by Claire Peate
“Ngh!”
“What?” He looked at my expression, frowning slightly.
“Oh. Nothing. Just … what a … what a rafter.”
“That’s nothing. There were eight of those and three thirty-footers. Not that I carried them by myself. Anyway, this was at the start of the project, I guess, moving the old timbers out and cutting back the undergrowth”.
Look at those arms! Look at that chest!
“Let me see! Let me see!” Henna wrangled the book off me. I outmanoeuvred her and grasped it tightly. But Louisa had come from out of nowhere, standing close to Gwyn, and now leaned in to him, bending over the book.
“Who’s that?” She pointed to a mean-looking old farmer who was gurning in the background, holding a large scythe in a very aggressive manner.
“That’s old Tomos, lives on the next farm to me, down near the river. He wasn’t a bundle of joy on the day. You can probably see that for yourselves. And that –” he pointed at the other farmer – “that’s Elijah from over the valley, poor man, it’s his flock that the predator’s been getting. Well, until tonight. Now it’s moved on to my flock…”
Cathy, who had been taking a sip of wine, choked and looked up at him. “You really think your sheep was attacked by a big cat?”
He sighed. “Folks have said there’s been a cat round here for years but I never reckoned much to the stories. But tonight – well, my sheep’s been torn in two and I don’t know how any other animal around here could do that. No dogs or badgers or foxes would do it.”
There it was again. Torn in two. I shivered.
Suddenly everyone fired questions at Gwyn. Were we in real danger? What did the cat look like? Had he seen the news report? What did he think of it? I couldn’t help feel a bit excited by the whole thing, which was probably enormously misguided of me because it sounded like we were probably in quite a bit of danger. But right here right now we were entertaining a handsome farmer in the middle of the night, and everything seemed pretty good. Even the possibility of an impending mauling from a wild animal didn’t seem so bad if Gwyn was on hand to rescue me.
There was a knock on the door.
Henna screamed.
“Jesus Henna, calm down.” Laura glared at her. “A big cat wouldn’t knock.”
Henna took a deep breath, gave her a sarcastic smile and then wobbled over to the wine bottle.
“That’ll be my vet.” Gwyn made a move to get up but various remonstrations from Louisa kept him seated.
Seeing as no one else was prepared to answer it and leave Gwyn, I went, collecting the poker on my way and putting it within easy reach. Just in case. I knew it wouldn’t be the big cat at the door because even I knew that a big cat could not knock on the door like that. Still, stranger things have happened. I could picture another one of my diary entries: “August 2nd: Five girls died in a savage cat attack in a Welsh valley in 2007.”
For the second time that night I opened the heavy old door. There was no slavering black cat ready to pounce and there was no tanned, handsome farmer leaning against the porch. There was just a very tired-looking middle-aged man standing in the gloom.
“Roger Williams, vet,” he muttered. “I had a call from Gwynfor Jones.”
“I’m here!” Our farmer strode down the hallway to the door, a gaggle of girls trailing behind him. “Thanks again,” he said to me and held out his hand. I shook it. It was large and strong and warm.
“I hope your sheep are all right,” I said lamely.
He joined the vet in the porch. “Best be off. What’s your name, love?”
“Rachel.”
“Well, Rachel, thanks again. And I hope you enjoy yourselves. And be careful. You’re not planning on going out into the wilds are you? I never set any store by all this talk of cats before, but this, well, I’m not so sure now.”
“We’ll be OK. There are five of us. Surely it won’t attack a group of five girls?”
“Be careful of the men round yer then,” he laughed. “Anyway, I live up on Ty Nant farm just round the corner if you have any problems. Anything.”
“Thanks,” I said, heart pounding, my head suddenly filled with the unmentionable things he could help me with. I held on to the door for support.
“Don’t get eaten or anything,” I called out after him as he disappeared into the darkness.
“Right-o,” he called back, and was gone into black night.
