Mud, Muck and Dead Things Read online

  One or two inquisitive heads appeared over the half-doors at the sound of Penny’s arrival, ears pricked. But Solo, who once would have been the first to identify the familiar engine noise and pop out his head to whinny a greeting, didn’t appear.

  She had visitors now. There were two cars, one parked near the ‘office’ and the other down by the gate into the paddock. The nearer one, a dark blue Passat, she recognised as belonging to Andrew Ferris. She hoped he hadn’t been waiting for too long. The mud-splattered elderly Jaguar down by the paddock was also familiar and belonged to Selina Foscott. All she needed, Ma Foscott and child.

  She climbed down. She could see Andrew, down there leaning on the paddock fence. On the further side she (with his help) had set up some low jumps. Andrew was watching, as if mesmerised, a small child atop a chestnut pony with white socks and laid-back ears. The pair approached a set of red and white parallel poles with the élan of a cavalry charge. Then, at the last moment, the chestnut swerved to one side and the rider carried straight on, to land with a thud Penny fancied she could hear, at the foot of the jump. The rider rolled over and sat up. The pony cantered off a short way and stopped, snorting like a dragon. A wiry figure in a Barbour descended on it and grasped the bridle in a way that meant no nonsense. The pony jerked up its head and stamped its front feet but didn’t offer serious resistance.

  ‘Charlie!’ yelled the wiry figure. ‘Don’t just sit there! Get aboard!’

  ‘Sorry, Andrew,’ said Penny, joining him at the fence. ‘I had to pick up the trailer from Eli Smith. He promised to fix the damage made when Solo tried to kick his way out.’

  ‘And has he fixed it?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Eli can fix almost anything if he wants to. Luckily he offered to do it or it would have cost me a fortune. He wouldn’t accept a penny. I hope Charlie’s all right.’

  ‘I should think so,’ said Andrew, glancing at the child with a dispassionate eye. ‘They seem to bounce, don’t they, kids?’

  ‘With luck. That one has had plenty of practice falling off.’

  ‘Come on, Charlie, look lively!’

  The small figure at the foot of the pole fence rose to its feet and plodded in a dispirited way towards the pony.

  ‘It’s a girl!’ said Andrew, surprised. ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Hadn’t you realised?’

  ‘They all look sort of the same in that gear, don’t they? Now I can see it’s got long hair. She must have had it tucked up under her hat and it’s got loose. Why is she called Charlie?’

  ‘Charlotte. But I think her mother wanted a boy. That’s her mum, Selina Foscott, issuing the orders.’

  ‘I thought that looked like old Selina. She’s what you’d call a virago, isn’t she? She doesn’t strike me as very maternal, more like a drill sergeant. Charlotte, eh? Charlotte Foscott, not an altogether ideal combination of names.’

  ‘First-class pain in the bum, that’s Selina. Come into the office.’

  As they walked back towards the loose boxes, Andrew said, ‘Lindsey rode out about twenty minutes ago with a learner. Thin bloke with sticking-out knees.’

  ‘Mr Pritchard. He’s taken up riding to expand his personal horizons. Those are his words. He’d be better off taking up watercolour painting if you ask me. But he’s keen and he pays.’

  They’d reached her ‘office’ which was in reality the converted end loose box. A glance showed it also doubled as tack room. A row of saddles perched on pegs. Beneath hung the bridles. To show it was also the office it contained a small table (referred to grandly as a ‘desk’) and a couple of old-fashioned wooden chairs. Shelves had been fixed up on the wall facing the saddles and held, along with various boxes of papers and some dented tins, a couple of hard riding hats. Because there were no windows, both halves of the door, come rain or shine, had to be hooked back to admit light when the office was in use. The glimpse of the yard also gave an illusion of space but in reality it was horribly cramped. Next door, on the other side of the wooden partition, Solo could be heard snuffling and stamping, occasionally bumping against the wall.

  Andrew looked at it all and sighed.

  ‘It’s OK, Andy. I don’t keep anything important or sensitive here, no accounts or tax records! That’s all back at my place. There’s just the appointments book for the riding lessons and odds and ends.’ As she spoke, she took out her mobile phone and laid it neatly on the table alongside the dog-eared appointments book and a piece of paper on which was scribbled, ‘Mick Mackenzie stopped by and left this’.

