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I heard myself saying quite automatically, ‘You know, since that fellow is presumably not coming back again to pick up Mr Winstone after all, shall we have a go at patching him up ourselves?’
It was for once the right thing to say. Suspicion evaporated for all of us. I saw Matthew Croft’s nod. He beckoned and I heard the creak behind as a youth scrambled out of the car and we all bustled Mr Winstone into the house. Inside, this place was no bigger than the average worker’s terrace in a London slum and if Danny Hannis lived here with his stepfather, it amazed me that there should have been enough space for him. The old man himself was settled into the dipped seat of an armchair and the younger men propped him there while I scurried into the equally diminutive kitchen to scour my skin free of that revolting stain. There was no tap, only a stone sink and a jug of water drawn from the village pump, but there was soap and a good cloth and at last my skin was pink and clean and I could stop acting like a shocked bystander and think of going back and offering help in the other room.
I didn’t stay there for long. I found myself being sent back into the kitchen very smartly on an order from Matthew Croft to do something useful like preparing warm water using the kettle on the stove.
The ancient cooking range was the sort that had to be lit in the morning and kept lit all day if any cooking was to be done, even in summer. It was sweltering in that tiny space and it took about ten minutes to heat the water. I reappeared in the doorway with a basin and a clean cloth in time to make Danny Hannis abandon the question he had been about to ask and rise instead from his crouch before the old man. ‘Come along, Pop,’ he said with that slight slant to the voice that men use to imply considerable care. ‘Bear up. What’s all this you’re saying about water? You didn’t get a good look, I suppose?’ This last was meant as a question for me without so much as turning his head.
I couldn’t tell him anything about any water beyond the basin in my hands. There was no need to say anything about burglary either. I’d overheard them eliminating that much and, besides, both the kitchen and this equally tiny living room were perfectly clear of signs of invasion. I might have still held out some hope that the departed male had merely been an awkward neighbour helping the old man home after a fall. Except that I could see now that my usefulness in the kitchen had the air of being inspired by that all too familiar division based on gender – and therefore presumed fitness to bear the hard truth.
I also believed Matthew Croft had only encouraged Danny to ask me his question in order to pave the way for giving me firm thanks and sending me on my way. I could tell they’d discussed this from the way Danny reacted when I repeated the all too brief description of a male with dark hair and a pale jacket. He hadn’t expected me to have anything to add. I was, in fact, forgotten at the instant I began speaking and Danny Hannis returned to his crouched position before the armchair. His hand went out to Mr Winstone’s where it rested upon the arm of his chair, and he fixed the old man with the most compelling concern I have ever seen and it shook me.
I heard him repeat for what had to be the hundredth time, ‘What happened to you, Pop? What could possibly motivate someone to bash you over the head?’
And if I had ever really felt I might need to stay to defend Mr Winstone from this man, the feeling was dispelled here. There was, beneath the search for information, genuine bewilderment in his voice.
It was at that moment that fresh voices came from the path and the owners of them entered through the front door. And when I say these newcomers brought a sharp return of tension, this feeling was based on Danny’s reaction rather than mine.
Chapter 3 (#u6c0a0f35-f7e5-5851-8e6f-61eead70f44e)
The first to come in was a woman in her mid-thirties, who matched Matthew Croft in being rather taller than the norm for her sex. She stopped on the threshold, took in the oddity of a scene where the old man was sitting in his armchair surrounded by his stepson, a friend and a stranger. Then she stepped in and moved Danny aside from his place before his stepfather’s chair with a murmur and a familiar touch to his wrist.
She was the sort of woman who might have posed for any of the propaganda photographs that had proliferated during the war; the sort where capable women in crisply tailored uniforms were caught in the last dramatic moment before setting off on a mad uncharted flight across England in order to deliver a new aircraft to its crew. Now she was asking Danny Hannis to explain how the old man could pass from being well and unharmed at her house a few hours ago, to this. I gathered she was a Mrs Abbey, who lived a short distance away. She was not only an older and decidedly more self-assured woman than I; she was also braver. Her hands went straight to the wound on Mr Winstone’s head.
