by Stephen Laws
“My name’s Hall. I own the farm west of the Fell Road. I was driving home at ten. Your car was heading down that road and into the village.”
“What are you . . . ? Wait a minute. Trudi!”
Dietersen turned to look back at the door into the lounge. When there was no sound or movement, he strode to Garvey’s desk and jabbed at the intercom. The intercom buzzer on his own desk inside the lounge sounded like an angry wasp.
“Trudi! Move your arse!”
Dietersen refused to turn and look at the newcomer, each passing second fuelling his anger. Eventually, Trudi appeared in the doorway, swinging on the doorframe by one arm, still posing for the photo shoot. Her lipstick was smudged.
“You and your girlfriends took the car out last Wednesday, didn’t you?”
“Yeah. We were bored, remember?” Her voice was still bored. “And you were being horrible.”
“Shut up. Did you go up the village road?”
“Oh Christ, Kapler. I don’t know. All the fucking roads ’round here look the same in the fucking dark.”
“Well,” Drew said, “if you were driving that Lexus parked in the drive, you were doing eighty down that unlit road, and you ran my Land Rover off the road and into a ditch.”
Trudi swung on the doorframe, bored as hell. Dietersen took an angry step toward her, and suddenly she wasn’t bored anymore.
“Kapler, don’t! Look, baby—I don’t know what he’s talking about. Honest.”
“All right.” Kapler struggled to remain calm. “All right . . .” When he turned to look at Drew, his smile was fractured around the edges. “Was your vehicle damaged?”
“Scratch on the fender, that’s all.”
“So how much do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Then what are you here for?”
“Just to give some neighbourly advice.”
When Dietersen laughed this time, it wasn’t fractured, and his composure had returned. “You’re here to threaten me?”
“Nope. I just wanted to say—next time, take it easy on the Fell Road.”
“You came all the way here just to say that?”
“That’s all.”
“And you’re not after anything.” Dietersen laughed again like a man in command of the situation. “Come off it.”
“There’s a cottage on that stretch of road. A widow and a little girl live there. Traveling at that speed, at night—on an unlit road? Anything could happen.”
“I’ll write you a cheque.”
“I’m told you’re a rich man. Good for you. But money’s no good to anyone with a broken neck in the ditch. Yours, mine—or anyone else’s.”
Dietersen turned angrily. “Garvey! Bring my chequebook.”
When he turned back, Drew was gone.
Dietersen turned his glare to Trudi.
“I don’t know what he’s talking about, Kapler.”
The interior door opened and Garvey emerged, sheepish.
“Follow him out, Garvey. And make sure he leaves. And close the fucking gate!”
When Garvey had left, Dietersen turned back to Trudi.
“Nobody makes me look like an idiot.”
“Come on, baby. Let’s finish what we started.”
“Trudi, I swear to God . . .”
But Trudi had turned and walked back into the lounge. When she looked back over her shoulder at him—with that look—Dietersen cursed himself, and followed.
TEN
Drew wielded the spade with too much anger, blistering the palm of his hand. He cursed, flung the spade down—and then stood with his hands on his hips for a long time, head down and breathing heavily. The sun was hot on his back, just like a taunt given his current endeavour.
Forcing himself to be calm, he carefully and slowly picked up the spade and began digging again at the base of the stone wall. He had often wondered who had built the wall, already there for many years when he had first bought the farm. Dry-stone, stretching for several hundred feet and presumably once forming some kind of boundary around the farm property. But now, apart from this stretch on the southwest corner of his land, it had mostly fallen prey to the changeable weather in this part of the world. Drew continued to dig, trying to clear his mind.
So what was that visit to Dietersen all about, if it wasn’t what he said? A threat.
“Shut up,” Drew said aloud, the spade biting into the hard ground. There was rubble here, maybe pieces of fallen wall. He bent, tugged out a rock and threw it aside in a spray of earth.
When is a threat not a threat?
“Con-tra-dic-tion!” Each syllable came with a blow of the spade. Unable to let Dietersen, or his girlfriend, get away with forcing him off the road yet not wanting to threaten him, however justified, Drew had simply not been able to let it go, and had been compelled to at least raise it with the businessman. But to what purpose? He felt angry and—not for the first time in his life—ineffectual.
“I should have just let it go.”
Throwing the spade down into the hole, he moved to the bag slung over the wall, rummaged for his water bottle and drank. He had worked up a sweat. Leaning back against the rough-hewn wall, he looked down into the valley at his farmhouse—and was instantly reminded by the surrounding outhouses of a series of failed enterprises. Drew kicked the spade at his feet.
And watched a familiar car pull into the farm gate from the main road. The car carefully negotiated the track leading to the house—a test for its suspension—taking a long slow curve around the outbuildings and stopping at the main door. Drew drank from his water bottle again, wondering how long the occupant was going to sit in the vehicle before realizing that he wasn’t going to come out. After a while, the door opened—and a familiar figure climbed out.
It was Faye Roche.
Drew watched her walk to the front door, drank again when she rang the bell.
Eventually, Faye gave up ringing, walked back to the car—her attention still fixed on the farmhouse and surrounding buildings.
