Cold in the Earth Page 9

  A few moments later Bill appeared in his stocking soles but still wearing his wet oilskins. Meg the collie, soaked and shivering, slipped past him to press herself against the warmth of the stove.

  In Bill’s hands was a tiny lamb, legs swinging from the sad, inert little body. ‘The first of the orphans. It’s a bit of a bugger that this is the best lambing season we’ve had for years, despite the rain. Do you suppose there’s any point in trying to revive it?’

  Marjory set down the iron. ‘Oh, Bill – a little black one!’

  She came over, touched the soft, damp fuzz of its fleece. ‘Poor wee thing – we should give it a chance, surely?’ Then she thought of Cat and grimaced.

  ‘Cat.’ Bill read her expression. ‘She’d fall apart.’

  The little creature’s eyes were shut tight, its life almost perceptibly ebbing away. Marjory hardened her heart against sentimentality; they might, after all, only preserve it for a more miserable end.

  There was a huge lump in her throat. ‘Let it go,’ she said.

  Miserably Bill nodded, then trudged out cradling the dying lamb, back into the wind and the rain.

  7

  It had all happened with such agonising suddenness and speed. Jake Morgan read it in the eyes of Willie Strachan the stockman as he stood in front of the desk, pleating his tweed bunnet in his labourer’s hands, black-seamed and cracked and split with outdoor work. He was a tall, wiry man in his thirties with a two-day growth of stubble, a hard man whose daily business was handling the dangerous unpolled cattle of the Chapelton herd, but he was clearly afraid to speak. As if the drooping lines of his body weren’t shouting the news so loudly that it was all Jake could do not to put his hands over his ears to shut it out.

  Jake had believed that here on these upland acres they were isolated enough to be protected. Conrad had been banished already to find digs in Kirkluce; the farm-workers and their families had been banned from leaving. The vaccine from Spain should arrive in the next couple of days; he’d reckoned that if the worst came to the worst, with the contagion in a neighbouring farm, he could disclose his precautions and demand special consideration. He’d prepared himself for a long-drawn-out agony, watching as the flood-tide of the virus lapped the shores of his island of security, wondering if his strategy would work. He wasn’t prepared for a lightning strike.

  ‘Yes?’ he said dully.

  Lesions, the man reported, on the lips of three of the cows. They seemed listless, too, hanging their heads and off their feed.

  ‘I – I see.’ Jake tried to clear his head, to think calmly, but the headache which was never far away these days had returned with excruciating force and there was a singing in his ears. Perhaps if they isolated these cows they could manage to contain it. No one need know; there wouldn’t be the usual to-and-froing to the village with gossip. They’d lose a few, obviously – could kill them and dispose of them quietly themselves – but once the vaccine arrived there would be a chance to save the nucleus of the herd if they acted fast enough.

  ‘Bring them into the stockyard, Willie,’ he ordered. ‘In fact, bring in all the cows from that field. Strict isolation – don’t let them near any of the others.’

  ‘Aye, I did that, sir, right away.’

  ‘Good man, good man. Now, what next?’

  ‘Well, I phoned the vet—’

  It took a second for the significance of the words to strike Jake. ‘What? You did what?’ Leaping to his feet, Jake yelled the word; the man recoiled, taking a couple of nervous steps backwards.

  ‘I thought—’

  ‘You thought? You thought? You know what you’ve gone and done? You’ve signed the death warrant of every animal on this farm! You’ve wiped out fifty years of work, mine and my father’s. You imbecilic, moronic bastard!’ Flecks of foam were gathering at the corners of Jake’s mouth.

  The door flew open and Brett Mason stood in the middle of the doorway, in a dramatic pose. ‘How can anyone in this house possibly be expected to live a normal life when—’

  Then, sensing for once a tension in the atmosphere which she hadn’t generated, she stopped. ‘Jake, what’s happened?’ she demanded sharply.

  Her brother spun round, his face suffused with alarming colour. ‘Meet the man who’s decided to destroy our lives,’ he said thickly. ‘We’ve got a couple of infected animals and he phones the executioners so they can come and massacre the Chapelton herd!’

