Cold in the Earth (10 page)

‘We’ve been given unprecedented rights to enter private property without a warrant. I stress that these must be exercised with extreme sensitivity. Remember that you will be dealing with people in a highly volatile emotional state and I don’t want any of the tragedies which may well occur to be laid at the door of police brutality. Remember, too, that you have the power to confiscate shotguns . . .’

Marjory had to suppress a gasp; it felt as if someone had taken a grip on her heart and squeezed it tight. In normal times, farmers had twice the normal risk of suicide anyway and in the last epidemic it had been a serious problem. Bill was a sensible man, but . . .

They’d talked last night about what they would do if a D notice was served on them, which would effectively quarantine them on the farm.

‘You need to take Cat and Cammie and go and stay with your parents before it happens,’ he pointed out. ‘You’ve got your work and they can’t afford to miss school. And even if we’re not officially quarantined, we’d stand more chance of escaping it if no one was going to and fro. I could stay here and you could leave supplies at the road-end so I don’t starve – and see your mother keeps the Tin full!’

The logic was inescapable but even so she had protested about her own banishment, if not the kids’, until Bill said gently, ‘It’ll only be for a week or two, probably, and surely you can stand it for that long?’ And of course she’d had to give in; she was after all an adult with a responsible job and it was pathetic to be making a fuss because she hated the idea of going back to living under her father’s roof. She’d agreed they’d pack up and leave that night.

She was having second thoughts now. Bill would be so isolated! They’d had to let the farm-worker go a couple of years ago when the dairy herd stopped being profitable and had to be sold. It was hard enough for him to manage now; imagine how it would feel to go on working these punishing hours tending livestock which might well be doomed, then going back to a silent, empty house.

If it was just the fattening cattle, she wouldn’t worry. Losing them would be a financial blow but they’d weathered setbacks before and no doubt there would be compensation eventually. But the sheep – the sheep were different. They had colonised Mains of Craigie land even before Bill’s grandfather bought the farm and Bill’s pride in and, yes, love for his heritage went deep. How would he deal with strain and anxiety and perhaps, in the end, despair, if she was banned from his side? She couldn’t bear it if anything happened to Bill.

By the time the Chief Constable had wound up his peroration, she had made up her mind. She would see Bailey and ask to take leave – call it compassionate leave, if necessary – and it was as if a burden had been lifted. She and Bill would be together, and together they could face whatever the fates had in store.

She was humming ‘Stand by Your Man’ as she made her way to the Superintendent’s office half an hour later.

‘No,’ Donald Bailey said flatly.

Fleming stared at him. ‘I’m asking on compassionate grounds, Don. Surely you can understand my position?’

She was taken aback. Bailey was inclined to be pompous and to stand on his dignity but he was in general a good boss and they’d always had a good relationship. She’d been, she thought, eloquent about her situation, both domestic and social; she’d expected him to try to talk her out of it, then, however reluctantly, to agree.

‘Of course I bloody understand!’ He spoke with a bluntness unusual for him. ‘It’s a hellish position for you, but then it’s not a bed of roses for anyone. People like you with good links to the farming community are particularly valuable just now, and anyway we’re going to be at full stretch over the next few weeks.’

She said stubbornly, ‘Surely it’s going to be mostly a problem for the uniforms? In fact, I’m expecting crime figures to drop. Having everyone staying in of an evening’s fairly going to cramp your style if you’re into housebreaking or pub brawls.’

Bailey shifted uncomfortably in his swivel chair, which gave a protesting squeal. ‘I’ll be brutally frank. We’re expecting trouble of a kind which may well involve the CID.’

‘Like suicides, you mean,’ she said flatly.

‘We-ell . . . Violence against the person, anyway, whether that person is someone at the other end of a gun or the man holding it.’

‘And what if Bill’s one of them, left on his own?’

Bailey pursed his lips. ‘It’s not very flattering, is it, to suggest that Bill might be selfish enough to inflict that on you and the bairns?’

