by Hazel Osmond
‘Yeah, those diaries and that photo.’
O’Dowd just laughed.
Mack struggled back to his seat and drank his lukewarm coffee, but stowed his chocolate bar away for later. He was tempted to ring Tess. That last view of her, waving him off at Bath Station with Gabi up in her arms and Joe and Fran by her side, had cut deep. Especially the way Joe had looked at him as though the travel-book story had stuck in his throat.
Hard when someone you admired smelt a rat and that rat was you.
He had to keep reminding himself he had no choice and once it was over and O’Dowd was off their backs, he could pay off his debts, even get some help for Phyllida if she’d agree to it. Although more likely he’d be standing in a courtroom while Cressida Chartwell’s lawyers tore him into little pieces.
Him in the dock or his family in purgatory? Bit of a nobrainer and if he played it right, he might get away with it.
With that thought he looked defiantly out of the window and was aware of a new feeling stirring within him, one he hadn’t experienced for quite a while. He certainly hadn’t expected to experience it now.
There it was, though – the thrill of the chase, no mistaking it.
CHAPTER 5
Jennifer drove off the main road and down the track, bumped over the cattle grid and stopped the car. There were snowdrops here, but the daffodils were still cowering, barely out of the soil, as if saying ‘You’re joking, we’re not going out there yet’. She turned off the engine and listened. Nothing.
Here, on this small road looking out on the hills and down to the river, she felt the embarrassment and anger that had stayed with her since yesterday’s Armstrong and Araminta incidents seep away. Thank goodness for half days. Sometimes she just needed a rest from pretending everything was fine; from that new tendency she had to want to smooth over any unpleasantness as though it was somehow her fault and not the other person’s.
She reached for her jacket, aware that the hard brightness in the sun gave a false impression of how warm it would be, and got out of the car to look at the sheep. It was the Bluefaced Leicesters up here, heavy with lambs.
When she was little, she had thought them ugly, all bony-nosed and arrogant. Now, if she heard anyone else say that, she bristled. They were pedigrees, beautiful in their own way and the farm’s reputation as well as her family’s was bound up with them.
Besides, these days, who was she to call anything or anyone ugly?
‘Not long now, ladies,’ she called and laughed at their complete lack of interest.
The wind was picking up, whipping the little bits of wool caught on the fence and, down by the river, she could see the branches of the trees swaying. Up here the trees had long ago been moulded into shape by the prevailing winds and now gave the impression that they were leaning forward as a preamble to setting off for a walk, the wind at their backs. The lichen on them made them look as if they were already in strange, fluorescent bloom.
Everything was simpler out here: sheep, earth, grass, trees, sky. She could usually stay here for hours just breathing great lungfuls of the purity, but not today: the wind had ice in it and despite her jacket she was starting to feel chilled. Back in the car, she turned up the heater.
Passing the large Suffolk ram, she slowed the car and wound down the window. He was a big-shouldered lad who, despite looking chunky and cuddly, could break the neck of a more delicate Leicester in a scrap.
‘Hello, Winston,’ she shouted and the ram took a few steps back, havered from side to side and then turned and ran.
All mouth and trousers.
Reaching a fork in the road, she hesitated and then turned left. The track here got bumpier and narrower until it ended in front of a small stone house with a green door. Right now the door was open and a young woman was struggling to peg out a variety of baby clothes on a rotary dryer. As she waved, the babygro she had been hanging out flicked up and over her face before she slapped it back with her hand.
‘Good drying day,’ she said as Jennifer got out of the car, ‘if you’ve got the strength to get the stuff hung out.’
Jennifer knew that in a straight fight between the wind and Bryony, her sister-in-law, the wind might possibly lose. The Suffolk ram definitely would. Bryony was a ‘direct from central casting’ farmer’s daughter and filled the role much more ably than Jennifer ever could. Hearty, a good rider, only ceding a few inches in height to Jennifer’s brother who himself was a big man, she approached everything with gusto, including motherhood. But today her eyes had a redness about them that Jennifer knew was not due to the wind.
