Potential Danger. PENNY JORDAN

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      ‘Are you sure you’re OK to drive this thing?’ he asked her, eyeing her tiny frame and the heavy bulk of the Land Rover. ‘That was quite a daydream you must have been in, to step off the pavement like that.’

      ‘Whoever was driving that Range Rover was driving far too fast,’ Kate defended. Inside, she was holding her breath and deriding herself at the same time. Why not simply ask him if he knew who had been driving it, instead of fishing so stupidly?

      ‘I didn’t see the driver,’ Tim admitted, ‘but it was one of the vehicles from the government experimental station.’

      ‘Do you go there much?’ Kate asked him.

      He shook his head.

      ‘No, they have their own resident vets. They’re doing research into animal diseases that sometimes requires them all to go into quarantine—no one allowed in or out—and outsiders aren’t encouraged at any time. Very wise, probably, in view of the potential danger. I suspect they’re trying to find an antidote for rabies, but that’s only my own private feeling. And then, of course, there’s the continued problem of assessing the radiation fall-out from Chernobyl…’

      ‘All that on one fifteen-hundred-acre estate,’ Kate marvelled sardonically, but Tim shook his head again.

      ‘Don’t knock it. They’re doing one hell of a valuable job, and unlike some of the big pharmaceutical companies, their research isn’t at the mercy of shareholders and profit margins. Some of the villagers seem to think they’re testing bombs in there, but they couldn’t be more wrong. If only the people in there were allowed to announce it…’

      His words gave Kate food for thought. Her father had told her that the establishment of the research station had caused resentment in the village, and despite the value of the work it was engaged on Kate suspected that that resentment would probably only increase if the local farming community suspected the station was engaged in experiments with rabies and other dangerous, contagious diseases.

      She arrived back in time to help her mother after lunch, wondering how she could best broach the subject of the man in the Range Rover. To describe him physically to her mother was bound to elicit too much curiosity, and yet when she sketchily drew a verbally toned-down image of him when describing the incident, her mother shook her head and told her, ‘I haven’t met anyone from the station—they don’t mix locally. They even shop outside the area. It must be an odd sort of life, living in a community and yet separate from it,’ she added musingly.

      Of course, there was no earthly chance that the man could have been Silas, but even so it disturbed Kate to know that there was any man in the neighbourhood so powerfully like her memories of him that even thinking about the incident now made her stomach churn. Odd that she could so easily forgive her father, and yet still feel so bitterly resentful of the way Silas had treated her. Perhaps because her father’s betrayal had been born of love and Silas’s of callous indifference.

      After lunch, Cherry insisted on returning to the paddocks with her grandfather, and having assured herself that she was not going to overtire herself Kate allowed her to go, noticing as she did so the healthy glow that being outside had already given Cherry’s skin.

      She had brought some work with her—assignments she wanted to prepare for the new school term—and she took her work upstairs to her room so that she could concentrate on it.

      Kate loved teaching, which was odd, really, for she had never intended to go into it. Research had been her chosen field—library work; and yet she now acknowledged that, despite its constant heartaches and strains, teaching gave her considerable pleasure. She was lucky in being at a school where the parents were caring and concerned, the children mostly from immigrant families, who were keen to see their offspring succeed in the world, and who saw education as a passport to that success.

      Children up here in the Dales came from families with a similar respect for education, although the children often had to travel many miles to get to school. The local village school no longer existed, and if she and Cherry moved…

      Her heart thudded uncomfortably. Slow down, Kate cautioned herself… They were here on holiday, that was all. And yet, as she stood up and looked out of her window, she acknowledged that her soul had been starved for the sight of her home. She missed its grandeur and its freedom; London caged and imprisoned her, although she hadn’t realised how much until now. But coming home would mean such an upheaval. She would have to find somewhere to live…

      ‘Kate…’

      The anxiety in her mother’s voice as she called to her took her hurrying to the top of the stairs.

      ‘Annabel’s gone,’ her mother told her worriedly. ‘Could you go and look for her? I’m right in the middle of baking.’

      Annabel was the latest in a long line of nanny-goats her mother insisted on keeping, despite their destructive tendencies, for she claimed that their milk was far healthier than that from cows. As Kate went downstairs in response to her mother’s summons, she learned that Annabel had chewed through her tether and wandered off.

      ‘If she gets into the government place, there’ll be such trouble,’ her mother worried. ‘There was such a to-do the other week. Some group or other broke in… They’re very security conscious.’

      ‘I’ll go and look for her. She can’t have gone far,’ Kate reassured her, knowing the breed’s penchant for stopping to eat whatever took its fancy.

      She suspected she would find the animal less than a few yards down the lane, but she discovered that she was wrong, and she had walked as far as the boundary of her father’s land with that now owned by the experimental station before she realised she was wrong.

      Surely Annabel couldn’t have strayed in there? she reflected, gazing at the high, heavy fencing that reared unattractively above the mellow stone walls that bounded the estate.

      Worn stone steps set into the wall showed where there had once been access over it, and Kate climbed up them so that she could look into the enclosed grounds.

      To her horror, she saw that the goat had indeed strayed inside the perimeter. She looked up when Kate called her name, but refused to move, simply shaking her silky white head and continuing her meal.

      How on earth had she got in? Kate wondered wryly. Agile as the creature was, she couldn’t have climbed over the wall and the perpendicular fence.

      She scrambled back down the wal, jumping the last couple of feet, and acknowledging as her muscles protested that she was slightly out of condition. Time was when she would have done that without having to soothe scraped palms of too-tender, ‘citified’ skin.

      Realising that she would have to find out where the goat had got in and get her out again, she looked to her left and right, wondering which direction to take first. Then she spotted some of the goat’s droppings, and with a faint sigh of relief turned to the right.

      A narrow, unkempt lane ran alongside the boundary wall, leading to a farm which had been empty for almost two years following the death of its owner, an incomer into the area who had tried and failed to raise prize cattle on the exposed fellsides. The farm had recently been sold, according to her father, but no one knew to whom. Her father had been slightly disgruntled by the sale, since he had wanted to purchase the land himself. Although not suitable for cattle, it could be used СКАЧАТЬ