  Her eyes widened. ‘The bulls! Oh no, Papa’s bulls! They can’t do that, they can’t, they can’t!’

  She began to scream hysterically, shriek after shriek. It seemed almost practised: performance art, perhaps. Strachan stared at her in alarm, unconsciously removing himself to a less exposed position between the desk and the fireplace.

  Jake, however, found himself unmoved. His sister’s over-reaction seemed, oddly enough, to make him feel calmer; he said coldly, ‘It won’t work this time, Brett. It’s too serious for your little games. If we can’t think of some way out, we’re finished.’

  She stopped, with bizarre effect, in mid-scream. Jake stood still, his hands to his aching temples. His companions were silent, although Brett’s bosom was still heaving with emotion and Willie Strachan’s eyes were wary.

  At last Jake sighed. ‘Right, I’ve got a plan. It probably won’t work, thanks to your little bit of personal initiative,’ he shot a smouldering look at the stockman, ‘but it’s all I can think of. Strachan, you can go back and phone the vet again immediately. Tell him it’s a false alarm, that you’ve had another look at the cows and they’re fine now. You can say you had a bit of a night last night and weren’t seeing straight this morning. I’ll make it worth your while.’

  But Strachan’s face had taken on a stubborn cast. ‘I’ll do no such thing. The fancy beasts you’ve got out there are no different from the sheep on Dougie Duncan’s wee hill farm that got culled last week – they’re out there, spreading what they’ve got. The law’s the same for the toffs as for the rest of us and you’ll not buy me to break it when there’s poor folk could lose their living because your cows were treated different.’

  At first Jake’s face showed incredulity and then it darkened into a mask of rage. ‘You impertinent – impertinent—’ Almost blinded by his furious despair, he blundered across the room towards the younger man who was standing with his arms folded and his stubbled chin stuck out truculently. Jake tried to swing his fist, but somehow his arm had no real strength in it. The rage seemed to be exploding inside his head, bringing with it a searing pain like none he had ever experienced before. Then everything went dark.

  He keeled over like a felled tree and landed heavily face down on a Persian rug, right at the feet of his horrified employee.

  ‘Oh, my God!’ Strachan dropped to his knees, took Mason’s shoulder and turned him on to his side. His mouth had fallen open and his eyes were almost closed, with an alarming rim of white showing.

  ‘You’ve killed him!’ Brett’s voice rose to a shriek. ‘You’ve killed him, that’s what you’ve done. Jake! Jake!’

  The screaming began again. Shaken to the core, the man scrambled to his feet. ‘Don’t, woman, don’t!’ He seized her arms and shook her gingerly. ‘Look, he’s not dead, he’s needing an ambulance instead of you skirling in his ear.’

  It was, in one sense, effectual. She stopped instantly and sprang away from him, her eyes glittering. ‘Take your hands off me, you peasant brute! Isn’t what you’ve done to him, done to us all on this farm, enough without assaulting me as well? But you’ll pay for it, oh yes, I promise you, you’ll pay for it.’

  Strachan stepped back, his face expressionless. Then he shrugged. ‘What’s the use?’ Going to the phone on the desk he dialled 999. ‘Ambulance,’ he said. ‘Quick’s you can.’

  Brett had shrunk back against the shelves by the fireplace in the attitude of a woman at bay, her hand to her throat, histrionically panting for breath. When Strachan came off the phone she said with icy hauteur, ‘May I have
your permission to go to my brother now, or will you attack me again?’

  ‘Please yourself,’ he said gruffly. ‘I never touched you, except to stop you getting wrochit up into the state he’s in now.’

  She subsided on to the rug next to her brother’s inert body, patting at his face, holding his hand, sobbing, but quietly. Jake’s colour was an unhealthy greyish-purple now and he was breathing stertorously.

  Strachan perched himself on the end of the desk, his arms folded, staring at the floor. Not a word was exchanged in the long twenty minutes until the wailing of a siren announced the ambulance’s welcome arrival.

  With swift efficiency the three paramedics went about their business. Brett, dry-eyed, watched in brooding silence until they loaded her brother on to the stretcher. Then she walked across to the telephone, close to where Strachan was standing looking awkward and out of place.

