Beneath the Soil (24 page)

‘And what has this got to do with Mr Fewings?'

‘Nothing! Poor Suzie's understandably upset, but to suggest I bumped off that geologist fellow because he knew about the gold … I didn't know myself before tonight. And what did I have to gain by removing him?'

He could be telling the truth, Suzie thought. I only told John Nosworthy this afternoon … no, yesterday afternoon. He might have rung Clive Stroud to tell him, but it seems unlikely.

DCI Brewer came between Clive and Elizabeth to take control. She scowled at Suzie, tight-lipped. ‘I very much wish you had kept out of this, Mrs Fewings. You had no right to come here and interfere with a criminal investigation. What you've done could seriously prejudice police enquiries. I suggest you get back in your car right now and go home.'

‘Are you fit to drive?' Dudbridge asked, more sympathetically.

‘Yes,' said Suzie, swinging her feet to the ground.

‘You've just had a stiff glass of brandy.'

Suzie said nothing about the whisky earlier.

‘I'll do it,' said Tom, holding out his hand as if for the key.

‘But what about Dad?' put in Millie. ‘Where
is
he?'

A blank silence fell over the room.

‘We'll get your father's car taken back to police HQ,' DS Dudbridge said. ‘Do a real forensic job on it. Don't worry. If anyone's been in the car before abducting him they'll have left traces.'

‘You think he's been kidnapped?' Millie was wide-eyed.

DCI Brewer cut in. ‘We're not saying that. If he got a phone call and left a message for your mother, then he clearly had an assignation to meet someone. As far as we know, he did so of his own free will. There's no reason to suppose the worst.'

‘Except that it's two o'clock in the morning and he still hasn't contacted us,' Tom objected.

‘He left his phone in the car,' the detective sergeant pointed out.

‘So what are you saying?' Millie demanded. ‘That he went for a walk on the moor in the middle of the night?'

‘We're doing everything we can to find him,' DCI Brewer told her more kindly. ‘We'll set up a fuller search as soon as it's daylight.'

‘Would somebody please tell me,' Clive Stroud pleaded, ‘why whoever is at the bottom of this used my name to make that appointment and left Mr Fewings' car outside my house with the tyres slashed?'

There was no answer to that.

T
he lights of the police vehicles made the night around them seem darker. Nick's car had been covered with a green sheet. A recovery truck was getting ready to load it on board.

Suzie felt a pang of bereavement. As long as the car was there, where Nick had apparently left it with his mobile on the back seat, she could believe that he would come striding out of the darkness to reclaim it. There would be hugs and exclamations of joy. Nick would have a simple explanation for why he was here and why he had walked off without a word. She could not imagine what that harmless explanation would be. She had to believe that there was one.

Now there was an ominous finality about seeing the hook of the crane hovering over the car, the driver waiting to winch it on board. Soon it would be gone. Just the imprint of its tyres fading when daylight broke.

And Nick would have vanished without trace.

Tom's hand was on her arm, urging her forward to where the smaller hire car stood waiting.

‘Key?' he asked.

She handed it over.

She was about to slip into the passenger seat, too numb to listen to what Tom was saying. Then her unfocussed eyes became aware that Millie was walking on past the car. For a puzzled moment she watched her daughter move out of the range of the lights, so that she was only a pale ghost of a figure approaching the wooden gate to Fullingford Castle. Millie tried the latch, but it was evidently locked.

Tom strode after her. ‘Just what are you doing?'

His sister turned to face him. ‘When the police came to our house, they said they'd found Dad's car outside Fullingford Castle. It was only when we got here that we found everybody was assuming it must really be outside Clive Stroud's house, because he lives next door. But what if it wasn't? What if he really
is
here?'

Wearily, Suzie joined them. Beyond the lights, the darkness was not as complete as she had thought. She looked up the grass-grown mound to where the square tower blocked out the stars.

‘I'm sure the police will have thought of that first, before they knew about Clive Stroud. They'll have assumed Dad stopped here to visit the jail. Maybe slipped and had an accident. They'll have been to look.'