The other woman had a less practical reaction. She was a motherly sort of person of about fifty. She wasn’t overweight, but comfortable with very fair hair of that sort that barely shows grey set in tight curls around her head, and she was clearly Danny’s mother and Mr Winstone’s wife. It was the combination of Mrs Winstone’s concern and Mrs Abbey’s uninterrupted bossiness that led me to realise that Matthew Croft hadn’t actually been practising that time-worn method of instilling calm by organising any stray womenfolk into running errands in another room. Just me.
It must be said that I didn’t really mind. This part of my discovery wasn’t what mattered here. Because I must admit that, to an extent, I’d understood why he should have thought that Mr Winstone’s distress hadn’t wanted a stranger’s invasive fussing. It hadn’t slipped my notice that there was something intensely personal about the old man’s confusion and the care that had been given here. And I would have gone easily when I’d realised what he wanted. He needn’t have thought I would have stayed to argue the point like some fearsome busybody or, worse, some frightened young thing needing to be shielded from the dread of walking home.
What did matter, though, was that when I saw his easy acceptance of Mrs Winstone’s right to ask any questions she chose, it served to make me very aware of the difference in his friend’s behaviour to Mrs Abbey.
I’d thought Danny Hannis had been preoccupied but reasonably pleasant before. I didn’t believe he had cared about me, beyond that effort of establishing my value as a witness to a distressing scene. Now I was unobtrusively watching him from my place in the kitchen doorway. Mrs Abbey had placed him against the wall beside his mother and I became acutely aware that while he was answering some of his mother’s agitated questions, the ones that weren’t answered by his friend at least, his attention was all for the other woman. Perhaps it was the unforgiving light – there was no electricity in this village to beat back the coming dusk – but I thought he was watching her and wearing that shuttered expression a man gets when he is uncomfortable but constrained enough by convention to keep from expressing the feeling out loud.
I wouldn’t say that his expression conveyed dislike. His mouth seemed able to form a smile readily enough when Mrs Abbey directed some comment at him. I might have worried that his unease lay in a wish to keep her from hearing the details of what had befallen Mr Winstone, except that he seemed to be making no effort to prevent his mother from thoroughly dissecting the lot.
Mrs Abbey was teasing some of the crusted hair aside to permit a clearer view. She was the sort who demonstrated the unbending practicality of one who was very much in the habit of getting on with things because no one else would be doing them for her. I thought she bore the shadow of what might have been wartime widowhood in the lines about her mouth and the neat order of her clothes. Presently, though, Danny Hannis and I both could see that the woman’s decisiveness meant she was probing vigorously at Mr Winstone’s head when she might just as well have left it alone.
Revulsion, both from her actions and the man’s strange powerlessness, made me lurch into saying to Matthew Croft, ‘Did you want me to clean up Mr Winstone? That is why you asked me to fetch hot water, isn’t it?’
Matthew Croft was standing very near me in the gloomy space between Mr Winstone’s shoulder and the sideboard that was set against the kitchen wall. He turned his head as I added haplessly, ‘I worked behind a chemist’s counter for six years; that must be a training of sorts for this kind of thing, mustn’t it?’
Heaven knows what I was thinking, saying that. It was purely a product of unease. Or an impulse to interfere since this other man had sent me scurrying for the hot water in the first place, or be helpful, or something. I regretted my offer just as soon as my gaze returned to the mess Mrs Abbey was uncovering on Mr Winstone’s head because it was, in fact, my idea of a nightmare to begin dabbing that crusted hair.
Luckily, Matthew Croft was seemingly oblivious to the way Danny might have thanked him for seizing this chance to diminish Mrs Abbey’s control of this room. He was also consistent in his effort to manage the stresses that had been working on me, as I now understood he had been doing all along.
I found myself being relieved of the steaming basin and then returning to the kitchen on a fruitless hunt for antiseptic. It was a charade, for him and for me, because he had no real idea of there being any antiseptic and I went straight to the sink in this rustic back room and used the curiosity of peering through the window above it as an opportunity to undertake an equally fruitless search for the house that sheltered the distant telephone.
