May wanted to fall onto her friend’s shoulder and sob. Instead she half-lied. She wouldn’t get away with trying to pretend she hadn’t been crying.
‘I’ve had the worst dream,’ she said. ‘I ran over a dog. Awful. This is what happens when you give your brain some time off the leash.’
‘Poor May.’ Lara smiled. ‘I’m going to find the manor house and get this mess sorted. We need healing treatments and plenty of ’em.’
‘I’ll come with you,’ said May. She could do with some fresh air and company. Anything to keep her thoughts snaking towards Michael.
A loud snore came from behind the closed door to the third bedroom. It made them both smile.
‘I think we can safely assume that Clare won’t be coming with us,’ said Lara, making May grin. And that surprised May, because she didn’t think she ever would again.
After dressing quickly they left Clare a note saying that they’d be back soon, then they set off to find the spa. In the daylight they could see that the cottage was in a beautiful spot. To their left the view was of the rooftops of the main town of Wellem and its small harbour. Down below them was a tiny horseshoe cove, although they couldn’t see much of it from this angle. If you looked at it from directly above, the cove would probably appear to have the shape of a lopsided heart. Across to the right was another small cottage, perilously close to the edge of the cliff. It looked as if the rocks had worn away over time and the house would crumble into the sea within the next couple of years. For that reason, it was easy to deduce that no one lived there. Or, if they did, they were daft.
It was warmer outside the cottage than in it, yet the sky was full of clouds. Clouds that didn’t look right, thought Lara. May was clearly thinking the same because she glanced up and said, ‘What a strange-looking sky.’ The clouds were doughy and low and a faint sweetness hung in the air, a scent that Lara associated with dry ice.
‘Shall we walk?’ she asked, pointing to the path that wound down presumably to Wellem. ‘Or shall we drive?’
‘Let’s walk,’ said May, leading the way. ‘It doesn’t look that far.’
Lara looked behind her again. There was definitely no manor house or other ‘exceptional log cabins’ as the advert put it. She followed May down the path which met with a crude road after two hundred yards. There was a lone cottage on the other side of the junction, but no more houses until just after a sign pointing to Spice Wood on the right. Every dwelling was made of thick rough stone, with not a new build to be seen.
‘There’s a shop,’ said Lara, pointing across the road. Above the door read: Hubbard’s Cupboard. A strange name for a shop, she thought, considering how bare its namesake was in the nursery rhyme.
‘I’ll wait outside. It doesn’t look big enough to fit two people in,’ said May, calculating how far she would have to bend down to get through the tiny door. She sat on the wall and looked down at the sea. It was a pretty little place, despite those grey clouds which seemed to float, then fall and dissipate, before a puff of other grey ones replaced them.
Lara pushed the door open and a loud bell on a spiral of wire heralded her entrance into the shop. As she walked in, silence fell and the male shopkeeper and a very eccentrically dressed old man with a pipe clamped between his teeth both turned to stare at Lara as if she had two heads – and neither of them attractive. It was like a scene from an old horror film, where the villagers make it clear that strangers are not welcome in these parts.
‘Hi,’ said Lara, feeling heat rising to her cheeks as the two men continued to stare at her. The older one was dressed like Sherlock Holmes in a long cape and deerstalker. Below his knees the resemblance ended: he was sporting pink pumps. His gaze never shifted from Lara, not even to blink. It was as if his eyelids were glued up. ‘Er, can you tell me where the manor house is, please?’
At least her question made them tear their eyes away from her and towards each other for a moment of collusion.
‘The manor house?’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Carlton Hall, you mean?’
‘Is that the spa?’
‘No Spar here. The nearest big supermarkets are in Wellem. Spar and Tesco.’
‘Ah, not Spar with an “r”,’ Lara clarified. ‘I mean the health spa. The big building?’
They were looking blankly at her. Hang on; Lara’s brain caught up with her ears.
‘Sorry, did you say the nearest supermarket is in Wellem?’
‘Yes. It’s about five miles away.’
‘Isn’t this Wellem?’ Now she really was confused.
