Suspicious Minds

by David Mark

  ‘But this …!’ she protests. ‘Why would somebody do this?’

  ‘There are bad people in the world. I’m not one of them.’

  ‘How can I know? I don’t know you, don’t know what makes you tick, what you’re willing to do …’

  ‘Enough,’ he says, the two syllables mushed together into one barked command. ‘Enough,’ he repeats, and she has the feeling that he wants to stroke her hair like a dog that has been reprimanded.

  Swiftly, wordlessly, he crosses to the woodpile. Pulls the hatchet from the stump. He slashes at the twine that binds the stag to the trees. Takes her hand and pulls her, firmly, away from the trees. The dismembered animal crashes to the ground; twigs and blood and rotten flesh.

  ‘A joke,’ he says, again. ‘Come back to bed.’

  He walks past her; back to the open door with its warm, soft light. After a moment, the smell of dead flesh lingering on her skin and hair, she follows him back inside.

  Soon, in the darkness, there is only the gnaw and crunch of Marshall’s teeth, dutifully grinding through bone.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Behind the wall, their scents obscured with dung and fishmeal, the bad men watch. Brendon, tall. Rufus, stocky. Both capable of great harm.

  Brendon did not wish to stay to see the results of their handiwork. He would have been happy to deposit their little gift and be gone before the smell woke the occupants. But the other man, the one named Rufus, had stayed to watch.

  Shapely, he’d thought. Pleasant curves and a mucky look about her, as if walking about without your drawers on wasn’t asking for trouble. Looked like a sweet fit. Looked like she’d come out to show herself off; to flaunt it, like they all do, when they’re youngish and prettyish and when they’ve worked out how pitifully biddable a man can be when his dick’s hard …

  Brendon hadn’t said a word as his colleague fumbled about in his trousers and silently enjoyed himself. He could hear him smiling in the darkness. Heard the hiss of ecstasy as he completed his handwork. He never reprimands him for his moments of self-indulgence. They have done terrible things together and neither is in a position to chide the other for taking their pleasures where they find them.

  Tacitus, he thinks, making a mental note to look him up. Knew his fucking stuff …

  They stay, hunkered down in the long grass, until long after the dog retreats inside. Then they make their way back down the valley to where their car is waiting; the rear seats stinking of spilled blood and sawn bone. Not all of it is animal.

  They drive for an hour. Stop, and make a call. Dump the phone in the water as they cross the bridge on a forested curve of road. They park up, tired. They don’t speak. There is nothing to say.

  When sleep comes, it is untroubled. They have done their job well tonight.

  For the tall man, the rewards will be financial.

  For his companion, his hands still smelling of meat and blood, the money is largely unimportant. He needs enough to clothe himself, to feed himself, to pay for occasional accommodation, but the amount of notes in his wallet is not how he judges himself. He lives for his work. Lives for the opportunity to cause fear. Cause pain. He delights in the dismantling of beautiful things. Nothing matters save the opportunity to take out his frustrations on flesh. It had been Jude Cullen’s flesh he was looking forward to spoiling, but the woman now has his interest. There’s a fire in him; an urge he can’t satisfy alone. She looks like she’s been hurt before. The way she carries herself; the set of her shoulders, the angle of her hips – she had been braced for pain or danger as if both were old friends.

  He feels momentarily blessed, as if some benign deity is arranging things in accordance with some impassioned prayer.

  Jude. Oh how he wants to wipe the look off that saintly cunt’s face.

  And her. The woman who shares his bed. The woman lit by moonlight. Each thrust, a knife through her man’s heart …

  He promises himself he will wait.

  Some things are all the better for letting the anticipation build.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Four months ago

  There’s a rickety old excuse for a barn about five hundred yards over the low boundary wall at the rear of the bastle. To Betsy, it looks like it sprouted from the earth, and is slowly sinking back into it. It’s not as old as the foundations of Jude’s place but it still gives the impression of having long stood sentinel over this slope of dirt and grass. It’s witnessed much during its long vigil. Jude has told Betsy all about the lead mines that honeycomb the land beneath them. Less of a filthy job than coal mining, but filthy nevertheless. That was how Jude had described it. It’s known suffering, this valley. Seen much life and no little death. The mine at Allenheads was one of the biggest in Europe. The locals paid the price for such success. Boys grew up fatherless; life expectancy was short. Only the few prospered. Grew rich. Became important. And when the decline came, they bought up the properties and land of the men who could no longer afford to keep them. Gave it all over to farming. Then to hunting, and grouse. The rich got richer. The poor stayed poor. And so the wheel kept turning.

