by Unknown
‘I can tell you exactly who did this.’ Pheely settled beside her on the sofa, spreading out the note and tapping it. ‘Spurs.’
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘It’s just his style. And you said yourself that he had a go at you earlier today.’ Pheely probed darkly.
‘Only because Lloyd thought he was a gypsy.’ And that we were some sort of item, she added silently, still not believing Pheely.
‘How anybody could mistake a four-thousand-pound horse for a gypsy’s is beyond me.’ Pheely tutted. ‘Unless, of course, he thought Otto was stolen – which I suppose, technically, he was. Dilly might have asked Spurs to ride him, but I am his legal owner and I forbade it – I’ve even hidden his tack. I wonder if I should report it?’
She wasn’t taking this very seriously, Ellen thought, starting to regret her panic-stricken call. An overexcited, panting Pheely, plus a spliff and a bottle of Scotch, had arrived within minutes, covered with greenery from a hasty dash through the Lodge gardens. She claimed nothing so thrilling had happened in the village since Prudence Hornton had driven drunkenly into the duck pond after a furious argument with Giles about alimony.
‘I just don’t believe Spurs would do this to me.’ Ellen read the angry black words. ‘I haven’t done anything to merit this.’
‘With Spurs, it doesn’t take much.’ Pheely lit the spliff. ‘There was a time when he’d do far worse just for giving him a dirty look. You have no idea the stupid little things that incensed him.’
‘Like what?’
Pheely gave her a wise look. ‘Hurting his warped libido, dealing a blow to that mountainous pride, making him think he’s in with a chance of a quick tupping session then turning out to be a tease. He’s very sexually driven.’
‘I did no such thing.’ Ellen felt her face flame.
‘I did once.’ Pheely drained her Scotch. ‘Awful.’
‘You did?’
She nodded. ‘When Daddy was ill – before it got really bad, but he’d started to sleep a lot – Spurs and I smoked a couple of joints while Daddy was taking a nap upstairs. I admit I did find him rather attractive then. Dilly had just started at playschool, and I hadn’t had a boyfriend since she was born – I suppose it dents your confidence. When Spurs made a bit of a play, I was very flattered. Okay, I was completely bowled over.’ She giggled, refilled her glass and toked again, too carried away by the memory to offer Ellen a drag.
‘He was very grown-up for sixteen – six feet one and a husky broken voice, that magnificent mane savagely cropped for school like an OTC recruit. He was so beautiful. You have no idea. I just thought, wow, wow, wow – this is going to be wonderful! I know it’s shameful – looking back, I feel like a terrible cradle-snatcher for even contemplating it although, God knows, he was probably far more sexually experienced than me even then and not that much younger. Glad Tidings got very tight on sherry at Hell’s Bells’ Christmas drinks once and told me she’d caught Jasper in bed with a girl when he was just thirteen.’ She took another deep draw and laughed again, her butterfly mind dancing back to the topic in hand.
‘We had the most amazing kissing session – it went on for hours – and I suppose I got a bit emotional, what with the dope and being so relieved to be fancied again, and I told him how beautiful he was and that I would do anything for him. Then he got this malicious look in his eye and said in that case could he call a friend who’d like to watch. He was on the telephone before you could say “peepshow”. I lost my nerve – I really wasn’t that experienced. Dilly’s father was my first – well, my only lover at that point. There was something about Spurs that was so dirty and dangerous. I was hopelessly excited but I just couldn’t go through with it. He was livid – stormed out on me that night and didn’t reappear for ages.
‘Every morning that bloody awful week I found a dead crow outside the kitchen door alongside the milk. Can you imagine? It scared me half witless. Spurs was behind it, of course – he used to shoot them out of the corn with his air rifle for a couple of quid from local farmers.’
‘It was definitely him?’
She nodded. ‘I stayed up one night and saw him delivering one of the wretched things. I so wanted to have it out with him, but I flunked it. He had his gun with him.’
