Cold in the Earth (11 page)

Jake was no fool and Conrad’s strategy, in any case, was hardly subtle. He was desperately hoping to inherit control of the farm – and he probably would, when Jake got around to remaking his will. Conrad had the true Mason feel for the beasts, a good eye for selection, and he’d carry on the tradition of Chapelton champions. Max, though . . .

It was like pressing on a painful bruise. As always, his mind slid away from the thought of his son.

He could hear his nephew’s voice now outside the door. At least Jake could trust him over this: the prosperity of the family business was dear to Conrad’s mercenary little black heart. Certainly, as a policeman, he’d be in the best position to know what, if anything, could be done, and perhaps, after all, media reports were exaggerated – they usually were.

One look at Conrad’s sombre expression as he came into the farm office behind his mother was enough to disabuse Jake of any such comforting delusion.

‘Does my bum look big in this?’

The large, jolly young woman who had squeezed herself into a short, tight, orange Max Mara skirt had to say it twice before the fair-haired woman, sitting in her office with newspapers bearing lurid pictures of cattle pyres open in front of her, reacted.

‘Sorry?’ she said. She looked up, her grey-blue eyes wide and expressionless, then realised what the question had been. For a terrible, unguarded moment the thought, ‘Your bum would look big in anything,’ almost reached her lips. She fought it back. ‘Well . . .’ she murmured diplomatically.

‘It does, doesn’t it?’ The woman turned to squint over her shoulder at the pier glass in the corner under a strong spotlight, and shuddered. ‘Oh dear. No wonder you were struck dumb. Never mind – back to the drawing-board.’

‘What about this – or this?’

After quarter of an hour’s hard work evangelising for the slimming virtues of black, she was able to see her customer leave with a larger, longer, slightly draped crêpe skirt in that useful colour and only a brief, longing glance at the orange creation, now back on its hanger.

Shutting the door behind her, she returned to her desk and the newspaper she had been studying with such painful attention. It wasn’t one of the garish tabloids; it was a sober production with the masthead the
Galloway Globe
, though its headlines were in the largest point available and its pictures of the pyres – livid smoke, sullen red and orange flames and the black, twisted limbs of burning carcasses – were as shocking as any. She read on, unconsciously wringing her slim hands, as she scanned column after column in a painful search for the information she hoped, yet feared, to find.

‘Are they going to come and kill all the sheep? Even the
lambs
?’ Cat was sitting up in bed, her eyes bright with tears, when Marjory came in to say goodnight.

The little wooden bed, tucked in under the eaves, had been painted white by Marjory herself, and Grannie Laird had stitched its patchwork quilt. These days Cat was starting to make noises about the room being babyish but at the moment the pink-shaded bedside lamp was bathing in its rosy glow the relics of childhood – the doll’s house, the soft toys which were almost if not quite outgrown – and creating an idyllic picture of comfort and security. Only the faint moan of a rising wind hinted at a bleaker world beyond the pink gingham curtains.

It had been a lot easier to deal with Cammie, whose main preoccupation was the cancelling of the mini-rugby tournament next week. Marjory had to swallow hard.

‘Not necessarily. If everyone is really careful and sensible it might just fizzle out and anyway our sheep might not get it.’ But Cat was entitled to an honest answer: she went on, ‘Though yes, of course they might.’

The tears spilled over and Marjory gathered her daughter into her arms with the meaningless reassurance mothers have murmured down the ages. ‘It’s all right, pet, it’s all right . . . Have you got a tissue? Here. Now listen – you’re a farmer’s daughter. You know what happens to sheep anyway.’

Sniffing, Cat nodded.

‘So it’s sad and we’re upset this is happening, but it’s not as if they were going to live happily ever after, is it?’

Fair-minded like her mother, Cat acknowledged the justice of this. ‘And at least there haven’t been any pet lambs this year.’

Marjory had thought of that; it was one of the few ‘well-
that
’s-a-mercy’ aspects of the whole sorry situation. ‘And you’ll have fun staying with Grannie and Grandpa. She’s going to give you cooking lessons and you’ll be much better than I ever was.’

‘And I can walk round to Flora’s after school.’ Her daughter brightened. ‘They’ve got satellite, you know . . .’

Having given her daughter’s thoughts a more cheerful direction, Marjory kissed her goodnight, but as she walked downstairs she was close to tears herself. Oh, what she’d said to Cat was sensible, but all the same it felt as if a whole ordered way of life was being torn apart by the forces of anarchy and chaos. She could almost see them, wolves prowling round the fold, grey menacing shapes in an outer, impenetrable darkness.

Had her parents, she wondered, felt similarly helpless as they waited for the outbreak of war? Of course it wasn’t the same – no one was going to come and bomb their farmhouse – but even so, it was a war of sorts, not only against the virus but against the bureaucratic powers of a government which either didn’t understand or didn’t care. Or both.

She would be obliged to help support its edicts, then she’d have to go home at night to her father who would have his own views and wouldn’t hesitate to express them. It was an indefinite sentence, too, the sort Human Rights legislation wouldn’t allow to be imposed in a courtroom. Cruel and unusual punishment.

‘Bill?’ she called as she reached the hall, but there was no answer. He must still be out with the sheep and anyway she had a pile of clothes that needed ironing before she could pack them. She set up the ironing-board in the kitchen and switched on the portable TV.

The news was on, full of more and more depressing stories about the progress of the disease. Marjory watched till she could bear it no longer, then channel-hopped between a soap, a quiz show and a sit-com, each of which seemed even more irritatingly stupid than usual, and she switched it off. She was ironing with only her own gloomy thoughts for company when she heard the door of the mud-room open.

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.’