The media were leaving; they came out past him, thanked him, got into the cars that sat in his gravelled driveway and roared off down towards the big cast-iron gates.
It was fate, he supposed, that had led him to Harmston, and the greenfield site that the county council was keen to develop, because here, by pure chance, he had found something for which he had long ago stopped looking, and he had used every ounce of guile he possessed, every trick of persuasion he had ever learned, to have his plans accepted, to sweep aside the objections, to get the Rookery built.
And now, it needed a road. He had established that Excelsior Holdings, a company based in London for whom the woodland was a distant and costly irrelevance that they could turn into hard cash, would be prepared to sell. And then, when that news was greeted with horror by the villagers, he had made it known that he had already made an offer to Bailey, and had been turned down. Now everyone knew that all Bailey had to do was sell to him, and the road wouldn’t go anywhere near the woodland. If it had to, it would, but he sincerely, honestly, devoutly hoped that it wouldn’t ever come to that.
Not because he gave a toss how many people would be deprived of a natural amenity, how much flora and fauna would lose its home. And not because he had any deep sense of community, for he and Shirley had deliberately kept out of village life. Apart from Bailey, they knew about half a dozen of the inhabitants by name, if that. Some of them he employed; he had had dealings with just two others, and that only because they had approached him.
So it was for neither of the reasons he had advanced to Curtis Law that he was holding fire on felling the oaks and the elms. He simply wanted Bernard Bailey’s land, and he would do just about anything to get it.
‘Death threats?’ Detective Chief Inspector Lloyd’s tone of voice, and the exaggerated Welshness which ran the words together with just a single ‘th’, indicated that he was less than impressed. ‘Can’t the uniforms deal with it? Sir,’ he added, smoothing down the dark hair at the back of his head, the only place he really still had any, and it needed a trim. His boss had become slightly more insistent on deference since the Chief Superintendent rank had been abolished, and the gap between him and Lloyd had been reduced to just one rung.
Detective Superintendent Case, with a full head of hair, although he too was looking at fifty from the wrong side, shook his head. ‘They were dealing with it,’ he said. ‘If you can call it that. But it’s a bugger, Lloyd. He had the whole place ringed with alarms because his machinery was being vandalized. And someone’s got through not once, but over and over again, and left death threats all over the place. The man was getting them on a weekly basis at one point. Now it seems they’ve turned even nastier. I think CID needs to take a look, at least. The reporter who’s been covering the story just rang the press officer to ask what we intend doing about it. I think his words were if whoever it was could deliver death threats, he could deliver death. And you can’t really argue with that.’
They sounded like a reporter’s words, thought Lloyd, but he supposed Case was right. ‘I’ll send someone,’ he said.
‘Do. And not a DC, either,’ added Case. ‘ Send someone with a bit of experience, and a bit of rank. Bailey’s an awkward customer at the best of times.’
Lloyd shook his head. ‘Is this all because he won’t sell his farm to a property developer?’ he asked, puzzled. ‘Since when were they the good guys?’
‘Since the alternative meant the rape, of the countryside,’ said Case. ‘According to the conservationists.’
‘Aren’t people’s jobs more important?’
Case shook his head. ‘Not now,’ he said. ‘They would have been up until a couple of years ago. But just after his first wife died, Bernard Bailey – what’s the word they use nowadays? – downsized what he actually farms. He’s got seventy-five per cent of his land doing nothing, uses casual labour when he needs it for the rest. It would mean the loss of three or four full-time jobs at most.’
‘Is he a friend of yours?’ asked Lloyd.
‘Not a friend, exactly. We’ve met. You know how it is. The thing is …’ he said, and paused.
At last. Case always took for ever to get to the point. You always had to have what Lloyd thought of as the Case history first.
‘We haven’t exactly acted like greased lightning over the vandalism,’ Case went on. ‘And as far as I can see, we’ve done sod all about the death threats. Bailey’s getting meaner by the minute, as you can imagine. And – well, we’ll both be attending a function tonight, and I’d like to be able to look the man in the eye rather than spend all night avoiding him.’
Case and Bailey belonged to the same lodge, no doubt. Lloyd had never been introduced to the arcane rituals of Freemasonry, and never wanted to be. But Case had, and you didn’t really need to be a detective to work out why Mr Bailey’s problems had a special significance.
