Picture of Innocence Read Online Free

soothing colourwashed walls, enlivened by more paintings by the same artist. The centrepiece was a dramatic black stove, pale peach armchairs facing it from three angles. Along the wall, under the window, was a long, matching sofa, and in front of it, a black coffee table. At the far end, through a stepped archway, a dining table and chairs stood on a raised polished-wood platform, lit by the same diffused light from another window. What had once been a rather poky dining room and front room had been opened out into one airy, inviting living space, and it wasn’t at all Judy’s idea of a farmhouse, especially not one presided over by Mr Bailey.
    To her left, she could see into an office with scuffed striped wallpaper, a metal desk, an open safe containing documents, and a chipped and dented filing cabinet. The only reference to the rest of the house was the cream vertical blind which covered the window. That, she presumed, was Bailey’s domain, and she expected to be taken in there to be shown the X-rated communications, but he walked past the office, opened a cupboard, reached in and pulled out two pairs of black rubber boots, handing a pair to her, and began unlacing his shoes.
    Judy’s heart sank. It had been the wettest spring since God knew when, and she was to be shown the death threats in situ . She slipped off her shoes, noticing the mess she and Bailey had made of the hall floor just by coming in from the courtyard, and grimly stepped into the boots. They were two sizes too big and cut down so that they came to mid-calf, catching the hem of her skirt, which sat on them like badly fitting curtains.
    They came back out, got into the Land Rover, and, for the next hour, she was driven round the entire farm, stopping to be dragged into hedges and ditches, squelching through God knew what, hostile bushes snagging her jacket and catching her hair, malevolent trees reaching out their branches to rub their wet bark against her, until she had seen and taken down each and every one of the death threats which had been nailed up on trees, stuck up in barns, pinned to bushes … all over the damned place.
    Back in the relative comfort of the Land Rover, as it jolted and whined its way through mud that would have given a hippopotamus second thoughts, she looked at them properly. They all carried much the same message, to the effect that Bailey was going to die a particularly grisly death if he didn’t sell up. The text, liberally sprinkled with four-letter words, was accompanied in each case by an amateurish drawing. They had been done on a computer.
    ‘A lass shouldn’t be readin’ that,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t let th’wife see ’em.’
    Judy was startled by the number of words he’d managed to produce, but chose to ignore the sentiment. ‘They appeared overnight?’ she asked.
    ‘Aye.’
    ‘And your alarms are activated at night?’
    ‘Aye.’
    The gate was controlled by the panel on the entryphone, unless it was opened with a remote-control ‘key’; in either event it would close automatically when the visitor passed a certain point, whether on foot or in a vehicle. Vehicles and pedestrians leaving the farm could press a button to open it, and it closed automatically once they cleared a certain point.
    ‘The gate,’ Judy said. ‘Who has a key for it besides you and Mrs Bailey?’
    ‘Th’wife’s not got one.’
    Judy frowned. ‘Isn’t that a bit inconvenient for her?’
    ‘Happen.’
    Oh, well, none of her business. ‘Does anyone else have one?’
    ‘Paxton and t’lass.’
    Paxton, she had already discovered, was his foreman. ‘Lass?’ she queried.
    ‘Daughter. She’s t’vet. Sees to th’animals.’
    She knew what a vet was. ‘What about your employees?’ she asked. ‘How do they get in?’
    ‘Paxton sees to ’em.’
    ‘And visitors?’ she asked. ‘ Deliveries? Do you sometimes leave the gate open for them?’
    ‘Nay. They use t’phone. Th’wife’s always in th’ouse.’
    She would