A Nice Place to Die (4 page)

Tim Baker must have organized that, Rachel Moody told herself.

In contrast, there was not even a token sense of community in Forester Close. No one had got around to putting up decorations yet.

‘They'll have to cancel the carol concert,' Rachel said suddenly. ‘It wouldn't be proper, would it?'

Sergeant Reid didn't know what she was talking about. ‘I like a good carol concert myself,' he said. ‘The kids love it when they sing a very odd version of
Good King Wenceslas
. And, of course,
Shepherds wash their socks by night
.' He laughed.

The DCI wasn't listening. ‘You know,' she said, ‘that woman who called the ambulance? There was something odd about her.'

‘The blowsy bleached blonde job, you mean?' the Sergeant said.

Moody thought how odd men's perception of women was, so subjective and always sexually coloured. What she had noticed about the woman from Number Two, Forester Close, was the desperate expression of fear in her eyes. Of course Donna Miller had been very shocked by what she'd seen, traumatized, practically. She'd been extremely pale under her make-up, and she couldn't stop shaking, which was natural enough. But to Rachel her eyes had told a different story. It was as though something she had long expected had happened at last and it was that which scared her. She was frightened, and she was defensive.

‘That woman's hiding something,' Rachel Moody said. ‘We've got to find out what it is she's not telling us.'

FOUR

A
mile or so away from Forester Close, on the other side of Old Catcombe, young Mark Pearson was on his way to the village rugby club to celebrate his twenty-first birthday.

He drove slowly round the bends in the narrow twisting lane. He'd almost knocked the vicar off his new blue bicycle the day before. He wondered where Mr Baker was off to, cycling away from the village like that as if the devil were after him. That's all we need, Mark thought, vicars on bicycles wobbling all over the road in front of farm vehicles.

Mark had lived in Old Catcombe all his life, as had his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather. Like them, too, he played prop forward for Catcombe Corinthians rugby team, and batted number three for the village cricket XI. He was big and strong with a mop of curly dark hair, not all that dissimilar from the Aberdeen Angus and Hereford beef bullocks he and his father raised on the family farm. Most of the residents of Catcombe Mead would dismiss him as a simple-minded son of the soil, an obsolete relic of a dead and irrelevant time.

Mark shared his family's attitude, which dismissed the incomers of Catcombe Mead as an unwelcome infestation of parasitical vermin who made no effort to control their sheep-chasing dogs, and habitually left gates open whenever they slipped into a field to trample on a crop.

But even so, for Mark's generation of the Old Catcombe order, there were already changes under way. The future for farming looked bleak. Many of Mark's friends who had been at school with him had tried to find work in the area, but failed and moved away to the city, or to another country.

Bert Pearson, Mark's father, assumed that he and his son would work together on the farm and then Mark would take over and employ a future son of his own in turn. Mark wouldn't say so to his father, but he couldn't see this happening. It was becoming more and more difficult to make a living from the land. And he couldn't help but resent the kind of money his former school friends were earning in the city. They came back on visits driving new cars, wearing sharp clothes. Mark wanted these things. He began to feel that life was leaving him behind. He wanted to have money in his pocket and know the feeling of simply spending it for fun. For him and his family, spending money was a painful process of juggling priorities and doing without. They spent on necessities, not for pleasure; just using money was a source of guilt.

Most of his life Mark hadn't questioned that he would work on the farm with his father and then take it over when his parents retired. Dad and Mum would move out of the farmhouse and live in a cottage nearby when Mark married and started a family of his own. They all took this process as preordained.

But that was then, Mark thought. It was the foot and mouth outbreak in 2001 which started it. Dad and Mum had kept the horrific details from their eleven-year-old son, but they could not hide what was happening on the farm itself.

The precautions were bad enough, the restrictions on where they could go, the stinking black antiseptic dips for their gumboots wherever they went, the anxious night and morning checks on the cattle and sheep for the slightest sign of lameness or sore mouths.

