by Peter Helton
I fled on the Norton into the hill fog that crept down the sides of the valley, then crossed over into Swainswick via Bailbrook Lane. Over here visibility was even worse. Once I’d taken to the narrow lanes that snaked through the Lam Valley the fog made orientation difficult. My poor abused DS had of course long been removed to the police compound where forensic technicians went over it with things a lot finer than the proverbial, yet even if the fog hadn’t obscured the opposite hillside I’d have found it hard to make out which field exactly it and the dead body had been found in. The smashed gate would give it away of course but I was on the wrong side of the Lam brook and the further I rode into the valley the less I could see. The lane I cautiously puttered along was at least tarmacked and gently rose and fell but was taking me nowhere near the place. I realized I had probably driven past the turn-off in the mist and was just slowing to turn back when a cluster of farm buildings hove darkly into view.
It was mid-afternoon yet the daylight could not have been described as broad. The buildings were substantial and satisfyingly old, apart from a huge modern brick and corrugated asbestos shed that, judging by the smell, was home to a large number of poultry. A no-nonsense wooden sign, hand-painted in black letters, proclaimed this to be Spring Farm. The big metal gates were open on a cluttered yard containing enough old farm machinery to start a museum of agriculture but mercifully there were no dogs in evidence (did I mention I was terrified of dogs?) so I rode straight in. The unusual exhaust note of the Norton served as a bell. A bulky bloke in black jumper, filthy yellow plastic dungarees and black wellies appeared from the far end of the shed, holding what looked like a broad broom devoid of bristles. I left the bike next to a square concrete tank of some sort and walked the twenty yards to the waiting man. At first, judging by his way of moving and the tightly curled hair, he appeared to be youngish but every yard I covered put a year on him until I came to stop before a man in his fifties. His square face was badly let down by a thin irregular nose and a small disapproving mouth. He lent on his muck-scraper and barked his greeting. ‘Yeah?’ He somehow managed to make the word sound like ‘Get back on your bike and ride out of here while you still can.’ Or perhaps it was just the fog getting to me.
I explained who I was and began by asking about the Citroën in the field but he interrupted me. ‘Ask the farmer.’ This was accompanied by a jerk of the head towards the farmhouse proper.
‘You’re not the farmer?’
‘He’s in the house.’
‘Okay. Did you by any chance see — ’
‘Ask the farmer.’
‘Okay, thank you so much.’
He waited until I was halfway towards what I took to be the front door, then called after me.
‘He’s busy!’
I turned but he was already disappearing round the corner of the shed. I knocked at the iron-shod door of the farmhouse and waited. For a while nothing happened. I knocked again. In mid-knock the door was snatched wide open by a man somewhere in his forties, who stepped forward and filled the old doorframe completely with his broad shoulders. He actually had to stoop to get out, where he straightened up and sniffed as though the all-pervading smell of chicken shit was somehow a new phenomenon. His face was pale and unshaven and could have done with some sleep. About a week’s worth. His checked shirt and cords had seen better days.
I pointed over my shoulder. ‘The man said — ’
‘Brian? Where is the bastard?’
‘He’s gone round that — ’
‘Who are you, anyway?’
I introduced myself. ‘I’m a private investigator, and I wondered if I could ask — ’
‘Ha!’ It was more a challenge than a laugh. Challenge to what, I didn’t know. He turned round and disappeared inside again but left the door open. ‘Private investigator. Yeah, just what I need,’ he grumbled over his shoulder.
I followed him through a wide corridor, its floor darkly tiled and cluttered with boots and wellies, into a big, cold, dysfunctional kitchen.
‘Private secretary is what I need, actually.’ His sweeping arm gesture invited me to appreciate the chaos of paperwork on the table, the chairs and the floor. An old-fashioned electric typewriter and a big-buttoned calculator stood half-buried amongst the papers, books and booklets, lists, maps and notepads. Adding to the chaos were the teetering piles of dinner plates and other crockery waiting to be washed everywhere and the stacks of used pots and pans. Some of those had also found space on the chairs and floor. More than anything he needed a housekeeper. It was my turn to sniff: there was more than a hint of decay here and someone had been hitting the bottle.
‘You any good with paperwork? Perhaps you could investigate this little lot for me. It’s certainly criminal. Thought up by the evil geniuses in Brussels, I’ve no doubt. Care for a drink? Hope you don’t mind if I do,’ he said when I shook my head. ‘Not that I really give a shit. About anything much.’ He picked up a bottle of supermarket gin from under the table and poured himself a generous measure into a glass blind with grime. Then he waggled the bottle towards me in a way that was meant to be tempting.
