Cold in the Earth (12 page)

Strachan stepped back, his face expressionless. Then he shrugged. ‘What’s the use?’ Going to the phone on the desk he dialled 999. ‘Ambulance,’ he said. ‘Quick’s you can.’

Brett had shrunk back against the shelves by the fireplace in the attitude of a woman at bay, her hand to her throat, histrionically panting for breath. When Strachan came off the phone she said with icy hauteur, ‘May I have your permission to go to my brother now, or will you attack me again?’

‘Please yourself,’ he said gruffly. ‘I never touched you, except to stop you getting wrochit up into the state he’s in now.’

She subsided on to the rug next to her brother’s inert body, patting at his face, holding his hand, sobbing, but quietly. Jake’s colour was an unhealthy greyish-purple now and he was breathing stertorously.

Strachan perched himself on the end of the desk, his arms folded, staring at the floor. Not a word was exchanged in the long twenty minutes until the wailing of a siren announced the ambulance’s welcome arrival.

With swift efficiency the three paramedics went about their business. Brett, dry-eyed, watched in brooding silence until they loaded her brother on to the stretcher. Then she walked across to the telephone, close to where Strachan was standing looking awkward and out of place.

With her eyes fixed on him, she too dialled 999. ‘Police,’ she said. ‘This is Mrs Brett Mason, Chapelton Farm near Glenluce. I wish to report that my brother and I have both been assaulted by Willie Strachan, the stockman on our farm. I was afraid to call for help while I was alone with my attacker and my brother was unconscious but now the ambulance men are here to protect me and I will go to the hospital with them. I am the mother of Sergeant Conrad Mason and I want him to be informed immediately. Thank you.’ She set down the phone without waiting for the operator’s response.

‘You ill-hearted besom!’ Strachan exclaimed. ‘I’ve done nothing—’ He swung round to appeal to the other men. ‘Here! You’ll bear witness there’s not a mark on the old bitch, nor on him neither—’

One of the paramedics put a restraining hand on his arm. ‘Calm down, laddie. She’s in shock, that’s all. Now, madam, if you’d just like to come and sit down a minute, I’ll take a few details while they get your brother settled in the ambulance. We’ll look after you both – don’t you worry.’

Brett, drooping artistically, allowed herself to be supported to a chair. She didn’t look shocked to Willie Strachan; it seemed to him that the expression on her face was one of vindictive triumph.

To her intense irritation, Laura found that her encounter with Max Mason had unsettled her completely. She was suffused with a sense of urgency which would have been more appropriate if Dizzy’s trail had been days rather than years old. Being reluctant to give Max her mobile number, but equally reluctant to miss his promised call with Jake Mason’s phone number, had meant that she was trapped by the phone and had to spend a bored and frustrating day in the flat, waiting.

Of course she’d tried phoning him herself, only to be fobbed off with an answering service. She’d tried Directory Enquiries in the hope of getting in touch with Jake and had been dealt with by a young man who expressed a conventional willingness to help her but, when she had no address to back up the name, showed a reluctance verging on hostility to the suggestion that he might explore the possibilities of Masons living in Galloway.

When Max phoned at last, in the early evening, only to ask her if she fancied going clubbing with him, Laura found it hard to be civil. ‘Not totally my scene, dude,’ she said with icy sarcasm. ‘What about that phone number? Did you get it for me?’

As before, she had cause to regret a blunt approach. ‘Oh, my father’s?’ He sounded defensive. ‘Well, not in that sense.’

‘And in what sense, precisely, did you get it then?’ she thought but managed not to say, though with difficulty, instead summoning up her best couch-side tones. ‘Problems?’ she murmured sympathetically.

Max seized on that. ‘It’s Ex-Directory, OK? And I didn’t keep a note of it. It’s back in the dark ages, after all . . .’

He was stalling, for whatever reason. Clearly, though, he wanted to pursue the acquaintance, which should give her a bargaining counter – if someone fancied you, it always did. She persisted. ‘But don’t you still have contacts who might know?’

‘Wo-ho! So many years back, what do you think?’

‘What a shame,’ she said sweetly. ‘Thanks, anyway, for contacting me. Pity there’s no way forward. It was good to have met you.’