And then the government vets identified a case of the disease on a local farm.

In those days Bert Pearson ran a mixed farm. Mainly cattle and sheep, with a few pigs; arable land to grow wheat for sale and maize as winter feed, and water meadows close to a small river for the stock.

Mark came home from school one day to find Ministry vets in white protective clothing destroying the last of the pigs. All the cows and sheep were already dead. Mechanical excavators had uprooted a field of wheat to dig a vast pit where the carcasses were already piled high. A pall of smoke hung over the pyre, but this did not hide the open-eyed faces of lifeless animals Mark and his father had known as friends.

That night was the first time Mark saw his father in tears.

A few days later, they learned that the rush to destroy all the farm animals within the prescribed exclusion zone had been a false alarm. There had been no local outbreak of disease. The vets had made a mistake. No one even said sorry.

That day, something inside Bert Pearson died. And Mark Pearson started to smoulder with anger against the smug ranks of outsiders who could not be called to account for the damage they did so carelessly.

Bert and Mark restocked the farm; at least, they bought new cattle and a few pigs. The sheep were not replaced. Nor were these new animals any connection with the carefully line-bred stock that had been wiped out by the agents of panicky politicians. It sometimes felt to Mark as though that one incident alone destroyed everything his Dad was: a father, husband, friend, and citizen.

Mark knew that since that time his laughing, lively Dad, rugby player, cricketer, the first to offer to mow the outfield on the pitch or provide a pig for the hog roast after the annual fete, had disappeared forever.

Bert Pearson now haunted the farm like a spare grey ghost. Some days he did not leave his armchair in the kitchen, but sat there all day in silence staring at children's programmes on the television. If he went out it was to walk, stiff and awkward, through the fields and down to the river. There he would stand without moving, staring at the water, taking no notice of the wildlife seething around him.

He took to going to bed early in the evening, about seven o'clock usually, or soon after the children's programmes on the TV gave way to the grown-up stuff. He didn't want to watch that.

Once in bed, he lay sleepless in the dark ignoring his wife and son, everything except the old sheepdog who padded after him to his bedroom and spent the night in there with him.

It was all too much for Joyce. She tried to help him. She had forced him to go to the doctor, who diagnosed severe depression and prescribed pills that seemed to make Bert more zombie-like than ever. She tried to interest him in going out with her to the pub for a meal, or to a film. He shook his head and slumped back in his chair, or turned the sound up on the television to drown her voice. Unable to face going to sleep with him in the bedroom where she was only too conscious of his lack of response to her, she moved into the spare room.

At first she wept a lot. Then she decided that she must make some sort of life for herself. To do that, she told herself, she had to give up on Bert. She didn't want to, but she was frightened that he would take her down with him into the misery he wallowed in. She couldn't stop herself, she did think he wallowed in it. He didn't even try to help himself.

She told Mark, ‘He's my husband, I married him for love. I know he's ill, he can't help it, but I'm only forty-eight, I can't go on like this.'

Mark didn't understand. So when his mother started to go out socially in the evenings, he blamed her. She had a group of women friends with whom she enrolled in adult education classes, played bridge, sang in a choir, or went out regularly to play bingo in the community hall of a town not too far away from Old Catcombe. The house was crowded with chairs she upholstered, patchwork quilts she stitched, and stuffed toys she won at bridge.

Mark, too, might have made a fresh start somewhere else. But he would have felt like a traitor to himself. The knowing eyes of the cattle when he came to check them in the afternoons, the jolly grins of the pigs as they scampered towards him when he brought their food, the sight of wheat turning gold before harvest, and the smell of cut grass at silage time; these things were part of him, as much a part as the beating of his heart or the pumping of his lungs. They gave him life. He knew this without sentimentality or poetic fancies. He rather wished he didn't.

