Cold in the Earth Read online

  The road was rising now, potholed and narrow, with passing-places. The wind was ripping the clouds apart so that there was even a blink of sunshine as Max reached the higher ground where Chapelton land began. A tiny loch, with the sky reflected in its peaty waters, showed dark navy blue and a dozen tiny rivulets trickled down into the broader shallow burn running brown and stony beside the road. And the sky – he’d forgotten that wide, wide sky and the feeling it gave you of the globe curving away beneath you.

  The fields his grandfather had nurtured into fine pasture stretched on either side, emerald-green in contrast to the rust-red of sodden bracken and the brown clumps of dead heather. Driving slowly now, Max put down the window and let in the fresh, damp air; he could hear the wind rushing through the roadside trees, already wizened and contorted by its power. Somewhere there was a curlew, giving the melancholy cry which is its name in Scots: ‘Whaup! Whaup!’ His throat tightened with some sort of atavistic emotion. It spoke to him, this countryside, in a language he’d all but forgotten at a level too deep to explain even to himself, but suddenly his life in London seemed insubstantial, shadowy.

  It was an unwelcome thought. Max drove on again, recognising familiar landmarks now: the old rusty bath in a corner of the field which acted as a drinking trough for the cattle, the rock outcrop that looked like a frog. But surely he should have been seeing some of the cattle by now, the great horned black cattle which were part of the landscape of his dreams to this day. There was no sign of them.

  There was the sign over the entrance to the farm, though, boasting proudly in blue and gold, ‘Chapelton. Pedigree Welsh Blacks. Champion herd.’ And there, stepping forward to block the way as he made to turn in, were two men in dark blue with diced caps.

  ‘Morning, sir. Heading for Chapelton?’

  Did the police run special courses in stating the bleeding obvious? ‘Self-evidently,’ he said acidly. ‘It’s my father’s farm. I’m Max Mason. All right?’

  The two men exchanged glances. The shorter, stouter one with sergeant’s stripes on his arm spoke this time. ‘Er – I don’t know if you’ve heard, sir—’

  ‘About my father? Yes, of course I have. That’s why I’m here. Now, can I go in and find out what’s happening?’

  ‘Well – I’m afraid there’s been an A notice served on the farm.’

  ‘Unfortunately, Sergeant, I’m not really up to speed on police jargon. Perhaps you could indulge me by explaining what that means in plain English?’ Good God, he sounded exactly like his father! Five minutes back and he’d slipped into speaking Landed Gentry. Why hadn’t he said, ‘Hey, man, what’s going down?’

  The sergeant cleared his throat portentously. ‘It means that the existence of foot-and-mouth disease has been confirmed on the premises and as a result teams from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food are engaged in an operation at this present time under the emergency powers. Anyone entering said premises at this moment in time would not be permitted to leave until such time as it is pronounced free from infection by the appropriate authorities.’

  Max gave a gasp, as if the air had been forced out of his lungs by a punch to the solar plexus. ‘You mean there are men in there right now, slaughtering the cows, the bulls—’ He choked on the word. ‘And there’s nothing I can do to stop it?’

  It wasn’t really a question. The policemen remained impassive, as if fearing a ‘No’ would be provocative.

  Swearing, Max slammed the car into reverse, shot backwards and spun it round so close to the men that they had to jump back for their own safety. Then he slammed on the brakes and leaned across to open the nearside window. ‘Is my cousin Conrad Mason in there?’ His teeth were clenched so that he could hardly articulate.

  Glancing at his sergeant, the constable said, ‘No, sir, he’s staying in Kirkluce I believe. Er – you’ve had quite a shock. Should you be—’

  Max didn’t wait to hear the end of the sentence. He was off down the narrow road at a crazy speed.

  Watching him go, the sergeant shrugged. ‘Och well, he’d be hard put to it to find a sheep to hit. And with the postie past and the mobile shop not due till eleven I can’t mind of anyone else who might get in his way this hour of the morning.’

