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frank about sex, but regarded finance as sacred and intensely private. But this man spoke almost as though he had been prepared for the question. ‘Not as much as you’d think. The farmhouse is tied to the land. It is covenanted as an agricultural residence, so it can’t be sold as a private house. And small farms are cheap, because most people think they are on the way out. Salisbury Plain is full of huge factory farms. Herefordshire has a few idiots like me who think that we can still make a living from smaller units.’
    Lambert nodded, studying his man closely, looking at him directly and unblinkingly, in that way which often unnerved people who were used to conventional social interchange rather than police interrogation. He had a feeling that Simmons was happy to speak of anything which would divert him from the period when the corpse had been hastily interred on the land which he had been working at the time. He said brusquely, ‘Tell us about this place twenty years ago. Tell us about what you were doing then and who else was around these buildings then.’
    ‘The type of farming was not radically different from what I am doing today. The great changes in British agriculture had come about well before then.’
    ‘I don’t want a lecture on farming history or modern methods. What I need is the clearest picture you can give me of what was happening in this particular place at that particular time.’
    Jim Simmons looked at him steadily, measuring his opponent as clinically as he would have assessed the potential of an acre of land. ‘Dan Burrell was emphatically still in charge. You did things his way or you didn’t stay around for very long.’
    ‘You must have found that irksome.’
    ‘Not at all. I may have given you the impression that he was a reactionary. If so, I have done him an injustice. Daniel was very aware of tradition and he regarded himself as being in temporary charge of land which had fed people and provided employment for centuries. But he was open to new ideas. He knew that you couldn’t hold back progress, even if you found it uncomfortable. He believed that you learned to farm by being in daily touch with the land, but he also sent me off to agricultural college to learn about the wider world and the ideas which were going to shape farming in the next generation.’
    ‘You’re saying that he was open to argument?’
    Simmons smiled. ‘We had a few of those, in our time. You had to choose your moments, with Dan. But if you did and you spoke sense, he would listen.’
    Bert Hook said softly, ‘And from what you said earlier, Jim, you had Mrs Burrell on your side.’
    The farmer glanced sharply at him with this first use of his forename, but raised no objection to it. ‘Emily was always good to me. She always wanted me to have the farm, once she realized that her own boy wasn’t interested in it.’
    Hook nodded. ‘Even when you didn’t seem the most likely candidate to take over.’
    It was an intuitive stroke, the kind of thing he sometimes threw in unexpectedly; it stemmed more from his assessment of the individual in front of him than from any knowledge of the facts of the matter. And it worked on this occasion. Simmons apparently accepted that he had done some previous research, that he knew more than he actually did about the situation in this place twenty years or so ago. ‘You’re right there. It was Emily who made me feel that I could take this place on, who made me feel that I could organize myself and organize the finance and the labour I needed to take over this place from Daniel and make it a going concern. It took her at least ten years to do that.’
    ‘Because no one would have thought that you had that in you when you first came here, would they, Jim?’
    ‘No, they wouldn’t, and least of all me.’
    ‘So tell us about those early years, Jim.’
    Simmons looked at the two CID faces opposite him, the senior one grave and suspicious, the other expectant and