Blood Substitute

by Margaret Duffy

  ‘That sounds much more likely to me too,’ Patrick murmured.

  ‘I can hardly devote police resources to investigate this,’ James went on as though Patrick had not spoken. ‘But, obviously, I must get to the truth.’

  ‘Aren’t there photos of this man?’ I enquired.

  ‘Yes, and I’ve seen them.’ Carrick shrugged, obviously having difficulty keeping his emotions under control. ‘But he was in his early twenties when he got my mother into trouble and that was thirty-seven years ago.’ Then, his voice breaking a little, he added, ‘Just an unhealthy thuggish-looking man in his late fifties.’

  ‘How can we help?’ I asked.

  ‘You can’t really. I just wanted to share it with you.’ After a pause he said, ‘But I wonder if …’

  ‘Yes?’ I encouraged.

  ‘Perhaps when you’re not busy you’d cast your gaze over this character who’s been listed as next of kin. According to the records he lives in your neck of the woods. I simply can’t take time off right now to look into it.’

  ‘A pleasure,’ Patrick said. ‘Where does he live?’

  ‘On Dartmoor, somewhere near Princetown. His name’s Archie Kennedy and the address is a farm but I’ve no idea whether he is a farmer.’

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I offered. ‘I’m always looking for excuses to head for the high moor.’ Not only that, I was, belatedly, planning my next novel and had only got as far as deciding that it would be Sherlockian, dark, and bog-ridden.

  Carrick looked dubious. ‘You’ll be careful, won’t you, Ingrid? This man might be a distant relation of mine but I ken that side of the family are a wild bunch.’

  ‘I’ll be birdwatching,’ I told him. ‘That means you can carry binoculars and point them absolutely everywhere.’

  Strictly speaking the farm wasn’t near home at all but quite a journey to the centre of the moor. After driving through Tavistock and then on to Princetown I had turned off on to a single-track road and, according to the compass, was now heading roughly south. Passing a few cottages and a barn I clanged over a cattle-grid and the road immediately deteriorated into a rough track with rudimentary passing places. Before me the moor stretched into apparent infinity: great russet and olive rolling downs, some of them crowned with granite tors. Overnight persistent rain had ceased, the wind direction now north-westerly bringing heavy showers with hail in dark grey and white curtains that blotted out some of the distant hills. Far to the south the sky looked brighter over Plymouth and the sea. It was a different climate down there. A different world, for that matter.

  A couple of miles farther on the track entered a narrow gully, briars and the previous year’s winter-bronzed bracken brushing the sides of the Range Rover as it bounced over the ruts. I involuntarily ducked as the vehicle scraped beneath a small rowan tree. A heron took off from the banks of a little stream that was in full spate and flapped away like an affronted umbrella only to be mobbed by crows. After driving parallel to the stream for a short distance I forded it and the track then climbed steeply, almost like a river bed itself with water flowing into it off the surrounding slopes.

  For some distance the track ran alongside a leat, the water as clear as molten glass, long green tresses of waterweed shivering in the current. Then, with a thunderous roar, hail blotted out everything. I slowed the car and pulled up at a point where the track appeared to veer sharply to the left, waiting for it to stop.

  It was actually ten days since our weekend in the Bath area and the first opportunity for me to have a day off with a clear conscience. People imagine when you tell them you write that you drift around for most of the time in long flowing gowns thinking Higher Thoughts while sipping from a delicate tall-stemmed wine glass. I thought back over my ten days: I had written not a word. Instead, there had been an every-evening crash course in punctuation for Matthew after an out-of-the-blue discovery that he was struggling with English; Katie was still at home with (another) chest infection, necessitating two trips to the doctor’s, and I had spent a lot of time with Justin who is in trouble at school with behavioural problems. In short, he is noisy, stroppy and just like his father at that age. Vicky, bless her sweet little soul, is no problem at all and being with her had been a salve for all the other worries.

  Somehow I had found the time to ride George – Patrick had been unable to get home – as although a real gentleman he gets bored and breaks out of the field to jaunt around the district if not regularly exercised. Katie’s pony Fudge follows along and the pair snack in any gardens where people have unwisely left the gates open. He had recently inflicted upon himself a nasty cut from the barbed-wire fence. The field is not ours but we had paid to have all the wire replaced with post and rail fencing. George had subsequently put Plan B into operation and started jumping out, again with Fudge rattling along behind.

  The children have a nanny, Carrie, and there is other help with housework, but I cannot expect them to cope with the other events that had occurred: blocked drains, a young jackdaw falling down the living-room chimney and then flying about, covering everything in soot before it could be released through a window, all of this culminating the previous day, while I was out shopping, with Justin climbing a tree he had been specifically forbidden to as it overhangs the river. He had fallen some fifteen feet from it to land in a pool, cutting his head on a rock, the intrepid Carrie plunging in to rescue him. There were now three stitches inserted in a large bump on my son’s forehead and I had promised him faithfully that his father would have a few thoughts on the matter to share with him. The fact that Justin had been incredibly brave about the stitches and that he had managed, his head pouring blood, to swim to where Carrie could grab him mitigated things a little – here again, surely, was an action replay of his father’s boyhood. And no, we were not going to chop down the tree.

