No Holds Barred

by Lyndon Stacey

  ‘And you’re telling me because … ?’ Daniel was pretty sure he knew the answer.

  ‘Well, obviously I can’t just drop everything and head off to Wiltshire, but then I thought of you. I mean, it’s right up your street. You can’t tell me you’re not bored silly driving a delivery round for me after being a copper for ten years.’

  Daniel didn’t try to deny it. He had been feeling a bit restless of late.

  ‘But I’m not a businessman,’ he pointed out.

  ‘You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and, anyway, I didn’t get the impression that it was the bookkeeping side of things she was having problems with. What d’you say? Will you give it a go?’

  Daniel remembered the conversation now with suspicion. How much more had Fred known that he wasn’t telling?

  To all outward appearances, Great Ditton was a quiet Wiltshire village, much like many others Daniel had passed on his way. If there had ever been anything great about it, it had clearly been way back in its history. Now it was a straggling collection of warm brick houses and pretty cottages, interspersed with square 1960s bungalows, wearing their tiny plots like straitjackets. In addition to these, the village boasted a squat-towered stone church with a clipped yew hedge, two pubs hung with bright baskets of flowers, a bakery, an estate agent, the garage where he’d first made Spotty’s acquaintance, and that modern rarity, a village post office and stores.

  Now that he’d left the village centre behind, the road began to climb quite steeply, the houses becoming fewer and further between. It was clearly prime farming country, and he passed the gateways to two such properties and the hexagonal roadside lodge to Great Ditton Manor before coming at last to an open five-bar gate that bore the name he’d been looking for: Maidstone Farm.

  Glad that journey’s end was in sight, Daniel swung the Merc into a tarmac driveway that climbed gently but steadily upward between dark banks of mixed woodland. After a couple of hundred yards, the way split, but a sign guided him to the right for the farm. A glance to the left revealed a narrow lane winding away out of sight through the woods, with a glimpse of a brick cottage off to one side.

  After another hundred yards or so, the farm drive levelled out and burst from the gloom of the trees into the sunshine as it ran on between acres of grassland divided by overgrown hedgerows. Ahead of him, in a slight dip, lay the farmhouse and an untidy sprawl of barns and outbuildings including stables and a ménage.

  Daniel slowed up and stopped, taking in the layout of the property. It seemed the fields of Maidstone Farm had escaped the modern trend of grubbing out hedges to create endless tracts of featureless but easily farmed land. The field on his left was grazed by a slow-moving herd of reddish-brown cattle, and, dredging the knowledge collected during his own rural upbringing, he decided they were probably Herefords. In line with what he’d learned about Jenny Summers’ livery business, the fields nearer the farm buildings were smaller and supported a mixed selection of horses and ponies.

  Beyond the pastureland to his left, the dark bank of woods he’d just passed through swept round in a curve that formed the horizon, effectively concealing any further Maidstone Farm land that might lie that way. On his right, the land dipped to where a willow-lined river wound its way across the flat valley bottom, beyond which a large Elizabethan house stood, partially clad in scaffolding, on a slightly raised plateau, its diamond-paned windows glinting in the sunlight.

  Taking a pair of binoculars from the glove compartment, Daniel took a closer look. Evidence of building work abounded. Two new wings appeared to have been added to what was clearly a substantial house to begin with, and outside the formal gardens that surrounded the property, it looked as though extensive landscaping was underway to turn open fields into parkland, à la Capability Brown.

  Daniel lowered the binoculars. It was reasonable to assume the house he was looking at was Great Ditton Manor and whoever lived there certainly had some grand ideas.

  Driving on, the Merc swooped down into the valley, the lane bordered by straggling, bramble-infested blackthorn hedges before running at length between the horse paddocks and into the farmyard itself.

  His arrival interrupted what appeared to be a slightly heated exchange between a well-built man in a navy-blue polo shirt and a fairly stocky woman with thick reddish-gold hair tied back off her face. They both paused to glance in Daniel’s direction as he parked in front of the house next to a red and cream Land Rover and a navy blue Transit van with mirror-glass windows. He thought the woman looked stressed and unhappy.

