Deadfall (3 page)

‘Not much point now. I won't be missed. Besides, I'm not sure the Morgan's fit for the road.'

‘I'm sorry. Oh, God, what a mess!'

‘Bed!' Linc said firmly.

Rockley knocked quietly on the back door just after one o'clock to say that he was leaving but forensics would be an hour or so longer. He gave Linc a card with his number on, saying he'd probably need to speak to him again and telling him not to hesitate if he thought of anything further.

Linc had fallen asleep over a crossword puzzle by the time another officer came up to the house at something past two, with the information that the
CSI unit had now finished and were heading off, if he wanted to bolt the gates.

Linc followed him down and locked up, then returned wearily to the kitchen and crashed out on his makeshift bed.

He tossed and turned for all of fifteen seconds.

HALF-PAST EIGHT
that morning found Linc turning the Morgan between wrought-iron gates into the long gravel drive of Farthingscourt. He passed the pretty South Lodge where Geoff Sykes, the deputy estate manager, lived, and drove through a band of ancient beech woodland before coming out into the rolling parkland that surrounded the house.

In spite of the horror of the previous night's events, the first sight of Farthingscourt on the far side of the valley gave him the buzz it always did. The drive curved to the right and ran down an avenue of stately copper beeches to the stone bridge spanning the river, and then climbed steadily all the way up to the house's impressive raised portico.

Built of Bath stone in the Palladian style, it was not so large as some stately homes and perhaps a little austere, but with the April morning sunlight glinting on the dozens of rectangular panes of glass in the huge sash windows, and bathing the masonry in a warm golden glow, Linc thought it beautiful.

He drove along past the front of the house and
round into the courtyard at the rear, trying not to cast his usual, wistful glance at the empty stables as he let himself in at the side door to the old kitchens. Although the Vicarage at Farthing St Anne was no more than fifteen minutes' drive from Farthingscourt, to an outsider it would probably seem absurd that someone with a stableyard and several hundred acres of park and farmland on his doorstep should keep his horse somewhere else, but Linc had to respect his father's wishes. When Sylvester, Eighth Viscount Tremayne, had lost his wife in a three-day-eventing accident seventeen years before, he had had all her horses destroyed and made it clear that no other horse would be tolerated on the Farthingscourt Estate from that point forward.

As he ran up the narrow back stairs to his apartment on the top floor, Linc remembered his father's words when, just five months ago, he had come back to live at the family home and announced that he now owned a horse.

‘Well, I can't stop you keeping the bloody animal, I suppose, but you'll not keep it here as long as I'm alive!'

The declaration was made with a quiet vehemence that brooked no argument and Linc knew better than to offer any. His riding had been a bone of contention between his father and himself ever since he'd been caught secretly riding a friend's pony, just ten months after his mother's death. He had never ridden just for the sake of rebellion, though he suspected his father thought he did. Even as a twelve year old, Linc could not fail to be acutely aware of the depth of the Viscount's grief and would not willingly have added to it, but he was his
mother's son where horses were concerned and, unlike his father, he didn't blame
them
for the tragedy. In a way, riding had been his way of dealing with the loss of his mother. He'd felt closer to her when on the back of a horse, and was sure she would have been pleased and proud that he was following in her footsteps.

The rooms Linc now occupied, right up in the attics of the building, had recently been converted from the long-empty servants' dormitories and comprised a sitting room, galley kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. He had furnished and decorated them himself and was very content in his self-contained isolation, far from the sumptuous grandeur of the public areas of the house.

Three low sash windows offered panoramic views over Dorset's Cranborne Chase, in which the Farthingscourt Estate sat, but Linc hadn't time on this occasion to stop and enjoy them. Nina Barclay, a friend of the Hathaways', had recently broken her wrist and was desperate for someone to keep her promising novice going for her until she was able to ride again. Her groom was keeping the horse fit but didn't have the confidence to compete on him, so as Noddy was entered in many of the same events, Linc had happily stepped into the breech. Today was to be his first outing with Hobo's Dream and though fate had decreed that Noddy should miss the competition, he didn't want to disappoint Nina if he could help it.

