All Things Undying (22 page)

I had to laugh. ‘Well, take care, Olivia. You still have my phone number, right?'

She patted her handbag. ‘Know what?'

‘What?'

‘I think I can wait to start being a barmaid. Alf wants watching, don't you think?'

EIGHTEEN

Simon Clark, ‘Gazumping London',
www.Bloomberg.com
, July 26, 2007

Although I drove around for several minutes, I couldn't find a single available parking space in the Visitors' Center car park. My hopes were raised when the tail lights of a green Vauxhall flashed white and the vehicle began to back in my direction. I had already turned the steering wheel, preparing to slip into its space, when another car zipped around the corner and beat me to it. The smirk on the driver's face as he aced me out made me wish I carried a box cutter so I could put it to good use on the young jerk's tires.

So I waited, idling, still fuming, near the entrance. Eventually, a woman entered the car park from Flavel Place, carrying two shopping bags. I followed her to her parking space, positioned the car strategically and waited while she stowed her purchases in the boot. She gave me a friendly wave, pulled out, and I slotted my car in, thinking, whew, dodged that bullet.

I walked the long way around to Horn Hill House, scanning light poles, eaves and rooftops along the way, checking to see if there were any CCTV cameras installed anywhere in the vicinity of the spot on the Embankment where Susan had been struck down.

Zero, zip, nada.

Other than a webcam on the roof of the Royal Castle Hotel (was it even operational?), Dartmouth didn't seem to be a town that was overly concerned about serious crime. Even the pint-sized police station appeared devoid of closed-circuit recording devices.

That night at dinner I asked Janet and Alan Brelsford about it.

Alan crossed his knife and fork on his plate and scowled. ‘Don't get me started!'

‘We petitioned for the cameras,' Janet said. ‘We don't have much trouble here on Horn Hill, but there have been a number of problems with hooliganism and vandals at Royal Avenue Gardens. However . . .' She drew out the word. ‘The town council, in their infinite wisdom, voted the proposal down.'

‘They think they can handle the vandalism and petty crime with better street lighting.' Alan picked up his silverware and began sawing on his lamb chop. ‘Idiots!'

‘What happened to Susan Parker had nothing to do with the presence or absence of street lighting, though, did it?' I sighed. ‘It was daylight. If there'd been a camera down there, the person who ran Susan down might even now be cooling his or her heels in one of Her Majesty's fine prisons.'

‘What you fail to understand, my American friend, is that installing CCTV cameras is an invasion of privacy. It might even contravene the Human Rights Act.' Alan drew quote marks in the air with his fingers.

‘In which case,' Janet huffed, ‘there needs to be a massive effort to pull them down all across the country. How many at last count? Forty-two million?'

‘To be fair,' Alan said, chewing thoughtfully, ‘the town council did consult the police, who weren't entirely on board. Said, and I quote, “it wouldn't help in the legal process”, whatever the hell that means.'

‘Stingy sods. They just don't want to spend the money!'

‘It's the same in the States,' Paul complained. ‘We bend over backwards to protect the guilty, always at the expense of the innocent.'

‘Makes me tired,' I said.

‘Me, too,' Paul said. ‘So, let's change the subject.' He smiled apologetically at our hosts, then affectionately at me. ‘Once you turn Hannah on, it's sometimes hard to turn her off.'

Five minutes later I was really ‘on,' telling the tale of my adventures with Olivia. I'd reached the part about the BMW and discovering the money in the boot, when the house phone rang.

Janet pushed her chair away from the table and hurried off to take the call. ‘Sorry, but that's probably a booking. They always call at night, for some reason.'

When Janet returned, she was grinning. ‘Guess who's coming back tomorrow?'

Back?
I thought for a minute. ‘Cathy Yates?'

‘Yup. By train, this time. I'm collecting her at the station in Totnes.' Janet reclaimed her chair, helped herself to more runner beans, then sent the bowl on another circuit around the table.

‘Had I but known,' I said, piling some beans on my plate, ‘I could have picked her up in her very own rental car.'

