Cold in the Earth (6 page)

Marjory had stayed for the late shift and it was after nine o’clock when she hurried across the car park in the teeming rain to head for home. The kids would have come back on the school bus; Bill would have forced Cammie to do his homework and Cat to stop doing hers, given them their supper and with any luck got them to bed so that their parents could have a quiet dram by the fire in what was left of the evening before the early night a farmer’s routine demanded.

They were, in a sense, in the calm before the storm at the moment. The black-faced ewes in lamb had been rounded up and brought down from the hills where they lived in all weathers to the luxury of the maternity suite, as Bill called the lush pastures close to the house. Once the lambing started he would barely see his bed. Marjory always tried as far as possible to work child-friendly hours for a few weeks, though in fact her mother was more than happy to help out with any problem.

As she drove the six miles home in the darkness, wipers switching in the persistent downpour, she thought lovingly of the man waiting for her at home: kind, humorous, hard-working, with the gift too of a solid sense of proportion. She relied on him to talk her down if she looked like getting her knickers in a twist over something insignificant and tonight she was planning to get his perspective on the Conrad Mason problem.

That was the Mains of Craigie sign now. She turned in and as her headlights swept round, dozens of eerily glowing eyes were picked up in the beam. Some of the sheep were restless and she could hear their plaintive bleats. They came from a ‘hefted’ flock – one with a homing instinct for its own particular territory, taught by ewe to lamb down the generations so that they never stray – and they were uneasy in this unfamiliar place. Marjory had a particular affection for the black-faced breed, the leggy, thick-coated ewes and the rams with their magnificent curly horns, hardy and undemanding creatures which even in harsh winter conditions would scrape down through the snow to find their own forage.

As she bumped up the stony track and over the brow of the last rise the farmhouse came into view, its welcoming lights glowing soft gold against the dark mass of the hills behind. Coming back to it at night, its promise of warmth and comfort always made her think of ‘The Last Homely House’ in
The Hobbit
: a bulwark of sanity against the crazy world of drugs and crime and personal disaster where she operated. How lucky they were, despite the problems of modern farming, to have all this and the bairns and each other!

The lights were on in the children’s bedrooms. That was a promising sign: all that stood between her and the fireside now should be a recap of any triumph or disaster their day might have held and a couple of goodnight hugs.

At last, with maternal duties discharged, Marjory sank into one of the deep-cushioned armchairs beside the hearth, kicked off her shoes with a sigh of content and wiggled her toes to the blaze. Meg the collie was blissfully stretched out on the rug and thumped her tail lazily when Marjory pointed out to her that she was a spoiled dog and other collies lived in kennels outside.

‘What other dogs do is wholly irrelevant to her,’ Bill said, handing Marjory a heavy tumbler with a measure of straw-coloured liquid in the bottom. ‘She knows she’s really a person with a furry coat.
Slainte!
’

He took his place opposite, a big man, broad in the shoulder and deep-chested, so that his tall wife was able to feel agreeably dainty beside him. His fair hair was receding rapidly now but his blue eyes still held, she always thought, the innocence of a good man who looks out on the world and finds that goodness reflected back.

‘
Slainte!
’ she responded, tilting her glass to him, and sipped, feeling the golden fire burn satisfyingly down her throat.

His day had been uneventful; she told him her worries about Conrad Mason and he considered what she had said in silence. She had learned long ago not to interrupt the process; if she tried to hurry a response, ‘“
The mills of God grind slowly
,”’ he would quote provocatively, ‘“
yet they grind exceeding small
,”’ and go back to his contemplation. Tonight when she was weary it was pleasant just to sit and watch the coloured flames, orange and scarlet and green, and the logs glowing red-hot. One collapsed into grey ash with a gentle sigh.

Eventually Bill said, ‘You’ve three problems, haven’t you? One’s the staffing angle – you’ve always said he’s one of your most effective men and you’d be hard pushed to find anyone as good again. The second is whether, if he doesn’t get his cards, anything can be done to stop him going “aff his heid” and hitting someone. And the last one, my lass, is covering your own back. What’ll happen if you go to the Super?’

