Elinor was sound asleep when she was awoken by the tendrils of light sneaking into her bedroom and tracing a pattern on the curtains on the other side of the room. She sat up in her bed, thoroughly confused. She knew it wasn’t morning. Why was the hallway light on?
She felt hideously tired. They’d arrived home from the art exhibition at half past eleven, she’d fallen asleep at twelve o’ clock and yet it felt like she hadn’t slept at all.
She heard a noise in the hallway that sounded ominously like Leo was putting his heavy boots on. Elinor jumped out of bed and raced to open the bedroom door.
She walked rapidly to the front door of the house and, sure enough, found Leo sitting on the hallway bench and working his tight-fitting boots onto his feet.
Leo looked up at her apologetically.
‘Sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.’
‘What on earth are you doing?’ asked Elinor impatiently.
‘I had a call from Sheila Burns.’
‘Sheila Burns?’ repeated Elinor stupidly, wearily rubbing her eyes and trying to remember who she was.
‘Yes. Sheila Burns. Don’t you remember the old lady who lives next to the wheat field?’
‘Oh! Yes. Her. So what’s she doing calling you at...’ Elinor looked quickly at her watch. ‘Two in the morning... Two in the morning! Has she totally lost her marbles?’
‘We told her to call if she saw something suspicious, remember?’ explained Leo patiently.
‘Ah, yes! What has she seen then? Some badgers conga dancing along the road? A fox playing tig with a colony of rabbits?’ asked Elinor sarcastically.
‘No, although I have to say that would be worth seeing,’ said Leo calmly. ‘She says the white van’s back again.’
With this, Leo bent down and shifted his second boot onto his foot.
Elinor looked at him in exasperation.
‘Leo, you can’t go searching out there on your own. It’s the middle of the night. You’ve no idea what’s really going on or what you could be getting involved in.’
Leo glanced at her amusedly as if to say, ‘Do you want to try and stop me?’
Elinor sighed. She knew that look.
‘Listen. Give me five and I’ll join you. At least two of us will be safer than just one.’
‘Elinor, I’m not going to boss you around,’ said Leo, pointedly referencing her earlier attitude. ‘But are you sure you want to do this? I’m just thinking of your anxiety.’
Unoffended, Elinor smiled back at him.
‘Yes, I know. My anxiety with a capital “A”. It’s always the elephant in the room, isn’t it? Well, screw my anxiety. Since I’ve come down to Cornwall my anxiety hasn’t stopped me doing anything I’ve wanted to do. So it’s not going to now.’
And with that, Elinor turned around and went back to her room to get changed.
Ten minutes later they were walking quietly down the road bordering the field of cows, only using the light of the moon to guide their steps even though Leo had his torch with him. They could see the white van glimmering at the far corner of the wheat field with its headlights on and the engine running.
Whatever was going on, it certainly wasn’t the most secretive of operations. The rumbling noise of the van’s engine echoed intrusively in the silence of the night. No wonder Sheila Burns had been woken up by it.
Leo and Elinor walked into the wheat field by opening the stiff wooden gate and soon found themselves hidden by the high Cornish hedge, which was an effective barrier between them and the van on the other side.
Leo switched on his torch when they stumbled over the tilled earth at the entrance of the field and he began to slowly sweep its light from side to side.
As they started to walk in a single file down the middle of the field, slowly heading diagonally towards the van in the corner, they tried as much as they could to follow the furrows in the ground so as not to damage the wheat too much.
Her senses sharpened by her apprehension, Elinor could feel the spiky burrs of the wheat heads rasping and catching on her trousers and she could vividly hear the quiet swish of the wheat stalks brushing against their legs as they walked through the field. But it was the steady pulsing of the van’s engine that dominated the quietness of the night and relegated all the other collective noises to the background.
Elinor felt the tension hit her in the solar plexus. Her legs felt strangely unstable and weak, her neck wobbling like that of a puppet on a string. She felt propelled forward by an irrational impulse while a sensible voice in her head screamed at her to go home and rest in the relative safety of Trenouth.
She started to chew her lip in an effort to calm her nerves, tasting the metallic flavour of blood on her tongue as her dry lips split under the relentless pressure of her teeth.
In her tired and confused state she nearly bumped into Leo as he came to a halt halfway down the field.
She stopped walking and looked cautiously around the enormous field but she still couldn’t see what had stopped him in his tracks.
‘Elinor, look over there,’ whispered Leo, pulling her to him and pointing his torch towards a hawthorn bush at the very end of the field in front of them.
Elinor strained her eyes, trying to figure out what her eagle-eyed uncle had spotted.
