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

by Matilda Swift

  Arrina couldn’t imagine where the sheep had come from. There were often sheep on the road above the Hayes place, which bordered the pastureland at the top of the hill. But this little lane snaked along a few other houses and on past Julie and Phil’s farm—which had cows but no sheep on it—before plunging down into the village to join the main road to Grindleford.

  Arrina rang Tony, grateful for the reliable phone signal in this part of Heathervale. She wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to tell him. But something about the tractor was setting off alarm bells in her head, and Arrina needed Tony to know about it.

  Tony’s phone rang and rang, but he didn’t answer.

  Perhaps it was foolish to be so worried about the tractor. Whoever had tampered with it had got what they wanted—Hugo was dead. And the killer couldn’t have any idea that Arrina was making a connection between the tractor accident several months earlier and the killing at the college. They wouldn’t know that they were coming closer to being caught.

  Still, she tried Tony again. She got no response. More sheep wandered around the corner. All Arrina had to do was wait for the flock to pass, and Tony would be there. She was sure of it.

  He would come and fix everything.

  ‘It... he...’ Fiona murmured. Arrina turned to the woman, whose face was ghostly pale. Fiona swayed on her feet, and Arrina and Ryan both rushed forwards and caught her before she fell. They helped her over to the low stone wall at the end of her driveway, where she muttered a few more words before finally finding the power within herself to put a sentence together.

  ‘The tractor isn’t Hugo’s,’ Fiona said. Her voice quavered, and Arrina thought at first the words were nonsense. Of course, the tractor was Hugo’s. He’d been driving it that day when she’d almost got run over.

  But then she realised what she’d been missing—the puzzle piece that her brain was straining to find. Arrina still had one arm around Fiona, and with the other, she gripped her phone so tightly she thought it might break.

  Arrina glanced over at the cherry-red tractor. And she recalled the charm bracelet she’d found in the grass beside Fiona’s house. The tiny tractor charm on it was a perfect match to the vehicle in front of her right now. ‘It’s not Hugo’s,’ Arrina said. ‘The tractor belongs to Maggie.’

  Fiona nodded and clutched a hand to her chest. ‘Hugo bought it for her,’ Fiona said. ‘He was taking it on a test drive when he lost control and crashed it.’

  ‘I was there,’ Arrina said. ‘He thought he’d hit a rock and the tractor had raced on ahead of him.’

  ‘It was the wiring,’ Ryan said. ‘The engine was set to increase its speed as soon as it moved up a gear. And it couldn’t be stopped with the brake.’

  The sheep coming down the road were moving slowly but surely towards them while Arrina’s mind raced at breakneck speed.

  ‘And you’re sure it was fine when Hugo bought it?’ Arrina asked.

  She felt Fiona’s shoulders shaking as the woman cried silent tears. It was bad enough that her husband had been killed, but to hear that someone had tried to kill him a few months earlier as well must have been awful. And the thought that Maggie might have been in the vehicle when it crashed was surely even worse.

  ‘Yes,’ Ryan said. ‘My mum and dad did the inspection together. They love working on tractors, and I know they wouldn’t have missed something like this.’ He looked back down at his clipboard again and leafed through the paperwork on it. ‘There wasn’t a single thing wrong with it. Mr. Hayes picked it up himself.’

  ‘And he drove it back from—’

  ‘No, wait,’ Ryan said. ‘There’s a note here on the inspection report. It says Hugo Hayes was supposed to come and collect it, but he couldn’t make it that morning. It looks like someone else picked it up for him. I can’t make out the signature though.’

  He held the paperwork out to Arrina, who was sitting by Fiona.

  Arrina leaned over to peer at the scrawled name. But before she could even make a guess at what it said, Fiona read the name of the person who’d picked up the tractor from the garage—the only person to touch it between its inspection and the time it was crashed by Hugo.