  These days, the barn sees little. It’s just another abandoned building: a weight pinning down the flapping corner of this great brown pelt of land. Jude rents the field out to hill farmers looking to keep their flock somewhere with guaranteed feed during the colder months. Betsy enjoys watching the animals snuggle up together in the lee of the drystone wall, or to waddle fatly into the comfort of the barn, staring out through the open windows like characters in a picture book.

  Betsy’s always a little cautious about opening the gate to the field. She still hasn’t got used to the idea that this is home. She feels a constant need to ask permission in case she accidentally transgresses some countryside code, though Jude would be the first to tell her to come and go as she pleases. He wants her to know she has no duties. No chores. No responsibilities. She’s free.

  ‘Yeah,’ she mumbles, watching a grouse waddle through the heather beyond the field. ‘Free as a bird.’

  It had all sounded lovely when he said it the first time. No duties. No presumptions. Now she feels overwhelmed by it all. It is as if she’s been ordering her meals from the same three-item menu all her life and has suddenly been handed a list of options thick as a phone book. She doesn’t actually know what she wants. She’d help Jude more if she could, but if she’s honest with herself, she doesn’t really know what he does. Some days he leaves on the quad; others he takes the battered old Land Rover, the back full of chainsaws and harnesses and spiked boots that weigh more than Marshall. He gets by, she knows that, but she has no way of gauging whether he has money to spare, or whether every day’s a challenge. He doesn’t talk about any of it. And her paranoia loves a vacuum. She can’t make up her mind whether she suspects him to be a secret millionaire, a drug dealer, a hitman, a gigolo, or somebody so utterly destitute that he’s picked up a vulnerable woman with the aim of pimping her out to the hill farmers. All seem equally possible, and similarly outlandish.

  ‘Betsy!’

  There’s thunder rolling in over the fell. The sky is chewing itself up; the wildflowers closing their petals as if it were night-time.

  ‘You might want to hurry before it …’

  Jude’s voice, bellowing out from the downstairs window of the barn, is drowned out by a sound like splitting oak. Where moments before there was a grey-blue sky, suddenly the air has taken on a purplish hue, the air sparkling with microscopic crystals. Her hair crackles with static. Her fillings suddenly sting. She glances right as a fork of lightning, bright and nuclear, rips the sky into fragments; a greasy grapevine of blood vessels gleaming in her vision as she puts her head down and runs towards the barn.

  The rain falls like pennies, scything down from a sky that seems somehow Biblical in hue and intent. She has never seen clouds move so fast. They turn in on themselves like so many sacks of eels, and the air pressure drops so suddenly that for an instant Betsy can’t hear prop
erly, as if she’s on a plane that’s hit turbulence and briefly dropped from the sky.

  ‘There’s a rut there, babe – watch your step!’

  She narrowly avoids stepping in the trench. The ground is hard and the tracks from the quad and the sheep have churned the ground into a meringue of peaks and dips. She bursts through the open door, laughing, her hair plastered to her face. He’s waiting for her, grinning widely. He’s got a joint in his left hand; a ceramic bottle in his right. Marshall is lying flat on a damp bale of straw, ears pressed against his head, still enough to pass for a rug.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Damp. Bit breathless. I saw you from the window and …’

  He looks past her, winking. ‘Simon, Vik, here’s her Ladyship, Duchess of Wolfcleugh, and light of my life.’

  Betsy twirls back towards the doorway. Sitting there in white plastic garden chairs are two men she doesn’t know, and whom she certainly hadn’t been expecting when she climbed over the stile and drifted off towards Jude like a moth sensing fire. She feels flustered, suddenly. Runs back the last moments to check for anything that might have shown Jude up, or embarrassed herself.