‘Hey, hang about! There might still be someone I could dig out—’

Taking candy from a baby, this was. Laura had to conceal the smile in her voice as she said, ‘Really? You mean you think you could?’ Yes, surprised, impressed – that was good.

‘Oh, I guess. Sure to be somebody, if I put my mind to it. But listen, what is your scene if you don’t do clubbing? Eating out, theatre—’

She sounded, she hoped, transparently honest. ‘Max, to be absolutely straight with you, I can’t think about anything else at the moment.’ Well, that was true, wasn’t it? ‘Why don’t you call me again when you’ve got your father’s number? Then I can talk to him and get it out of my system. He might give me the brush-off, I suppose, but—’

‘Oh, I think you’ll find he will. He doesn’t really do helpful. But you’d feel you’d given it your best shot and then—’

‘Absolutely. And then – Speak to you soon.’

Laura put the phone down with some satisfaction. Max might do a good line in cynical manipulation but he wasn’t the only one who’d read the manual on playing power-games. She’d put money on getting a phone call tomorrow night saying he’d quite unexpectedly found the number in an old diary or some such face-saving excuse. It did cross her mind that she could be storing up a certain amount of trouble for herself in encouraging Max to think their relationship might have some future, but she didn’t want to think about that now.

She didn’t really want to think, either, about the dangerous vacuum in her life which, following the rules of nature, was being filled to the exclusion of everything else by this enquiry, but she recognised the unhealthy signs of obsession. So the following morning after breakfast, telling herself sternly that she couldn’t afford to put her life on hold for a glimmer of information which might all too easily be a will-o’-the-wisp, she poured another cup of coffee, fetched the road-map and the
Good Pub Guide
and prepared to give her housing dilemma her best shot. She’d been thinking about Wales, hadn’t she, and Devon? Yet somehow, she found she was leafing through towards the back of the road atlas to where she could find the maps of Scotland, inexorably drawn to the one which showed the south-western corner which had occupied her thoughts since the day before yesterday.

Laura had never really studied a Scottish map before. Why would she? She’d been to Edinburgh a couple of times, holidayed once in St Andrews, but that was the extent of her experience of the northern kingdom. Certainly, no mental picture had been conjured up by Max’s mention of Galloway.

Looking at the map now, the most noticeable thing about the area labelled ‘Dumfries and Galloway’ was how cut off it seemed to be from the rest of Scotland. The sweeping motorway from Carlisle to Glasgow seemed almost to mark out a boundary; from it, a single road wound its way west to Stranraer with its ferry links to Ireland. Other roads, twigs of the main branch, led to towns and villages with intriguing names – Beeswing, Kirkgunzeon, Palnackie – all thickly clustered to the south and along the coastline of the Solway Firth. Moving north, there were fewer names, further apart, with blank tracts of land in between, seamed with a river or a lake or two – or lochs, she supposed they must be called – and forests. Then, to the north-west, not far from the Irish Sea coast, there was an area where there seemed to be nothing at all.

Even without the Dizzy connection, it looked intriguing. It promised beauty, with its seascapes and low hills, empty moors and great forests. There was nothing at all to stop Laura going up there to have a look – just a look.

Except, of course, for the foot-and-mouth epidemic. It was, she remembered suddenly, one of the places which had been hardest hit, like Cumbria, and they were talking about the countryside being ‘closed’. She’d seen what was happening on the news – the sad, sickening evidence of an epidemic raging out of control, whatever spin government officials might attempt to put on it. She switched on the news at lunchtime with a renewed and personal interest.

Marjory Fleming was preoccupied as she walked through the entrance hall in Kirkluce Police Headquarters. A farmer near Bladnoch had barricaded himself into his farm with his infected cattle; he was known to have licences for three shotguns. He was someone Marjory and Bill had known since they all went to Young Farmers’ dances together, and Superintendent Bailey, aware of their friendship, had called her in to see whether she thought she could talk him down before they put in the heavy mob.

