Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  CONTENTS

  Cold in the Earth

  Also by Aline Templeton

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Postscript

  About the Author

  COLD

  IN THE EARTH

  Aline Templeton

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Also by Aline Templeton

  Death is My Neighbour

  The Last Act of All

  Past Praying For

  The Trumpet Shall Sound

  Night and Silence

  Shades of Death

  Copyright © 2005 by Aline Templeton

  First published in Great Britain in 2005 by Hodder and Stoughton

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  The right of Aline Templeton to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Epub ISBN 978 1 84894 751 1

  Book ISBN 978 0 340 83855 6

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  An Hachette Livre UK Company

  338 Euston Road

  London NWl 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  To Iain and Clare, at the start of their life together, with much love

  ‘Cold in the Earth – and fifteen wild Decembers,

  From those brown hills, have melted into Spring.’

  Emily Brontë

  Prologue

  Cold, cold, cold. It was the extreme discomfort which penetrated her conscious mind at last and she found she was shivering so violently that her teeth chattered together; her hands were numb, her feet were wet and stinging painfully. Her eyes shot open and she gasped.

  It was night and the sky was very clear and black, etched with the brilliant points of a million stars. Over the dark bulk of the house there was a full moon, bone-white against the darkness. The branches of the trees and the leaves of the privet hedges, silver-edged with hoar-frost, glittered in the steely, unearthly light.

  She was standing in one of the narrow, overgrown blind alleys of the old maze. She had been dreaming about it, hadn’t she, and here she was. Both feet were muddy and one was bleeding from a gash on the instep; the little gold ankle bracelet she always wore was missing too. The jacket of her thick, flannelette men’s pyjamas had a tear in one arm and there was a long scratch on the skin below; she must have forced herself through gaps in the hedging. Sleep-walking when she was troubled was a childhood habit, now, she had believed, outgrown. But then of course she had been troubled over these last weeks, very troubled.

  Tremors of shock as well as cold shook her as she looked about her in the sick confusion which always followed a rude awakening. Everything felt hazy and unreal to her still. Shaking her head as if to clear it, she turned uncertainly to orientate herself towards the entrance gate.

  It was as she struggled to locate it that she heard the click of the gate’s latch. She tensed; who else could be about, here in the dead of night? That had been part of her unease, the suspicion that she’d been spied on, followed unseen . . .

  Through the sparse, scrubby privet bushes at the end of the long alley came – something. It was swathed in black and its head was a silver bull mask with sharp, sweeping horns that glinted in the moonlight. It capered towards her, tossing its head as it came. A figure of nightmare.

  She shrank back into the corner of the blind alley, her heart beating so frantically that she thought it might leap from her chest. She could make no sense of this . . .

  It wasn’t real, was it? She was still dreaming, in that hideous, persistent way which had been another of her sleep-curses all her life, when you knew you were asleep but still were helpless to rouse yourself from the night terror which had you in its grip. And she was terrified now, in that state of dream-paralysis when your legs feel too heavy to run away and there is no point in trying to scream because your voice is frozen in your throat.

  It had stopped capering. It was cantering, lowering its head. She was trapped; even if she could force movement upon her leaden limbs the hedges here grew densely, a solid barrier on three sides that seemed almost to be closing round her. She could hear the animal snorts and the heavy breath as it gathered speed.

  Once the horror happened, the shock would wake her as usual and she would fling herself upright in bed, gasping and sobbing and soaked in sweat. Please God, make it soon! She was actively willing the final charge when it came.

  It was only when one of the pointed silver horns, razor-sharp, pierced her through to the heart with exquisite agony that she understood this was no dream, for the brief moment before she fell into the sleep that knows no waking.

  1

  The hens, newly released from overnight protective custody, were picking their way down the henhouse ladder with a sort of dreamy deliberateness, blinking in the watery sunshine of a January morning which was surprisingly mild even for this mild south-west corner of Scotland. The sound of their reflective crooning filled the damp air, punctuated by an occasional squawk of indignation as some giddy young thing jostled the dowagers in her unseemly haste.

  Watching them, the woman’s hazel eyes warmed in amusement as they tittuped fussily out across the sodden grass under the old grey-lichened apple trees, sharp yellow beaks stabbing hopefully for worm delicacies or beetle treats. The woman was tall, only a couple of inches under six feet, with a boyish, athletic build; she was wearing blue workman’s overalls and gumboots and her hair, chestnut-brown with only the first traces of grey showing, was cut in a short, practical style. Her countrywoman’s complexion showed tell-tale signs of exposure to the elements though her hands were curiously smooth and well kept: nicely shaped hands, large and capable, with neatly manicured nails.

  ‘Off you go, chookie chookies!’

