by Kim M Watt
They both gave Dandy an accusing look, although DI Adams supposed Collins was just staring at the damp patch hoping he was in the right area.
“Alright.” They’d stopped to retrieve the brochure and letters Dandy had discovered last night from the evidence room, and now she laid the letters out on the desk next to the ones Alice had received. It was impossible to be sure without an expert looking at them, but to her the paper looked and felt the same, the print the same size and font and layout. “Do you think it’s time to pay a visit to BelleVue?”
DI Collins was still working his way through his emails, and now he looked over at her with a grin. “Yes, but you might want to wait while I make a phone call.”
“Who to?”
“The tech’s tracked down the owners of that farm.”
The email was rather heavy on the details regarding how difficult it had been to find a contact number, and just how late Jules (the tech) had been up last night, and just how early she’d got up this morning. There was also a lot of detail about exactly how she’d done it, all of which DI Adams skimmed, leaning over Collins’ shoulder. The landline and all the mobiles for the Elliot family had been disconnected. There was no forwarding address. Not even their customers or suppliers seemed to know where they’d gone – although they had paid off all their accounts before they went, which to DI Adams’ mind rather suggested they were hoping they’d be back. Jules hadn’t been able to get hold of anyone on the neighbouring farms, which seemed a little odd, but from the phone records she had eventually turned up a worried best friend, who told them the family had just packed up and moved to Spain. “It doesn’t seem right,” she’d said. “Sara hates paella.”
And she had Sara’s Spanish number.
Now DI Adams tapped her pen against her notepad as she leaned over the phone. She’d argued that Sara might be more willing to talk to a woman, and after some grumbling about people skills Collins had given in and settled back in his chair to listen.
“And you don’t know what the buyer wanted the farm for?” DI Adams asked. She could almost see the woman, standing in a quiet spot well out of earshot of her family, in some Spanish town where whitewashed walls glowed in the sun and bougainvillea splashed purple across the courtyards, and the earth was baked terracotta.
“No,” the voice said over speakerphone, her tone low and subdued. “But you can’t run a farm without livestock. And we couldn’t afford to replace them. The offer came just in time.”
“And was it the first offer they’d made?”
A moment’s hesitation, so small that if DI Adams hadn’t been looking for it, she’d have missed it. “Yes, first time.”
“That was lucky.”
“Yes.”
“And when you said you lost the livestock, how did that happen?”
“Some contaminant got into the water troughs. It was quick. We just woke up one morning and …” her voice caught, then she continued. “We lost about a quarter of our sheep. We were trying to claim on insurance, but you know what they’re like. They were insisting it was a man-made, introduced substance, and that we’d done it ourselves.” Another pause, and DI Adams looked at Collins across the desk. He had his fingers wrapped around his mug, his face serious. “Anyway, we were still trying to deal with that when we lost fifty more.”
“Fifty?” DI Adams wasn’t quite sure how many sheep a place like that had. Collins mouthed, that’s a lot.
“Yes.”
“Poisoned again?”
“No. They … something ate them.”
“Something ate fifty sheep?”
“We thought it might be feral dogs, but they were really eaten. Dogs usually just savage them.”
DI Adams scrawled a couple of notes on her pad, her writing messy and spiky. “So you reported it?”
“We …” a sigh drifted across the phone. “We did, but the police who came out couldn’t find anything, and the insurance policy didn’t even cover being eaten. I suppose that’s kind of a rarity in the Yorkshire Dales.”
“I suppose.”
“And then we lost the rest.”
“What, all of them?”
“Right down to the old girl who was in the barn because she’d gone lame.”
“How?”
“They were just gone. And our dogs as well.”
Collins shook his head, lines creasing his forehead.
“Were they stolen?” DI Adams asked.
“That’s what we thought, but how do you get a couple of hundred sheep into trucks in the middle of the night without anyone noticing? Without the dogs barking? How does that even happen?”
“You heard nothing at all?”
“No. We just woke up the next morning and the fields were empty. It was like some Twilight Zone thing.”
“Did you report that?”
A longer pause this time. “No. We were just … shell-shocked, you know. In less than a month we lost everything except the land itself. We couldn’t even think straight.”
“I’m so sorry,” DI Adams said, and she was. She couldn’t imagine that sort of loss.
“And then the offer arrived. And they only wanted the land. So we took it.”
“The insurance claim is still ongoing?”
“We gave up. The offer was good enough that we just cancelled everything and told the insurance not to bother. Fat lot of good they were anyway.”
“And was this offer through an agency or private?”
“Private.”
“Can you give us a name?”
“No. No, I can’t do that.”
DI Adams made a quiet fist on the table. “Okay. Any particular conditions on the sale?”
Silence, then the woman said in a low voice, “That we left, and we didn’t talk about it. They even gave us … they called it a property swap. But I just … the timing’s all wrong, you know?”
“I know,” DI Adams said quietly. “Thank you for talking to us. It won’t go beyond this room.”
“Alright.” The woman paused again, then said in a very soft voice, “I want to go home.”
