Chapter 22
‘It all makes sense if you think about it,’ said Gemma, looking at Rowan and Willow’s faces in turn.
‘Does it?’ said Rowan. ‘Ashley was the one who discovered the break-in, if you remember. Why would she do that if she was responsible for it?’
‘Well, how better to exclude herself from any suspicion?’ answered Gemma. ‘Especially when she went on to help us get everything straight. We’d never think she was the culprit.’ She glanced at Leo. ‘And there’s something about that day you don’t know, something odd.’
‘Go on…’ Rowan’s voice was hard.
‘We all thought the place had been ripped apart, and it certainly looked that way – shelves torn from the walls, stuff scattered everywhere – and yet the shelves hadn’t been torn from the walls.
If they had, half the wall would have come down with them.
I found all the screws on the floor and I’m pretty sure the shelves had been carefully removed, piece by piece, and then positioned in the room to look as if they’d been flung about.
And then there was the door to the farmhouse which hadn’t been forced, yet half the windows were already broken – wouldn’t it have been an awful lot easier to just smash one and climb in that way? ’
Willow frowned. ‘Sorry, I’m not sure what you’re getting at.’
‘Why it’s odd is that, given the amount of damage that was done, none of us heard a thing, and yet there would have been a lot of noise.
I think whoever did it wanted to make it look as if a mindless act of vandalism had taken place, but actually the whole thing was done as quietly as possible and then staged to look as if the place had been ransacked. ’
‘It does makes sense if you think about it,’ said Leo.
Rowan’s eyes were wide with hurt. ‘You knew about this, didn’t you? Yet you never said anything.’
Leo gave him a sheepish look. ‘We discovered the details of Flora’s garden that same night, and I kind of forgot about it.
Plus, I knew that you’d had some aggro from the village when you moved in so I just assumed, like you probably did, that it was someone with a point to prove.
I’m sorry, but taken on its own, it didn’t feel like something I should have worried you with.
’ He looked down at the floor, chastened.
‘You still should have told us,’ said Rowan. ‘If you had, maybe we wouldn’t be in his sorry mess. We could have put an end to it there and then.’
‘But I had no idea it was Ashley until just now,’ Gemma reminded them.
‘She even swung me a story about how working in the garden was changing her life, making it so much better. And that was all part of her act, too. She was deliberately mirroring my feelings, aligning her emotions with mine. I would never have suspected her.’
‘But where’s your proof? Unless Ashley has admitted it?’
Gemma dropped her head, the enormity of Ashley’s betrayal hitting her. The ease with which she had been manipulated.
Willow stared at her, her face ashen. ‘How could she do that to us?’ Her voice was tiny. ‘I thought she was our friend.’
Gemma faltered. She hadn’t been thinking straight.
She was so desperate to unburden herself, to salve her guilty conscience, that she’d hastened to tell the story in all its awful detail, like she was the saviour of the whole affair for discovering the culprit.
But she’d forgotten what she was actually saying, and the impact it would have.
Willow looked devastated, even worse than she had before.
She swallowed. ‘I know, I’m so sorry, and—’
‘So why on earth would she be trying to ruin us?’ asked Rowan, cutting across her.
‘Because she wants the farm. Hannah at the library told me that she and her family own half the village. Surrounding villages, too.’
‘Hannah at the library?’
Gemma nodded. ‘She thought I already knew what Ashley does. Her and her husband.’
‘And what do they do?’
‘He’s the local estate agent. And she buys up properties and rents them out.
She’s not a particularly scrupulous landlord either, and I reckon that’s being generous.
Ashley told me herself that the chap who owned this place before you was a stubborn so-and-so and wouldn’t sell the land to anyone local.
How would she know that unless they’d tried? ’
Willow shot her husband a look. ‘That might explain why our offer on the farm was accepted,’ she said. ‘We never could figure that out. There must have been much higher offers than ours.’
