The Devil`s Feather

by Minette Walters

  She killed the engine and jumped down from the cab, whistling to the dogs to quit their noise. “You’re in the way,” she told me. “Another time, park up by the hedge.”

  I opened my door. “Sorry.”

  “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said curtly. “I wasn’t trying to hit you.”

  “I realize that. I’d have moved except I couldn’t tell which way you were going to turn…and I didn’t want to make matters worse.”

  “The opposite of what you’d expect. I thought you grew up on a farm.”

  “I meant the tractor.”

  She crossed her arms. “Did you want something?”

  “No. I just thought I’d…see how you are. You haven’t been around and you didn’t anwer my messages.”

  To my surprise, a slight flush rose in her cheeks. “I’ve been busy.”

  I pushed the car door wider. “Is this a bad time? I can come back later.”

  “It depends what you want.”

  “Nothing. I just came for a chat.”

  She frowned at me as if I’d said something peculiar. “I have to unhitch the baler and grease it. You can talk to me while I do that if you like. You’re not dressed for it, though. The barn’s pretty messy.”

  “That’s OK. Everything’s washable.” I climbed out of the car and picked my way across the rutted yard in my long wrap-over skirt and leather flip-flop sandals. She eyed me disapprovingly and I wondered what was offending her. “Is something wrong?”

  “You look as if you’re going to a garden party.”

  “I always dress like this.”

  “Well, you shouldn’t. Not on a working farm.” She nodded to some sacks of potatoes inside the barn entrance. “You can sit on one of those. What do you want to talk about?”

  “Nothing in particular.”

  She eased the baler forward and worked it loose from the tractor tow before pushing it back against the wall. For a small woman, she had extraordinary strength. According to her, anyone could do anything when they needed to. It was mind over matter. Until it came to talking. Her expression said very clearly that if I expected her to start the conversation, I was going to be disappointed. I watched her take a handful of grease and work it into the twine-tying pivots.

  “Do you have to do this every time you use it?”

  “It helps. The machine’s twenty years old.”

  “Is it the only one you’ve got?”

  “It’s the only baler.” She jerked her chin at a combine harvester at the other end of the barn. “That’s what handles the crops.”

  I turned to look at it. “Dad had one in Zimbabwe.”

  “It’s pretty much standard these days. Some people rent them but I bought that secondhand at a farm auction.”

  I watched her working. “Why were you using the baler today?” I asked after a while. “I haven’t seen any crops being harvested, so there won’t be any straw yet.”

  “I’m taking the hay from the field margins while the weather holds.” She seemed to think it was an intelligent question because she decided to expand on it. “The long-range forecasts are predicting more rain for August so it seemed sensible to bale what we could while we had the chance. We’ll have trouble bringing in the wheat if the forecasters are right…let alone straw.”

  We…? “Do you have help?”

  She put the lid back on the can of grease and picked up a rag to wipe her hands. “Some. There’s Harry who’s worked here for years and a couple of lady part-timers—one comes mornings, the other afternoons.”

  “From Winterbourne Barton?”

  “Weymouth.”

  “What do they do?”

  “Whatever’s on the rota.”

  “Ploughing?”

  She nodded. “Anything to do with the crops. Harry and I look after the herds, the fencing and the woodland…but we all lend a hand where necessary.” She eyed me curiously as she folded the rag and put it on the grease can. “Don’t they have women farmworkers in Zimbabwe?”

  “Thousands.”

  “Then why do you look so surprised?”

  I smiled. “Because everyone in Winterbourne Barton describes you as a loner, and now I discover you have three people working for you.”

  “So?”

  “It’s a wrong description of you. I got the impression you lived and worked on your own.”

  Her mouth twisted cynically. “That’s Winterbourne Barton for you. They’re completely ignorant about how much work is involved in running a farm, but then most of them have never lived in the country before.” She glanced towards the house. “I’m making some sandwiches for lunch. Do you want to come in while I do it?”

  “Will the dogs be there?”

  Her dark eyes narrowed slightly, but more in speculation than contempt. “Not if you don’t want them to be.”

  I stood up. “Then I’d love to come in. Thank you.”

  “You’ll have to move your car in case Harry or Julie comes back. If you park up there”—she pointed towards the left-hand end of the hedge—“you’ll see the path to the back door. I’ll meet you there after I’ve seen to the dogs.”

  THE FARMHOUSE WAS a thin, straggling building, constructed in the same Purbeck stone as Barton House and Winterbourne Barton. The core, the rooms around the front door, was seventeenth-century, but the extensions on both sides dated from the nineteenth and twentieth. In floor space it was almost as big as Barton House, but its piecemeal fabrication meant it lacked the clean lines and elegance of Lily’s property.

  We entered through the kitchen, which was larger, brighter and better appointed than Lily’s. A plate-glass window gave a view of the garden, which was entirely laid to lawn, without a shrub or flower in sight. Six-foot-high wire fencing ran inside the beech hedge, preventing the mastiffs from escaping, and a large wooden kennel stood in one corner. At the moment, there was no sign of any of them.

