Dead in Time

Chapter Ten

Slightly less than one week later, I stood in a leafy country track, the tangs of overlaying manures on the air. A neatly painted sign poked out of the hedge before me:

Old Wallow Farm : Organic Fruit & Veg : Rare Breeds

please don’t feed the geese

A lifelong townie, I’d been half-expecting a mud hole with a couple of wooden barns and a tractor parked next to a cattle grid, or at least something vaguely redolent of a Stella Gibbons novel. Instead, as I walked into the tarmac and concrete arrivals yard, I saw a long, low, grey stone building to one side, flanked by a small timbered structure too big to really be called a shed and, to the other side of the yard, the corner of a larger building in the same clean-lined, grey masonry. I guessed it must be the farmhouse, though from what I could see it looked tall and square, more like a Georgian parsonage than one of those higgledy-piggledy homesteads that grows out of the land. I reached up to tuck my hair behind my ear, and my fingers brushed against Mum’s sapphire stud. It seemed very quiet. I couldn’t hear any of the sounds I associated with farms. Nothing was going ‘moo’ or ‘oink’ or even making any of those drawn-out, strangulated ‘rrrrrgggrrrrgggghhh’ noises that always so surprise young children brought up on Old MacDonald and fuzzy picture books.

Starlings perched on the roof of the house; unlike the ones that frequented my building, they weren’t impersonating crying babies or mobile phones or anything except, perhaps, other starlings.

I looked around for some kind of sign or indication of where I should go. A young woman with a smart ponytail and a gilet apparently made from recycled mattress quilting appeared at the door of the long, low building, and waved to me.

“Miss Ross? Hello! Taxi found us all right, then? Lovely. Do come in.”

I did so and found a cosy, comfortable office that held a large L-shaped desk covered with paperwork and supporting an elderly PC and printer. Underneath it, an equally elderly tricolour collie overflowed from a well-chewed wicker basket. The dog looked up, turning extremely intelligent liquid brown eyes on me, and then it thumped its tail half-heartedly on the faded blue carpet. Corkboards covered two of the walls, peppered with coloured pins and patches of paper. A scattering of ribbons and rosettes—red, blue, white, and green—with gold lettering on them, and photographs, had all been pinned up at eye level. Dogs, but also horses, sheep, and cows. I had no idea how you told the breeds apart, but I assumed that they were all excellent examples of what they were supposed to be.

I had spoken to Christy Brooks, the owner of the smart ponytail and squashed-mattress gilet, on the phone. In person, she seemed just as cheerful and clean-scrubbed as I’d imagined her.

She offered me a seat in a comfortable office chair and brought me a cup of tea from the little staff kitchenette. Then she picked up a radio and paged my arrival through to Joss Napier, explaining that they couldn’t use mobile phones because the farm nestled neatly in a black spot with utterly dreadful reception. A voice crackled through over the radio, telling her to take me into the morning room. I hadn’t been intimidated up until that point.

“Righto, will do. Come along,” she said to me, all bright and chipper, and I headed meekly after her, out of the farm office by a back door.

The collie got up arthritically and followed us out onto a patch of beautifully manicured green lawn, where the dog squatted to relieve—ah—herself. The lawn, frilled with lavender beds and speckled with the browning leaves of daffodils and glossy blooms of tulips, hugged a brick paved path that led down to a set of french doors. Ms. Brooks took a key from her pocket, opened the doors, and led me into a small room with a tiled floor. Modern panelled doors led off to the left and right, while a rack of boots and wellies lay straight ahead of me, a knobbly, extremely muddy rug and a coir mat on the floor, and a washer-dryer rumbled to itself in the corner. The collie waddled over to a metal dish full of water and took a few gulps as Ms. Brooks opened the door on the left.