The Walking Dead

When the girl had first arrived, punctual to the minute, the farmer's wife had thought her pretty. When she had come closer, the woman saw the livid scar on the girl's forehead, running laterally, and the second shorter one, vertical on her left cheek.

The farmer's wife tried not to stare. She thought the scars were from a car accident, a head striking a windscreen.

'I hope I am not late. Have not kept you?' the girl asked. 'Not at all, no. You're on the dot.'

The girl was probably in her early twenties; the woman glimpsed her hands and saw no wedding ring. Sad for her: with such disfiguring wounds, the girl would have difficulty in finding a husband with whom to raise a family…She was Asian, but her accent was local. The farmer's wife hesitated as to whether Oakdene Cottage should be let to an ethnic-minority group, then killed the thought. She would let the cottage to the girl for a month, payment in advance, not to champion racial tolerance but because — the books of Oakdene Farm showed it — she and Bill needed the cash.

'Come on in, my dear, and look round.'

'Thank you, but I am sure it will be very satisfactory'

'And how many will you be?'

'Eight in all. It is for our family. Some are coming from abroad.'

'Well, it'll be a bit of a squash. Only four bedrooms — did I say that?'

'It is not a problem. I think it will be excellent.'

The farmer's wife said quickly, 'And that will be, for a month, eleven hundred pounds, paid in advance.'

A young man was left sitting in the car that had brought the girl. She would have been pretty, with a good figure under her jeans and light windcheater and striking dark hair to her shoulders, but for those hideous injuries. They went inside, and the farmer's wife fussed through the details of the kitchen and its appliances, the room hot water, the bedrooms and their linen, the dining room, crockery and cutlery stores, but she thought the girl only vaguely interested, which surprised her.

'It's ideal,' the girl said. She was at the doorway, gazing out over the fields and the emptiness of the Bedfordshire farmland. She would have heard rooks calling and the engine of Bill's distant tractor. 'So quiet, perfect for my family.'

'And if you don't want quiet, Luton's only five miles…Either my husband or I will pop down and do the grass, see that you're settled.'

'No need. We'll do it. You can forget we're here. We will enjoy looking after your lovely cottage. We'll see you when we leave.'

'You're sure?' She had enough to be getting on with at the farmhouse, and Bill did on the land, not to come down the quarter of a mile on the side track to cut the grass.

'Absolutely sure, thank you.'

The deal was done. The girl was driven away up the long, bumpy track to the main road.

Only when she had gone, and the farmer's wife had gunned her Land Rover, did she realize that she was ignorant of the girl's name and had no address for her. But she did have a letting for a month when there were no other takers for Oakdene Cottage, and eleven hundred pounds in fifty-pound notes rammed into her trouser hip pocket. She wondered why an Asian family should wish to stage a reunion in such a remote corner of the county, but only for a moment. Then she was considering how to prioritize eleven hundred pounds in cash, none of it for declaring.

* * *

He looked up from his screen. Its content rarely held him after his lunch break. After his two sandwiches and an apple, taken in a plastic box to the park at the back of the building, he was usually enveloped in tiredness. Now he was wondering — as his mind wandered — whether he could slip down to what he called 'the heads', lower himself on to the lavatory seat and get in a ten-minute doze that would help him through the remainder of his working day.

Dickie Naylor scowled.

The bloody woman was eyeing his territory already. Through the open door of his cubicle, he saw that Mary Reakes was gazing into his space, and he fancied he recognized covetousness in that look. Not that his cubicle had much to offer: a desk with a screen on it, a fishing-line tangle of cables beneath, his upright swivel chair, a lower upholstered seat for a visitor, a floor safe alongside two filing cabinets that each had a padlocked bar running vertically over the drawers, a side-table with a coffee machine and a couple of plastic water bottles. There was precious little else, except wall charts of holidays to be taken by the few staff who answered to him, and the roster for their night-duty obligations, a photograph of a cricket team proudly holding up a pathetically small silver cup and one of his wife in the garden, pictures of sour-faced bearded men were pinned to a board.