Millie, undeterred, was climbing the gate. Tom vaulted after her.

‘Can't do any harm to check it out.'

Suzie sensed the need in them to be doing something positive, not just spectators to the drama which had played itself out in the Strouds' house.

The teenagers were already climbing the mound. Suzie followed them.

She caught them up at the base of the tower. Millie was struggling with the door.

‘Told you,' Tom said. ‘They're not going to leave it open, are they?'

‘I keep remembering that horrible dungeon where we were when that thunderstorm struck. What if Dad's down there?'

Suzie put her hand on the stones beside her. They felt faintly damp and colder than she expected. Was it just the early morning dew, or was she remembering too vividly the history of this place? She thought of those ancestors of hers who might have sat in the stannary court and condemned wrongdoers to imprisonment here in the tinners' jail. It had been a strangely independent system of justice which had operated outside the normal courts of the country. The tinners' laws had been notoriously harsh. She remembered the punishment for adulterating tin: spoonfuls of molten tin being poured down the miscreant's throat. She shuddered.

What hidden forces of retribution had been at work here today? And how was Nick involved?

A muffled shout came from the other side of the tower.

‘Result!'

Millie sprang away from the unyielding door and went rushing round the corner of the tower. Suzie followed the sound of their voices.

She made out the dark outline of Tom in the starlight.

‘No glass in the windows. They're pretty narrow, though. Think you can squeeze through there?'

‘I wish we had a torch,' Millie said. Her voice was more subdued now. The childhood memory of terror was still haunting her as she faced the blackness inside.

Suzie knew she should be telling them to go no further. They shouldn't be breaking into a scheduled monument. The police or the castle's custodian would surely have found Nick if he was there. Yet she could not fight down the faint hope that she was wrong, that Nick might be there, bound and helpless, waiting for her to rescue him.

‘You don't have to come,' she told Millie.

‘I'm not waiting here on my own.'

Tom was already inside, feeling his way through the darkness.

‘Watch out for the steps,' Suzie called in sudden alarm.

‘I'm not daft, Mum.' His voice came back hollowly.

She squeezed herself into the embrasure in the two-metre-thick walls. A narrow window, and then she was dropping to the stone floor.

She tried to remember that long-ago visit to this jail. She did not think there had been any furniture, just the stern stone shell. But who knew what might have changed in the intervening years?

She felt her way around the walls.

‘Dad?' Tom's voice called, nearer now.

There was no answer. It was too much to hope that there might have been.

‘He could be gagged,' Millie said behind her. ‘Or drugged.'

‘Steps here,' Tom called back. ‘There's a rail.'

She felt the iron railing under her hand. There were metal treads underfoot. The darkness became even more oppressive as she descended. The railing led her in a spiral down to the lower level. No starlight penetrated here. The heat of the summer's day just gone seemed as though it had never entered this dark dungeon.

Suzie stopped at the foot of the metal staircase, unwilling to go further.

‘Move yourself, Mum,' Millie said from the step above.

Suzie moved aside. She could hear the others shuffling around the darkened space.

‘Ow!' Millie cried. Then, ‘No, it's not him. It's something hard.'

The sound of something more ominous – the clank of chains. Suzie struggled to remember if there had been chains in the stannary jail – or perhaps they were a recent introduction, to satisfy the expectations of visitors to a dungeon, especially ghoulish children.

It was almost a relief when the two had made their circuit of the dungeon in the dark and came back with nothing to report. Her disappointment was less because she had never really believed Nick would be here.

But there was a tremor in Millie's voice as she said, ‘I really hoped …'

Suzie put her arm round her daughter's shoulders. ‘Let's go home.'

In spite of herself, her eyes were closing as Tom drove them north towards the dual carriageway. She felt exhausted.

Lights sprang out at them from the roundabout. The filling station must be open twenty-four hours. Beyond it lay the unlit café with a motel.

‘Stop!' she said suddenly to Tom. ‘Pull over here.'

