Cold in the Earth

by Aline Templeton

  The ward was on the second floor. She chose the stairs as being less conspicuous than the lift if someone noticed her and she changed her mind about going in. Visiting hours were over now and the hospital should be settling down to its quieter night-time routine.

  The main door to the ward was standing open and she could hear the sound of voices and laughter coming from the office just inside. Setting her feet down quietly to make no sound on the hard floor, she went in. Ahead lay a short corridor with rooms opening off to either side. Some, with long windows on each side of the door, showed double rows of beds; others were obviously single rooms.

  Nervously she drew level with the open office door and saw that its entrance was blocked by a policeman, standing with his back to her. He was engaged in banter with women inside; she could hear their laughter.

  Holding her breath, she slipped past. She hadn’t thought of a police guard, though after what she had read in the newspapers it wasn’t surprising. And at least it gave her a clue; only one of the rooms had a chair outside it and a table with a newspaper and an abandoned coffee mug. She scratched on the door and opened it.

  The room was dark but there was a light over the bed. He was lying there, propped up a little on pillows with tubes leading between his body and stands with bags of liquids. His arms lay slack at his sides on top of the neatly folded sheet, as if they had been placed there by someone else. His eyes were closed, but his face – oh, slackened and distorted by illness and blurred by age, certainly – was still the face of the man she loved. His hair was still dark, still close-cropped, crisp-curled like a lamb’s fleece.

  Her eyes filling, she went to the bed. Involuntarily she stretched out her hand to run it through his hair as she so often had; with a shock of remembrance she felt its unexpectedly silky softness. ‘Jake, oh Jake!’ she mourned.

  The eyes opened slowly but he did not turn his head. Choking back her tears, she moved forward to stand in his line of sight.

  ‘Jake, it’s Rosamond. How are you?’

  There was no response. She had no way of knowing if he couldn’t hear or if he had heard but chose to ignore the wife who had thwarted his will and left him all those years ago.

  ‘They were looking for me. I thought it was best to come back.’

  Still no reaction. She took his hand; it lay unresisting and flaccid in her own.

  ‘Do you want me to stay? Or should I go and leave you?’ She studied him intently. He blinked, but no flicker of emotion crossed his face.

  She bit her lip. She had no experience of the victims of strokes and it was hard to know what she should do. She had almost made up her mind to leave as quietly as she had come when the door was suddenly flung open.

  ‘How the hell did you get in here? Stand away from the bed!’ The policeman in the doorway was very young, hardly more than a boy, and there was a level of panic in his tone.

  She did as she was told. ‘Please don’t worry. I’m his wife. It’s all right, truly.’

  ‘But you shouldn’t be in here! No one’s allowed in without permission.’

  ‘You were talking to the nurses. I didn’t want to disturb anyone,’ she lied. ‘There’s no harm done, I promise.’

  He looked a little calmer, but still scared. ‘OK, you’re his wife. I’ve seen your picture. But you could have been anyone. This is going to mean real trouble for me when I report it.’

  She seized her chance. ‘Look, constable, let’s do each other a favour. Smuggle me out again and no one will know.’

  ‘But they’re looking for you, aren’t they?’ he said, but she could see that he was weakening.

  ‘I promise I’ll come back to do it properly tomorrow.’ She sighed. ‘It was just that I didn’t want to find a reception committee waiting for me before I could speak to him myself. Not that it’s done any good.’ She looked back at the inert figure on the bed, his eyes closed now. ‘I don’t know whether he can’t respond or whether he’s ignoring me deliberately.’

  ‘Oh, I can tell you that.’ The constable seemed proud of his newly acquired medical knowledge. ‘It’s called locked-in syndrome. They think he can probably see and hear but he can’t move or speak.’

  She stared at him in horror. ‘But that’s – that’s dreadful! He’s a clever, active man—’

  ‘Not any more,’ the constable said with the callousness of youth which knows itself to be immortal. ‘Look, if we’re going to do this we’d better make it quick. They’ll be round soon to put the lights out.’