‘How’s Louise?’ Jennifer asked, and as if on cue there was a loud bellowing wail from inside the house.
Bryony flicked her eyes skywards. ‘Teeth still giving her jip. There she blows.’ She hared off into the house, returning with Louise still bundled in her quilted sleeping bag. She was struggling and crying, her face pink and wet.
‘Now, look,’ Bryony said, leaning her head back to avoid Louise’s flailing fists, ‘what’s Auntie Jen going to think of you?’
Louise obviously didn’t give a damn and both women watched her continue to try and fight her way out of her sleeping bag and her mother’s arms. As Bryony was used to handling appreciably bigger livestock, Louise was wasting her time.
‘Oh, for goodness’ sake,’ Bryony said wearily after one particularly bolshy struggle, and Jennifer wondered how much worse this would be for her when lambing was properly underway and Danny too busy to take some of the strain from her at night.
‘How about I take Louise for a couple of hours?’ she said. ‘Mum would be delighted, and you can have a sleep.’
‘No, no. I can’t let you do that.’ There was something in Bryony’s tone that told Jennifer she could be persuaded.
‘Come on, I’ll take your car with the seat; you can bring mine along later when you come and collect her.’
Jennifer was amused to see that once the decision was made Bryony set about getting her daughter bundled away with her customary vim, wrestling Louise into the car seat and pinning her down expertly with the straps. Louise looked outraged and reapplied herself to trying to make everyone’s eardrums bleed, but as Jennifer set off the crying lessened and when they reached the fork in the road, this time Jennifer taking the road on the right, it had stopped. Jennifer saw Louise’s hand go to her mouth. By the time Jennifer got her first glimpse of home, Louise was asleep.
Set down in the fold of the valley and surrounded by fields on all sides Jennifer likened Lane End Farm to a big stone ship that had come to rest in a sea of green. The farmhouse itself was the bow, albeit a blunt one; the wide yard was the deck and the clutter of barns and sheds forming a U-shape on the other side of the yard, was a stern of sorts. With a stretch of the imagination you could see the sheep dotted over the fields as white flecks of foam.
In the yard, Jennifer stopped the car and gently lifted Louise out. A quick fluttering of her eyelids was her only response and as Jennifer manoeuvred past the coats and discarded wellingtons in the porch, she did not stir again.
‘Brought you a present,’ Jennifer said pushing open the kitchen door and her mother, putting a plate high up on the dresser said, ‘If it’s anything else that wants feeding, you can take it back,’ before turning and seeing it was her granddaughter. She took Louise into her own arms eagerly, a smile transforming her face. It was a face that, with its aquiline nose and high cheekbones, Cress always joked belonged to a duchess, but had ended up on a farmer’s wife. Her mother’s way of carrying herself too, with her back very straight and her chin lifted, added to the impression that she was slightly superior and not to be crossed. Mostly this demeanour was saved for those who angered her; with those she loved she was as warm as any apple-cheeked farmer’s wife, and with children she was a thing of putty. The only time that the family had to be wary was if she had on what Jennifer’s father Ray called her ‘lemon-drop look’. Then you’d best keep quiet, find something that needed do
ing elsewhere and hope that it wasn’t you that had displeased her.
As her mother settled down with Louise in her arms, Jennifer took off her jacket and wandered over to the cake tin. Coffee and walnut today, the icing thick and studded with nuts. ‘This looks good,’ she said, cutting a slice and bringing it over to the table.
‘You’ll not have bothered with lunch before you left, I suppose?’ her mother asked.
‘Did, but wished I hadn’t. Thought I’d give that new shop round the back of the hospital a go. Sandwich tasted a bit weird though, left a lot of it.’
Her mother screwed up her face. ‘Meant to tell you not to go there. You know Craig who helps with the silage?’
‘Craig with the long nails who keeps ferrets in his kitchen?’
Her mother nodded. ‘His daughter’s bought that shop.’
Jennifer almost spat her cake out. ‘Lovely, ferret-meat sandwiches.’
‘Don’t be daft,’ her mother said seriously. ‘You can’t eat ferret meat, it might even be illegal.’