  The hail petered out to be be replaced by rain and I leaned over to gaze out at the bleak Foxtor Mires that were now unveiled to the left and below me. This was the ‘so horrible a place’ renamed the Great Grimpen Mire in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. Deadly dangerous to the unwary, it all looked pretty innocuous from up here but the lurid green patches, literally rafts of mosses floating on deep water above the impermeable granite beneath, are warning enough to the knowledgeable walker. There are ways across the mire, used only in the summer months, but one needs to be in the company of an experienced guide.

  I could see from my vantage point that the track was flooded for a short distance about a hundred yards from where I had stopped, water gushing across it and then down into the valley. The track acquired a lot of black, peaty mud after this and then forked, the left-hand route sort of slithering down towards the boggy ground and disappearing from sight around a rocky outcrop. I was not perturbed: I had an Ordnance Survey map and the farm was marked on it. I set off again and as soon as I had crossed the flood my mobile rang. I pulled up.

  It was Patrick, asking after Justin and relieved to know that, although being kept off school for the day, and quiet – which was different and wonderful – he seemed perfectly all right.

  ‘Should we stop his pocket money for a month, do you think?’ Patrick suggested.

  ‘No, that would be counter-productive because he’s saving up to buy a book from the school book fair,’ I said. ‘I think that as he’s had a real fright you just ought to stick to the talking-to.’ We had already discussed the behaviour problem and were hoping to address it by Patrick taking some leave and devoting more time to the boy. I thought that in the long term more would be achieved by sending him to stay with his grandmother – after all, Elspeth had sorted Patrick out, hadn’t she?

  ‘Thinking of stitches, you remember when James went off during the match to have his cut attended to and a substitute came on?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The man’s been missing from home for a week and his body’s been discovered in a wood. He was murdered, shot in the back of the head.’

  ‘That’s d
readful!’

  ‘James is upset as he knew him quite well – the guy was a DS working at HQ in Bristol and, obviously, they’d trained for matches together.’

  ‘Is the killing to do with the job, do they think?’

  ‘There’s every chance that it could be as he was part of a team tackling some nasty outfits that have moved to the West Country from London. But of course it’s early days yet: the body was only found this morning.’

  ‘Did James ring you with the news himself?’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘That might mean he’s hoping SOCA will get involved.’

  ‘That occurred to me too.’

  I suddenly recollected that players temporarily brought on to replace injured team-members are referred to as blood substitutes.

  Two

  I drove on, the going getting rougher and rougher and, not for the first time, wondered how people make a living on these remote Dartmoor farmsteads. The answer, I suppose, is that they do not and that most are now lived in by people who seek wild places and have other means of support or those who are retired and want to keep a few animals as a hobby. But what was a Scot doing in the fastnesses of England when he had the whole of his native land available to him?

  I spotted Sheepwash Farm another half-mile farther on, the ancient steading seeming to huddle beneath a promontory that jutted from Fox Tor and looking like a house built just below the prow of a stone ship. The road climbed towards it and then, just past the entrance, appeared to come to an end at a gateway that led to the higher open moorland on the flanks of the hill. I stopped the car and looked at the group of buildings through my binoculars: it seemed to be a ruin. This called for a more direct approach than originally planned and so I drove closer.

  The place was indeed mostly in ruins, the walls of the old barn and byres that fronted the central yard crumbling, their roofs open to the sky in places. The house was little better, with slates missing, vegetation growing in what guttering remained and from holes where stones were missing in the chimney stack. The upstairs windows were either shuttered or boarded up on the inside and the curtains were drawn on the ground floor. I drove between the leaning gateposts – there was no gate – into the yard and turned off the engine.

  It had stopped raining and a deep and utter silence flowed in with cold, damp air when I opened the driver’s window. Then, in the distance, a lamb bleated. A swallow swooped from one of the byres, skimmed over the roof of the house and went from sight. Nothing else moved; there were no vehicles here unless they were inside the barn and no tracks because the yard was surprisingly clean: it appeared to be deserted.

  I got out of the car, the quiet sounds I made a violation of the silence. I did not slam the door, just gently pushed it to before walking slowly towards the house, which was actually no larger than a cottage. The blank windows seemed to stare back at me and for some reason I shivered.

  I banged with my knuckles on the front door as there was no knocker or bell. There came no echo from within as there might in a house devoid of furniture, but instead there was a kind of dead resonance. I had a story ready should anyone answer the door – that I was on a hunt for a relative – but nothing moved inside; no one came. I knocked again, louder, with the same result.

  Wondering if anyone was outside in a garden at the back I went down the narrow passageway between the house and the barn – the house was joined to an open tractor shed on the other side – but there was nothing that could be described as a garden at the rear, only a tiny paddock overgrown with bracken and rushes. Three large wooden packing cases – empty, I saw when I went closer – were stacked up against the rear wall of the house.

  I went back around the front.

