The Devil`s Feather (13 page)

“So what’s the moral of the story?” I asked with a smile. “Don’t judge a book by its cover?”

“Something like that,” she agreed.

“And if Jess produces a carving knife?”

“Your doctor friend should be struck off for negligence,” said my mother rather dryly. “He shouldn’t have left you alone with a dangerous patient.”

I
SUPPOSE
I could have checked with Peter, but there didn’t seem much point. I decided my mother’s logic was sound. We make our decisions in life on
who
we believe as often as
what
we believe, and I had no reason to think the local doctor would wish a disturbed lunatic on to me. I was a lot less sure about Madeleine’s motives. There was no question she and Jess hated each other, and the old saying “Half the truth is a whole lie” applied to both. If I believed Jess, Madeleine had deliberately abandoned her mother to die of neglect; if I believed Madeleine, Jess was a dangerous stalker.

There was probably a grain of truth in both stories—Madeleine didn’t visit Lily as often as she might and Jess visited too often, which suggested jealousy was at the heart of their hatred—but I was discovering at first hand just how quickly whispers become accepted as fact. According to Dan Fry’s latest email, even Adelina Bianca was hinting that I’d faked my abduction. In an interview with an Italian magazine, she was quoted as saying: “Of course there’s money to be made out of pretending to be a hostage—the public loves horror stories—but anyone who does it belittles what the real victims go through.”

I’ve no idea if she was referring to me—there was a US deserter who faked his kidnapping before fleeing to the Lebanon—but that’s how her words were interpreted. Dan told me that four of the main terrorist groups had denied holding me, and the Arab press was full of articles claiming a foreign correspondent had sought to make money out of passing herself off as a victim. Thankfully, the Western press ignored it—either from fear of a libel suit or because they knew my story hadn’t appeared—but it made me even more reluctant to advertise where I was. It turned me against Adelina. I knew her words had probably been “rearranged” to suit the editor’s take, but I did wonder if the reason she was able to give interviews was because nothing much had happened to her.

When I finally went looking for Jess, she said she could always tell when Madeleine had been spreading her poison. It didn’t matter who the recipient was, or how sensible they were, they never smiled as freely afterwards as they’d done before. She said I’d tried harder than most but I’d made my interest in her wrists too obvious. She took the hint after a couple of days and left me to get on with it. There were some things in life that weren’t worth bothering with, and convincing strangers that she wasn’t planning to knife them was top of the list.

It was an interesting rebuttal, since I hadn’t told her I’d spoken to Madeleine. Was Madeleine so believable that everyone reacted in the same way? If so, it was frightening. I did ask Jess why she allowed half-truths to stand instead of coming out fighting, but she shrugged and said there was no point. “People believe what they want to believe,” she said, “and I refuse to be something I’m not just to prove them wrong.”

I couldn’t follow her logic. “In what way?”

“I despise them,” she said rather dryly, “and I’d have to pretend I didn’t if I wanted to change their minds.”

“You might feel differently if you got to know them.”

“Why? It won’t change the fact that they believed Madeleine.”

This was part of a conversation we had in her kitchen after I plucked up the courage to drive to her house. There was no alternative, since she hadn’t responded to either of my telephone messages, but I was terrified her mastiffs might be roaming free. I drove up the half-mile track to the farm and slowed to a halt in the middle of the yard while I tried to work out where her front door was. I had my window down because it was a rare day of sunshine in an otherwise wet month, and I heard the dogs barking furiously as soon as I put the gears into neutral. The sound was too loud for them to be inside and I looked around nervously to see where they were.

The house was separated from the yard by a beech hedge that was tall enough to mask the ground floor, but there was no obvious gap to suggest an entrance. To my left was a barn, and to my right the track appeared to follow the line of the hedge round a sharp corner at the far end of the house, although flashes of prowling mastiff behind the beech trunks persuaded me that getting out for the purpose of exploration was a bad idea. As I was pondering my options, I heard the sound of a powerful motor and a tractor came roaring around the bend, towing a hay baler behind it.

I had a brief glimpse of Jess’s scowling face before she swerved past me and into the barn. Half a second later, she reversed out again, missing the back of my car by six inches as the baler swung in the opposite direction from the tractor. She performed a neat three-point turn, with the tractor a whisker away from my wing mirror, before she reversed the whole contraption back under cover. She wasn’t taking any prisoners that day, and I’m sure I did look scared as a couple of tons of metal looked like flattening my Mini.

She killed the engine and jumped down from the cab, whistling to the dogs to quit their noise. “You’re in the way,” she told me. “Another time, park up by the hedge.”

I opened my door. “Sorry.”

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” she said curtly. “I wasn’t trying to hit you.”

“I realize that. I’d have moved except I couldn’t tell which way you were going to turn…and I didn’t want to make matters worse.”

“The opposite of what you’d expect. I thought you grew up on a farm.”

“I meant the tractor.”

She crossed her arms. “Did you want something?”

“No. I just thought I’d…see how you are. You haven’t been around and you didn’t anwer my messages.”

To my surprise, a slight flush rose in her cheeks. “I’ve been busy.”

I pushed the car door wider. “Is this a bad time? I can come back later.”

“It depends what you want.”

“Nothing. I just came for a chat.”

She frowned at me as if I’d said something peculiar. “I have to unhitch the baler and grease it. You can talk to me while I do that if you like. You’re not dressed for it, though. The barn’s pretty messy.”

“That’s OK. Everything’s washable.” I climbed out of the car and picked my way across the rutted yard in my long wrap-over skirt and leather flip-flop sandals. She eyed me disapprovingly and I wondered what was offending her. “Is something wrong?”

“You look as if you’re going to a garden party.”

“I always dress like this.”