  With her eyes fixed on him, she too dialled 999. ‘Police,’ she said. ‘This is Mrs Brett Mason, Chapelton Farm near Glenluce. I wish to report that my brother and I have both been assaulted by Willie Strachan, the stockman on our farm. I was afraid to call for help while I was alone with my attacker and my brother was unconscious but now the ambulance men are here to protect me and I will go to the hospital with them. I am the mother of Sergeant Conrad Mason and I want him to be informed immediately. Thank you.’ She set down the phone without waiting for the operator’s response.

  ‘You ill-hearted besom!’ Strachan exclaimed. ‘I’ve done nothing—’ He swung round to appeal to the other men. ‘Here! You’ll bear witness there’s not a mark on the old bitch, nor on him neither—’

  One of the paramedics put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Calm down, laddie. She’s in shock, that’s all. Now, madam, if you’d just like to come and sit down a minute, I’ll take a few details while they get your brother settled in the ambulance. We’ll look after you both – don’t you worry.’

  Brett, drooping artistically, allowed herself to be supported to a chair. She didn’t look shocked to Willie Strachan; it seemed to him that the expression on her face was one of vindictive triumph.

  To her intense irritation, Laura found that her encounter with Max Mason had unsettled her completely. She was suffused with a sense of urgency which would have been more appropriate if Dizzy’s trail had been days rather than years old. Being reluctant to give Max her mobile number, but equally reluctant to miss his promised call with Jake Mason’s phone number, had meant that she was trapped by the phone and had to spend a bored and frustrating day in the flat, waiting.

  Of course she’d tried phoning him herself, only to be fobbed off with an answering service. She’d tried Directory Enquiries in the hope of getting in touch with Jake and had been dealt with by a young man who expressed a conventional willingness to help her but, when she had no address to back up the name, showed a reluctance verging on hostility to the suggestion that he might explore the possibilities of Masons living in Galloway.

  When Max phoned at last, in the early evening, only to ask her if she fancied going clubbing with him, Laura found it hard to be civil. ‘Not totally my scene, dude,’ she said with icy sarcasm. ‘What about that phone number? Did you get it for me?’

  As before, she had cause to regret a blunt approach. ‘Oh, my father’s?’ He sounded defensive. ‘Well, not in that sense.’

  ‘And in what sense, precisely, did you get it then?’ she thought but managed not to say, though with difficulty, instead summoning up her best couch-side tones. ‘Problems?’ she murmured sympathetically.

  Max seized on that. ‘It’s Ex-Directory, OK? And I didn’t keep a note of it. It’s back in the dark ages, after all . . .’

  He was stalling, for whatever reason. Clearly, though, he wanted to pursue the acquaintance, which should give her a bargaining counter – if someone fancied you, it always did. She persisted. ‘But don’t you still have contacts who might know?’

  ‘Wo-ho! So many years back, what do you think?’

  ‘What a shame,’ she said sweetly. ‘Thanks, anyway, for contacting me. Pity there’s no way forward. It was good to have met you.’

  ‘Hey, hang about! There might still be someone I could dig out—’

  Taking candy from a baby, this was. Laura had to conceal the smile in her voice as she said, ‘Really? You mean you think you could?’ Yes, surprised, impressed – that was good.

  ‘Oh, I guess. Sure to be somebody, if I put my mind to it. But listen, what is your scene if you don’t do clubbing? Eating out, theatre—’

  She sounded, she hoped, transparently honest. ‘Max, to be absolutely straight with you, I can’t think about anything else at the moment.’ Well, that was true, wasn’t it? ‘Why don’t you call me again when you’ve got your father’s number? Then I can talk to him and get it out of my system. He might give me the brush-off, I suppose, but—’

  ‘Oh, I think you’ll find he will. He doesn’t really do helpful. But you’d feel you’d given it your best shot and then—’

  ‘Absolutely. And then – Speak to you soon.’

