The Antique Dealer’s Daughter. Lorna Gray

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       Chapter 8

      I have often wondered if I am the sort of person who tends to make things unnecessarily dramatic with the force of my own emotions. But lately I have tended to believe it is more complicated than that. I think that sometimes it is my better feelings that keep me from making bigger mistakes. I didn’t march back to the bus stop to idle away three hours until the second and final bus of the day came. I didn’t feed the resentment from my ejection from the Manor or use it as an excuse to relieve all the other stresses of the morning either. I’m already a woman who is haunted by the grander wrongs I have encountered in life – there are plenty of real opportunities to feel wretchedly at fault if one only looks for them after all – and I certainly didn’t need to add to the burden by participating in the more immediate idea of tit-for-tat that grows all too often from smaller trespasses upon basic civility.

      I suppose the simple truth was that I was haunted enough by things that I couldn’t control, so I certainly didn’t wish to add to the list by including things I could. So instead I shed the lot by feeding a few scraps to the goat as I’d promised, then I wheeled the bicycle gingerly down the hill back to my cousin’s cottage and took the water jug from the cool of the kitchen to find the spot in the stream above the ford where the sheep didn’t spoil the banks.

      The hour that followed began with an introduction to yet another man. This one wasn’t balding and wasn’t attacking anyone either. He was robust and friendly and he was interrupted in the act of propping his motorcycle against the verge outside my cousin’s gate as I returned with a brimming jug.

      Constable Rathbone accompanied me inside. He was flushed after his race down the track from the other direction – the route that rose from the cottage through dark green trees and a gate onto a lane – and his hair had been swept into chestnut curls around the base of his helmet by the wind. He was here, as the Captain had foreseen, because Mr Winstone had reported his assault early this morning and this proved that it was a good job I’d put off racing for that bus because it really would have been suspicious if the main witness had taken off before she’d even left a name and forwarding address.

      The constable sipped my tea and took notes while I recounted a simple statement of what I had found on Mr Winstone’s garden path. The kitchen was an inferno because I’d had to light the stove to boil the kettle and the room was only made bearable by the breeze that was wafting in through the open front door. Through the course of the policeman’s questions I learned that he was a true upholder of the law and by that I mean he gave the impression he might be very efficient at setting-to with whistle and truncheon if he were called to suppress a civil disturbance. I had a suspicion, however – and it was borne out by the fact that he had not yet visited the supposed site of the attack – that when it came to the investigation of a crime, his training only went as far as recording the bare facts of the case ready to hand over the lot to a detective from the county force. I supposed PC Rathbone might prove to be capable of rising to the task of arresting his man if the brute were to be caught in the act of doing something irrefutably guilty. But quite honestly the good Constable Rathbone didn’t give the impression that he had any idea of actually going in hunt of him.

      In a way it was fortunate Constable Rathbone wasn’t much of a detective. He had finished his tea and was folding away his notebook and reaching to collect his helmet from the kitchen table when we heard a car roll to a halt on the trackway outside. There was a creak as its springs met a hollow and silence as the engine died. Naturally, I went to look. I was half hopeful that this was a cab bearing my cousin home from the hospital. It wasn’t. The chrome bumper of a black bonnet peeped at me from beyond the screen of the garden gate while I hovered near the mass of coats hanging in the hall. Aunt Edna didn’t seem to be stalking me from amongst them today.

      But a real living person was hunting me. The sound of a car door swinging on its hinges travelled through the open front door. It was followed naturally enough by the thump as the car door was shut again, only, instead of hearing next the crush of dry stone underfoot, there was a cough as the engine kicked urgently back into life. The driver had climbed back in again. He made his car perform a quite extraordinary turn in about thirty rapid shuffles back and forth before dashing away again around the bend towards the lane where the gate had been left swinging. It was the black Ford and the swift about-turn had occurred when its bald-headed driver had stepped around the front of his car and found himself being presented with a close view of a policeman’s motorcycle.

      I stood there too stunned to really register shock. Quite honestly, it had never occurred to me to think that I was the common theme in this run of oddness rather than the Manor. Only here I was gripping the coarse folds of one of many aged coats, merging with them, really. And thinking that I’d met bombs and war, and wasted years dreading that all the human nastiness that ran like a vein through the whole lot might persist into peacetime, and yet at the same time I’d still happily been convinced that none of it had ever been specifically directed at me. Now, though, this man had apparently taken to calling on my doorstep just as soon as I’d left myself with no real chance of catching any bus anywhere and I was feeling as though this one thing were about to prove that my attempt to find a little perspective here was set to be horribly skewed the wrong way. Where I had meant to assert once and for all that nastiness had no place in my daily life at all, these people appeared determined to prove that it very specifically did.

      ‘Changed his mind, did he?’ PC Rathbone joined me in the hall, small eyes in a sunburnt face wrinkling comfortably at the now vacant trackway. ‘Oh, no, here he is back again.’

      The policeman was oblivious to the fact that this was an entirely different car. I couldn’t quite see its nose well enough to say what make of vehicle it was, but this time the gate was carefully pushed shut and the black bonnet that drew to a halt at the end of my garden contained the unmistakeable might of a very powerful engine. It seemed that I had been partially right to think the Manor owned its share of this strangeness because here was its representative arriving in person at my garden gate. It must be said that the news didn’t exactly come as a relief.

      Willpower made me shake off the clawing grasp of musty coats and the proximity of the amiable policeman and step out onto the path. My hands met and gripped the weathered wood of the gate and I waited there while the car creaked and Captain Langton climbed out. I saw him hesitate fractionally as he saw me there, but then he turned to press the car door shut. Unlike the other man, this man didn’t even quiver when he stepped around the nose of his car and his eyes fell upon the policeman’s motorcycle.

      His eyebrows lifted a fraction though when I didn’t open the gate for him. Instead I leaned across it with my weight on my hands to tell him in an unfriendly whisper, ‘PC Rathbone is here asking about Mr Winstone’s injury. And did you see the other car?’ I could tell from the brief drift of his attention towards the empty lane that he hadn’t. ‘It was the man from the Manor but PC Rathbone thinks you’re him. He didn’t notice that the other car drove СКАЧАТЬ