John Harding 2-Book Gothic Collection. John Harding

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      I was near out the door when his voice caught up with me and hauled me back. ‘Oh, just one more thing.’

      I turned. ‘Yes…?’

      ‘That noise, that head on wood noise, or should we say wood on head? Couldn’t have been an oar, by any chance?’

      I stared him out again, aware of the blood draining from my face.

      ‘That I couldn’t tell you, sir,’ I said, ‘for it’s a sound I have never heard.’

      We had two or three more encounters after that and it every-timed the same, he’d hark back to the business of the sound and again-and-again me about the oars, but I had nothing to add. I felt he unsatistfied the whole thing in some way but put that down to the man’s nature and the exigencies of his job. In the coroner’s court I would often catch him looking at me as if I were some puzzle he couldn’t quite figure, an object of fascination to him. I had plenty more of the same questions from the coroner, who was a kindly old man who told me to sit down when I gave my evidence and made his clerk fetch me a glass of water. Answering him and upglancing and seeing Hadleigh with his eyes upon me then, I couldn’t help wondering if this had been all along the point of his interrogations, to rehearse me for when the proper questions came. I felt that if we had met under different circumstances, a ball perhaps – not that I had ever been to one – or on a skating rink, Hadleigh would have liked me, but because of the Whitaker affair, I confounded him quite.

      So why now did I think Hadleigh would want to help me? Why would he believe my story, even suppose I could get to tell it to him? It was a big thing to expect a grown man, a sceptical police officer, to swallow – more like a fairy tale than a proper mystery – that my brother and I had a wicked governess who was plotting to steal him. Moreover, that she might not be human, but some manifestation from another world, even our previous and now dead governess, scorning the next world for this.

      Then again, for all that he had not friendlied me, but continued to examine me with those sharp blue eyes of his, Hadleigh had proved my saviour in all the business of Miss Whitaker’s brother, specially in that awful scene in the courtroom when the man stood up and shouted, such terrible things that I had to cover my ears, that it was all a whitewash, that his sister’s death had not been properly investigated, that her employer was to blame for letting her on the lake with no one but a child to save her, that there was ‘something fishy about the whole thing’.

      I felt near to have died from the shame of it all, with everyone’s eyes feeding off me, like crows on a dead rabbit, but it seemed no sooner had the disturbance started than Hadleigh and his men were upon Whitaker and had his arms pinned behind his back and him marched out of the room and not let back in again for the rest of the proceedings. It was the same when I outed the courthouse and again when I returned next day. Whitaker lay in wait for me but just as we pulled up in the horse and trap Hadleigh had his men upon him and him whisked away and no more harm done. I suspicion that he scared the man off too, for I never eyeclapped him again.

      So the situation with Hadleigh was like a finely tuned balance, with not much required to tip it one way or the other. On the one hand, he had knight-in-armoured me, saving me pain and humiliation at the hands, or rather from the mouth, of Miss Whitaker’s brother. On the other, he looked at me as if I were his special study, an enigma only he could solve, and his protection of me from Whitaker no more friendly to me than that. Still, I nothing-elsed, I had no other to turn to. It was Hadleigh or no one.

      Deciding that I had nothing to lose by seeking his help was not the same, though, as getting it. The police station was in our little town. It was eleven miles away and I had no way of getting there except for carriaging by John. But I could not just say, ‘I want to go into town,’ it would not be allowed by Miss Taylor, indeed had never been allowed before she came, even by Mrs Grouse. Giles and I hardly evered to town, for all our needs were met at Blithe, where we were fed and watered and measured for our clothes and doctored when we illed.

      This last made me think. We were doctored but we were not dentisted. Once, when I was smaller and had an aching baby tooth, they took me into town to see Mr Field, the dentist, an ornery old man who evidently hated his job and even more so when it involved children. Now it obvioused me that a dentist could not call upon me at Blithe, for he would need his equipment, the heavy leather and brass chair, which he could pump up with a pedal to bring you to his height, and the looming flamingo threat of his drill, which I had never seen in action but only heard from the waiting room, although that was enough to shiver me quite.

      I thought at first of complaining of toothache so I would have to be taken to Mr Field, but that would not do, for if Miss Taylor came too, as well she might, then it would not opportunity me to visit the police station to see the captain. Only one solution suggested itself to me. Giles would have to be the one who visited the dentist. I would accompany him and, when the moment opportunitied, slip away to the police station.

      It was a couple of days before I aloned with Giles, long enough to put my plan to him. His reaction was no more than I expected. ‘The dentist? Ask to see the dentist? No fear! I’m not being drilled and filled or having my teeth pulled out one by one. The Spanish Inquisition used that as a form of torture, you know.’

      ‘But, Giles, you wouldn’t have to have your teeth drilled or taken out. There’s nothing wrong with them.’

      Giles inserted a finger into his mouth and ran it over his teeth, checking. ‘How can you be so sure? What if I get there and old Field spots something and gets that drill of his going?’

      ‘But he won’t, Giles, because there’s nothing wrong with your teeth.’

      ‘Oh, yes, so you’re a dentist now, are you? And anyway, what if he says there’s something wrong with one of ’em even though there’s not, just so as he can pull it out and collect a fat fee?’

      ‘He wouldn’t do that. It’s not allowed. It’s…it’s…it’s against the Hippocratic oath.’ I uncertained the truth of this, but when I explained what the oath was to Giles he didn’t question it, which just goes to show that if pulling out good teeth isn’t against it then it should be.

      Giles suspicioned me one, weighing up his options. ‘You’re sure he won’t do anything to me?’

      ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

      ‘Well, OK then, I’ll do it. When do you want me to go down with the toothache?’

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