The Hard Way

in the shop.”
    Pauling fired the engine up and took off again and Reacher twisted in his seat and watched the eastern half of the farm go by. It looked exactly the same as the western half. But in reverse. Trees near the house, then wide flat fields, then a ditch on the boundary. Then came the northern leg of the Bishops Pargeter crossroad. Then the hamlet itself, which was little more than an ancient stone church standing alone in the upper right-hand quadrant and a fifty-yard string of buildings along the shoulder of the road opposite. Most of the buildings seemed to be residential cottages but one of them was a long low multi-purpose store. It was a newspaper shop, and a grocery, and a post office. Because it sold newspapers and breakfast requisites it was already open.
    “The direct approach?” Pauling asked.
    “A variant,” Reacher said.
    She parked opposite the store where the shoulder was graveled near the entrance to the churchyard. They got out of the car into a stiff wind that blew strong and steady out of the east. Reacher said, “Guys I knew who served here swore it blew all the way from Siberia without anything getting in its way.” The village store felt warm and snug by comparison. There was some kind of a gas heater going that put warm moisture into the air. There was a shuttered post office window and a central section that sold food and a newspaper counter at the far end. There was an old guy behind the counter. He was wearing a cardigan sweater and a muffler. He was sorting newspapers, and his fingers were gray with ink.
    “Are you Dave Kemp?” Reacher asked.
    “That’s my name,” the old guy said.
    “We were told you’re the man to ask.”
    “About what?”
    “We’re here on a mission,” Reacher said.
    “You’re certainly here early.”
    “First come first served,” Reacher said, because the London guy had, and therefore it might sound authentic.
    “What do you want?”
    “We’re here to buy farms.”
    “You’re Americans, aren’t you?”
    “We represent a large agricultural corporation in the United States, yes. We’re looking to make investments. And we can offer very generous finders’ fees.”
    The direct approach. A variant.
    “How much?” Kemp asked.
    “It’s usually a percentage.”
    “What farms?” Kemp asked.
    “You tell us. Generally we look for tidy well-run places that might have issues with ownership stability.”
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    “It means we want good places that were recently bought up by amateurs. But we want them quick, before they’re ruined.”
    “Grange Farm,” Kemp said. “They’re bloody amateurs. They’ve gone organic.”
    “We heard that name.”
    “It should be top of your list. It’s exactly what you said. They’ve bitten off more than they can chew there. And that’s when they’re both at home. Which they aren’t always. Just now the chap was left alone there for a few days. It’s far too much for one man to run. Especially a bloody amateur. And they’ve got too many trees. You can’t make money growing trees.”
    “Grange Farm sounds like a good prospect,” Reacher said. “But we heard that someone else is snooping around there, too. He’s been seen, recently. On the property. A rival, maybe.”
    “Really?” Kemp said, excited, conflict in the offing. Then his face fell, deflated. “No, I know who you mean. That’s not a bloody rival. That’s the woman’s brother. He’s moved in with them.”
    “Are you sure about that? Because it makes a difference to us, how many people we have to relocate.”
    Kemp nodded. “The chap came in here and introduced himself. Said he was back from somewhere or other and his wandering days were over. He was posting a packet to America. Airmail. We don’t get much of that here. We had quite a nice chat.”
    “So you’re sure he’s going to be a long-term resident? Because it makes a difference.”
    “That’s what he said.”
    Pauling asked, “What did he post to America?”
    “He didn’t tell me what it was. It was going to a hotel in New York. Addressed to a room, not a person, which I thought was strange.”
    Reacher asked, “Did you guess what it was?”
    Dave Kemp,
the farmer in the bar had said.
Nosy bugger.
    “It felt like a thin book,” Kemp said. “Not many pages. A rubber band around it. Maybe he had borrowed it. Not that I squeezed it or anything.”
    “Didn’t he fill out a customs declaration?”
    “We put it down as