Ellen chewed her thumbnail. The thought of Pheely and Spurs kissing all those years ago made her veins clog and tangle, her lungs fold in on themselves and her head pound. Stop it, she told herself. Stop it. He’s bad. He’s done awful things. You hardly know him. He’s just scared you half to death to amuse himself. Feeling so jealous is crazy.
‘Don’t you see that he must be behind this?’ Pheely was saying, picking up the note again, the spliff dangling from her lips. ‘If you and he had a dodgy dalliance over the weekend, you mustn’t keep it to yourself. You could be in a lot of danger, darling. Is there something you’re not telling me?’ The green eyes blinked through a miasma of dope smoke, almost but not quite concealing the desperate desire for hot gossip.
Ellen nearly pulled the nail off her thumb as she gnawed at it, looking from Pheely to the note and then to the window, beyond which lay the garden where, for a while, she’d thought that not just one but all of her wishes were going to come true. She had been such a fool.
What had he been going to tell her on the night of the storm? she wondered hopelessly. All week she’d toyed with a hundred ideas, but her stupid, dreamy imagination had lingered lovingly over the notion that he had been on the brink of saying that he had agreed to go away again, but that now he couldn’t leave her. This was so dumb, and obviously so far from the truth, it was laughable.
She stood up furiously. ‘I’m going round to see him. I need to have this out.’
‘What – now?’ Pheely looked groggily at her watch. ‘It’s after eleven.’
‘I don’t care.’ She went to fetch her coat. ‘Can you stay here until I get back?’
‘What if he’s hanging around in the garden with more dead animals?’ she yelped, peering out of the windows.
‘Lock the doors, finish the joint and you’ll be fine,’ Ellen assured her. ‘Please, Pheely? I have to do this.’
‘God, you’re brave.’ Pheely shuddered, biting the spliff for safekeeping and leaning back from the smoke as she buttoned Ellen’s denim jacket for her as if she was a child, her fingers shaking.
‘He doesn’t frighten me as he does you.’ Ellen smiled, but her skin was tightening like a wetsuit in cold water.
‘Not yet.’ Pheely brushed a long blonde hair from the jacket. ‘But if you two carry on like this, he will.’
‘He started it,’ Ellen hissed, ‘and I’m going to put a stop to it.’
The rain had eased to a warm drizzle as Ellen splashed through the puddles on Goose Lane, wishing she’d remembered to bring a torch. This side of the village was deserted, although she could hear raucous laughter beyond the manor as the last few drunks were dispatched from the Oddlode Inn.
Two shadowy figures were lurching across the village green as she turned the corner into Manor Street, at last reaching the part of the village that was illuminated at night, albeit dimly, its few lights set between thick trees that hunched like pallbearers beneath the lead-lined-coffin clouds, casting huge ominous shadows. The rain had brought out the sherbet smell of the cow parsley that sprouted beneath the laurels in front of the village hall, and the sweet reek of the lilac bush above them, which drooped under the weight of the water it had collected.
Ellen took a deep, scented breath, and faced the manor gates. The house was in darkness, all its big mullioned windows showing blank faces.
Either the Bellings were out, or they had gone to bed.
She looked at the buzz-box on the gatepost, reluctant to summon fearsome Hell’s Bells or grand Sir St John from their sleep. She wished she knew which of the windows was Spurs’ so that she could bombard it with pebbles. She eyed them speculatively. She didn’t even know if he lived in the house with his parents.
; Frustrated by her cowardice – and by such an unsatisfactory anticlimax – Ellen prowled the outer perimeters of the high Cotswold-stone wall for ideas, passing the now silent Oddlode Inn and turning into Manor Lane. Her heart lurched as she spotted one of the Missing posters she’d Sellotaped up earlier. The ink had run in the rain so that Fins’ angry little face slid off the page like Munch’s The Scream with tufty ears.
Moving into the black water of unlit darkness once more, Ellen stalked past a locked garden door in the eight-foot wall and an equally impenetrable set of tall double gates.
