Dishonour Among Thieves Read online

  Rory Macshane had concealed his past history, including his escape story. Nobody knew what he was capable of, and no one, for that matter, would have thought a chap who had been a farm labourer would have the wits to defeat trained guards and searchers. Rory had once been a Commando—but no policeman had ever learnt that: in short, Rory was more accurate in his assessment of the prison staff than the staff were about Rory Macshane.

  Chapter Two

  IT WAS NEARLY four years since Superintendent Macdonald, C.I.D., had confided to his friends Mr. and Mrs. Hoggett that he wanted to buy a small dairy farm in Lunesdale with the intention of retiring to farm his own modest holding when retirement was due. Giles and Kate Hoggett had warned him of the difficulties inherent in his project: the high cost of land (especially land fit for dairy farming), the high cost of good cows and of feeding stuffs and the drawbacks of having his land farmed by a bailiff in his absence. Macdonald’s legacy from his old uncle—£7,000—had looked a tidy sum to finance his modest project until he went into the matter in detail with the Hoggetts: they warned him that dairy farming was a skilled business and that as a tyro he was more likely to lose money than to make it.

  Nevertheless, Macdonald stuck to his idea: he travelled up north to Lancaster whenever he had a fine weekend and inspected property after property in Lunesdale, under the careful guidance of Giles Hoggett. Giles was ageing now, but he knew a lot about cow pastures and meadows, about farmhouses and barns, about milking cows and store cattle, and even a bit about sheep and fell farming.

  It wasn’t until Macdonald saw Fellcock Farm that he made up his mind that this was the property he wanted and that he was going to have it somehow. Fellcock was a hill farm to the south of Lunesdale: the sturdy stone house was on the eight-hundred-foot contour line, the highest farm in the rural district. The pastures and meadows sloped down from the level of the ancient stone house, from whence the River Lune could be seen far below, its serpentine coils shining across the vivid green dales, backed by woodland. In the far distance, beyond the woods and hills of Lunesdale, shone the wide waters of Morecambe Bay, and on the northern skyline were the craggy heights of Furness and the Lakeland mountains: Scafell and the Langdale Pikes, Helvellyn and Great Gable.

  It was an enchanting prospect: Macdonald loved the view and the loneliness, the chequer of green fields and the wild fell country behind the house; he enjoyed the fact that the stone house caught the last rays of the setting sun long after the valley was in shadow and he liked looking down on the steadings on the lower slopes and across the Lune to distant Wenningby, where Giles Hoggett’s farmstead snuggled comfortably against the vivid green of his well-tilled meadows and pastures, five hundred feet lower than Macdonald’s hill farm.

  Giles Hoggett, a veritable Cassandra in some respects, was dubious over the purchase of Fellcock: it was too high for milking cows, the land wanted a deal of till and cultivating to produce a good hay crop: there was no metalled road across the last half mile of fell, and the road up from the valley was steep and rough. Kate Hoggett pointed out all the difficulties of housekeeping in such a remote and lonely spot: no running water in the house, no electricity, and the flagged roof and mullioned windows needed repairing.

  It wasn’t until Macdonald fetched Jock and Betty Shearling to view his longed-for property that the Hoggetts began to consider the prospect more hopefully. Macdonald had got to know Jock Shearling and Betty Fell four years ago, when he had helped the Camton police to investigate the fire at Aikengill and the sheep stealing on Croasdale Fell. Jock and Betty had been married for over three years now.

  What Jock and Betty didn’t know about hill farms wasn’t worth knowing, and their great desire was to get their feet on the first step of the farming ladder. They had no capital to buy a farm of their own, but Macdonald’s offer gave them a chance to buy a few beasts of their own while they tilled his land and improved his buildings at a wage from which thrifty Betty knew she could save steadily, week by week.

  Macdonald drove the young couple up to Fellcock one sunny September day, before he put in a bid for the land: he knew that Jock and Betty were accustomed to fell farming, but he wondered if Betty would say “no” to the ancient remote house. He needn’t have bothered: Betty looked at it as her future home.

