Farm Fatale (26 page)

    But as she drove back into the village, her demons, quite literally, returned. Proceeding up The Bottoms' drive, she looked sourly at the gracious building glowing in the sunlight. The gray stone no longer looked friendly with age and use. It looked forbidding. The tiny leaden panes between the mullions no longer winked in the sunlight but leered. Even the lichened stone lions flanking the door seemed to snarl in warning. Samantha's trepidation increased when, after opening the front door and calling loudly into the hall, she remembered that Guy had gone to a meeting in London. With
Ghosts
of the Area
never far from her mind, she was suddenly reluctant to be in The Bottoms alone.

    She twiddled the car keys for a second, then decided to drive round the village. Nothing, after all, cheered one up as much as seeing how much smaller and cheaper everyone else's houses were besides one's own. Even if one's own
was the Spook Sheraton. These cottage
s here, round the green, for example.
Tiny. One bedroom at the most
. Slums, really. Samantha was beginning to feel better already.

    She braked in horror to avoid a black and white cat lounging in the middle of the road. Was it the haunted cat? Well, if not, it almost bloody was, Samantha thought, missing its front paws by millimeters as she swerved to the right at the top of the village street. Finding herself in a previously unexplored part of Eight Mile Bottom, Samantha felt fear claw at her heart. Her nerves were more shredded than a steak tartare. That she and the supernatural did not mix had been illustrated several times in her professional career, most recently at her audition for the stage version of
The Witches of Eastwick
. Or
The Bitches of Chiswick
, as she had dubbed it after having been put through her thespian paces by two female directors who subsequently decided to pass on her talents. "But why?" Samantha had stormed at Russ. "I thought I was definitely slated for the part."

    "You were slated, definitely," Russ assured her, which had seemed a weird sort of explanation. And his pre-audition good-luck message, "Break everything," had not, in retrospect, been particularly encouraging. She was, Samantha thought crossly, pressing her foot on the accelerator, better off without him.

    Suddenly, and most unexpectedly, a large, heavily decorated sign of the cross appeared in the center of her windshield. Samantha let out a prolonged shriek of terror. How much more of this could she stand?
The Amityville Horror
had become
The Omen
; expecting unscheduled decapitation any minute, Samantha's hand flew to her neck. A second later she realized the cross was actually the top of a spire and she was driving up to the church.

    Enlightenment dawned. Who better to rid a house of ghosts than a man of the cloth? Double-parking the car with a screech, Samantha dashed out and headed through the church door.

***

"But
something
must have happened," Mark insisted desperately. "Gothic multiple murders, that sort of thing?"

    "Not really, sir," said the duty sergeant at Slapton Police Station. "We don't get that sort of thing round here. Most trouble in this area is usually down to the Four Ds."

    "The Four Dees?" Mark frowned. And who the hell might they be?

    "Drugs, Drink, DIY, and Domestics," intoned the constable. "Oh, and the occasional bit of knicker-sniffing."

    Slamming the receiver down in disgust, Mark returned to his laptop. His stomach ran cold with dread at the thought of emailing the editor to report that his column's investigations into rural crime had proved even more fruitless than Rosie's snail-ravaged gooseberry bushes. He dragged his fingers hard through his hair and reached for an unopened package of chocolate chip cookies.

    Still, hopefully the editor would be merciful. Crashing and grinding the cookies in his teeth was a relief of sorts. Reaching for another, Mark heard the now-familiar screech of wheels followed by the slither of envelopes across the sitting-room floor.

    "Better get that red bill paid," shouted Duffy. "They'll be cutting you off if you're not careful. Takes ages to get reconnected as well. Mrs. Sidebottom hasn't had it for months—-mind you, that's no surprise to anyone." As the postman leaped back into his van, Mark returned to the silent kitchen and the empty screen of his laptop. Was the problem that he had promised the editor too much? Too late, he had realized the genius of Househusband had been to keep editorial expectations as low as possible. Genius and Househusband—two words he had never imagined it possible to use in the same sentence. An indication of how low he had fallen.