I closed the door and drew the bolts closed again. Oh my goodness. What a treat.
9
“I can’t believe we’re in so much danger.” Cathy said quietly, perched on the edge of her chair, staring into the last embers of the fire.
“Never mind that.” Louisa sat back into the sofa. “This is perfect! Perfect! Thank you for organising it, Laura.” She leant over and gave Laura a kiss.
“I didn’t organise the farmers or anything.” Laura shrugged the kiss off.
“But what a bit of luck.”
Henna examined the stem of her wine glass. “You’re not actually planning to…”
“To what?” Louisa had a broad smile across her face. “Of course not, Henna, I’m almost a married woman! But I can find him attractive. It doesn’t mean I want to get off with him or anything. It’s just so nice to flirt with someone. God, it’s been so long I thought I’d forgotten how, but it all comes back, doesn’t it? All the old techniques!”
I hid my smile. “But you do want to get off with him, don’t you?”
“Well, yes. Of course. But honestly Cathy you can stop looking at me like that, nothing’s going to happen! Like I said, I love James and we trust each other and nothing is going to happen. It was just harmless flirting. That said…” She turned to Laura who was busy stoking the glowing logs sending embers flying. “You could try to build him into the weekend, couldn’t you? I mean, it would be a shame to not see him again. He’s the only person we’ve met round here…”
“And the vet,” Henna added.
“You get off with the vet then.” Louisa winked.
“Hold on.” Henna leant forward, looking serious. “Are you saying none of us can get off with Gwynfor, even though you’re not going to?”
Louisa laughed incredulously. “Look, no one is going to get off with anyone. OK? It’s my hen do. It’s about having a laugh with my mates before I get married. It’s about me.”
“So, can I just clarify,” Henna put her glass unsteadily on the side table, “you’d be pretty pissed off if any of us were to get off with Gwyn?”
“Yes.”
“OK.” Henna leant back. “Glad that’s clear. You’re not going to have him, and neither are we. Seems a shame, though. Letting him go to waste.”
“He might be married,” I volunteered. “Although he wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.”
“Rachel, you looked!”
I shrugged.
“Look.” Louisa folded her arms. “If anyone was going to get off with anyone it would be me, because it’s my hen do. But I’m not because that’s not what this weekend is about. It’s about friendship and wine and relaxing. When you have your hen dos, then you can have hen’s prerogative and do what you like, but this is my weekend. OK?”
“Fine,” said Henna, pouring another glass of wine. “But can I leave him my number. For another time?”
Louisa rolled her eyes. “Yes. Whatever.”
A log snapped in the grate making Laura jump back.
“I wonder what the vet said.” She poked the log tentatively. “Whether it was a cat attack.”
“Maybe we’ll have to cancel the horse riding,” Cathy said.
“We can’t!” I pleaded. “What will I have to tell Marcia when I get back? I have to go horse riding. And besides a cat isn’t going to attack five girls and five horses. We’ll be fine! I don’t want us to be put in mortal peril or anything, but I do really want to go horse riding.”
Laura nodded. “Rachel’s right. We’ll be fine. Just stay out of the woods and make sure we’
re home by dark. We won’t even know it’s there. If it is there.” She turned back to the fire.
“Well, I definitely think we should open another bottle of wine.” Henna staggered up. “Rach, where are they hidden?”
“I’ll show you.” We walked into the kitchen, somehow made less scary when there were two of us. The wine was tucked behind the breakfast cereals so I crouched down and fished behind the packets of cornflakes. “There aren’t many left.”
Henna swayed in the doorway, hiccupping. “We can go into town and get some more tomorrow, I guess.” She staggered towards the wall and tapped the rota. “That’s if it’s timetabled in our precious Schedule and Rota.” She did an impression of Laura, arms crossed, looking super-serious.
I laughed. “That’s as maybe, but there aren’t any towns nearby. And anyway, you’re right, it’s not in the rota so you’re not going to get away with it.”
