Cold in the Earth

CONTENTS

Death is My Neighbour

The Last Act of All

Past Praying For

The Trumpet Shall Sound

Night and Silence

Shades of Death

Copyright © 2005 by Aline Templeton

First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Hodder and Stoughton

An Hachette Livre UK Company

The right of Aline Templeton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 751 1

Book ISBN 978 0 340 83855 6

Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

An Hachette Livre UK Company

338 Euston Road

London NWl 3BH

To Iain and Clare, at the start of their life together, with much love

Prologue

Cold, cold, cold. It was the extreme discomfort which penetrated her conscious mind at last and she found she was shivering so violently that her teeth chattered together; her hands were numb, her feet were wet and stinging painfully. Her eyes shot open and she gasped.

It was night and the sky was very clear and black, etched with the brilliant points of a million stars. Over the dark bulk of the house there was a full moon, bone-white against the darkness. The branches of the trees and the leaves of the privet hedges, silver-edged with hoar-frost, glittered in the steely, unearthly light.

She was standing in one of the narrow, overgrown blind alleys of the old maze. She had been dreaming about it, hadn’t she, and here she was. Both feet were muddy and one was bleeding from a gash on the instep; the little gold ankle bracelet she always wore was missing too. The jacket of her thick, flannelette men’s pyjamas had a tear in one arm and there was a long scratch on the skin below; she must have forced herself through gaps in the hedging. Sleep-walking when she was troubled was a childhood habit, now, she had believed, outgrown. But then of course she had been troubled over these last weeks, very troubled.

Tremors of shock as well as cold shook her as she looked about her in the sick confusion which always followed a rude awakening. Everything felt hazy and unreal to her still. Shaking her head as if to clear it, she turned uncertainly to orientate herself towards the entrance gate.

It was as she struggled to locate it that she heard the click of the gate’s latch. She tensed; who else could be about, here in the dead of night? That had been part of her unease, the suspicion that she’d been spied on, followed unseen . . .

Through the sparse, scrubby privet bushes at the end of the long alley came – something. It was swathed in black and its head was a silver bull mask with sharp, sweeping horns that glinted in the moonlight. It capered towards her, tossing its head as it came. A figure of nightmare.

She shrank back into the corner of the blind alley, her heart beating so frantically that she thought it might leap from her chest. She could make no sense of this . . .

It wasn’t real, was it? She was still dreaming, in that hideous, persistent way which had been another of her sleep-curses all her life, when you knew you were asleep but still were helpless to rouse yourself from the night terror which had you in its grip. And she was terrified now, in that state of dream-paralysis when your legs feel too heavy to run away and there is no point in trying to scream because your voice is frozen in your throat.

It had stopped capering. It was cantering, lowering its head. She was trapped; even if she could force movement upon her leaden limbs the hedges here grew densely, a solid barrier on three sides that seemed almost to be closing round her. She could hear the animal snorts and the heavy breath as it gathered speed.

Once the horror happened, the shock would wake her as usual and she would fling herself upright in bed, gasping and sobbing and soaked in sweat.
Please God, make it soon!
She was actively willing the final charge when it came.

It was only when one of the pointed silver horns, razor-sharp, pierced her through to the heart with exquisite agony that she understood this was no dream, for the brief moment before she fell into the sleep that knows no waking.

1

The hens, newly released from overnight protective custody, were picking their way down the henhouse ladder with a sort of dreamy deliberateness, blinking in the watery sunshine of a January morning which was surprisingly mild even for this mild south-west corner of Scotland. The sound of their reflective crooning filled the damp air, punctuated by an occasional squawk of indignation as some giddy young thing jostled the dowagers in her unseemly haste.

Watching them, the woman’s hazel eyes warmed in amusement as they tittuped fussily out across the sodden grass under the old grey-lichened apple trees, sharp yellow beaks stabbing hopefully for worm delicacies or beetle treats. The woman was tall, only a couple of inches under six feet, with a boyish, athletic build; she was wearing blue workman’s overalls and gumboots and her hair, chestnut-brown with only the first traces of grey showing, was cut in a short, practical style. Her countrywoman’s complexion showed tell-tale signs of exposure to the elements though her hands were curiously smooth and well kept: nicely shaped hands, large and capable, with neatly manicured nails.

‘Off you go, chookie chookies!’