Marjory’s heart sank as she listened to him; she had been astute enough to ask for time to think it over before she gave him her response, which basically meant phoning Bill. Apart from the fact that he would have a useful opinion on whether the personal touch would do more harm than good, she welcomed an excuse to speak to him when there was actually something to talk about. They spoke every night, of course; he sounded exhausted but calm and so far there had been no disasters to report, but there never seemed to be much they could talk about. Once she’d said that the children were fine and checked that he’d picked up the supplies from the road-end, any news she had to give him was bad news and he didn’t need that. He didn’t ask the questions that would have forced her to tell him the terrible news of farms and farmers’ lives being destroyed on every side; she thought she sensed a superstitious fear of talking about it, in case it might attract disaster to him too.

Perhaps he wouldn’t even want to discuss the problem about poor Bob Christie which had just been dumped in her lap. Lost in thought, she almost bumped into DS Mason who was crossing the hall at speed. He stopped sharply and apologised.

‘My fault, Conrad. An emergency?’

‘Yes – well . . .’ He was frowning. ‘There’s been a weird message from my mother – something about an assault by our stockman and she’s gone to hospital with my uncle.’

Fleming was startled. ‘That sounds bad!’

Mason hesitated. ‘Yes – but when I ran a check on it to see what had happened there’d been an ambulance call earlier. I contacted the paramedics and they seemed to think there’s nothing in it, except that my uncle’s had quite a severe stroke. Which is bad enough, of course,’ he added hastily.

His final remark, Marjory noted, was very much an afterthought. ‘Of course. Don’t let me detain you anyway. Keep me in the picture, if you would.’

‘I’ll do that. Thanks.’

Marjory watched him go, her mind distracted from her own problems for the moment. There was no doubt about it, the Masons were a weird lot. What normal son, on hearing his mother has complained of being assaulted, runs a check on it to see whether she’s telling the truth?

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Mother, he didn’t assault you.’

The relatives’ waiting room at the hospital was fortunately empty, so that Conrad Mason had no need to consider the sensibilities of strangers in giving his reaction.

Brett sat in a red moulded-plastic chair, ignoring the polystyrene cup of pale grey tea placed beside her by a solicitous nurse, with the air of a duchess inexplicably forced to accept hospitality in a pig-sty. ‘Of course he did, dreadful man. I’ve made a complaint to the police so you can see to it that he’s properly punished.’

A muscle twitched in Conrad’s jaw. ‘Can I explain to you the laws of evidence in Scotland? You can’t convict on one person’s unsubstantiated word against another’s. There has to be what’s known as corroborating evidence – the tiniest bruise, perhaps? But there isn’t a sign of one, is there, and as far as Uncle Jake is concerned, he had a stroke, that’s all.’

‘But you don’t understand
why
he had a stroke!’ Brett cried. ‘That – that creature decided there was something wrong with a couple of the cows and phoned the vet. And now they’re going to come – come –’ her eyes welled up – ‘and simply
obliterate
your grandfather’s memorial!’

Conrad went very still. ‘Do you mean – foot-and-mouth?’

‘Well, of course. Only he’s so stupid it probably isn’t – and the whole herd, and Jake too, most likely, are going to die because of that man. If you don’t call that assault, what is it?’

The vision came before him of Satan, old and fierce and proud, reduced to nothing more than a tonnage of dead meat, his progeny slaughtered with him so that the line he had perpetuated would simply vanish, tipped on to a pyre or into a pit. Conrad felt sick, dizzy. There seemed to be a sort of roaring in his head.

‘Got to get out of here,’ he said thickly, pushing roughly past his mother who had jumped up anxiously. He hurried blindly past the sympathetic stares of staff used to seeing distraught relatives, and somehow got himself outside into the open air. He lit up, dragging the smoke into his lungs as if it were as necessary as oxygen.

It was some time before he came back. He was pale but calm and when his mother started to fuss round him he shook her off unkindly.

‘Stop pawing me. Now, there’s no point in discussing this. You can stay here; I’m getting back to the authorities to see if anything can be done.

‘But as far as Strachan is concerned, drop it. All you’re doing is making a fool of yourself, and while you’re entirely at liberty to do that I won’t have you making a fool of me as well. You’ll withdraw the charges, and then you’ll keep your big mouth shut. Is that clear?’

Brett’s eyes had been fixed on her son’s face. She began to smile, almost to simper, fluttering her short, stubby eyelashes.

‘Oh, Conrad, you are
so
like your grandfather! Sometimes I almost think it’s him speaking to me. As long as I have you, I feel I haven’t altogether lost him.’