Creature Comforts

by Trisha Ashley

  ‘They’d be in school,’ I objected.

  ‘Skiving. I really don’t think that Dan is mad enough to shoot at you, even with an air rifle.’

  ‘You’re right, I don’t either now I’ve thought about it,’ I agreed.

  ‘Whoever it was has probably frightened themselves silly and gone to put the gun back where they got it,’ Cam said. ‘Come on.’

  I felt a bit shaken, but we saw no one until we reached the drive, where Dan, wearing overalls and a face like thunder, was painting the rusty entrance gates. He was up a ladder and you could see the bit he’d already done, so it seemed even less likely that he’d just run down the path and taken a potshot at me.

  Cam told him what had happened and asked if he’d seen or heard anything suspicious.

  ‘It wasn’t me, if that’s what you’re getting at,’ he declared, looking both shifty and angry at the same time.

  ‘I didn’t think it was, Dan,’ Cameron said mildly. ‘Did you see anyone?’

  ‘No – and now I’d best get on with these gates, though what painting has to do with gardening, I don’t know,’ he said sullenly, and then turned back to his job.

  I suspected he’d had a bruising encounter with a furious Rufus when he’d arrived at work that morning. He looked pretty jaded, too, so maybe everyone had gone back to his cottage and made a night of it.

  My theory turned out to be quite right, because Myra came down later and described in graphic detail to Judy and me what had happened the previous night. She’d had a perfect view of the proceedings from her bedroom window.

  ‘I was woken up by car horns honking outside and then I heard Rufus and his mother having a stand-up row on the front steps. There were three cars out front with Dan and his friends, and she wanted them all to come in. But Rufus said he wouldn’t have any of them under his roof, other than his mother, and told them to clear off. But he put it a bit stronger than that.’

  ‘I heard the cars going up and then going away again,’ I said. ‘Lulu had already rung me from the pub to say they were heading this way and I tried to warn Rufus.’

  ‘That Fliss said she’d go with Dan, so he let her get her things, while Dan waited outside. I don’t think he should have been driving, from the sound of him.’

  ‘I’m sure he shouldn’t.’

  ‘And this morning, my friend who lives next door to Dan told me they all went back there. They made a shocking noise and she banged on the wall several times, because her husband had to get up for work early, and eventually it went quiet.’

  ‘I wonder where Fliss is now,’ I pondered. ‘Dan obviously made it into work this morning, because he’s painting the front gates.’

  ‘That’s because last night Rufus told him that if he wasn’t at work by half-past eight on the dot, he was fired,’ Myra said. ‘What goings-on! And that Fliss is a strange woman. I was there when she turned up to stay yesterday afternoon, without a moment’s warning, then ordered me to take her case up to her room!’

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Judy.

  ‘I said, “Take it yourself, you lazy bugger.”’

  ‘Attagirl, Myra,’ Judy said.

  ‘Then Rufus came in and said he had no idea where she was sleeping anyway, and she’d have to make herself a bed up.’

  ‘Poor Rufus, having a mother like that,’ I said. ‘She was drunk and made a scene in the pub last night, too, before they all headed up to the Hall. Still, perhaps she’s gone home now.’

  ‘Let’s hope so,’ Myra said. ‘Rufus went out early and came back with stuff for that dog,’ she added. ‘Not that I agree with having dogs in the house, shedding hair and making mess.’

  This severity was somewhat tempered by the fact that Pearl’s head, minus the plastic cone, was now resting on Myra’s knee. She gave her a bit of the ginger parkin she was eating and said, more mildly, ‘I only hope she’s house-trained.’

  ‘Nearly,’ Judy said encouragingly.

  After Rufus closed at four, he came to collect Pearl and was back to being tight-lipped, terse and distant, even apologising again for what Fliss had said to me.

  Luckily Judy absolutely insisted he have tea before he took Pearl home, and by the time he’d got himself around sandwiches, cheese scones and fruit cake, he’d thawed a bit.

  Pearl lay quietly at his feet, but as usual Babybelle had to be fended off the cake stand. Debo came in after a while and helped herself to coffee and a sandwich.

  ‘So, have you dished out all the dirty details?’ she asked Rufus. ‘We know what happened last night, so you might as well talk about it.’

