by Jill McGown
‘Oh, God,’ she groaned.
He looked utterly innocent. ‘What? I haven’t said anything yet.’
‘You don’t have to. You want me to do something I won’t want to do.’
‘It’s a doddle. You just have to go to a farm—’
‘I hate farms.’
He sighed, shaking his head. ‘You city girls are all the same. One hint of mud, and you get the vapours.’
‘Just have to go to a farm and do what?’
‘Talk to a nice man called Mr Bailey about death threats.’
‘Death threats?’ repeated Judy.
Death threats, thought Jack Melville, landowner, country gentleman, old Harrovian, dabbler in stocks and shares, financial consultant to the already very-rich. Death threats. Whatever next?
His long face, youthful for its thirty-eight years, was serious. Surely Terri’s friends on the Save Our Woodland Sites committee hadn’t started sending death threats? There were one or two he wouldn’t care to vouch for, and whom he fancied were responsible for the curiously middle-class graffiti to be found scrawled on Bailey’s ludicrous, ten-foot-high security fences. But death threats? Jack was the spokesman for the Save Our Woodland Sites committee, for God’s sake. They couldn’t start doing that sort of thing. You could end up in prison for that.
He had just given an interview in his capacity as spokesman to someone who had introduced himself as Curtis Law, Aquarius 1830, as though Jack should have heard of him. He hadn’t. And it had taken him a moment or two to work out why he was being interviewed about Bailey’s death threats. He usually found some frightfully important work to do when the all-female group had its interminable discussions, and frequently forgot that he was its spokesman. He had been press-ganged, a man being deemed to have more gravitas. They were a little impolite about Bailey at times, but surely Terri wouldn’t condone the sending of death threats?
He loved his wife dearly, and by and large he sympathized with her aims for preserving the village way of life, but she did rather take the whole thing too seriously. She had got up the committee to object to the development in the first place, and they had fought against planning permission being given for an access route at all, which would have effectively stopped the whole thing in its tracks. They had lost that battle, and now that land of some sort was to be sacrificed to the earth movers, the fight had become personal. Bailey’s land was the lesser of two evils, and he must be made to sell. The veiled suggestion by the reporter that the SOWS might be behind the death threats – Jack was never sure whether the acronym had been intentional or not – had bothered him a little, though he had laughed it off.
He had acquitted himself pretty well in the interview, he thought. He had explained that while roads were of course the greatest evil since the plague, and every day the countryside was threatened with more and more of them, they were a necessary evil. The development had to have an access route, and therefore, if there was a choice, surely fallow fields were better victims than woodland which had been enjoyed for generations? Yes, he wished that Bernard Bailey-would just sell the land to the developers, hut neither he nor any member of the SOWS would stoop to scare tactics.
The door opened and Terri came in, her curly salt-and-pepper hair tousled and damp from the drizzly day. ‘June says the television people are here again.’
‘I know,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve just given them an interview. Bailey’s getting death threats now, apparently.’
‘Oh, that,’ she said.
Oh. He had hoped she might at least be surprised. ‘You know about them?’ he asked, flipping the computer back on, establishing a link with the stock markets again.
‘Everyone knows about them. He’s been getting them for months.’
The reporter had said that. ‘ He’s had more this morning. Rude ones. Why is it that everyone knows about them but me?’
‘Because you’ve always got your head buried in that thing,’ she said, waving a dismissive hand at their livelihood. ‘You never watch television. It was on the local news for weeks until they got bored with it.’
‘It’s …’ Jack paused, not wanting to hear the answer. ‘It’s not anyone on your committee that’s sending them, is it?’
‘Not as far as I know. But if it is, who cares?’
Oh dear, oh dear. ‘ I care! It’s against the law.’
‘Against the law?’ said Terri, all wide-eyed mock shock. ‘I didn’t know that. Thank you, Uncle Jack.’
‘Well,’ he said, on the defensive. ‘ You’re not condoning that sort of stuff, are you?’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Laws were made to be broken. And Bailey isn’t going to force McQueen to take that road through Bluebell Wood, not if I can help it.’