The rain started to fall harder again, sliding through her hair and on to her face, soaking through her denim shoulders and thighs as she dipped her head and plodded into it, losing some of her enthusiasm to bawl Spurs out. She blinked it out of her eyes as she reached the corner of North Street, where the high manor wall gave way to a lower one, which bordered the paddocks. In the middle of it, there was an inviting little rail. She clambered over, and landed with a splash in an unseen water trough.
Now spurting water from her trainers and jeans, she squelched across the dark field, burning her wet ankles with nettles and cursing all the way. He’d better be in after this. Her weakening anger staged a comeback, fuelled by an unpleasant encounter with a huge pile of gently steaming manure.
On the other side of a five-bar gate was a Tarmac yard skirted by old open barns containing Hell’s Bells’ horsebox and a sheep trailer, along with an assortment of agricultural devices with great spikes and rollers. It looked like equipment gathered from a torture chamber. Beyond another padlocked five-bar gate was the stableyard with its grand archway leading to the old hunt kennels. One bright streak of light cut diagonally across the gloom beyond the arch and Ellen jumped as a shadow moved across it.
She crept through the arch, hearing the water drumming hard overhead as she moved momentarily out of the rain, pressing her back to the wall and shuffling sideways to crane towards the source of the light.
Set high in a steeply pitched roof was what appeared to be an old grain hatch, now converted into an ivy-fringed window, revealing a heavily beamed ceiling and an old model aeroplane dangling from an unshaded lightbulb. Even standing on tiptoe, Ellen couldn’t make out anything else – the window was far too high. Nor could she see an obvious entrance to the flat: no front door or stone staircase to that storey.
She squelched crossly to the other side of the yard, where another archway led to a weed-strewn back drive that culminated in the tall, locked wooden gates she’d walked past earlier. To the left, a vegetable plot had gone to seed, and to the right, a row of potting sheds and tall yews divided the drive from the manor’s sculpted gardens. She darted past them and, feeling more and more like a mad stalker, found her way to the opposite side of the kennels, tucked away behind the yews along with down-at-heel rows of broken cold frames and mildewed glasshouses with few intact panes remaining. On this side, there was a line of brightly lit skylights in the building’s steep stone roof, and beneath them a vast black door with no handle.
Ellen fought down a wave of panic that told her to go home, dry off and save this until morning. But she was damned if she was going to lie awake stewing. She hammered on the door with her fist, hoping it didn’t open to reveal a wizened old gardener in his pyjamas, or a strapping stablehand.
Rain drummed her shoulders as she hammered again and again. The more it beat on her temples and soaked into her clothes, the more angry she felt that Spurs could play such a childish game. He was a spoilt brat, a twisted excuse for a human being whose charmed birthright of wealth and sheer beauty had rotted his soul to black tar. He wasn’t worthy of all the hot, cold, steamy, tingly and downright disturbing thoughts she’d had about him in the past few days. The only reason she’d felt so hopelessly out of control and excited during the weekend was because of the building storm, she told herself angrily. He’d blown hot and cold on her sweaty skin, had been as changeable as the weather – sunny one minute and stormy the next. Well, now it was time to rain on his paradox.
She stepped back and glared at the cheery skylights, aiming a hard kick at the door and stubbing her toes on the stone step through the sodden trainers. Hopping around, she wished she’d brought his rusty horseshoe with her so that she could hurl it through one of them – preferably the one that was open so that she didn’t have to pay for the glass to be replaced.
She stood still and looked again. Aha!
Struck with an idea, she cast around for something to throw, but the grass around her was devoid of useful missiles. Hell’s Bells obviously didn’t go in for Pheely’s characterful garden statuary – just banks of lush bedding plants and roses.
She dragged off one of her waterlogged trainers – now a good throwing weight – took aim and hurled it. She hadn’t lost her touch. It sailed through the gap in the open skylight and landed on the other side with a satisfying clatter.
She was still staring up at the window, waiting for a head to poke out, when the door in front of her was wrenched open.
‘What the fuck do you think you’re playing at?’ Spurs stood tall and furious in front of her, silhouetted in light like a demon emerging from a hell pit, roaring like the fires within.
‘That should be my line,’ she snarled.