    Pacing back into the sitting room, Mark was shaken out of brooding by the sight of a pair of naked and shapely breasts walking past the open front door. Dungarees was taking the lunchtime air, or as much of it as she could given the cigarette plugged into her mouth and the large baby clamped to her left nipple. Even to Mark's inexpert eye, it was definitely too old to be breast-fed; this, as well as other darker thoughts, were obviously going through the mind of Mrs. Womersley as she looked up from weeding her daffodils to give Dungarees a disgusted stare. Her expression didn't change much when it switched to Mark, now hanging out of the front door. Swiftly, he went back inside to his laptop. There was something sinister about that old bag next door.

    Mark had typed no more than two words before the familiar thudding sound began on the cottage's front wall. Walking over to the window, Mark saw the Muzzles' cheeky-faced eldest boy Satchel kicking his large black soccer ball hard against the front of Number 2, aided and abetted by Blathnat. Mark glared murderously at them through the grubby old glass, then he raced across the sitting-room floor and almost ripped the front stable door off its hinges.

    "Just shut up, will you,
aaarrgggh
," he yelled, as the top half swung back, as usual, and crushed his fingers. "I'm trying to bloody work in there. If you two don't stop making all that bloody noise," Mark snarled, shaking his hand to relieve the pain, "I'll tear off both your arms and beat you with the soggy ends." One of his masters at school, he remembered, had used this threat to great effect.

    "Hey, hey,
hey
. Hang on
right there
just
one
minute.
Whoo!
" Dennis the Menace was loping toward him down the street, shaking his head and waving his arms. "Hey, hey,
hey
. Don't ruin the vibes, man. We don't shout at the kids round here."

    "Well, that's pretty bloody obvious," snapped Mark, catching the insolent eye of Satchel.
Satchel
. That was a laugh. Bloody kid obviously never went
near
a classroom. Making "calm down" gestures with his hands, Dennis retreated back up the lane, the wind billowing through his rainbow-colored tie-dye trousers whose crotch was on a level with his knees.

    As the hated children began kicking the hated ball noisily about the street again, Mark resisted the overwhelming urge to run away and never come back. Hands rammed violently into his pockets, he walked slowly back into the cottage, glancing at the bottom of Cinder Lane as he did so. He was amazed to notice a gleaming Jaguar XK9 double-parked alongside the Muzzles' rusting vehicles. Surely not the vicar's? The vicar was a sight better off than the usual pastoral padre if that car was anything to go by.

    A thought struck Mark with the force of a thunderclap. Hell, the vicar might even make a story. He rushed into the church and started clearing his throat exaggeratedly to announce his presence. It had instant results. A figure came hurtling out of the gloom of one of the side chapels. As it passed a stained-glass window, Mark saw with surprise that it was a woman. It was a lady vicar then. With long red hair, a very short skirt, high heels, and what, even from this distance, looked like a definite case of TT. Terrific Tits. Mark's heart soared. The editor was going to love this. A sexy woman vicar with a Jag. No doubt about it, this
was
definitely a story.

    "I'm so glad to see you," Samantha exclaimed dramatically. "I need your help
desperately
."

    "You do?" Mark asked, gratified.

    "Yes," Samantha gasped huskily. "I need someone who knows about black balls of hate."

    Mark's mind flew immediately to Satchel's football, which, at this very moment, was being slammed against the cottage wall with destructive regularity. "I'm your man," he said.

***

"They're called Jennifer and Britney?" Rosie echoed as Jack introduced her to his two favorite cows.

    "That's right. After Jennifer Lopez and Britney Spears," Jack admitted, not without a certain reddening of the ears. Rosie was also embarrassed—to think that someone who had spent half his life in a cowshed seemed better versed in popular culture than she was. Yet Jack, it turned out, liked nothing better than plowing late at night with the radio on full-blast in his tractor. Just like his uncle, Rosie thought, remembering the first time she had encountered the Womersleys.