  ‘She’s everything you said and more,’ says a tall, good-looking, twenty-something with an impressive quiff and intelligent eyes. In his pink-and-white checked shirt and with his good cord trousers tucked into Wellington’s, he’s the kind of young country gent she’d ordinarily expect Jude to steer clear of. He looks like somebody featured in a Daily Telegraph picture special. And yet Jude is grinning at him like they’re cousins. She spots the joint in her partner’s hand and understands why. He reaches out and cups her around the waist, his skin unexpectedly rough against her hip.

  ‘She could do better,’ growls the other man, appraisingly. He’s older. Fatter. Mixed race, perhaps. He’s got a perfectly shaved head, glistening like a peeled apple. He’s a bit of a mess: Bermuda shirts and hairy legs stuffed into old walking boots. He’s wearing a bodywarmer over a couple of unravelling jumpers. He gives a nod at Betsy, for politeness, but doesn’t move.

  ‘I didn’t know you had company,’ says Betsy, looking to Jude. ‘I was going to say I’d made you something to eat. Just some leek and potato soup, but it’s up there when you want it. If you want it, I mean …’

  Jude grins at her. Looks at her as if he’d like to eat her with a spoon. He takes a swig from the bottle and she can’t decide whether the act makes him seem somehow sexy and roguish, or just a middle-aged man getting stoned and drunk in the barn when he said he was out working.

  What if the bad men come, she’s thinking. What if today’s the day …

  ‘You, my darling, are extraordinary,’ he declares. ‘A peach. A pumpkin. A penguin. That would be amazing. Will it keep a while longer, do you think? We were just setting the world to rights, that’s all.’

  Betsy grins, indulgently, swallowing down her distaste at seeing him so unlike himself. ‘Of course. I’ll head back up …’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ says Simon, starting to stand. ‘It’s coming down in sheets. One lightning strike and you’ll end up like a charcoal outline and that would be a hell of a waste.’

  ‘Simon here is the chivalrous sort,’ says Jude, and to Betsy’s surprise he waves his friend back into his seat. He takes Betsy’s hand and pulls her over to where he stands. From her new vantage point she can see the rain surging past the doorway, billowing like sails. The earth is turning to swamp as she stares. She glances back to Jude, then past him, at the huge assemblage of old furniture stacked up against the far wall. Jude follows her gaze.

  ‘Stuff she planned to do up and sell on,’ he explains, looking away. ‘Mostly knackered now, though the oak’s still good. Oak’s hard as iron after a couple of centuries. The older it gets the harder it gets …’

  ‘Exact opposite to my problem,’ says Simon, sucking on his joint, and giving a bark of laughter.

  Vik spits. Puts a finger to his nostril and pushes out something vile, for emphasis.

  ‘She, you say? Who’s fucking “she”, eh? Cat’s mother? By she, you mean your partner, yeah? Actual lady of the manor. You think she’d be OK with this, do you? Your fucking pride, Jude …’

  Jude pats at the air, not letting it bother him. The air splits again; lightning turning the sky a scorching white. Marshall shivers. The sheep, huddling in the far corner, begin to bleat, nervously.

  ‘Don’t listen to Vik,’ says Jude, in Betsy’s ear. ‘He’s got things he needs to get off his chest. He’ll feel better for it.’

  ‘I should go,’ begins Betsy.

  ‘We’re here for a quiet word, that’s all,’ says Simon, pointedly, to the man beside him. ‘Jude’s been very gracious, hasn’t he? Opened the good stuff, all very civilized. Happy to listen to our proposal …’

  ‘Simon here is a land agent,’ explains Jude, taking another swig from the container. It’s old. Pot. Two-tone. There’s a stamp on one side: a face with writhing snakes for hair. ‘Remind me to tell you all the synonyms for “land agent” once we’re alone.’

  Simon gives something like a bow. Looks at her, patronisingly, as if to tell her she’s a lot cleverer than he would have expected.

