The Final Curtain (3 page)

Joanna revised her approach. Normally in cases like this, once the police had decided there was no real threat, they reassured the occupants, quoting low crime statistics as fluently as a politician. Next they would give practical advice, sometimes to update door and window locks, sometimes to secure outbuildings and occasionally to link their burglar alarms to the police station. But here there was still a problem. It would be no use linking Butterfield Farm to the police station. Timony Weeks would continue calling them out on a daily basis, wasting hours of their time. And if there was an emergency it would take the police at least half an hour to reach her. There wasn't a police helicopter for miles. It would have to come from Manchester or Wolverhampton. If there really was a serious problem Timony Weeks would be on her own for some considerable time.

Joanna stopped to open the gate which bore an oval sign, Butterfield Farm, gaily painted with a couple of swallows wheeling around in a sapphire sky, and underneath it a second sign,
Beware of the Bull
. It was an obvious fable – there wasn't an animal in sight – but at least it was a change from
Beware of the Dog
. Or, as Joanna had read worryingly outside one house,
Beware of the Cat!

With good countryside manners she closed the gate behind her and descended gingerly down the track, avoiding skidding on the icy patches and pulling up outside.

There were two cars parked side by side, a blue Isuzu and a black Qashqai, with garaging room for plenty more. She noted four garage doors, a couple converted from barns, judging by the arches in the brickwork. So Mrs Weeks was not a farmer. Farmers had too many uses for barns to convert them into garages. Close up, the condition of the farm impressed her even more and reinforced her initial instinct that this was the property of either a very wealthy or a very industrious lady. Possibly both. Maybe it was her wealth that was feeding her paranoia. Rich people often suspected someone was about to come along and relieve them of their money and/or possessions. Perhaps this was the simple explanation of the calls to the police. Timony Weeks had so much to steal that she expected someone to rob her. As Joanna wondered she realized something else. Today was as bright and clear as a winter's day can be. There was no pollution in the moorlands. The air was crystal glass, practically ringing in its clarity. The sky was a sheet of perfect azure. The purity in the air comes only in winter, when dust and pollens are absent and the atmosphere is holding its breath, waiting for spring to breathe again. But however bright the day, the house itself was in the shade, which made it appear colder and darker than its surrounds. It had been built to peer out on the dark side, facing north-east, which gave the farm a forbidding and unwelcoming look. Joanna looked around her and worked out why. The house had been built with its long angle watching the approach. She climbed out of the squad car, conscious that she was treading in the footsteps of almost the entire Leek police force, including Detective Sergeant Mike Korpanski. Picturing Korpanski's size elevens beating a march to the front door, she finally chuckled to herself. It was her turn to meet the old bat.

As soon as Joanna had left the warmth of the car she felt the raw chill bite her face. It was always a few degrees colder out here than in Leek town centre. Snow could lie in the moorlands for weeks after it had melted on St Edward's Street. These lands not only had their own geography but also their own eco-climate. Global warming seemed a million miles – or more literally, a million years – from here. But the strange thing was that it was even colder down here, in the valley, than it had been up on the ridge. Unusual again. Normally people got blasted away by the cold, the wind and frequently the rain, when they were on the top. Valleys were, in general, where you found shelter – and homesteads. This was where the farmers would traditionally build, facing south to scoop up every ounce of warmth, light and sunshine. But not Butterfield Farm. It had patently been reconstructed in recent years, probably by its current owner. It faced the wrong direction and, besides, this valley was boggy. Joanna had noticed rushes sprouting in the surrounding fields, testifying to a high water level. If she was building a house with unlimited funds she would love Butterfield for its situation but she would have drained the valley and angled the house to face south.

Had this simply been designed by someone who did not understand how to make a house suit the land, or had it deliberately been rebuilt at this angle to face the track and keep watch for a lone traveller coming down the road? She stood and studied the farm. Now she understood she realized something else: every window watched her. Then another thought: was she being infected by paranoia too? Joanna wrapped her coat around her, tightened her belt and strode towards the front door. She hunted for either a bell or a knocker, found neither and thumped. As she had suspected from her distant view, Butterfield was a new build, probably rebuilt on the site of an ancient cottage with barns. That was the only way that you could get planning permission out here. So everything, the angle of the house, the watch over the approach and the fact that travellers could not ring or use a knocker, must have been decided by the owner, together with the architect. Why no bell or door knocker?