    "Both naughty girls. Jennifer likes to snatch my hat off in the winter, and Britney always gives me a shove when she passes."

    Yet after this promising start to the day, Rosie was disappointed when Jack kept out of her way all morning. Was he regretting their charged encounter of the day before? Perhaps he was, after all, embroiled in a relationship somewhere. Although where and with whom he was embroiled Rosie couldn't imagine. There was no sign of any embroiling on the farm.

    In his absence, however, she made some of her best animal sketches ever of the cows in the upper field. Jennifer and Britney in particular turned out to be natural models. Coquettish, selfconscious, they pranced obligingly around for her, turning with a skittish flick of their tails. Samantha's wholesale destruction of all her early sketches became increasingly insignificant as Rosie, her pencil flying across the pad, improved on what had gone before. By the end of the morning, the character of Camilla the theater-producing cow, complete with a necklace of fat golden dandelions, had sprung exuberantly if improbably to life.

    The smooth and lichened rock on which Rosie sat was at the summit of the highest hill on Jack's farm, commanding a view not only of Eight Mile Bottom but of the receding hills and valleys beyond it. Rib after rib of rolling green stretched away to the sharply defined horizon, their vibrancy of color almost audible in the still air. Two hills in particular caught her attention. They looked, she thought, like sharks' fins jutting from a grassy sea. Or like two crumpled dragons that had collapsed in combat centuries ago.

    It was a sparkling blue and green spring day. From within a square foot of where she sat, Rosie could count nine different types of leaves, in colors ranging from emerald to brilliant lime. Flowers too—daisies led away in paths over the sheep-cropped turf, while the trails of brilliant yellow blazed by the dandelions were visible for miles. The sky seemed filled with competing birdsong—one a clear, glassy plink, another a piercing soprano fizz, rising, falling, and rising again.

    Her back to the field, Rosie did not see the tall figure approaching. But she felt the something cold and wet that suddenly thrust itself into her hand.

    "Kate! Bloody hell." As her hammering heart subsided, Rosie patted the dog gingerly.

    "Sorry," said Jack. "Didn't mean to make you jump. But Kate and I wondered if you might like to join us for lunch. It's past two o'clock, and we don't do starving artists on this farm." He set down a battered rucksack on the grass, while Kate sniffed and nudged Rosie's paintboxes and brushes.

    "Thought you might enjoy trying a few of the local delicacies." Jack produced two brown bottles of beer, a round loaf of crusty bread, and a couple of wax-paper-wrapped parcels.

    "Ooh, yes." Thinking of her unvarying diet of pasta and pesto, Rosie looked at the parcels with longing. Then fear flexed its icy fingers and snatched at her heart. What was in those parcels?

    "It's not…is it?" she stammered, unable to frame the dreaded word.

    "Meat?" Jack looked at her. Rosie gazed pleadingly back and nodded.

    His teeth flashed in a grin. "'Course it isn't. Matter of fact, it's cheese. Made in a local dairy with the milk from these very artists' models here." He waved his broad hand at the cows tearing at the grass, their tufty coats shining in the sun. His tone was light. He did not seem to be about to add any depressing statistics about the milk fetching eight pence a pint while the cheese cost £4 a pound.

    Rosie brightened. Her stomach rumbled as she realized how hungry she was. Mark had eaten the last of the Weetabix that morning, using up all the milk in the process.

    "The Bottom Blue is particularly good." Jack cut open the packets with a wood-handled knife.

    Rosie imagined the explosion of salty curds on her tongue. "I adore blue cheese. It's always delicious."

    "Isn't it? Particularly when it's been maturing for a while, like this one."

    Rosie swallowed.

    "Because then it's really special," Jack continued airily.

    "Is it?" Rosie's salivary glands were working overtime.

    "Yes. It's then that you get the maggotty bit at the bottom. We locals like to dip our bread in it."

    Rosie, feeling as if she were about to be sick, tried to stop her face from contorting in a rictus of disgust. Then she noticed the corners of Jack's mouth quivering and realized he was joking.