Jennifer went back to eating her cake with slightly less gusto. As she chewed she watched Louise’s hand curl itself around one of her mother’s fingers and felt again that sense of peace she had experienced on the drive home, even if she couldn’t go so far as to call it contentment. Everything was safe and familiar here in the kitchen with the clock ticking, the Rayburn pumping out the heat, the big wooden table solid with memories of family meals.
‘Alex rang again,’ her mother said and Jennifer’s sense of peace withered. There were all kinds of things lurking under her mother’s statement: the hint of disapproval that Jennifer had not returned his earlier call and, most gut-wrenching of all, the inference that she should get on the phone right now because Alex was obviously still keen on her and how much longer did she think she could leave the poor man dangling?
‘He mentioned something about a dinner with the Henshaws? Carlisle on Wednesday? Said he’d pick you up at seven.’ Jennifer couldn’t bear to see that awful optimism in her mother’s eyes.
‘Let’s have a look at the lamb-cam,’ she said, almost sprinting towards the small television perched on the worktop by the window and knowing her mother wouldn’t have been fooled by the unsubtle change of subject. Installed with great fanfare, the lamb-cam relayed images from the four CCTV cameras fitted in the lambing barns and enabled her father to see at a glance what was going on. With the sound turned right up, it was easy to hear the distinctive bleat and blare of a ewe about to give birth. Though it was rarely on during the day, at night it enabled her father to simply tumble out of bed at regular intervals and check what was going on rather than having to go out to the barn in the dark and cold.
Jennifer switched on the monitor, turned up the volume and waited for the screen, split into four, to settle. Lambing had barely begun yet, and she did not expect to see much happening, but in one of the quarters she could see her father and brother bent over a ewe. She fiddled with the volume, but could not pick up what they were saying.
‘Hear the cottage next to Mr Armstrong is rented out,’ she said back over her shoulder, ‘Sonia mentioned something about a writer?’
She realised it was a mistake as soon as she’d said it. There was the lemon-drop look.
‘Just a writer, Mum, not a journalist,’ she said hurriedly, but her mother made a little ‘humph’ noise and Jennifer knew it would be a good idea to retrieve her jacket and pop out and see how Ray and Danny were doing.
In this mood her mother reminded her of a particularly ferocious lioness protecting her cubs.
Outside the light looked fragile and the cold hit her after the warmth of the kitchen, but inside the smallest of the rooms in the barn the lamps used to warm the lambs gave everything a comforting glow. The combined smell of sweet hay and warm sheep was one that reached down deep inside her to tell her everything here was safe, like when she was a child. The old Jennifer.
She had a quick look in a couple of pens and the knobbly-kneed lambs stared up at her and bleated; a high, thin noise. They had that shell-shocked look they all had at being born, and tottered about on their spindly legs, their wool still yellow from the afterbirth.
Her father and her brother were further down the barn, her father watching as Danny tried to push a tiny lamb under a ewe whose head was restrained in a wooden clamp. The ewe was becoming increasingly agitated about not being able to turn her head to see what was going on.
‘Hello, love,’ her dad said, with a quick smile. ‘You look nice.’
She saw her brother gently show the lamb where it was meant to be aiming while trying to stop the ewe from kicking out. It was a delicate operation and it always surprised her how her large, often clumsy brother, could exhibit such co-ordination when necessary. After a few false starts the lamb started to suckle, its tail wriggling excitedly, and the ewe gave one more indignant shuffle and then stood still. For the moment the ewe, which had lost its own lamb, was accepting this one as hers.
Danny straightened up and smiled, but it was a smile that morphed into something more mischievous and Jennifer knew that someone, some time today had been on the receiving end of a practical joke and Danny wanted to tell her about it. Ray had always been fond of a little gentle leg-pulling and Danny, the more robust variety. Jennifer took it as a sign of the rude, often extremely rude, good health of their relationship.
‘Go on,’ she said. ‘What was it this time?’
Ray frowned. ‘Not sure we should tell you, Jen.’
