For an arbitrary order suggested a likely accident. Anything else suggested murder.
MIDDLEBARROW FARM
CUMBRIA
The Middlebarrow Pele Project was situated to the east of the hill that comprised Arnside Wood, which gave entrance to a protected area called Arnside Knot. Deborah St. James and Nicholas Fairclough skirted this hill on the way to the project, curving through the upper part of Arnside village and then down again, following signs that directed them towards a place called Silverdale. As they drove, Nicholas Fairclough chatted in what seemed to Deborah to be a habitually friendly manner. He appeared open and forthright, the least likely individual to have planned the murder of his own cousin, had it actually been a murder. He made no mention of Ian Cresswell’s death, of course. The drowning of the man— as unfortunate as it was— bore no relationship to the ostensible reasons for Deborah’s visit to this place. She wasn’t sure she was meant to keep it this way, however. It seemed to her that one way or another she had to bring Cresswell into the picture.
This wasn’t her forte. Chatting up people in general was difficult for her, although she’d improved over the years since she’d learned the value of having her photographic subjects relax while she snapped their pictures. But that kind of chatting up was, at least, honest in its own way. This brand of chatting up— when she was pretending to be someone she utterly was not— left her in a quandary.
Luckily, Nicholas didn’t appear to notice. He was too intent upon reassuring her of his wife’s support of the work he was doing.
“She’ll be standoffish till you get to know her,” he told Deborah as they zipped along the narrow road. “It’s her nature. You’re not to take it personally. Allie doesn’t trust people much as a rule. It’s to do with her family.” He cast her a smile. He had an oddly youthful face— like a boy’s when he hasn’t come into his manhood yet— and Deborah reckoned he’d remain young looking right to the grave. Some people were lucky that way. “Her dad’s the mayor of the town she was born in. In Argentina. He’s been mayor for years, so she grew up in the spotlight there and she had to learn to monitor everything she did. So she always thinks someone’s watching her, to catch her out doing… I don’t know what. Anyway, it makes her skittish at first. Everyone has to earn her trust.”
“She’s quite attractive, isn’t she,” Deborah said. “I expect that could be a problem for someone in the limelight, even in a small town. All eyes on her, if you know what I mean. Where in Argentina is she from?”
“Santa Maria di something. I always forget. It’s about ten words long. It’s in the foothills of wherever. Sorry. All the Spanish names flummox me. I’m completely hopeless with languages. I can barely speak English. Anyway, she doesn’t like the place. She says it felt like an outpost on the moon. I expect it’s not that big, eh? She ran off from home when she was something like fifteen years old. She made it up with her family after a bit, but she never went back.”
“Her family must miss her.”
“That,” he said, “I wouldn’t know. Although I expect they would do, wouldn’t they?”
“You’ve not met them, then? They didn’t attend your wedding?”
“Actually, there wasn’t much of a wedding. Just Allie and me and city hall in Salt Lake City. Someone to do the ceremony and two women we carted in off the street to be witnesses. Afterwards, Allie wrote to tell her parents we’d done the deed, but they didn’t write back. They’re cheesed off about it, I expect. But they’ll come round. People always do. Especially”— he grinned— “when there’s a grandchild on the way.”
That explained the magazine she’d seen. Conception with its countless stories on antenatal this and postnatal that. “You’re expecting? Congrat— ”
“Not yet. But any day now.” He tapped his fingers a bit on the steering wheel. “I’m very lucky,” he said. Then he pointed out an autumnal woodland to the east of the road on which they were driving, a rich panoply of umber and gold deciduous trees contrasting against the green of conifers. “Middlebarrow Wood,” he told her. “You can see the pele tower from here.” He pulled into a lay-by to give her a view.
The tower, Deborah saw, was on a rise of land that looked rather like the prehistoric barrows one found all round the countryside in England. Behind this rise, the woods began, although the tower itself was out in the open. This would have given it a superior position should any border reivers have come calling, a regular occurrence during the centuries when the border between England and Scotland continually shifted. The intent of the reivers was always the same. They were marauders who had taken advantage of the lawlessness of that period of time, perfecting the art of stealing cattle and oxen, invading homes, and stripping their victims of everything they owned. Their objective was always plunder and getting back to their own homes without being killed in the process. If they themselves had to kill to accomplish this, they did so. But that hadn’t been their first priority.
The pele towers had been an answer to the question of protection from the reivers. The best of them were indestructible, with stone walls far too thick to be harmed and windows just wide enough for an archer to fire from, and separate floors for animals, their owners, their household activities, and their defence. But the towers had fallen out of use as time went on, after the border was finally firmly established, along with laws and the advent of lawmen willing to make those laws more than someone’s passing fancy. Once the towers fell out of use, their materials were employed for other buildings. Or the towers themselves were subsumed into larger structures, becoming part of a great house, a vicarage, or a school.
Middlebarrow Tower was of the first type. It stood tall, with most of its windows intact. A short distance from it and across a field, a group of old farm buildings gave testimony to what some of the tower’s original stones had been used for. Between the tower and these farm buildings, a camp had been set up. It was equipped with small tents, honey pots, and several makeshift sheds with a larger tent to accommodate the twelve-step programme, Nicholas Fairclough said. This was also the dining tent. Meals and twelve-stepping went hand in hand.
Nicholas pulled back into the road, which descended to a lane leading off towards the tower. The tower, he said, was on the private land of Middlebarrow farm. He’d got the farmer to consent to the project— not to mention to consent to the presence of the recovering addicts who were currently living and working there— once he saw the benefits of a restored tower that could be used as anything from a holiday rental to a tourist attraction.
“He’s settled on turning the place into a camping site,” Nicholas told her. “It’ll bring him some extra money during the season, and he’s happy enough to put up with us if that’s the end product. That was Allie’s idea, by the way, approaching the farmer with the possibilities for the tower if he’d let us renovate it. She was involved with the pele project in its initial stages.”
“But not now?”
“She likes to be in the background. Plus… well, I daresay when the addicts began to arrive, she was a bit more comfortable being at home than hanging about here.” They pulled onto the site where work was in progress, and Nicholas added, “No need to be wary, though. These blokes are far too used up— and far too ready for a change in their lives— to be harmful to anyone.”
But they were not, Deborah found, far too used up to work. A team leader had been assigned to the project, and when Nicholas introduced him as Dave K— “It’s traditional not to use surnames,” he told her— it was clear that work leading to hunger leading to meals leading to twelve-stepping and then to sleep was the order of the day. Dave K had a roll of plans with him, and he unscrolled them on the bonnet of Nicholas Fairclough’s car. With a nod at Deborah meant, she assumed, to convey acknowledgement of the introduction, he lit a cigarette and used it as a pointer as he spoke to Nicholas about the project.