She suddenly saw the hawthorn bush move to one side and a figure of a man literally pop out of the ground like a Jack in the Box.
The man scrambled up, letting the bush fall back into place again. Once he was standing, he suddenly caught sight of their torchlight and stood rigidly still as he stared across at Leo and Elinor in stunned surprise. He was young, possibly in his early twenties, and dressed conventionally in jeans, trainers, a thick black jacket and a woollen red hat.
After a nerve-racking minute in which they all remained curiously static, the man lifted up the torch he was carrying loosely in his hand and pointed it directly at them, blinding Leo and Elinor with its powerful light in the process. As they blinked in the torch’s fierce glare, they could see the man studying them and then they saw him turn to look anxiously back at the hawthorn bush.
Within moments the bush moved again and a second man came up the same way as the man before him. The second man exclaimed loudly when he caught sight of them but the other man shushed him angrily, still keeping a watchful eye on Leo and Elinor as they stood immobile in the middle of the wheat field.
Elinor looked at Leo apprehensively, wondering how this face-off was going to end. She had no idea what these men were doing coming out of the ground at this hour but whatever it was it couldn’t be an innocent occupation, given they were doing it under the dark cover of night.
Elinor pulled on Leo’s sleeve.
‘I think we should go, Leo,’ she whispered urgently, even as a third figure pulled himself up from behind the roughly used hawthorn.
Leo nodded his agreement silently. Taking hold of Elinor’s elbow he quickly led her back the way they’d come.
She tripped continually on the uneven mounds of earth and wheat as she tried to keep up with Leo’s breakneck speed. She also kept twisting around frantically, trying desperately to keep a cautious eye on the men behind them.
She really didn’t like feeling vulnerable and completely exposed to danger. And the truth was that she and Leo were walking away now with their backs towards a strange group of men who’d suspiciously gathered together in the dead of night.
Even though the men were congregated at the other side of the wheat field, she figured it wouldn’t be too hard for them to catch her and Leo up if they decided they wanted to. Elinor’s ears strained as she listened out for any sudden indication that any of the men might be running after them.
By the time she’d turned around for a third time she could see there were now six dimly discernible figures standing bunched together at the other end of the field, flashing their torches towards her and Leo, watching them carefully as they made a quick exit out of the field.
Once out of the wheat field, Leo and Elinor walked up the road circling the cow field at a tremendously fast pace. The thick, shrouding darkness of the dense night made it difficult for them to see the black tarmac of the road clearly, but it didn’t slow them down one iota.
Elinor felt her apprehension and fear begin to subside once they were safely through Trenouth’s entrance and back in their front garden once more. Only then did she have the courage to turn around one last time to look at the white van purring away on the other side of the cow field, still with its front lights blazing a yellow path in front of it.
‘Elinor, you go in. I’m going to stay up and see what happens with that white van. It can’t be staying there all night.’
‘Leo, what the hell’s going on with those strange men appearing in the field like that?’
‘I’ve no idea. But I do know I’ll be speaking to Richard Glynn as soon as I get a chance, and I’ll be asking him a few pointed questions.’
‘You think he knows what all this is about?’
‘To be blunt, Elinor, yes I do. It’s his wheat field. If there’s a secret entrance into it he’d be the most likely candidate to know about it.’
Elinor worriedly eyed her uncle’s worn and wrinkled face, with his thick grey hair standing up in tufts; he obviously hadn’t had time to brush it down after getting up from his bed. He was getting too old for this kind of caper.
‘Would you like a hot drink?’
Leo nodded as he sat down heavily on the slate steps leading to their front door.
‘Yes, I’d love a black coffee with a dollop of whisky in it, please.’
Elinor glanced down at him anxiously as she put her key in the front door. Leo must be unaccustomedly concerned about what he’d just witnessed to be asking for whisky at this time of the night.
Leo sank his head briefly into his large, gnarled hands, combing his fingers through his shaggy grey hair. When he raised it again his expression was troubled, digging a groove between his thick grey eyebrows.
Elinor opened the front door and trod thankfully into the familiar comfort of the entrance, switching on the lights as she did so.
‘Hold on a minute! Here they come,’ said Leo excitedly from the doorstep.
Elinor poked her head out of the door and followed his pointed finger.
Sure enough all six men, with their torches waving about madly, were climbing over the Cornish hedge just like Leo himself had done not so long ago, after his initial exploration of the wheat field.
The men jumped agilely down onto the road and quickly let themselves into the back of the van.
Two minutes later the van drove up the road and turned the corner, disappearing into the darkness with its red taillights fading away gradually like the dying embers of a fire, and leaving Leo and Elinor to the stillness of the night again.