‘Why? Fuel's OK.'

‘I'm just not happy about you driving. I'm sure the hire insurance on this car doesn't cover a nineteen-year-old boy.'

‘Mum, you haven't signed any papers,' Millie reminded her from the back of the car. ‘Remember? Mike said you could pay him in the morning.'

‘All the same. We'll get a few hours' sleep here. They'll be searching for Dad at daybreak.'

‘They won't want you,' Tom said, not unkindly. ‘Honestly, are you sure about this? I can have us home in half an hour.'

‘That's just what worries me. The last thing I want right now is to be had up for breaking the speed limit with an uninsured driver at the wheel. Yes, I'm sure.'

He turned the car off the road and drew up at the lighted shop. Suzie got out. She feared the door might be locked, with a night safe for motorists to pay for their fuel, but she walked in to a jangling bell.

‘Have you got a room for the night? Three people,' she asked the young woman at the till.

‘Bit late, isn't it?'

Suzie declined to offer an explanation. The cashier reached behind her and took down a key.

‘One room or two?'

‘A family room, if you've got one.'

‘Number five.' She pointed round the side of the darkened café next door.

‘No chance of a meal, I suppose?' Tom crinkled his blue eyes at her.

The cashier was impervious to his charm. ‘Breakfast starts at six o'clock. There's coffee and tea in your room.'

Tom shrugged and scanned the shelves for food. He gathered up packets of sandwiches and chocolate and placed them on the table.

‘Thanks, sunshine.'

‘You're welcome.'

In the family room, Suzie nibbled at the chicken sandwich Tom handed to her, but it tasted like sawdust in her mouth. She swallowed more gratefully the coffee Millie poured for her.

She and Millie took the double bed, leaving Tom with the single.

‘This is crazy,' he grumbled. ‘We could have been home by now.'

‘That's not the point,' Millie told him. ‘It will start to get light in a couple of hours. Mum wants to be close when they start to search the moor.'

Is it true? Suzie wondered. Is that what I'm doing here?

She was too exhausted to know.

Once in bed, Millie and Tom fell instantly asleep, with the abandon of healthy teenagers. For all her weariness, Suzie found she could not sleep. Her mind kept playing over all the possible scenarios. Nick, pursuing some dangerous line of enquiry he had not wanted to tell her about. Nick, bound and imprisoned in something like the dungeon of Fullingford Castle. Nick, face down in a moorland stream in the dark, like Bernard Summers.

Nothing made sense. Why, out of all the people investigating Eileen Caseley's murder, should Nick Fewings be the one to be singled out as a victim?

She woke suddenly, with a stale taste in her mouth. Daylight was flooding the room. She must have slept at last, and far later than she had meant to.

Millie was wriggling into the jeans she had removed for the night. There were sounds from the bathroom which must be Tom. Suzie hurriedly got out of bed with a conviction of guilt.

‘Don't panic,' Millie said. ‘It's only seven o'clock.'

‘I meant to be up at daybreak.'

‘It's not going to help anyone if you run yourself into the ground.'

All the same, it was unlike Millie to be dressed and wide awake at this hour of the morning.

Tom came out of the bathroom rubbing his wet hair with a towel.

‘All yours. Sleep well, Mum?'

‘Not for ages. And now I've overslept.'

‘Get yourself a shower,' Millie ordered. ‘You'll feel better.'

Suzie would have gone straight to the car, but the children herded her into the café.

‘You're not going anywhere till you've got some food inside you,' Tom ordered. ‘And I'm certainly not.'

To her surprise, she was able to manage a poached egg on toast, but she hardly noticed what she was eating. Her mind was racing through the possibilities for the day ahead.

She checked her phone, in the vain hope that there would be a message from Nick or the police. Nothing.

‘We'll go back down the Fullingford road, just in case there's something.'

‘I don't think that's one of your better ideas,' Millie said over her mug of hot chocolate. ‘You weren't exactly flavour of the month with the Strouds. What you told them sounded to me like grounds for divorce.'