  ‘Rory,’ she said. Her voice no longer shook. Her shoulders did not feel weak beneath Arrina’s arm. ‘Rory picked up the tractor that day. I remember now. Hugo told me his brother collected it and insisted on looking at the engine himself. Rory knew it was a gift for Maggie. She was supposed to come over that afternoon to try it out.’

  ‘Rory looked at the engine,’ Arrina repeated. ‘And he knew Maggie was going to drive it.’

  37

  Arrina stood up as she rang Tony’s number again. He still didn’t answer. She looked down the lane at the road full of sheep. They’d almost reached the house now. Arrina thought of squeezing through the placid animals and running to Tony. But the thick clot of woolly bodies filled the road entirely. It would take far too long to get through.

  ‘Where’s Maggie now?’ Arrina asked.

  Fiona glanced down at her watch. Then she whispered, ‘She’s at the farm. Rory’s got the combine harvester out today. He’s planning to show her how it works.’

  The woman looked decades older than her sixty years. She looked as though she could crumble into dust or crack into a thousand tired pieces. Yet she pulled herself instantly up to her feet. She strode back towards the driveway of her house. ‘I’ll get the car,’ she said. ‘Call the police.’

  Arrina could already see the ease with which someone could slip beneath the wheels of a combine and get churned up by the dangerous machine. An accident, Rory could claim. A tragic but common accident on a working farm like his.

  She couldn’t let that happen to Maggie.

  The bleating sheep continued their slow march along the road. The leaders of the flock were almost level with the cherry-red tractor.

  ‘We need to go now,’ Arrina said, ‘or we’ll be blocked in.’ Then she turned to her ex-student. ‘Ryan, give me the tractor keys.’

  He pulled them from his pocket and started to climb up into the cab.

  ‘No,’ Arrina said. She could have used Ryan for his tractor-driving skills, but this was too dangerous a situation to put him in. She pulled him back and took the keys. ‘You stay here and look after Fiona. She’ll panic when she realises that she can’t get to the farm herself. But call the police, and keep her calm. Try to call Maggie as well.’

  Arrina knew that the last part was impossible. They wouldn’t be able to call Maggie if she was up at the Hayes farm. The signal in that part of the village was atrocious. Usually, Arrina was glad of it since it kept the students off their phones while they were at college. But right now, she was cursing the situation.

  Arrina leapt up onto the tractor. She had driven Julie and Phil’s tractor several times, as well as a few others over her years in Heathervale, and always found it a thrilling adventure—sitting high above the world and bouncing over any obstacle in her path. But she wasn’t fond of tractors anymore.

  She checked the various levers and pedals, glad that this tractor looked familiar. Then she turned the key and put it in gear. The sheep around her front wheels didn’t even flinch at the roar of the huge engine. She threw the thing into reverse, prayed that Ryan’s family had worked out every fault in the wiring, and zoomed off backwards down the narrow lane.

  She went as quickly as she could, thanking her lucky stars that this tiny road was so quiet. There were no obstacles in her way. She backed all the way to the main road. Then she did an ungainly turn to get herself pointing in the right direction before pushing her way through the traffic to head towards the Hayes farm.

  At the first set of traffic lights, Arrina fumbled a set of headphones from her bag and Julie’s number onto her phone. She would only have a minute or two of signal as she passed through the centre of the village. But given how quickly Julie always spoke, that would be more than enough. Arrina only hoped she would be able to hear her over the rumble of the engine
.

  Julie answered straight away, and Arrina shouted, ‘Are there sheep in the road below your farm?’ She hoped the blockage did not go as far back as that. Otherwise there was no telling when Tony would be able to get through them.

  ‘Are there sheep? There are about a million of the bleeding things. They’re everywhere I look. I feel like I’m in a fabric conditioner advert or the dreamscape of a chronic insomniac.’

  ‘Where—’

  ‘And you know where they’re all coming from?’ Julie interrupted before Arrina could get her question out. ‘Those fences that Phil asked the Parish Council to fix. They turned him down yesterday, and it’s like the sheep have decided to celebrate their victory. They’ve flooded onto the road up above the farm. And to make matters worse, the Environment Agency have left all our gates open while they’re here on their ridiculous milk investigation.’