“We want that for you. Is there anything else you can tell us? Anything at all? Even if you can’t give us a name, anything that might help us look in the right place?”
“No.”
“Mrs Elliot—” DI Adams could hear kids shouting in the background, excited holiday shouts.
“I have to go.”
Then there was nothing but the dial tone, and DI Adams scowled at the phone as she hung up, suddenly wishing she’d had more for lunch than a salad. This sort of thing called for more substantial fuel.
There was silence for a moment, then Collins said, “Jules put a note at the end of the email.”
“What’s it say?”
“Sara called Thomas Wright twice the week he died.”
DI Adams rubbed her mouth. “Interesting.”
“I suppose we need to find out who owns all that land now.”
“I can guess.”
“So can I.” He thought for a moment, then added, “I don’t understand how they heard nothing, though. You can’t exactly muzzle a couple of hundred sheep.”
“You think she was lying?”
He shook his head. “It didn’t sound like it. But it does sound very Twilight Zone-y.”
“Or, you know. Other stuff.”
He raised his eyebrows at her. “Magic stuff?”
“There has got to be better way to put it.”
“Says the woman with the invisible dog.”
DI Adams waved at him dismissively, and he snorted, then added, “I’d also like to know what can eat fifty sheep in a sitting.”
“Well, if we’re talking other stuff, I can think of two kinds of creature. One I’m pretty sure is innocent.”
Collins stopped with his mug halfway to his mouth. “Not goblins. I did not like goblins.”
DI Adams wondered if it was wise to hope for more than two varieties of large, magical, and carnivorous creatures
to be living in one of the most popular tourist areas in the UK. She supposed not.
She was just heading out of the office with her car keys in hand when the tech appeared, hands in her pockets.
“Want to see it?” she asked
“See what?” DI Adams asked.
“The thingy that popped the brakes on that SUV.”
“Is ‘thingy’ tech-talk for some kind of explosive device, Jules?” Collins asked from inside the office.
“Yeah. Pretty much.”
“So no chance of an accident,” he said, joining them at the door.
“Not unless someone accidentally stuck the thingy to the exact spot where they could destroy the braking system by detonating it remotely at whatever time suited them. Accidentally, of course.”
“Seems unlikely,” DI Adams said.
“Yeah. Wanna see?”
“I’ll come see,” Collins said.
DI Adams checked the time. It was already after 3 p.m., and if she wanted to get down to the Manchester offices of BelleVue and have a chat to anyone she couldn’t leave it much later. It was an hour and a quarter even in good traffic. “I’ll pass.”
“Sure? It’s interesting.”
“I believe you. Send photos.” She headed for the door, Dandy loping happily behind her.
She was just opening the car when a familiar voice shouted, “DI Adams! Inspector!”
She groaned, considering just jumping in and making a run for it, but Ervin was already jogging across the street.
“I was just coming to see you,” he said.
“I’m busy, Ervin.”
“I’ll be quick. I wondered if you’d heard about all the cars that had their tyres slashed near Toot Hansell last night?”
DI Adams frowned. “No. Vandals?”
“Maybe, but it was on a walking track. Pretty weird, right? And Toot Hansell again!”
She leaned on the car. “Where were they parked?”
“Near the woods to the northwest of town. A sunset ramble, apparently. The ramblers all came back and there wasn’t a single tyre left whole. Weird, right?”
Northwest of town. The dragons had their mount somewhere around there, as far as she knew. Not even the W.I. had actually seen the place, but she knew that was where the ground got rough and the woods impassable. And, of course, dragons had been sneaking around farms in just that area. Empty farms. She sighed. “Maybe it was an angry rival rambler group.”
Ervin snorted. “Yeah, we all know how competitive those ramblers are.”
“What do you want, Mr Giles?”
“For you to stop calling me Mr Giles, and also tell me if you’ve looked into BelleVue at all.”
“I can’t comment on an ongoing investigation.”
“Not even a little? I did give you everything I knew.”
DI Adams folded her arms and regarded the journalist with narrowed eyes. Dandy had given him a good sniff, paying particular attention to his satchel, then gone to lie in the middle of the road, flopping down like a very old and rather dirty rug. DI Adams wondered if invisible dogs could still get hit by cars, or if he had the same casual relationship with them as he seemed to have with doors and walls.
“Fine,” Ervin said. “I hope I get an exclusive at the end, at least.”
“Alright,” she said. “Not saying this is related to anything, but you might want to look into a farm in that sort of area. Maybe more than one,” she added, thinking of the tech’s note saying she hadn’t been able to reach any neighbours.
“What about them?” If he’d been a dog, she was pretty sure he’d have been quivering. “More slashed tyres?”
“You’re the investigative journalist.” She pushed herself off the car and opened the door.
“Right, so I just go wander onto some farms and hope no one sets any dogs on me for trespassing?”
“I pretty much guarantee you’ll be safe from that.”
“Pretty much? I’d rather a more categorical guarantee.”
DI Adams watched Dandy put himself in the passenger seat, apparently without actually climbing in the door. She could never quite tell how he did it. “Well, I wouldn’t like to overstretch my boundaries. One never knows, after all.” She swung into the car and added, “Let me know what you see.”