Had there
never
been either or had they been removed? Was the intention to positively
discourage
strangers from calling in to Butterfield Farm? If so, why?

She only had a minute to reflect before the door was pulled opened by a tall, muscular woman with straggly, greying hair and piercing eyes. She was somewhere in her late sixties, and was wearing baggy dark trousers and a cream polo neck sweater, the sleeves pushed up to display powerful, freckled forearms. She eyed Joanna with suspicion and some hostility.

‘Yes?'

‘Mrs Weeks?' Joanna asked dubiously. This did not look like the eccentric old bat she'd been imagining on her drive out. Or a retired actress, for that matter.

‘No, I'm not,' the woman said flatly. ‘She's inside. I'm Diana Tong, her secretary-cum-cleaner-cum-general-dogsbody.'

Joanna felt like retorting that she was also a dogsbody, answering a crappy summons made by a cracked old woman as a ‘servant of the public', but she resisted. If the new superintendent was as humourless as Korpanski had warned she'd better be careful. In future there would be no Colclough to make excuses for her, indulge her and haul her out of scrapes. She could not afford to be the teeniest millimetre out of line. And so she gave the woman a bland smile and introduced herself, resisting any sarcasm. At the same time she flashed her ID card and followed Diana Tong inside.

Again, inside Butterfield was tasteful. They had stepped straight into a kitchen, fitted out in yellowed pine with grey granite tops, an island in the centre and gleaming copper pans hanging from steel hooks. The floor was terracotta tiled, the walls painted a buttery cream. A red Aga stood at one end. The image of a farmhouse kitchen was completed with dark beams criss-crossing a white ceiling. Joanna looked around in admiration. Most women would kill for this kitchen. In fact, she would – well, not literally but … Impervious to her admiration, Diana Tong marched straight ahead, Joanna trailing in her wake. They passed through three rooms. Butterfield was a long, low house, one room deep, each room leading into another. They all had low-beamed ceilings and cream-washed walls. The doors were period oak, with thumb latches, and there were plenty of tasteful pieces of antique furniture, oak, mahogany and some walnut, all looking authentic and valuable. Chinese porcelain and Staffordshire figures sparsely distributed gave the rooms an air of quiet, dignified elegance. The walls were dressed with a few pictures that looked like original oils – a couple of portraits of people in period dress and some landscapes with sheep or cows. Lamps illuminated the darker corners with soft warmth and the ambience of shabby chic was completed by Persian silk carpets carelessly thrown around. But Joanna noticed that every single window faced north-east, watching the approach. Each time they moved to another room she was aware of the empty grey lane. Like a castle it guarded its entrance, as though expecting an assault. Beyond the lane were the pale peaks of the moorlands, today capped with snow. The entire place was like a feature in
Period Homes
and further evidence of being out of sync with the vision she had drawn up of a scatty, eccentric sixty-year-old who kept calling out the police in a panic because of strange, almost supernatural events. Joanna had to completely hold back on that assumption. This place was organized and controlled, and none of this was making any sense. Her toes tingled a little as she kept up with the broad back and brisk step of the very businesslike Diana Tong, who finally turned back to say, ‘Lovely, isn't it?' She flung her arms out wide. ‘This is what money can buy, Inspector Piercy.' Her tone was resentful, her thick eyebrows meeting in the middle in a deep, angry scowl.

Joanna couldn't think of a suitable rejoinder so she simply nodded and walked behind the ‘general dogsbody' into a final smaller room at the end of the house. As they entered a Burmese cat exited snottily past them, tail erect and twitching, as though she was too posh to remain in the room with a mere policewoman. Joanna lifted her eyebrows.