She’d have liked to have an answer to that. There wasn’t one, though; winded, she subsided and he went on, with evident reluctance, ‘I’m afraid it’s an order, Marjory. I need you.’

‘Sir,’ she said automatically, then paused. ‘I could resign . . .’

It was gesture politics and they both knew it. She’d get no support from Bill, who would have every right to feel insulted at the implication. It would certainly be crazy for her to throw away their only certain source of income because she was feeling neurotic. And she could almost hear her father’s voice – ‘Well, I could have told them they were daft to put a woman in a man’s job.’

She didn’t meet his eyes. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled.

Bailey’s brow cleared. ‘I always knew I could rely on you to conform to the highest standards of the service,’ he said.

It was only as she heard the familiar orotund phrase that she understood how anxious he had been, and realised that, perhaps, he had stuck his neck out in backing her promotion and would suffer for it if she let him down with a response which would definitely be judged feminine and neurotic. Which might – she was nothing if not fair-minded – even
be
feminine and neurotic.

‘Thanks, Don,’ she said with genuine gratitude, getting up. Then, at the door, she turned. ‘But how would you like to have to go home every night and hear from my father what a balls-up the modern police force is making?’

He’d been a constable when her father was a sergeant. He laughed. ‘Rather you than me, right enough. Thanks, Marjory.’

‘What are you saying? Are you trying to tell me that after Papa slaved all these years to breed the best pedigree herd of Welsh Blacks in the country, they could just march in here in their jackboots and slaughter them all? Wipe out his life’s work, the heritage he left us? And you would just let them do it, just stand by and do nothing – nothing?’

The woman’s voice rose dangerously. She was pulling a long chiffon scarf through her hand with sweeping, theatrical movements and her heavily jowled face was mottled with patches of dark red. Her histrionic behaviour was in marked contrast to her overweight frame, with its broad bosom and wide hips. Only her style of dress, shapeless layers and wispy scarves, gave a hint of the Isadora Duncan within struggling to get out.

She gestured dramatically towards a row of leather-bound ledgers in a bookcase to one side of the elaborate Victorian fireplace. Above it hung the dusty, mounted head of a magnificent black bull with sweeping horns, a silver plate underneath declaring its champion status. Round about were mementoes recording triumphs at the Royal Smithfield Show: rosettes, certificates, framed newspaper cuttings.

‘Look at those records, Jake! Meticulous records of every cow, every bull, every pedigree, right back to nineteen forty-seven. That’s more than fifty years!’ She glared at him: her eyes were a curiously opaque grey-green which at school had earned her the unkind nickname ‘Goosegogs’.

‘I can count, Brett.’

The man who spoke sounded exhausted. His head was propped in his hands as he sat at a Regency partner’s desk facing a tall bay window which gave on to a gravel drive and a lawn beyond. The wall behind him displayed a montage of bullfighting posters, ancient sepia photographs and, in pride of place, a silver mask of the horned head of a fighting bull, superbly moulded but tarnished from neglect.

He had a marked family resemblance to his younger sister: the same heavy build, the same strongly delineated features, which, though clumsy on a woman, were striking in their male form. The years had been much kinder to him too and his thick black hair, curling and cropped short, showed no trace of grey. The contours of his face might have blurred and his eyes, dark blue where hers were green, were set in sclerotic whites which suggested too many evenings spent with a whisky bottle as sole companion, but he was certainly still an attractive man.

‘Do you think I haven’t flogged my guts out trying to find a way round this?’ he said tautly. ‘Foot-and-mouth isn’t even that serious, and you can vaccinate against it – but the Government won’t authorise the vets to prescribe it. Yes, yes, I know,’ as she made to speak, ‘I’ve thought of that – give me some credit!’

He glared at her and when she subsided went on, ‘I’ve tracked down a supplier in Spain and he’s sending me some so I can do it myself – oh, there’s a nonsense about vaccinated herds being less valuable, but who’s to know? I can protect our own cattle, but it wouldn’t make a blind bit of difference. If just one of the farms on the Chapelton boundaries has just one infected animal the men from the sodding Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food are entitled to walk in here and slaughter everything that moves.’