‘This is Dullem,’ said Sherlock. ‘Ren Dullem.’
Lara scratched her forehead in confusion. This was odd. But if they were in the wrong village, how come there was a note for her pinned on the door. ‘There’s obviously been a huge mistake,’ she muttered to herself. ‘Erm, we’re in the cottage up there,’ she said, and pointed over her shoulder. ‘It’s the white one, with the honeysuckle, at the top of the path.’
‘Well Cottage,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘Staying there, are you?’ He and Sherlock exchanged disgruntled looks, their eyebrows raised.
‘Do you happen to know who owns it? I think there’s been an error in our booking and we shouldn’t be here.’
‘Oh, yes, I know who owns it,’ said the shopkeeper. ‘I know only too well.’
If the sun was shining this would be an incredibly pretty spot, thought May. She had forgotten what quiet in the daytime sounded like; she was so used to traffic outside her house, city noises, bustling rush. She felt naughty, as if it were illegal to be doing nothing. It was such a lovely warm day too; it didn’t make any sense for those strange clouds to be in the air. They only seemed to rest over the bay; there were none in the distance at all.
She didn’t want her thoughts to wander over to Michael again but they did. She wondered how many times he had tried to ring her now. What was he doing? Was he thinking everything through, trying to unpick the knots and find a way they could make this all right? He was wasting his time. He couldn’t make that amount of deception go away. It was all spoiled beyond any salvage operation. She felt tears start to rise as memories of all the lovely times they’d shared together pushed through the shit of the past few days: sex, snuggled up in front of the TV, cooking together. They hadn’t gone out much in their ‘courtship’. May had insisted on that. It would have been wrong, when Susan was hospitalized, to gallivant to the pictures or to fancy restaurants. And she hadn’t ever been to Michael’s house because she didn’t think it right to invade the space he shared with Susan. How could she have been so blind and stupid? She hadn’t spotted a rat in the whole nine months; she had given him all her trust and he had abused it. That was it. She would never ever go out with another man, ever. Michael was the last and worst of a list of useless tosser boyfriends. She was going to become a nun and glue up her genitals.
‘Morning.’
She looked up at the word to see a man striding past on his way down the hill. An incredibly tall man with untidy black waves of hair skimming the back of his neck. He had wide shoulders and long legs, big thighs and a fine chunk of bum pushing at the material of his faded blue jeans. May’s brown eyes locked with the man’s even darker brown ones and something rather odd happened. The world melted away around them. For a second, the dark-eyed stranger appeared as if through a distorting photo lens that faded the background and brought him rushing towards her. Her hands went tingly and she felt ever-so-slightly faint. It was like a blast had occurred inside her and the fallout had rushed down to her nerve endings. And the effect wasn’t just one way. The man stopped suddenly as if he had run into an invisible wall. May saw the Adam’s apple in his throat rise and fall as he swallowed. For one long moment there was just May and this man on the planet. Then he quickly ripped his eyes away and carried on walking. Luckily for May he had gone round the corner just before she leaned backwards too far over the wall and fell into the shrubbery.
When Lara emerged from the shop, she couldn’
t see May anywhere. Then her friend’s head popped up from behind the wall, covered in heather.
‘I fell,’ May explained. It was the only thing she could explain. She certainly couldn’t explain why the sight of that man sent her into a tailspin. He wasn’t exactly George Clooney and his jeans and checked lumberjack shirt weren’t off a Paul Smith hanger, but whatever chemicals he was kicking out, boy oh boy. She’d fallen all right. It was just as well they were leaving and going to the spa, then. Her brain really did need recalibrating. This wasn’t normal behaviour. Especially not mere seconds after declaring to herself that she wouldn’t let another man near her in a million years.
Lara lent her an arm to lean on so she could lever herself up.
‘They don’t seem to like strangers around here,’ she whispered when May had righted herself. ‘I’ll be glad when we can leave and get to the spa. Turns out we’re in the wrong village. This isn’t Wellem – it’s Dullem, and can’t you just tell?’ She stole a glance upwards at those lumpy clouds. ‘Dull by name, dull by nature.’