  “They’re round the front,” said Jess, as if reading my mind. “I’ll let them back into this side when you go. My mother used to have flower borders all the way round but the first puppy I had rooted the plants out. It’s easier like this.”

  “Are they always out?”

  “If I’m working. When I’m here I have them in the house. If you think of them as overgrown hearthrugs, you might not find them so frightening. Mastiffs are a sociable breed…they love being around people. The only thing they ever do is put themselves between their owners and a stranger, but they won’t attack unless the stranger attacks first.”

  I changed the subject rather too abruptly. “This is a nice room, Jess. Much nicer than Lily’s kitchen.”

  She watched me for a moment before turning away to open the fridge door. “Do you want to look at the rest of the house while I make the sandwiches? I’m sure you’re curious…everyone else is.”

  “Do you mind?”

  An indifferent shrug was her only answer.

  It was hardly the most fulsome invitation I’d ever had but I wasn’t going to argue about it. The rooms we inhabit say as much about us as how we behave, and Jess was right, I was deeply curious about her surroundings. I’d been told variously that the house was frozen in time, that it was a shrine to her family, full of morbid souvenirs and with an emphasis on death in the shape of stuffed animals. I came across these immediately, to the extent that there were four glass cases in the hall, containing a pheasant, a fox cub, two weasels and a badger.

  This was the seventeenth-century heart of the building and I could well believe it had remained untouched for years. The only natural light came from a window halfway up the stairs, but it wasn’t enough to brighten the gloom of the dark oak panelling around the walls. The ceiling was furrowed with ancient beams and the flagstones worn into a visible curvature between the front door and the stairs.

  The two rooms leading off the hall dispelled any sense of a house frozen in time. One, which was clearly Jess’s office, had filing cabinets, a desk and a computer, and the other an old sofa and
piles of beanbags that smelt powerfully of dogs. Against the longest wall was a steel grey designer hi-fi system with shelf upon shelf of CDs, DVDs, videos and vinyl records framing a plasma screen. I hadn’t thought of Jess as a music, film or television buff, but she clearly was. She was even connected to Sky digital, if the unmistakable black remote on the sofa was any guide. So much for a shrine to the past, I thought enviously, wishing Barton House had more to offer than four terrestrial channels on one miserable little screen in the back room.

  I almost stopped there. It’s one thing to be offered free rein of someone else’s house, another to exercise it. I was trespassing out of curiosity or, even worse, a childish desire to put one over on Winterbourne Barton by being able say I’d been invited in. It was the mismatch between what I saw and how it was described that drew me on, for I couldn’t see where the ideas of morbidness had come from until I found a corridor full of photographs of Jess’s family.

  There was tier upon tier of the same four laughing people—a man, a woman, a boy and a girl—with variations on the same pictures occurring every two or three feet. Poster-size portraits. Postcard-size snaps. Enlarged headshots extracted from group photographs. Single prints of the children pasted alongside their mother and father to create a laughing group. It was a collage of black, white, sepia and vibrant colour on the continuous canvas of the corridor walls, and it was a glorious expression of life.

  I thought of the pictures I had of my parents, the formal ones of their wedding, and holiday snapshots showing awkward smiles or squints of reluctance to be caught on camera. There was only a handful, taken unawares, when they were being entirely natural, and I thought how much better to duplicate the laughing ones than fill the spaces with self-consciousness and solemnity.

  “What do you think?” asked Jess’s voice behind me.

  I hadn’t heard her approach and turned a startled face in her direction. “Brilliant,” I said honestly. “It’s the way I’d like to be remembered.”

  “You don’t look very impressed.”

  “Only because you crept up on me. Who took them? You?”

  “Yes.” Her dark eyes roamed across the pictures. “Lily hated my gallery. She said it was unhealthy…kept telling me to let my memories go.”

  Standard advice, I thought, but I couldn’t see that it applied to pictures. My mother had photographs of her dead parents on her bedside table, and I’d never felt they shouldn’t be there. “Why didn’t you put yourself into any of them?”

  “I did. That one.” She pointed to a postcard-size shot at the beginning, showing her parents arm-in-arm with a girl whom I’d taken to be her sister.

  I moved back to look at it. “I didn’t recognize you. When was it taken?”

  “On my twelfth birthday. Mum and Dad gave me a camera and I let Rory use it to take that photograph.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Eight then…fifteen when he died. Sally was two years younger.”

  “What about your parents?”

  “Both in their late forties.” She pointed to a poster-size photograph halfway down the corridor. “That’s the last picture I took of them. It was about three weeks before the accident.”

  I walked past her to stand in front of it. It was in colour, there was no sea in the background, but the composition and the way the sunlight lit the sides of the couple’s faces reminded me of the black-and-white image of Madeleine at Barton House. “Was it you who took the picture of Madeleine on my upstairs landing?”

  “Maybe.”

  “It’s the only thing worth looking at in the whole house. The rest is tacky as hell…including Nathaniel’s paintings.”