‘No thanks, really, I’m driving.’
‘No shit. I thought you came in a biplane. You look like a barnstorming stunt pilot in that get-up.’ He let himself drop heavily on to the only chair that wasn’t covered in paperwork or dirty kitchenware. ‘Siddown, make some space for yourself and call me Jack ’cause that’s my name. Jack Fryer. Small fry. Cheers.’ He raised his glass in salute. Here was a man who had been drinking steadily for hours and handled it with a depressing and frightening tautness that balanced precariously on top of a barely suppressed rage.
I carefully cleared a chair for myself and gestured at the papers festooning the table. ‘So, what’s all this?’ I asked. Anyone can make a mistake.
‘This is called a SUBSIDY APPLICATION FORM,’ he said in capital letters. ‘The new subsidy, of course.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you, fuck! But hey, let me enlighten you. Used to be that we received payments based on the number of animals we reared. Aha? Made sense? No more. From now on subsidies will be based on number of acres farmed, no matter how many animals on them. What could be simpler? Suicide, that’s what. Let me show you. These,’ he flung them in the air one by one, ‘are the ex. . plana. . tory. . booklets. Two, three, five. . about ten of them. And then there are the maps. And the lists. Every acre needs to be registered with the Rural Payments Agency and they manage to miss half of your fields off the lists and if you call their fucking helpline you get some twelve-year-old twit telling you the payments have been put back by three months. The bank’s already said they won’t play ball any more which means I could easily lose the farm. And even if I don’t, the new subsidies will amount to only half of what we used to get which means we’ll no longer make any profit at all. I don’t know why I bother with this fucking crap. If I had the money I’d sue the minister for agriculture for destroying my livelihood. And driving me to drink. Are you sorry you asked yet?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘Well, that makes you a right weirdo. So what do you want? If you can’t calculate acreage or repair dishwashers then you’re no fucking use to me at all.’ He waved a hand at the piles of furry dishes in and around the sink.
‘You can wash these things by hand, you know?’
‘Bollocks. I tried it once. It can’t be done. Did you say private investigator? What might you be investigating on my farm?’
Botulism, I nearly said, looking at spoons stuck in half-eaten tins of food, but asked about my DS instead. Had he noticed it across the valley?
‘Of course I did. And the police already asked me a lot of dumb questions about it on Sunday.’
‘What kind of dumb questions?’ I was hoping to get the answers without having to ask dumb questions myself.
Jack obliged. ‘When had I first noticed there was a black car in the middle of the field? I noticed it when I looked out the window Thursday
morning. Why didn’t I report it then? Because it’s not my bloody field, that’s why.’
‘Whose bloody field is it?’
‘Tony bloody Blackfield’s bloody field. Bought it for Lane End Farm some ten years ago from the Fairchilds. And Blackfield’s just the kind of bloke to leave an old wreck in it, if only to piss everybody off. Either that or bloody joyriders dumped it there, I thought at the time. Then they told me about the dead guy in the car. Was anyone missing, did I know anyone fitting the description? What, a bloke with half his brain seeping from his ears? No, can’t say I do, officer. And so it went on. Did I know someone called Honeysomething?’
‘Honeysett.’
‘That’s the one. What a stupid name. I’d never heard of him.’
‘I’m Honeysett.’
‘Thought that’s what you said.’
‘It was my car you saw, but I didn’t drive it there. Neither did I stick a dead body in the back. But I’d like to know who did.’
‘That’s understandable, but why ask me?’
‘Got to start somewhere. Where can I find the farmer who owns the field?’
He snorted his contempt. ‘Blackfield? Some farmer. Keep on down the lane, take the first turn to the left, cross the Lam via the bridge, then keep going north, ignoring all else until you see a big ugly mess. And that’s just his face. Ha! You can’t miss it, his place is a shambles. Though what kind of reception you’ll get I can’t say.’
‘You don’t think much of him, then? As a farmer, I mean.’
‘I don’t think much of him in any capacity. He’s not doing much farming though, that’s for sure.’
‘Then what does he do?’
Jack Fryer pulled his unshaven face into the caricature of a grin. ‘That’s a damn good question and you should definitely ask him that. And please come back and let me know what his answer was.’ This thought seemed to produce some genuine mirth for a moment, then his smile vanished without a trace. ‘Now if that’s all, I’d like to get on with this shit here.’
‘Sure. I’ll see myself out.’