I perceived a high garden wall, the stunted church tower and perhaps the roof of a distant barn and that was all. I pretended that I was looking out as a means of soothing away the intense strangeness that was coming in waves from those people behind me. It was also a way of escaping the vision of untrained hands running over a head stained with all that drying blood. In truth, I believe I was really bracing myself, all the while, for the news that Mrs Abbey had been sent in after me.
I’d thought she would be. If Danny had really wanted to exclude her, he might have taken this chance to ask her to help the stranger find whatever it was that Matthew Croft wanted. I found my hands were gripping the smooth stone rim of the sink in readiness for the turn to meet her. But I didn’t need to. Because in that room behind me, I knew that she had taken the basin straight out of Matthew Croft’s hands and now she was dabbing at a clot on Mr Winstone’s head with that neglected cloth.
In this room, the homeliness of a ringing telephone made me think of doing what I ought to have done in the first place. I reset the kettle on the hot plate and boiled it to make Mr Winstone a strong cup of sugary tea.
I had barely made it when I was called back into that cramped room again by the clear mention of, ‘Miss Sutton.’
It was Danny giving my name to his mother. Mrs Winstone had finished bewailing the time she had wasted languishing in the clutches of the girl who set her hair and instead was wondering who had found her husband. And Danny was now requiring me to repeat my pathetically unsatisfying description of male with dark hair and a pale jacket and it made this crowded house suffocating because the description didn’t inspire recognition in anyone and I didn’t know why Danny should suddenly have thought to include me. It wasn’t enough to imagine that he had simply wanted the witness to speak for herself.
Danny took the teacup from me and left me stranded while Mrs Winstone beamed at me. She did it in that shattering way people have of being utterly admiring of acts of kindness that are only ever foisted upon a person by circumstance. Somehow that sort of appreciation always jars for me. I didn’t want gratitude for an act that any civilised person would have done. And I didn’t want to have my own small intervention swelled into the status of a noble deed when I thought there were already quite enough tensions in this room without pretending that the incident hadn’t simply been a normal every-day blunder. Particularly when the utterly dismayed perpetrator of it had quite clearly cared enough afterwards to bring Mr Winstone home.
I must have spoken at least part of that thought out loud. Presumably the less defensive part. Mrs Winstone turned to her son. ‘This didn’t happen here? Mrs Abbey, did this happen at your house? Did this happen at Eddington?’
All eyes turned to Mrs Abbey. It happened with a suddenness that would have made my face burn crimson. I thought the lady displayed creditable poise when she only paused in her ministrations to say with sympathetic understanding, ‘Bertie visited us today, but I’m afraid I can safely promise that he wasn’t in my little yard when I stepped out to run my errand to the shop about twenty minutes after he left. I wish he had been. I can only say, Mrs Winstone, just how relieved I am that I encountered you and extracted you from your hairdresser’s house – otherwise it might have been another hour yet before you’d come home to find the old man like this.’
Mrs Abbey wasn’t congratulating herself on her timely intervention. She really did care, I think, about the delay. But as she finished I saw her gaze flick curiously over Mr Winstone’s head because Matthew Croft spoke almost immediately with a clearer question of his own for the old man. ‘Were you at Eddington to repair the pump?’
The question was so abrupt that it came out like undisguised suspicion, though I didn’t think he meant it like that. It was simply that he wasn’t bound as Danny was to this woman and he wanted to know if this explained the reference Mr Winstone had made to fiddling about with something to do with water.
‘Of course I wasn’t working on the pump.’ At last Mr Winstone spoke and his voice was as battered as his head. Five people were suddenly united in thought as we watched a veined and arthritic hand lift to sweep a shocked teardrop from the corner of his eye. A faint rattle of grit scattered to the floor. ‘That’s the boy’s job. Why aren’t you listening? Mrs Abbey only needed me to take a look at something in the house as I was passing by.’ He rounded on his stepson. ‘And I was only asked to help because you weren’t there. I told you this earlier. You know she always has something that needs doing. It was afterwards that I stopped at the turbine house. Now I’ve got to get on. Mrs Abbey here is adamant that she’s going to take me to the doctors and I’ve got plenty to do first. It’s bad enough that you …’
The old man’s voice tailed off into a jumbled agitation about his wife’s supper. He gave the impression she was very particular about meal times. I saw the blankness ripple across Danny’s face as he realised that his stepfather had at last recalled the site of his incident. I also saw the bemusement that followed as his mother slipped into real shock and began engaging everyone in a needlessly circular discussion of alternative meal choices if they were going to be late back from the doctors. And it was then that I realised that Danny did mean to use me to manage Mrs Abbey after all.
