Pictures of Perfection

They were only a couple of miles outside Enscombe now on the narrow winding road Wield remembered from the day before, bounded by an ancient drystone wall on one side and a hedgerow not much younger on the other.

A Post Office van came up behind them, tailgated them for a while, then on the first not very long straight gave a warning peep on the horn and shot past.

‘Bit chancy,’ said Wield.

‘He’s late for the lunch-time pick-up,’ said Filmer. ‘Always late, is Ernie Paget. Except when he’s early ’cos he doesn’t want to be late somewhere else.’

‘At least he does move at speed when he has to,’ observed Digweed irritably. ‘Do we have to dawdle so? I have work to do even if you don’t!’

‘More haste less speed,’ observed Wield, which was not very original but proved almost immediately accurate. The red van had vanished round the next bend. Suddenly they heard a screech of brakes, a chorus of baa-ing, and a loud bang!

‘Holy Mother!’ exclaimed Filmer, hitting the brake hard.

They went round the bend in a fairly controlled skid, coming to a halt aslant the road with a jerk that threw Wield and Filmer against each other and flung Digweed forward with his arms wrapped round the front-seat head restraints.

The van hadn’t been so fortunate. It was halfway through the hedge, straddling a narrow but deep drainage ditch, with steam jetting up from beneath the buckled bonnet.

Ahead, the road was packed with sheep milling around in panic. A man was ploughing through them bellowing what sounded like abuse but turned out to be commands to a pair of Border collies.

‘You both OK?’ said Wield. Filmer grunted laconically but Digweed was no Spartan in either suffering or speech.

‘OK? Not content with depriving me of two hours of peaceful and profitable existence, you finally attempt to rob me of existence itself, and you ask if I am OK?’

He paused rhetorically, his face flushed with a rage which made him look a lot healtheir than his usual scholarly pallor. He was, Wield decided, OK.

‘Let’s take a look at Ernie,’ said Filmer.

At this moment the door of the van opened and the driver staggered out. His face was covered in blood and he let out a terrible cry and slumped sideways as his feet touched the ground.

Fearing the worst, Wield got out and hurried forward.

‘Don’t move,’ he cried, recalling his emergency medical training.

The mask of blood turned towards him.

‘Don’t move? I’ve smashed me fucking van and broken me fucking nose and now I’m up to me hocks in freezing fucking water and you tell me don’t move? Who the hell are you? Jeremy fucking Beadle? Gi’s a hand out of here, it’s sucking me down.’

The farmer had arrived too. He was a man of medium height with a breadth of chest and shoulder which seemed to have bowed his legs. He had a shepherd’s crook in his right hand, its handle carved from a ram’s horn into a beautifully detailed hawk’s head. He proffered this to the postman and hauled him on to the road.

‘You’ve knackered that hedge, Ernie Paget,’ he said. ‘Who’s going to fettle it, that’s what I want to know.’

‘Sod your hedge. I were lucky it weren’t your wall.’

‘Nay,’ said the farmer. ‘You’d likely have bounced off the wall. By gum, you’re quick off the mark for once in your life, Terry Filmer. Last time I called police, they were an age coming. You going to arrest him for speeding?’

‘You by yourself, George?’ said Filmer. ‘You know the law when you’ve got stock on the highway. One man up front, one behind.’

‘Oh aye? Happen I’m a bit short-handed today. Like you lot, I hear!’

Wield noted the sarcasm, but was too busy checking Paget to try to follow it up. He couldn’t find any damage apart from the nose and some bruised ribs, but it would take a proper hospital examination to check if there was anything broken.

‘Let’s get him into the car,’ he said to Filmer, ‘and you can call up some help.’

‘Hang about. I’ll just sort these sheep, then you can come up to the house for a mug of tea,’ said the farmer.

He turned and began to bellow instructions again, rather unnecessarily it seemed to Wield, as the dogs had been quite happily turning the flock through an open gate into the field beyond the wall. There was a cold wind blowing down the valley and Wield shivered. The farmer seemed unaffected even though he was wearing only a short-sleeved tartan shirt and his close-cropped head was hatless. Wind and weather had cured his skin to the consistency of leather. His trousers, which were tied round his waist with baling twine and looked as if they could walk by themselves, were tucked into a pair of odd wellies, the left black, the right green.

‘I’m not going to hang around here any longer,’ declared Digweed, who had preserved an unnatural silence for the past couple of minutes. ‘I can be comfortable in my own house long before you get this lot sorted out.’

‘Do us a favour, Mr Digweed,’ said the postman as Filmer helped him to the police car. ‘Tell Mr Wylmot at the Post Office that I’ve been held up.’

‘Certainly,’ said Digweed. ‘I hope you’ll be all right, Mr Paget.’

Wield felt, though he did not show, surprise at this faint glimmer of human feeling. He said, ‘Hold on, Mr Digweed, and I’ll walk into the village with you.’

He followed Filmer to the car and said, ‘I’ll leave you to sort this lot out. I’ll be making for the Hall to meet Mr Pascoe. Why don’t we meet up at Church Cottage in about an hour?’

‘Fine,’ said Filmer. ‘Try not to bleed on the seat, Ernie.’

‘This farmer, what’s his name?’

‘Creed. George Creed. He farms Crag End up there.’

He pointed to a whitewashed farmhouse set like a solitary molar in the rocky jaw of land rising to the west. The track running up to it was steep and unmetalled. Wield hoped the postman’s ribs, not to mention the car’s springs, would survive the trip.

He said, ‘Owns it, does he?’

‘Rents it from the Guillemard estate.’

‘They own most of the land round here, do they?’

‘Did once. Lot of it had to go for death duties when the Squire inherited in the ’fifties. Since then the bottom’s fell out of sheep, and there’s only three working farms left on the estate and t’other two are in a bad way.’

‘But Creed makes a go of it?’

‘Good farmer, George. Didn’t just stick with sheep. Nice herd of cows too. And pigs. Best ham in the county comes from George’s porkers.’

‘I noticed that he seemed to know all about Bendish going missing.’

It wasn’t intended as reproof but Filmer seemed ready to take it as such.

‘Most folk’ll know by now,’ he said with some irritation. ‘It’s not like the town round here with no one bothering with their neighbours. And you’ve got to know how to talk to these folk. I don’t know what your fat boss is playing at, sending a soft townie like that Pascoe out here. We’d have done better with a couple of dogs sniffing around the moor in case the lad’s lying up there somewhere with a broken leg. Yon fancypants likely wouldn’t know blood if he trod in it!’

‘I’ll pass your observations on, shall I, Terry?’ said Wield. ‘And talking of blood and fancypants, Postman Pat’s just dripped down your trousers.’

And smiling to himself, he turned and hurried after the bookseller who, forecastably, had been too impatient to wait.

CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_841af6b0-0f21-5dc1-b4b4-cc92e9ef309f)