Picture of Innocence Read Online Free Page B

they all did. But if they weren’t cancelled, they would cut off after fifteen minutes and reset themselves; the suggestion had apparently been made by the officer called out this morning that Mr and Mrs Bailey might have slept through them, so Bailey intended giving her a demonstration. He closed up the box, locking it, thus setting the alarms. He, Judy established, had the only key.
    A pick-up truck rumbled into the yard, and Bailey’s wife returned with the man Judy had seen taking the cow into the cowshed. ‘This is Steve Paxton, our foreman,’ she said.
    ‘Hello,’ said Judy. I’m—’
    ‘Test th’alarms,’ said Bailey, and Paxton nodded, walking purposefully off somewhere. ‘Get in t’kitchen,’ he said to his wife. ‘Make thissen useful.’
    Mrs Bailey smiled at Judy, and went down the hallway, and through the door at the end.
    Judy was still trying to work out the Bailey relationship when suddenly the air was filled with deafening noise, which Bailey allowed to continue well past tolerance levels before he finally opened the box, cancelling the alarms, and let the lid hang open once more.
    Paxton came back as Judy’s hearing was returning to normal, grinning at her. ‘I was leaning on the fence,’ he said. ‘ That’s what happens if you put any real weight on it. Happens if anything higher off the ground than a cat crosses the infrareds, too.’
    ‘Thank you,’ she said, her ears still ringing.
    ‘They can hear them for miles,’ Paxton went on. ‘We get complaints from the neighbours when we test them like we’ve just done.’
    Judy could believe it, though their only neighbours were a mile away. At night, they would seem louder.
    Paxton left them then to go about his more usual duties, and Judy turned to Bailey. ‘Whoever it is might be—’
    The entryphone buzzed as she spoke, and Bailey reached past her to answer it. ‘Aye, all right,’ he said. ‘If tha must.’ He hung up, and went back outside, sitting down at the table on the veranda.
    Judy followed him out. ‘Whoever it is might be slipping in on foot through the gate as someone leaves,’ she said doggedly. ‘Then wait until after dark, put the threats up, and then just leave by the gate again.’ She explained as tactfully as she could that it needn’t be someone with no right to be there. Someone on the premises legitimately could do the same thing. ‘I don’t know if you—’
    Bailey left her in mid-sentence as a small hatchback drew up, going down to the car, and taking something from its woman driver after a brief conversation. The car drove off, and he came back up the steps and sat down again.
    ‘I don’t know if you want us to speak to—’
    The entryphone interrupted her again, and he got up to answer it. ‘Right, lad,’ he said, pressing the button, and came back out.
    ‘Would you like me to have a word with your employees?’ asked Judy.
    ‘I can do that missen,’ he said. ‘Don’t need a lass to do it for me. I want t’bugger caught. That’s what I need thee for.’
    ‘It won’t be easy,’ Judy told him honestly. But he was fond of security, she thought, and he clearly wasn’t short of a bob or two, so she would advise some more. ‘ You might want to consider closed-circuit television,’ she said, feeling as though she were advising Heathcliff to bug Cathy’s bedroom, so little did Mr Bailey appear to belong to this century, but he seemed to know what she was talking about. Mrs Bailey reappeared with a tray, and poured two mugs of coffee, handing one to Bailey. ‘A camera over the—’
    An elderly coupé arrived, followed by an estate car, and Judy had once again lost her audience, as a vaguely familiar young man emerged from the former, greeting the Baileys by their first names.
    ‘Police,’ Bailey said to the young man, with another nod of his head in Judy’s direction.
    ‘I’m Curtis Law, Aquarius 1830 ,’ the young man said to Judy. ‘You must be DI Hill. Bernard said you’d be