Mrs Abbey had suggested that the old man should see the doctor. Now Danny was intending to use my presence to save himself from having to tell this woman that he and his friend had already planned to use the car for precisely this purpose, and she wouldn’t be coming along.
I could tell he was about to suggest that she should walk me home. It made me wonder what kind of hold this woman had over such a man that he was contorting himself into peculiar strategies just so that he could avoid offending her. Because clearly he had no concern whatsoever about what should happen if he irritated me. It made me wonder if this uneasy tiptoeing was someone’s unhappy idea of love. And whose.
And still Mrs Abbey’s long fingers were lingering over that crust of blood in Mr Winstone’s hair.
She really was making the wound bleed again. Just a little, but all the same this was ridiculous. I was standing by the immaculate little sideboard and it struck me that the gloriously open front door was just there. It was barely three yards or more away if I slid along the mantelpiece behind Mr Winstone’s chair. I didn’t care what use Danny Hannis thought I might be. I didn’t know any of these people and I wasn’t obliged to bolster the numbers of bystanders so that Mrs Abbey could be grouped with me and with all due politeness barred from trespassing upon their visit to the doctor. And it certainly wasn’t for me to stage-manage this scene so that the particular bystander in question wouldn’t know it was Danny’s choice to cut her out of their plans.
I turned my head and abruptly discovered that Matthew Croft’s eyes had followed me as I passed him. I was beyond the barrier of the armchair now and it was hard to make out his features in this dark and busy room. I was near the small window that looked out over the garden and I didn’t think he was having the same difficulty reading mine. I didn’t like to think what he might be seeing there. He was trying to ease his way around the chair after me. He was moving quite swiftly. He meant to speak to me. I thought he meant to stop me from going. He was probably intending to assume responsibility for directing my movements again, as though someone needed to manage my shock for me after this distress. He was going to insist that I had some company, and for the sake of his friend he would probably decree that it should be Mrs Abbey. Only that woman was scolding her patient loudly. Her voice swamped all else; deliberately, I think.
She’d just been promising again that soon she would finish dabbing at his head when she told Mr Winstone clearly, ‘Don’t dramatise, Bertie. I know what you’re hinting at and I really don’t think this could possibly mean we’re set for a return to all that awfulness we had at the beginning of the year.’
She made Matthew Croft freeze in his pursuit of me. His head turned. She had the attention of the whole room when she added, ‘It’s such nonsense when we know full well this fellow today was one of those squatters from the camp. Who else could it have been? Dirty people. I always thought it was only a matter of time before something like this happened. Unless you’re going to tell us he had a limp?’
I thought she meant that last part as a joke. I saw a corner of her mouth twitch as she dropped that bloody rag back into its bowl with a soggy slap. I saw her hold up her dirtied hands, looking for somewhere to wipe them. She swiftly stepped through to the tiny kitchen to claim a towel while nobody moved. Then she stepped back into the room again and gave a shake of her head at the foolishness of it.
‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘The only connection this has to that sorry business is the charge that might be laid at the squire’s door because he went away and allowed those rough vagrants to settle here unchecked. If only the old fool would come home where he belonged, he’d do something about that dirty camp and we wouldn’t need to be haunted by anyone, dead or living. Although, of course …’ There was a furtive pause while she scrubbed her hands a little more before she added on a secretive whisper, as if none of us were listening, ‘between you and me I can’t imagine how he can come back when certain neighbours will persist in reminding him of his loss.’
It was an exceedingly odd statement. But my surprise was nothing to everyone else’s reaction. They weren’t surprised; they were dumbstruck. It left Matthew Croft stranded in the middle of the room and she had even silenced Mrs Winstone. But it was Danny’s reaction now that shocked. The gloom in this house was consuming everyone, but I could still see Danny. I could identify him from the intensity of concentration that passed from him to that woman.