  ‘Except maybe some more of thae MAFF inspectors, Sarge.’

  ‘Oh aye.’ His superior sniffed. ‘Well, if he wipes some of them out it’ll give the buggers a taste of their own medicine, won’t it?’

  The Glen Inn was a small grey building on the outskirts of New Luce, little more than a pub with rooms. An undistinguished glass extension at the side revealed tables with orange cloths and cream napkins optimistically set for service and window-boxes on the stone ledges of the deep-set windows at the front suggested an attempt to prettify the bleak exterior, but empty as they were they only added to its dilapidated appearance.

  Brett Mason eyed the place with distaste as she got out of the car in the deserted car park at eleven o’clock. Hardly what she was accustomed to! But then, the whole world had turned itself upside down in the last twenty-four hours: the farm, the cattle, Jake . . .

  She daren’t think about the cattle, or about Jake. She’d checked out of the more comfortable hotel in Dumfries where she’d spent the night; there was no point in staying when it was just too harrowing for her to go and see him lying there with tubes everywhere. He wouldn’t have wanted her to be upset.

  And now there was the farm. She’d been told, quite brutally in the circumstances, that she couldn’t go back to her own home – her only security – without being imprisoned there for days, weeks even, amidst the sort of butchery that would give her nightmares for years afterwards. ‘Has Britain become a police state?’ she’d demanded of the hapless official, shaking with fury. The answer seemed to be that it had and owning property conferred no rights over what happened on it.

  She had been, quite simply, thrown to the wolves, with no home, no Jake to protect her and Conrad flatly refusing to deal with that wretched man Strachan and claiming that he couldn’t be at her side where he was needed because of his duties. Well, she’d remember that the next time he came asking for money.

  So this – this hovel was what she was reduced to. At least it would give her well-placed headquarters for a campaign of harassment to make sure of getting back to the farm as soon as possible. They’d get tired of her turning up three times a day to check on progress and it was her lifetime’s experience that the squeaky wheel did indeed get the grease.

  And however angry she might be with Conrad at the moment, she was still determined to see to it that they were both securely established at Chapelton if – well, if anything happened. She couldn’t be entirely sure that Jake had actually changed his will as she had instructed him to, and if Max hadn’t been cut out – as he so richly deserved to be – it would be a disaster. But they said, didn’t they, that possession was nine-tenths of the law, and she was confident that she could make Max’s position completely intolerable if he tried to assert his rights.

  Brett picked up the case she had packed so hastily yesterday before following the ambulance to Dumfries and walked across the car park to the hotel, noting with some disapproval that the window-frames needed painting.

  She felt a certain proprietorial interest in the Glen Inn; after all, Scott Thomson would never have been able to find the deposit for a mortgage if it hadn’t been for the compensation he’d extracted from Jake a couple of years ago. And it wasn’t as if the man didn’t know all about Satan’s little ways; it was pure incompetence for a stockman who’d been with them all these years to let himself be cornered, and frankly he was lucky to have escaped with only a crippled arm when you considered what had happened to Satan’s previous victim.

  With the smug air of a benefactress Brett entered the narrow hall and looked around. It was the first time she had set foot in the place: there were chips in the cream paintwork and she dismissed as ‘petrol station flowers’ the bunch which had been placed rather than arrang
ed in a vase on the reception desk. There was a little brass bell beside it; she pinged it once, then a moment later twice more.

  A door at the back of the hall opened and a woman appeared, looking flustered and smiling nervously. She was pale and very thin, with bruise-coloured circles under her eyes and the lines of a frown between her brows. When she saw who stood there she stopped, standing very still, her smile fading, but she said, politely enough, ‘Good morning, Mrs Mason. Can I help you?’

