Secret Asset

41

It was the Young Farmers Dinner Dance, but Charlie Hancock was not so young any more. He was too old for dancing. He’d spent the greater part of the evening, after the meal, drinking pints with the other older farmers at the village hall bar. He’d had the one obligatory bop with his wife, Gemma, then let her dance with her girlfriends, while he discussed the impact of the dry winter on the corn crop with his pals. She now sat half asleep in the passenger seat.

By one o’clock they were both ready to leave, and though he was pretty sure he shouldn’t really be driving—even the weakest bitter added up after a while—he took the wheel since Gemma’s eyes weren’t so good in the dark. He’d stuck to the back roads, through the tucked-in village of East Ginge, and the feudal holdings of the Lockinge estate, then relaxed as he climbed up into the Downs, since here at this hour he was unlikely to encounter anyone at all, much less a panda car with a policeman keen to breathalyse a farmer with a bellyful of brew.

He felt a bit sick and he needed to pee quite badly, so though he knew he was less than ten minutes from their farmhouse, he pulled over at the crest of Causewell Hill, where the dead-end track down to Simter’s Pond started. Gemma stirred only slightly when he clambered out, breathing in the cool air and looking up to admire Orion in the clear sky as he went about his business. He saw the deep marks of fresh tyres on the track, and would have thought nothing of it—it had become a bit of a lover’s lane, this remote stint of a road—had he not breathed in through his nose and caught the strongest whiff of smoke. He sniffed again, more carefully, and the smell was stronger. Something was burning.

Charlie couldn’t leave it, no way. This was no time to be stubble burning—not in June, and not in the middle of the night—and fire was a farmer’s nightmare. He wasn’t sure whose land he was on, since Simter had sold it recently to an outsider, but he assumed they’d want to know if a field were burning, or, worse, far worse, a shed or outbuilding had somehow caught fire.

He got back into the car and started down the lane. Gemma, jogged awake by the rough track, asked him what he was doing, but before he could answer they had turned the corner and before them, just in front of Simter’s Pond, they saw a car on fire. It must have been burning for some time, for only its shell remained. The flames had subsided, though they still lapped now in short, erratic breaths in the cool night air, casting a light caramel glow across the surface of the pond.

He stopped then, and got out to check if anyone was in the vehicle—but the heat was still so intense that he couldn’t get close enough to make sure.

“Joyriders,” he said to Gemma as he got back into the driver’s seat. “Bloody kids.”

“Hadn’t you better ring the police?” she asked drowsily.

He sighed. Part of him was wary of ringing after a night out. There were so many horror stories of even good Samaritans getting done—like that manager of a golf club who, rung by the police after the place had been broken into, drove over at three in the morning because they asked him to, and then got breathalysed and arrested.

But Charlie knew the right thing to do. After all, what if there were bodies in the car? And, of course, whoever owned this land would want to know that someone had dumped and burned a car, stolen in Wantage or Swindon most likely, in the middle of their lane.

He used Gemma’s mobile phone to dial 999, gave his name and said what he had seen. When they asked what make of car it was, he told them to hang on a minute, went and looked, then said he thought it was a Golf—a black Golf, though that might just be the effect of the fire. T-reg, he added, since the plates had not yet been burned away.

And fortunately, after taking his name and address, the dispatcher said he could go home himself, which he did, driving extra carefully. Charlie and Gemma were almost asleep by the time the patrol car made its way to Simter’s Pond. Unusually for what seemed just another joyriding wreck, a fire engine was sent from Wantage, after an alert duty officer learned that it was a T-reg Golf that had been dumped.