Picture of Innocence (5 page)

It was someone called McQueen who had come to see him; Bernard had told him to get out, but he had stood his ground. Men could; Bernard wasn’t so brave with men. And McQueen had said that he knew why Bernard had let most of the crops go and had concentrated on animals; which had, as things had turned out, been a wrong move, with the beef ban.

She had already known that Bernard was having a difficult time of it with the export ban produced by the beef health-scare; half his profits had gone at a stroke, and the cows weren’t being auctioned at anything like their proper price at home. He had had to slaughter some of the cattle, and was still waiting for compensation; he had been told he might have to slaughter a whole lot more. Nothing had been settled about that, and he was having to feed and water them until it was. Couldn’t sell them, couldn’t do anything with them.

What she hadn’t known, what she had found out, was that Bernard had risked almost all his capital in some financial venture; not long after his first wife died, it had failed, and he had lost it all. That when the beef ban had come along, he had had nothing to fall back on, and had borrowed money, then more money, then more, until now one missed payment on the loan meant repossession of the farm. That he was paying it back with money he didn’t have, living on credit that he couldn’t repay. That despite the impression he gave of solid wealth, the truth was that he was broke, and the farm couldn’t carry on for more than a few months longer.

But McQueen wanted Bernard’s land, and the amount he was prepared to pay for it had made Rachel’s eyes widen. Bernard had turned him down, of course, because he had very much greater expectations. But Rachel had already decided that she wasn’t going to tell him about the baby she was carrying; once she had heard McQueen’s offer, she knew she had to get rid of it altogether. If there was no baby, he would have no incentive to keep on juggling his money around; he would
have
to sell, and she would still be able to salvage something from her dreadful mistake of a marriage. Because while her share wouldn’t be the spectacular amount that giving him a son would net her, it would be a great deal better than nothing.

So she hadn’t left him. She had made arrangements to terminate her pregnancy, quietly and discreetly, under the guise of a visit to her fortunately uncontactable family, had really gone on the pill, and had returned to Bernard to await developments. But what she hadn’t reckoned on was Bernard holding out as long as he had.

For almost twelve months she had hung in there, her eyes on the prize, the hammerings growing more frequent as Bernard’s frustration with her lack of productivity grew. In January, he had installed the security fencing, and she had discovered that she was not to be given a key for the gate. She couldn’t take her car out and be certain of getting back in, not without Bernard’s permission; effectively that meant that she was stuck in Harmston, which not only didn’t have a fishmonger, it had no chemist, no outlet for family-planning requisites. Bernard accompanied her on shopping trips to Stansfield, watching her every purchase. Rachel, convinced that he must sell any day, had simply made alternative arrangements, and her non-productivity had continued until Bernard’s suspicions that she was on the pill had hardened to certainty. Then one night, six weeks ago, she had been dragged out of bed and subjected to a brutal and prolonged assault designed to discourage its use.

Her feeble, barefooted attempts to defend herself had proved useless, and the careful, deliberate violence had gone on until she had finally collapsed, wrenching her shoulder as Bernard’s grip had refused to yield to her body weight. She had best get pregnant soon, he had said, as she half-knelt, half-hung there in agony, because if there was no sign of a baby in the very near future, she’d get the same again. Then he had let her fall barely conscious to the floor, had got undressed, got into bed and gone to sleep.

When he had got up next morning, she had managed to pull the duvet from the bed, and wrap herself in it; eventually, she had stopped shivering. And when he had left in the afternoon to go on his rounds with Steve Paxton, she had telephoned Nicola for help. Nicola had been horrified, but useful, with her medical knowledge. She had given her first aid, but had insisted on taking her to casualty in case of cracked ribs or worse. There, Rachel had told a pack of lies to account for the state she was in, and had been examined. Very extensive deep bruising, they had said, but no internal injuries, no broken bones. She could have told them that, because that had not been Bernard’s intention.

Before leaving Barton, Rachel had asked Nicola to take her to the station where she had shut herself in the photo booth and taken photographs of her injuries before time took care of them. Bernard might try to prolong the divorce proceedings, and she had wanted ammunition.

Now she had been caught out in a lie, and her plan of action had changed once more. He had been going to do that to her again; she couldn’t have taken another beating like that, and telling him that she might be pregnant had been a desperate measure that at least called a halt to the violence while she worked out where to go from here.

