Reacher said nothing.
Pauling said, "I parked right next to him, didn't I? That farmer said he was in a Land Rover and there was only one Land Rover in the lot."
Reacher said, "I wish he hadn't been in here."
"This is probably one of the reasons he chose to come back. English beer."
"You like it?"
"No, but I believe Englishmen do."
Their sandwiches were surprisingly good. Fresh crusty home-made bread, butter, rare roast beef, creamy horseradish sauce, farmhouse cheese on the side, with thin potato chips as a garnish. They ate them and finished their beers. Then they headed upstairs to their room. It was better than their suite in Bayswater. More spacious, partly due to the fact that the bed was a full, not a queen. Four feet six, not five feet. Not really a hardship, Reacher thought. Not under the circumstances. He set the alarm in his head for six in the morning. First light. Taylor will stay or Taylor will run, and either way we'll watch him do it.
Chapter 61
THE VIEW OUT the window at six the next morning was one of infinite misty flatness. The land was level and gray-green all the way to the far horizon, interrupted only by straight ditches and occasional stands of trees. The trees had long thin supple trunks and round compact crowns to withstand the winds. Reacher could see them bending and tossing in the distance.
Outside it was very cold and their car was all misted over with dew. Reacher cleared the windows with the sleeve of his jacket. They climbed inside without saying much. Pauling backed out of the parking space and crunched into first gear and took off through the lot. Braked briefly and then joined the road, due east toward the morning sky. Five miles to Bishops Pargeter. Five miles to Grange Farm.
They found the farm before they found the village. It filled the upper left-hand square of the quadrant formed by the crossroad. They saw it first from the southwest. It was bounded by ditches, not fences. They were dug straight and crisp and deep. Then came flat fields, neatly plowed, dusted pale green with late crops recently planted. Then closer to the center were small stands of trees, almost decorative, like they had been artfully planted for effect. Then a large gray stone house. Larger than Reacher had imagined. Not a castle, not a stately home, but more impressive than a mere farmhouse had any right to be. Then in the distance to the north and the east of the house were five outbuildings. Barns, long, low, and tidy. Three of them made a three-sided square around some kind of a yard. Two stood alone.
The road they were driving on was flanked by the ditch that formed the farm's southern boundary. With every yard they drove their perspective rotated and changed, like the farm was an exhibit on a turntable, on display. It was a big handsome establishment. The driveway crossed the boundary ditch on a small flat bridge and then ran north into the distance, beaten earth, neatly cambered. The house itself was end-on to the road, a half-mile in. The front door faced west and the back door faced east. The Land Rover was parked between the back of the house and one of the standalone barns, tiny in the distance, cold, inert, misted over.
"He's still there," Reacher said.
"Unless he has a car of his own."
"If he had a car of his own he would have used it last night."
Pauling slowed to a walk. There was no sign of activity around the house. None at all. There was thin smoke from a chimney, blown horizontal by the wind. A banked fire for a water heater, maybe. No lights in the windows.
Pauling said, "I thought farmers got up early."
"I guess livestock farmers do," Reacher said. "To milk the cows or whatever. But this place is all crops. Between plowing and harvesting I don't see what they have to do. I guess they just sit back and let the stuff grow."
"They need to spray it, don't they? They should be out on tractors."
"Not organic people. They don't hold with chemicals. A little irrigation, maybe."
"This is England. It rains all the time."
"It hasn't rained since we got here."
"Eighteen hours," Pauling said. "A new record. It rained all the time I was at Scotland Yard."
She coasted to a halt and put the stick in neutral and buzzed her window down. Reacher did the same thing and cold damp air blew through the car. Outside was all silence and stillness. Just the hiss of wind in distant trees and the faint suggestion of morning shadows in the mist.
Pauling said, "I guess all the world looked like this once."
"These were the north folk," Reacher said. "Norfolk and Suffolk, the north folk and the south folk. Two ancient Celtic kingdoms, I think."
Then the silence was shattered by a shotgun. A distant blast that rolled over the fields like an explosion. Enormously loud in the quiet. Reacher and Pauling both ducked instinctively. Then they scanned the horizon, looking for smoke. Looking for incoming fire.
Pauling said, "Taylor?"
Reacher said, "I don't see him."
"Who else would it be?"
"He was too far away to be effective."
"Hunters?"
"Turn the motor off," Reacher said. He listened hard. Heard nothing more. No movement, no reload.
"I think it was a bird scarer," he said. "They just planted a winter crop. They don't want the crows to eat the seeds. I think they have machines that fire blanks all day at random."
"I hope that's all it was."
"We'll come back," Reacher said. "Let's go find Dave Kemp in the shop."
Pauling fired the engine up and took off again and Reacher twisted in his seat and watched the eastern half of the farm go by. It looked exactly the same as the western half. But in reverse. Trees near the house, then wide flat fields, then a ditch on the boundary. Then came the northern leg of the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then the hamlet itself, which was little more than an ancient stone church standing alone in the upper right-hand quadrant and a fifty-yard string of buildings along the shoulder of the road opposite. Most of the buildings seemed to be residential cottages but one of them was a long low multi-purpose store. It was a newspaper shop, and a grocery, and a post office. Because it sold newspapers and breakfast requisites it was already open.
"The direct approach?" Pauling asked.
"A variant," Reacher said.
She parked opposite the store where the shoulder was graveled near the entrance to the churchyard. They got out of the car into a stiff wind that blew strong and steady out of the east. Reacher said, "Guys I knew who served here swore it blew all the way from Siberia without anything getting in its way." The village store felt warm and snug by comparison. There was some kind of a gas heater going that put warm moisture into the air. There was a shuttered post office window and a central section that sold food and a newspaper counter at the far end. There was an old guy behind the counter. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and a muffler. He was sorting newspapers, and his fingers were gray with ink.
"Are you Dave Kemp?" Reacher asked.
"That's my name," the old guy said.
"We were told you're the man to ask."
"About what?"
"We're here on a mission," Reacher said.
"You're certainly here early."
"First come first served," Reacher said, because the London guy had, and therefore it might sound authentic.
"What do you want?"
"We're here to buy farms."
"You're Americans, aren't you?"
"We represent a large agricultural corporation in the United States, yes. We're looking to make investments. And we can offer very generous finders' fees."