Bluebell Wood. The damn place didn’t have a name, not one that anyone knew. The committee had called it Bluebell Wood when they had decided to save it, and they had a lot more in common with McQueen than they would like to think. His development was called the Rookery, and was marked on the plans in pseudo-medieval lettering. McQueen had christened it that himself, just as they had christened Bluebell Wood. Real country people didn’t give places names, twee or otherwise, unless they had to.
Jack had lived here all his life; he liked the woodland. But there was plenty of it. ‘Bluebell’ wood was just one part of a real wood, with a real, unromantic name. Sharpe’s Wood. It had once, long ago, belonged to a Mr Sharpe, so Sharpe’s Wood it was. When he had mentioned this to Terri, she had pointed out that it was the thin end of the wedge. Bluebell Wood today, McQueen’s Wood tomorrow. Sharpe’s Wood, she had reminded him, had once been part of a forest. A forest that had belonged to no one, and which, bit by bit, had been consumed by commerce.
‘You give someone like McQueen an inch,’ said Terri, ‘ and he’ll grab everything, develop it all into housing estates and golf courses. Real villagers won’t survive. Just people like that lunatic Bailey.’
Real villagers. Jack was a real villager, unlike Terri. His great-grandfather had owned most of Harmston in his day; he and Terri lived in what had been the manor house, and he still owned some of the land round about. Come to that, Bailey had more claim to being a real villager than many of the people who wanted him out; his family had farmed that land for generations. But Bailey had been born and brought up in Yorkshire, and had come to claim his grandfather’s inheritance a mere twenty-five years ago; he was regarded as an incomer. And he had never been popular. Villages could tolerate a fair amount of nonconformity, but Bailey had long since passed the eccentricity high-water mark, and Terri’s description of him as a lunatic wasn’t so wide of the mark. The villagers would heave a collective sigh of relief if he were to disappear from their midst.
So Jack hadn’t been reassured by her denial of any knowledge of these death threats; Terri wasn’t above underhand methods to get her way. But then, that was probably why they had such a successful marriage despite everything, he thought. Because neither was he.
Judy had had to negotiate an electronically locked and controlled gate, and was driving slowly and distastefully over the mud about which Lloyd had been so scathing; it was a roadway, but one which had been driven on by tractors, walked on by cows and sheep, that sort of rural thing, and Judy did not like rural.
Stansfield was a town of sixty thousand people – it had never occurred to her when she moved there that the division would police villages and farms miles away from the place. She was used to city streets. Before Stansfield it had been Nottingham, and before that London, where she had been born and brought up. She liked tarmac and paving stones.
At last she could see buildings, and made her way towards them. In one, she could see a youth spreading what she assumed to be straw in what she took to be a cowshed, largely because an older man was leading, a cow into it. Parking beside a Land Rover and a startling, bright red BMW two-seater, she got out of the car to see a dark, weather-beaten man approach her, sleeves rolled up to reveal muscled arms. He could have been any a
ge at all; she understood that he was in his mid-forties.
‘Mr Bailey?’ she asked, smiling. ‘Judy Hill.’ She withdrew her hand when it became clear that it was not going to be shaken. ‘My DCI tells me you’ve received some rather upsetting communications.’
‘Aye.’ He jerked his head towards the house, turned, and walked up the steps to the open door.
Judy glanced again at the sports car parked incongruously beside the Land Rover, and at the six-foot-plus Mr Bailey’s retreating back with its broad shoulders. Not his, surely. He’d hardly be able to get into it, for one thing. She presumed that she was supposed to follow, like the old sheepdog that walked at his heel, looking up at him anxiously. He patted the dog’s head absently as he went into the house.
The dog stopped on the wide, railed veranda, but Judy imagined that she was allowed in. The film of thin watery mud which covered the courtyard had splashed over her shoes, and she could see nothing on which to wipe them before entering. She shrugged at the dog, and followed Bailey into a wide hallway in which, beside the door, there was the entryphone for the gate, and some sort of switch box, its cover hanging open.