‘It goes on until the small hours, and I can think of better ways of spending the time than being told I can’t do my job. Take pity on me, Lloyd. Send someone who’ll keep him off my back for tonight, at least.’
A public relations exercise. Lloyd disapproved, basically, of the Brotherhood, but the man was nonetheless receiving death threats, and someone ought to be doing something about it. He rather thought he might go to see Mr Bailey himself. Bailey could hardly complain about his rank, and Lloyd fancied he came over quite well on the box. He could certainly handle a reporter that spoke journalese.
‘Not you,’ said Case, in an accurate assessment of Lloyd’s unspoken thoughts. ‘You and I are going to headquarters’He picked up a fax. ‘To discuss the – and I quote – ‘‘eighteen-month-long spate of drug thefts from chemists, hospital dispensaries, hospices, research establishments, doctors’ surgeries, et cetera, the clear-up rate of which is far from satisfactory, and the seriousness of which means that they must be given top priority’’. The ACC is still suffering from verbal diarrhoea, poor chap.’ He looked up. ‘But we have to go. So send someone else, Lloyd. Even if you do like being on the telly.’
‘It’s not like it was in Sherlock Holmes’s day,’ Lloyd said, ignoring the jibe. ‘ Hasn’t anyone told the ACC that? They don’t smoke Turkish cigarettes with distinctive ash – they don’t leave behind them the telltale aroma of Arabian body oils. They’re just junkies looking for pills to pop or something to sell.’
‘Mm. He thinks it might be more organized than that. It seems that this reporter – the same one that’s covering the Bailey business – has been critical of our – and I quote again – ‘‘piecemeal approach’’.’
‘Which reporter? Curtis Law?’
‘That’s him. Do you know him?’
‘He’s been going on about this for months!
He’s
the one who thinks it’s organized, not the ACC. If that’s what this conference is about, it’s a complete waste of time.’
‘Fifteen minutes, my car, waste of time or not.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Lloyd, knowing when he was beaten.
He went downstairs to the CID room, and considered Tom Finch, who was a sergeant, and therefore of a rank regarded as suitable. Of course, he looked about fifteen, with his curly fair hair and his cheeky grin, so he wouldn’t do, despite the fact that he was thirty, married with two children, and a very able officer. Besides, Judy had never been blooded in the sport of TV interviews. ‘Is DI Hill back from court?’ he asked, jerking his head at Judy’s door.
‘Yes, guv,’ said Finch, who liked to think that he was in a TV cop show. ‘Her new wheels can shift a bit, can’t they?’
Lloyd knocked on Judy’s door, and smiled at her. What more could Case and his fellow Masons want? A detective inspector, no less. One with twenty years’ service. One with clear-eyed common sense, and brown-eyed, brown-haired, exceedingly pleasing looks. One with instinctive dress sense, and a knack of getting to the bottom of little puzzles, which this surely was. One who would not only talk intelligibly to Bailey and the media, but intelligently, and in a middle-class, educated accent at that. The education had veered a little too much towards maths and logic for his taste – he preferred language and literature – but all in all, as packages went, Judy was a very elegant one.
‘Oh, God,’ she groaned.
He looked utterly innocent. ‘What? I haven’t said anything yet.’
‘You don’t have to. You want me to do something I won’t want to do.’
‘It’s a doddle. You just have to go to a farm—’
‘I hate farms.’
He sighed, shaking his head. ‘You city girls are all the same. One hint of mud, and you get the vapours.’
‘Just have to go to a farm and do what?’
‘Talk to a nice man called Mr Bailey about death threats.’
‘Death threats?’ repeated Judy.
Death threats, thought Jack Melville, landowner, country gentleman, old Harrovian, dabbler in stocks and shares, financial consultant to the already very-rich. Death threats. Whatever next?
His long face, youthful for its thirty-eight years, was serious. Surely Terri’s friends on the Save Our Woodland Sites committee hadn’t started sending death threats? There were one or two he wouldn’t care to vouch for, and whom he fancied were responsible for the curiously middle-class graffiti to be found scrawled on Bailey’s ludicrous, ten-foot-high security fences. But death threats? Jack was the
spokesman
for the Save Our Woodland Sites committee, for God’s sake. They couldn’t start doing that sort of thing. You could end up in prison for that.
