The Phantom Farm Read online

  I waved my handkerchief and Mr Latham loped across the yard towards me. He groaned. ‘What’s wrong?’ I hissed.

  ‘I think I put my foot in something nasty,’ he whined.

  ‘Where now?’ I asked.

  ‘Hush!’ he said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Listen.’

  I listened. I heard men’s voices. They were chatting and laughing. There were other odd noises too but I couldn’t work out what they were.

  ‘We’ve found the butcher shop where they cut up the secret supplies of meat,’ he said.

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The noises,’ he said. ‘That is sawing of bones, and that is a meat cleaver chopping up joints. I should be a detective, you know.’

  He was right. I had heard the sounds in the butcher shop on Drayton Lane. ‘They’re inside the barn,’ I said.

  Special Constable Latham was panting a little. In the faint light I saw him raise his truncheon and creep carefully along the front wall of the barn until he came to a door. There was no light showing. The wooden walls were cracked and twisted so they must have been well covered with blackout curtains.

  ‘You go first,’ the policeman told me.

  I lifted the latch, opened the door and stepped forward.

  The inside of the barn was dark as the bottom of a well at midnight. The place was empty.

  Chapter 7

  Torches and traps

  I pushed the switch on my torch and shone it around. There were bits of farm machines and piles of hay, scythes and wagons and horse harness and cartwheels. There were ropes and rags and sacks and bags, spider-webs and dust and grease and cracked buckets. But no butchers.

  Mr Latham stretched his neck to look over my shoulder. ‘I can still hear them,’ he croaked. Sure enough the sounds of men talking and laughing was still drifting on the calm barn air. That’s when I suddenly thought of ghosts. It was a phantom farm. We were hearing the spirits of the long-dead farm hands.

  I froze. I wanted to turn and run all the way home like the little piggy in the rhyme. But my feet seemed stuck to the floor. Miss Wearmouth told us ghost stories. I never knew if they were true. Now I was sure they must be… and I was in the middle of a ghost story.

  Mr Latham broke the spell. ‘They must be in a building at the back of the barn,’ he said.

  I blew out my cheeks and breathed again. ‘Of course. That must be it.’

  We slipped out of the barn and back into the yard. We were tiptoeing to the back of the barn but I wasn’t sure why. Another deep breath and I looked around the corner. There was a haystack. It was the shape of a house and almost as large as the barn.

  I waved for the policeman to follow me. We shone our torches on the stack. We could still hear the sound of men’s voices but there was no one there. Just a haystack.

  A haunted haystack. I think my heart stopped beating for ten seconds.

  The constable and I walked around the hay and back to the barn. We circled them twice. The voices never stopped and yet we couldn’t see who was making the sounds.

  Then we heard the rattle of a diesel engine as an old lorry chugged down the lane. It stopped at the gate. We heard the same sounds we’d been making ten minutes before as the farmyard gate opened, then closed. We watched from the shadow of the corner of the barn. The lorry headlamps glowed through the slits in black covers. Enough light to see the path; not enough light to show us hiding.

  The lorry pulled round to the back of the barn and parked next to the haystack. The driver tooted three times on his horn turned off the engine, opened his cab and jumped down—a man as tall as Constable Latham but twice as heavy.

  ‘They will do anything to stay in their filthy game. They will even kill people,’ I muttered. I hadn’t believed it before. But this man looked the sort who would snuff us out like a candle. I stayed frozen and silent and watched something amazing.

  I saw a ray of light shine from the corner of the haystack. It grew wider. It seemed as if the haystack was opening up… and it was. The stack was a wooden hut, covered in hay to disguise it.

  Not a haunted haystack on a phantom farm after all.

  As the door opened wider I saw Farmer Edwards and his son George smile a greeting in the light of the oil lamps for the lorry driver. He closed the door behind him.

  ‘There’s a plough at the side of the barn,’ Constable Latham said. ‘We can jam it up against the door and trap them inside. We can get the Portsmouth police to arrest the lot of them red-handed. They’ll go to prison for twenty years!’

  There was a soft click behind us. A voice said, ‘I don’t think so.’

  We turned slowly. The soft click was a knife blade opening. The voice was the man holding the wicked weapon. He’d stayed in the cab when the lorry driver went inside the haystack. He’d crept down and caught us. We thought we were crime hunters—we’d just been hunted.

  The man with the knife was Slick Sam.

  Chapter 8

  Cows and carves

  Sam forced us to walk into the butchery inside the haystack. The smell of blood made me feel sick. Bits of meat dripped onto the straw on the floor. Worst of all, the faces of the Edwards family and the driver were full of fire and fury. Their red-stained hands held glittering butchers’ knives.

