Tainted Ground
Authors: Margaret Duffy
Contents
Recent titles by Margaret Duffy from Severn House
TAINTED GROUND
COBWEB
BLOOD SUBSTITUTE
SOUVENIRS OF MURDER
CORPSE IN WAITING
RAT POISON
STEALTH
DARK SIDE
ASHES TO ASHES
Margaret Duffy
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First published in 2006 in Great Britain and the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERSÂ LTDÂ of
19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.
This eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital
an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited
Copyright © 2006 by Margaret Duffy.
The right of Margaret Duffy to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Duffy, Margaret
Tainted ground
1. Langley, Ingrid (Fictitious character) â Fiction
2. Gillard, Patrick (Fictitious character) â Fiction
3. Women novelists â Fiction
4. Detective and mystery stories
I. Title
823.9'14 [F
]
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6435-2 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-690-8 (ePUB)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland
The three who would shortly be hung by their heels and have their throats slit were still walking and talking and fearfully peering over their shoulders for unwelcome faces intruding into their new lives â¦
D
ark days.
They would continue: all the while the raw February days promising only more misery and darkness. Looking professionally and critically at that sentence â I am a writer by trade â it seems over the top and excessively dramatic. But, reflecting on that time when bitterly cold mist saturated everything, dripping from every branch and twig in our Dartmoor garden, and within the cottage feverish and fretful children cried and coughed, and in a not-so-distant field a man took up a captive-bolt pistol to shoot an old, much-loved horse â¦
Dark days.
On that day when Polar Bear had to be put down my husband Patrick could not be described as having reached rock bottom but he had been writing off for jobs for weeks (he had recently resigned his army commission), mostly dead-end jobs that he did not really want, and having received no useful replies his mood was already grim.
âHe
was
around thirty years old,' he said, matter-of-factly, reseating himself at the dining-room table and making a play of resuming letter writing.
Patrick and I had been taking it in turns to look after the animals. Katie was still too poorly to help and that morning I had let them out of the stable and into the field, the big grey retired hunter and Katie's pony Fudge, and given them hay. All had seemed well. Later, the owner of the field, whose house overlooked it, had phoned to tell us that Polar Bear seemed to have rolled, as horses enjoy doing, but was unable to rise. Old horses do sometimes get cast, as it is referred to, when they become stiff in the joints, but when Patrick had arrived with a farmer friend shortly afterwards and they had, by dint of encouragement and their own muscle-power got Polar Bear back on his feet, he had promptly collapsed again. The vet had diagnosed progressive heart failure and the decision that had then been made was the only one possible.
I sat down at the table and put a hand on Patrick's arm. âI'm really sorry. But he had a couple of really happy years with us after you rescued him.'
Word in a small village gets around at a speed that seems to defy even modern electronic communications. The phone rang and it was a friend offering to take Fudge off our hands for a while on the grounds that he would be lonely. Gratefully, I agreed.
âHe'd have been dead by tomorrow morning but you can't just leave them like that â¦' Patrick whispered after I had relayed the information to him, his voice trailing away and giving no indication that he had heard a word I said.
Katie came into the room and I was shocked at how pale she was after suffering from a bad chest infection. Her brother Matthew had had it too, to a lesser extent, but had now recovered and was able to go back to school. They are Patrick's brother Larry's children and we adopted them when he was killed. Nothing had been said about Polar Bear in Katie's hearing other than that he was having trouble getting up but, gazing at her, I knew that she had guessed the worst.
âIs heâ?' she began, lips quivering.
Patrick pushed back his chair and held out his arms to her. âPlease come and give me a cuddle,' he requested softly.
I found this psychology quite magnificent and took myself off, my own lips quivering, to attend to Justin, just turned four, our eldest, who was wailing, spluttering and revoltingly messy with tears and a bad cold, having, I discovered, just tripped over one of the sea of toys on his bedroom floor and hit his head on something. Our youngest, Victoria, mercifully too young to know anything about dead horses, had merely just started crying because she was teething and Justin had woken her from her afternoon nap. Oh, and their nanny, Carrie, was at home with her mother in Plymouth, with the flu.
As to the deadline for the delivery of the shooting script of
A Man Called Celeste
â what shooting script?