  ‘Hi. Daniel Whelan,’ he said, getting out of the car and approaching the two of them.

  For a moment, the woman looked puzzled, but then the penny dropped.

  ‘Daniel, of course.’ She mustered a smile. ‘I’m Jenny. You’re earlier than I expected.’ She shook his hand, then gestured towards the other man. ‘This is Taylor Boyd. You’ll be working together. Taylor – our new driver, Daniel.’

  Daniel shook hands with a man of about thirty, with an earring and dark hair made spiky with gel. His eyes were concealed behind mirrored sunglasses that hadn’t come from any pound shop, and both his handclasp and expression were cool and unwelcoming. The blue shirt carried a gold logo spelling the words ‘Summer Haulage’.

  ‘Taylor, I’ll speak to you later,’ Jenny told him. ‘But don’t do anything until I’ve had time to think about it.’

  The man accepted his dismissal with a perfunctory nod, but muttered, ‘Don’t take too long, then,’ before turning away.

  ‘Trouble?’ Daniel asked quietly as the man moved out of range.

  Jenny sighed and shook her head.

  ‘Not really. It’s OK.’

  Daniel raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Did Fred tell you why I was coming?’

  She looked at him, pale blue eyes large in a freckle-dusted but rather plain face.

  ‘Of course. I’m sorry, I was forgetting – it’s just …’

  ‘I know. You don’t know me from Adam.’

  She nodded, relieved that he understood.

  ‘You know, I could murder a cup of tea,’ Daniel said.

  TWO

  The kitchen at Maidstone Farm was a genuine farmhouse kitchen. Not the designers’ country kitchen of the glossy magazines but the sort that had evolved over several generations of use into a comfortable and practical space.

  The room was dominated by a vast range cooker that sat in an even more vast arched brick fireplace. A big flat-bottomed kettle rested on one of the hotplates and a black cat on another. Free-standing cupboards and a huge pine dresser stood against the cream painted walls, and the floor was composed of uneven flagstones. Over the family-sized stripped-pine table, a vintage clothes airer suspended from the central beam was draped with tea-towels and hung with strings of onions and bunches of herbs. Children’s pictures were pinned to the American-style fridge with magnets, and a small pair of red sandals lay where they had been kicked off, next to one of the chairs.

  At the opposite end of the room stood a grandfather clock and the biggest sideboard Daniel had ever seen. In front of a smaller fireplace, on a rather threadbare square of carpet, stood three mismatched armchairs, a sofa and a coffee table weighed down with magazines.

  Two windows looked out over the yard, one at the carpeted end of the room and the other over the old sink with its wooden draining board. The curtains were blue and white check, the china on display also blue and white, and the whole effect was effortlessly authentic.

  Jenny filled an electric kettle and switched it on, taking two mugs from a shelf and a teapot from the dresser. Taz padded round sniffing interestedly, before lying down with a sigh on the cool flags under the table.

  ‘So, this Taylor character. What does he do, exactly?’ Daniel asked.

  ‘He’s one of the drivers.’ She paused. ‘Well, actually, having said that, he’s kind of taken charge since Gavin’s been in hospital.’

  ‘And do you always let him speak to you li
ke that?’

  Jenny flushed slightly.

  ‘I know it’s feeble, but sometimes it’s just easier to pretend I haven’t heard. He’s basically keeping the business going. I wish I could do it myself, but what with the livery yard, and the kids, and visiting Gavin, I just haven’t got the time. I put up with his attitude because I don’t think I could manage without him.’

  ‘Do you really think he’d leave if you stood up to him?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. You think I’m being weak, but, to be honest, it’s only lately he’s got so bad. I wonder if he thinks … well, that Gavin …’

  ‘That he’s not coming home?’

  ‘Well, yes.’

  ‘I assume he didn’t behave like that with your husband?’

