by Fiona Walker
‘Yes, but hurry!’
Bay’s dogs swayed on the passenger seat beside him at the front; Ellis and Sienna were strapped into the row behind them, rattling from side to side, thoroughly overexcited by the mission.
‘Doggie! Save doggie!’ Sienna chanted, as they bounced along seemingly endless farm tracks.
‘Is it much further?’ Carly reached down to reassure the injured dog as his big broken body slammed against the base of the bench seat with every turn.
‘Five minutes max.’ Their reluctant ambulance driver forded a stream. ‘I’ve forgotten your name, sorry.’
‘Carly.’
In front, her son introduced himself too. ‘I am Ellis Peter Turner and I’m four.’
‘Turner, you say?’
‘That’s right.’ Carly was getting used to local reaction to the surname. Her hackles rose as he let out a cynical laugh.
‘I might have guessed.’ He had an amused, drawly voice, like a posh Simon Cowell. ‘Something tells me I’ve just been had here.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s your lot behind all this lamping business in the first place.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘There’s no point denying it. We caught Jed Turner twice last year. Your boys promise the urban coursers a night’s entertainment, spring the gates, act as guides. What do you charge to find them a good spot?’
‘I have no idea what you’re banging on about, lover, but you’d better bloody step on it.’ The dog was starting to fit, eyes rolling back, legs jerking and twitching. ‘Faster!’
They drove straight to a neighbouring village she’d never been to, turning into a wide driveway with Compton Equine Clinic signs to either side, then bouncing over speed bumps to a modern Cotswold-stone state-of-the-art surgery surrounded by stable-yards and turn-out paddocks.
‘It’s a horse hospital.’ She panicked they wouldn’t agree to see the dog. He was terrifyingly still now.
‘A vet’s a vet, especially when they’re an old friend.’ Bay leaped out and ran inside. Moments later he reappeared with a small, bearded man, whom he was briefing on the run: ‘I’m bloody sorry to land this on you, Paul, but you’re closest, and I don’t want the Turners putting some gypsy curse on this shooting season because their best bull-lurcher pegged it in my car.’
‘We’re not really set up for small-animal surgery, Bay.’
‘You’ve not seen the size of this dog.’ They wrenched the tailgate open and levered out the dog.
The vet, Paul Wish, was a New Zealander with a gentle, no-nonsense manner, calling on a team of veterinary nurses, who prepared the animal, clinging to his last thread of life, to be rushed into an operating theatre.
‘This is going to take a while,’ Paul told Bay and Carly, as he prepared to leave them in the waiting room, a mobile phone pressed to his ear. ‘I’ll do what I can, but I have to be honest, I don’t think—’ He broke off to leave a message: ‘Gill, call me the moment you get this. I could use your suturing skills right now.’ The phone was lowered. ‘I don’t think there’s a lot of hope.’
‘Do what you can,’ pleaded Carly.
‘And do it quickly.’ Bay glanced at his watch. ‘We’ve got a pony booked in for a scan later. Do you want a lift home?’ he asked Carly.
‘I’ll stay here to see how the dog does, thanks.’
‘You might be in for a long wait,’ warned Paul.
She and the children were waiting-room old-hands from antenatal appointments – Sienna had already found the toy-box in the corner and Ellis was raiding the complimentary biscuits – and there was no way she was leaving the dog with the pleading eyes.
*
Eight metal shoes clattered along the Plum Run between the Comptons at trot, briefly muffled as they rode up onto the verge to let an ambulance past, then clattered on.
‘Time for a quick coffee?’ asked Petra.
‘Why not?’ Gill replied.
It was their much-repeated catchphrase, delivered with French and Saunders aplomb.
Petra counted Gill among her closest village friends. Kind, practical and immensely likeable – as long as you didn’t mind old-school bluntness, drinks mixed so strong they were dangerous near naked flames and four-by-four road rage along narrow local lanes – she was a lot more fun than the starchy front implied, with a gratifyingly ticklish sense of humour for all its bad puns. She also knew a lot more about Petra’s marriage than most villagers.