  ‘Indeed you can.’ Brett eyed her pityingly; really, it was quite depressing the way some women let themselves go. Lisa Thomson had been a pretty enough girl with her dark curly hair and big brown eyes but now the hair was dragged severely into an elastic band at the back and with not a scrap of make-up on her face she looked like a woman of forty when she couldn’t be thirty yet. She’d lost weight, too, which didn’t suit her – subconsciously Brett smoothed down her skirt over her own solid thighs – and she looked as if her dress shop was Oxfam in Kirkluce. It was sad to see her so lacking in self-respect – and that sour expression didn’t help either.

  Brett took particular pains to smile graciously herself. ‘Now, Lisa, you’ve probably heard of the sad problems we’ve been having at Chapelton.’ She paused for the appropriate expressions of sympathy but when they were not forthcoming went on with a sharper edge to her voice, ‘I want to be on the spot until I can get back into my home, so I shall require a room here – your best room – for a few days. And of course it would have to be at a very special price – you must be desperate for custom at the moment.’ She looked pointedly at the full complement of keys hanging on the board behind the other woman’s head.

  Lisa’s dark eyes narrowed and for a brief, uncertain moment Brett had the crazy idea she was going to say no. She didn’t, of course; she looked down at the ledger open in front of her and said in a colourless voice, ‘Certainly, Mrs Mason. That won’t be a problem.’

  She named a figure which Brett of course ridiculed, offering a much lower price which was, naturally, acceptable. She handed her case to her hostess and followed her up the narrow stairs to the landing which had five numbered doors opening off it. After insisting on viewing each of them, with unfavourable comments, she settled for the one she had been shown first with a grudging, ‘I suppose this will have to do.’

  Gesturing to Lisa to put the case down, she collapsed into an upholstered chair with wooden arms which stood beside the disused fireplace, now filled with a bunch of dusty silk flowers. ‘Oh dear!’ She heaved a theatrical sigh.

  She got no response. Lisa left the room, closing the door so firmly that it almost sounded as if it had been slammed. Brett was alone, with nothing to do but consider her emotions.

  She didn’t like being alone. She never had. There was something unnerving about no one being there to react to you, as if you were looking in a mirror and there was no reflection. There had always been someone when she needed them, up till now – darling Papa, Jake, Conrad . . .

  Now what was she to do? Lisa, ungrateful madam, had shown not the smallest interest, despite Brett having been like a mother to her when she’d married Scott and joined the Chapelton community nine years ago.

  She could feel the familiar tension rising. This was when she would normally have announced that one of her nervous attacks was threatening, but now there was no one to hear her say it, soothe her, arrange for the problem to go away. She felt abandoned, even betrayed all over again, as she’d felt when Papa died and left her, when Eddie had walked out on their marriage . . .

  What if she had an attack here on her own? What if she wasn’t strong enough to beat it by herself? It was frightening, terrifying, a great big black thought like a cloud blotting out the sun.

  It mustn’t happen, that was all. Despite all they had done to her, despite Jake’s illness and the tragedy of the farm and her son’s unfeeling attitude, she must put herself first for once, stop thinking of others and keep calm. She found a handkerchief, blew her nose, then sat up straight in her chair, rearranging the scarf round her shoulders.

  The remote control for the small television in the corner was lying on a shelf beside her. She clicked it and the room was instantly full of company and laughter. She settled back in her chair to watch; after all, there was something terribly unsatisfying about being distraught if there was no one to see how distraught you were.

  Back at the reception desk in the hall, Lisa Thomson looked down despairingly at the register where she had just recorded the unwelcome guest. How was she ever going to tell Scott that she hadn’t told Brett Mason where she could go, sailing in here as if she owned the place?

  They’d had such a fight to get the money out of the Masons for Scott’s arm. He could never work as a stockman again, but he wasn’t in a union so they’d had to employ a lawyer to make Jake pay up. And that was only because he was scared there’d be an order for his precious bull to be destroyed if it got to court. It should have been, when it killed one of the stockmen before Scott, and it was an evil beast, Scott said, just biding its time to do it again.

