Martin Edwards - The Hanging Wood

‘I must talk to Hannah Scarlett, it’s a matter of life and death.’

Orla shaded her eyes from the July sun. Her right hand trembled so much that she dropped her mobile into the shallow ditch and had to reach down to fish it out. In front of her stood the hedge marking the boundary of her father’s farm.

‘Life and death,’ she hissed into the phone.

‘May I have your name?’

‘Orla … Orla Payne.’

A long, long pause. ‘You spoke to DCI Scarlett yesterday afternoon?’

The detective constable sounded young and sceptical. Orla pictured her, pursing her lips, searching for a politically correct way to say get lost. A gatekeeper, tasked with making sure her boss wasn’t disturbed. She’d written Orla off as a drunken time-waster, just because her voice was too loud and she’d slurred her own name. So what if she’d downed a few cans? This was supposed to be a free country, it wasn’t against the law to drown your sorrows.

‘That’s right.’ Yesterday’s call had gone badly, but she’d summoned the nerve to try again. The last chance saloon.

In the hedgerow, a linnet sang. The summer air tasted sweet, and she could smell the fields. But her head ached; she couldn’t do this. It was too difficult.

‘Ms Payne. Are you still there?’

Legs swaying, Orla grabbed the handle of the car door and steadied herself. She’d parked next to the ditch. On the way, she’d cracked the wing mirror against a drystone wall, but who cared? People would say she was unfit to drive. Yet here she was, calling the Cold Case Review Team at Cumbria Constabulary. She wasn’t afraid any longer. Fear had become as pointless as hope.

‘Ms Payne?’

‘Just put me through, will you?’

‘I’m sorry-’

‘Am I talking to myself?’ Orla was trying not to scream with frustration.

‘DCI Scarlett is on leave today.’

The woman spoke with exaggerated patience. Orla’s cheeks were moist. Despair made her guts churn.

‘Can I help, Ms Payne?’

‘Too late,’ Orla mumbled into her phone. ‘It’s just ancient history to everyone else. Nobody cares about justice.’

People never listened to her. The warning she’d been given was true: nobody would believe what she had to say. She had no proof; talking to the police was a waste of time. The energy had drained out of her, like oil trickling from a leak in her car. She had no fight left.

‘Ms Payne?’

Orla killed the call.

She tried to crush the mobile in her hand, but it was impossible, so she hurled it over the hedge. The phone struck a black tank squatting on top of a small trailer, and fell into a trough filled by the tank with water for the cattle to drink. The trough was an old enamel bath, and her father hadn’t bothered to take the taps off.

Contacting the police was a stupid idea. She should never have listened to Daniel Kind. All he knew about murder came from books and dusty archives. He’d advised her to talk to Hannah Scarlett, but yesterday afternoon Orla’s brain was even fuzzier than it felt right now. She’d made a fool of herself when she was put through, and in the end, Hannah lost patience.

Orla kicked the car door, wishing it was the head of the detective constable. Her boots had steel tips, and they dented the paintwork. Didn’t matter. She’d never drive that old banger again.

The lane led to Mockbeggar Hall, and she saw its turrets poking up above the copper beeches. As a child, she’d dreamt of living in the Hall. In one of her favourite fantasies, there had been some mix-up, and in the end she proved she was no farm kid, but an unacknowledged daughter of the Hopes family, who had owned the Mockbeggar Estate for generations. But now the Hall belonged to the Madsens, who had made their money through selling caravans. Her father reckoned the Madsens always got what they wanted in the end, and he was right.

She walked to a point where the hedge gave way to a fence. In the field, a trio of plump Friesians grazed, each with a yellow tag in its left ear, bearing a number inked in black. Their eyes were dark, with no discernible pupils. They looked mournful, as if someone they knew had died.

Orla ripped off her headscarf and threw it into a clump of nettles. A splash of red and gold among the green. She no longer felt self-conscious about her bald head. The cows weren’t embarrassed, and neither was she.

A red sign stapled to a fence post said Danger — electric shock. She heard a faint tick-tick-tick. Throughout summer, the strands of wire were live. As she levered herself over the fence, her leg brushed the wire. The impact from the current felt like a blow from a mallet. It was years since a farm fence had shocked her, and she landed on the ground in a heap.

Swearing, she clambered to her feet, vaguely aware that the booze had deadened her senses. She stumbled away from the fence in the direction of the farm buildings. Sometimes she kept to the tractor tracks, sometimes she veered over the grass. A single cow, black with a white blotch on its belly, trudged towards her. Its lumbering tread hinted at menace, but Orla wasn’t scared. She’d grown up with animals, and found their smells comforting. Cows don’t hurt anyone, unless you are stupid enough to let a dog scamper around and frighten their calves.

As she passed, the cow made a crooning noise. It didn’t take much imagination to believe the animal was pleading with her. Orla had never lacked imagination; she and her brother Callum shared that in common.

Lane End Farm stood four hundred yards ahead. On this side of the old higgledy-piggledy house was a long line of cattle sheds and outbuildings, along with a slurry tank and the grain silo. The back garden where she and Callum once played was overgrown. Most of the windows were at the front of the house, facing in the opposite direction. She remembered peering through each of them, gazing at the horizon, trying to make out the contours of Blencathra through the morning mist.

She’d come full circle; Lane End was where it all began. Her mother had given birth to her in the kitchen — her waters broke suddenly, and there was no time to drive to the hospital. Orla’s earliest memories were of playing hide-and-seek with Callum around the sheds and machinery while their father barked orders to his men and their mother stayed in bed with what she called a migraine and Dad called a hangover. Orla used to shut her eyes so tight they hurt, counting to one hundred and then calling, ‘Coming, ready or not!’ Callum always made it hard for her to find him, taunting her for the eternity it took to track him down.

Callum’s voice rattled around in her brain. The last time she saw him, he’d been so pleased with himself, teasing her by refusing to let her into a secret, laughing fit to burst when she ran off with tears in her eyes, saying she didn’t care.

Her foot caught on a hook protruding from a lichen-smeared stone cheese press long ago abandoned in the grass, and she lost her balance for a second time. This time her ankle wrenched, and she sat down to massage the tender flesh. For an instant, she had an impression of a flash of light, as if the sun had glinted on a pair of field glasses.

When she picked herself up, not a soul was to be seen. These days farms needed fewer people to do all the work. An engine roared into life behind the stone-built shippons; a tractor must be heading out into the narrow lane.

The grain silo loomed in front of her, linked to the farmyard by a dirt track rutted by huge tyres. The silo was forty feet high, a finger pointing to Heaven. A memory swam in her head of the silo’s arrival at Lane End Farm; it came in component parts, arched sections of steel. She and Callum watched the crane lifting the sections into place as their father yelled instructions, and waved his arms like a human windmill.