Cold in the Earth Read online

  She couldn’t read his expression. ‘They’re killing them now. They’ve been at it most of the day – I’m expecting a call from them any time now to say they’re finished.’ He fished out a mobile phone from his pocket and set it between them.

  ‘Are you alone at the farm?’ she asked.

  He looked puzzled. ‘Alone – oh no, I’m not at the farm at all. If I’d set foot in the place they weren’t going to let me leave until it was declared free of infection, and God knows when they’ll get round to that. No, I’m staying here.’

  As Laura’s heart sank he went on, ‘And you are too, obviously. Brilliant! You can hold my hand when my wicked cousin comes in breathing fire. My aunt’s summoned him. She’s staying here too and when I drifted in this afternoon I thought we’d have to book another hospital bed beside the Minotaur.’

  ‘That must have been the lady I saw in the dining-room this evening.’ For once Laura felt some sympathy for Max. ‘How is your father? Have you been to see him?’

  ‘Not good, but still hanging on. No, I haven’t visited. Have to give the old bastard a sporting chance and the sight of me would probably carry him off.’

  He changed the subject. ‘Still, I’m in the driving-seat at Chapelton. I went in this afternoon to check it out with the lawyer. Stuffy old sod – he wouldn’t tell me a thing about the will but since he agreed I should take over day-to-day admin I think I can take it I haven’t been bumped off the beneficiary list.

  ‘That was what nearly finished Auntie off – she was sure her dear little Conrad was right in there. He’s a policeman now, apparently, of all bizarre things. So I’m scared he’s going to have me arrested on some trumped-up charge when he comes roaring in tonight. You will come and vouch for my good character, won’t you, if I’m hauled off to the Tolbooth in Kirkluce?’

  He had glanced at his watch and now he was drumming his fingers on the table; he was, she realised, genuinely nervous about the confrontation ahead. The last thing she needed was to get herself involved in a family fracas. She stood up.

  ‘I will, I promise. But I’m sorry, I’m going to abandon you now. I’ve driven eight hours today and I’m bushed.’

  ‘Laura, you can’t—’ As he spoke, the phone on the table rang and he reached for it, saying hastily, ‘Wait just a minute, I want to say something – hello? Max Mason speaking.’

  She could, of course, leave anyway but it would be gratuitously rude. She hovered, in the awkward position of trying not to eavesdrop while being unable to avoid hearing every word.

  They had finished the slaughter, it appeared. They were moving out tonight and tomorrow the disposal of the carcasses would start.

  Max seemed surprised, if pleased. ‘I was told this afternoon that it was likely to take some time?’

  There was some lengthy conversation, then he gave a tight-lipped smile. ‘Nice to have friends in high places, then. I’m glad my cousin’s useful for something.’

  He listened again, then said, ‘I don’t see why it shouldn’t be there. We won’t be needing the ground for cattle for quite a bit. If ever. Go ahead, dig your pit.’

  He rang off. ‘Sorry. Well, at least they’re getting on with it. They’ve decided pyres are too risky now – wouldn’t you think they could have worked that out before they contaminated half the farms in the country? So tomorrow they’re digging a pit in Satan’s field—’

  Laura had been conscious of a door slamming a moment earlier; as Max started speaking the door to the bar had been flung open and a man strode in, tall, broad and good-looking in a brutalist kind of way.

  ‘What?’ he bellowed. ‘What did you just say?’

  Max looked up with elaborate unconcern though Laura noticed that his defensive body-language – rigid shoulders hunched, fists clenched before him on the table – betrayed his anxiety. ‘Well, well, well! If it isn’t my cousin Conrad!’

  ‘You can’t dig up Satan’s field!’

  ‘Wanted to keep it as some sort of shrine, did you? You and my father were always besotted with the animal – nasty-tempered brute, as I remember.’

  ‘Don’t – don’t be ridiculous.’ Conrad spat out the words; the hatred between the cousins was almost tangible. ‘It’s some of the best pasture we have – we’ll need it when we restock.’