Danny’s stillness now had an entirely different quality from the awkwardness that had prevented him from halting her dominion over his father’s treatment. His expression also swept away the fantasy I had been harbouring that there was a secret between them and it was love. The expression on his face was blank like that of a person facing a sudden resurgence of defensiveness that ran deep; deeper even than Mr Winstone’s wound.
This was because Danny could tell as well as I that the odd turn of Mrs Abbey’s speech had the taste of revenge on someone, but it wasn’t meant to rebuke Danny for his manoeuvrings over taking Mr Winstone to the doctor. I thought this was directed at Matthew Croft for his rudeness in dissecting Mr Winstone’s visit to her house, although, to do Mrs Abbey credit, I didn’t think she had meant her remarks to have this impact. This wasn’t within her control. Something very nasty began to build in the damp corner beyond the fireplace and it grew bolder when Mrs Abbey straightened.
She was flushing and trying to act as if she hadn’t said a thing. She knew she’d made a mistake. She attempted to make amends by urging Mr Winstone onto his feet and then there was a sudden rush of life back into this room as stronger hands than hers lunged to keep the old man from falling. There was a scuff as the armchair was moved aside and then a decisive lurch of men across the room towards me and the door.
I was outside before I knew it. They were driving me along from behind. After all that anticipation, the fresher air of a dusky August sky was no relief at all. The shadows chased me out. These people were disturbing me far more than any brief distress of finding an old man on his path and I thought I had remembered now what old business Mrs Abbey had stumbled into talking about. My cousin had mentioned something like this in her letters.
The squire was an old army man and my cousin called him Colonel, presumably because my cousin didn’t owe him the same deference he got from those who deemed him lord and master. Her letter had mentioned the tragedy of a son’s death in some sort of incident in the winter. She’d implied that the loss had shattered the entire community, and I’d witnessed proof myself now of its wounds. But having said so much, my cousin’s letter had declined to convey the rest, in part due to her preoccupation at that time with her own mother’s death and also to supposedly preserve tact and to save misunderstandings later. And also, I’d thought, to irritate my curiosity in that infuriating way people have when they have something they wish they could talk about but don’t want to be the gossip who tells you.
As it was, I wasn’t quite sure I wanted to find out the rest quite like this. There was an additional hint within my cousin’s letters that a local man had been caught up in the mess and I thought I had some idea now of who that local man might be.
Mrs Abbey began to rapidly retract her judgement of the old squire’s neglect of his estate. It was too late though. It was horrible but it was as if Mrs Abbey had accidentally summoned the dead son, poor man, and it was his shade, or at least the shadow of his end, that crept after us from the house.
Now she was bustling ahead and chattering about her wretched squatters instead. And all the while I thought the strangest thing of all was that no one simply swept it all away with the obvious retort that Mr Winstone hadn’t been hinting anything at all. The poor man could barely recall meeting me on his path; he certainly wasn’t giving graphic accounts of the terrors that had walked him home and connecting them to any old business that could affect people like this.
Mr Winstone was scuttling along behind her, between his helpers. He wasn’t terribly steady on his feet. It was only after they had made it through the gate and past me to move on towards the car that Danny said something rather dry that made the ugliness that had been working its tentacles after them along the path sharply turn on its heel and climb out over the garden wall. He said that he was glad that someone was on hand to give such a well-founded explanation of how his stepfather’s injury today had stemmed from that scene in March, because this was the first mention he’d heard of that tragedy for almost six months. His dry humour was for his friend’s sake. I knew it was because it drew that man’s attention from the immediate task of preventing the invalid from pitching headfirst into the side of the car. I saw Matthew Croft right the old man and then turn his head to give a surprisingly warm grin. And then I was only left with the puzzling realisation that while I had been watching and worrying over the reasons why a man like Danny Hannis might find himself unable to risk offending Mrs Abbey, I really should have been noticing that she didn’t like his friend at all.