On my way to the front door, while searching in my pockets for matches to light a much-needed Camel, I came across a crumpled piece of paper. I unfolded it. It turned out to be the so-called map Cairn had given me at the Rose and Crown. The thing was hand-drawn in black biro in a shaky and spidery line, and the tiny writing on it was so illegible it took me a moment to decide which way was up. I turned round and walked back into the rancid kitchen. ‘One more thing. .’
‘Yes, Mr Columbo.’
‘This is supposed to be a map of the area. Show me where I am.’
‘You’re back in my kitchen which is. .’ He smoothed the map on the table and squinted at it. ‘Here. That squiggle is Spring Farm.’
‘Do you know someone called Albert?’
He shook his head.
I felt stupid but I had to ask it. ‘Do you know of any witches around here?’
‘Can never find one when you need one, right? Are you as weird as you appear or is this gin faulty?’
‘Just stuff some kids told me about a witch living in the valley.’
‘Kids? Oh, I think I know who they mean, the Stone woman. Stupid brats. It’s like you’ve stepped into the Middle Ages when you set foot in the valley. People are as superstitious as ever. Hardly surprising with a whole new generation of New Age brats desperate to believe in any kind of crap as long as it’s different from the crap their parents believed in.’
‘Stone woman?’
‘Yes. That’s her name. She’s not as stony as all that. I suppose she’s a target for that kind of thing. Calling her a witch, I mean. She grows herbs down at Grumpy Hollow.’
‘Grumpy Hollow? Are you serious?’
‘That’s what the place is called. Always has been. No idea why. When we were kids we’d go and play at the Hollow, there’s a couple of springs down there and we found it quite spooky but perhaps it was just because it had a weird name.’
‘Is it near here? Can you show me on this map?’
‘Yeah, it’s right there, it’s marked even, see it?’ He pointed to another squiggle and some writing that I had thought spelled Guppy Horror, which wouldn’t have surprised me one bit, this being Somerset after all. I folded the map back into my pocket. ‘Right, thanks. This time I’m really out of here, promise.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
Once outside again I finally got a cigarette lit and took it as an excuse to wander about in the yard. You can’t really ride a motorbike and smoke at the same time so it was plausible that I’d hang about for a bit longer. Not that I knew what I was looking for but I thought I’d recognize it when I saw it. That’s how I had always worked in the past — hung around, made a nuisance of myself, stuck my nose in. The mist had thickened even further, which gave me the irrational feeling that the valley itself was trying to make things difficult for me, though Jack Fryer had been helpful enough. I sauntered further towards the back of the long chicken shed where a steel-grey double door turned out to be locked when I tried to open it. A couple of paces further along and the square-faced man suddenly swung round the corner again, still carrying his shit scraper. ‘Did the farmer say you can come round here?’
‘He didn’t say I couldn’t,’ I suggested. ‘I’m just having a fag before getting back on the bike.’
He simply stared hard with disapproving eyes and gave me the distinct impression that he considered me another bit of shit to be scraped out of the yard.
I ignored it. ‘What’s that Stone woman like down at Grumpy Hollow?’ I asked, hooking a thumb in the general direction the map had indicated.
His eyes widened and he gripped the scraper’s handle harder. ‘Stay away from there if I was you.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘S’not a good place, it’s a witchy place. And the Stone woman, I’m not saying she’s a witch but you can’t help but wonder. Stuff you hear.’
‘What kind of stuff?’
‘Strangers coming and going. Weird stuff she grows.’ He shrugged. ‘I heard someone say down the Surgery that half the stuff she grows is poisonous. Stuff like that.’
‘At the surgery?’
‘Brains Surgery.’
‘Brain surgery?’
‘It’s a pub in Larkhall, Brains Surgery,’ he said slowly. ‘Brains, it’s a beer.’
‘Poison? I wouldn’t have thought there was that big a market for it.’
He shrugged again. ‘You don’t know, do you?’ He turned and walked away, once more rounding the corner of the shed in pursuit of avian excrement. I didn’t follow him. Whether he meant that I didn’t know or one never knows I wasn’t certain, but if someone told me there was a witchy place full of poison then I considered it my duty to go there and be scared.
As I walked towards the Norton I could just make out Jack Fryer’s face through the grimy kitchen window behind his stacks of mouldy dishes, watching me. I gave a cheery wave with the hand that held the cigarette, hoping it might explain why I was still there, then took a last puff, flicked the butt into the weeds by the gate and kick-started the bike. It took a few goes, the Norton never did like murk.