To outsiders, the Gunns’ was a materially enviable life. The family owned a Cotswold farmhouse and a London pied-à-terre and their children were privately educated. They drove around in gas-guzzling off-roaders, had plenty of gadgets to play with and took two holidays a year. Charlie loved his country sports; they owned three ponies and one horse, as well as a delinquent dog and several chickens. Petra had achieved the have-it-all generation’s dream of family and career, even if it had come at a price: their marriage was uncommunicative, seldom sexual, still less affectionate, and a financial minefield. Their social lives were largely conducted separately, and Petra rarely snatched more than five hours’ sleep a night. She was fond of saying that putting Charlie first meant she had the last laugh, but she struggled to find much her husband said amusing now. So it was funny that she still cared about him so much. In between wanting to kill him. After eighteen years of marriage, Charlie’s hairline had receded, like a Norfolk coastline, and Petra, who ground her teeth in her sleep, had lost half a millimetre of smile according to her dentist. But between them they still had enough left to tear their hair out, grit their teeth and persevere with their marriage. They loved their children and their house and, grudgingly, each other.
Friendships like that with Gill helped enormously, although they had none of the deep heart-to-hearts she had once or twice a year with old college friends; it was the day-to-day rhythm of life they shared, its reasons to be cheerful or irritated, the underlying unhappiness with their marriages implicitly understood, a silent pact broken only in a crisis. Married to small, cycling-mad beta Paul for more than twenty years, Gill treated him like a fourth child and craved adult company. That they worked together made the struggle even harder at times. Her delaying going into the clinic – ‘It’s only paperwork and drug reps on Thursday mornings’ – was a regular occurrence.
The two women consequently squeezed in a coffee between early-morning hacking and work, a secret indulgence stolen after they’d waved off Mo and Bridge in Compton Bagot. It wasn’t that they deliberately excluded the others, but they always seemed to have a lot still to talk about, happy to put off work for another half-hour, and Petra’s welcoming kitchen was on Gill’s way home.
Georgian-fronted Upper Bagot Farmhouse was on the lane between Comptons Bagot and Magna. Seven years earlier, the Gunns had traded up from a chocolate-box thatch in Chipping Hampton – their first home away from London, all too soon bursting at the seams after they’d doubled their brood from two to four – to a ‘forever house’. It had ticked every one of Charlie’s extensive wish-list requirements, including the game larder, walled garden and railed paddocks, apart from affordability, especially since his daily commute had proved so punishing. That he now used the London flat during the week meant its rental income no longer helped to pay off the Cotswold mortgage. Seven years ago, Petra’s wish list had been simpler: somewhere peaceful to write, and somewhere to keep horses. That she would spend so long working in one to pay for the other was trade off she hadn’t fully appreciated back then, but she was proud of the neat little stable-yard where she kept the Redhead and her daughters’ ponies, her early-morning work-out routine through winter being mucking all of them out.
The old ironstone stables that had been part of the original farmyard had been converted when Upper Bagot Farm was developed, and the farmhouse had its own modern courtyard of four wooden stables, tack room and store. Here was where Bella’s spoilt Welsh pony was lavished with more kisses than any boy-band poster, watched jealously b
y Prudie’s long-suffering, largely neglected New Forest. The outgrown family Shetland mowed the lawn and gave rides at the fête every year, and the stroppy Redhead ruled the roost, with a lot of door-kicking and face-pulling.
The original milking parlour and timbered barns had all been converted into luxury homes, creating a pocket-sized community that locals had nicknamed ‘W1’ because its inhabitants had all come from London. The Gunns were the only ones not retiring to the country. Among their neighbours were a glamorous former dentist in the Old Byre, who was rarely at home for more than a week at a time between cruises; a pair of elderly tennis enthusiasts in the Barn; two jolly foodies, who threw old-fashioned dinner parties in the Stables; and lonely retired airline pilot Kenneth in the Granary, a keen gardener who had left Petra his usual canvas bag of goodies hanging on a fence post this morning – lettuces, radishes and freshly cut flowers.
‘I wish I had a Kenneth next door,’ sighed Gill, whose sprawling, historic cottage on the far edge of Compton Magna was flanked by holiday lets.
‘He can talk for an hour and a half about aphids without pausing for breath,’ Petra reminded her, in an undertone.