  It was a compliment but Jess didn’t take it as one. “It looks nothing like Madeleine,” she said crossly. “I only did it to make Lily happy. She needed to believe that something good had come from the Wrights. If it was an honest photograph her bitch of a daughter would look like the portrait of Dorian Gray—ugly as sin.”

  “Your mother’s pretty,” I said, in an effort to distract her.

  Jess ignored me. “You know, I sometimes wonder if that’s what Madeleine’s at. As long as Nathaniel puts her viciousness into his paintings, she can pass herself off as sweet.”

  It was a strange analogy. “Except his paintings aren’t vicious, they’re just not very good. If he had any talent, he’d have sold them and they wouldn’t be gathering dust in Barton House.”

  “Then it’s a vicious destruction of talent,” she said flatly. “He used to be good before he married Madeleine. Peter has one of his early paintings. You should look at it.” She opened a door at the end of the corridor. “Did you get this far?”

  “No.”

  “This is the best room.”

  I thought she meant it was best in terms of decor and size, or “best” as in reserved for visitors, so I wasn’t prepared for what I found. There wasn’t a stick of furniture inside. It was a huge shuttered room with a woodblock floor, white walls and a series of slim floor-to-ceiling panels set asymetrically down the centre with mini speakers attached to them. I had no idea what I was supposed to be looking at until Jess touched a series of buttons on a panel by the door and the room came alive with moving images and sound.

  For a few sickening moments, as the farm appeared on the wall at the end, I thought I was about to see her family go through a series of repetitive loops on video. In that case I’d be agreeing with Lily. What could be more morbid and unhealthy than sitting in the dark, watching dead people perform bursts of activity at long-forgotten parties or school plays?

  “It’s the life-cycle of the weasel,” said Jess as different footage played across the screens. “That female was nesting under the house for a season…she moved into Clambar Wood when the dogs sniffed out her entrance. Those are her kittens…she’s teaching them to hunt. It’s probably where the myth of weasel gangs comes from. In fact they’re incredibly territorial and only come together for mating. Look at that. Do you see how beautiful they are? Farmers should encourage them instead of killing them. They’ll go for eggs and chicks if they can get them but their favourite prey is mice and voles.”

  “It’s amazing,” I said. “Who took it?”

  “I did.”

  “Did you set up the room as well?”

  She nodded. “I made the panels light enough to move to produce different effects. Some films are more effective if the screens form a continuous arc…like birds in flight. I’ve some great footage of crows leaving their roost in the morning, and it’s stunning to watch them wheel around the arc. The weasels work better in a staggered formation because it shows how territorial they are.”

  “Can I see the crows?”

  She glanced at her watch. “It’ll take too long to set up. I’d have to realign the projectors as well.” She touched the buttons and plunged the room into darkness before easing me out and closing the door. “I’m working on the soundtrack for the weasels at the moment, but maybe I’ll set up the crows when that’s finished.”

  I allowed myself to be shepherded back towards the kitchen. “But what are the films for? Are they for schools? What do you do with them?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean, nothing?”

  She took some sandwiches, wrapped in clingfilm, from the worktop and tucked them in her pocket. “It’s just a hobby,” she said.

  I looked at her in disbelief. “You’re crazy! What’s the point of making films that no one sees? You should be showing them…finding yourself an audience.” I paused. “It would be like me writing columns that no one reads.”

  “I’m not like you. I don’t have to be admired all the time.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  She gave an indifferent shrug.

  “What’s wrong with showing you’ve got talent? You’re good, Jess.”

  “I know,” she said bluntly, “but what makes you think I need you to tell me? How much do you know about filming? How much do you know about weasels? Anyth
ing?” She gave a dismissive laugh when I shook my head.

  “I was only saying what I honestly felt.”

  “No, you weren’t.” She opened the back door and ushered me out. “You were being patronising—probably because you feel guilty about listening to Madeleine. In future you’d do better to keep your mouth shut.”

  It was like walking on eggshells. I couldn’t see what I’d done wrong except compliment her. “Would it have been better if I’d said it was crap?”

  “Of course not.” She flicked me a scathing glance. “I hate liars even more than I hate arselickers.”

  From:

  connie.burns@uknet.com

  Sent:

  Wed 21/07/04 13:54

  To:

  alan.collins@manchester-police.co.uk

  Subject:

  contact details

  * * *

  Dear Alan,

  Journalists are notoriously jealous of their stories. I don’t trust my boss not to cut me out of the O’Connell/MacKenzie loop and pass off all my research as his! I’ll let you know my address and phone number as soon as I’ve found somewhere permanent to stay. At the moment I’m living out of a suitcase.

  It was ever thus!

  Best wishes,

  Connie

  PS. I can’t believe how bad the mobile signals are in this country! I think I’ve signed up to the wrong server!

  9

  JESS AND I parted on superficially good terms but there was no invitation to return, and she gave a noncommittal nod when I said I hoped to see her at Barton House. It was all very confusing. Rather than go straight home, I drove to the village to see if Peter was home. When I spotted his car in the road, I pulled in behind it and rang his doorbell. I had second thoughts while I waited, mostly to do with rumour-mongering and disloyalty, but I was too curious to give in to them.