Danny grinned down at the straw.
‘I’ll just go and ask Mum then,’ she said pretending to move away and heard her Dad’s quick, ‘Best keep it between the three of us.’
‘It’s about Mrs Chambers, see,’ Danny added.
Jennifer felt her curiosity sharpen. Mrs Chambers was fantastically efficient, like some particularly virulent weed-killer – no piece of church brass was polished, no jumble sale hosted, without her being there to keep everyone right. Her behaviour as chair of the Luncheon Club made Jen’s mother and the rest of the committee feel as if they had been serving up swill to the local OAPs before she’d arrived.
‘Mum was hosting the Luncheon-Club meeting, see,’ Danny said, ‘so I’d kept out of the way until all the cars had gone and then nipped in to get a handful of biscuits. Turns out Mrs Chambers was still waiting for one of those daft sons of hers to pick her up. I just did a quick in-and-out, like, but not before I heard Wifey lecturing Mum on the proper way to cook beef. Should have seen the way Mum was pleating the edge of the tablecloth. Then I noticed the monitor for the lamb-cam was on.’
‘I’d been looking at it over breakfast with the sound down. Forgot to switch it off,’ Ray added helpfully.
‘She had her back to it, Mrs Chambers, and Mum was busy with the tablecloth,’ Danny’s eyes were twinkling at the memory, ‘so I came back out here and—’
‘He …’ Ray could not finish the sentence for laughing.
‘What? What?’ Jennifer said.
‘I mooned her.’ Danny was looking very pleased with himself.
‘Buttock-naked,’ Ray confirmed.
Jennifer felt the laughter bubble up through her.
‘More a half moon really,’ Danny said in all seriousness, ‘it was that quick.’
This set Ray off again and he had to go and sit on a straw bale.
Their laughter had just died away again when there was a commotion at the door of the shed and Jennifer’s mother appeared, eyes blazing and a wide-awake Louise on her hip.
Ray stood up abruptly.
‘Hello, pet. Jen didn’t say Louise was here.’ He tentatively raised his hand and waved at the little girl.
‘Never you mind Louise,’ Jennifer’s mother snapped, shifting her gaze to Danny and then back to Ray. ‘It’s very interesting what you can pick up on that lamb-cam.’
‘Oh bugger,’ Danny said, ‘the monitor’s on in the kitchen again, isn’t it?’
‘Yes it is, and the volume wa
s up nice and loud too.’
‘That was me,’ Jennifer said. ‘Sorry.’
‘Now, Bren,’ her father started, ‘it was just a bit of fun, no harm done.’
‘No harm done? She could have had you both for sexual harassment.’
They were all waiting for the lemon-drop look, but it didn’t come. What came was laughter, quiet at first and then louder and more wholehearted. It set them all off again, even Louise.
Jen wanted this moment of laughter and new lambs to go on forever. ‘You should be really grateful Mrs Chambers didn’t turn around,’ she said to Danny. ‘She was bound to have found fault with your buns.’
‘Aye,’ Danny agreed, just managing to get the words out, ‘but I’d have got a winner’s rosette for me sausage roll.’
CHAPTER 6
As Mack struggled to stand upright in the wind, clinging on to the door of a taxi, he found it hard to recall that thrill-of-the-chase moment he’d had on the train.
‘This is it,’ he asked, looking around, ‘the whole of Brindley?’
‘Divvn’t be soft,’ the taxi driver replied. ‘The opera house is down that hill and the casino’s round the corner.’
Mack didn’t laugh, but even if he had, it would have been torn away in the wind. There were no streetlights, but he could just make out a row of squat, stone cottages which he supposed was Brindley Villas. Turning his head to the left, he saw a couple of larger, detached houses, also built in stone. He looked off to the right. Nothing, just a signpost. He guessed it would say ‘Civilisation: 350 miles this way’.
He knew the North would be like this. Bring on the cloth caps and rickets.
As the taxi driver struggled round to the boot and started to get out his case and rucksack, Mack turned to see what delights lay behind him. A low tin hut, a couple of cottages and what might be the shop.