  ‘I shouldn’t think so.’ Jenny poured hot water into the pot and began to stir it with a long-handled spoon. ‘But it was Gavin’s business, so I don’t really know. Taylor’s only been working for us for about eight months. He’s from a local family that have lived round here for ever – as long as my family. His father owns the scrapyard next door to the garage. They’ve got a bit of a reputation. I tried to warn Gavin but he said Taylor was OK. Gavin isn’t from round here,’ she added, as if to excuse his misjudgement.

  ‘How is your husband now? I mean, any change?’

  Jenny bowed her head and turned away, busying herself with rummaging in a cupboard.

  ‘No. No change. The hospital can’t tell me if he’ll ever regain consciousness. We just have to wait.’

  ‘That’s tough.’ Daniel hesitated to question her any further but he was intrigued. ‘So, are the police any further forward with what happened? Fred didn’t seem to think they’d got much to go on.’

  ‘No.’ Jenny poured tea and then milk into the mugs. ‘It’s been over two months now, and they say they’re still working on it, but if they’ve made any progress, they certainly haven’t told me.’

  Daniel accepted his tea gratefully. His last stop for refreshment was a distant memory.

  ‘I know it must be hard for you, but can you bear to tell me what happened?’ he asked, sitting at the big table and reaching for the packet of biscuits.

  Jenny took a chair opposite him.

  ‘Freddy Bowden says you used to be a policeman.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Why did you stop?’

  ‘I trod on some high-ranking toes over an internal matter and it all got a bit messy. Basically, they made it impossible for me to stay.’

  ‘Do you mind? I mean, still?’ Jenny was watching him closely.

  He shook his head.

  ‘It’s history now. You either move on or waste your life being bitter.’ He felt a bit of a fraud making it sound so easy. God knows, it hadn’t been – still wasn’t, to be honest. But they weren’t here to discuss his problems. ‘So, your husband … Fred said something about poachers.’

  ‘Yes, well, we don’t know it was anything to do with poachers. Gavin just said he’d seen some lights across the fields when he was checking on the lorries, and he was going out to investigate. I didn’t think much of it at first. I mean, he was always going off in the evenings. Sometimes he’d take a gun and shoot rabbits, sometimes he’d go looking for poachers. He had a bit of a thing about them. My Dad never bothered that much when he was here. “So what if they take a few rabbits or fish,” he used to say. “There’s plenty to go around.”

  ‘There’s one old guy the locals call Woodsmoke – you’ll know why if you ever get downwind of him. Anyway, he’s been around since I was a kid and he’s never done any harm, but Gavin couldn’t stand him. He was determined to keep him off the farm, though how he thought he’d do it I can’t imagine. Woodsmoke could run rings round him in the woods if he felt like it. I think, deep down, Gavin knew that and it made him even madder.’

  ‘Did Gavin take the gun the night he was attacked?’

  ‘No. He said he was just going for a look round. Like I said, I didn’t think twice about it, until it started to get late. He’d sometimes go down to the village for a pint before closing and get chatting to his mates, but when it got to past midnight, I did start to worry a bit. We’re early risers – have to be – and we normally go to bed quite early, too.’

  ‘Who were his mates, particularly?’

  Jenny looked a little discomfited.

  ‘I don’t really know.’

  ‘Did you never go to the pub with him?’

  ‘Well, when we first met, of course, but it was never easy for us both to go out, with the kids. Then when Izzy came along … Isobel, my youngest,’ she explained. ‘When she was born, it became even more difficult. I don’t mind, really. I’m usually tired by the end of the day, and I’m not really a pub sort of person.’

  With a decade of experience behind him when it came to hearing what people weren’t actually saying, Daniel drew from her words and body language an attempt to hide the hurt of a marriage gone a little stale.

  When he didn’t respond immediately, Jenny tried again.

  ‘I could have gone with him, if I’d wanted to, but, like I said, I wasn’t really bothered. And, anyway, men need their “man time”, don’t they? They don’t always want their wives and kids hanging around.’

  Daniel had his own views on that but he reverted to her original tale.