  ‘We were tactfully avoiding the subject,’ Judy told her.

  ‘Well, there’s no point in tact when the whole village knows what happened,’ Debo pointed out. ‘You had a row, Fliss went off to Dan’s cottage with him and his friends – if you can call that motley crew friends – and kept the neighbours awake half the night. But she’s gone now.’

  ‘Has she? How do you know?’ he asked.

  ‘Because she was on her way to the station after lunch when she spotted me coming out of the village shop and stopped her taxi. She told me to look for somewhere else to live, and said if I didn’t get out of the Lodge voluntarily, I’d wish I had. So I said it was an empty threat … and then I asked her if she’d thought of suing her plastic surgeon, since the last facelift had clearly gone disastrously wrong,’ she added brightly.

  ‘What did she say to that?’ asked Judy.

  ‘Nothing, just told the driver to take her to the station and then she put the window back up.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ Rufus said.

  Debo gave him the puckish grin. ‘Oh, I knew it was all hot air, because you don’t really want us to go, do you, darling?’

  ‘No, though I am glad to see those rickety sheds and all the wire netting vanishing into a skip.’

  ‘I saw Dan painting the gate earlier and he wasn’t a happy bunny,’ I told him.

  ‘He was insolent when I got back from the pet store, smirking and saying I’d have to be nice to my future father-in-law, so goodness knows what line Fliss has been spinning him.’

  ‘You don’t think she really might marry him?’ I asked.

  ‘No, I’m only amazed it’s lasted this long. Anyway, I put him on a final warning and then he said if I fired him just because he was seeing my mother, he could get me for wrongful dismissal.’

  ‘That wouldn’t wash, because everyone knows he’s been slacking since Baz went to live abroad,’ Judy said. ‘We’d all say so.’

  Rufus suddenly seemed to notice my grazed face for the first time and asked, ‘What happened to your cheek?’

  ‘She caught it on a branch on her way back from the Spring earlier,’ Debo said, which was the story I’d spun them so they wouldn’t worry, because I was sure it was an accident. ‘Just as well it’s being cleared back this weekend,’ she added, then suggested Rufus and I take Pearl and Babybelle for a walk. ‘A quiet one; don’t let Pearl exert herself.’

  Rufus had driven down in the Land Rover, so I said I’d show him Ashurst Beacon, a local beauty spot. The air always seems fresher up there and we sat on the edge of the stone monument, looking at the panoramic views, while the dogs wandered around the clumps of gorse and bracken. We didn’t say a lot, but at least the silences were as companionable as they’d been before his mad mother popped her snake head up and hissed.

  Rufus dropped me and Babybelle back at the Lodge and said he was going to have a quiet evening settling Pearl into her new home.

  ‘I’m not sure I feel like facing everyone at the Screaming Skull anyway, after last night,’ he added.

  ‘No one will blame you for the way Fliss and Dan behaved,’ I told him. ‘And you’ll have to brazen it out sometime.’

  ‘Maybe tomorrow,’ he suggested. ‘And perhaps, eventually, we’ll have that dinner together at Sweetwell,’ he added, with a hint of his old smile, and I found myself hoping that we would.

  Lulu and I arrang
ed to meet up with the dogs at the Lady Spring after lunchtime on Friday, and walk together down to the lower pool. We were wearing our new, matching macs, since the day was cool and damp, and when we came across Rufus, who was taking a sedate ramble with Pearl, he said it was like running into two Little Red Riding Hoods at once.

  He came on the walk with us, and Pearl would have liked to have got into the water with Babybelle and Dusty, but she’d have to wait a few days till the stitches were all healed and out.

  We sat on the mossy rocks and chatted, and Lulu said that since there had been no further word from Guy, he must have got the message and the panic was over.

  ‘Solange – my friend in the village – emailed me to say that Guy’s horrible elder brother has moved in now, though I don’t know what help he’ll be, because he’s a lecherous old soak.’

  ‘Not your problem, thank goodness,’ I told her.

