The Slay of the Land (The Heathervale Mysteries Book 1)

by Matilda Swift

  It couldn’t be true. Gillian DeViers couldn’t have been made head of Heathervale College. That made absolutely no sense at all. And surely, Arrina would have heard something about it.

  Then she remembered her encounter with Victor in the village hall earlier. He’d wanted to speak to her, and Arrina had brushed him off, assuming it was about Olly. But perhaps he’d been intending to tell her that her suspension had been made permanent and, worse still, that she’d been replaced by Gillian DeViers.

  He would have called or sent an email about that though. Arrina hadn’t received a notification about any contact from him at all.

  A sense of dread washed over her as she remembered that she’d turned her email notifications off that morning. At that time, she hadn’t wanted to hear about Maggie Lee quitting her job. But Arrina wondered whether she’d inadvertently missed an update on her own position.

  Every cell in her body urged her not to do it, but Arrina opened the email app on her phone. She squinted as she looked at the screen. There, at the top of her emails, was a message from Victor Stones. The subject line was: UPDATE ON SUSPENSION. Arrina didn’t have to read it to know what it contained. But she did anyway.

  It was just as Julie had said.

  She read the message over and over again, not once losing the plummet of shock in her stomach as she read of the board’s decision. Apparently, due to her inability to step back from her position while suspended, she was being fired with immediate effect. And her replacement was Gillian DeViers.

  Arrina read the email in her car. She read it as she trudged up the hill to her house. She read it as she poured out food and milk for Tinsel. Again, as she sat numbly on her window seat and ate one of Julie’s brownies without even tasting it.

  The words refused to lose their effect even as she read them for the thousandth time before she fell asleep in the early hours of the morning.

  She felt as though she read them in her sleep, and her dreams that night were all of a thousand-foot-high Gillian DeViers lifting one sharply heeled foot and bringing it down on top of Arrina’s head. On the underside of Gillian’s shoe was the email from Victor Stones. Just before it hit her, the word fired throbbed in a visceral, blood-soaked red.

  29

  The next morning, Arrina woke feeling exhausted in a way that reached deep inside her bones. Tinsel was sitting on the pillow by her head, awake and alert before Arrina for once, as though guarding her from dangers that might come into her bedroom.

  But the worst had already happened, and there was nothing that either she or Tinsel could do about it.

  Arrina needed a pot of her top-shelf tea, which was simply called Barry’s. It was a no-nonsense brand of breakfast tea from Ireland, and it made Arrina imagine a tall, burly Irishman picking her up and shaking her out. She crawled from her bed and put the kettle on. Then she turned to her fridge to get the milk.

  It wasn’t there. Arrina stood in front of the open fridge door and stared. She looked from shelf to shelf. It was one thing to lose her job to Gillian DeViers. That was bad enough. But now she couldn’t even find a large bottle of milk in her own fridge.

  She shut the door and gazed around the kitchen.

  There was the bottle—sitting out on the counter, right where she’d left it the night before when she’d filled Tinsel’s bowl. Arrina gave the milk a sniff and promptly poured it down the sink.

  She looked down at what she was wearing—a baggy old T-shirt, which had a tea stain splashed across the front and a small hole under the left armpit. She considered shoving her feet into her hiking boots and heading straight into the village for milk dressed like that. Why not? She was unemployed now. She might as well look the part.

  Tinsel sauntered into the kitchen and sat down in front of her on the stone floor. He slowly leaned his head back to look up at her face.

  He meowed.

  ‘What?’ she asked him. ‘Are you trying to make some sort of comment on my fabulous outfit?’

  He meowed again.

  ‘No, you’re probably just complaining about me pouring milk away.’

  Arrina thought about Julie and Phil’s recent milk spillage, which gave her an idea. She could bypass a trip to the village and drive to theirs for milk instead. Julie had probably gone to the café to open up by now, but Phil would be around.

  She messaged Julie:

  Can’t face the High Street today. Popping by your farm for some milk. Do you think I need to change out of the T-shirt I slept in? Don’t want to accidentally seduce your husband, and I do look absolutely ravishing.

  Julie started to type a response immediately, and Arrina smiled in anticipation of the jokes her best friend would make.

  No milk, Julie messaged.

  No farm. Closed by Environment Agency.

  No café today. All shut. Crisis mode.

  Then after several seconds, during which Arrina simply stared at the screen in disbelief, Sorry.

  Arrina didn’t know what to think. She tried calling, but Julie didn’t answer.

  She quickly typed a message to say how sorry she was and to let her know how she could help. Julie thanked her and said she would send more details soon.

  Arrina showered and got ready. She felt a knot in her stomach about Julie and Phil’s farm. And below that, there was a whole tangle of terrible feelings about her own situation. But for now, she was just going to focus on milk for her tea. There was nothing more that she could do.

  She dressed in dark jeans and a thin black jumper. The outfit was too warm for the Indian-summer that Heathervale was experiencing. But Arrina wanted the soft hug of the cosy clothes around her body.

  She drove down her hill and along the country lanes. For a Saturday, the roads were remarkably quiet, and Arrina had the strange sensation that everyone was gathered together somewhere and talking about her.