‘Mmm.’ Bill was spot-on with his analysis, as he usually was. ‘It depends. He won’t care about Johnston and to tell you the truth, I know I should but I’m not sure I do – she’s kind of a feeble creature and I’ll be surprised if she doesn’t jack it in anyway. But if I tell him I felt threatened – you know what a stickler for protocol Bailey is. Mason would be out so fast his head would be birling.’

‘Do you know what you want?’

‘Oh, I know what I
want
right enough. I want Mason to keep a civil tongue in his head and I want everyone else to behave so well they won’t provoke him. Oh yes, and I want world peace and us to win the lottery and Scotland to get the Rugby Grand Slam this year. And I wouldn’t mind just once having Cammie choose to read a book instead of zapping aliens on his GameBoy.’

‘Well, I’m jake with all the rest but I think you’re reaching a bit with Cammie.’ Bill finished his whisky and got up. ‘You’ll have to work it out for yourself, lass. I’m just away to let Meg out and check on the sheep.’

As he moved, Meg was instantly at his heels. Marjory drained her own glass. ‘You did remember to shut in the hens, didn’t you, love?’

‘Would I forget your precious chookies?’

Master and dog went out together. Marjory stood up, yawning hugely, put the fireguard in front of the fire and switched off the lamps. She’d think about what to do in the morning, but at least now she had the problems clearly articulated in her head.

4

With a cup of coffee, a road map and a
Good Pub Guide
, Laura Harvey was attempting to plan her future.

The one-bedroom flat she was renting had been a lucky find. It was tastefully furnished in neutral colours and the big windows and cream walls made the living-room with a kitchen area at one end feel quite spacious. It had a good central location too, within walking distance of Oxford Street.

She’d been here for two weeks. London was full of seductive attractions, her friends were hospitable and it would be easy just to drift, filling her days with pleasant, purposeless activities until it became a way of life – easy, and self-destructive. In the aching emptiness of her loss, she felt a fierce need for somewhere to call home and it wasn’t going to be in another restless capital city. She was in danger of making her grief a prison; planning a physical escape had a symbolic attraction.

She’d been very disciplined, each day choosing a different route out of London, only to return depressed each night by country roads choked with traffic and pretty villages which were no more than urbanised commuter colonies. She would have to go further afield, she realised now, find a pleasant country pub and spend a night or two over on the borders of Wales, perhaps, or down in Devon. The map was spread open now on the coffee table and she was surveying it helplessly.

Yesterday’s edition of the
Sunday Tribune,
also on the coffee table and folded open at the page with her article, distracted her attention and she looked at it again with the pride of authorship. ‘
Dear Dizzy
 . . .’ was the headline and below, ‘
Laura Harvey anatomises the psychology of loss
.’ The small photo of Laura at the head of the column, she had noticed wryly, made her look strikingly like Dizzy herself. She was pleased with it, though. It read well and she was hopeful Nick Dalton might think so too and ask her to write something else. If she was lucky, it could be a new direction for her career – once she found somewhere to pursue it from. She went reluctantly back to the map.

Her house-hunting research was in want of focus. She needed a practical itinerary, clear, ordered objectives, systematic planning. With a pad balanced on her knee and pen poised, she turned to the map of the whole country. Wales, Devon, East Anglia, Cumbria . . . where to start? She sighed, twisting a strand of hair escaping from its clip at the back as she always did when trying to concentrate.

At last she did the only logical thing. She shut her eyes and was just describing circles with her forefinger prior to stabbing the map at random when the phone rang. She suspended the operation, opened her eyes again, feeling foolish, and answered it.

It was Nick Dalton’s secretary. They had, she said, received a lot of e-mails about Laura’s column; would it be all right to forward them to her, once they’d weeded out the cranks of course? Nick himself would be phoning in a day or two, but he was very pleased.

Glowing with pride, Laura agreed and hurried to plug in her laptop. Imagine – fan mail! She was, however, quite unprepared for what came through: there must have been at least seventy e-mails. Feeling stunned, she settled down to read them.