‘So can my husband. That and the best bicycle GPS app.’
While the dressage horse waited obediently in one of Upper Bagot Farmhouse’s wooden stables, enduring much show-off rolling from the chestnut mare, who was back in the field with her pony friends, the coffee pod machine grumbled out two Guatemalan lungos, milk-frothed clouds poured on top. The two women took their caffeine fix at the breakfast bar, hair steaming.
A Hansel and Gretel trail of breakfast cereal, dressing-gowns and slippers led off to the snug, from which the television boomed and voices shrieked.
‘They keep lining up like the Brady Bunch offering to do the washing-up, but I’ve told them they need to relax.’ Petra pulled a what-can-I-say face. ‘I love having them all home, but I classify summer holidays as a manic episode. One minute.’
She stuck her head around the door to find three figures silhouetted against the television screen, eyes inches from Scooby Doo: Ed, on a growth spurt with a lot of ankle and soft, round tummy showing in outgrown Hobbit pyjamas, Prudie standing in ballet third position in a Coolest Kid Ever nightie, Bella with her Joules pony pyjamas on inside out, dark hair on end as usual. Wilf, the delinquent spaniel, was helpfully washing up the cereal bowls abandoned by sag bags on the floor. There was no sign of Fitz.
‘I’m home!’ she told them brightly. ‘Everything okay?’
They murmured vague assents.
‘How long until you all go to Italy?’ Gill asked, when she came back.
‘A fortnight. We’ve got Gunny’s summer visit first.’ Charlie’s mother was travelling up from Kent the next day for a week’s stay, a triannual ritual Petra anticipated with the same foreboding and need for gin as getting a manuscript back from a pedantic copy-editor. ‘I’ve a packed schedule planned. Thank heaven for Tesco vouchers.’
‘And Open Garden Week, don’t forget. Bring her to admire the Walcote Wishes – we’ll sedate her with Paul’s elderberry wine and his guided tour of his veg patch.’
‘She’ll critique it all on her blog. The flat delphiniums at Tie Cross Cottage were an utter disgrace. You’ll find your herbaceous borders named, shamed and face-tagged.’
Barbara ‘Gunny’ Gunn, an early adopter of silver surfing, was a keen blogger, unsparing in her opinions on social class, marriage, books, gardening and food, which she now shared with her legion of subscribers. Her son’s family and their lives in the Cotswolds were favourite subjects for Gunn Points posts.
‘Is Charlie taking time off while she’s here?’ Gill asked pithily.
‘What do you think?’
‘Sudden heavy caseload?’
‘You guessed it.’
They shared a wise look over their coffee cups, working mothers accustomed to being the only parent whose job had to fit around school holidays. For Petra, Charlie’s perpetual absence was a running joke among village friends.
‘We’re all still placing bets as to how you killed him,’ Gill said now.
Regularly away shooting in winter and playing cricket in summer, Charlie was an elusive Compton weekender, especially when his mother was visiting. On the rare occasions he did appear for longer than it took to sleep off the London hum, he was so gregariously sociable and charming that everyone was left wanting more.
Petra had come to realise that her husband was an unambitious lawyer, treating his tenancy at chambers and their Pimlico flat in much the same way he’d treated the library and digs at university, as places he alternated to sleep off a big night out. He looked magnificent in a wig, an adversarial pin-up, and was well-liked, immensely sociable and superb at networking, but he wasn’t very good at winning for his clients. His cases were thinner on the ground each year. He and Petra earned roughly the same, yet his routine was never compromised by curveballs, like sick children, broken dishwashers or visiting grandparents.
‘This is delicious coffee.’ Gill sucked off the white moustache from her first sip. ‘You’re one mother of a barista, Gunn.’
‘No, Gunny’s the mother of a barrister. I’m his wife.’ Petra boom-boomed.
‘Don’t you forget that.’ Gill adopted her mock-schoolmarm air, but her eyes were serious. ‘You have a good marriage. Bay really does have a terrible reputation as a flirt.’
‘Tell that to Charlie! My husband’s been trying to befriend Bay for years, remember? He’d quite happily pimp me and the kids if it gets him an invitation to the Well-hung supper.’