  The pay-off, though, had been pretty good in the end. In fact, they’d talked about it being kind of a blessing, you could say. Well, you wouldn’t be able to buy your own home, even, on a stockman’s wages, let alone a nice wee business, and it had just seemed meant when the Glen Inn came up for sale. It had been their local; a bit spit-and-sawdust, a bit run-down, but they’d reckoned all it needed was a bit of TLC. There were disused rooms upstairs they could do up with en suites and then they could make their fortune with the holiday market and weekend breaks. Donna and Kylie were out at school all day; Lisa would have time on her hands when she wasn’t having to go up to the big house to clean and it would be rare to be her own mistress instead of having Mrs Mason yakking on at her all the time.

  The bank manager had said to her the other day that they’d set out with ‘the fatal combination of optimism and inexperience’ – well, why couldn’t he have told them that at the start instead of now? She kept her mouth shut, of course, because she’d to keep on his good side, but it made her sick to her stomach when she thought back.

  The improvements went way over their budget; they’d had to borrow extra to pay for them but even so when the inspectors came round from the Tourist Board they only gave them one star – ‘acceptable’ – when they’d been counting on three stars – ‘very good’. And Lisa’s cooking was only ‘acceptable’ too – well, she’d never thought she’d be in A Taste of Scotland right off, but she’d shed hot tears over the insult. Advertising was something they hadn’t allowed for properly either, and since they couldn’t afford a computer they weren’t on the Internet, which didn’t help. They’d got by last year, just, on casual visitors for overnights and meals, along with the bar profits.

  That was before Scott began drinking them. He’d missed the outdoor work and the beasts at Chapelton – he’d been there a long time – and once the first excitement of being his own boss wore off, he hadn’t enough to do. His drinking had started during the long, dreary winter months when he’d have a dram with the regulars, just to be sociable, he said. Then, as the business failed to meet its targets and the bank got restless, he began to match them glass for glass. Now, with the locals staying at home and the countryside officially declared closed, he was seldom sober.

  Lisa had never dreamed that she’d have to take on such an awful lot of responsibility. Scott was nine years older, an old-fashioned husband who in their nine-year marriage had never expected her to do more than look after the house and the weans and have his meals ready for him when he came in. He’d lifted his hand to her once or twice recently – but then, she tried to excuse him to herself, it was really hard on him when what mostly needed doing was stuff he called ‘woman’s work’ and he felt he was lowering himself if he did it. He hated taking orders from people too, even if they were the paying customers.

  Lisa’s eyes filled with tears as she looked down at the name on the register. They
needed the money so badly! Foot-and-mouth had been the last straw for their ailing business, and they wouldn’t be in line for fat compensation cheques like the farmers, like the Masons. Repossession was staring them in the face and then what would she do with two children and a crippled husband? Then she sniffed and wiped her eyes fiercely with her fingers. She hadn’t time to waste fussing about the past – or even about the future. What she had to do at the moment was to work out a lunch for Mrs Mason that wouldn’t have the old bag demanding a refund. Oh, and how to break the news to Scott so that he wouldn’t set about their much-needed guest, even verbally, let alone – she felt sick at the thought – physically.

  At least she’d been smart enough to overstate the price of a room so that even after she’d let herself be beaten down she would still be getting £10 a night over the normal rate. At the memory of Brett Mason’s satisfaction at the bargain she had struck, the faintest ghost of a smile crossed Lisa’s lips, though it didn’t last long.

  9

  The police, arms linked, had formed a solid, double-banked line across the road and were gradually but inexorably pushing back the struggling, shouting protestors. They made an unlikely mob, with tweeds and oiled jackets predominating, but anger thickened the air like fog as they found themselves forced to retreat down the narrow walled lane, away from the junction where a line of vehicles had drawn up: 4x4s with officials and government vets, a van with equipment, police mini-buses and escort cars with their lights flashing. Breathing heavily, Tam MacNee pushed forward. He hated being drafted on to uniform duties, hated wearing the bloody thing, come to that. And the waistband wasn’t as comfortable as it used to be; he’d need to have a word with Bunty about her high teas.