  “ ’Tis a good house: I can make a do of it,” she said confidently. “ ’Tis a better house than my father and mother ever had, and if it wants fettling up a bit, Jock’s handy with roofs and chimneys and suchlike.”

  Jock looked at the buildings first: the long sturdy barn and the lean-to calf shippons; then he walked over the fields.

  “ ’Tis good land,” he said. “Nicely placed for draining and the meadows slope to the sun. That needs some till, lime and basic slag, but you can get the hill-farm subsidy for them, and then you’ll want a tidy lot of stock—young beef cattle to start with—till the land’s in better heart. Then that’ll be fit for dairy cattle. If you let me work it, gaffer, reckon you won’t lose in t’ long run.”

  So Macdonald bought his forty acres of enclosed land, together with the buildings and farmstead and rights of sheep grazing over the fell, and Betty and Jock moved in before winter and began to put things to rights. Macdonald gazed out across Lunesdale to the distant mountains and was aware of a deep-seated satisfaction. It was the first land he had ever owned: it was his own and one day that sturdy stone house would be his home. He had lived in London since he was ten years old: his career had been in London, but his roots were in the Highlands where his forebears had been crofters: in comparison with their humble steading, the land and buildings at Fellcock were rich. Macdonald knew that: he looked at the green fields and the sturdy stone house and his heart warmed to both. This was where he meant to live when he retired: surely in this place a man could live at peace; even though the world went mad, this hill country might keep its ancient dower of quietude under the northern stars.

  2

  It was at Michaelmas that Macdonald became owner of Fellcock—that Jock and Betty moved in—and for the next six months he was spending money on his farm steadily. He paid for the grazing cattle and the young stock, for a tractor and implements, for hay and concentrates, for repairs to barn and shippon and house, for furniture and paint and wallpaper, but every time he visited the place, the house was more like home, the land in better heart, the grazing cattle thriving. In March, the first of his beef cattle went to market and lambing was near at hand: Jock had rounded the ewes up from the fell and they were brought into the pastures adjacent to the house. On Lady Day, Macdonald drove north, a full week’s leave ahead of him, to observe the lambing—his first lambing as “gaffer.” Jock Shearling used the old term of respect: the gaffer was the master, the hind was the man, or bailiff; in the conservative north, especially in the remote fell country, ancient terms were still used and it somehow pleased Macdonald to be addressed as “gaffer”: the word was native to the district. “Sir” does not come naturally to the lips of the country fraternity in the north: “boss” smacked of the town, but “gaffer” was still a term of respect.

  It was nearly four o’clock on a sunny afternoon when Macdonald turned from the main road on the south bank of the River Lune and began to climb into the hills: he drove through the village of Crossghyll, where folks were beginning to recognise him and hands were waved in welcome. All the village folk knew who he was and had probably commented on his temerity in buying a hill farm, “at his age, too: ’tis a young man’s job, is Fellcock.” But Jock and Betty had silenced the critics. “He’s got a head on his shoulders: he’s a worker, and he’s kind and straight with it,” said Betty, and Jock said, “If you take Mr. Macdonald for a fool, the fool’s yourself.” So the villagers waved to the newcomer from London and reminded themselves that Macdonald had done a good job when he rounded up the black-market gang when old Tegg, the shepherd, had been killed on Croasdale Fell, and Macdonald waved back, pleased to be accepted as a neighbour by the most reserved folk in England, the fell fa
rmers of higher Lunesdale.

  The village left behind, he had five miles of hill to climb, the gradient getting steeper and the surface rougher with every mile: it was not until he had passed Greenbeck—his nearest farming neighbours, but two hundred feet lower than Fellcock, that the going was really bad. Macdonald had already started a fight with the local council in order to get the road improved. He maintained that the road was a highway, marked on the Ordnance Survey as such, giving access to two farmsteads, Fellcock and High Garth, and that it was the business of the local authority to keep it in repair.