‘Possibly there were,’ said Rowan. ‘But I’m not sure what difference that makes. He chose us – it doesn’t really matter why. I expect it’s no more than that he liked the plans we had for the farm.’
‘Yes, I’m sure he did,’ answered Gemma. ‘But don’t forget this is Edmund and Flora’s descendant we’re talking about.
Someone related to two very principled and philanthropic people and, in all likelihood, someone who inherited those traits too.
I think he was a decent man. The kind of person who might not want to sell the farm to anyone locally, knowing that, perhaps as had happened in the past, the people who would want it were very unprincipled people, who would build a load of houses on the land at the drop of a hat in order to make a huge profit. ’
‘So you’re saying that Ashley and her husband, family, whoever, have tried to buy the farm in the past but couldn’t, and so when it was sold to us, they then set about trying to ruin us, presumably with the intention of swooping in with a pot of money to “save” us when that happened?’
‘That’s about the size of it, yes.’
Willow banged a hand down on the table, making them all jump.
‘Stop it!’ she shouted, and Gemma was horrified to see tears rolling down her cheeks again.
‘Stop blaming people and assuming things you don’t even know for certain are true.
What does it matter? It doesn’t change what’s happened.
It won’t magically make all the crops grow again, and it doesn’t change the fact that we’ve put everything we have into making this place a success, and now it’s all been for nothing.
’ And with that she burst into choking sobs.
A stunned silence hung heavy in the air while Willow slumped forward, covering her face with her hands.
‘I’m so sorry,’ whispered Gemma. ‘I didn’t mean…’
There was a raucous scraping noise as Rowan pushed back his chair from the table, hurrying to comfort his wife, the air bristling with the tension of unspoken words.
Words that Rowan was far too nice to ever say.
Because the fact was that he had told Gemma how reluctant they had been to become a part of the local community.
Not just because of the comments that had been made when they arrived, but because it was their natural inclination to stay a self-contained unit.
And Gemma had changed all that. Forced their hand.
None of this would have happened if she hadn’t got Ashley involved, bringing her to the farm against Rowan and Willow’s better nature, whatever they said. They should never have listened to her.
‘I think I should go,’ she said. ‘Let you get back to how things were before.’
‘No!’ Despite her tears, Willow’s voice was shocked. ‘Gemma, you’re not to go, none of this is your fault. Rowan, tell her. She’s not to go. Gemma is one of the best things to have happened here. Without her help we’d have been sunk.’
‘You’re sunk now,’ said Gemma. ‘And it is my fault.’
Willow stared at her husband, her cheeks wet with tears, and as Rowan opened his mouth to speak, time slowed down until it was barely moving, one second crawling into the next as he closed it again without saying a word.
Gemma got to her feet, eyes welling. ‘He’s right. It is my fault…’ She gave Willow a sad smile. There was a pain around her heart, as if it might break in two. ‘I’m truly sorry.’ She crept from the room, eyes so full of tears she could scarcely see where she was going.
The kitchen was silent as she walked back through it, laying her key on the table and thanking Rowan and Willow for everything.
Even Leo was silent, although he accompanied her to the door, a gentle hand on her back, and the saddest of smiles on his face.
He followed her out, stood on the threshold and opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head.
‘It’s best this way,’ she said, and began to walk away.
He watched her until she was out of sight. And she knew this because that’s exactly what Leo would do.
The tears flowed again as she picked her way through the churned mud on the track back to her car, slipping and sliding, her balance hampered by the one small case and bag she carried.
She remembered vividly the day she had arrived, when Willow had hoisted her suitcase with ease, carrying it without complaint back to the house.
It felt like a lifetime ago. She had brought so few things with her to the farm because she hadn’t thought she’d be staying.
Even so, she hadn’t needed half of them, and they had lain in her drawers, forgotten.
Her hair straighteners, her make-up bag full of lipsticks and blusher, beauty balms…
none of which had any place on the farm; her life simply hadn’t required them.
It had been a lifetime ago since she had arrived at Thistledown, a different life. And now she was going back to it.