And there was only one way that she could see.

‘She’s fine,’ said Nicola, scratching Nell’s head as she threw the syringe in the bin, having given the old dog her annual check-up. Animals were the only living things her father cared about; she had inherited her love for them from him. She hoped she had inherited nothing else.

‘Tha can tek ’er back to t’farm,’ said her father. ‘There’s a cow Paxton doesn’t like t’look of. Tek a look at her while tha’s theer.’

It was perhaps her father’s stage Yorkshireness that upset Nicola most of all; he hadn’t set foot in the place for a quarter of a century, and she doubted very much that he’d ever heard anyone under eighty speak like that even when he’d lived there. He’d picked most of it up from the telly, she was sure.

‘Well, I …’ she began.

‘I’ve business in Barton,’ said her father. ‘Can’t tek dog in wi’ me, can’t leave ’er in t’car. Tha’s doing nowt else.’

Nicola pushed her short dark hair behind her ears, a habit she knew she had when she wanted to say no and couldn’t, because her husband had pointed it out to her. ‘The thing is, Gus is making—’

‘Tha’s been told,’ he said. ‘And don’t forget t’other beast. She’s in t’cowshed.’ He pushed open the swing door.

‘What’s wrong with her?’

‘Tha’s t’vet. Thee tell me.’ The door swung back behind him.

The outside door banged shut, and Nicola heard the Land Rover start up and drive off. He had deliberately come at lunchtime, so that she couldn’t plead a patient. She looked at Nell, who was looking back at her with the anxious expression she always wore, and sighed. ‘Come on,’ she said to the dog. ‘Let’s go and find Gus.’

‘Oh, Nicola!’ Gus said, irritated, when she told him.

‘What else could I do? He just left her and went.’

He shook his head, and stooped to tickle Nell’s chin. ‘Shall we hold you hostage until he pays her something?’ he asked the dog, who wagged her tail.

Nicola could never resist the top of Gus’s head, its short fair hair growing almost in a circle from the crown. She kissed it. ‘We’d just end up with another mouth to feed,’ she said, then wished she hadn’t, when she saw Gus’s reaction.

And I can’t even feed the two of us, is that what you mean?’

‘You know I don’t,’ she said. ‘You’ll get a job eventually. And we’ll be all right even if you don’t get one for a while.’

‘All right? I do your accounts, remember.’

‘There are people worse off.’

‘Not many vets,’ he said, straightening up. ‘ You could tell your father you don’t run a taxi service for retired sheepdogs. You could send him a bill now and then. It isn’t all my fault we’re broke.’

‘It isn’t your fault at all.’ Nicola knelt on the floor and absently patted the dog. ‘He wouldn’t pay them if I did send him bills,’ she added. He wouldn’t just not pay them, she thought. He would take it as a personal insult. ‘And I do have
some
paying customers,’ she said with a smile, trying to lighten the prevailing mood a little. ‘I’m quite a good vet, you know.’

‘He spends money like water, Nicky – I’m sure he just doesn’t think about it because you don’t send him bills. Of course he’d pay them. He doesn’t expect your gratitude for the rest of your life, but he’s not going to pay you if you don’t ask him. He buys her BMWs, for God’s sake, and he doesn’t pay you!’

They had had this conversation several times since Gus had been made redundant. And they had felt the loss of his income very keenly, but they would survive. Nicola smiled. ‘He’s got to keep Rachel happy,’ she said. ‘She’s going to give him a son and heir, isn’t she?’ She ruffled the dog’s hair. ‘Maybe we should kidnap
her
. What do you think, Nell?’

Gus crouched down and covered Nicola’s hand where it rested on the dog’s head, and gave it a little squeeze. ‘Go on, then. Go and mend his cow. I’ll keep your lunch warm.’

‘You’ll make someone a wonderful wife,’ she said.

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know I had it in me.’ He stood up. ‘What did you eat before?’ he asked. ‘When I was still in the ranks of the employed?’

She shrugged. ‘Pot Noodles. Or, as we in the veterinary trade like to make clear, Not Poodles.’

‘I think I’d
prefer
poodles,’ said Gus. ‘What do I do if I get an emergency?’

‘In the kitchen? Don’t ask me.’

He pulled a face. ‘An emergency call for you,’ he said.