  ‘So, when it got late, what happened then? What did you do?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do. I’d tried calling him on his mobile, but the reception is very variable round here. There’s lots of places on the farm where you can’t get a signal at all, so I wasn’t surprised that I couldn’t get him. All I could do was wait. It’s daft, but I kept wishing he’d taken the dog with him, though what Monty could have done I don’t know. He wasn’t exactly a guarding breed, just a soft old Labrador, but you never know – if someone threatened Gavin, he might have reacted. But that night he left him behind.’

  ‘Did he usually take him?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘Sometimes. Not always.’

  Daniel glanced round the kitchen, but there was no dog’s bed, no bowl or toys.

  ‘So, where’s the dog now?’

  ‘We lost him. He, um … wandered off.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘A couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘And … ?’ Daniel waited.

  ‘He, um …’ Jenny looked at the ceiling and bit her lip to stop it quivering. ‘I haven’t told the kids this, but they found his body a couple of days later. It looked like he’d been in a fight. They didn’t want me to see, but I insisted because I couldn’t believe it was really him, and it was horrible!’ Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks, and she dragged a handkerchief from the pocket of her jeans.

  ‘You said “they”. Who found him?’

  She mopped at her eyes and sniffed.

  ‘Actually, it was Liam Sellyoak’s groundsman that found him. Liam lives next door, at the manor, though he’s not often there.’

  ‘Liam Sellyoak the footballer?’

  ‘That’s right. Then Taylor went round to identify Monty before telling me. He brought the body home.’ Her voice cracked and she covered her eyes with her hand. ‘I still don’t understand why it happened. I mean, he never normally strayed far and he wasn’t a fighter. He was done – you know, neutered – so it wasn’t as though he was out after a bitch on heat, or something. Anyway, I couldn’t tell the kids. Not after Gavin and everything. It was just too much. I didn’t want them having nightmares. I told them he’d been knocked down by a car. They were devastated. They still are.’

  ‘They’ll get over it, given time. Kids are tougher than you think.’

  ‘I know. The trouble is they keep asking when we’re going to have another dog – Harry, especially. He keeps on and on about getting a puppy, but I’m scared in case something happens to that, too. I feel like nothing’s safe any more. I worry about the kids all the time, too.’

  ‘That’s only natural, considering what’s happened, but
it will get better. Trust me.’

  ‘You’re probably right.’ She sniffed and wiped her eyes. ‘Sorry. Have you got kids?’

  ‘Just one. Drew. He’s nine. He lives with his mother most of the time.’

  ‘Do you see much of him?’

  ‘Not as much as I’d like. Amanda and I are getting a divorce, and things are difficult at the moment.’ Once again, Daniel steered the conversation back to the story of her husband’s attack, and, with a tenuous control on her tears, Jenny recounted the manner in which his body had been found lying on the driveway.

  ‘Sue – she’s my stable manager – found him on her way in to work and called me. I thought he was dead. There was blood coming from his nose and one ear, and he was so cold. There was a frost on the ground, but the doctors say that although he was suffering from hypothermia, the cold might actually have saved his life, stopped him bleeding to death.’

  ‘And the police haven’t any idea what happened?’

  ‘Not really. He still had his mobile phone and wallet, so it wasn’t a mugging. He had head injuries, but there was no sign that he’d been hit by a car or anything. They did say they thought he’d been moved – something to do with the grit found in the wound – but who would do that?’

  ‘It’s certainly odd. And he hasn’t said anything at all since it happened?’

  She shook her head. ‘He’s been unconscious the whole time. It’s awful. He just lies there so still, and I talk to him, about the kids and the business and such, but I don’t know if he can even hear me.’ She fell silent, staring at the tabletop, a crease between her brows. ‘I feel so guilty.’

  ‘What have you got to feel guilty about?’

  She shrugged again.

  ‘Nothing. Everything. Things I said, things I didn’t say. That sounds stupid, but things could have been better, you know? We had a few problems, a few rows, and now I might not get the chance to try and put it right.’

  ‘You know, it’s normal to feel like that,’ Daniel said. ‘But you have to let it go. Nobody’s life or relationship is perfect all the time.’