel in her arms. The dog was staring up at her wide-eyed. The knife fell away, clattering in a sudden silence. The shearing machine had stopped. Nobody spoke, until Lionel began to shout.
‘Here! Come here!’ he called in a deep voice of authority that could not fail to be obeyed. Then he put a hand on the dog’s side, examining the wound more by touch than by sight.
‘Punctured lung, seems like,’ he said. ‘Have to get her to a vet quick.’
Thea’s gratitude at his shared perception of where the priority lay made her want to hug him. But before she could move, obedience to Lionel’s shout became manifest. Four men came into view, two from one direction, two from another. Thea looked at them in bewilderment.
‘James!’ she squeaked. ‘Oh, James. Take me to a vet. We’ve got to save Hepzie.’
Lionel asserted himself again. ‘Rog – you phone Hendersons and tel
l them there’s a dog with a collapsed lung coming. Get ready for surgery. Tony, you run them in, will you? You know where it is, and your truck’s outside the gate already. Unless this lot’ve boxed it in.’
Thea ignored everything except her suffering pet. The agony was unbearable, thinking about the soft innocent animal’s possible demise. Following the greasy sweating Tony to his truck, she cast a glance back at Susanna, aware of an overflowing hatred towards her. The woman was sitting on the ground again, clutching her upper arm, which seemed to be pouring with blood.
‘Did I do that?’ Thea asked, as she paused momentarily. ‘Good!’
The sea of sheep seemed to part effortlessly for her and Tony, but another man blocked her way. ‘Go now,’ he said. ‘But I’ll want to talk to you as soon as this is sorted out.’ He nodded down at the dog, with a true Englishman’s concern.
‘Thanks, Mr Hollis,’ Thea said, before wondering whether it was proper protocol to call a Detective Superintendent Mr.
The file that Thea had sent to James read as follows:
‘Missing person, Felicity Winstanley, aged 18. Reported missing by parents Helen Winstanley and James Winstanley October 2001. Known to use Class A drugs.’
‘Fairweather Farm. Refuge for recovering drug addicts.
Unclassified, unregistered. Address not disclosed. No questions asked. Telephone 07712 455677.’
‘“Why Drugs Must Not be Legalised” by Paul Jennison. Abstract – drug addiction is the single biggest cause of crime in the UK, and police tolerance is exacerbating this. The perceived problem of the cost of sustaining the addiction leading to theft of goods and money is the wrong approach. Legal drugs would still be expensive. Thefts would still take place and lives still be ruined. The only solution is to remove the incentive to use drugs. Full article appears in the Big Issue.’
‘“I owe it all to Fairweather Farm.” Susanna Hawker, 34, speaks to Jenni Murray on Woman’s Hour in March 2002 about her problems with drugs since her late teens. A secretive establishment in the heart of the countryside is credited with Susanna’s full recovery. “At Fairweather, people are given the confidence and freedom to recover in their own way. Not everybody succeeds, but the friendships can last forever. I show my gratitude by working there in my free time. The Farm is run by a dedicated couple, who frequently go to London and other towns and cities to invite addicts living rough to spend some time with them. The whole thing runs on a shoe-string, with no grants, but active local support. It operates outside the usual Social Services or NHS provisions, because several of the users are in trouble with the law.”’
‘E-mail from anonymous listener to Woman’s Hour on message board: I spent a few weeks at Fairweather Farm last year, at the suggestion of my mother, who lives nearby. It worked for a while, but is not really an answer to the problem. Susanna means well, but there are many things I didn’t like about the place. It felt like being part of a cult, at times.’
‘Missing person. Monique Puyere. Aged 22. French. Last seen in London, Camden Town. Reported missing by her older sister, with whom she was living until recently. Known to be user of Class A drugs.’
Thea waited at the vet’s while they performed emergency surgery on Hepzibah. The waiting room was deserted, except for one girl on reception, who repeatedly had to answer the phone. Tony and Rog had returned to finish their shearing, but not before supplying her with a mobile phone and a promise to send somebody to be with her.
Her mind was blank to begin with, but slowly the pressure of recent events broke through the protective wall and flooded her head with questions and explanations.
She had worked out the balance of hostilities between Fairweather Farm and Barrow Hill. The Jennisons – or Paul, at least – had disapproved of the illicit ‘rehabilitation’ going on under the controlling hand of Martin and Isabel Stacey. The precise motivations of the Staceys were still not apparent. Perhaps simply to acquire free labour for the farm, or to implement sincerely held ideas about how best to fight the scourge of drug addiction. The implication that they collected addicts from the streets of London fitted in part with the glimpse she had gained of the arriving minibus. The further suggestion that one of their inmates had been Helen Winstanley’s daughter had caught Thea up short. Who else in the area had errant offspring who were taken to Fairweather? Did they get special preferential treatment? Had it been personally affected locals who set the thing going in the first place?