  Laura put the phone down with some satisfaction. Max might do a good line in cynical manipulation but he wasn’t the only one who’d read the manual on playing power-games. She’d put money on getting a phone call tomorrow night saying he’d quite unexpectedly found the number in an old diary or some such face-saving excuse. It did cross her mind that she could be storing up a certain amount of trouble for herself in encouraging Max to think their relationship might have some future, but she didn’t want to think about that now.

  She didn’t really want to think, either, about the dangerous vacuum in her life which, following the rules of nature, was being filled to the exclusion of everything else by this enquiry, but she recognised the unhealthy signs of obsession. So the following morning after breakfast, telling herself sternly that she couldn’t afford to put her life on hold for a glimmer of information which might all too easily be a will-o’-the-wisp, she poured another cup of coffee, fetched the road-map and the Good Pub Guide and prepared to give her housing dilemma her best shot. She’d been thinking about Wales, hadn’t she, and Devon? Yet somehow, she found she was leafing through towards the back of the road atlas to where she could find the maps of Scotland, inexorably drawn to the one which showed the south-western corner which had occupied her thoughts since the day before yesterday.

  Laura had never really studied a Scottish map before. Why would she? She’d been to Edinburgh a couple of times, holidayed once in St Andrews, but that was the extent of her experience of the northern kingdom. Certainly, no mental picture had been conjured up by Max’s mention of Galloway.

  Looking at the map now, the most noticeable thing about the area labelled ‘Dumfries and Galloway’ was how cut off it seemed to be from the rest of Scotland. The sweeping motorway from Carlisle to Glasgow seemed almost to mark out a boundary; from it, a single road wound its way west to Stranraer with its ferry links to Ireland. Other roads, twigs of the main branch, led to towns and villages with intriguing names – Beeswing, Kirkgunzeon, Palnackie – all thickly clustered to the south and along the coastline of the Solway Firth. Moving north, there were fewer names, further apart, with blank tracts of land in between, seamed with a river or a lake or two – or lochs, she supposed they must be called – and forests. Then, to the north-west, not far from the Irish Sea coast, there was an area where there seemed to be nothing at all.

  Even without the Dizzy connection, it looked intriguing. It promised beauty, with its seascapes and low hills, empty moors and great forests. There was nothing at all to stop Laura going up there to have a look – just a look.

  Except, of course, for the foot-and-mouth epidemic. It was, she remembered suddenly, one of the places which had been hardest hit, like Cumbria, and they were talking about the countryside being ‘closed’. She’d seen what was happening on the news – the sad, sickening evidence of an epidemic raging out of control, whatever spin government officials might attempt to put
on it. She switched on the news at lunchtime with a renewed and personal interest.

  Marjory Fleming was preoccupied as she walked through the entrance hall in Kirkluce Police Headquarters. A farmer near Bladnoch had barricaded himself into his farm with his infected cattle; he was known to have licences for three shotguns. He was someone Marjory and Bill had known since they all went to Young Farmers’ dances together, and Superintendent Bailey, aware of their friendship, had called her in to see whether she thought she could talk him down before they put in the heavy mob.

  Marjory’s heart sank as she listened to him; she had been astute enough to ask for time to think it over before she gave him her response, which basically meant phoning Bill. Apart from the fact that he would have a useful opinion on whether the personal touch would do more harm than good, she welcomed an excuse to speak to him when there was actually something to talk about. They spoke every night, of course; he sounded exhausted but calm and so far there had been no disasters to report, but there never seemed to be much they could talk about. Once she’d said that the children were fine and checked that he’d picked up the supplies from the road-end, any news she had to give him was bad news and he didn’t need that. He didn’t ask the questions that would have forced her to tell him the terrible news of farms and farmers’ lives being destroyed on every side; she thought she sensed a superstitious fear of talking about it, in case it might attract disaster to him too.

  Perhaps he wouldn’t even want to discuss the problem about poor Bob Christie which had just been dumped in her lap. Lost in thought, she almost bumped into DS Mason who was crossing the hall at speed. He stopped sharply and apologised.

  ‘My fault, Conrad. An emergency?’

  ‘Yes – well . . .’ He was frowning. ‘There’s been a weird message from my mother – something about an assault by our stockman and she’s gone to hospital with my uncle.’