For a moment he said nothing as he registered the drowned rat in the buttoned-up denims standing on one leg in front of him. The whites of his eyes gleamed as his gaze moved up and down the rain-blacked Levi’s, the mud-splattered ankles and the flattened, dirty-blonde hair. ‘You came to see me,’ he said at last, the anger evaporating. He sounded as though he’d been expecting her.
‘Was that your intention?’ she demanded. ‘Because you didn’t need to go to such elaborate lengths. You could have just invited me over for tea in the usual way.’
‘How did you get in?’ He was looking over her shoulder at the dark house. ‘My parents are away. No one’s around to open the gates.’
‘I can walk through walls,’ she muttered, in no mood to describe her water-trough dunk.
‘And drive people up them.’ A smile lifted the stubbled cheeks.
‘And line people up against them to shoot them if they wind me up.’
‘Come in out of the rain.’ He stood back, laughing now, delighted by his unexpected visitor. ‘You’re soaked through.’
‘I’m fine out here.’ Ellen felt safer in the garden. She hopped back a few paces and balanced herself with her bare toes. ‘This won’t take long. I’d have brought your friend badger back, but he has a sore throat.’
‘You what?’ He creased his forehead, stepping out into the rain.
‘I can’t believe you could do something so foul,’ she raged. ‘Why, Spurs? What have I done to offend you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘The sodding great badger carcass that I’ve just hauled off my car bonnet, that’s what. And the gift-tag. Nice touch.’
The rain was easing off again, jewelling Spurs’ black curls and speckling his grey T-shirt to match his freckled face. The silver eyes watched Ellen as she hopped around the grass like a furious fairy who’d burned her toe with her magic wand.
‘And you think I have something to do with it?’ he asked eventually.
‘Of course you bloody did – Pheely told me all about the crow milk-round you once made, just as she told me about the horseshoe. You really should vary your routine.’
‘Interfering bitch!’ he exploded.
Ellen gasped, taking a few stumbling hops back. ‘What did you say?’
‘Interfering bitch,’ he snarled again, eyes darting furiously. ‘You can’t deny it. You should keep away from her. You should keep away from me, come to that. You should never have fucking well come here, turning me inside out and giving Pheely an excuse to get her cauldron out.’
Ellen couldn’t speak. She seemed to have forgotten how to breathe too.
‘What?’ he snapped, taking in her white face.
&n
bsp; ‘I didn’t believe it was you,’ she breathed eventually. ‘Even coming here to “confront” you I was fooling myself because I just wanted to prove it wasn’t you. And it was. Oh, God, it was.’ She clasped a shaking hand to her mouth.
‘It wasn’t me!’ He charged up to her, so livid that the veins leaped from his skin like cobwebs as he spoke. ‘How many times? It wasn’t me! I’ve changed. I don’t do things like that any more.’
Looking at that beautiful, corrupt face, Ellen was reminded of the parable of the boy who cried, ‘Wolf!’, only in Spurs’ case it was ‘I’ve changed’.
And she so wanted to believe him that it hurt like a body-blow. She cast her eyes to his hand, remembering how she had taken it in hers and almost lost consciousness because of the force that had exploded through her. She had never been so attracted to anyone in her life. Even now, certain that he would wilfully terrorise her because she had let him down, she was shot through with longing. But he was a stranger, she reminded herself. Their few hours together meant nothing compared to her thirteen years with Richard, and the chemical combustion between them was far too life-threatening to analyse. To look into the flames would blind her. Self-preservation took hold.
‘I just want you to leave me alone,’ she said.
‘My pleasure!’ He held up his arms and took a step back.
Ellen stumbled back too, looking up at his molten eyes.
‘What do you think I’ve been doing all week?’ he yelled, backing away still further. ‘You’re the one who’s come here to crawl under my skin again. Believe me, you are so much better not knowing me. Go play with your Ken-doll boyfriend.’
‘He’s not my boyfriend!’
‘Sorry. My mistake. Call me old-fashioned. You’re fucking him, therefore I assume he’s a boyfriend. What would you prefer? Lover? Playmate? Re-bounder?’