  ‘What I explained, Betsy, is that Jude has made his point. He’s stood his ground. Nobody could accuse him of turning tail or giving up without a fight. But the development of the valley requires everybody to be of an accord. Certain landowners in this valley have plans that could make a lot of people financially comfortable for the rest of their lives but if one person holds out, the whole project stalls. He’s willing to pay not just the market value, but over and above. Not bad for a house you didn’t even know was coming to you until the will was read out …’

  ‘What do you think he’s doing in the meantime, eh Jude?’ growls Vik, kicking out at nothing. ‘Rent rises. Job cuts. Bringing in cheap labour from God-knows-where. And Brendon’s got that madman on a frayed leash, I swear to you. The squire can’t hold him back. He’s a psycho to begin with, but he’s got it in for you in a big way. Don’t act like this place is your fucking dream. You’re being a twat about it because he fucked your wife!’

  Betsy shoots a look at Jude. He’s swaying, as if there’s nothing on his mind except happy thoughts and butterflies. She looks in his eyes, expecting to see his pupils expanded to the size of Kalamata olives. They’re normal. Fine. His breath tastes of tobacco and of the gum that he chews to disguise it. No alcohol. No marijuana. Heart rising, she glances at his visitors. Both men look as though they are struggling to hold their sentences together, although Vik is clearly not the type to become more mellow the more he smokes.

  He’s putting this on, she realizes, suddenly. He’s just pretending!

  ‘That was completely unnecessary,’ says Simon, apologetically. He swings the chair on to its back legs. Starts rocking; a schoolboy at the back of the class. ‘Nobody likes to pry into another man’s business, Jude. People talk, you know they do, and you lost friends when you were going through your – shall we say – downhearted spell. You did things you may now regret. But there are plenty still grateful to you for standing up for them, and few have anything but a good word to say about poor sainted Maeve, God rest her. But it’s clear you have a new life now. A new partner, and what a partner she is. So why not make the most of this opportunity? Start again, with money in your pocket. Campion will take care of this place, I guarantee it. I know he’s made all sorts of outlandish threats but there are checks and balances in place. We just need you to rescind the agreement he had with Maeve, that’s all. Then sell up and head on to pastures new. The impact on the environment will be minimal.’

  ‘Don’t be expecting his missus to come to your rescue again, lad,’ growls Vik, stubbing out the end of his joint. ‘That ship has sailed. Don’t neglect the few people you’ve got on your side, that would be my advice. If you thought you had some leverage on him you’ve shown you’re not willing to use it, so I’d do the right thing while there’s still a plea
sant option open to you …’

  Jude’s eyes flick towards Simon at the exact moment that he plonks the front leg of the chair back on to the hard earth of the barn. There is a bang. It’s nothing compared to the sound of the storm, but the resulting explosion throws Simon back off his chair and into the stinking hay behind him; his trousers ripped to shreds; blood speckling his legs. To his side, Vik throws up his arms in defence as the last of the blast scorches his cheek and ear, sending him tumbling the other way.

  Jude moves fast. Brings the ceramic bottle down on the side of Vik’s head. Vik gives a grunt and topples to his stomach.

  Simon has one hand to his face and the other grasping his leg, shuffling back against the wall.

  ‘No,’ says Jude, and kicks him in the side of the head. ‘No, it’s not for sale. No, I’m not leaving. No, I don’t give a shit what you say. And no, I’m not fucking scared of anything you send after me because there is nothing in this world you could do to me that I wouldn’t repay a hundred times over. I know you can’t hear – that’ll be the perforated eardrum – but I sense you get the gist of my message.’

  Bleeding from the nose, a boot print on his cheek, Simon tries to pull himself upright. Jude seems about to let him go, then something seems to grip him – some sudden mania that refuses to let things be. He drags Simon by the hair, and throws him on to the ground where his seat had been moments before. Without a word, he stamps on his back. Betsy barely hears the explosion this time, the sudden tremble beneath the ground, but she sees the result. Simon squirms back, holding his stomach, jagged shards of plastic and shell sticking into the perforated pinkness of his stomach and chest.

  ‘I’d get that seen to,’ growls Jude, in his ear. ‘And I’d think about sending Betsy here some flowers. That was a shitty thing to say.’

  He turns. Whistles. Marshall leaps down from the hay bale and runs to his master’s side. Betsy stands perfectly still, unwilling to be as similarly well trained. He comes back. Looks into her eyes, raising her face so that his lips brush hers.