“Oh well, it’s the pub tomorrow night anyway.” She wobbled down onto her knees and shuffled over to me as I examined what was left of our much depleted wine stock. It was serious; we were down to the budget supermarket own-brands.
Henna sat back on her haunches, holding on to the door frame for support. “Rach, can I ask you something?”
“Sure.” I sat back. “What?”
She hiccupped, looked over her shoulder and then, leaning forward, said softly, “What do you think of Laura?” Her breath smelt of pure Wolf Blass.
“Laura?”
“Shhh!” She theatrically put a finger to her lips.
I looked round and dropping my voice said, “She’s fine. I met her a while ago so I kind of know her a bit. Why?”
Henna put her hand up to the enormous purpling bruise on her forehead and then looked at me meaningfully.
“She did that to you?” I looked at it in horror as Henna nodded. “Why?”
“She said it was an accident. It wasn’t.”
“Oh my God! What happened?”
Henna checked behind her again, wobbled and fell over. “She’s mad. She is, honestly! Mad.” She hoisted herself up by holding on to a shelf. “Everyone’s going on about being scared of a big cat, but I reckon we should all be more concerned about who is in the house with us than what’s locked outside.”
I laughed.
“Seriously!” Henna said, “Listen to this then: Laura and I arrived at the Hen House at the same time and I guess we both had in mind what she’d said about the rooms being on a first come first served basis. So we both sprinted to the front door to be the first one in.”
“And you collided?”
“No, she bloody nutted me.”
“No way!”
“Definitely. She nutted me. I’d got to the door just before she did and she leant forward and nutted me right there on the doorstep. But Louisa was behind us and I reckon she knew what had happened, so Laura had to concede the second best room to me.”
“Oh my God. I thought all the rooms were really good. Except mine.”
“Mine’s got an en suite and Laura has to share a bathroom with Cathy. But yes, they’re all much better than yours.” Henna put her hand on my arm. “I think you’re really great not making a big thing about having that awful room. The others would kick up a stink. I would have done. But you just accept it.”
“You mean I’m a pushover?”
“Unselfish,” Henna corrected, pointing a finger vaguely in my direction. “Right. Help me up. I reckon this Aldi French wine should hit the spot.”
“Yes. It will probably do that.”
Henna giggled but then clutched on to my arm. “Hey, don’t say anything about Laura nutting me, will you?”
“Of course not!” I winked and we headed back into the lounge.
10
It must have been about two in the morning by the time we stumbled off to bed. Laura instigated the move after blurrily consulting the Schedule & Rota and telling us we had to be up in six hours and off to the health spa an hour after that. Those beauticians were going to have their work cut out when they saw the state of us – I wondered fuzzily whether some sort of liver-focused massage would be on offer to help mend a part of my body almost certainly damaged after the volume of alcohol I’d consumed. Once the handsome farmer Gwyn had left, the five of us had found a renewed energy, which we diverted into the opening of a few more bottles of wine, which meant, in my case, getting pissed. For the second time that evening. The others weren’t in a better state and there was much swaying and clinging on to bits of furniture once we managed to prise ourselves off the hugely comfy sofas.
After we staggered round the house locking all the doors and windows, we each went our separate ways, all the other girls heading up the stairs to their beautiful airy bedrooms and sumptuous bathrooms, while I slunk off to bed in the kitchen.
In the kitchen.
Laura had been absolutely right about all the bedrooms being good except one. Mine. A miniature bed was shoved against one wall, a miniature chest of drawers next to it and a miniature window facing out to the front door. It was all a bit Alice-in-Wonderland; perhaps one of the wine bottles I’d emptied had carried a “drink me” label on it and I had actually grown into an enormous giant in a perfectly normal-sized room. But that couldn’t have been as my six bags were perfectly in proportion to me and were piled up on the chest of drawers, ready to topple at a moment’s notice.