“No one at home, Faye,” said Drew quietly.
Faye pulled open the car door, leaned in—and the sound of the horn blatted up the sides of the valley. Birds flew from the hedge at the side of the house. Drew sighed and drank again. Faye blatted once more, this time impatiently. Drew watched her move away from the car, looking around and . . .
“Oh no.” Groaning, he turned, replaced the water bottle and picked up the spade again.
Faye had seen him and had begun to walk up the side of the valley toward him. She was wearing the same coat she’d worn on the night of the accident, an anorak with fur trim. She didn’t seem to have changed since the days she had taught him at Nicolham School, and he could feel her getting nearer as he sweated and worked, digging the hole at the foot of the dry-stone wall. Now he was angry with himself again, for being angry with her—angry at what she had undoubtedly come to say, angry because he knew instinctively why she was here. When he heard the soft footfalls that meant she had reached the top of the rise where he was working, he said, without turning, “Yes, I did go to see him.”
“Who?” Faye asked, out of breath.
“Dietersen.”
“Really—and what did he have to say for himself?”
“It wasn’t him in the car that night. It was his wife, lover, partner—whatever.”
“She’s definitely a ‘whatever.’ “
Drew glanced back to see Faye sit on the grass, regaining her breath.
“That’s why you think I came up here to see you? Checking up on ex-pupils like bossy ex-schoolteachers are supposed to do?”
“Waste of time. Don’t know why I went. Land Rover’s fine. No need for police.”
“Well, he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. The fact that you confronted him about it might mean he—or his ‘whatever’—will be more careful next time. But I didn’t come to see you about that. How’s your head?”
“Fine. No problems.”
“I
didn’t come to see you about that either.”
Drew turned and leaned on his spade. “It wasn’t me, you know.”
This time it was Faye’s turn to be perplexed. “What wasn’t you?”
“I didn’t throw that piece of chalk at Laurie Turner. It was Barry Lomas. But you still gave the detention to me.”
“And that’s been on your mind for thirty years?”
“What do you want, Faye? What brings you way up here?”
“I got to thinking after that night. About you and what happened here. To your wife, I mean.”
Drew’s jaw clenched. If Faye reacted to that sudden tension, she didn’t show it; just sat watching silently, as if waiting for a response. Drew slowly turned, picked up the spade and began digging again.
“It happened, Drew. It happened, and it was horrible. But you can’t just carry on like this, away from everything—away from everyone.”
“I’m going to plant pear trees along this wall. Never tried pears before. But I think they’ll take, so I’m going to give it a go.”
“I was talking to George, Tom and—what’s his name?—Laurence Burns, down at the pub. They’ve been up to see you again, haven’t they? Been trying to convince you about getting more involved in village life again. The way you used to, before . . .”
“They say late autumn, early winter is best time. But I’m doing some preparation now. Get the hard work done, get the soil cleared.” The spade hit a rock with a shivering clang. Drew yanked it out and sent it tumbling down the slope past Faye.
“They say they’re not giving up on you,” Faye continued. “They don’t want you stuck up here alone. Neither do I. They made me feel a little ashamed, actually. Do you remember when I used to come up to see you—tried to give you the pep talks? I gave up, and I shouldn’t have. Your friends didn’t give up, though—they still haven’t.”
Drew wielded the spade again, found another rock and jammed the edge under it, levering it out of the soil. “The key is to choose a sunny, sheltered spot. I’m planting up here rather than the low-lying land by the cottage ’cause that’s where morning frost lingers sometimes. Pears don’t like that.”
“Seeing you that night down at Cath’s place—that made me think again. Made me realise that I shouldn’t have given up on you.”
“They suffer if there’s a cold easterly wind. Another reason I’ve chosen this place. They need more sunlight than apples. See? A sunny, southwest-facing wall for growing and training the trees . . .”
“Not when other things started to go wrong for you on the farm. The Mad Cow crisis—losing all your livestock first. Then the fire.”
“Fertile, well-drained, moist soil—got some loam in already. Not a heavy clay soil, and it won’t get water logged here. If it was chalky soil or light, sandy ground, it wouldn’t work. It would stress the trees. And a stressed tree makes for poor fruit. Do it right—there’ll be fruit for twenty years . . .”
“You don’t need to be alone, Drew. There’s help if you need it.”
“Help? Like the help I didn’t get from the Farmer’s Union when . . .” Drew reined in his anger, resisted throwing down the spade. Instead, he carefully and firmly planted it, dusted his hands and walked over to Faye. He looked past her, out across the valley and down to the farmhouse. “I’m sorry. You mean well, Faye. And so do George and the others. And I never thanked you properly for looking after me—back at school and then that night with Dietersen’s car.”
“I knew you didn’t throw that chalk at Laurie Turner.”
Drew turned to look down at her.
“I needed to have you stay behind so we could talk. You’ve always been stubborn, Drew. If I’d asked you to stay and talk about your mother and father, you just wouldn’t have done it. But you always obeyed the rules at school, even when those rules were wrong. And I could see how much your parents’ splitting up—so publicly—was affecting you. Might seem strange to hear that now after all this time, but . . .”