  ‘True. Well, I’d better get back,’ she said, checking her watch. ‘We have two lots of Haunted Weekenders arriving and the rest of the hotel is pretty full up tonight, too. Are you both coming down later?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said firmly. ‘Rufus’s feeling a bit shy, but he can’t go into purdah just because his mother and Dan made a scene.’

  ‘You’re so bossy,’ Rufus said.

  ‘She’s always been a bit like that,’ Lulu assured him. ‘Especially when she started working abroad for that charity.’

  ‘Assertive,’ I corrected her. ‘That’s different.’

  ‘Bruce says Dan’s barred for a fortnight. Rufus,’ Lulu said. ‘If he causes trouble again, it’ll be for life.’

  When we walked through the public bar later, Dan’s cronies all looked very sheepish. Lulu said Bruce had told them to remind Dan that he was barred, and his girlfriend with him, in case he’d been too drunk to take it in.

  ‘One of them told him Dan and Fliss had had a bit of a bust-up on the phone earlier, so they’d thought it was all over, but apparently they made it up again.’

  ‘Pity,’ Rufus said morosely, and since he seemed about to sink back into gloom, Cam chose to divert his thoughts by describing the shooting incident.

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Rufus asked, staring at me with those unnerving, sea-washed light green eyes.

  ‘Or me,’ Lulu exclaimed. ‘You could have been killed!’

  ‘It was just an air rifle and it didn’t come that close. Anyway, I didn’t want to make a fuss because I’m sure it was just a teenager messing about. Whoever it was probably didn’t even know we were there.’

  ‘I don’t want anyone shooting on my land,’ declared Rufus.

  ‘I don’t suppose it could have been Dan?’ suggested Lulu. ‘Not shooting at you, just trying to frighten you a bit.’

  ‘That did cross my mind at first,’ I admitted, ‘but he’s all talk and no action, and anyway, he was up a ladder painting the Sweetwell gates five minutes later, so it can’t have been him.’

  Rufus suddenly looked as if an unpleasant idea had occurred to him, but if so he didn’t share it, only saying, ‘Well, I’d better get back. I’ve left Olly dog-sitting Pearl, so I don’t want to be out for too long.’

  ‘Olly loves animals and he’s very kind,’ Lulu said. ‘She’ll be fine with him.’

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ I said. Cam, as he was doing with increasing frequency, said he’d stay and give Lulu a hand before he went home.

  The air was cool and fresh outside, with a few faint stars like sharp pinpricks in the dark velvet sky, and all was quiet until we’d got well above the Lady Spring and the dogs began to bark.

  ‘Something’s set them off,’ I said. ‘Still, at least now they won’t be able to get out, because they’re all within the garden wall and there’s a strong gate.’

  ‘That’s something,’ Rufus said. ‘It will look a lot better once it’s all cleared.’

  ‘The small new kennel block and runs will be just outside the garden, but by then the new fence will be up and—’

  I stopped dead, because there in the torchlight was the huge dark shape of Babybelle, sitting by the side of the drive like a forlorn hitchhiker.

  ‘How on earth did you get out?’ I asked her incredulously. But as we neared home, with her plodding behind me, I could see the gate in the wall was swinging open.

  ‘She might have managed to burst out of her pen by flinging herself at the door, but she couldn’t undo the bolt on the garden gate,’ I said. ‘And I’m certain Debo and Judy are checking and rechecking to make sure everything is locked up properly before they go to bed. You don’t think someone could be sneaking round in the evening and letting the dogs out, do you?’

  ‘You’re thinking of Dan?’

  ‘I – no,’ I decided. ‘He’s all hot air really, so I can’t imagine him doing something like that. And didn’t his friends say he’d just made up with Fliss? He’s probably on his way to London.’

  ‘Perhaps, but there’s no saying when he set off – if he did. But you’re right, it does seem a bit petty.’

  ‘It was probably just accidentally left open, then – Debo thinking Judy had locked it and vice versa,’ I said. Then added, ‘Swim early tomorrow?’

  ‘OK, swim,’ he agreed.

  Rufus was just slipping into the water when I got to the pool next morning and I had a total Elizabeth Bennet moment – the one where, having first been overwhelmed by the size of Mr Darcy’s house, she spotted him in his wet shirt. And Rufus wasn’t even wearing the shirt.