As if the dimensions of the room weren’t bad enough, to get to the room I had to go through the kitchens, so I can only assume it was a pantry or store-room at one time, which made sense because you could still see where there had been hooks in the ceiling once, no doubt where they had hung meat to cure. Lovely.
Having said all that, the room itself was nice. Cosy. Painted a rosy sort of limewash, it was homely enough but it was ridiculously small. Hardly room to swing a cat. Ha ha.
From the tour of the house I’d seen that the other bedrooms weren’t much worse than Henna’s. They all had double beds and they were all decorated beautifully with antique furniture. Louisa’s room had an enormous oak four-poster bed in the middle and mullioned windows facing out into the valley. She had exposed roof beams and a huge old chandelier in the centre of the room. The walls were painted china blue and there were stylish oil paintings of seascapes dotted on the walls. One door led off to a walk-in wardrobe, the other to her en suite bathroom with amazing power shower, roll-top bath and one of those enormous frosted glass-bowl sinks suspended in a granite surface. In fact her bathroom was bigger than my bedroom down here. Her bath was bigger than my bed.
It was in this tiny annexe that I found myself suddenly wide awake later in the night. It was still pitch black so it must have been fairly early in the morning. Something had woken me up.
I sat up and put the light on. It was four o’clock. I didn’t feel too bad considering last night.
There was a noise.
Outside, under my window. Was he back? Was Gwyn outside again?
I sat in bed and listened.
I couldn’t hear the sheep, but then my box of a room was on the other side of the house so the chances are I wouldn’t hear them if they were bleating at the tops of their sheepy voices.
There it was again, the familiar feeling of terror creeping up on me. Was there a big cat prowling around outside? I could hear something like the snapping of branches.
And then it was gone.
Perhaps it was Gwyn, lurking around the house. Perhaps my worries were real and he wasn’t a farmer at all. Perhaps earlier this evening in the cunning disguise of a farmer he had just been carrying out a reconnaissance in preparation for an attack now or another night? Maybe the vet wasn’t a vet at all but one of his cutthroat band? OK, he looked pretty vet-like and I could definitely imagine him handling kittens and rabbits, but still – it wasn’t a normal evening.
I wished more than anything that I didn’t have the downstairs room. In all probability if someone broke in they would explore the downstairs’ rooms first and find me l
ying here with nothing to defend myself with except a hard copy of the latest Freya North novel, which I could hit them over the head with, and a leather bookmark to whip them out of my room. Mind you, it would take a pretty smart person to work out there was a tiny room through a narrow door in the kitchen pantry. Maybe I was safe after all, hidden behind the breakfast cereals. That’s if they didn’t choose to break into the house via the ancient old window in my room, the one at exactly the right height for someone to get in through.
I shivered.
There was no way I was poking my head out of the curtains and looking outside. I don’t think I had the strength to have another shock that night, to see another face at another window. Especially as I was on my own down here. I turned off my light and lay in bed, listening out for any more noise from outside. I listened for a long time, straining to hear the sound of a twig snapping or the rustle in the shrubs outside my window. Or even the sound of an animal being torn in two. But there was nothing more. Eventually it got lighter outside and at five o’clock I finally plucked up the courage to creep out of bed and take a peek, bracing myself in case there were any farmers outside, staring in at me.
Nothing.
I must have imagined the noise outside my window; or it had been in a dream I was having or something. I was obviously too caught up in the big cat mania.
11
Six hours in a cramped bed was no way near sufficient for me, especially when part of those six hours had been spent lying wide awake, clutching the duvet and listening out in terror for hungry wild animals prowling around below my bedroom window. My alarm went off and I was sorely tempted to reset it for half an hour later, pull the covers back over my head and drift off into my dreamless sleep, but visions of Laura barking at me like a purple-faced sergeant-major rapidly changed my mind. I surfaced and threw on my clothes before heading out through the narrow passage into the kitchen, where Cathy was checking the Schedule & Rota.
“You’re on breakfast duty then?” I asked, rubbing my eyes and yawning.