His anger mounted as he spoke; he brought his clenched fists down on the red leather desk-top with a force which indicated the level of his frustration.

Brett swooped over to take the chair opposite and covered her brother’s hands with her own. ‘Jake, you’re getting too emotional,’ she said infuriatingly. ‘You need to calm down and think this thing through rationally. Now, who’s in charge of making the MAFF decisions? We probably know them, or at least know the person who tells them what to do. If it’s a question of money – well, I know you’re always boring on about times being hard, but to save the herd—’

He stared at her, rage swamped by astonishment. ‘Are you really suggesting trying to bribe officials? Are you mad? Or do you want me to end up in jail?’

Brett tossed her head and laughed, in a parody of the girlish gesture someone had once, long, long ago, described as attractive in the days when her hair wasn’t grey and straggling. ‘Don’t be silly, Jake. I wasn’t suggesting anything crass, that goes without saying. There must be subtle ways of approaching these things.’

He groaned, sinking his head into his hands again. ‘Oh, shut up, Brett. Just shut up, would you?’

She burst instantly into noisy tears. ‘Shut up? How can you say that, when all I want, all I’ve ever wanted, is the best for you and Conrad, and to preserve Papa’s legacy . . .’

Jake sat in dull despair as the self-indulgent lamentations continued. He was trapped in a relationship more permanent than any marriage with this woman who owned a half-share of his business, his house and the family money and was bound to him by the ties of blood and the needs generated by her own failures. She was demanding, extravagant, possessive and becoming more neurotic with every year that passed. As if his anguish at the thought of losing his own life’s work – the superb black bulls with the same ancient Celtic lineage as the glorious fighting bulls of Spain – weren’t enough, he would no doubt have to cope with what Brett termed ‘one of my
petites crises de nerfs
’.

The first of these had been when her husband, a transparent chancer she’d insisted on marrying against all advice, had decided there must be less costly ways of earning money and walked out. The second was worse, when Jake had signed the papers committing her adored papa to a discreet private nursing home when age had compounded the ravages of absinthe abuse to the point where he was actively dangerous. There had been others over the years, though latterly Jake had come to suspect they were manipulative contrivances directed at ruthlessly forcing her brother or her son into compliance with her selfish demands.

The sound of a car being driven a little too fast, spurting gravel, cut off Brett’s sobs as if it had triggered a switch. She jumped up, dabbing at her eyes with the end of her scarf.

‘That’s Conrad back. He’s the very person who can tell you what to do. I’ll fetch him now.’

Her departure was a relief. The headache Jake had suffered all day was pounding now and he reached into the desk drawer to take another couple of painkillers, though it was only two hours since he’d taken the last dose and they didn’t seem to be doing much good anyway.

All day the news had been getting worse. He’d tried telephoning MAFF to point out that the Welsh Black was a rare breed and to offer to put the herd in quarantine along with everyone coming into contact with them, but the only person he had reached was some underling who had just parroted the regulations, then when he lost his temper put the phone down on him.

And the herd, really, was the only thing nowadays that gave Jake anything recognisable as pleasure – his magnificent beasts, majestic, simple in their needs, honest to their own brute natures. Human relations were ugly and sordid by comparison, a maze of complicated and dangerous paths where you could see no way through – like the maze there at the foot of the garden which he had so deliberately neglected for so many years. He didn’t often allow himself to contemplate the grim wreckage of his life, the failures, the disasters, the terrible secrets, but in the apocalyptic light of present events he found himself contemplating them more and more often. He groaned, shut his eyes and leaned back in his chair, digging his fingers into the base of his skull to try to ease the pain.

The sound of Brett’s whining tones as she complained her way down the corridor with her son was almost a relief, though there wasn’t much love lost between Jake and his nephew. True, Brett was an unduly possessive mother and far from easy to live with – who knew better than he did himself? – but Conrad treated his mother with cruel impatience and blatant contempt, and even Jake too, in the unguarded moments when his temper got the better of him. Afterwards, he was always obsequiously and unconvincingly apologetic.