  He put his head out of the door. ‘They’re still having their tea-break. Off you go. Remember, tomorrow, you promised.’

  She left as quietly as she had come. Outside, a wind had got up and was tearing the mist to rags. She could see a glimpse of the moon, and this time the drops on her cheeks were warm and salty.

  15

  Tiny stones from the gritting lorry bounced up off the road and pinged against the body of the car as Marjory Fleming drove along the main road in its wake. She had been travelling quite fast; as she turned off on to the untreated road leading up through Glenluce she felt the back of the car start to fishtail. Her stomach lurched, though she steered it out of the skid competently enough.

  That was careless! Yesterday evening’s fog had left wet roads and of course the hard frost which had followed meant black ice today. They’d be having fun in Traffic this morning – cars in ditches, jack-knifed lorries and complaints from everyone about the gritting being too little, too late.

  Becoming a statistic wouldn’t do her cred any good. She drove on at a more respectful speed, paying extra attention to the road, though she couldn’t get her personal problems out of her mind. How strange it was that at the start of this upheaval she had been worried about all the wrong things! Like her father, for instance: she had expected to have to field constant questioning and comment from him but in fact she’d hardly seen him and when she did he was absorbed in the children and showed no interest at all.

  She had a friend who practised what she called prophylactic worrying: her theory was that since everyone knew that what you worried about never happened, you chose the worst thing you could imagine to worry about and then you’d be all right. She claimed it worked, though Marjory had never been totally convinced and certainly in this case could never have imagined anything coming between her and Bill. And yet . . .

  In a few days at most the farm would be given the all-clear and she and the children could go home at last. It was a bitter irony that having left so reluctantly she should be so dreading her return: the empty chicken run, the deserted fields and at the centre of it all a disheartened, resentful man who had nothing to do to pass the long days. Even Meg would be low-spirited; collies were highly intelligent, over-sensitive creatures and even a day or two without work was enough to induce a crisis of self-confidence. The children, too, had got used to the freedoms of the town and being the focus of their grandparents’ attention; going back to the farm, with no animals, a depressed father and their mother’s cooking – correction, make that heating up of ready meals – would be a difficult adjustment. It was all going to be very, very tough.

  She sighed as the car rattled over the cattle-grid and glanced round about her. Such a bleak picture! No sheep. No birds that she could see. Pine trees motionless and grey with frost. The little burns all locked into stillness. A nuclear winter might be something like this: a silent, ice-bound landscape with a low red sun veiled in brownish cloud. They were forecasting snow today and Marjory was keen not to be up on this high, exposed ground when it started.

  There was the Chapelton ‘Pedigree Herd’ sign; she turned in. There was no one guarding the entrance today and she wasn’t sure if there would be anyone at the crime scene either. She couldn’t see any cars parked outside the imposing Victorian mansion.

  There were steps flanked by balustrades leading up to the front door and to one side was a room with a wide bay window which was Jake Mason’s study and which, with the smaller farm offic
e, was the only place in the house they were authorised to search. They could also enter the flat in the steading where Diana Warwick had lived, but the Sheriff had been strict and the terms of the warrant were very specific. Human Rights legislation outlawed any sort of fishing expedition and he had considered intrusion on the personal areas of the house unjustified by the evidence. It was for today only; if they wanted an extension he would be prepared to listen to their arguments.

  In fact, there was no way that Fleming could have rationalised bringing in extra manpower for a search and it was such a huge place that she’d have time for only the most cursory look round if she were to be in time for her appointment with Bailey – and it was never wise to keep him waiting.