‘Oh, you squeaked by on that one, Hannah Ives.' Janet waggled her brows. ‘While you were in the shower, Europcar called saying they'd collected it. Cathy'd left them our number.'

Paul shook his head. ‘Hannah sometimes skates on very thin ice.'

I stuck out my tongue at him. ‘Better to be lucky than smart.'

Alan laughed. ‘Who said that?'

I shrugged. ‘I don't know, but it seemed appropriate.'

Janet turned to me. ‘Cathy says she has exciting news.'

‘Gosh, I wonder if she's found out more about her father?'

‘I asked her that, but she just laughed and said I'd have to wait until she got here.'

When Cathy arrived, she didn't make us wait long for her news. She dragged her bag into the entrance hall, parked it next to the newel post, and plopped herself down on a chair in the lounge. While five minutes out of Dartmouth, Janet had given me a head's up on her cell phone, so Paul and I were waiting for them.

‘You'll never guess in a million years, so I'll tell you.' Cathy slapped her hands on her knees. ‘I've just bought the Bailey farm, Three Trees.'

That can't be right
, I thought to myself. I glanced from Paul, to Janet, and back to Cathy again. ‘You bought Three Trees Farm?' I repeated dumbly.

‘Abso-flipping-lutely! Isn't that a gas?'

I was still trying to process the information when Paul said, ‘I thought it sold to a couple up in Manchester.'

Cathy grinned slyly. ‘Well, it did, but I outbid them.' She all but pulled the tablecloth out from under what remained of the tea things with a flourish and a cry of ‘Tah-dah!'

‘My offer was accepted several days ago.' She pressed her hands together, raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Thank you, Jesus!

‘We'll be exchanging contracts in a couple of weeks,' Cathy rattled on, ‘and my solicitor thinks that since it's a cash deal, and there's no chain of sales, we can go to completion on the same day.' She paused to take a breath. ‘Don't you just
love
British terms? Anyway, I don't know why there have to be so many steps, but with such an old farm, I guess they have to check out the boundaries, and rights of way and . . .' She waved a hand. ‘Makes my head hurt. That's what I pay the solicitor for, right? So
he
can buy the aspirin!'

As Cathy talked, Janet had been stacking the cups and saucers on the tea tray, but she stopped for a moment to ask, ‘Whatever made you decide to buy the Bailey farm, Cathy?'

Instead of addressing Janet, Cathy looked directly at me. ‘Remember when I told you that I had a private reading with Susan Parker, Hannah? I gave her a watch that used to belong to my father, and almost right away . . .' Cathy took a deep breath. ‘You know how she always used to see a letter, like in someone's name? Well, in my case, she saw a number. Three. Isn't that amazing?'

‘Amazing,' Paul said, using a tone of voice I recognized. I inched my foot closer to his and got ready to stomp.

‘Then she got all shivery,' Cathy continued. ‘She put her hands on her neck, and started gagging. Said she couldn't breathe, like she was strangling. Right away, I knew I was on the right track.'

‘You did?' I had absolutely no idea what Cathy was going on about.

‘Didn't you ever wonder how the farm got its name?'

Janet stopped fiddling with the tea tray and sat down. ‘Would it be stating the obvious to say that perhaps at one time, there were trees there, and that the trees were three in number?'

‘That's right!' Cathy said, a proud teacher commending a student. ‘But not just any trees, Janet. In the seventeenth century, those trees served as an unofficial gallows!'

I thought it was a stretch, and Paul did, too. Before I could stop him, he commented, ‘Three trees and a hanging could just as well apply to the crucifixion of Christ.' Anticipating objection, he raised a hand. ‘Just saying.'

Cathy ignored him. ‘My father's body lies on that farm somewhere, Hannah, I can just feel it. And Susan could, too. Honest to God, when I saw on CNN that somebody'd run her down, and she had
died
, I cried buckets. Buckets! She was the real deal, wasn't she?'

‘I like to think so, Cathy, but Susan was always the first to admit that she could occasionally be wrong.'