By now I could see no more than a hundred yards in any direction. It was a stupid idea to ride deeper into this valley which I didn’t know at all. If the fog got any thicker I’d have trouble finding my way around. The complete absence of signposting made me wonder whether the signs that were taken down in 1940 to confuse an invading Jerry had ever gone up again. The lanes were just wide enough for a tractor around here so I pootled slowly along, having no desire to become embedded in the back of some farm machinery. After a while a turn-off came into view on the left, an unmade road that led downhill and looked slippery. It was. But the Norton coped admirably with the wet, rutted track that curved down steeply between hedgerows. I only caught glimpses of sheep in the fields on either side, sitting about in dripping, dispirited huddles. I didn’t want to depress them any further so refrained fr
om shouting the traditional ‘Mint sauce!’ at them. I was too busy trying to keep the bike steady anyway. When I finally reached the bottom I was confronted by a stand of trees, a stream and no bridge. The lane disappeared into the stream and reappeared on the other side. In other words, a ford. It wasn’t exactly a raging torrent but after a week of nearly solid rainfall this was no babbling brook either. There was no easy way of telling how deep it was at the centre without walking right in. Fallen leaves from the mixed bit of woodland the stream bisected here had been churned into slippery mush by heavy tyres. That was the trouble with the countryside: most of it was built with four-wheel-drives in mind. I had one-wheel-drive but just didn’t fancy turning round so I pointed the Norton at a likely-looking spot in the brook, put it in first and opened the throttle wide. The rear wheel raced, eventually found some grip and propelled the bike forward. Before I knew it I was completely drenched in icy water and plastered with mud. The engine sputtered and died on reaching the other side of the stream, probably feeling it had done enough by getting me across. I wheeled the bike to a tree where I could leave it leaning and draining, feeling quite a bit like leaning and draining myself. I knew it would be hopeless trying to restart the engine straight away. Having stuck my helmet on the handlebars I set off on foot. If the scribbly map was right then the path that led through this narrow band of trees would lead directly to Grumpy Hollow and ‘the Stone woman’, as Jack Fryer put it.
With no engine running the sudden noise reduction made me aware of the many sounds that are drowned by motorized transport: the rushing of the stream over its stony bed; the dripping of moisture from the fog-laden trees; the odd dispirited moan of a sheep or lowing of a cow in the distance; the squelching of water inside my boots and the growling of my stomach. I stomped along what was now just a muddy track, though the water-filled ruts showed that cars did come down here. The track lost the stream after a while and the trees were thinning out. It became even quieter. Another fifty yards and the track widened into a rutted quagmire. Bits of assorted fencing were ineffectually leaning this way and that. What had once been a wooden five-bar gate was mouldering in the weeds. Asquare sign tied with garden twine to the one surviving and otherwise unoccupied gatepost read PRIVATE KEEP OUT. A smaller, handwritten sign underneath proclaimed DANGER, POISONOUS PLANTS. This just had to be the entrance to Grumpy Hollow. Here the land fell away to a shallow bowl into which the mist had settled — or was this where they made the stuff? — and out of it rose solitary trees and the roofs of various structures. This then was Stone’s herb farm, although ‘farm’ seemed too grand a word for such a ramshackle affair. I couldn’t see a living soul. It was far too foggy and boggy and wet. I was hungry and thirsty. And wet and muddy. And just how poisonous were these plants anyway? I took a few unenthusiastic steps through what remained of the gate and sniffed the stagnant air. Something came flying out of the gloom. It missed my head by a few inches and slammed into the mud somewhere behind me. I turned around to see what it might have been when another missile sailed past, close enough for me to feel the air move. I looked all round but in the gloom and mist couldn’t see anyone. A scarecrow poked its unmoving head out of the mist, there were muckheaps, water tanks, sheds and all sorts. Another missile landed near me. ‘Hey, stop that!’ I protested ineffectively in a to-whom-it-may-concern fashion. Ineffectively, since the next missile hit me squarely on the right knee. ‘Ow! All right already, I get the message!’ Rubbing my knee with one hand and waving the other in surrender I hobbled back through the gate. A last vindictive missile landed near me. I picked it up. It was a small apple. Not exactly lethal but a hard enough object when thrown with enough force. When I got back to the ford I washed the mud off it and took a bite. Not only was it hard enough to threaten my dental work but it was so sour it made me shudder. My assailant hadn’t wasted any dessert apples on me. I spat it out, plonked the helmet back on my head and for five minutes worked up a sweat pumping the kick-starter on the Norton. When it finally fired up I thought it a very cheerful sound. This time I managed to cross the stream without drowning the engine and I rode out of the valley before the fog could swallow me up.