  Golden sunlight was fingering the silky, dark chestnut of his hair, as if it couldn’t quite believe that it was real, and suddenly I wanted to do the same …

  And come to think of it, last night I’d fingered rather more than his hair, but then, I’m not responsible for what I get up to in my dreams!

  Tom, helped by Brandon Benbow from the alpine nursery and one of his strapping teenage sons, spent half the day erecting the new notices and signposts for the ghost trail, all over the valley. Then Foxy and Sandy’s father came down and gave the Green the first rough mow of the year, so things were starting to take shape.

  That night Jonas had a couple of new really scary stories to tell in the pub and I was so petrified as we walked home that I grabbed Rufus’s hand and held it tightly all the way again.

  However, we saw nothing more frightening than the large, pale shape of a barn owl swooping silently past, and when Rufus left me at the door, he said firmly that he wasn’t detouring round the haunted bit of the drive any more to please me. If he did meet any ghosts, he said, they’d be a pleasant change from his mother!

  Chapter 26: Skulduggery

  ‘I’m scared – and if Judy ever finds out, she’ll kill me!’

  ‘All the more reason to get going now, then, so we don’t meet her coming to look for you,’ he said with a touch of impatience and, reaching over me, turned the key in the ignition.

  It was a dry but overcast Sunday morning, which was actually better for the mammoth annual path clearing than hot sunshine. The volunteers, including myself and Rufus, who had again left Foxy in charge for a while, all met up in the pub car park and were assigned to groups working on different parts of the path, cutting back encroaching branches and brambles all the way up to the Spring where we were to convene for lunch.

  We were all ready for it by then and most volunteers had brought their own sandwiches, if they were staying for the afternoon too. Tom provided cakes donated by Judy and Myra, cold drinks and tea made in a brown, mottled pot, big enough to accommodate an elephant.

  Rufus had to go back to Sweetwell, but I thought I’d wait to see if Tom wanted a hand with the washing up before I gave up for the day. Call me a wimp, but I felt as if I needed a tepid bath and a lie-down in a darkened room. Muscles I didn’t even know I’d got were aching.

  I was just finishing off a piece of cake and thinking I’d start collecting the white china cups together, which Tom had evidently borrowed from the Hut, when to my surprise Simon appeared.
/>   ‘Hi, Simon – I didn’t know you were here,’ I said. ‘We’ll have to stop meeting like this.’

  He smiled weakly at the joke as he sat down beside me on the grass and said, ‘I’ve only just got here.’

  ‘Oh, well, I’m off in a minute and so are quite a few of the morning volunteers, so they’ll be glad of some fresh helpers.’

  ‘I came to talk to you, really,’ he said. ‘I – you know you said that it was your ex-fiancé that Cara went off with last weekend?’

  ‘Yes, Kieran – they’d known each other before, in Oxford.’

  ‘She didn’t come back for a couple of days and when I asked her where she’d been and why she hadn’t told me she’d be away, she said it was her own business if she wanted to spend a few days in Oxford with an old friend. And then … we argued,’ he said miserably. ‘She said perhaps we should cool things a bit, if I was going to get so jealous.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, Simon, but I don’t see what it’s got to do with me. I’m not engaged to him any more, so he’s a free agent.’

  ‘She swore they were only friends, but he’s back and he’s been staying up at Grimside all weekend.’

  ‘I assume Sir Lionel’s still away?’

  ‘He was back for a night midweek and then went to London. They lead very separate lives, but even so, he’s going to be hopping mad when he finds out some man has been staying at the house with her.’

  His jaw set grimly. ‘When she went out to the stables earlier on her own, I asked her straight out what was happening. She told me we were finished and to stop pestering her.’

  ‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out, Simon.’

  ‘I thought she loved me, but I can see now that she played me for a fool, till someone better came along,’ he said bitterly. ‘I’ll be off to another job as soon as I can.’

  ‘I’d still like to ask Cara those questions about the accident, but I don’t suppose I’ll ever get the chance now,’ I said.

  ‘She swore she’d told everything she knew to the inquest,’ he said. ‘But when you said at Grimside that you’d never have insisted on driving the car that night, I realised you were right, so she must have lied about that.’