  ‘If we restock.’ Ignoring his cousin’s stunned expression, Max got up. ‘Come on, Conrad, I know we can’t expect civilised behaviour from the Filth, but you might at least say hello to a lady.’

  Conrad half-turned, then at the sight of Laura, gaped. ‘Di?’ he stammered, then, ‘No, no, of course it isn’t.’

  Max’s smile was malicious. ‘This is Laura Harvey, her half-sister. It’s a remarkable likeness, isn’t it – like a ghost of time past, coming back to haunt us?’

  It took only a moment for the man to regain his poise. He smiled, very charmingly, and held out his hand. ‘Do forgive me. I didn’t mean to insult you – you must be years younger! How is she, by the way?’

  ‘I’m – I’m afraid we’ve lost touch.’ Laura, too, had been thrown by the introduction. It was what Max liked to do, his standard power-play, but she wasn’t about to accept his direction. ‘You two obviously have a lot to discuss,’ she said firmly. ‘I’m off to bed.’

  She ignored Max’s protest and walked out, aware that Conrad’s eyes were following her. But she was more disconcerted when, as she closed the glass door, she realised that Scott Thomson, too, was staring after her, with an expression on his face that she could not read.

  It was, perhaps, unsurprising that Laura slept badly. She woke fully at around three o’clock, that time of the morning when, viewed through the prism of tiredness, the world seems a cruel and hopeless prison. Her grief for the loss of her mother, suppressed by activity during the day, welled up now and she turned her face into her pillow to stifle her sobs.

  At last she got up and went through to the little shower-room to splash her face. She could hear the moaning of the wind; she switched off the light and pulled back the curtain to look at the weather.

  It was pitch black outside. There was no moon and no sign of stars; after living in towns and cities this deep darkness was almost shocking. It wasn’t raining, but there was a strong wind blowing and she could just see bushes being whipped about in the garden below. She dropped the curtain again. As she was turning away, she heard a noise from somewhere not far away. It sounded like a bull, or a cow, perhaps, bellowing. She didn’t know much about animals, but it sounded as if it was in distress.

  They’d slaughtered all the Chapelton cattle, hadn’t they? And there certainly wasn’t another farm between here and there. Could they have missed one, left it wandering alone and terrified among the corpses of its herd?

  Laura looked out of the window again, but apart from wavering, indecipherable shadows she couldn’t see anything. She was getting cold now too. Trying to put the thought of the wretched creature out of her head, she got back into bed and tried to compose herself for sleep.

  10

  ‘Good morning, ma’am.’ PC Langlands was at the reception desk the following morning when DI Fleming came in. Instead of calling her usual cheerful greeting, she looked straight through him, leaving him searching his conscience for a reason and nervously anticipating a summons to account for whatever it was.

  Oblivious to the trouble she had caused, Marjory Fleming plodded up the stairs to her office, her whole body heavy with the weight of her misery. Perhaps, she reflected briefly, it just showed what a cushy life she’d had that she’d never before felt wretched like this.

  She’d never been at odds with Bill before, for a start. They’d had the odd quarrel, but until yesterday they’d always been on the same side. It hadn’t been easy recently, with all that was going on, and the lengthening pauses in their evening conversations had been thick with unspoken thoughts. But Bill was a reasonable man and after all it was at his insistence that she had gone to stay with her parents precisely so that she could carry on her j
ob.

  Still, his sympathies were naturally with his friends and colleagues; hers were too, only she did feel a certain resentment that while she was understanding about their difficulties, they seemed entirely unprepared to make allowances for her own. Did they think she enjoyed this, for heaven’s sake? She didn’t say that to Bill, though; for days now they had talked stiltedly about the children, her parents, anything but what was uppermost in both their minds.

  Yesterday, when he picked up the phone, she knew from his voice that he had heard about the day’s events. Tired of papering over the cracks, she said abruptly, ‘Have you been talking to Susie?’

  Yes, he had, and it was clear where he stood. ‘It’s been a bad business. It’s an awful pity you had to be involved.’

