Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [78]
“Santa Maria di something. I always forget. It’s about ten words long. It’s in the foothills of wherever. Sorry. All the Spanish names flummox me. I’m completely hopeless with languages. I can barely speak English. Anyway, she doesn’t like the place. She says it felt like an outpost on the moon. I expect it’s not that big, eh? She ran off from home when she was something like fifteen years old. She made it up with her family after a bit, but she never went back.”
“Her family must miss her.”
“That,” he said, “I wouldn’t know. Although I expect they would do, wouldn’t they?”
“You’ve not met them, then? They didn’t attend your wedding?”
“Actually, there wasn’t much of a wedding. Just Allie and me and city hall in Salt Lake City. Someone to do the ceremony and two women we carted in off the street to be witnesses. Afterwards, Allie wrote to tell her parents we’d done the deed, but they didn’t write back. They’re cheesed off about it, I expect. But they’ll come round. People always do. Especially”— he grinned— “when there’s a grandchild on the way.”
That explained the magazine she’d seen. Conception with its countless stories on antenatal this and postnatal that. “You’re expecting? Congrat— ”
“Not yet. But any day now.” He tapped his fingers a bit on the steering wheel. “I’m very lucky,” he said. Then he pointed out an autumnal woodland to the east of the road on which they were driving, a rich panoply of umber and gold deciduous trees contrasting against the green of conifers. “Middlebarrow Wood,” he told her. “You can see the pele tower from here.” He pulled into a lay-by to give her a view.
The tower, Deborah saw, was on a rise of land that looked rather like the prehistoric barrows one found all round the countryside in England. Behind this rise, the woods began, although the tower itself was out in the open. This would have given it a superior position should any border reivers have come calling, a regular occurrence during the centuries when the border between England and Scotland continually shifted. The intent of the reivers was always the same. They were marauders who had taken advantage of the lawlessness of that period of time, perfecting the art of stealing cattle and oxen, invading homes, and stripping their victims of everything they owned. Their objective was always plunder and getting back to their own homes without being killed in the process. If they themselves had to kill to accomplish this, they did so. But that hadn’t been their first priority.
The pele towers had been an answer to the question of protection from the reivers. The best of them were indestructible, with stone walls far too thick to be harmed and windows just wide enough for an archer to fire from, and separate floors for animals, their owners, their household activities, and their defence. But the towers had fallen out of use as time went on, after the border was finally firmly established, along with laws and the advent of lawmen willing to make those laws more than someone’s passing fancy. Once the towers fell out of use, their materials were employed for other buildings. Or the towers themselves were subsumed into larger structures, becoming part of a great house, a vicarage, or a school.
Middlebarrow Tower was of the first type. It stood tall, with most of its windows intact. A short distance from it and across a field, a group of old farm buildings gave testimony to what some of the tower’s original stones had been used for. Between the tower and these farm buildings, a camp had been set up. It was equipped with small tents, honey pots, and several makeshift sheds with a larger tent to accommodate the twelve-step programme, Nicholas Fairclough said. This was also the dining tent. Meals and twelve-stepping went hand in hand.
Nicholas pulled back into the road, which descended to a lane leading off towards the tower. The tower, he said, was on the private land of Middlebarrow farm. He