I was fully aware that after an eventful career working for Special Operations units and then D12, a department of MI5, during part of which time I too had been involved and we had operated as a team, Patrick must be feeling that his life had run into a wall. In his mid-forties and with a young family to support he was too young and his army pension not sufficiently generous to enable him to devote the rest of his working life to charity even if that appealed to him, which it did not. Not yet. I supposed that if my writing earnings were added in we could manage but most of this was being squirreled away into investments for the children's university fees.
Here then was a man who had given up his career (danger had come far too close to home as a result of the MI5 work to make carrying on an option), whose old regiment, the Devon and Dorset, had just been axed and who had this very day had to watch his horse being destroyed.
Mid-morning the following day Patrick's mother, Elspeth, phoned from the rectory at Hinton Littlemoor in Somerset to tell us that John, his father, had been rushed into hospital after being taken ill with chest pains during the Communion service at which he had been officiating. I spoke to her initially and then handed over to Patrick, numbly dreading even worse news to come.
âI'm going up there,' Patrick announced afterwards when he found me in the kitchen. âNow. Mother's fantastic but he's never had a sick day in his life and she's a bit thrown by it all. I can act as a buffer between her and the parish duties and organize things. Can you manage here?'
Well, of course I could. I put my arms around him and drew him close. âPlease drive carefully.'
The following days tended to merge one with another and I put writing to the back of my mind and threw myself into cooking the kind of meals that would put colour back into the children's cheeks now they had their appetites back. They all love roasts. So we had mountainous roasts and Yorkshire puddings, almost every day. I made soups with dumplings and all the nourishing and hearty things I could think of. I unashamedly bribed them with extra pocket money to eat more fruit and vegetables and after almost a week, with a wan Carrie back at work and well enough to look after Vicky, took the three eldest into Plymouth on the Saturday for a river trip and plenty of sea air. Looking at them, running about on the Hoe afterwards, I knew they were well on the mend.
Patrick rang every evening. John was still having tests but the enforced rest had done him good. Then, shortly after we arrived back from the outing to Plymouth, Patrick rang again with the more sombre news that his father needed a triple-bypass operation and it would take place the following Monday.
âIs it at all possible for you to come here?' he went on to ask. âI think Mum would enjoy female company and I'm having to go out quite a bit â flying the flag at local events.'
I found myself wondering if he was attending Mothers' Union meetings and undertaking other such parish duties and said, after consulting with Carrie and aware that Katie was now fit for school and Justin for playgroup, that I would set off with my laptop the next morning.
âWe're taking Mum out to lunch,' Patrick said after giving me a quick kiss. He had met me at Bath station as he had the car. âShe's popped into Sainsbury's. I said we'd pick her up there.'
âI've brought your post.'
âAnything interesting?'
âI haven't
opened
them.'
âYou could have done.'
âBut I never have and I'm not going to start now. How are they both?'
âMum's OK but, understandably, will be going through hell on Monday. Dad's actually quite a lot better. He was suffering from total exhaustion as well as the heart problem.'
âI thought he looked really tired the last time I saw him â when James was shot.'
âYes, well, we were all wrung out then.'
Detective Chief Inspector James Carrick, a friend of ours, had had three months off work after the attack that had almost ended in his death. He was now back at work and I knew we would call in at the Manvers Street police station to see him.
Elspeth, a little thinner in the face than I remembered, enjoyed our lunch at the restaurant. Over coffee she transferred her worries from husband to son.
âNothing in the job line yet? Heavens, it must be awful for you â you've never been unemployed before.'
Patrick said, âWell, if nothing else I've established that it'll mean carrying on commuting to London, or at least the Home Counties. There's nothing with the right sort of money in the West Country, although I don't mind doing most things in the short term.'
Elspeth's lips pursed. She cannot be described as a snob but would nevertheless not be enchanted if her firstborn went from lieutenant colonel one moment to supermarket cleaner the next, even temporarily. âYou could always move to cut down on the travel,' she said.
âThat'll be the last resort,' Patrick told her, not adding, âOver Ingrid's dead body,' a state of affairs of which I had made him aware.
âThat reminds me,' I said, rummaging in my bag. âOne of your letters is from the Home Office. I didn't know you'd applied for any government jobs.' I gave him the thick white envelope.