  ‘You know I haven’t any choice,’ she cried, feeling betrayed. ‘You know I don’t like it any more than you do. None of us wants this—’

  ‘But it was so badly handled! Couldn’t you have intervened, worked at persuading them to accept the situation instead of putting in the heavies?’

  ‘You think we didn’t? Perhaps you can suggest the easy way to make someone who’s barricaded themselves in and whistled up a protest mob comply with the law?’ She was angry now. ‘I can promise you we tried everything else – it’s too expensive to mobilise that number of people unless there’s no alternative.’

  ‘Oh, if it’s a question of money, of course—’ There was pent-up rage in his voice.

  ‘Your money. Their money.’

  ‘If it’s our money, it’s not how we’d choose to spend it.’ Then Bill stopped and she heard him take a deep breath. ‘Look, Marjory, we’re getting into a quarrel over this and it’s not constructive. You have your point of view and I have mine. It’s just I was very upset to think that you’d lost a good friend.’

  Good friend! ‘Did she tell you what she did to me?’ Marjory’s tone was dangerously quiet.

  ‘Did? No.’

  ‘She spat in my face.’

  It silenced him and she enjoyed a moment of bitter satisfaction. When he spoke again his voice was softer.

  ‘I didn’t know that. I’m sorry, love.’

  She hung up on him. She knew it was stupid. She had waited for him to ring back. He hadn’t.

  This morning she was suffering for having taken an olive branch and trampled it underfoot, and she was worrying about the children too. Cat, under Janet’s influence, was rapidly becoming a Fifties throwback: Marjory rarely saw her without a pinny on and she had even said reproachfully, ‘Mum, why don’t you pull out all the beds to clean behind them every week? You can’t have a clean house if there’s dust under the beds.’ Like her grandmother, she’d taken to waiting hand and foot on the menfolk and her brother was rapidly becoming a male chauvinist piglet.

  But last night, when Marjory had got home late, lacerated after the day’s problems and her conversation with Bill, Cammie was still awake and in tears when she went into his bedroom. Playing Racing Demon with Grandpa had palled; Cammie had made the mistake of saying it was boring and his grandfather had taken his revenge by confiscating Cammie’s beloved GameBoy.

  The child put his arms round his mother’s neck and sobbed. ‘I don’t like it here any more. I want to go home.’

  ‘I know, I know. It’s a bit tough, isn’t it? But maybe it won’t be long now.’

  She managed to soothe him, kissed him goodnight and went wearily downstairs trying to work out what to do.

  It wasn’t that she had any brief for the GameBoy – just the opposite – but Cammie was, after all, a kid who’d been uprooted from home and this was just plain bullying. How typical of her father to react with vindictiveness to any slight, real or imagined! What was so sad was that he and Cammie had been developing quite a good relationship and this had created a no-win situation. If Cammie went on feeling unjustly treated it would sour his affection for his grandfather, but if Marjory waded in and forced the return of the stupid thing, her father would never forgive Cammie for causing him to lose face. It was Angus who would be the principal loser: it was his problem, his choice . . . Still, it was a shame.

  She could hear the sound of the television as she came downstairs; it had barely been on since the children arrived. There was a light in the kitchen, though, so her mother must be working there. She could go and talk to her about it.

  It didn’t, of course, come as news to Janet. In her own inimitable way she managed to be sympathetic to everyone without taking sides; after listening patiently she had told her daughter not to fash herself, that it would all be fine in the morning and why did she not get herself off to bed for a good sleep because she was looking real peelie-wallie?

  Marjory had agreed, but it was still one more reason for feeling depressed. She let herself into her office and sat down at her desk to check her e-mails, hoping against hope that there wasn’t another exercise like yesterday’s on the agenda. For once, the thought of paperwork was positively inviting.

  She found nothing too alarming: the tasking group anticipated no serious disturbances over the next twenty-four hours, she had a debriefing appointment with the Super, a planning meeting, a request for permission to go on a training course and there was a circular about planned alterations to the canteen. And a note, unsigned, which said in quotation marks,

  ‘For the future be prepar’d

  Guard whatever thou canst guard:

  But thy utmost duty done

  Welcome what thou canst not shun.’