“Well, you shouldn’t. Not on a working farm.” She nodded to some sacks of potatoes inside the barn entrance. “You can sit on one of those. What do you want to talk about?”

“Nothing in particular.”

She eased the baler forward and worked it loose from the tractor tow before pushing it back against the wall. For a small woman, she had extraordinary strength. According to her, anyone could do anything when they needed to. It was mind over matter. Until it came to talking. Her expression said very clearly that if I expected her to start the conversation, I was going to be disappointed. I watched her take a handful of grease and work it into the twine-tying pivots.

“Do you have to do this every time you use it?”

“It helps. The machine’s twenty years old.”

“Is it the only one you’ve got?”

“It’s the only baler.” She jerked her chin at a combine harvester at the other end of the barn. “That’s what handles the crops.”

I turned to look at it. “Dad had one in Zimbabwe.”

“It’s pretty much standard these days. Some people rent them but I bought that secondhand at a farm auction.”

I watched her working. “Why were you using the baler today?” I asked after a while. “I haven’t seen any crops being harvested, so there won’t be any straw yet.”

“I’m taking the hay from the field margins while the weather holds.” She seemed to think it was an intelligent question because she decided to expand on it. “The long-range forecasts are predicting more rain for August so it seemed sensible to bale what we could while we had the chance. We’ll have trouble bringing in the wheat if the forecasters are right…let alone straw.”

We…?
“Do you have help?”

She put the lid back on the can of grease and picked up a rag to wipe her hands. “Some. There’s Harry who’s worked here for years and a couple of lady part-timers—one comes mornings, the other afternoons.”

“From Winterbourne Barton?”

“Weymouth.”

“What do they do?”

“Whatever’s on the rota.”

“Ploughing?”

She nodded. “Anything to do with the crops. Harry and I look after the herds, the fencing and the woodland…but we all lend a hand where necessary.” She eyed me curiously as she folded the rag and put it on the grease can. “Don’t they have women farmworkers in Zimbabwe?”

“Thousands.”

“Then why do you look so surprised?”

I smiled. “Because everyone in Winterbourne Barton describes you as a loner, and now I discover you have three people working for you.”

“So?”

“It’s a wrong description of you. I got the impression you lived and worked on your own.”

Her mouth twisted cynically. “That’s Winterbourne Barton for you. They’re completely ignorant about how much work is involved in running a farm, but then most of them have never lived in the country before.” She glanced towards the house. “I’m making some sandwiches for lunch. Do you want to come in while I do it?”

“Will the dogs be there?”

Her dark eyes narrowed slightly, but more in speculation than contempt. “Not if you don’t want them to be.”

I stood up. “Then I’d love to come in. Thank you.”

“You’ll have to move your car in case Harry or Julie comes back. If you park up there”—she pointed towards the left-hand end of the hedge—“you’ll see the path to the back door. I’ll meet you there after I’ve seen to the dogs.”

T
HE FARMHOUSE WAS
a thin, straggling building, constructed in the same Purbeck stone as Barton House and Winterbourne Barton. The core, the rooms around the front door, was seventeenth-century, but the extensions on both sides dated from the nineteenth and twentieth. In floor space it was almost as big as Barton House, but its piecemeal fabrication meant it lacked the clean lines and elegance of Lily’s property.

We entered through the kitchen, which was larger, brighter and better appointed than Lily’s. A plate-glass window gave a view of the garden, which was entirely laid to lawn, without a shrub or flower in sight. Six-foot-high wire fencing ran inside the beech hedge, preventing the mastiffs from escaping, and a large wooden kennel stood in one corner. At the moment, there was no sign of any of them.

“They’re round the front,” said Jess, as if reading my mind. “I’ll let them back into this side when you go. My mother used to have flower borders all the way round but the first puppy I had rooted the plants out. It’s easier like this.”

“Are they always out?”

“If I’m working. When I’m here I have them in the house. If you think of them as overgrown hearthrugs, you might not find them so frightening. Mastiffs are a sociable breed…they love being around people. The only thing they ever do is put themselves between their owners and a stranger, but they won’t attack unless the stranger attacks first.”

I changed the subject rather too abruptly. “This is a nice room, Jess. Much nicer than Lily’s kitchen.”

She watched me for a moment before turning away to open the fridge door. “Do you want to look at the rest of the house while I make the sandwiches? I’m sure you’re curious…everyone else is.”

“Do you mind?”

An indifferent shrug was her only answer.

It was hardly the most fulsome invitation I’d ever had but I wasn’t going to argue about it. The rooms we inhabit say as much about us as how we behave, and Jess was right, I was deeply curious about her surroundings. I’d been told variously that the house was frozen in time, that it was a shrine to her family, full of morbid souvenirs and with an emphasis on death in the shape of stuffed animals. I came across these immediately, to the extent that there were four glass cases in the hall, containing a pheasant, a fox cub, two weasels and a badger.

This was the seventeenth-century heart of the building and I could well believe it had remained untouched for years. The only natural light came from a window halfway up the stairs, but it wasn’t enough to brighten the gloom of the dark oak panelling around the walls. The ceiling was furrowed with ancient beams and the flagstones worn into a visible curvature between the front door and the stairs.

The two rooms leading off the hall dispelled any sense of a house frozen in time. One, which was clearly Jess’s office, had filing cabinets, a desk and a computer, and the other an old sofa and piles of beanbags that smelt powerfully of dogs. Against the longest wall was a steel grey designer hi-fi system with shelf upon shelf of CDs, DVDs, videos and vinyl records framing a plasma screen. I hadn’t thought of Jess as a music, film or television buff, but she clearly was. She was even connected to Sky digital, if the unmistakable black remote on the sofa was any guide. So much for a shrine to the past, I thought enviously, wishing Barton House had more to offer than four terrestrial channels on one miserable little screen in the back room.