Cold in the Earth (26 page)

In a few days at most the farm would be given the all-clear and she and the children could go home at last. It was a bitter irony that having left so reluctantly she should be so dreading her return: the empty chicken run, the deserted fields and at the centre of it all a disheartened, resentful man who had nothing to do to pass the long days. Even Meg would be low-spirited; collies were highly intelligent, over-sensitive creatures and even a day or two without work was enough to induce a crisis of self-confidence. The children, too, had got used to the freedoms of the town and being the focus of their grandparents’ attention; going back to the farm, with no animals, a depressed father and their mother’s cooking – correction, make that heating up of ready meals – would be a difficult adjustment. It was all going to be very, very tough.

She sighed as the car rattled over the cattle-grid and glanced round about her. Such a bleak picture! No sheep. No birds that she could see. Pine trees motionless and grey with frost. The little burns all locked into stillness. A nuclear winter might be something like this: a silent, ice-bound landscape with a low red sun veiled in brownish cloud. They were forecasting snow today and Marjory was keen not to be up on this high, exposed ground when it started.

There was the Chapelton ‘Pedigree Herd’ sign; she turned in. There was no one guarding the entrance today and she wasn’t sure if there would be anyone at the crime scene either. She couldn’t see any cars parked outside the imposing Victorian mansion.

There were steps flanked by balustrades leading up to the front door and to one side was a room with a wide bay window which was Jake Mason’s study and which, with the smaller farm office, was the only place in the house they were authorised to search. They could also enter the flat in the steading where Diana Warwick had lived, but the Sheriff had been strict and the terms of the warrant were very specific. Human Rights legislation outlawed any sort of fishing expedition and he had considered intrusion on the personal areas of the house unjustified by the evidence. It was for today only; if they wanted an extension he would be prepared to listen to their arguments.

In fact, there was no way that Fleming could have rationalised bringing in extra manpower for a search and it was such a huge place that she’d have time for only the most cursory look round if she were to be in time for her appointment with Bailey – and it was never wise to keep him waiting.

Conrad had supplied the keys with a bad grace and no instructions. She had to try three before she found the one which would admit her to the vestibule – ten feet square, fourteen feet high with a floor of encaustic tiles as its only feature – then pressed down the brass lever latch on the mahogany inner door with its etched frosted glass and went into the hall. It was a huge, sombre space with elaborate ceiling mouldings and a heavily carved staircase going up from its centre to a landing the full width of the hall. There it divided into two flights, rising to either side under three tall arched windows fitted with opaque leaded glass which reduced the amount of light while adding little to the decor. There were no curtains or carpets to reduce the harsh effect of so much dark, highly varnished wood.

Her feet echoing on the parquet floor, Fleming went towards the study and let herself in. Almost the first thing she noticed was the smell of dust, which caught at her throat. She wasn’t, heaven knew, the best housewife in the world – ask Cat – but this was the smell of deep-seated neglect, lodged in the heavy, dark red velvet curtains and the upholstery of the button-backed chesterfield. It looked as if when the Masons had bought the property they’d taken over the furnishings as well and they hadn’t been cleaned since.

She’d heard that bulls were Jake Mason’s religion: this, then, was the Holy of Holies. From the walls, a hundred bulls looked down from posters, photographs, framed newspaper cuttings. There were rosettes, silver cups and statuettes. Above the elaborate fireplace hung the massive head of a black bull, a silver plate below it presumably declaring its champion status though it was too dark with tarnish to read. Its glass eyes were dull under a film of dust and Fleming could see where moths had eaten away at the hide. The horns, though – those sharp, forward-pointing horns – were still undeniably impressive.

She stood below, looking up at them. On their own farm they’d always had polled cattle. Some came that way genetically; some you de-horned because they were dangerous otherwise. Even cows, if they had a calf to defend, could be lethal, but she’d read in one of the reports that Mason refused to poll his herd despite a string of minor incidents and one or two major ones. Demeaning, he had called it. Allegedly.