‘But that doesn’t make any sense . . .’ began May, checking her trousers for rips.
‘Stupid flaming holiday agency sent us to the wrong place. Stupid flaming me obviously didn’t check the booking confirmation properly. I am really sorry about this – I promise I’ll sort it.’
‘So who owns the cottage we’re staying in, then? Did you find out?’
‘Val, Jean or Frances Hathersage. The guy at the shop didn’t know if they all still own it jointly or if one or other has sold out to the rest. I’m gathering they are three sisters. They didn’t know where Val was based, Frances lives on a farm at the other side of the bay and Jean, who seems to be our best bet, lives up at the cottage we passed on the way down. Apparently there’s no love lost between them.’
‘They sound like three dotty old ladies, don’t they?’ Smiling, May rolled their names around in her mouth and conjured up a picture of old maids knitting by a fireside.
‘I hope they’re not dotty enough not to give me a refund,’ said Lara, pushing up her sleeves, literally and metaphorically. God, she’d need a massage after all this stress. The tension was settled in her neck and needed battering out with a big bamboo stick.
Lara plodded up the hill, which seemed a lot steeper on the way up than it had on the way down. She wiped her forehead clear of perspiration. The skies should have been pure and blue with this heat, not full of stodgy clouds.
May’s thoughts were a long way from focusing on the gradient of the hill. What the hell had just happened to her with Mr Nice-bum? It must be shock, she reasoned. After all that had happened with Michael and her resolve to become a born-again virgin, her body had temporarily revolted and made a reverse thrust. There was no other explanation for it. God, she really did need a holiday. At least the perfidious Michael had slipped into the dark recesses of her head for a while – that alone was worth a moment’s insanity.
They turned right onto the path that led to the cottage. There was a painted notice hanging on the gate:
La Mer
Trespassers will be shot.
Strangers will be shot twice.
May pulled a ‘yikes’ face at Lara. Not so much a sweet little old lady as Ma Baker, then.
Lara heard a dog barking inside the house as she knocked; it was a weird strangled sound as if it came from a very old dog with an instinct to make a warding-off noise but finding the effort too much. There was a beautiful bench made from twisted tree branches outside the door which appeared to have been painted recently – turquoise. Blue window boxes stood on the stone sills full of compost but no plants. Actually there were no flowers anywhere in sight. Unusual for an old lady’s garden, Lara thought.
There was no answer so she knocked again, but before she could pull her hand away the door was flung open, and impatiently so. Facing her, and the complete opposite of what she expected to find, was a hulking great man with long, straggly black hair and a face full of equally black beard. He looked like either a descendant of Rasputin or a man who plays as the number eight at rugby for France. At first glance she judged him older than she was; at second glance she realized they were roughly the same age since, under all that hair, there was definitely a thirty-something face – but it wasn’t a friendly one.
‘What?’ he snapped.
‘Is Jean Hathersage in?’ said Lara, cowed for a second but then recovering in defiance of his rudeness.
‘Yes. What do you want?’
Lara huffed. ‘Can I see her, please?’
‘I’m Gene Hathersage.’
‘You’re Jean?’ Then Lara twigged. She almost said, I thought you were a woman, but that wouldn’t have been very wise, she realized. There was nothing about this hairy beast of a man that resembled a woman.
‘Gene with a “G”. It’s a man’s name as well, you know,’ he said, as if he had read her thoughts.
‘Yes, yes, I know,’ Lara replied nervously. ‘Gene Wilder. Gene Hackman. Gene . . . er . . . Alexander . . . Oh, hang on, that was Hilda Ogden, I think.’
‘What do you want?’ he barked, waiting for her to explain why she was trespassing on his property.
‘Well, there’s been some mistake,’ Lara began, and she smiled, hoping to encourage his sympathetic nature to the fore. ‘We should have been booked in at the spa in Wellem. It appears that we’ve landed up at your cottage instead. So we just need a refund, then we can get on our way.’
