Minette Walters - The Devil's Feather

Re the Hound of the Baskervilles. Conan Doyle describes it as a mastiff/bloodhound cross, the size of a small lioness with phosphorous flames dripping from its jaws (!), and trust me, even Bagley’s interesting imagination would have trouble embroidering Jess’s soft-mouthed mutts into anything so exciting. It’s true you can’t move when they sit on you, but their favourite occupation is to drool saliva into your lap not grab you by the throat and shake you. She’s keeping them in for the moment because Bertie’s buried in the top field and she’s worried they’ll dig him up. Once the turf has grown over the grave, they won’t be interested. She explained this to Bagley but, unfortunately, it seems to have made him more suspicious.

Re the DVD. It never occurred to me to destroy it. Am I still anxious about it? No. If I’m honest, I’m rather proud of it. I even wish Bagley could see it. It might help him to understand why I’m so jubilant about taking MacKenzie on a second time. As a wise man once said: “Winning is everything.”

You’ve been a good friend, Alan, and I hope I’ve set your mind at rest. In passing, if I ever do kill MacKenzie I won’t bother to hide his body. There’ll be no point if I can hack him to death in the hall with a blunt axe and plead self-defence. Maybe I should have done it when I had the chance!

With my love and thanks,

Connie

I DIDN’T KNOW THEN if Madeleine kept her appointment with Inspector Bagley. If she did, he never referred to it. He fell into the habit of dropping in unexpectedly, both at Barton House and Barton Farm, sometimes making two or three visits in a day. He usually found me working at my computer, but invariably missed Jess, who was out in her fields, bringing in a late harvest after one of the wettest summers for years.

On several occasions she discovered his car in her drive and the man himself poking around in her outhouses, but she took it all in good part, even though he didn’t have a search warrant. She told him he was welcome any time, and suggested he keep checking the back garden so that he could satisfy himself the only bones there were beef bones. Her dogs lost their suspicion of him once they learnt the sound of his engine, but he never lost his suspicion of them.

I, too, remained wary around them. Some phobias aren’t susceptible to logic. I could cope with one dog at a time but the four en masse still alarmed me. It was clear they missed Bertie. Outside, they patrolled their wire enclosure looking for him, and, inside, sat by doors, watching for his return. Jess said they’d do it for a month before they forgot him, but Bagley didn’t believe her.

“They’re not waiting for the other dog to return,” he told me one morning, “they’re trying to get out.” He was standing behind me, reading what was on my computer screen, a complicated paragraph on post-traumatic stress statistics. “You haven’t got very far with that, Ms. Burns. You’ve only added one sentence since last night.”

I clicked “save” and pushed my chair back, narrowly missing his foot. “It would go a lot faster if you didn’t keep coming in and breaking my train of thought,” I told him mildly. “Can’t you ring the doorbell once in a while? At least give me a chance to pretend I’m out.”

“You said I could walk in whenever I felt like it.”

“I wasn’t expecting you to take up residence here.”

“Then shut your back door, Ms. Burns. It’s an open invitation to anyone to enter.” He offered me a cigarette. “After what happened, I’m surprised you’re so unconcerned about unwanted visitors.”

It was a variation on a question he’d asked a hundred times already. I accepted a light. “I’m not unconcerned,” I answered patiently, “but the alternative is to turn this place into a prison. Is that what you want me to do? I thought modern policing was all about persuading victims to get back to normal as fast as possible.”

“But this isn’t normality for you, Ms. Burns. Normality was checking the locks on the doors and windows every two hours.”

“And a fat lot of good it did me,” I pointed out. “It raised my stress levels, and MacKenzie got in anyway.” I fingered the panic alarm round my neck. “In any case, I now have this. It’s given me confidence that the cavalry will turn up…which was the intention, wasn’t it?”

He smiled rather sourly as he dropped into the armchair beside the desk. “Indeed, but I suspect it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money. Are you ever going to use it? Ms. Derbyshire refuses to wear hers.”

“There’s no point when she’s out in the fields. It needs a landline or a telephone signal to work.”

He cast his usual glance around the office as if something would suddenly show itself to him. “I had a word with Alan Collins last night. He said you’re too clever for me, and I might as well give up now. He also said he won’t be shedding any tears if MacKenzie’s never heard of again. If anyone deserves what he gets, it’s your attacker.”

I doubted Alan had said anything so crass, particularly to an opposite number in a different county. “Really?” I asked in surprise. “I’ve always thought of him as such a stickler for the rule of law. I can’t imagine him ever going on record with favourable views about summary justice and vigilantism.”

“It wasn’t on record,” Bagley said. “It was a private conversation.”

“Still…will he repeat those remarks to me, do you think? I like the one about my being too clever for you. If I were to broaden that out into a general piece, contrasting IQ levels among the police with those of prison inmates-” I raised an eyebrow. “What do you think?”

“That you’re probably the most annoying person I’ve ever met,” he said grimly. “Why doesn’t it worry you to be interviewed, Ms. Burns? Why doesn’t it make you angry? Why don’t you have a solicitor? Why isn’t he arguing police harassment?”

“ He? If I had one, don’t you think he’d be a she?”

Bagley flicked ash irritably into the ashtray on the desk. “There you go again. Everything has to be turned into a joke.”

“But I enjoy your visits,” I said. “Winterbourne Barton’s a black hole as far as social interaction’s concerned.”

“I’m not here to entertain you.”

“But you do,” I assured him. “I love watching you poke around the garden looking for clues. Have you found anything yet? Jess says you keep going back to her granary, so presumably you’re wondering if we buried MacKenzie under a ton of wheat? It wouldn’t have been easy, you know. Grain’s like quicksand. We’d have had trouble lugging a corpse on to the heap without sinking in ourselves.”

“She’s added another ton in the last couple of weeks.”

“And it’s all about to be shifted to a commercial grain store. Don’t you think someone will notice if a body tumbles out?” I watched his mouth turn down. “I don’t understand why you can’t accept that he freed himself and took to his heels. Is it because you’d have killed him if you’d been in our shoes?”

He took a thoughtful drag of his cigarette. “I’m sure you dreamt of revenge.”

“All the time,” I said with a small laugh, “but it did me even less good than checking the window locks. I lost so much weight over it that I feel like an old hen about to drop off her perch. Look.” I extended a bony right arm. “If there’s any useful meat on me you’d need a microscope to find it. How could that ”-I cocked my left forefinger at a grape-sized bicep-“vanish a corpse in thirty minutes?”

He smiled reluctantly. “I’ve no idea. Would you like to tell me?”

“There’s nothing to tell, but even if there were you wouldn’t be able to use it. You’re on your own and there’s no recorder. Anything I said would be inadmissible as evidence.”