As a weapon, horns were finely adapted. It was, after all, what they were designed to be and a blow, delivered with the thrust of a powerful neck behind it, could readily produce the injury the pathologist had described.

Right. She glanced at her watch – quarter to ten. If she wanted to look at the flat and the field again she couldn’t afford to stand speculating. She took a rapid mental inventory of the room in case a follow-up was needed: the ledgers on either side of the fireplace, the remarkable silver bull mask, black with tarnish, on the other wall, the list of things to do on the desk in the window – phone NFU, phone MAFF, order feed-stuff – which was probably the last thing Jake Mason wrote before his stroke. And was, by all accounts, the last thing Jake Mason was ever likely to write.

Locking up as she left, she went out, walking down the icy steps with some caution, then headed for the stockyard building. A dozen housekeepers had since passed through the flat Diana Warwick had occupied, but Fleming still wanted to see it for herself, to try to imagine how it would have felt to have been an adventurous girl accustomed to roaming the world, finding herself isolated in this backwater.

The door to the flat opened on to a steep staircase and led into a small sitting-room furnished with what looked like rejects from the main house. In the bedroom, a cheap-looking divan, an old-fashioned wardrobe and a chest-of-drawers took up most of the floor space. The bathroom looked pre-war, untouched apart from its accumulated chips and cracks, and the kitchen was a curtained area with a discoloured sink and two electric rings.

She went to the window with its view of the straggly maze she remembered and stood looking out, as Diana must have done too. Why had the girl come here – and, more importantly, why had she stayed? It was understandable that leaving home in a temper, you might take up the casual offer of a job, but why would you stay in this shabby, claustrophobic place with a thoroughly unreasonable mistress? There were always people who weren’t Brett Mason advertising for housekeepers.

You’d stay if you were in love. If you were in love, you were dumb enough to put up with anything – though Fleming had a suspicion that the bathroom might have finished it as far as she personally was concerned.

So who was the man? Diana had met Max and his father in Pamplona, which was why she was here in the first place. In that situation the smart money would be on Jake; what twenty-year-old girl is likely to fancy a seventeen-year-old boy?

She hadn’t even met Conrad before she arrived. So she hadn’t come here for love of him – although that didn’t mean he was ruled out. She might have come because it was convenient, but stayed because she’d fallen for him. The same applied to Scott Thomson, of course, if your taste was for a bit of rough. So where did that get you? Nowhere.

Fleming let herself out of the flat, glancing nervously at her watch. It was after ten now; if she was to be sure of getting back in time she must leave by ten-thirty. Keeping Donald waiting, as he had explained to her at their first encounter, was not so much a discourtesy to him personally as an undermining of the whole structure of the police force. Half-past ten at the very latest.

She walked on down the drive to the field where Diana’s body had been interred, a five-minute walk from the flat. The scene was very different today from the last time Fleming had been here; the air was clean again now that the slaughtered carcasses of the cattle had been removed, there was no one about and at the far end of the field a yellow digger stood abandoned in what had become a sea of frozen mud. Where the plastic tent had been only blue and white crime scene tapes strung between metal poles marked Diana’s unofficial grave. There was nothing to be learned here. Fleming turned back.

Deep in thought before, she had barely noticed the entrance to the maze as she had passed it, a wrought-iron gate rusting now and listing on its hinges. Beyond it the privet hedges were a disordered tangle, with some bushes overgrown and leggy, some sparse from lack of pruning and some no more than dead twigs. The delineation of the pathways she remembered fleeing down, pursued and shrieking with delicious childish terror, had all but disappeared; you could find your way through gaps to the centre of the maze and that strange monument to the Minotaur – half-man, half-bull. If it was still there.

Prompted by curiosity, she opened the gate. It rasped on its rusty hinges; she had to lift it up to move it and when she let it go again it sank on to one corner at a drunken angle.

Beneath her feet, the ground was uneven and iron-hard. Old dead leaves, blown in heaps against the base of the hedge, were a grey, frozen sludge, but every blade of the rough grass in the alleyways, every leaf of the straggly privet, was separately encased in its pall of frost. There was no colour, no sound; under the threatening, gun-metal sky the maze looked as if it had been ice-bound for a hundred years.