“We talked. I remember. And you did help, Faye. You did. Good God—so you stage-managed the whole thing?”
“And then afterwards—when we kept the talking going, remember?”
When Drew spoke again, the anger had dissipated: “You’re a remarkable woman, Miss Roche. Always were. And you did help me back then—a lot.”
“I want to help you now. And you can start by doing me a favour.”
“A favour?”
“Yep, but it involves talking to some people.”
“Christ, you want me to go into therapy?”
“Not the way you’re thinking. First, a question.”
“This is like being back at school again.”
“Have you seen them?”
“Them?”
“You know what I’m talking about. Them. The things that you’ve been hunting and trying to track this last couple of years.”
Drew paused, looking long and hard at her face for any sign of derision or humour. There was none. He turned to look out across the valley, to the Fell.
“Yes, I’ve seen them. They’re out there, all right. They’re clever, though. Clever in a way that sometimes just doesn’t seem possible. But I’ve seen them.”
“Then come and talk about them.”
“Talk? To who?”
“Cath’s been asked to give a talk on writing to the Nicolham Culture Club. I want you to come and give a talk about what you’ve been looking for up here.”
“They think I’m nuts down there. That I’m chasing shadows up here.”
“Tell me who thinks that. Because I don’t know anyone who does. Tom lost another three sheep last week . . .”
“He didn’t tell me.”
“That’s because he hasn’t seen you—and you’re not answering your blasted phone! Livestock’s being taken all the time. You know that. And I don’t know anyone who’s laughing about it. So I want you to come a give a talk. About them—about what you know and what you’ve been doing up here all this time.”
“You’re trying to socialise me, Faye.”
“Just one talk. That’s all. I’ll fix everything. Anyone laughs, I’ll personally boot them out of the room.”
“Or give them detention?”
“I’m retired, remember?”
“You’ve never retired, Miss Roche. You may have given up the day job—but you’ve never retired.”
“So is that a yes, then?”
“Don’t think pears would ever take there. Do you?”
ELEVEN
The Nicolham Culture Club building served many purposes, and had done so since its erection in the centre of the village more than a hundred years ago; annexed to the local school. A simple eighty-foot square building composed mainly of the grey stone and slate quarried from nearby and also used for the construction of the school, it had signs over the door that revealed it was also the Horticulture Centre, the Fell Walking Club, the Local Historical Society and Women’s Institute.
Cath Lane stood before a maximum crowd of eighty—all seats having been taken when it had become known that Nicolham’s own resident novelist would be giving a rare talk on her work that evening; the first time ever since she had moved into the white cottage on the Fell Road. Faye Roche sat at the back with Rynne (there was no school tomorrow, so a lateish night was okay this evening). Faye had been smiling throughout, and Cath had attempted a few barbed glances in her direction at what seemed appropriate moments without making it obvious. This had been a setup, and Cath had fallen for it.
“Honestly, sugar. It’s just a half dozen or so of the locals. Scribblers, you know? Been at it for years, wanting to break through. Needing some good advice. You were like that once. Looking for advice. Remember those talks you went to? The ones you were telling me about that helped you so much. What are their names? Michael Lambton—you know, that lot.”
“Faye, you know I don’t do that stuff since we moved. I write. That’s it.”
“You were on that television document
ary a few nights back.”
“That was cut in from an old interview.”
“Well, I think you’re being mean. You could at least give a little advice to the really enthusiastic would-be writers in your own village. Not as if it’s one of those book-tour thingies that you used to do. This would be half an hour at most. Sort of a guest slot.”
“Half a dozen people. That’s all.”
“Well—maybe ten.”
But the hall was packed to capacity, and Cath recognised Faye’s handwriting on the block-letter posters adorning the walls that advertised the forthcoming talk of the village’s celebrity writer; posters that, by their ragged tape and dog-eared corners had clearly been there for some time prior to their conversation. And in the audience, clearly not local, was at least one journalist she had met years ago when her first novel had made such an impact. The audience appreciation was honest and evident, but a knot of anxiety had fixed in her stomach when they had first arrived. Faye had made the introductions, and Cath had felt anxious enough to throw up. This was the first time she had stood in front of an audience to talk about her work since . . . since the Bad Day. But the sight of Rynne, sitting at the back, brought a sense of resolve. Cath had fought back and had commenced with a question-and-answer session straight from the start, rather than giving a talk. Some of the questions were the standards that she had been asked so often that her reply was instinctively ready:
“Where do you get your ideas from?”
“For thrillers with a harder—let’s say more ‘horror’ edge—from a horror bag I bought for my daughter in Plymouth market. It cost ninety-nine pence and it’s never let me down.”
“What time of day is it best to work? Morning or afternoon?”
“For me, the best time is later in the day, usually into the evening—when my daughter lets me.” Audience laughter—and sparkling eyes from Rynne at the back. “That’s a legacy from the days I worked nine to five in an office job, and only got a chance to work after work—if you see what I mean. But for everyone wanting to write, the rhythm and time of day that suits you best is something you have to find for yourself over time.”