She shooed the laggards out of the little hut, checked with swift efficiency for night-laid eggs which she put into the bowl she had brought, then set it down outside while she fetched the pail with the morning mash from its place of concealment behind the henhouse. It was never wise to provoke the frenzy of shoving, flapping, bullying and shrieking which the sight of this induced until the hens were safely out of the hut’s confined space.

She liked hens. She liked their plump, red-brown, compactly feathered bodies on those improbably slim legs; she liked their clockwork movements and the comfortable sounds they made and their silly social squabbles. She liked the rusty throat-clearing of Clinton the rooster – so-called from his ruthless predation on the younger, fluffier members of his entourage – before he produced his crow. And there he went now, shaking his magnificent red comb and stretching out his plump neck.

Tipping the mash into the trough, she watched the mayhem for a second or two, then with the empty pail over her arm collected the bowl of eggs and went through the wicket gate in the dry-stone wall enclosing the old orchard towards the farmhouse. It sat nestled into one of the green Galloway hills, built out of the local stone so that it looked almost like an astonishingly convenient geological formation rather than the work of human hands. In the style of a child’s drawing it had a window on either side of the door on the ground floor, three windows above and a grey slate roof which was glinting now in the morning sun, crowning the house with silver.

The sound of a quad-bike’s engine made her turn and across the valley on the hillside opposite she could see her husband Bill taking a trailer of feed out to the pregnant ewes which were bundling along behind him as fast as their woolly bulk permitted, the collie Meg rushing round importantly at their heels although in fact no herding was needed. Bill stopped the bike and jumped off, a big man, solidly built, though he had kept himself fit and still looked too young to have just celebrated his forty-third birthday.

There was a thick ground-mist which suggested that the sunshine wouldn’t last for long, but it gave an unearthly beauty to the landscape where the shoulders of the soft hills seemed draped in glistening gauze and the tops of bare trees emerged spikily from a swirling lake of vapour. She allowed herself a moment to admire the place she had known and loved all her life – ‘God’s private backyard’, as her father described this tranquil corner of Scotland, bypassed by the busy world.

‘Mum! Mum!’ Her reverie was broken by Catriona’s agitated shout from the farmhouse door. ‘Hurry up! We’re going to be late!’ A conscientious eleven-year-old, Cat lived in a state of permanent terror that she might make herself conspicuous by some appalling transgression like being a couple of minutes late for school.

‘Just coming,’ her mother called over her shoulder. ‘Round up Cammie, will you?’ Cameron would no doubt have to be prised away from his GameBoy; at nine, his mind was untroubled by any tedious considerations of duty.

Putting two fingers to the corners of her mouth, she emitted an ear-splitting whistle which echoed across the valley. Bill looked up; she waved goodbye and as he sketched a salute in response, turned and plodded back to the house. She wiped her boots on the hedgehog scrubber by the mud-room door, then went in to pull them off and stack them on the wire shelf which ran along one wall. Cammie’s boots were, of course, lying on the tiled floor; she tidied them automatically as she passed, padding in her thick woolly socks through to the kitchen.

Cammie was sitting in the sagging armchair beside the elderly Aga, the inevitable GameBoy in his hands. Cat was trying without success to pull it away from him; she had her father’s fair hair but was slim and long-legged, while Cammie, big-boned, tall for his age and already a star in the local mini-rugby team, certainly took his build from the paternal line although he had dark hair and eyes like his mother’s.

‘Geroff!’ he was complaining, shrugging Cat away. ‘I’m just finishing this one game, so chill, OK?’

‘We’ll be late! Mum, make him—’

‘Cat, it’ll be quicker to let him finish. Cammie, see you’re at the front door, ready, in three minutes or you don’t see that thing again for twenty-four hours.’

‘Sure, sure,’ he grumbled, getting up and walking towards the cloakroom, still clicking, while his sister sighed dramatically.

Upstairs, their mother rapidly unzipped her heavy overalls as she made her way to the bathroom to wash her hands, then hopped along to the bedroom, pulling off her socks as she did so. The overalls came off; underneath them she was wearing a smart grey trouser-suit with a V-necked white sweater. She slipped her feet into a pair of low, classic black court shoes, tugged a brush through her hair, put on a slick of lipstick, then checked her appearance in the long mirror on the door of the wardrobe. She settled the lapels and gave a tug to the bottom of the jacket.