A tiny, bony woman was sitting at a desk, absorbed in a computer screen. She looked up and Joanna's confusion deepened. She looked nothing like the dotty old bat she'd imagined, but a calm woman in her forties, physically no bigger than a child. She was dressed in loose white cotton pyjama pants and a blue silk wrap, something like a smoking dressing gown Noël Coward might have worn. Joanna stared. That was way back in the 1930s. All the same, the woman who was sitting across the room was only missing a long, slim cigarette holder to be cast in a starring role in
Blithe Spirit
. It made the up-to-date computer that she was working on look slightly anachronistic, as though someone in a Jane Austen novel was chatting on a mobile phone.

Again, like the atmosphere from the outside, Joanna had an odd sensation that something here was not adding up.

She cleared her throat and wondered how to begin this. She wanted Timony Weeks to stop this repeated wasting of police time by calling out of police for what appeared to be ‘minor incidents' or calling in response to her ‘senses'. On the other hand, she owed the woman the benefit of the doubt.

As she waited the woman was busily studying her. Joanna met her gaze. And had another shock. The clothes might be 1930s; Timony Weeks aged sixty. But the face that looked at her was unlined and almost expressionless, the eyes thickly made-up with heavy black kohl, false eyelashes firmly and defiantly stuck on beneath tattooed eyebrows, while her mouth was plumped up, too big and dominant for the tiny face. Joanna blinked. The final feeling of a doll's mask was completed by very thick strawberry-blonde hair cut to the actress's shoulders and a thick fringe which covered the top half of her face. Only her eyes were untouched by the cosmetic surgeon's attentions. Nothing they could do about the colour except, perhaps, coloured contact lenses. At the moment they were faded blue and regarding her curiously.

Again, Joanna had an odd sense of confusion. The physiognomy had thrown her. She was not sure of anything about this woman, whether she was sane or mad, old or young. Her body was as small as a child's but her eyes were old and shrewd. Joanna studied her further for clues that would help her fix a label on Timony. Her arms were thin, the sleeves pushed up to the elbows in the stuffy atmosphere. The hands were liver-spotted, sporting large, gaudy rings. Her neck was quite creased. Joanna raised her eyes to the pale pink lipstick thickly applied to her mouth, which didn't quite move in time to her question: ‘Who are you?'

‘Detective Inspector Joanna Piercy, Leek Police.'

‘They haven't sent
you
before.' The voice was undoubtedly old, cracked, harsh and hostile.

‘No. I've been away. I've been on my honeymoon,' she added, still with a sense of unreality at that last spoken word.

‘Honeymoon?' The woman cackled. ‘
I
should be the expert on those.' Another cackle. ‘I've had enough of
them
, haven't I?' The question was rhetorical but the dogsbody smiled politely and nodded in agreement.

‘Really?' Joanna was dismissive. She didn't want to hear some long, drawn-out life story. She didn't have the time and she wasn't interested. She simply wanted to put a stop to these frequent calls to the station so they could all get on with their real jobs. Policing, catching criminals and upholding the law. ‘I've come in response to your
repeated
reports to the station about intruders on your property and requests for a police presence,' Joanna said briskly, trying to assert her authority. ‘In particular, your telephone call today when you claimed you could smell cigarette smoke.' The woman's eyes narrowed with reflected hostility. She'd picked up on Joanna's implied criticism of people who wasted police time. The two stared each other out.

Then Joanna drew out her notebook. ‘Would you like to tell me about this latest episode?' She could so easily have inserted the word ‘delusional'.

The woman stared at her with chilly dislike. Then she gave a
humph
. ‘You'd better sit down, Inspector.' As Joanna looked around for a spare chair she barked, ‘Not in here. This is my study. Sacrosanct. The sitting room, Inspector, if you please.'

So Joanna followed Mrs Weeks back into the sitting room and sat on the chintz-covered sofa, notebook in hand. Timony Weeks sat opposite her, crossing her legs, high-heeled mules dangling on the end of her feet with orange painted toenails. The secretary had melted away – wise woman – and Timony was still regarding her with undisguised hostility, which was reflected by the cat. They had disturbed its hideaway on a cushion on the sofa and she had responded with arched back and a glare. Timony Weeks reached out and stroked the animal as it extended its neck and narrowed its sly blue eyes.