Cathy flapped a hand. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've heard all that. But you know what?' She leaned forward, as if her words were only for me. ‘That means that some of the time, she's gonna be tee-totally right!'

Claiming jet-lag, Cathy eventually left, heading up to her room to settle in.

As soon as she was out of earshot, I telephoned Alison, playing it casual. ‘How's your father?' I asked. ‘How's he dealing with the sale?'

‘Wait, wait, wait!' Alison said. ‘You're not letting me get a word in edgewise!'

‘Well, OK,' I said. ‘Over to you!'

‘I was just about to call you, Hannah. Have I ever got news!'

‘News?' I was playing dumb.

‘You'll never, ever guess who bought the farm.'

‘Is this a trick question, Alison? I was there, remember? When you told Paul and me about the buyers from Manchester. Champagne? Party hats?'

‘Well, they got gazumped.'

‘That sounds ominous.' Visions of the Mancs sprang to mind, felled in their prime by a rare, African disease contracted while on holiday in Kenya. ‘What's gazumped?' I honestly didn't know.

She laughed. ‘A London company trumped their offer by a good ten thousand pounds. There was a bidding war, actually, and the poor Mancunians kept upping their offer in thousand-pound increments, but eventually they had to drop out and the London people won.'

‘Who would want Three Trees that badly?' I asked, feeling guilty about playing Alison along.

‘You'll never guess.'

I hate playing Twenty Questions. ‘Is it bigger than a bread box?'

‘Oh, Hannah, you crack me up! As soon as I tell you this, you will guess for sure. The buyer is American!'

‘Could it be . . .' I paused for dramatic effect. ‘Cathy Yates?'

‘Exactly! I was gobsmacked.'

‘I'm gobsmacked, too,' I told her truthfully. It's just that I had been smacking my gob about ten minutes earlier. ‘Does your father know?'

‘We're not going to tell him until after we complete.'

‘Alison, that could be weeks! How can he not know?'

‘Well, the offer was made through a limited partnership in London. Cathy's the only partner, of course, but Dad won't know that.'

‘Crimenently, Alison. Your father will have a stroke when he finds out!'

‘So what? At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the money. And after we've completed, there'll be nothing Stephen Bailey or anybody else can do.'

NINETEEN

Pat Kemp,
Ministry of Food: Women's Land Army: Index to Service Records of the Second World War 1939–1948, Series: MAF421,
National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey

W
hile Paul was soaking in the tub, I kicked off my shoes, climbed on to the bed and reached for my iPhone. Olivia hadn't given me her phone number, but when she called me earlier in the week, the number had been captured in my ‘Recents' folder. I scrolled through the list of incoming calls, tapped her number, adjusted a pillow behind my back, and waited while it rang.

No answer.

I left a brief message asking Olivia to call me back, then joined Paul in the bathroom, a place, Paul always claimed, where he did some of his finest work. The toilet lid was up, so I put it down and sat on it.

Paul glanced up from the paperback he was reading to ask, ‘So, how was your day, sweetheart?'

Paul had bugged out on me at tea time, leaving me alone in front of the television screen with Cathy and the dirty dishes, so I hadn't had the chance to tell him about an unnamed person from Totnes who was presently, according to a police spokesman on BBC1, helping police with their enquiries in the Parker case.

‘There are a lot of people living in Totnes,' Paul reasoned after I'd finished. ‘Why are you so eager to pin the hit-and-run on poor old Alf?'

‘He gives me the creeps?'

‘Hah! Take that to the police and they'll act on it right away.'

‘I'd sure like to know where he got all that money.' I smiled, remembering Olivia's reaction when she opened the bag. ‘Olivia calls it wonga. I looked it up, by the way. It comes from “wanger”, a Gypsy word for coal which was apparently used as currency at some time in the past.'

‘Dough, moolah, cabbage, bread, bacon . . . whatever. Maybe he doesn't trust banks to take proper care of his wonga.'

I giggled. ‘When you put it that way, it sounds mildly off-color.'