Tainted Ground Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Recent titles by Margaret Duffy from Severn House

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  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

  TAINTED GROUND

  Margaret Duffy

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  First published in 2006 in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD 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) – Fiction

  2. Gillard, Patrick (Fictitious character) – Fiction

  3. Women novelists – 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 …

  One

  Dark days.

  They would continue: all the while the raw February days promising only more misery and darkness. Looking professionally and critically at that sentence – I am a writer by trade – 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 …

  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.

  ‘He 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. ‘I’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.

  ‘He’d have been dead by tomorrow morning but you can’t just leave them like that …’ 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.

  ‘Is he—?’ she began, lips quivering.

  Patrick pushed back his chair and held out his arms to her. ‘Please 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 – 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 So
merset 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.

  ‘I’m going up there,’ Patrick announced afterwards when he found me in the kitchen. ‘Now. 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. ‘Please 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.

  ‘Is it at all possible for you to come here?’ he went on to ask. ‘I think Mum would enjoy female company and I’m having to go out quite a bit – 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.

  ‘We’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. ‘She’s popped into Sainsbury’s. I said we’d pick her up there.’

  ‘I’ve brought your post.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘I haven’t opened them.’

  ‘You could have done.’

  ‘But I never have and I’m not going to start now. How are they both?’

  ‘Mum’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.’

  ‘I thought he looked really tired the last time I saw him – when James was shot.’

  ‘Yes, 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.

  ‘Nothing in the job line yet? Heavens, it must be awful for you – you’ve never been unemployed before.’

  Patrick said, ‘Well, 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. ‘You could always move to cut down on the travel,’ she said.

  ‘That’ll be the last resort,’ Patrick told her, not adding, ‘Over Ingrid’s dead body,’ a state of affairs of which I had made him aware.

  ‘That reminds me,’ I said, rummaging in my bag. ‘One 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.

  ‘I haven’t,’ Patrick said. ‘Perhaps they’ve decided I ought to be in prison after all.’

  He read in silence for a while – there was a lot of it – once glancing up fleetingly at the pair of us, eyes rather round, read on, gazed out of the window for a few seconds and then, when Elspeth and I were practically bursting with impatience, whistled softly.

  ‘Well?’ I shrieked at him, causing a few nearby heads to turn.

  Patrick cleared his throat. ‘Tell me – do I want to be a policeman?’

  ‘A policeman?’ Elspeth and I chorused in unison.

  We got into a huddle around the coffee pot in order to cease making an exhibition of ourselves and he read the whole thing out to us. Well boiled down, it was this. Following proposals set out in a government White Paper by the previous Home Secretary it had been decided to run pilot schemes allowing retired army officers and others in comparable services – Customs and Excise and the probation service – and jobs such as financial crime investigators and business executives with particular management skills to join the police at senior ranks. If the scheme was eventually formally adopted, police recruits would not necessarily have to start as constable and spend specified lengths of time at lower ranks before promotion.

  There would be intensive training and, eventually, examinations. Candidates would have to show good aptitude: a previous senior position did not even guarantee a place on the pilot scheme, which would run initially for twelve months, following a probationary period of three. The writer of the letter was unusually frank and pointed out that not all senior police officers were convinced it was a good idea and the final decision would probably rest with them.

  I ran my eye down the pay scales. ‘You’d be getting practically the same salary, even during the trial, as you were before.’ I studied Patrick. ‘Do you want to be a policeman?’

  ‘Not if it’s a desk job.’

  ‘You might have to not be fussy and settle for that,’ Elspeth said, uncharacteristically brutal.

  ‘OK,’ said Patrick, after due thought. ‘I’ll go for it if I can do the probationary period somewhere in the West Country, preferably not far from here. You’ll need a hand while Dad’s ill.’

  ‘You mustn’t run your life around your father and me,’ Elspeth said.

  He smiled upon her. ‘I can’t keep travelling the length and breadth of the UK if they send me to Cumbria or East Anglia either. Those are my terms and I shall make them very clear,’ he added regally, refolding the letter and putting it back in the envelope.

  ‘Didn’t you join the police when you left school?’ I asked. ‘And left because it wasn’t exciting enough?’

  ‘When we lived near Plymouth just after John was ordained,’ Elspeth said. ‘That’s right. I have a photo of you in uniform standing next to a double-decker bus at the training school looking about fifteen. I must show it to the children.’

  Patrick sighed.

  Later, back at the rectory, he filled in the application form, enclosed a copy of his CV, which fortunately he had with him, and was going out to post it when he paused and said, ‘Why me, though? Why did this land on my doormat?’

  ‘Commander John Brinkley,’ I said, looking up from the book I was reading.

  ‘Brinkley?’

  ‘He was the liaison officer between the Met and MI5 when you worked for D12, wasn’t he? Not only that, I’ve thought for some time – after certain things had been smoothed out in odd ways – that your name is still wafting around favourably in the upper regions of New Scotland Yard. They want you. But you won’t be working here, not after the initial period, and if it comes about at all, you’ll be in London.’

  Patrick gazed around. ‘Where the hell do you keep this crystal ball?’

  When he had l
eft the room Elspeth said, ‘What certain things sorted out, if you don’t mind my asking?’

  ‘Oh, dead bodies in the course of our work and when we were helping James Carrick – things like that,’ I replied lightly.

  She stared at me. ‘Sometimes, Ingrid, I simply don’t know whether the pair of you are having me on or not.’

  One of the things uppermost in both Patrick’s mind and mine was that if, due to his ill health, John had to retire soon, as obviously he must do eventually anyway, where would they live? The rectory came with the job; the stipend was modest so they could not have accrued sufficient savings with which to buy a retirement home now. It looked as though my desire to stay in the Devon cottage might just have to go out of the window in order that we could buy a larger house with an annexe or granny flat for them. That was if Patrick made a go of the job.

  I forced myself out of this somewhat negative reverie with an effort. I would deal with one problem at a time.

  John had his operation and on the Tuesday evening was well enough to receive more than his wife by way of visitors. Patrick had waved to him through the glass doorway when he had accompanied Elspeth late the previous day – she can drive but had obviously been glad of his support.

  ‘Everything’s absolutely fine,’ Patrick told his father. ‘A retired lay reader from Frome has volunteered to take Matins and a ditto Bishop of Plymouth who now lives in Norton St Philip is doing the rest. Members of the PCC are organizing nearly everything else.’

  ‘That’s good of them,’ John said, speaking very quietly as he was still weak. ‘Sorry about the old horse,’ he went on. ‘Your mother told me.’ There was the hint of a twinkle in his eyes. ‘I think she’s quite relieved in a way, never liked horses – too big and dangerous.’

  As we were leaving another visitor arrived.

  ‘James!’ I exclaimed and kissed his cheek.

  ‘Thought I’d return the favour being as John practically lived at my hospital bedside for a week not all that long ago,’ he said.

  ‘So you’re fully fit?’ Patrick enquired, a hand on the other’s shoulder in man-to-man fashion.