‘Not my problem,’ said Gene Hathersage, shrugging his great shoulders. He looked from Lara to the stunned-into-silence May behind her, then back to the smaller, curvier woman with the messy blonde hair, who was standing stubbornly in front of him, but there was no hint of approval coming from his night-black eyes, only cold annoyance.
Lara was incensed but she kept her temper under wraps and pushed out her smile again. ‘Well, it’s not ours either.’ Why the hell hadn’t she checked the booking confirmation properly? It wasn’t like her to be off the ball like that.
‘You booked it, you paid for it. Like I say, not my problem.’
And with that Gene Hathersage closed the door in Lara’s face just as she was about to continue her argument.
‘Well, I . . .’ She plonked her hands on her hips and opened and closed her mouth like a gasping fish. She turned to May. ‘Did you hear that? How bloody rude.’
May chewed on her lip. She might have worked in an aggressive male environment, but she had never met anyone who gave off as much belligerent testosterone as the man she had just seen.
‘We’ll have to ring the holiday agency,’ she said.
‘Yes, we certainly will,’ said Lara, marching away from that man’s house. The sooner she never saw him again, the better. She hoped, when she traced them, that his sisters would be more affable.
Chapter 20
Joan Hawk was changing. She had been working at Carlton Hall for nearly three months now and, though the changes had been subtle ones, they hadn’t escaped Gladys Coffey’s notice. First it was the introduction of heels replacing the flat ballet shoes she had worn in the early days. Then it was longer lashes, false or mascara – Gladys wasn’t sure, but they were definitely longer. Then it was the presence of glossy lipstick – pink after week three, now the shade was veering towards red. Then the shapeless dresses were replaced by skirts and blouses, open to three buttons at the neck. Today, Joan’s hair was hanging free in two dark curtains framing her face, no longer secured by a hoop of elastic.
‘Good morning, Gladys,’ said Joan with her usual wide smile.
‘Morning, Joan,’ returned Gladys.
She’s started to disapprove of me, thought Joan sauntering past her. It amused her.
There was something not quite right about Joan Hawk, Gladys thought, watching her hips sashay down the hallway and into the study where Lord Carlton was waiting for her. She wondered where Joan had been because she had no business to be up that end of the house. Gladys knew Joan had been regularly snooping
because she had laid little traps for her. Hairs Gladys had stuck across cupboard doors had disappeared; deliberate sprinklings of dust had been unsettled. Most annoyingly of all to Gladys, Joan had slipped under her radar. Enquiries to people she knew in Wellem had brought no information about her. Gladys was convinced that, despite Joan’s supposed knowledge of the area – which could easily have been gleaned from books –Mrs Hawk had no more been brought up in Wellem, than she herself had had an affair with the Shah of Persia.
She had tried to broach the subject with Lord Carlton only yesterday but had been surprised at his reaction.
‘What is it you’re trying to tell me, Gladys?’ he had snapped – and he had never snapped at her in the forty years she had been working at the house.
‘I don’t think Joan is a local girl,’ said Gladys.
‘If she says she is, then she is. Why would you question her?’
Gladys had been reduced to stuttering something in her defence, but it sounded childish and ridiculous.
‘Badly done, Gladys. After having to suffer working with Flora and Doris, women of the highest incompetence whom you engaged to “help”, it’s a blessed relief to have the enormous burden of running the estate and all that entails taken from me. It’s been a living nightmare, these past years. Do-able when I was younger, but not now, Gladys.’ Then he had delivered a mighty hammer blow. ‘And if I hear you have been stirring up trouble behind Joan’s back, I’m afraid we shall have to think about parting company. Even after all these years, Gladys. I’m too old for politics and back-biting.’
He had walked off from her shaking his head and she had felt wounded by his coldness. She couldn’t leave Carlton Hall. It was as much her home as her cottage near the village square was – probably more so, because she had spent more of her life here than there. Her mother had been the housekeeper here before her, and Gladys would come here often as a small child to help her mum dust or sweep the floors. Looking after the present Lord Carlton was Gladys’s life. She would be lost if he let her go.
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