‘If you can’t get me at the farm, ring Willsden and Pearce.’

‘How come,’ he asked, as he went into the kitchen, ‘both Willsden and Pearce run round in brand new’ Range Rovers and you can’t even afford a mobile phone?’

She was going to be told the answer. She put Nell’s lead on.

‘Could it be because they get your business while you’re doing people favours you don’t even want to do for them? Because you fall for any sob story you hear? Because you treat that stingy old bugger’s animals for nothing? Because you don’t know how to say no to any—’

She ushered Nell out and closed the door. She had heard the lecture, and Gus knew that she wouldn’t be waiting to hear it again. Their old car shuddered into life, and she headed out for the farm, windscreen wipers protesting because the fine rain that misted her windscreen wasn’t wet enough for them.

The odd thing was that, despite what he had just said, Gus might just be the only person in Harmston who got on quite well with her father. If you didn’t count that reporter, whose support her father had deliberately courted. Her father had spent his entire life alienating people very efficiently indeed.

At the age of twenty-one, just after he had inherited the farm his grandfather had left him in his will, he had got her mother, then just fifteen years old, and a Saturday employee in the farm office, pregnant. They had announced their intention of marrying as soon as she was sixteen, still a month away. There had, of course, been a huge row with both sets of parents, and her mother’s parents had said that they would refuse consent. Her father had, in typically melodramatic fashion, eloped with her mother to Scotland, established residency, and had married her there. Nicola had been born in Scotland. Then he had come to Bartonshire and taken possession of the land his grandfather had left him.

And it wasn’t
just
melodrama; the fact was that she had never known any of her grandparents, whom he had cut off completely from that day on. The tentative attempts she had made after her mother’s death to trace the family had ended in failure, and she hadn’t tried again.

Her mother had produced her prematurely within two months of their marriage. It had been a difficult pregnancy, and she had been advised not to have any more children. Which she hadn’t. Just miscarriage after miscarriage, and the occasional stillborn baby, until she had been worn out. And her father had blamed her for failing him. He’d married her so she’d give him a son, he’d said. And what had she given him? Her. A lass. What use was a lass to him?

He had taken over a successful farm, and had made it more successful. And, like his grandfather before him, he had played the stock market, and played it well. So well that he had gone into a sort of semi-retirement already. He was well off by any standards in his own right, but he had been and still was obsessed with the millions that remained just out of his reach.

Nicola had escaped his brutal discipline when she went to veterinary college, and had married Gus almost as soon as she had come back to Harmston. She had never told Gus what he was really like; Gus was so gentle, so unlike her father, that she thought it would hurt him to know. Her mother had died at thirty-nine, miscarrying her umpteenth child, less than two years ago.

And her father had been married to Rachel for almost eighteen months.

Curtis Law stood in front of one of the outbuildings, and nodded solemnly, then smiled and nodded. ‘Will it look all right?’ he asked. ‘It’s raining now – it wasn’t when I was interviewing them.’

‘No one’ll notice. Trust me, I’m a cameraman.’

Curtis carried on with his nods and smiles. Reaction shots. How he might have looked while they were answering his questions. He repeated one or two so that they could edit him in, and he wouldn’t just be a voice coming out of the ether.

He had been right in the middle of a big story for
Law on the Law
when
Aquarius 1830
had taken it into their heads to base him at the Stansfield regional office. He had been less than pleased to get sent to some outpost of the empire, and the first thing he’d had to cover had been some rich crank with a load of land he didn’t want to part with, and the equally well-heeled villagers who opposed his stand.

That was all it had been to start with, the human-interest bit at the end of the proper news, the always entertaining sight of the middle classes getting their dander up. But the dead donkey had got up and walked a few times since that first story, for which Curtis was truly grateful. Vandals had started raiding Bailey’s farm, putting sugar in petrol tanks, slashing huge, expensive tractor tyres, daubing the vehicles with paint, which had provided
Aquarius 1830
with several nights’ bulletins, and then Bailey had proved to be a genuine nutcase, which was always good news for local media. He had ringed his farm with more alarms than a high-security prison, and the villagers had objected both to the eyesore of a fence and to the ear-splitting alarms, which could be heard for miles. But practically as soon as he’d installed them, Bailey had got up one morning to find death threats pinned up all over the place, and he had been finding them ever since.