  She read it with a wry smile. No prizes for guessing who’d sent that one.

  Marjory was in the middle of a report when the man himself knocked on the door and came in.

  ‘Tam!’ she said. ‘I got your note – appreciated the support if not the message. You bloody try welcoming—’

  Then she noticed his expression. ‘What’s happened?’ she said sharply.

  He sat down. ‘We’ve maybe a wee bit of a problem on our hands, boss. We’ve just had this call from the guys digging a burial pit over at Chapelton. They’ve found a body.’

  Laura began her research in the morning in the offices of the local weekly paper, the Galloway Globe, and found that the editor, a round, cheerful man rejoicing in the name of Neil MacSporran, was delighted to be helpful. He set her down with back copies of the newspaper and even recommended a few people he thought would be happy to talk to her.

  By eleven o’clock she was drinking coffee and eating featherlight oven scones in the kitchen of a farm near the coast towards Wigtown which had lost its stock in the first week of the epidemic. The place was eerily empty and silent; the farmer’s wife talked incessantly while her husband said nothing but paced like a caged animal, often stopping by the window to look out over the deserted fields. She talked, he didn’t, which worried Laura: he was in a high-risk profession for suicide and a reactive depression, left untreated, was a recipe for disaster.

  As she rose to go, she said to him, ‘Have you been offered counselling?’ and at last saw him animated.

  ‘Load of blethers!’ he snorted. ‘My certies, lassie! If you caught me having any truck with a daft-like notion like yon, you’d know I’d gone clean gyte!’

  The vocabulary was obscure but the meaning was plain enough and perhaps he knew his own business best. Laura grinned, agreed that he might not be the ideal subject and left, promising to come to see them again.

  She had lunch in a cosy café in Wigtown and a useful chat with its proprietor, then after a browse through a couple of the bookshops for which the town is famous and more conversations, she had pages of notes to write up and she headed back.

  She’d booked in to the Glen Inn for another couple of nights. It would give her a chance to find out if the Thomsons remembered Dizzy and she might even pluck up the courage to ask the unpleasant Mrs Mason for her recollections, though these were unlikely to be positive; Max had said the two women had been at loggerheads.

  Lisa had clearly been pleased about the extra business even though s
he had looked this morning as if the strain of catering for several visitors single-handed was almost overwhelming. She confided that she and Scott had been very late to bed; they couldn’t lock up until the cousins left the bar and they’d stayed up till all hours quarrelling. ‘Bellowing like two of their own bulls,’ she said with a nervous giggle.

  ‘Oh! I wonder if that was what I heard last night,’ Laura had said, though on reflection she was fairly sure the sound had not come from inside the hotel. If it was a lone animal she could only hope they had found the poor thing today and put it out of its misery.

  Driving back over the now-familiar territory to New Luce, Laura planned the rest of her day: she should write up her research on her laptop while it was still fresh in her memory, and she’d bought a copy of The Thirty-Nine Steps, with its Galloway background, which would keep her comfortably amused in her room and out of Max’s way at least until dinnertime.

  Just before she reached New Luce she realised there was a police van behind her and she slowed down to let it overtake. There were two police cars in the car park of the hotel too; it must be something to do with the slaughter at Chapelton.

  She was completely unprepared for what awaited her. As she opened the front door, Max emerged from the dining-room at the side of the hotel, looking white and shaken.

  ‘Laura!’ He pounced on her, grabbing her arm so hard that it was painful. ‘Where have you been? I needed you!’

  ‘Max, whatever’s wrong?’

  He gestured behind him to the open door of the dining-room where Laura could see uniformed police and two or three other people sitting at one of the tables. ‘They came this morning – they’ve found a woman’s body in the field they were digging up. It’s been there for years. Laura, it’s my mother, I know it is! I always thought my father might have killed her – why would she have gone away and never got in touch with me?’

  He began to cry, great tearing sobs. Laura, dumbfounded, put her arm round his shoulders and looked helplessly round for somewhere he could sit down.