Ahead were dark green carpeted stairs with a black cast-iron railed banister curving off to the right, then going straight up; against the stair wall stood a long, low, black-lacquered telephone table with a dark green velvet seat over which a quilted jacket had been thrown despite the row of pegs, black cast-iron, like the railings above them, between it and the door at the other end of the wall. Big, bold, colourful oil paintings hung on the rest of the rough, whitewashed walls.
Immediately on her right was the door to the sitting room, sparingly and airily furnished, the fine, cream-coloured vertical blinds closed, producing a soft light from the watery sunshine which fell on to more of the dark green carpeting and soothing colourwashed walls, enlivened by more paintings by the same artist. The centrepiece was a dramatic black stove, pale peach armchairs facing it from three angles. Along the wall, under the window, was a long, matching sofa, and in front of it, a black coffee table. At the far end, through a stepped archway, a dining table and chairs stood on a raised polished-wood platform, lit by the same diffused light from another window. What had once been a rather poky dining room and front room had been opened out into one airy, inviting living space, and it wasn’t at all Judy’s idea of a farmhouse, especially not one presided over by Mr Bailey.
To her left, she could see into an office with scuffed striped wallpaper, a metal desk, an open safe containing documents, and a chipped and dented filing cabinet. The only reference to the rest of the house was the cream vertical blind which covered the window. That, she presumed, was Bailey’s domain, and she expected to be taken in there to be shown the X-rated communications, but he walked past the office, opened a cupboard, reached in and pulled out two pairs of black rubber boots, handing a pair to her, and began unlacing his shoes.
Judy’s heart sank. It had been the wettest spring since God knew when, and she was to be shown the death threats in situ. She slipped off her shoes, noticing the mess she and Bailey had made of the hall floor just by coming in from the courtyard, and grimly stepped into the boots. They were two sizes too big and cut down so that they came to mid-calf, catching the hem of her skirt, which sat on them like badly fitting curtains.
They came back out, got into the Land Rover, and, for the next hour, she was driven round the entire farm, stopping to be dragged into hedges and ditches, squelching through God knew what, hostile bushes snagging her jacket and catching her hair, malevolent trees reaching out their branches to rub their wet bark against her, until she had seen and taken down each and every one of the death threats which had been nailed up on trees, stuck up in barns, pinned to bushes … all over the damned place.
Back in the relative comfort of the Land Rover, as it jolted and whined its way through mud that would have given a hippopotamus second thoughts, she looked at them properly. They all carried much the same message, to the effect that Bailey was going to die a particularly grisly death if he didn’t sell up. The text, liberally sprinkled with four-letter words, was accompanied in each case by an amateurish drawing. They had been done on a computer.
‘A lass shouldn’t be readin’ that,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t let th’wife see ’em.’
Judy was startled by the number of words he’d managed to produce, but chose to ignore the sentiment. ‘They appeared overnight?’ she asked.
‘Aye.’
‘And your alarms are activated at night?’
‘Aye.’
The gate was controlled by the panel on the entryphone, unless it was opened with a remote-control ‘key’; in either event it would close automatically when the visitor passed a certain point, whether on foot or in a vehicle. Vehicles and pedestrians leaving the farm could press a button to open it, and it closed automatically once they cleared a certain point.
‘The gate,’ Judy said. ‘Who has a key for it besides you and Mrs Bailey?’
‘Th’wife’s not got one.’
Judy frowned. ‘Isn’t that a bit inconvenient for her?’
‘Happen.’
Oh, well, none of her business. ‘Does anyone else have one?’
‘Paxton and t’lass.’
Paxton, she had already discovered, was his foreman. ‘Lass?’ she queried.
‘Daughter. She’s t’vet. Sees to th’animals.’
She knew what a vet was. ‘What about your employees?’ she asked. ‘How do they get in?’
‘Paxton sees to ’em.’
‘And visitors?’ she asked. ‘ Deliveries? Do you sometimes leave the gate open for them?’