  High Garth farmhouse had been vacant for years, and Fellcock had not been inhabited for three years before Macdonald bought it, so the local authority had “let that be.” The farmer of Greenbeck was now a milk producer, which meant that the milk lorry collected his milk, and as far as Greenbeck the road was passable: beyond Greenbeck it was a very bad road indeed, but Macdonald intended to have that altered: as a potential dairy farmer he meant to have the advantages which accrue to that honourable calling.

  He reached his own turn at last, the rough track which joined Fellcock Hall to the highway. (Most sizeable farmsteads are “halls” in Lunesdale.) Jock Shearling was there, busy with the new gate, and Macdonald gave a cry of pleased surprise. He knew that Jock had been working hard to improve the rutted track which led from the road to the house, bringing up tractor loads of pebbles from the shiller banks in the valley, but Macdonald had never expected Jock to transform a rough track into a very presentable metalled road with a surface of grit and asphalt which looked almost a road layer’s job.

  “Good day, Jock. How on earth did you manage it? This is a grand job. Did the council send their roadmen up?”

  “Not them.” Young Jock smiled back at the gaffer. “That’s our road, from here to the house,” he said. “Them in the council won’t touch that: they let me have a load of asphalt they’d got left over from the work they did below Greenbeck—aye, and they brought it up in their big lorry. Likely, there’s a bill coming for that, but ’twas worth it. That’s a right good road now—or soon will be.”

  “It is indeed; it’s one of the things we wanted,” agreed Macdonald. “The Co-op man can get his van to the door now.” (It was always “we” and “our” when they spoke of the farm, a joint venture.) “Did the councilmen give you a hand laying the stuff?” went on Macdonald.

  “Not them,” said Jock. “They dumped it and made off: none of their business, this wasn’t. I was lucky,” he added leisurely, leaning against the stone stoop (the gatepost). “I was just getting busy shifting the stuff when a chap came down from up yonder.” He pointed up hill to the open fell. “ ’Twas a Saturday afternoon; he was one of the gangers working on t’ pipe line over Bowland and he’d walked over t’ fell to find Crossghyll village, t’ pub he wanted, I reckon. But he stopped when he saw me working and asked if I wanted a hand.” Jock scratched his head and grinned. “I did that,” he said, “ ’twas a right heavy job at first, and this fellow was a hefty chap. I said: ‘See how you make do and then maybe we’ll talk business.’ He was a worker, that one was,” added Jock. “I soon saw that; he didn’t waste no time and didn’t chatter neither. He worked a half day Saturday and a full day Sunday: thirty bob I paid him and ’twas cheap at the price, because he knew the job and put his back into it. Same the next weekend—and that’s why you’ve got a road instead of a mud lane to drive on.”

  “I’ve got you to thank for the road, Jock,” rejoined Macdonald. “Not many men would have tackled it: you did all the ground work, levelling and laying the pebbles and gravel, but I’m glad you got some help over the surfacing. Get in the car and I’ll drive you home to tea on your own road.”

  Jock got in, adding: “Thought it’d be a nice surprise for you to see the job done: it’s worried me to see you bumping a decent car over them potholes, and reckon you didn’t like it neither, treating the springs and tyres like that.”

  “You’re right,” said Macdonald. “I’d been meaning to take a pick and shovel and lend you a hand myself, but there’s other jobs I’d sooner be tackling. You must have been surprised when one of those navvies offered to do an extra job on a Saturday afternoon: they’re a rough lot from what I’ve heard. I had a crack with the gang boss sometime back: he said most of them are the dregs of the labour market, unskilled labour, here today and gone tomorrow.”

  “Likely they are: that’s a rough job, digging that pipe line,” said Jock. “Maybe the chap who worked here wanted some extra cash to pay for his drinks—costs money to get drunk these days, poor silly sods. But he was a worker, that one was.”

  Macdonald pulled up at the gate which gave on to his own fold-yard and Jock said:

  “Drop me here: I’ve got some young stock in the shippon at High Garth. I fixed it with Mr. Brough: he wasn’t using it and I keep an eye on some Aberdeen Angus he’s got on the pastures there: suits us both—saves him sending a man up and costs us nothing.”