  ‘He’s deid,’ said a man who was standing as though waiting for me to return. He was wearing hiking clothing, the full kit: over-trousers, gaiters, walking boots and a very expensive anorak. The binoculars on a strap around his neck looked top-of-the-range too. He somehow belonged to this place: a chill emanated from him, possibly from the cold blue eyes.

  ‘Deid?’ I echoed.

  ‘Aye, deid. Early last winter.’

  I decided to take a risk and tell the truth. ‘It’s Archie Kennedy I’m looking for,’ I told him.

  ‘Aye, that’s him. Deid.’

  ‘That’s a shame. Were you a friend of his?’

  ‘In a manner of speaking.’

  I went a little closer to him. ‘Do you know if there are any other relatives I can contact?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you living here now?’

  ‘You ask a lot of questions.’

  ‘Sorry, I write books for a living – people and places interest me.’

  He did not thaw by one fraction of a degree and said roughly, ‘There’s nothing here for you or your stories.’

  ‘It has a strange atmosphere,’ I replied defensively.

  ‘It has a violent history.’

  It was obvious that he was not about to be more forthcoming so I had no choice but to tell him it was lovely to have met him, wish him good day, get into the car and leave.

  I rather felt that I had masses of material.

  ‘Do you reckon he was living there?’ Patrick asked later when I told him of my encounter.

  ‘There are no other houses nearby that could have suggested he was a neighbour,’ I replied. ‘I actually think it’s a strong possibility he not only lives there but is Archie Kennedy himself. He spoke with a strong Scottish accent. To have two Scots living in the same area – the middle of a bunch of bogs six miles from Princetown – is too much of a coincidence.’

  ‘He could have been a regular hill-walker from the village; it’s quite large. And if you look at the map you’ll see that the road takes a long route following the contours of the land – Princetown is only really a couple of miles away just over the hill to the north.’

  ‘If you survive crossing the various mires and don’t fall down the mineshafts,’ I said sarcastically.

  ‘Ingrid, I cut my special operations teeth on Dartmoor – they chuck you out there clad in only a thin tracksuit and armed with a bluntish knife, two snares and some fishing line. I know what I’m talking about.’

  I love this man of mine to bits but the moor covers 365 square miles, give or take a few, and even he is sometimes prone to trumpet-blowing. Waggling a finger at him, I said, ‘And I happen to know that on one of your very first evening sorties the six of you went straight into the Plume of Feathers in Princetown, four formed a barbers’ quartet, someone else played the piano and you did impressions. I gather you ate and drank very well on the proceeds and were allowed to sleep in the camping barn that night.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Your mother.’

  He grimaced. ‘I didn’t tell her about the aftermath – how we were rounded up, given a thorough dusting and then chucked into Crazywell Pool before being told to stick to the rules for the rest of the exercise.’

  ‘And did you?’

  ‘No, we trotted ourselves dry across to Chagford and repeated the performance there.’ Laughing, he added, ‘You don’t find out until years later that they only pick the real anarchists for Special Ops.’

  It was two days after my own sortie on to the moor and late evening. Patrick was home for a short weekend. He had been on another training course, which were for SOCA these days and not so physically demanding, thank everything holy, and had flown to Plymouth from London as there always seem to be engineering works on the railways at weekends.

  ‘I don’t really know what to tell James,’ I admitted.

  ‘Tell him what you’ve just told me,’ Patrick said after taking a sip from his whisky nightcap.

  ‘But you’ve just rather rubbished my conclusion.’

  ‘It’s up to James what he reads into your findings. From what you’ve said though, it doesn’t appear likely that anyone’s living in the farmhouse as it’s uninhabitable.’

  ‘It could have been ma
de to look like that. Oh, I forgot to mention the packing cases by the back door.’

  ‘Packing cases?’

  ‘Yes, new-ish wooden ones. The sort of things valuables might have been packed in for shipping.’

  ‘They could have been acquired to be chopped up for kindling.’

  ‘So is someone living in the place, or aren’t they?’ I retorted, exasperated.

  He gave me an unnerving grin. ‘There’s only one way to find out – conduct a night offensive.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem necessary somehow,’ I replied after a pause. ‘I don’t think James expects us to go to those lengths.’

  Patrick did not answer, unaccountably going outside into the yard for a few moments. When he came back he said, ‘There’s a three-quarter moon, not a breath of wind and the weather’s settled. Let’s go for it – I could do with some fresh air.’

  ‘What, drive out and sneak up on the place now? That’s daft!’

  ‘I’ll go on my own then.’

  And he actually poured the rest of his tot back into the bottle.

  I was glad when Patrick offered to drive as, from the turn-off in Princetown, this would have to be achieved without lights. Car headlights are visible for miles in wide open spaces, especially ascending hills when they shine up into the sky or illuminate things you don’t want them to. The moonlight was quite bright so finding our way was not a problem, the only hazards being rocks sticking out from the sides of the track that were visible in daylight hours but now hidden in deep shadow and likely to inflict real damage on the wheels or suspension if struck at speed.