‘You’ll never guess in a million years, so I’ll tell you.’ Cathy slapped her hands on her knees. ‘I’ve just bought the Bailey farm, Three Trees.’
That can’t be right, I thought to myself. I glanced from Paul, to Janet, and back to Cathy again. ‘You bought Three Trees Farm?’ I repeated dumbly.
‘Abso-flipping-lutely! Isn’t that a gas?’
I was still trying to process the information when Paul said, ‘I thought it sold to a couple up in Manchester.’
Cathy grinned slyly. ‘Well, it did, but I outbid them.’ She all but pulled the tablecloth out from under what remained of the tea things with a flourish and a cry of ‘Tah-dah!’
‘My offer was accepted several days ago.’ She pressed her hands together, raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Thank you, Jesus!
‘We’ll be exchanging contracts in a couple of weeks,’ Cathy rattled on, ‘and my solicitor thinks that since it’s a cash deal, and there’s no chain of sales, we can go to completion on the same day.’ She paused to take a breath. ‘Don’t you just love British terms? Anyway, I don’t know why there have to be so many steps, but with such an old farm, I guess they have to check out the boundaries, and rights of way and…’ She waved a hand. ‘Makes my head hurt. That’s what I pay the solicitor for, right? So he can buy the aspirin!’
As Cathy talked, Janet had been stacking the cups and saucers on the tea tray, but she stopped for a moment to ask, ‘Whatever made you decide to buy the Bailey farm, Cathy?’
Instead of addressing Janet, Cathy looked directly at me. ‘Remember when I told you that I had a private reading with Susan Parker, Hannah? I gave her a watch that used to belong to my father, and almost right away…’ Cathy took a deep breath. ‘You know how she always used to see a letter, like in someone’s name? Well, in my case, she saw a number. Three. Isn’t that amazing?’
‘Amazing,’ Paul said, using a tone of voice I recognized. I inched my foot closer to his and got ready to stomp.
‘Then she got all shivery,’ Cathy continued. ‘She put her hands on her neck, and started gagging. Said she couldn’t breathe, like she was strangling. Right away, I knew I was on the right track.’
‘You did?’ I had absolutely no idea what Cathy was going on about.
‘Didn’t you ever wonder how the farm got its name?’
Janet stopped fiddling with the tea tray and sat down. ‘Would it be stating the obvious to say that perhaps at one time, there were trees there, and that the trees were three in number?’
‘That’s right!’ Cathy said, a proud teacher commending a student. ‘But not just any trees, Janet. In the seventeenth century, those trees served as an unofficial gallows!’
I thought it was a stretch, and Paul did, too. Before I could stop him, he commented, ‘Three trees and a hanging could just as well apply to the crucifixion of Christ.’ Anticipating objection, he raised a hand. ‘Just saying.’
Cathy ignored him. ‘My father’s body lies on that farm somewhere, Hannah, I can just feel it. And Susan could, too. Honest to God, when I saw on CNN that somebody’d run her down, and she had died, I cried buckets. Buckets! She was the real deal, wasn’t she?’
‘I like to think so, Cathy, but Susan was always the first to admit that she could occasionally be wrong.’
Cathy flapped a hand. ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve heard all that. But you know what?’ She leaned forward, as if her words were only for me. ‘That means that some of the time, she’s gonna be tee-totally right!’
Claiming jet-lag, Cathy eventually left, heading up to her room to settle in.
As soon as she was out of earshot, I telephoned Alison, playing it casual. ‘How’s your father?’ I asked. ‘How’s he dealing with the sale?’
‘Wait, wait, wait!’ Alison said. ‘You’re not letting me get a word in edgewise!’
‘Well, OK,’ I said. ‘Over to you!’
‘I was just about to call you, Hannah. Have I ever got news!’
‘News?’ I was playing dumb.
‘You’ll never, ever guess who bought the farm.’
‘Is this a trick question, Alison? I was there, remember? When you told Paul and me about the buyers from Manchester. Champagne? Party hats?’
‘Well, they got gazumped.’
‘That sounds ominous.’ Visions of the Mancs sprang to mind, felled in their prime by a rare, African disease contracted while on holiday in Kenya. ‘What’s gazumped?’ I honestly didn’t know.
She laughed. ‘A London company trumped their offer by a good ten thousand pounds. There was a bidding war, actually, and the poor Mancunians kept upping their offer in thousand-pound increments, but eventually they had to drop out and the London people won.’
‘Who would want Three Trees that badly?’ I asked, feeling guilty about playing Alison along.
‘You’ll never guess.’
I hate playing Twenty Questions. ‘Is it bigger than a bread box?’
‘Oh, Hannah, you crack me up! As soon as I tell you this, you will guess for sure. The buyer is American!’
‘Could it be…’ I paused for dramatic effect. ‘Cathy Yates?’
‘Exactly! I was gobsmacked.’
‘I’m gobsmacked, too,’ I told her truthfully. It’s just that I had been smacking my gob about ten minutes earlier. ‘Does your father know?’
‘We’re not going to tell him until after we complete.’
‘Alison, that could be weeks! How can he not know?’
‘Well, the offer was made through a limited partnership in London. Cathy’s the only partner, of course, but Dad won’t know that.’
‘Crimenently, Alison. Your father will have a stroke when he finds out!’
‘So what? At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is the money. And after we’ve completed, there’ll be nothing Stephen Bailey or anybody else can do.’
NINETEEN
‘The American military police were called Dewdrops because their helmets were white.’Pat Kemp, Ministry of Food: Women’s Land Army: Index to Service Records of the Second World War 1939-1948, Series: MAF421, National Archives, Kew, Richmond, Surrey
While Paul was soaking in the tub, I kicked off my shoes, climbed on to the bed and reached for my iPhone. Olivia hadn’t given me her phone number, but when she called me earlier in the week, the number had been captured in my ‘Recents’ folder. I scrolled through the list of incoming calls, tapped her number, adjusted a pillow behind my back, and waited while it rang.
No answer.
I left a brief message asking Olivia to call me back, then joined Paul in the bathroom, a place, Paul always claimed, where he did some of his finest work. The toilet lid was up, so I put it down and sat on it.
Paul glanced up from the paperback he was reading to ask, ‘So, how was your day, sweetheart?’
Paul had bugged out on me at tea time, leaving me alone in front of the television screen with Cathy and the dirty dishes, so I hadn’t had the chance to tell him about an unnamed person from Totnes who was presently, according to a police spokesman on BBC1, helping police with their enquiries in the Parker case.
‘There are a lot of people living in Totnes,’ Paul reasoned after I’d finished. ‘Why are you so eager to pin the hit-and-run on poor old Alf?’
‘He gives me the creeps?’
‘Hah! Take that to the police and they’ll act on it right away.’
‘I’d sure like to know where he got all that money.’ I smiled, remembering Olivia’s reaction when she opened the bag. ‘Olivia calls it wonga. I looked it up, by the way. It comes from “wanger”, a Gypsy word for coal which was apparently used as currency at some time in the past.’