  ‘This’ was a white envelope.

  ‘His bill,’ said Penny. ‘I don’t have to open it to know what it is, but I do have to pay it. Mick’s very good but he can’t afford clients who don’t pay their vet’s bills.’

  ‘Is it likely to be a big bill?’ He looked concerned.

  ‘Any bill is a big bill for me! The livery clients pay the vet’s bills for their own animals, of course. But my trusty mounts have both had problems recently.’ She glanced at Andrew. ‘That’s what you’ve come to talk to me about, isn’t it, my dodgy financial situation? I couldn’t trouble you to put the kettle on, could I? You’re nearer.’

  ‘Putting on the kettle’ involved lighting a bottled-gas burner. Andrew obliged.

  ‘This isn’t safe in here, you know, all this wood – and animals in attached accommodation.’ He indicated the gas bottle. ‘It’s meant for a patio.’

  ‘Lindsey or I only light it when we take a tea break or have a visitor like you. It isn’t going to blow up on its own,’ Penny told him defensively.

  ‘It would blow up if there were a fire and it engulfed this office of yours. Take the thing home with you at the end of the day, at least.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t talk about disasters, Andy. I’ve got enough of one with bankruptcy looming. And I can’t lug a gas bottle about with me everywhere I go.’

  ‘It’s not as bad as that,’ he said, ‘well, not yet. But you’ve got to increase your income, Penny. Quite seriously, it’s a matter of urgency.’

  ‘I haven’t got any free loose boxes. I can’t take on any more livery clients. I could give up this office, turn it back into stabling, but I’d have nowhere to talk to clients when they come and want to discuss things, and Lindsey and I wouldn’t have anywhere to keep all the gubbins. As it is I may have to buy a new riding pony soon, for the learners, if I hear of a suitable one that isn’t out of my pocket. Solo’s getting crotchety with age. He’s never taken against the trailer before but the other day he went berserk. The vet says he might have impaired sight in one eye and if he’s right, it’s the end of Solo’s usefulness for the riding lessons. He’d be a positive danger to a learner, in fact to anyone. The possibility is terrifying. I couldn’t let him off the premises. Even here, if it is his eyesight, he’d be likely to kick out or shy unexpectedly. Handling him would become dangerous and my insurance wouldn’t cover me if there were an accident as a result. It probably doesn’t already, now Mick Mackenzie’s drawn my attention to the matter.’

  Penny made a gesture of resignation. ‘Let’s face it. The poor beast is useless, a liability.’ She reached out and touched the unopened white envelope. ‘Perhaps that’s what this contains, not the bill. Just a final reckoning for Solo.’

  ‘So he’d be for the bullet in the head?’

  ‘I hate the thought. He could go into retirement in the paddock for a bit but in the end… a blind horse is a blind horse. Meantime, well, he’s costing me money and not earning me any.’ Penny twisted a length of brown hair round her forefinger and looked miserable.

  ‘The riding lessons do pay, don’t they? Can’t you extend that side of things? Even without Solo?’

  ‘Without poor Solo, no. Anyway, there’s only Lindsey and me here to do everything. If one of us takes a pupil out, that leaves just one to deal with all the rest. Neither of us takes a holiday, not a proper one. Lindsey did take a fortnight at Easter because her husband insisted, and I was pretty pushed to cope, I can
tell you.’

  ‘I came over and helped,’ he said, hurt.

  ‘Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean that. I know you did and very grateful I was. I am grateful, Andrew, for everything, for your doing the accounts cut-price and volunteering to come over and shovel horseshit and build fences and all the rest of it. You’re the best friend I’ve got.’

  He gave her a meaningful look.

  ‘Don’t, Andy. You’re married, remember?’

  ‘Not so you’d notice. Karen’s been in Portugal for the past week, floating down the Douro. Doesn’t come back until the week after next and then it’s only a few days before she’s off again, Middle Europe, I fancy.’

  ‘She works hard, Andrew. It can’t be any fun shepherding tour groups around.’

  ‘I know she works damn hard. I know she enjoys it. I wouldn’t ask her to give it up. That would be selfish and pointless. But both she and I know that, as a marriage, we’re pretty well washed up. It’s only a matter of time before one of us calls it quits. I’m waiting for her to say it. She’s waiting for me.’