  Macdonald laughed. “Good for you,” he said. “I’ll put the car away and say good day to Betty, and then I’ll come along to High Garth and see your beasts. It’s a funny thing, I’ve thought several times of going to have a word with Mr. Brough myself about that barn.”

  “That’s sense, that is,” replied Jock contentedly, “but likely if you’d gone he’d have been asking rent for his buildings: I knew he was short of labour and we fixed it so there was no money in it. I can see his beasts haven’t broken out and that while I’m along there foddering our own cattle.”

  3

  Five minutes later Macdonald was striding over the rough fell which lay between his boundary walls and the fences of High Garth. The two steadings were nearly a mile apart: it gave Macdonald immense satisfaction to see his own well-tilled fields, enclosed by drystone walls which were now in excellent condition, and to compare them with the rougher pastures of High Garth: here, most of the walls had gaps in them, the gaps closed by posts and barbed wire—a botched-up job, Jock called it, but Jock was a skilled waller.

  Macdonald knew all about High Garth because he’d asked Giles Hoggett about it. The land and buildings were the property of a very old man named Nathaniel Borwick. Nat Borwick had been born at High Garth Hall in the year 1873: he had worked there as unpaid labourer to his father until the latter’s death in 1918, when Nat had inherited the land and had got married. (He hadn’t been able to get married before, his father wouldn’t allow it, said Giles Hoggett.) From 1918 until the 1940’s Nat Borwick and his wife and son had farmed High Garth, living in the gaunt stone farmhouse on the fell in conditions akin to those of medieval peasants, save for the two amenities of glazed windows and chimneys. Nat’s son, Sam, had run away in 1942 and joined the Lancashire Fusiliers, and never been heard of since, according to Giles Hoggett. In 1948, Nat Borwick, then seventy-five years of age, had “given it best” and had gone to live, with his wife, in a cottage in Kirkham, in the river valley. Nat had refused to sell his farm: he maintained obstinately that his son Sam would come back one day, and Sam would farm High Garth: Borwicks had farmed it for three hundred years and Nat meant them to go on farming it. The land would have gone back to the fell had it been left untilled and ungrazed, so Nat rented the land to Matthew Brough, a prosperous farmer in the valley, and Brough used it as grazing land for beef cattle and sheep, mowing the meadows and housing the hay in the barn for winter fodder. The house, meantime, was uninhabited, its windows shuttered and barred, its doors bolted and padlocked, waiting until Sam Borwick came back to live in it. Since everybody was certain that Sam never would come back, it looked as though the house would never be lived in again—and Macdonald had his own private and personal reasons for taking an interest in it.

  Macdonald strode on over the fell and turned along the track which led past the gaunt stone house to the fold-yard and buildings. The gate had long since fallen, the wood rotted away from the hinges; the flagstones and cobbles of the yard were overgrown with tussocky grass, bramble, and bracken a
nd gorse flourishing in the cracks and crevices. It was a sad sight, but the stone house and outbuildings still stood foursquare and sturdy, as though waiting for an owner to put them to rights; there was nothing ruinous about the place: it was neglect, not decay, that made it melancholy.

  Passing the front of the house, Macdonald walked the length of the barn to the shippon entrance at the gable-end: he could hear Lassie, the sheep dog, barking, and Jock cursing her; no farmer lets his dog bark itself into spasms of excitement, a sheep dog has to be obedient. There were four young Galloway steers in the standings, fine young beasts, which Jock and Betty had bought. Jock had to take them out to the trough in the fold-yard to water them, and he mucked out the shippon while the beasts drank their fill, watched over by Lassie, so that they didn’t break away and go galloping over the fell. Then Jock forked down hay from the loft above the shippon and cut up some mangles in an ancient cutter which he had found and put to rights.

  While Jock was busy, Macdonald wandered round the great barn and inspected some of the rusting implements which Nat Borwick had left there. After Lassie had driven the cattle back to their stalls, the dog raced round the barn barking, until Jock called her to heel again.