He'd eaten a hurried breakfast at the Vicarage after helping Ruth with the horses, and all he had to do now was change into his riding clothes, touch base with his father and head for Hampshire.

In search of Sylvester Tremayne, he let himself into the main part of the house on the first floor and made his way along the Long Gallery towards the wide central flight of stairs. From either side of the corridor, oil-painted images of previous Tremaynes looked down with varying degrees of hauteur from their gilded frames. A runner of hardwearing carpet protected the polished boards from the thousands of visiting feet, whilst stanchions bearing heavy ropes kept sticky fingers away from the priceless portraits.

Linc gave a mock salute to one of these as he passed. St John, Third Viscount Tremayne, had been, according to tradition, the closest the family had had to a black sheep, frittering away much of its quite substantial wealth, killing a love rival in a duel, and finally meeting his own death racing his curricle from London to Brighton. He had died in the reign of George III, aged just twenty-nine, without producing an heir, and the title had passed to his younger brother, Sebastian.

Now the same age as his ill-fated ancestor, it was said by many that Linc was extraordinarily like him to look at, a comparison which didn't displease him. St John was pictured here dressed in riding clothes and leaning against a stone balustrade, whilst in the background a groom hung on to a spirited grey stallion. In keeping with his rebellious reputation he wore his hair unpowdered and tied back with a black ribbon, and if not exactly handsome his features were at least regular and strong enough to be considered good-looking. On one hand he wore a beautifully chased gold ring with a sizeable emerald at its centre, and another gold ring adorned
his left ear. What had always drawn Linc to the Third Viscount was the suggestion of a sardonic smile that curved his lips; he looked like a man who was nobody's fool but who found much amusement in life.

At the far end of the gallery, near the top of the stairs, hung the portrait of the current Viscount, Linc's father. It had been painted thirty years ago, when Sylvester Tremayne was first married and in a break with tradition also portrayed his new wife, Marianne. The style was informal; the Viscount wearing his usual camel-coloured corduroys and tweed jacket, and Marianne seated by his side, dark-eyed and lovely, laughing up at him in amber cashmere and pearls. The artist had captured their mutual love and the portrait always inspired a tinge of sadness in Linc. Both his parents had effectively been lost to him on the day Marianne Tremayne had suffered her fatal fall.

A quick search of the first floor proved fruitless and he eventually ran his father to ground downstairs in the library, one of the many rooms that were off limits to visitors.

Aside from the desk, at which he was seated, several red leather-covered reading chairs stood about, each with its attendant table and lamp, and towering bookshelves exhibited row upon row of gold-embossed leather spines; volumes that Linc could not recall ever having seen anybody read. The library was, as always, poorly lit, heavy velvet curtains and north-facing windows combining to protect the treasures within.

As Linc went in, his father's two wolfhounds, Saxon and Viking, got to their feet and padded
across to see him, flattening their ears and wagging their long feathery tails with pleasure.

Viscount Tremayne, on the other hand, greeted his son with an unencouraging grunt.

‘Thought you were off playing with your bloody horses today,' he remarked.

‘I am. I just thought I'd check everything was okay with you before I went,' Linc said evenly.

‘Well, you only just caught me. Sykes wants me to look at the roof of the summerhouse – something about loose ridge tiles, I gather – and I've got Bennett coming out about the forestry grant at half-past ten. Some of us have work to do, you know.'

‘I was up 'til almost eleven o'clock last night going over the farm accounts with Geoff,' Linc retorted, goaded in spite of himself.

‘Well, you wanted the job,' his father observed, looking over the rim of his spectacles. His hair and beard were grey, and seventeen years of grieving had left their mark, but at sixty-four he was still an imposing figure, and one who'd been known to reduce junior staff to mumbling confusion with just such a look.

Linc was made of sterner stuff.

‘I did, and I do, but I'm entitled to some free time, and how I choose to spend it is my affair,' he replied. ‘I'll be back in plenty of time for the sponsors' meeting tonight, don't worry.'