  Arrina swerved around a slow-moving Ford Escort as she passed the supermarket. A tiny smart car was heading straight towards her. She scanned the cab for a horn but couldn’t find one. She flashed her lights at the car until it pulled up onto the pavement to get out of the way.

  ‘You’d think they’d know better at the Environment Agency,’ Julie continued. ‘But no. Apparently, investigating harmless milk spillages and trying to close down small family farms keeps them too preoccupied to close gates behind them. So now there are sheep absolutely everywhere! They’ve surrounded the house completely—we’re trapped. It’s like we’re in some weird, fluffy version of a Hitchcock movie. And they’ve got down onto the lane below. Goodness knows how long it will take for them all to be rounded up. And if anyone thinks muggins here—’

  ‘Julie!’ Arrina shouted to interrupt her friend’s mile-a-minute diatribe. ‘I know this is a strange question, but is there a police car stuck in the flock of sheep on the road below you?’

  Julie was silent. Speechless for once in her life.

  Arrina flashed her lights again at a pair of elderly men who were crossing the road ahead of her. One of them shook his cane in the air. But when Arrina showed no sign of slowing down, he shuffled off at a surprising clip.

  ‘That is a strange question. And I don’t know how you could possibly know this, but there is a police car trapped down there. It’s been inching along for the past twenty minutes. It’s probably moved about two hundred metres since the sheep poured onto the road around it.’

  Arrina had been trapped by flocks of sheep herself several times in the past. The stupid animals didn’t respond to the beeps of a horn, and if she got out and shooed them, they simply ran back in amongst their friends, and the whole fluffy white mass churned around without progressing.

  ‘In fact,’ Julie said. ‘I’m just looking out of the window now, and there are three police cars stuck in a line.’

  Her voice crackled as she spoke, and Arrina knew she was reaching the edge of the signal in the centre of Heathervale. She didn’t want to slow down and risk not reaching Maggie in time. She had to think quickly.

  Three police cars. Tony had really meant it when he said he was calling in backup. Those were probably all the police cars for miles around. Tony surely didn’t think Fiona was dangerous enough to warrant such a show of force, but it wasn’t every day that they arrested a murderer in Heathervale, and certainly not one who was a prominent local citizen like Fiona Hayes. Most likely, Tony’s colleagues had followed him to witness an arrest that would go down in local history.

  ‘OK,’ Arrina said. ‘This will sound crazy, but I’m just going to call in all my best friend points and ask you to do me an enormous favour.’

  She expected some sort of jokey reply, or at least a comment on the fact that Arrina had overextended her best friend credit by a long way in the past few days. But Julie simply said, ‘Name it.’

  ‘I need you to fight your way through the sheep somehow and get down to those police cars. Tell the officers inside that Rory Hayes is the one who murdered Hugo. I’m pretty sure he’s planning to kill Maggie Lee as well. She’s at his farm right now, and I think she’s in danger. I’m driving over there, and I need the police to come and help me.’

  Julie said nothing.

  ‘Hello?’ Arrina said. ‘Julie?’

  There was no reply. When Arrina glanced down at the phone, she saw that the call had ended. She’d lost the last thread of signal as she drove towards the college. She hoped that Julie had heard at least part of what she’d said.

  If not, Arrina was going over to face down a murderer utterly alone.

  38

  The huge cherry-red tractor veered dangerously on the country-lane corners that led to the Hayes family farm. Arrina was only a couple of minutes away now, and she had no idea what to do when she arrived. The Hayes farm was huge. It was split over two sites, which straddled the Hope Valley Bypass. Arrina had only ever seen the few fields at the back of the college. She had no idea where to begin looking for Rory.

  Sharp, swift breezes cut in around the window frames of the tractor cab. Her thoughts were shaken in her skull by the heavy trundle of the engine as she pushed the tractor to its limits. She searched her mind for a thread that made sense of what was happening.