  She parked at the back of the village hall, where there were always a few free spaces. Today there were more than a few, and again Arrina had the creeping sensation that something was going on behind her back.

  She tried to brush it off.

  Then she walked quickly along the High Street, with her head firmly bent. She was sure she heard whispering from the few people she passed, but she ignored it and headed straight to the village’s cramped three-aisle supermarket.

  She did not look at anybody in there. Didn’t even glance up to meet the checkout boy’s eye as he scanned her single pint of milk.

  The only time Arrina looked up was right as she was about to leave the tiny shop—there, on a rack by the door, was the free local paper. And on the front page was the smug, powdery face of Gillian DeViers, announcing her new position as the head of Heathervale College.

  Of course Gillian had run straight to the paper and insisted on the front page. Arrina wasn’t even surprised.

  Rows and rows of Gillian faces leered at her. She almost reached out to pick one up. But she couldn’t bear to do it. Not even if the article would explain how Gillian planned to keep the college going in spite of the ongoing murder investigation.

  Arrina quickly pushed out of the shop, milk in hand, and headed directly to the village hall to drive home.

  Just as she turned the corner at the back of the hall, she ran into Olly’s mother. The two women collided and looked up, blinking as though they had both just emerged from darkened rooms.

  ‘I’m sorry—’ Arrina started, but before she could continue, the other woman hurried away.

  Arrina stared after her, mouth open but no words coming to fill it.

  What had that been about? She understood that Olly’s mother must be as worried as Arrina about the reactions of people in the village—more so, in fact, since her son had been arrested for murder. But surely, she didn’t think she had to hide from Arrina.

  It had really come to something when even a murder suspect’s mother wouldn’t give her the time of day.

  Arrina walked the last few feet to her car and got in. Then she twisted her key w
ith such abrupt annoyance that her engine spluttered and instantly cut out. She tried again. The engine turned over noisily. It coughed and wheezed. She tried once more, though she knew it was useless. It would need at least five minutes to recover before Arrina could try again.

  She glanced in the rear-view mirror at the village hall. It loomed behind her, promising black-and-white confirmation that she’d lost the access road vote. She knew she shouldn’t go and look. But in spite of herself, Arrina left her temperamental car behind, walked around to the front of the large, empty building, where the door was open all day, and let herself in.

  The planning records were pinned to a noticeboard beside the stage at the far side of the room. Arrina couldn’t make her own access road form out from the doorway, but she imagined that she could see the red Application Denied stamp on it already.

  She walked over slowly, as though the seconds before the outcome was confirmed were somehow worth savouring.

  Reaching the noticeboards, the first thing she saw was Phil’s application to have the fences mended on the hill above his farm in order to keep the sheep from escaping and blocking the road. He’d been rejected, and Arrina felt bad for him. But then she wondered if it mattered at all now anyway, given what was happening on the farm.

  She walked along the wall of all the villagers’ current applications until she reached the information about the access road for the college.

  The council’s response to the application was full of obscure, unreadable jargon, and Arrina was tempted to pull out her red teacher’s pen and start editing it. But that wasn’t important right then. The message was clear enough—the petition for the road had been rejected. The stamped words Application Denied at the bottom further confirmed it.

  There would be no access road to the college. Not even that legacy, which Arrina might have been happy to leave the college with as her final, lasting accomplishment—even that wasn’t going to happen now.

  Instead, Arrina would just slink off to whatever backwater, juvenile-delinquent place would employ a woman who had lost her last job due to a murder investigation. Soon nobody in Heathervale would even remember her, and that would be that.

  Arrina wandered down the row of other planning applications. She sighed in annoyance when she saw that two people had already submitted their own bids for access roads.

  ‘Would they jump in my grave as fast?’ she murmured to the dust motes twirling through the empty room.

  One of the applications had been submitted by the Yates family. Arrina peered at the route that the proposed road would take. It was going straight through the Morgan woods. Arrina’s eyes widened in surprise. She knew that the Yates family weren’t pleased about the Morgans taking up several valuable acres of their land, but they’d never tried to do anything about it in the past. Perhaps they’d been too afraid to try themselves, and they hoped that the county roads people would do a better job at shifting the well-entrenched family.

  Besides that, the Yates family would get a tidy little payout if the road cut through their land. They were playing a risky game though. There was no telling what the Morgans would do when they heard about this.

  Arrina looked at the second application—it was the last one on the noticeboard, tucked away in the corner of the room. It hadn’t been submitted by a person but by a company—one that Arrina immediately recognised—Heathervale Feed and Farm Supplies. That was the company that Gillian DeViers claimed she ran, when in fact it was her sister, Colette, who worked hard to keep the family business going.

  The route for that road cut across the land around Gillian’s house—right through the apple trees which Wilfred Morgan had picked clean just two days earlier. Arrina frowned at the small map of the proposed access road. She didn’t understand why Gillian would want it to cut through her land. But no, it wasn’t just her land that would be paved over but Gillian’s house as well.

  ‘Why?’ Arrina exclaimed, getting no reply from the sunlit air. Could it be that Gillian’s sister, Colette, had submitted the application as revenge against her domineering sibling? But she must have known that it would never get past the Parish Council, where Gillian controlled the vote.