The Viscount regarded Linc for a long thoughtful moment before returning his attention to the papers on his desk. ‘Suit yourself,' he said. ‘It's all the same to me. Just don't expect me to hold your job open for you if you end up in hospital with a broken neck!
There'd be no shortage of takers. Reagan, for one, would jump at the chance.'

‘I'm sure he would, but you know as well as I do that he's not the right man for the job,' Linc pointed out. ‘Sykes is worth ten of him.'

‘Sykes doesn't want the job, Reagan does. You put his nose severely out of joint turning up when you did.'

‘You had no intention of giving him the position,' Linc protested. Reagan was Farthingscourt's head forester, and a very able one at that, but there was something indefinable in his manner that meant that as far as the Viscount was concerned, he had risen as far as he was going to. ‘Anyway, I don't intend ending up in hospital, if I can help it,' he added cheerfully.

‘Your mother didn't intend ending up in a coffin!'

Linc knew the futility of further discussion.

‘I'll see you later, then. Oh, and by the way, I met a friend of yours last night.' He gave his father a brief account of the raid on the Vicarage and the ensuing investigation.

‘I'm sorry to hear about the Hathaway girl,' his father said. ‘Rockley's a good man. If there's anything to find, he'll find it. Is the girl going to be all right?'

‘Her father rang from the hospital this morning but there's no real news. She's still unconscious and they're going to do a brain scan. Apparently they think she may have been struck from behind and then hit her head again when she fell.'

‘Bloody thugs!' the Viscount growled.

‘Yeah. I just wish I'd got there ten minutes
earlier . . .' Linc walked over to the door. ‘Well, I'd better get going before the stampede starts.'

The ‘stampede' was the family name for the hordes of visitors who tramped round Farthingscourt on Saturdays, Sundays and Wednesdays. In reality it started with little more than a trickle at Easter, but in the high season numbers stepped up considerably, to the point where a limit had to be set to safeguard the antiquities they came to see, and even the very fabric of the building itself.

His father raised a hand but not his eyes, and with a sigh, Linc let himself out.

He left the damaged Morgan in the open-fronted barn that did duty as a garage, heading for Andover in the Land-Rover Discovery instead. His competition start-time was half-past ten and although Nina and her groom would already be there with Hobo, and could warm him up, Linc wanted to leave himself a little time in hand to renew his brief acquaintance with the horse before competing.

Once clear of the back roads and doing a steady sixty-five in light traffic, he tried to concentrate on mentally rehearsing his impending dressage. Dressage is basically the horse's version of a dog's obedience test: a succession of linked moves combining changes of pace and direction which is marked on precision and style. But whereas a ring steward calls the instructions to the dog handler, the dressage rider must memorise his test in advance. With around half a dozen different novice tests and a similar number of intermediate ones, concentration was vital.

Today's test was one Linc had ridden on Noddy
only a few weeks ago and knew fairly well. Before long he found thoughts of Abby and his own troubled relationship with his father increasingly intruding.

Guilt about his own, unwitting contribution to Abby's plight had passed, and what he felt now, aside from anxiety, was chiefly anger. In the short time he'd known them the Hathaways had become very dear to him, in a way representing the kind of ideal family life he'd missed out on. In attacking Abby the thieves had dealt a devastating blow to the whole unit.

Linc remembered the stricken look in her father's eyes last night. Given time, the Reverend David Hathaway, currently a university lecturer in theology, would no doubt find comfort in his faith but that first outburst of fear and anger had been the instinctive reaction of any distressed parent.

Linc wondered if his own father would have coped better with his wife's death if he had had such a strong faith to fall back on. While Marianne had been alive the local vicar had held a service every Sunday in Farthingscourt's private chapel for the benefit of the Tremayne family and their estate workers. These days the vicar visited just once a month, and the family usually only attended in force at the traditional times of the year, and then more through duty than conviction. Indeed the Viscount had been heard to say that in his opinion the Sunday regulars were merely hedging their bets.