One cold bright day after a long spell of dry weather, Mark heard a commotion in the field where the cattle had been let out at last after being shut in the stockyard during a long wet autumn. The farm dogs were barking as though repelling a small army. Mark shouted for his father, but Bert did not respond. Meanwhile the noise of motorbike engines being gunned sounded like several chain saws from the lane.

Mark jumped on the farm quad bike and the dogs leaped up behind him, barking wildly. He sped out of the yard and down the lane towards the field where the cattle were.

He had only gone a few hundred yards when he was met by an eye-catching young girl running up the lane towards him. At first sight she looked to him to have no clothes on, except for a pair of ridiculous high-heeled scarlet boots, but then he saw that she was wearing a skirt like an elastic band and a skimpy top several sizes too small for her rather large breasts. She looked terrified, her eyes wide with fear and her mouth open as she screamed for help. He couldn't hear her screams over the sound of motorbike engines and the bellowing of the herd of bullocks which was stampeding up the road behind her.

Mark's first reaction was furious anger. This ridiculous girl with her stupid clothes and her purple hair was putting his animals in danger. She reached the quad bike and clung to him. Her over-tight clothes had split, and he caught a flash of her breasts. Part of the side-seam of her bright red skirt had burst open and he saw dark pubic hair. It was an extraordinary feast of female flesh for him to encounter so suddenly. But he didn't have any time to enjoy it.

‘Get behind the quad bike and keep still,' he shouted at her.

The cattle had slowed down at the sight of him and were milling in the narrow lane, the leaders lowering their heads to challenge the dogs, which had raced forward to confront them.

‘Oh, my God,' he heard the girl gasp, ‘they're trying to kill me.'

‘Shut up,' Mark said. This time he said it quietly, almost hissing at her.

He had got off the quad bike and was walking slowly towards the angry, frightened bullocks. He addressed the girl in a soothing, slow tone but not for her benefit, only to quieten the animals.

‘What do you think you're doing?' he said.

The sound of racing motorbikes almost drowned what he said.

‘These monsters ran out when Kevin and Nate went into the field to ride their motorbikes,' she said. Her voice shook with shock and fear. ‘Nate left the gate open and I couldn't stop them. I thought I was going to die.'

Snorting and stamping, the animals now turned back the way they'd come, calmed by the sight of Mark and the dogs and the familiar quad bike.

‘Are those yobs out of their minds, taking motorcycles into a field full of bullocks?' Mark said, still in his quiet voice although he was finding it hard not to shout at her.

He got back on the quad bike and slowly followed the animals, which were now moving restlessly towards the gate to their field. The girl climbed up behind him and held on to him. He could feel her trembling as she clung to him. The dogs had raced ahead and were in position in the lane to turn the animals in through the gate.

Mark could now see two youths on motorbikes racing in a wide circle on the pasture.

‘Who are they?' he asked the girl. ‘They're going to pay for this.'

His threat sounded a little pathetic even to him. There was nothing he could do. He didn't even have a mobile phone to call the cops.

But the revving engines and the flashes of colour on the lads' helmets enraged the bullocks anew. They surged through the gateway into the field and charged, bellowing furiously, towards the motorcyclists.

The girl screamed, ‘Kevin, look out,' and then he heard her say under her breath, ‘Oh, please God let them be all right.'

‘To hell with them, what about my bullocks?' he said.

The two youths seemed suddenly to realize they were in danger from the approaching animals. The bullocks were almost upon them. Not sure how to escape, they revved their engines again and sped away across the field and through the open gate out into the lane. The sound of their motorbikes was audible long after they had disappeared.

Mark jumped off the quad bike and closed the gate. For several minutes he watched the bullocks, deprived of their quarry, come to a halt. Slowly, one after another, they lowered their heads and started to graze.

‘Bastards,' Mark said, turning back towards the girl.

She was still perched on the back of the quad bike and looked good to him even with her teeth chattering and streaks of mascara smeared on her pale cheeks.