  ‘I’m not an agony aunt, Andrew,’ Penny said firmly. ‘Nor, even if you were free, would we make a success of it as a twosome: I might not be playing nanny to elderly well-heeled cruise-goers sailing up and down European rivers, but I spend all my time here.’

  ‘My dear old mum,’ said Andrew wistfully, ‘used to read paperback romances in which couples got married for love.’

  ‘I don’t live in a paperback romance and neither do you.’

  He pulled a face, rolling his eyes. ‘Cruel, cruel world…’

  ‘Yep, that’s it.’

  A shadow fell across the door and they both looked up.

  ‘Raining again,’ Selina Foscott informed them briefly. ‘We’ve got Sultan under cover and Charlie’s unsaddling. Oh, here she is.’ Charlie appeared weighed down with the saddle, the bridle reins trailing in the dirt behind her. ‘Right, chuck it down in there,’ ordered her mother. ‘OK?’

  This last query was addressed to Penny and before she could reply firmly that no, it wasn’t all right, Selina was already in retreat.

  ‘Sorry, we’ve got to dash. Look lively, Charlie, hop in the car. Might see you tomorrow, unless it tips it down. If so, see you some time next weekend.’

  She vanished. ‘See what I mean?’ hissed Penny. ‘Shove Sultan under cover, unsaddle and dump everything in the tack room… but no mention of rubbing down the animal or washing the mud off his legs, cleaning out his hooves, anything like that. No cleaning up that tack.’ She pointed to the jumble of leather on the floor. ‘That’s been left for me or for Lindsey to do.’

  ‘That’s what she pays her livery fees for, or so she’d reckon.’

  ‘She reckons wrongly. That is not what she pays her livery fees for! She pays for the animal to be stabled here, fed, mucked out and groomed, fair enough. We exercise Sultan if Charlie can’t get over here during school term to do it. All that is regular maintenance and labour-intensive, not to say time-consuming. It does not cover the pair of them coming over here on a dirty day like today, riding the animal round and round the field until it’s thoroughly muddied up and sweating and then pushing off home! What’s the difference between that – ‘ she jabbed a finger towards the saddle at their feet – ‘and dropping your dirty washing on the bedroom floor and waiting for someone else to pick it up and launder it? Anyway, taking care of an animal is part of having one. I’m not her ruddy employee!’

  ‘Tell her.’

  ‘You can’t tell Selina anything.’

  ‘You can tell her to take her pony and wretched child elsewhere.’

  Penny sighed. ‘She’s determined to make a showjumper of Charlie – not that either Charlie or Sultan have any aptitude – and that means a succession of mounts for Charlie, all stabled here for years to come.’

  ‘Increase the fees.’

  ‘Daren’t. I ask the most I can. You may not have noticed, but this isn’t a de luxe establishment.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘See what I mean? I don’t need more complications, Andy! No, you don’t love me. You admire me for slogging away here against all the odds, when what that really means is that I need my head seeing to. The only other reason I keep going – apart from your support and Lindsey’s devotion – is that Eli Smith rents me the paddock cheap and doesn’t mind if I spill over and graze my horses in the next-door field that technically I don’t rent. Not that he uses it for anything else.’

  Andrew frowned again. ‘Funny old stick, Eli, touchy, too.’

  ‘Yes, he is, but reliable. Even he may get an offer for the land one day, so good he can’t turn it down. Then, well, that will be that. I couldn’t afford to buy it.’

  The kettle had boiled and was filling the little room with steam. Andrew made the tea and handed a chipped mug to Penny.

  ‘Ta,’ she said as she accepted it. ‘Funny thing, now that we’re talking of Eli…’ Penny stopped.

  ‘What’s that, then, the funny thing? Other than Eli himself.’

  Penny sipped the tea, muttered, ‘Ow!’ and put down the mug on top of Mackenzie’s veterinary bill. ‘I drove past that yard of his as I was coming home here. You know, the place just up the hill – used to be the farmhouse and buildings. Eli stores all his merchandise there.’

  ‘Is that what it is, all that junk?’

  ‘He calls it that.’

  ‘I call it accumulated rubbish. Why doesn’t Eli live up there? At the farm?’

  ‘Because the house is haunted, ask anyone round here, the old-timers, I mean. It was the scene of a horrible crime.’ She paused.