  ‘Mum, is that you?’ came a whisper from nearby. ‘Can I come out?’

  Arrina jumped in surprise. She looked all around the hall but saw nobody there. Then she heard a noise from the stage and walked cautiously in that direction. The voice had sounded familiar, but Arrina had no idea who would be hiding in the village hall in the middle of a Saturday morning.

  The door on the stage jiggled. It was the door that led to the annex and the back exit of the building, which was always locked when there wasn’t a meeting going on. Arrina knew from her own efforts to open it yesterday how stiff the stage door could be.

  Someone was back there now, shoving at the awkward door and wrestling it open.

  A head popped around and instantly ducked back.

  Arrina was left with a ghost of shocked eyes in the doorway and... no, that couldn’t be right. Her mind was playing tricks on her, surely. But she could have sworn it—above that pair of wide eyes, she’d seen a mop of bright-blue hair.

  Could it be?

  Arrina blinked. The boy was in prison. His parents had told her that. Arrina assured herself that she must be wrong. It was the tiredness. The stress. She promised herself that her eyes were being deceived.

  But it didn’t work.

  She ran across the hall and up the steps to the stage, then through the doorway in search of Olly.

  30

  ‘Olly,’ Arrina shouted into the gloom of the corridor. No reply.

  There were three doorways to choose from—the annex to the right, the storeroom to the left, and the back exit straight ahead. Arrina couldn’t pick which one seemed most likely. Olly wasn’t supposed to be in the village hall at all, let alone through any of those three doors.

  Arrina had just bumped into his mother. Surely, she would have stopped and told Arrina if her son had been released. Unless perhaps she didn’t know.

  The annex door stood slightly ajar. It was the site of Arrina’s access road defeat and where, she’d realised only later, Victor Stones had tried to tell her that she was being fired and replaced by Gillian DeViers. Arrina had no desire to go in there, but she did want to find Olly and discover what on earth was going on with the boy.

  She pushed the door open and flicked on the light. It was a classroom-sized space, with a table and chairs still set up in the centre of it. There were no doors or curtains to hide behind, no boxes or cupboards that a person could be concealed within, and no sign of Olly.

  Arrina walked out of the annex and crossed the corridor to the storeroom opposite. She’d been in there many times before. It was the same size as the annex but crammed with so much junk from various village events that there was barely enough space to walk along the length of it. Arrina couldn’t imagine what Olly would be doing in there, but she opened the door and stepped inside.

  The room was transformed.

  The panto props, play costumes, jumble-sale tables, and Christmas decorations were all neatly stacked up into a high wall in front of her.

  Arrina eyed the careful display. She spotted a gap at the end of the row of village paraphernalia. She squeezed through it and found herself in a makeshift bedroom—a mattress lay on the floor with an open suitcase of clothes beside it, and a few feet away, there was a table piled high with books, art supplies, and food packets.

  But there was still no Olly.

  She wondered if he’d slipped out through the back exit of the building. Though that was only open on meeting days. And besides, from the looks of this room, he was trying very hard to stay hidden. It didn’t seem likely he would risk going outside and being spotted. Arrina looked around the small, messy space.

  The wooden backdrops from last year’s panto were propped against the far wall—the painted palace where Cinderella’s prince lived was standing straight, but the grubby kitchen
where Cinderella herself slept was leaning at an angle. Arrina walked over and peered into the shadows behind it. Even in the low light, she could see Olly’s distinctive blue hair as the boy huddled in the narrow hiding place.

  ‘What on earth...?’ Arrina asked.

  Olly shuffled out from behind the painted wooden board.

  ‘I’m so stupid,’ Olly said. ‘I’m so, so stupid.’

  ‘Olly, what are you doing here? I thought you were being held by the police.’ She looked around the storage space again. The boy had been living here for days, by the looks of things.

  ‘Can you just go back to thinking that? I’m an absolute idiot for sticking my head out into the hall.’ Olly raked his fingers through his hair, which looked like it needed a wash. But for a teenage boy, he didn’t look too bad. He was clearly being taken care of by someone. ‘I thought you were my mum coming back.’

  ‘Your mum was here?’

  ‘No,’ Olly said. Then he pressed his lips shut, like a little kid trying to will a mistake away.

  ‘Olly, you’re not in trouble here.’ Though Arrina wasn’t actually sure that was true. How had he got out of police custody? ‘I just need to know what’s going on.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what’s going on,’ said a voice from behind Arrina. She and Olly both jumped at the interruption. Arrina swivelled around and found herself face-to-face with Tony Mellor.

  Tony was here. And he didn’t look surprised at the sight of Olly. In fact, he was staring hard at Arrina, making her feel like she was the one in the wrong.

  ‘That would be fantastic,’ Arrina said. ‘Because right now, it looks like... well, I’ve no idea what it looks like, but it’s certainly nothing good.’

  ‘What’s going on is that you’ve inserted yourself into a murder investigation, even though I specifically told you to leave it to the police.’

  ‘You locked up my student.’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I saw you take him away, and—’