The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray

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       Chapter 6

      This new morning began with company and friendliness, where yesterday had ended with loneliness and worries. The nearby shop – and by nearby I mean at the end of a heating two-mile walk to the bus stop and beyond – stood a few doors down from Mrs Winstone’s hairdresser in a sunken lane with sheep pasture beyond. The most sinister thing I encountered in that busy place while I made the sacrifice of funds and rations for the sake of the Colonel’s lunch was the welcome offered by the shopkeeper and her mildly mildewed husband and the collection of respectable mature ladies who used the shop as a waiting room for the doctor’s house next door. They seemed to take their slice of gossip as a kind of tithe on users of the public telephone.

      Which meant in a way that it was perhaps fortunate that I failed to reach my cousin on the ward telephone at the hospital. If I had, I’d have unwittingly filled the assembled ears with enough gossip to keep their mouths working for the next few days at least. Instead, I only got to speak to a nurse, who wouldn’t even confirm that there was a Miss P Jones on the women’s ward at present. The most she would say was that the telephone trolley would be on the ward for the patients’ use at six o’clock this evening and I could try again then, which wasn’t terribly useful since sometime in the course of last night I had discovered the idea of achieving a different and more enjoyable kind of flight in the form of going down to join Phyllis today. It would be typical if it turned out that as I travelled down on the bus to Gloucester, she should be travelling up towards her home.

      I’d left my suitcase at the Manor. It would save at least part of this long walk if I decided to make the trip anyway. It was a good job too because I knew I’d never have found the courage to climb back up out of the valley otherwise. The walk back to the village on its own seemed designed for exhaustion. It was hot already and a heat haze was casting mirages amongst the tall masts of the wireless station by that bus stop. Only one car passed me on the long lane and it was fortunate that I had about a mile’s warning before it came into view because, unbelievably, it nearly ran me over. It barrelled down into a dip between farm buildings like a rude black beast of a bull and sent a chip of stone flying up onto my ankle while I politely waited on the verge. Then it vanished around a bend and took the roar of its motor with it.

      I thought I’d found it parked in the massive stone barn that flanked the Manor farmyard. No one was in the village again and the farmyard had renewed its camouflage of dereliction. I’d walked that way round to the Colonel’s kitchen door after doing my duty by knocking on Mr Winstone’s door first. He wasn’t there. No one spent their days at home here.

      The long black nose of the enormous car was occupying the cusp between light and shade beneath the great gaping threshing doors of the barn. A touch to its bonnet proved that the engine was warm. Movement emerged from the depths within and it was Danny Hannis’s dog. He sauntered out from the left-hand wing of the barn. It was now that I saw that this great building was no longer dedicated to grain processing. Half of the space within was consumed by the unmistakeable profile of a shrouded steam engine. The other bay housed rusting hay rakes and implements and a very expensive modern grey tractor which looked similarly like it had already worked very hard for its keep.

      There was no sign of the man but the dog was a curious soul. He supervised me as I abandoned this dark cathedral for farming technology. He was with me when I caught the distant murmur of a voice beyond the turn of the other barn; the older one that sagged beneath the weight of its years and ranged further up the hill to meet the Manor kitchen.

      It wasn’t a happy voice. It was a low stutter of ‘m’s, like a moan. My first thought naturally enough was of Mr Winstone. My second was for that missing housekeeper.

      There it was again, to my left behind a low door into this second barn. It was a low mumble like an injured soul might make, or a hostage, bound and gagged. It made me grasp another concept of horror. The one where a forgotten woman lay unheeded for days on end.

      The cobbled space between house and barn was empty. So were the long terraces of the garden. There was no other sound of life here. Other than the dog, I mean. He was at my heels and the only sound he made was the faint click-click of claws on the cobbled ground.

      It was the stuff nightmares are built on. I had to ease open the door into an ancient space. I had to wake to the guilt of knowing I’d meant to look last night for conclusive signs that the housekeeper really had left, only I’d been distracted by the way Freddy had appeared. The door was set on surprisingly well-oiled hinges between ancient СКАЧАТЬ