  ‘Oh, right, yes, I’ve been told about that. Eli’s exploiting it, shrewd old bugger that he is. A rumour of a ghost is a pretty good way of keeping Nosy Parkers from sniffing round the place.’

  ‘I don’t know if the story originates with Eli, or why he should invent it if it does, but he won’t live there or farm there, so other people think there must be something about the place. I’m certainly not saying Eli believes in spectral apparitions floating around in the middle of the night. All the same, his memory must hark back to a period of his life he’d want to forget. In that sense perhaps he’s haunted, even if the house isn’t, if you see what I mean?’

  ‘Perhaps that’s why some people see ghosts and others don’t,’ Andrew offered. ‘The ghosts come from within, not from outside ourselves.’

  There was an awkward pause. ‘Look,’ said Penny briskly, ‘do you want to know what the funny thing is or not? I’d got past the yard and just a short way on there’s an entrance to a field. A car had pulled off the road and parked in it, a pretty super-duper sort of car, a silver-grey Merc. Doesn’t belong to anyone round here, I’m sure.’

  ‘Driver nipped behind the wall for a call of nature.’

  ‘Oh, no, that’s the really funny thing. He was in the car, trying to hide, crouched down along the front seat by the dashboard. But I could see him quite clearly.’

  ‘Aha! A mystery. I’ll drive back that way and see if he’s still there.’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘If he drove this way, we’d have seen him.’

  ‘No, we wouldn’t. We were both hanging over the fence watching Sultan and Charlie. Talking of which, I’d better go and see to poor Sultan.’

  Andrew said thoughtfully, ‘Have you got a phone number for Eli?’

  ‘Got his mobile number, why?’

  ‘I’ll give him a call and suggest he checks out his yard. I mean, as far as we know everything he keeps there is rubbish. But he’s a canny old bird. He might have something valuable there, something the haunted-house yarn is supposed to protect from snoopers. Well, if there’s been a stranger hanging around, a stranger who didn’t want you to see him, Eli would want to know about it.’

  Penny reached up on to the shelf and took down a grubby exercise book. ‘Here you are, my useful phone number list. Eli’s mobile is in there. Thanks again for coming over, Andy, and making the
tea. But I really have to go and fix up Sultan.’

  He was leafing through her address book as she left.

  Chapter 3

  ‘Why worry about tyre tracks?’ demanded Sergeant Phil Morton rhetorically. ‘Why not just drive all over the shop and destroy the lot?’

  He drew in at the tail of a queue of vehicles that had parked on the roadside. Both of them could see that, ahead of the queue, other vehicles had pulled off the hard surface on to the grass verge before the entrance to the farmyard. Phil Morton was right to spot the offence and be annoyed. Other tracks would potentially have been obliterated. The two of them got out and Morton turned up his collar. Rain had been forecast – again – and had begun to fall in the form of a thin persistent drizzle. A lousy summer was creeping into a dismal autumn.

  ‘Dave Nugent had the right idea in taking off for the Algarve with his golf clubs and a bottle of sunscreen,’ muttered Morton, finding a new source of grievance.

  ‘Dr Palmer is here,’ said Jess as they passed a familiar Toyota.

  Phil snorted. ‘Bet he’s pleased, and all!’

  ‘We’re none of us pleased, Phil. Give it a rest.’

  Morton was an inveterate grumbler. In the short time they’d worked together Jess Campbell had got used to it and normally she didn’t mind too much. But it was Friday afternoon and she was tired. She’d been looking forward to the weekend.

  They drew level with the two vehicles that had pulled on to the soft earth. One, Jess was dismayed to observe, was a police patrol car. The other was a battered lorry laden with junked household appliances, dented cookers, scratched washing machines and what looked like a commercial coffee maker. As they appeared alongside, the door of the cab opened and a squat figure in a disreputable sweater and grimy jeans climbed down and confronted them.

  ‘Who are you?’ he growled.

  ‘Inspector Campbell,’ said Jess. She indicated Phil. ‘Sergeant Morton.’

  Phil obligingly took out his ID and held it up.

  Small dark eyes studied it carefully before swivelling back to Jess and subjecting her to the same comprehensive inspection before the answer came in a hoarse rumble from somewhere inside the tatty sweater. ‘I’m Eli Smith and this here…’ Mr Smith waved a sunburned hand, ‘this here is my yard, my land, as it happens.’