  Conrad had supplied the keys with a bad grace and no instructions. She had to try three before she found the one which would admit her to the vestibule – ten feet square, fourteen feet high with a floor of encaustic tiles as its only feature – then pressed down the brass lever latch on the mahogany inner door with its etched frosted glass and went into the hall. It was a huge, sombre space with elaborate ceiling mouldings and a heavily carved staircase going up from its centre to a landing the full width of the hall. There it divided into two flights, rising to either side under three tall arched windows fitted with opaque leaded glass which reduced the amount of light while adding little to the decor. There were no curtains or carpets to reduce the harsh effect of so much dark, highly varnished wood.

  Her feet echoing on the parquet floor, Fleming went towards the study and let herself in. Almost the first thing she noticed was the smell of dust, which caught at her throat. She wasn’t, heaven knew, the best housewife in the world – ask Cat – but this was the smell of deep-seated neglect, lodged in the heavy, dark red velvet curtains and the upholstery of the button-backed chesterfield. It looked as if when the Masons had bought the property they’d taken over the furnishings as well and they hadn’t been cleaned since.

  She’d heard that bulls were Jake Mason’s religion: this, then, was the Holy of Holies. From the walls, a hundred bulls looked down from posters, photographs, framed newspaper cuttings. There were rosettes, silver cups and statuettes. Above the elaborate fireplace hung the massive head of a black bull, a silver plate below it presumably declaring its champion status though it was too dark with tarnish to read. Its glass eyes were dull under a film of dust and Fleming could see where moths had eaten away at the hide. The horns, though – those sharp, forward-pointing horns – were still undeniably impressive.

  She stood below, looking up at them. On their own farm they’d always had polled cattle. Some came that way genetically; some you de-horned because they were dangerous otherwise. Even cows, if they had a calf to defend, could be lethal, but she’d read in one of the reports that Mason refused to poll his herd despite a string of minor incidents and one or two major ones. Demeaning, he had called it. Allegedly.

  As a weapon, horns were finely adapted. It was, after all, what they were designed to be and a blow, delivered with the thrust of a powerful neck behind it, could readily produce the injury the pathologist had described.

  Right. She glanced at her watch – quarter to ten. If she wanted to look at the flat and the field again she couldn’t afford to stand speculating. She took a rapid mental inventory of the room in case a follow-up was needed: the ledgers on either side of the fireplace, the remarkable silver bull mask, black with tarnish, on the other wall, the list of things to do on the desk in the window – phone NFU, phone MAFF, order feed-stuff – which was probably the last thing Jake Mason wrote before his stroke. And was, by all accounts, the last thing Jake Mason was ever likely to write.

  Locking up as she left, she went out, walking down the icy steps with some caution, then headed for the stockyard building. A dozen housekeepers had since passed through the flat Diana Warwick had occupied, but Fleming still wanted to see it for herself, to try to imagine how it would have felt to have been an adventurous girl accustomed to roaming the world, finding herself isolated in this backwater.

  The door to the flat opened on to a steep staircase and led into a small sitting-room furnished with what looked like rejects from the main house. In the bedroom, a cheap-looking divan, an old-fashioned wardrobe and a chest-of-drawers took up most of the floor space. The bathroom looked pre-war, untouched apart from its accumulated chips and cracks, and the kitchen was a curtained area with a discoloured sink and two electric rings.

  She went to the window with its view of the straggly maze she remembered and stood looking out, as Diana must have done too. Why had the girl come here – and, more importantly, why had she stayed? It was understandable that leaving home in a temper, you might take up the casual offer of a job, but why would you stay in this shabby, claustrophobic place with a thoroughly unreasonable mistress? There were always people who weren’t Brett Mason advertising for housekeepers.

  You’d stay if you were in love. If you were in love, you were dumb enough to put up with anything – though Fleming had a suspicion that the bathroom might have finished it as far as she personally was concerned.

  So who was the man? Diana had met Max and his father in Pamplona, which was why she was here in the first place. In that situation the smart money would be on Jake; what twenty-year-old girl is likely to fancy a seventeen-year-old boy?