  She shooed the laggards out of the little hut, checked with swift efficiency for night-laid eggs which she put into the bowl she had brought, then set it down outside while she fetched the pail with the morning mash from its place of concealment behind the henhouse. It was never wise to provoke the frenzy of shoving, flapping, bullying and shrieking which the sight of this induced until the hens were safely out of the hut’s confined space.

  She liked hens. She liked their plump, red-brown, compactly feathered bodies on those improbably slim legs; she liked their clockwork movements and the comfortable sounds they made and their silly social squabbles. She liked the rusty throat-clearing of Clinton the rooster – so-called from his ruthless predation on the younger,
fluffier members of his entourage – before he produced his crow. And there he went now, shaking his magnificent red comb and stretching out his plump neck.

  Tipping the mash into the trough, she watched the mayhem for a second or two, then with the empty pail over her arm collected the bowl of eggs and went through the wicket gate in the dry-stone wall enclosing the old orchard towards the farmhouse. It sat nestled into one of the green Galloway hills, built out of the local stone so that it looked almost like an astonishingly convenient geological formation rather than the work of human hands. In the style of a child’s drawing it had a window on either side of the door on the ground floor, three windows above and a grey slate roof which was glinting now in the morning sun, crowning the house with silver.

  The sound of a quad-bike’s engine made her turn and across the valley on the hillside opposite she could see her husband Bill taking a trailer of feed out to the pregnant ewes which were bundling along behind him as fast as their woolly bulk permitted, the collie Meg rushing round importantly at their heels although in fact no herding was needed. Bill stopped the bike and jumped off, a big man, solidly built, though he had kept himself fit and still looked too young to have just celebrated his forty-third birthday.

  There was a thick ground-mist which suggested that the sunshine wouldn’t last for long, but it gave an unearthly beauty to the landscape where the shoulders of the soft hills seemed draped in glistening gauze and the tops of bare trees emerged spikily from a swirling lake of vapour. She allowed herself a moment to admire the place she had known and loved all her life – ‘God’s private backyard’, as her father described this tranquil corner of Scotland, bypassed by the busy world.

  ‘Mum! Mum!’ Her reverie was broken by Catriona’s agitated shout from the farmhouse door. ‘Hurry up! We’re going to be late!’ A conscientious eleven-year-old, Cat lived in a state of permanent terror that she might make herself conspicuous by some appalling transgression like being a couple of minutes late for school.

  ‘Just coming,’ her mother called over her shoulder. ‘Round up Cammie, will you?’ Cameron would no doubt have to be prised away from his GameBoy; at nine, his mind was untroubled by any tedious considerations of duty.

  Putting two fingers to the corners of her mouth, she emitted an ear-splitting whistle which echoed across the valley. Bill looked up; she waved goodbye and as he sketched a salute in response, turned and plodded back to the house. She wiped her boots on the hedgehog scrubber by the mud-room door, then went in to pull them off and stack them on the wire shelf which ran along one wall. Cammie’s boots were, of course, lying on the tiled floor; she tidied them automatically as she passed, padding in her thick woolly socks through to the kitchen.

  Cammie was sitting in the sagging armchair beside the elderly Aga, the inevitable GameBoy in his hands. Cat was trying without success to pull it away from him; she had her father’s fair hair but was slim and long-legged, while Cammie, big-boned, tall for his age and already a star in the local mini-rugby team, certainly took his build from the paternal line although he had dark hair and eyes like his mother’s.

  ‘Geroff!’ he was complaining, shrugging Cat away. ‘I’m just finishing this one game, so chill, OK?’

  ‘We’ll be late! Mum, make him—’

  ‘Cat, it’ll be quicker to let him finish. Cammie, see you’re at the front door, ready, in three minutes or you don’t see that thing again for twenty-four hours.’

  ‘Sure, sure,’ he grumbled, getting up and walking towards the cloakroom, still clicking, while his sister sighed dramatically.

  Upstairs, their mother rapidly unzipped her heavy overalls as she made her way to the bathroom to wash her hands, then hopped along to the bedroom, pulling off her socks as she did so. The overalls came off; underneath them she was wearing a smart grey trouser-suit with a V-necked white sweater. She slipped her feet into a pair of low, classic black court shoes, tugged a brush through her hair, put on a slick of lipstick, then checked her appearance in the long mirror on the door of the wardrobe. She settled the lapels and gave a tug to the bottom of the jacket.

  Fine. Detective Inspector Marjory Fleming was ready to go on duty.

  Laura Sonfeldt closed the main door with its chipped and battered paint, then the metal security door, and walked slowly down the steps outside the Women’s Refuge.

  It was bitterly cold. A piercing wind whipped driving rain down the narrow New York street, sending litter skittering across the sidewalk. A sauce-smeared fast-food carton blew against her camel slacks but she barely noticed, blinking back tears as she tucked her blonde hair inside her striped woolly hat, pulling it down over her ears, turning up the furry collar of her coat and gathering it tightly about her slight frame.