They varied enormously in character. Some were short and gratifyingly appreciative of a good professional job. Laura enjoyed those. Others were less complimentary and she was mature enough to stop reading when she recognised their tone. There were some making helpful suggestions (‘Try the Salvation Army’ was the usual one – as if they hadn’t!) and still more expressing sympathy. She came across two which claimed to know where Dizzy was, but the context made it plain that these were either naïve or malicious nonsense. A small number were encouraging, telling of the unexpected return of a prodigal son or daughter and urging her not to give up hope, but the vast majority were heart-rending cries of agony, hundreds of words describing unremitting grief and pain for someone who had walked out, last week in one case, more than twenty years before in another.

Laura felt emotionally battered before she was half-way through them. She forced herself to stop – they had a horrid fascination – and make a cup of coffee while she took time to think.

She didn’t have to read them all, couldn’t possibly reply. She wasn’t strong enough, just at the moment, to bear the weight of other people’s despair. Perhaps the newspaper would help; it was bound to know of counselling services they could recommend and have secretaries to deal with this volume of correspondence. She would switch off the laptop now and go back to her blind selection of an area to visit.

Her finger was poised to click the mouse-button when her eye caught the subject of the e-mail she had stopped at. ‘Was Dizzy Di?’ it said. She caught her breath, clicked on it and scrolled down with a shaking hand.

‘Yo! Laura Harvey,’ it began. ‘Did your sister look like you? There was a gorgeous Di who looked like that, way back in the bad old days when we were in the power of the Minotaur. I would have played Theseus to her Ariadne but she escaped first and I could only follow. Call me to hear more.’ It gave a mobile number and a name.

Laura’s hand was stretching out to the phone when she had second thoughts. Struggling to keep calm, she read the message on the screen again, more carefully this time. It had a very strange tone; had the sifting process let one of the crazies through?

On the other hand – yes, Laura looked like Dizzy; yes, Dizzy did call herself Di outside the family. And for all she knew this sort of cryptic style might be no more than a common affectation in chat-rooms on the Net.

It still made her feel uncomfortable. She frowned at the screen. What sort of person had written this? It shouldn’t be impossible to tease something useful out of the evidence in front of her.

He wasn’t very sensitive, for a start – that jaunty ‘Yo!’ wasn’t an appropriate response to an article which had been serious, even moving. A young person, perhaps, or at least someone trying to appear trendy.

Then there was the reference to the Minotaur, Theseus, Ariadne – what on earth was that about? She’d had the Ladybird book of Greek myths when she was small – there’d been a labyrinth, hadn’t there, and human sacrifices to a monster, half-man, half-bull, until Theseus killed it. There was something else she’d read too, a book by Mary Renault expounding some theory about it all being to do with some ancient Greek fore-runner of bull-fighting. Ariadne, she seemed to remember, scrabbling in the rag-bag of recollection, was the customary simpering supportive princess. Not exactly a role she could imagine Dizzy performing – but then he said that she hadn’t.

So what did it have to do with her sister? And why should – she squinted at the name – this Max Mason have wanted to put it in his message?

The most obvious answer was, to get attention. But just saying he might have known her sister would have had that effect – so what did this do that the plain facts wouldn’t? Well, it caught her off-balance, intrigued her, whetted her curiosity. And curiosity was like an itch you just had to scratch, driving you to impulsive, unconsidered behaviour.

Laura felt the tingle of anxiety. She would have called herself streetwise after her years in New York; this was a rather strange individual she knew nothing about, yet she’d been on the point of grabbing the phone and opening up a channel for him into her life without giving a thought to her own security. Not very smart!

She couldn’t possibly ignore the message, even though it didn’t sound as if he and Dizzy were still in touch. She could e-mail back, of course, which would keep him at one remove, but then he’d have her e-mail address and she wasn’t at all sure that she wanted him to be able to contact her at will.

A ‘number withheld’ call was probably the best thing: he’d have no way of calling her back if he proved to be some sort of weirdo and she put down the phone on him. And as a plan, it had the merit of satisfying her impatience to find out what he had to tell her. She reached for the phone again, dialled the privacy number carefully, then the number she had been given. She drummed her fingers nervously as she heard it ringing.