  She hadn’t even met Conrad before she arrived. So she hadn’t come here for love of him – although that didn’t mean he was ruled out. She might have come because it was convenient, but stayed because she’d fallen for him. The same applied to Scott Thomson, of course, if your taste was for a bit of rough. So where did that get you? Nowhere.

  Fleming let herself out of the flat, glancing nervously at her watch. It was after ten now; if she was to be sure of getting back in time she must leave by ten-thirty. Keeping Donald waiting, as he had explained to her at their first encounter, was not so much a discourtesy to him personally as an undermining of the whole structure of the police force. Half-past ten at the very latest.

  She walked on down the drive to the field where Diana’s body had been interred, a five-minute walk from the flat. The scene was very different today from the last time Fleming had been here; the air was clean again now that the slaughtered carcasses of the cattle had been removed, there was no one about and at the far end of the field a yellow digger stood abandoned in what had become a sea of frozen mud. Where the plastic tent had been only blue and white crime scene tapes strung between metal poles marked Diana’s unofficial grave. There was nothing to be learned here. Fleming turned back.

  Deep in thought before, she had barely noticed the entrance to the maze as she had passed it, a wrought-iron gate rusting now and listing on its hinges. Beyond it the privet hedges were a disordered tangle, with some bushes overgrown and leggy, some sparse from lack of pruning and some no more than dead twigs. The delineation of the pathways she remembered fleeing down, pursued and shrieking with delicious childish terror, had all but disappeared; you could find your way through gaps to the centre of the maze and that strange monument to the Minotaur – half-man, half-bull. If it was still there.

  Prompted by curiosity, she opened the gate. It rasped on its rusty hinges; she had to lift it up to move it and when she let it go again it sank on to one corner at a drunken angle.

  Beneath her feet, the ground was uneven and iron-hard. Old dead leaves, blown in heaps against the base of the hedge, were a grey, frozen sludge, but every blade of the rough grass in the alleyways, every leaf of the straggly privet, was separately encased in its pall of frost. There was no colour, no sound; under the threatening, gun-metal sky the maze looked as if it had been ice-bound for a hundred years.

  Fleming’s breathing seemed unnaturally loud. It condensed in steam and rose in front of her, moving like the only other living thing in this dead landscape. She shivered. Her fingers and toes were starting to sting in the biting cold so she swung her arms and stamped as she set off.

  Neglect had blurred the labyri
nthine pathways but the maze had not lost its power to mislead. There seemed to be only one way which wasn’t overgrown, leading directly from the gate; following it round, Fleming found that it was a blind alley and she was boxed in by a thick stand of privet, through which she could see the centre space but not reach it and was forced to retrace her steps to find a way through.

  And there it was, just as she had remembered it, though weeds had forced their way through the stonework as the mortar had crumbled and where there had been smooth green sward were now rough grass and nettles.

  The plinth was about three feet square and about four high, built of the local sandstone, and it too showed signs of neglect. Some of the mortar in its walls had crumbled with frost and rain though there had been a clumsy repair to hold in place the large flat stone on top, into which a metal plaque had been inset like a sundial. The engraved image was obscured by a layer of rime; Fleming rubbed at it with her fingers and as it melted the lines of the carving emerged.

  It had given her nightmares as a child and she wasn’t altogether sure that it wouldn’t now. It was brilliantly executed, done in profile and with a certain relish at the brutality of the subject. The dramatic head of the bull wrinkled horribly and realistically at the neck into a powerful human torso; the arms and hands reached forward as if to grasp a victim while the strongly muscled legs and thighs indicated the beginning of a prancing charge.

  Max had called his father the Minotaur, according to Laura Harvey. And from what Marjory could remember of the Greek myth, the Minotaur had demanded tribute of youths and maidens; was it possible that Diana Warwick, having been killed by Jake’s bull, became some sort of sacrifice linked in his diseased mind with this most bizarre place? Yet the maze had been Edgar Mason’s folly, not his son’s; surely, if this had been an ancestral practice, someone would have noticed over the years if maidens regularly went missing from the district?