The gates were padlocked, a sturdy chain wrapped umpteen times around the frames where they met in the middle.
‘Up and over,’ said Cole, holding the gate steady while Sarah tried to avoid the single strand of barbed wire along the top. At least she wasn’t wearing heels.
A large gravelled area, bordered by railway sleepers, lines of apple trees stretching away up the slope towards another hedge. The barn was off to the right, red brick and thatched, the double doors padlocked.
Wooden benches and tables were slowly rotting on a lawned area in front, a fire pit on the far side of that.
Sarah was peering in the windows of the barn, her hands cupped around her eyes, shielding them from the reflection.
‘Can you see anything?’ asked Cole.
‘There’s some strange wooden thing, and some huge oak vats. I suppose they’re oak. Lots of barrels too.’
‘Let me have a look.’ He was looking through the same window, towering over Sarah. ‘That’s a cider press. Funny that, finding a cider press on a cider farm.’
‘There’s an upstairs,’ she whispered. ‘We need to get in there, really.’
‘Why are you whispering?’
‘In case there’s anyone here?’
‘Then they can bloody well let us in, can’t they.’ Cole stepped back. ‘Hello! Hello!’
‘We haven’t got a warrant.’
‘We don’t need one if they let us in.’
‘And what if they don’t?’
‘Then they’ve got something to hide and we go and get a warrant.’
‘You make it sound so easy.’
Cole followed Sarah around to the back of the barn, each window giving a view of the same cider press and oak barrels, albeit from different angles. It was an odd contraption: two giant wooden screws at either end of a beam, a barrel underneath to catch the juice when the beam was screwed down to crush the apples. No doubt the canning plant two miles away had a more modern version.
Several pallets of gold and pink cans wrapped in plastic were gathering dust at the far end of the barn; other cans had been opened, the contents poured down a drain in the floor, and then dumped in a green wheelie bin that looked out of place in the otherwise antique barn.
‘There’s nothing here,’ said Cole.
Back round the front of the barn now, still dutifully following Sarah, he leaned on a five-bar gate and looked out across the orchard beyond to a fork in the farm track. ‘I’m guessing left will take us across the orchards to the visitors’ centre,’ he said, following the line of light bulbs in the apple trees, the cable sagging in the gap between the branches. ‘Where does the right track take you?’
Sarah was dragging a map across the screen on her phone, following the farm track – virtually at least. ‘There’s another barn,’ she said. ‘Let’s go and have a look.’
‘Bloody marvellous.’ Cole was making no effort to hide his irritation. ‘I’m so glad I asked.’
Trudging now, stepping over the puddles and the fresh tyre tracks in the mud. The dusting of snow that had fallen that morning had long gone; he’d got covered in it on that pig farm, but it had melted by the time he’d left Express Park at the end of his shift. He tapped Sarah on the shoulder. ‘These tracks were made after the snow melted.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I just can, all right. I am the Rural Crimes team, after all.’ Cole shook his head. ‘They’re dry, where the tyre has compressed the water out of the mud.’
Sarah kept going, much to Cole’s disappointment.
‘There it is,’ she said. ‘In those trees. The track continues on, so presumably it goes out to the road further down.’
Tiptoeing now, although he wasn’t entirely sure why. Sarah was, so that must be it.
The barn was set back from the track, an old post and rail fence around the front, the gate long gone, only the iron hinges left sticking out of the post. More fresh tracks had come in from the other direction too; come and gone, if the mud splash pattern was anything to go by.
Two large barn doors, a padlock hanging open from the latch on one of them. It was smaller than the other barn, single storey, with a tiled roof that was covered in moss; damp from the overhanging trees.
‘It’s not locked.’
‘I can see that,’ replied Cole.
Sarah opened the door slowly, trying not to stand on the tyre tracks leading into the barn. The door swung easily, coming to rest against the small grass bank that Cole was standing on. She blinked, her eyes trying to adjust to the darkness. ‘There’s a car, up on blocks,’ she said.
‘What is it?’
‘It’s got a cover on it and the wheels are off. It’s not going anywhere.’
Cole had stepped over the tyre tracks and was opening the left-hand door, allowing more light to flood into the barn. ‘It looks like an old moggie to me,’ he said. ‘Judging by the shape.’
‘What’s a moggie?’
‘A Morris Minor. Classics, they are, these days.’
A black cover, elasticated; it had been hooked under the bumper front and back.