‘Not a chance,’ Gill said. ‘Especially if you call it that.’ The Austen family threw a notoriously cliquey party to gather the county’s movers and shakers as soon as the season’s first pheasants were deemed gamey enough to stew in a vat of Calvados and cream. ‘And especially not if you keep flirting with Bay.’
‘I told you, we’re just trapped in a manège à trois of Pony Clubbers. Charlie’s delighted.’
As an old-fashioned networker, her husband had made it his mission to infiltrate the village hierarchy over several seasons, with dedicated church-going and bonhomie at local events. Being a top-class delegator, he’d thrust that mantle to Petra as court cases in London took up more of his time. Over the moon that a social connection between the Gunn and Austen families had at last been forged – albeit by eight-year-olds bonding between gymkhana potato races – Charlie had encouraged his wife to chat up the party-throwing, landowning, moneyed Austens while supporting their daughters at Pony Club rallies and other competitions all summer. By nature sociable and ever-grateful to be away from her desk, it was an easy enough task for Petra to get talking to other Pony Club parents. Tellingly, Charlie had no interest in befriending Gracie’s less glamorous family, another of the village’s oldest farming clan, but her warm-hearted, perennially broke mother Mo had become a firm friend and hacking buddy, while Tilly’s cool, stand-offish mother would never be a Saddle Bag. Petra had disliked Bay’s wife on instinct.
‘I have no idea why men are attracted to ice queens like Monique,’ she said now.
‘Sex,’ Gill said crushingly. ‘She’s supposed to be sensational in bed. Went out with a race trainer I know before Bay.’
‘You’d think they’d get frostbite.’
‘I meet Moni Austen a lot on the dressage circuit,’ Gill said, using her spoon to scoop up the froth from the top of her cup, ‘and she’s a very tough cookie – she’s known as the Assassin in the warm-up arena because she’d ride over anyone.’
An ultra-slim Dutch dressage fanatic always hidden behind dark glasses, Monique Austen had taken Petra’s mobile number months ago, saying she’d text to arrange a play-date for the girls but never had. Text addict Bay, by contrast, had been hitting send such a lot recently that, had his wife not been quite so beautiful – and by all accounts pathologically possessive – she might have mistrusted his intentions.
‘Are you warning me off him?’ She took in Gill’
s stern expression.
‘I hardly think I need to do that, do I? I’m just saying you should try to focus on what’s important.’ Those brown eyes looked pointedly to the door that led to the snug and her children, now glued to Star Wars judging from the sound effects. ‘And you really don’t want to cross Monique Austen.’
‘Especially not in working trot M to K.’ Fond of Gill as she was, Petra was irritated at times by the way she used her seven-and-a-half-year head start in life to talk down to her.
Gill’s phone had chirruped several times in her pocket. She plucked it out impatiently now. Moments later, she was throwing back her coffee dregs and sprinting around the kitchen island as though the lungo had been shot straight into a vein.
‘I need to borrow your car. Emergency admission at the clinic. Can you hang onto my big chap until I get back?’
‘Of course. What’s happened?’ Petra felt guiltily relieved that a veterinary emergency had put an end to the morality lecture.
‘No idea, but Paul’s patching something up in theatre and he stitches like a saddler.’ Gill was already out of the door, Petra grabbing the key fob to follow.
‘It’s a push-button ignition,’ she explained, as Gill jumped into the Gunns’ big SUV and tugged at the seatbelt. ‘Put your foot on the brake. Voilà!’
It was only while waving her off that Petra realised she still had the fob in her hand.
‘Whatever you do, don’t stall the engine!’ she shouted, but the car was already accelerating along Plum Run.
*
At the stud, the paramedics, police officers and undertakers all knew each other of old: it was a death-scene reunion. Boiling the kettle so often that her pores were opening, Pip kept her ears trained for hints of suspicious circumstances, but they mostly spoke in low, respectful tones that were a far cry from Luther.
‘Been busy lately?’ Pip overheard one say to another as she crossed the courtyard with a rubbish bag while they vaped outside the back door.
‘They’re piling up, bro. Same every year. Summer holidays and Christmas, we always get a rush on.’