  ‘Constable Latham, isn’t it?’ the farmer said. He was short and powerful with black hair turning grey at the sides. His hot-cheeked son had muscles like a strong man in a circus.

  ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of evading the ration laws of this country,’ the constable said boldly but his voice was shaking.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Slick Sam said again. ‘You think you are helping the people win this war? You’re not. It’s people like me and Mr Edwards that’s doing that, Mr Copper. People are hungry and we’re feeding them.’

  Everybody wants a little bit extra, I remembered my dad saying.

  ‘It’s against the law,’ the policeman whined.

  ‘There’s no law against killing an old cow and selling the meat,’ Slick Sam sneered. ‘There’s just a law against getting caught doing it.’

  ‘And I caught you,’ Mr Latham said.

  Sam tested the blade of his knife against his thumb. It looked sharper than Dad’s razor. Mind you, a rusty sheet from a tin roof was sharper than Dad’s old razor. Thinking of Dad brought a tear to my eye. I knew I wouldn’t see him again. Not a bomb, not a bullet. A knife would finish me off.

  ‘My dad knows where we are,’ I said. ‘He said if we weren’t home by seven he’d call the Portsmouth police.’

  The black market men looked at one another. Farmer Edwards spoke at last. ‘It’s no use, Sam. We’re finished.’

  Sam snarled, ‘We can carve up the copper and sell him as best steak. Nobody needs to know.’

  Young George Edwards spoke for the first time. ‘But we can’t hurt a girl, Sam, we can’t.’

  ‘I can,’ the spiv argued. ‘Leave her to me.’

  The lorry driver stepped forward, moving like one of the battleships in the harbour. He grabbed the spiv’s wrist and twisted till the man in yellow shoes cried out and dropped the knife. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’re thieves, not killers.’

  He looked at Special Constable Latham. ‘Nobody likes you, Latham. Even the real police look the other way when we hand them a nice piece of steak or a couple of pound notes.’ He nodded towards the strips of meat hanging from a rail. ‘This was just a cow that died of old age. The law says we should report it to the ration people. Every farmer knows that. But any farmer will just sell it to hungry families. You don’t have to arrest us.’

  The Constable stretched his Nat Jackley neck as far as it would go. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘And I am.’

  I’d been so sure I wanted to see the villains behind bars. But I thought of the chicken I’d eaten. I was no better than Slick Sam. And I thought of the hungry families.

  Everybody gets the same rations so we share it out, fair and square, Dad had said. But it�
�s not that simple, he’d added.

  ***

  The next day we finished our maths lesson early so Miss Wearmouth said, ‘We have time for a story. I think today I’ll tell you a ghost story.’

  ‘There’s no such things as ghosts,’ I said.

  Her eyes were like swollen gooseberries behind her little glasses. ‘Don’t be cheeky, Rose. If I say there are ghosts there are ghosts.’

  ‘But…’

  ‘But nothing. You can miss your break time and clean my blackboards.’

  ‘Yes Miss Wearmouth,’ I said with a sigh. And she told us a tale about a haunted barn.

  That break time I cleaned the board with a smile on my face. Haunted barns? No such thing.

  Epilogue

  The butcher shop hidden inside a haystack was a clever idea. The special constable tracked them down by following the man who tried to sell the meat in the town—the ‘spiv’.

  The farmers were caught cutting up meat. They said it was an old, dead cow—not stolen—but they were arrested, fined and sent to prison.

  There were dozens of ration rules and thousands of people broke those rules. Most of them got away with it because the police couldn’t lock away half the country… the police pretended it wasn’t happening.

  The laws in wartime sometimes gave the wrong people the punishments. A woman fed her own scraps of bread to the birds in her garden and was fined twelve shillings. A shopkeeper was fined five pounds for selling sweets he made from his own sugar ration.

  Yet some lorry drivers got away with some really big frauds. If one of them had a lorry full of food he might park in a quiet spot. He would go for a walk while a couple of crates were stolen from the back. The thieves would leave the driver a packet of money and sell the food for a fortune. The wealthy people could afford the stolen food, the poorer hungry families stayed hungry while the thieves got rich. They usually got away with it.

  The little criminals were punished; the big criminals escaped.

  What would you have done if you’d known a farmer selling his dead cow?

  This electronic edition published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  First published 2015 by

  A & C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  50 Bedford Square

  London WC1B 3DP

  www.bloomsbury.com

  Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

  Text copyright © 2015 Terry Deary

  Illustrations copyright © 2015 James de la Rue

  The rights of Terry Deary and James de la Rue to be identified as the author and illustrator of this work have been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  ISBN 978-1-4729-1630-3

  ePub ISBN: 978-1-4729-1631-0

  ePdf ISBN: 978-1-4729-1632-7

  A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the British Library.

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