She was, however, perfectly, convincingly repentant. She knew she’d made a crass mistake and if she didn’t, she certainly found out when it cost her the right to accompany Mr Winstone on his trip to consult the doctor. I felt almost sorry for her when she joined me just as the men were depositing their charge in the passenger seat. She had been roundly excluded from the crush as Mrs Winstone organised herself into the back seat. Danny was folding himself in beside his mother without so much as a glance for the neglected neighbour. It became all the more humbling when the small dog clambered in after them. The only person who didn’t go was the wavy-haired youth Freddy, who was hovering by the bumper in that helpful way people have when they desperately want to be useful but have no idea what to do. I thought he was waiting for orders and it belatedly occurred to me that Matthew Croft had been intending to offer the boy as my companion when he’d been trying to organise my walk home.
I didn’t mean to give Matthew Croft time to remember. I was a few yards away, at the limit of the pockmarked garden wall, and I would have left there and then except that Mrs Abbey had her hand on my arm as she told me earnestly, ‘You’ve been badly shaken by your brush with this fellow, haven’t you?’
She was speaking as though nothing else mattered beyond Mr Winstone’s injury. Perhaps nothing else did. They all knew each other, these people, and the slip about a man’s death must have been made by others before. I played for the same indifference while carefully dodging away from that clutching hand of hers. After all, it had last been seen grasping a bloody rag.
I remarked lightly, ‘Shaken by that man? No.’
She looked disbelieving. ‘You kept dithering in and out of the room all the time that we were talking.’
I conceded the point with a faintly worn smile. Rightly or wrongly, I soon took advantage of a disturbance within the car to make my getaway from all of them. That telephone was ringing again – that blessed reminder of noisy things that belonged in the companionable bustle of my familiar city life – and I went to it like it was a lifeline.
Chapter 4 (#u6c0a0f35-f7e5-5851-8e6f-61eead70f44e)
Suddenly it wasn’t as late as I’d thought. I supposed escape might feel like that. The large house that stood on the opposite side of the triangle was still touched to warmth by the last of the day’s colour. It wasn’t the one that was ringing. That was coming from the other side of the village; in the space after the church but before the turn where the lane coursed away downhill. This grand house was the steward’s house and it was where my cousin had lived and grown until her father had died and her mother had retired to the cottage. I’d only visited these parts once as a child and that had been when I was eight. I barely remembered it but I did remember the village boys who had waged cheerful war with my cousin’s older brothers while my cousin scolded and I trailed about behind the lot of them like a pathetic undersized shadow. It was possible that Danny Hannis had been one of them.
The house seemed to be a boarding house for farm workers now. There was a steady stream of them passing between the steward’s house and what I’d taken earlier to be a derelict farmyard, only now it was flooded with light and crowded with men and tired carthorses. This, suddenly, was the bustle I was used to. Here the crowds took the form of dusty males ranging along the lines of various low stone walls, smoking and drinking weak beer. The farmhands were all, to a man, tanned and wiry. None of them wore a pale summer jacket. I suspected that most weren’t wealthy enough to own one.
Freddy didn’t own one either. He caught up with me before I’d even reached the point where the track veered to the right, downhill to my cousin’s cottage, or left around the lower limit of the churchyard and towards that telephone. He grinned at me as he fell into step beside me. He was all limbs and amiableness. ‘I don’t mind walking with you, Miss.’
The boy matched my sense of escape. He was on that cusp between childhood and manhood. He was aged perhaps fifteen and his face had the unsymmetrical structure of a teenage boy whose features were just beginning to settle into the mould of the man he would become. He wasn’t tall. He was perhaps my height and no more, but he had an endearing air of doubtful friendliness; warm and cheerful because it was in his nature to be so, but doubtful because perhaps other people didn’t always welcome it.
A certain sense of this boy’s niceness after that room full of adult complications made me protective but perhaps less tactful than I ought to have been. I remarked, ‘I’m going to answer that telephone. But I’ll be very glad of your company if you can explain to me precisely how it happens that there is so much danger tonight that I must let you escort me about the place, and yet somehow once I’m home I’m supposed to be perfectly happy to send you merrily onwards to your own home alone.’