Fleming’s breathing seemed unnaturally loud. It condensed in steam and rose in front of her, moving like the only other living thing in this dead landscape. She shivered. Her fingers and toes were starting to sting in the biting cold so she swung her arms and stamped as she set off.

Neglect had blurred the labyrinthine pathways but the maze had not lost its power to mislead. There seemed to be only one way which wasn’t overgrown, leading directly from the gate; following it round, Fleming found that it was a blind alley and she was boxed in by a thick stand of privet, through which she could see the centre space but not reach it and was forced to retrace her steps to find a way through.

And there it was, just as she had remembered it, though weeds had forced their way through the stonework as the mortar had crumbled and where there had been smooth green sward were now rough grass and nettles.

The plinth was about three feet square and about four high, built of the local sandstone, and it too showed signs of neglect. Some of the mortar in its walls had crumbled with frost and rain though there had been a clumsy repair to hold in place the large flat stone on top, into which a metal plaque had been inset like a sundial. The engraved image was obscured by a layer of rime; Fleming rubbed at it with her fingers and as it melted the lines of the carving emerged.

It had given her nightmares as a child and she wasn’t altogether sure that it wouldn’t now. It was brilliantly executed, done in profile and with a certain relish at the brutality of the subject. The dramatic head of the bull wrinkled horribly and realistically at the neck into a powerful human torso; the arms and hands reached forward as if to grasp a victim while the strongly muscled legs and thighs indicated the beginning of a prancing charge.

Max had called his father the Minotaur, according to Laura Harvey. And from what Marjory could remember of the Greek myth, the Minotaur had demanded tribute of youths and maidens; was it possible that Diana Warwick, having been killed by Jake’s bull, became some sort of sacrifice linked in his diseased mind with this most bizarre place? Yet the maze had been Edgar Mason’s folly, not his son’s; surely, if this had been an ancestral practice, someone would have noticed over the years if maidens regularly went missing from the district?

This was ridiculous. She was allowing the atmosphere of the place to cloud her judgement. And that was the first flake of snow; the sooner she got out the better.

She went back, as she thought, the way she had come, but yet again found herself trapped by thick privet. She really had no time to waste; she decided to force her way through, fairly sure that on the other side was the blind alley she had come along before which would lead her to the gate. It wasn’t easy; the branches were springy and put up brutal resistance; she had scratches on her hands by the time she reached the other side of the hedge. Stepping out of it, she felt a twig snatch at the fabric of her trousers and with some irritation stopped to release herself.

Bending down, she saw in the heart of the hedge, near the bottom, a small piece of fine chain hanging on a twig. It was black with dirt but when, out of curiosity, she picked it up and rubbed it in her fingers it showed gold. It had a tiny gold charm and a catch but that was still closed; the fragile chain had snapped in the middle. Perhaps it was a bracelet which had caught on a twig, like her trousers, and the owner hadn’t noticed at the time. It didn’t look particularly valuable anyway.

She was turning away when she remembered suddenly a snatch of the conversation with Laura Harvey: she’d said something about an ankle bracelet her sister had always worn. Fleming fished it out of the hedge and looked at it again.

Yes, it could well be an ankle bracelet. She’d never had one herself – had always thought they were a bit trashy – but wrist bracelets weren’t usually as delicate as this. And the minute charm, now she looked at it closely, was in the shape of a dolphin. She turned back, frowning, to look at where it had been. If Diana Warwick had been wandering round in the maze, she’d better check it out more thoroughly.

The slender chain had certainly been there for a long time; the hedge had grown out and round it. And now she noticed too that above, caught in the centre of the hedge, was a small piece of rag, blackened and frayed. Probably a trivial record of some earlier visitor and entirely irrelevant, but given the bracelet, it would be worth following the principle that everything is evidence until you’ve proved it isn’t. She teased it out carefully and folded it in a tissue before putting it, with the broken chain, into her pocket.