The Hard Way

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.

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    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