“Oh, well, that’s a fair exchange,” he said, but she was already pulling out of the space, powering the passenger window down so Dandy could stick his head out, dreadlocks flopping wildly and his eyes that uneasy LED red that had somehow come to seem entirely normal. In the rear-view mirror, she saw the journalist jog to his car, and she smiled. She didn’t think there would be anyone at the farms for the journalist to worry about, and if there were, she had a feeling he was the sort of person who could wriggle out of almost anything. And maybe a little extra pressure was just what BelleVue needed.
A bit over an hour later, she found herself being swallowed by a black leather sofa that was too hard on the edges and too soft in the centre, while a young man at a glossy black desk whispered into his phone and Dandy roamed around the stark room sniffling at the walls. She wished she knew what he was thinking. He seemed to regard everyone from Miriam to the car thief she’d arrested on her last case with the same distracted interest, which struck her as very undiscerning and not very useful. He certainly didn’t live up to Thompson’s dire predictions about devil dandy dogs. Unless he was secretly sacrificing chickens in the bathroom while she was sleeping or something.
The young man put the phone down and said, “You can go in now.”
“Thanks,” DI Adams said, peeling herself out of the sofa with some difficulty.
“Tea, coffee?” the secretary offered. He seemed to be having some trouble looking directly at her, and she wondered if she had biscuit crumbs on her nose.
“No, thanks.” She didn’t wait for him to show her in, but opened the door and walked into an office with two glass walls that overlooked a slightly rundown area of canal. It was a grey sort of day down here, not as sunny as it had been when she’d left Skipton, and the dull sky was reflected in the marble floor.
“Detective Inspector,” the man behind the desk said, getting up hurriedly and extending a hand. “Welcome.”
“Thank you,” she said, shaking his hand and seating herself without being asked.
“Has Tom offered you a drink?”
“I’m fine, thanks.”
“Right, right.” The man sat, smoothing the hair at the sides of his head. “To what do I owe the pleasure of a visit from the Skipton police?”
“Mr Butler—”
“Please, call me Gary.”
“Mr Butler,” she repeated, watching Dandy sniff the man then wander to the windows and stare out, apparently transfixed by the view. Useless animal. “What can you tell me about your company’s plans for building in the Skipton area?”
“Ah, yes. We have a most excellent range of executive homes currently under construction. Two, three, and four-bedroom duplexes with–—”
“I was aware of those, yes. How about any other projects?”
He frowned. “No, none.”
“Nothing, say, in the region of Toot Hansell?”
“Toot where?” He grinned. “Is that a real name?”
He was either an excellent liar or he really knew nothing about it. Which wasn’t out of the question. “Alright. Why did BelleVue host a cocktail party for the Skipton council members?”
“A combination of market research and, shall we say, greasing the wheels?”
She made a quick scribble on her pad. “A bribe, in other words?”
“No! No, of course not. But it doesn’t hurt to wine and dine those who might be approving planning permissions, or indeed might become buyers. It’s just business.”
“Hmm.” She scribbled again, less a note than a doodle. “Did you meet Gavin Peabody, Thomas Wright and Charles Morgan?”
He frowned, rolling a pen in his fingers. “I think so. Councillors?”
“Yes
. All recently deceased.”
He stopped rolling the pen. “Oh dear. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“There’s been a lot of upheaval at the council since your cocktail party. Two retirements. Three deaths.”
“I hope you’re not suggesting BelleVue had anything to do with it.”
“An excellent question.” DI Adams said, even though it hadn’t been a question. She took a moment to scratch on her notepad, and Gary craned his neck to try and see what she was writing. “I’ve looked into your company. There have been complaints made about your methods of acquiring property.”
“Unfortunately people sometimes regret selling, even when they get an above-market price. Their claims have always been groundless. Nothing has ever made it to court.”
“Some environmental groups have been less than happy, too.” This she’d found with a quick Google search the night before. Protests at development sites and concerns about construction techniques.
“Well, yes. But, again, we were never found to be at fault. All our works have been fully approved by local councils. Progress is disruption, I’m afraid.” Gary clasped his hands on the desk, his face smoothing, and DI Adams wondered how many times he’d said those words. They had the hollow ring of the well-rehearsed.
“I guess that depends on your perspective,” she said, and scribbled in the notebook again. It was making him wonderfully uneasy. “What do your developments normally look like? Housing? Shops?”
“It really depends on the area. We do tend to work with mostly residential, though. High quality builds and secure, well-landscaped neighbourhoods.”
She frowned. “Like gated communities?”
“Yes, exactly.”
DI Adams tried to imagine a gated community springing up next to Toot Hansell. Somehow, it seemed as impossible as a cluster of skyscrapers. This was a village that didn’t even bother to lock its doors. A gated community felt more than disruptive. It felt insulting, somehow. “And there’s a lot of demand for that?”
“Oh, definitely. Everyone wants safety. Everyone wants that exclusive, American-style home, with large square footage and a big yard. It’s the dream.”