Susanna had some strong personal investment in the place, which the disapprobation of the Jennisons clearly threatened.
The hostile reception of Jennifer Reynolds’s speech at the public meeting was very likely on the same topic. Had she questioned the activities at Fairweather? Were the villagers actively in sympathy with it? Did they collude to keep it from the public gaze and the attentions of the police?
Just how altruistic was the whole exercise? At first Thea had believed it to be a network of benevolence and charity. Now she wondered if it had more sinister aspects. Was it all down to money? Did it involve blackmail or extortion or organised fraud?
But oh, the poor little dog. Nothing mattered as much as this terror and guilt that surged through her at the image of the innocent animal trying to save her from danger. Except, she had to admit, that wasn’t really how it had been. Hepzie didn’t understand threat or malignancy. She’d just been jumping up at Thea in a frenzy of delight at finding her mistress again, after being shut indoors. She had been indiscriminately joyful, leaping and wagging and smiling, expecting to be greeted and hugged by anyone she approached. It had been an act of the most wanton evil to stab her like that.
The door opened, and Harry Richmond came in, almost on tiptoe. His expression, as he focused on Thea, was of profound concern and distress. ‘How is she?’ he whispered.
‘They’re operating. It’s been ages.’
‘I’ll stay with you, shall I?’
‘That’d be nice. Thanks.’
They sat in silence, listening to the receptionist answering calls from pet owners wanting appointments, or advice on their cat’s scratched head. Nothing sounded urgent or even interesting.
‘Did you know about Fairweather?’ she asked him, when the silence began to weigh heavily.
‘Oh yes. How did you find out?’
‘Lindy. Spying. The internet. It eventually came together. Did you suspect Susanna?’
He shook his head. ‘I was quite sure Clive had organised it. Paid somebody to assassinate Joel while he had a perfect alibi.’
She thought that over. ‘But the Reynoldses and the Jennisons were on the same side.’
‘Were they?’ He shook his head. ‘I doubt that.’
‘But—’ The door at the end of the waiting room opened, and a white-coated woman emerged. ‘Mrs Osborne?’
Thea got up. ‘Is she all right?’
‘I think she’ll be fine. The lung’s inflating on its own again now. She’ll be conscious in a few minutes.’
‘Can I see her?’
‘Better not. You might get her too excited.’
Thea had an image of the comatose dog recognising her and trying to jump up and cover her with tail wagging and licks. ‘Right,’ she agreed. ‘When, then?’
‘Leave her here overnight. She should be almost back to normal by the morning.’
Harry took her home. The borrowed mobile phone trilled while they were in the car, and Thea answered it.
‘Thea? It’s James. How is she?’
‘They think she’ll be all right. I’m coming home now. They’re keeping her in overnight.’
‘You’ve got a bit of a reception committee here. They all think you’re a hero.’
‘That sounds ominous. Can you send them away?’
‘I’ll try. But I doubt if I can shift them all.’
Thea relayed this to Harry. ‘Who does he mean? What do they think I’ve done?’
‘Got them off the hook, perhaps?’ That gave Thea plenty to think about as they covered t
he last few miles. Who could possibly think that? Susanna had been acting in defence of the Staceys, hadn’t she? Didn’t that implicate them in the murders? Helen had a daughter who fitted into the story somewhere. June, Lindy and Lionel had never been on a hook, as far as Thea could see.
James sat her down with a large mug of tea, and did his best to explain. The network had never been the object of close police scrutiny, because nobody had made any complaints and there was no indication of criminal activity. It was, however, flagged up against the name of Duntisbourne Abbots as something to be aware of. The double killing of the Jennison brothers had brought it to the forefront of police attention, but still with no obvious law-breaking activity. The Staceys provided wobbly but acceptable alibis, and the handful of youngsters in the hut were all able to produce identification and reasons for being where they were.
This immunity from serious police attention was, it was beginning to appear, largely due to the protective offices of most of the population, who had been convinced from the first that Fairweather was providing a highly desirable service.
‘But how?’ Thea demanded. ‘I’d have thought they would have hated it. Drug addicts roaming around their precious homesteads. Surely they’d be horrified?’
‘Ah, but that isn’t the way they see it. Not at all.’ Here James looked to Harry for confirmation. ‘As far as the village is concerned, the Staceys were keeping their own kids safe. Once Martin had found and rescued Felicity Winstanley, and got her off the crack, he could do no wrong. He gave priority to local people, you see. Daisy Isbister was headed off before she could get seriously hooked, and her friend Monique – you remember Monique, I suppose? – was a dramatic success story. Virginia’s boy, Kenny, was brought back from a ghastly squat in Birmingham. And so it goes on.’