He wasn’t offended. He told me simply, ‘My home isn’t just downstream from the turbine house Mr Winstone mentioned.’
Ah.
I confessed sheepishly, ‘That’s my cousin’s nearest neighbour. I thought that little brick hovel was somebody’s cottage.’
I made Freddy laugh. ‘Absolutely it is. And did you notice that it comes complete with running water laid on beneath the floorboards? You should be careful who you say that to. The turbine house is a matter for local pride. It gives light to the farmyard and the Manor. And it would give power to the steward’s house too if we had a man in there at the moment. We’re as modern as you like here.’
But not so modern, I thought, that anyone thought to mind the traditional distinction between the luxuries experienced by the land-owner compared to those of his tenants.
Then Freddy added doubtfully, ‘Did you say you were going to answer that? It’s in the Manor. Someone should be there.’
That told me what dwelling had the boldness to possess a telephone in this humble place. Its busy farmyard yawned in the gloom beneath us, where life hummed from every ancient stone and sagging roof, and stables for carthorses nestled against the rear wall of a massive stone barn. Below, the trackway descended into stillness. So did the cobbled surface that curved along the front of the enormous barn and veered left at the corner of another. There was no farmhouse attached to this enclosed run of buildings. There was no reassuring glow from watchful windows to oversee either route. Moths and shadows were the only traffic on this trackway. And the memory of Mrs Abbey’s summoning of ghosts and odd strangers, which to these people was also the correct description for me.
I dithered and spoke before I’d thought. ‘You’d think that Mr Winstone would be able to name this man if he’d ever met him before, wouldn’t you?’
Freddy only said politely, ‘Miss?’
The real worry burst out and it matched the blazing colour that still just touched the sky behind the darkened curve of the opposing valley hillside. I said bitterly, ‘I can’t believe I didn’t hear anything. I must have been at home when it happened. I was outside, sitting on my cousin’s front step. The turbine house would have been just out of sight around the bend of the track and I heard nothing. I must have followed them almost step for step up the hill and yet I saw nothing. There was nothing at all except the endless murmur of that telephone.’
I turned suddenly and chose the lane above the barn. I could hear my old friend that telephone still, but rather less insistently against the muffle of that great stone barn. Now it was a forlorn note of neglect. The farmhands were all going home for the night and not one of them thought he should answer it. I knew why. It was someone else’s job and, besides, after the tension I’d encountered in that room after the mention of the Colonel’s son, I could guess that none of them would dare.
I wondered if Danny might. Only he wasn’t likely to be released from his care of his stepfather for a while yet.
The Manor stood a little aloof from the village. We scurried along the frontage of that vast stone threshing barn and passed its gaping void of a vacant doorway. The cobbled drive rose past the stone barn to nose onto a narrow yard that was lined to our left by another older, rougher barn and on our right by the beginnings of parched garden terraces. No beans or cabbages were tended here. Above all this towered the Manor, a building that thrust up old weathered Cotswold gables all along its western face. Mullioned windows studded three floors and hundreds of tiny diamond panes of glass were each turned crimson by the last glimmer of daylight. It was all at once bleak and the most beautiful house I had ever seen.
A sudden doubt made me ask, ‘Freddy? Where is the doctor’s house?’
Freddy didn’t know I was thinking about that man again. The one who had been supposed to be going to fetch help. The boy told me innocently, ‘They’ve gone to the next village along. A place called Winstone.’ He caught my look. He grinned. ‘Mr Winstone’s kin took the name when they travelled into Somerset sometime around the dawn of the universe and in the time since, nature and work have conspired to carry him back again. Him and Mrs Winstone have been married for nearly twenty years, I think.’
Freddy was also unaware that part of this determination to answer the telephone was the tantalising idea that the Manor might be about to gift me the opportunity to speak to my cousin. I might be able to ask her advice before consigning myself to the silence of a solitary night in her cottage. The invitation was certainly lingering there in the air.
The kitchen door was unlocked in a manner that implied someone ought to be at home. I hallooed as one was meant to upon trespassing into a private house, but then I stepped in and found the light switch. Its garish yellow glare revealed a cavernous void that showed very little sign of regular use. The whole place confirmed Mrs Abbey’s statement that the Colonel was spending his bereavement elsewhere.