  She was suffering agonies of guilt. It had been such a touching farewell, there in the shabby common room with its motley collection of begged and borrowed chairs and tables, where the walls and floor bore the scars of careless living, spilt food and children’s mess and no amount of disinfectant could disguise the smell of soiled diapers and kids’ sick. The women themselves were stick-thin with living on their nerves and their drug of choice, legal or otherwise, or else obese from comfort-eating to blot out the fear which had eventually brought them to the shelter, but all had the same haunted and watchful eyes. They had said goodbye to Laura with speeches, hugs, tears and a garish plaster figurine of a mother and child which was in her tote-bag now.

  Abandoning them had been a hard decision, even if she’d never been sure how much good she’d managed to do in these past five years of being a listening ear to a never-ending succession of desperate women, most of whom carried the sort of personal baggage that doomed them to be perpetual victims. Counselling always seemed a bit like offering a sticking-plaster for an amputated limb; to have any sort of chance of straightening themselves out they needed intensive psychotherapy, and even then . . . Well, she’d found herself becoming more and more cynical about her profession, even if – or perhaps because – her own sessions with spoiled and wealthy socialites had funded her pro bono work here at the Refuge.

  If it hadn’t been for her mother, she’d probably have drifted on like this for years without subjecting her own generalised dissatisfaction to proper analysis, shoemakers’ children being notoriously ill-shod. But when the transatlantic phone call came from her mother’s next-door neighbour – ‘Jane will probably kill me for this, but I thought you ought to know she’s had a mild heart attack’ – along with the pang of fear had come clarity: she was an exile in a foreign land with a misleadingly similar language, and she was desperately, intolerably homesick.

  It would have been different if it had worked out with Bradley, but it hadn’t. The Rhodes scholar she had fallen in love with at Oxford and married in a romantic ceremony in the college chapel two weeks after her graduation had turned into a merchant banker back home in New York. As her experience of the Bowery and his of Wall Street diverged further and further, the marriage died by slow and wretched degrees until it was a positive kindness to put it out of its misery.

  Even then, she hadn’t thought about going home. She had good friends and the exhilaration she’d initially felt in New York hadn’t altogether disappeared. She couldn’t really complain about her job with a large firm offering designer therapy mainly to women whose child-like frames gave their disproportionately large heads the look of potatoes on sticks; it paid well and made few demands beyond the ability to stop yourself telling them to get a life and a square meal. She’d justified its triviality by her work at the Refuge, sometimes feeling guiltily that she got more out of the arrangement than they did.

  Now, though, she could only think how tired she was of city life, weary of its noise and its smell and its polluted air, its intractable problems and its belief that perpetual motion was the same as progress. As she dodged the dirty spray thrown up by a car going through a flooded pothole, she thought longingly of the quiet green English countryside and of her mother who despite having l
ost one daughter had never so much as hinted that the other had a duty to return. With one last, guilty look up at the grimy windows Laura tramped off up the sidewalk. That part of her life was over. All she had left to do now was to go back to her apartment, get on with booking her flight, and break the good news to her mother; her lips curved at the thought of hearing the pleasure in her mother’s voice. And she’d stop being Laura Sonfeldt; that wench belonged in the foreign country which felt like the past already. She’d go back to being Laura Harvey, a woman at home, at peace.

  When she let herself into her rented third-floor walk-up the red light on her answering machine was winking. She pressed the message button without foreboding, pulling off her gloves as she listened and tossing them on to the couch beside the telephone table. It took a moment for the sense of it to sink in, then she froze in the act of unbuttoning her coat, as if the chilling words had turned her veins to ice. She heard her own voice cry, like a child’s, ‘Oh no, no! It isn’t fair!’ before she fell on to the couch, sobbing as if her heart would break.

  Marjory Fleming set down her pen, rolling her head to ease the stiffness in her neck and shoulders and cupping her hands over eyes which were smarting from the strain of peering at the figures on the computer in front of her. She yawned hugely.

  It was late January, a Monday afternoon, and the rain was battering the windows of the Galloway Constabulary Headquarters with what seemed like gratuitous violence, blotting out the view – such as it was – of the roof-tops of the market town of Kirkluce, midway between Stranraer and Newton Stewart. The lights in DI Fleming’s small fourth-floor office had been on for much of the day and she had spent most of it compiling statistical returns.

  Was it really worth the work she’d done to get herself promoted – the studying, the exams, the courses, the interviews? To be fair, she enjoyed her CID responsibilities and she had no problem with the management element: having kids gave you all the experience you needed in adjudicating squabbles, negotiating, motivating, and when it came to the crunch putting your foot down. She knew that her nickname – Big Marge – while on the whole affectionate, indicated a certain wary respect and she didn’t mind her reputation. She wasn’t immune to the pleasures of power and the money didn’t come amiss either, with farming in the state it was in at the moment.