He had just given an interview in his capacity as spokesman to someone who had introduced himself as Curtis Law,
Aquarius 1830
, as though Jack should have heard of him. He hadn’t. And it had taken him a moment or two to work out
why
he was being interviewed about Bailey’s death threats. He usually found some frightfully important work to do when the all-female group had its interminable discussions, and frequently forgot that he
was
its spokesman. He had been press-ganged, a man being deemed to have more
gravitas
. They were a little impolite about Bailey at times, but surely Terri wouldn’t condone the sending of death threats?
He loved his wife dearly, and by and large he sympathized with her aims for preserving the village way of life, but she did rather take the whole thing too seriously. She had got up the committee to object to the development in the first place, and they had fought against planning permission being given for an access route at all, which would have effectively stopped the whole thing in its tracks. They had lost that battle, and now that land of some sort
was
to be sacrificed to the earth movers, the fight had become personal. Bailey’s land was the lesser of two evils, and he must be made to sell. The veiled suggestion by the reporter that the SOWS might be behind the death threats – Jack was never sure whether the acronym had been intentional or not – had bothered him a little, though he had laughed it off.
He had acquitted himself pretty well in the interview, he thought. He had explained that while roads were of course the greatest evil since the plague, and every day the countryside was threatened with more and more of them, they were a
necessary
evil. The development had to have an access route, and therefore, if there was a choice, surely fallow fields were better victims than woodland which had been enjoyed for generations? Yes, he wished that Bernard Bailey-would just sell the land to the developers, hut neither he nor any member of the SOWS would stoop to scare tactics.
The door opened and Terri came in, her curly salt-and-pepper hair tousled and damp from the drizzly day. ‘June says the television people are here again.’
‘I know,’ said Jack. ‘I’ve just given them an interview. Bailey’s getting death threats now, apparently.’
‘Oh, that,’ she said.
Oh. He had hoped she might at least be surprised. ‘You know about them?’ he asked, flipping the computer back on, establishing a link with the stock markets again.
‘Everyone knows about them. He’s been getting them for months.’
The reporter had said that. ‘ He’s had more this morning. Rude ones. Why is it that everyone knows about them but me?’
‘Because you’ve always got your head buried in that thing,’ she said, waving a dismissive hand at their livelihood. ‘You never watch television. It was on the local news for weeks until they got bored with it.’
‘It’s …’ Jack paused, not wanting to hear the answer. ‘It’s not anyone on your committee that’s sending them, is it?’
‘Not as far as I know. But if it is, who cares?’
Oh dear, oh dear. ‘ I care! It’s against the law.’
‘Against the
law
?’ said Terri, all wide-eyed mock shock. ‘I didn’t know that. Thank you, Uncle Jack.’
‘Well,’ he said, on the defensive. ‘ You’re not condoning that sort of stuff, are you?’
‘Why not?’ she said. ‘Laws were made to be broken. And Bailey isn’t going to force McQueen to take that road through Bluebell Wood, not if I can help it.’
Bluebell Wood. The damn place didn’t have a name, not one that anyone knew. The committee had called it Bluebell Wood when they had decided to save it, and they had a lot more in common with McQueen than they would like to think. His development was called the Rookery, and was marked on the plans in pseudo-medieval lettering. McQueen had christened it that himself, just as they had christened Bluebell Wood. Real country people didn’t give places names, twee or otherwise, unless they had to.
Jack had lived here all his life; he liked the woodland. But there was plenty of it. ‘Bluebell’ wood was just one part of a real wood, with a real, unromantic name. Sharpe’s Wood. It had once, long ago, belonged to a Mr Sharpe, so Sharpe’s Wood it was. When he had mentioned this to Terri, she had pointed out that it was the thin end of the wedge. Bluebell Wood today, McQueen’s Wood tomorrow. Sharpe’s Wood, she had reminded him, had once been part of a forest. A forest that had belonged to no one, and which, bit by bit, had been consumed by commerce.
‘You give someone like McQueen an inch,’ said Terri, ‘ and he’ll grab everything, develop it all into housing estates and golf courses. Real villagers won’t survive. Just people like that lunatic Bailey.’