  Rory Hayes had killed his own brother. Now he was trying to kill his niece as well. That didn’t seem possible. What was his motive?

  Arrina thought of the will that had been changed recently. Hugo’s will had previously passed everything to Fiona. But then Hugo had changed it to transfer the inheritance to Maggie. Why would that make a difference to Rory? Either way, the farm bypassed him entirely, and he had no heirs of his own.

  Arrina thought of the interactions she’d had with Rory over the past week. First, she’d seen him coming out of the greengrocers in a daze—eating an apple and appearing not to notice her. Then he’d run up to her at the drystone wall behind Fiona’s house and asked for a cigarette, even though he didn’t smoke. At the time, she’d chalked up his strange behaviour to grief and the stress of his brother’s death.

  But what if it had been more than that? What if he was trying to hold it together after he’d done the unthinkable? After he’d killed his brother in cold blood. Arrina couldn’t understand why, but she felt certain that he’d done it.

  Arrina drove past the front of the college. Blue-and-white police tape flapped in the breeze. Arrina dragged her gaze away and kept her focus on driving the enormous machine beneath her.

  She prayed for the sound of sirens in the distance. But she knew that all three of the local police vehicles were trapped by sheep on the other side of the village. Reinforcements were very far away.

  She reached the entrance to the Hayes farm and yanked the steering wheel sharply to the right. Driving down the short, rutted lane brought her to a farmhouse. She pulled up outside it and looked for signs that anyone was around.

  The noisy tractor engine blocked out all sounds, so she turned it off, opened the door, and looked at the place.

  It was a two-storey building made of old stone that had a faint green tinge from the lichen that covered it. White paint peeled from the window frames. Shattered slate tiles in the courtyard showed where the roof had been neglected to the point of collapse.

  There was no sign of life in there. Arrina considered going up to the house to see if anyone was inside. But then she heard the rumble of an engine in the distance. She knew that must be Rory’s combine harvester. And the dangerous piece of farm machinery would be excellent cover for an ‘accident’ in which Maggie Lee would lose her life.

  Arrina drove off in the direction of the sound, following well-worn paths around Rory’s harvest-ready fields. The engine complained as she pushed it to its limits, but Arrina kept going, urging the tractor up and down each smooth rise and dip of the ancient Peak District landscape. Undulating wheat spread as far as the eye could see.

  Then she caught a glimpse of bright yellow on the horizon. She’d seen that huge, trundling combine in the fields behind the college before. It was Rory’s. The path
she was on took a sharp left, but Arrina needed to continue straight in order to reach Rory.

  She looked around for another path to take her in that direction, but she could see nothing. She slammed the tractor into its highest gear, pushed up the throttle lever, and ploughed straight through the field in front of her. She flattened stalks of wheat. They swished as if a hurricane were passing through. Startled birds leapt up from every side, making Arrina jump and yelp in her seat.

  She could see nothing through the windscreen. Nothing on either side. Just wheat in every direction, like a golden sea trying to drag her in.

  Suddenly, she popped out into an empty field, and she slammed hard on the clutch and brake.

  She looked around.

  She had come to a stop at the peak of a gentle hill at one end of a fallow field. She killed the engine. She heard the combine humming through the fields again. It was louder than before. It was close. She swivelled in her seat to find it.

  There.

  Down past the fallow field was another one, high with autumn crops. Rory’s yellow combine was driving through it. The vehicle moved slowly. It pushed a cutter bar ahead, mowing down the firm stalks of wheat as if they were nothing.

  Arrina was too far away to see who was in the combine’s cab. But the neat turn it made at the end of the field made her certain that Rory was at the wheel.

  Was Maggie in there with him, or had something terrible already befallen the sweet young chemistry teacher? Arrina panicked at the thought of this. But she saw that Rory had only cut two neat strips of the field. Surely, he hadn’t hurt her already. If he wanted to make this look like an accident, he would need to seem like a tired farmer busy at his work. Arrina was hopeful that Maggie was still alive. But where was she?