‘Nay. They use t’phone. Th’wife’s always in th’ouse.’
She would be. But the woman must sometimes go to the loo. ‘There must be times when Mrs Bailey isn’t available to answer the entryphone; Judy said. ‘What, happens then?’
‘They don’t get in.’
Was this any way to run a farm? Judy might not dabble in things rural very often, but she doubted it. ‘Is your daughter’s practice in Harmston?’ she asked.
‘Aye.’
‘Does she have employees … a partner?’
‘Husband. Nowt to do wi’ practice. Unemployed.’
They pulled back on to the roadway behind the red sports car, which was also returning to the farmhouse, having been somewhere a lot less muddy than they had. Things were looking up, thought Judy; her ordeal was almost over, and she was going to find out who in this godforsaken place drove a two-seater. Both vehicles parked in the courtyard, and Judy clambered out, a process made even more difficult by the ill-fitting wellies, looking up only when she made landfall.
Getting out of the car was a girl in her late twenties, dressed for her surroundings, but elegantly and expensively; she wore little or no make-up, and her blonde shoulder-length hair was natural, straight, and well cut. And, for a reason Judy could not pin down, she was quite the most wickedly attractive woman she had ever seen. She reached back into the car, and took out a carrier bag, then walked towards the house.
‘Your daughter?’ said Judy.
‘Th’wife,’ said Bailey. ‘C’mon.’
And Judy, waddling behind him towards the delectable Mrs Bailey, her clothes muddy and wet, her outsize wellington boots banging against the backs of her legs, would garrotte Lloyd for this.
‘Hello,’ said Mrs Bailey, turning as she reached the porch, smiling as slowly as she spoke, a long dimple appearing. ‘You Inspector Hill? You goin’ to get to the bottom of all this, then?’
And she had a voice like Devonshire cream. ‘I hope so,’ said Judy. ‘But the flaw with entryphones is that someone—’
‘Who let thee in?’
‘One of the men watched out for me,’ his wife said, her voice as soothing as balm. ‘He was workin’ down that way anyway.’
Bailey took the carrier bag from her, and looked inside.
‘Went into Stansfield. Got a nice bit of salmon. We got no fishmon
ger in the village,’ she said to Judy, by way of explanation.
Bailey handed back the bag, and Judy presumed the conversation was over, and reminded herself that she wasn’t here to probe the depths of this strange marriage.
‘As I was saying,’ she went on, ‘ the problem with entryphones is that anyone leaving can admit someone, and—’
‘Get t’shoes,’ Bailey said to his wife, with a jerk of his thumb towards the open door, and sat down on one of the wicker seats.
Mrs Bailey went inside and reappeared minus her shopping and with their shoes. Bailey extended one leg, an indication, it transpired, that his wife should remove his boots. Judy didn’t suppose the service would be offered to her, but her boots were so huge that she had no need of assistance anyway. She stepped out of them, and thankfully slipped on her own shoes, as Mrs Bailey picked up both pairs of boots and went to a standpipe, where she washed the mud off them and her hands.
‘Fetch Paxton,’ he said, with a jerk of his head towards the buildings in the distance, and Mrs Bailey dried her hands on her designer sweater, and obediently trotted off.
Judy dragged her thoughts away from the Baileys’ domestic set-up and opened her mouth to continue.
‘C’mon,’ he said, getting up, going into the house.
Once again she followed him into the hallway, where she was shown the switch box, which proved to be the alarm system, and Bailey explained how it worked.
Fort Knox should be so lucky. There were fourteen alarms altogether, consisting of the perimeter fence alarm, an alarm which was triggered if the gate remained open for more than thirty seconds, and twelve separate infrared alarms for the unfenced boundaries. If one alarm went off, they all did. But if they weren’t cancelled, they would cut off after fifteen minutes and reset themselves; the suggestion had apparently been made by the officer called out this morning that Mr and Mrs Bailey might have slept through them, so Bailey intended giving her a demonstration. He closed up the box, locking it, thus setting the alarms. He, Judy established, had the only key.