It made me say to the boy, ‘Didn’t you say someone still lived here?’
He was looking pale in the harsh electric light. I made him come inside so that I could shut the door before all the summer insects could swarm in after us. This little piece of practicality made him muster the words to reply, ‘The housekeeper.’
His voice was very small. His wide eyes were taking in the clean surfaces and empty stores. The farmyard might not have been as derelict as I had supposed, but here the abandonment was real. It was not, however, so old that dust was yet filming the bare surfaces and still that wonderful beacon of life was justifying our intrusion by persisting shrilly.
I followed its call through to where the high beams of the kitchen dropped into the cooler air of a narrow dining room. The light from the kitchen was strong, but this place was made oppressive by walls of panelled oak. Almost the entire space was occupied by an enormously long and very old banqueting table. I didn’t need my father’s training in the trade to recognise its value. Nor did it require his skill to identify the ancient mechanism for a spit-roast within the equally massive but decrepit fireplace. It too was gloomy in that way that spoke of a livelier past long neglected.
By the time I had proceeded through the turns of an impossibly dispiriting passage, the caller had given up and so had I, nearly. I couldn’t find a light switch and the array of paintings that belonged to the era when young gentlemen took grand tours had swiftly given way to the cold metal of old muskets and gin traps. Then I emerged into the loftier space of a broad Georgian stairwell and here was salvation in the form of an elegant table lamp. The moment it was lit, it felt as if I had stepped out of a museum and into a home. I had been beginning to feel thoroughly unwelcome in a place that preferred to be left alone to sleep and dream of the lingering weight of the son’s death. There was also, predictably enough, a growing sense of unease brought on by the memory of that unlocked door and the realisation that the man who had dropped Mr Winstone almost by my feet might have taken flight this way. The feeling was made worse when I checked the shadows in the passage behind me and realised that Freddy had not followed me here.
That wonderful table lamp saved my ebbing confidence; saved everything. A small stack of letters had been collecting by its side for a matter of a fortnight at most. Here I was in a space where a white plasterwork ceiling hung high above at the level of the attic floor. Glass consumed the entire end wall of the house except for the black rectangle that was reserved for a wide front door. Dusky blues shot across the sky outside and the lamp sent rainbow hues racing after them across the chequerboard marble floor. This place was no monument to mortal decay or the lair of a dangerous man; more the tidy corner where the family ought to have been, only they had lately but temporarily stepped out for a while.
The caller obliged me by trying again and drew me at last to trace the sound through the doorway that stood opposite in the narrow portion of wall at the foot of the stairs. If the entrance hall was welcoming, this room was glorious. A vast and elegant bay window faced full west over gardens and the lip of a drop that plunged away so suddenly into the valley below that it was almost powerful enough for vertigo. This view was at last the peace and glory of the countryside.
I lifted the receiver from the thoroughly modern bakelite telephone, which stood on the expansive desk. I said, ‘Hello, um—’ I scanned about me frantically for something that would help me recall the family name, if I had ever been told it. The oval portrait of an attractive woman in dated clothing on the nearest bookcase was no help at all. With an effort I dredged up an image of the platter of post. ‘— Langton residence?’
‘At last.’ This was the operator. She sounded beyond exasperated as she hastily retreated from the conversation to allow the caller, male, to say tersely, ‘Hello? Hello?’
‘Good evening,’ I replied politely, repeating after a moment, ‘The Langton residence. May I help you?’
‘Where the devil have you been? I’ve been trying for days.’ My politeness was wasted. The man on the other end of the line was clearly intending to make absolutely no concessions for basic civility. He was also, as it turned out, unwilling to leave me room to actually answer him.
I began, ‘Well actually I—’
‘Where’s Mrs Cooke? Why isn’t she there?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t know Mrs—’
‘What on earth do we pay you for if you don’t know where she is?’
‘You aren’t actually my employ—’
‘Hang on.’ The voice became muffled as a hand was placed over the mouthpiece. ‘I don’t know, sir. I’m trying to find out, only there’s some dim-witted—’
