Deep Water, Thin Ice (27 page)

Alex didn’t see why she shouldn’t continue to visit the Grenloe. It wasn’t just a strike for independence or rank stubbornness; she liked to go there, she always had. It had gone from being a place of refuge to somewhere she genuinely enjoyed for its own sake. And she’d truly come to regard Mick as a friend. Even so, when Theo rang her from London she didn’t mention her visits. He didn’t ask…so she didn’t say. She had no intention of going through all that again.

With Theo away, she’d taken to going down daily, keen to see the rare and elusive bittern. With spring coming on, the reserve buzzed with activity. And since Christmas Mick had become easier to talk to; he seemed more relaxed.

‘Have you ever been married?’
she asked him one day. ‘Years ago,’ he’d said shortly. ‘It all went wrong.’ And he was coming up fifty, she’d found out. He’d cut his hair too, she noticed, and he’d cleaned up the carriage, with his possessions put away or neatly piled up. ‘Welcome to civilisation Mr Fenby,’ she said dryly.

Now it was nearly nine in the evening on a balmy late January night. As Mick had predicted the spell of cold weather earlier in the month had been relatively brief, to be replaced by a protracted spell of dryness and surprisingly mild temperatures. Alex walked into the snug and across to the front windows, sneaking a furtive glance into the glass at the mirror image of the room over her shoulder, checking
there was no-one there. She quickly drew the curtains against the blackness outside and turned back to face the room, and then did the same with the curtains to the side window. She’d come off the phone with Theo just a few short minutes before but, just as she rested the handset back on its stand, there’d been the unmistakeable sound of footsteps. She was sure they’d come from upstairs and she’d had to go up to look, just to be certain. There’d been no-one there of course. She’d lost count of how many times she’d been through this before.

So back in the snug, her hands nervously clumsy, she slipped a CD of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet into the machine to play. She’d brought a pile of CDs back from London before Christmas and had only recently started listening to them again. Then she walked to the sofa, sat down a little stiffly and crossed her legs, waving a defiant foot in time to the music. She forced herself to lean back more heavily into the seat and let her head fall back, trying to relax. Her eyes closed, she tried to focus on the music, but before long a conversation she’d had with Mick that morning drifted back into her mind.

‘I hear Theo Hellyon’s gone away,’ he’d said, not looking at her. ‘I suppose that’s why I’m being graced with your presence so much: you’re bored.’

‘You know that’s not true.’ She’d leaned back and pointedly looked out of the window behind her. ‘Do you know you can hear the booming of the bittern all over the village? It’s quite eerie.’

There was a pause before Mick spoke again, quietly then, almost as if he were addressing the question to his coffee mug rather than her.

‘Is it serious with him?’

‘Serious? With Theo?’ She’d forced a laugh. ‘
I
don’t know.’ She’d immediately changed the subject.

Serious? she thought now, as the music filled the air around her. She really didn’t know. She’d sometimes asked herself the same question, at times like this, alone in the evening, usually after one of Theo’s calls. When he was with her it all seemed clear; he was a perfect partner: affectionate, interesting, reassuring and supportive. When he was away it was as if a spell was broken; though she thought about him often he didn’t seem to hold her in the same way. When he rang her, she loved to hear his voice. When she put the phone down after talking to him, she nearly always had a smile on her face. He had that effect on her. So why did she hesitate to respond when he said: ‘Miss you,’ as he so often did?

There was a noise again and she opened her eyes with a start. This time, it came from outside: the shrill, rasping bark of a fox and she gave a wry smile. She really shouldn’t be so jumpy. A few times recently she thought she’d seen something out of the corner of her eye, only to find nothing there when she turned to look. Then there were the doors which seemed to close or open at will.

Her mind was playing tricks on her again. Maybe she’d feel better when Theo came home after all.

*

It was the twenty-ninth of January and Theo still hadn’t come home. Alex filled the filter coffee maker, primed it with coffee grounds and switched it on. She was expecting Elizabeth Franklin.

They’d met in the gallery in the village, the first time they’d spoken since Christmas. Alex needed a birthday present for her sister and Liz had followed her in soon after in search of one of the pretty hand-made greetings cards. ‘Don’t see you passing much these days,’ Liz had remarked affably though sounding a little disappointed. They chatted, watched over with barely disguised curiosity by the woman behind the counter. Helen Geaton reminded Alex forcibly of a younger version of Sarah Hellyon. It was disconcerting, as was the woman’s habit of staring at her and then suddenly looking away when Alex turned. It made for stilted conversation and, before she left, Alex invited Liz up to the Hall for coffee the next morning.

It was Elizabeth’s third visit to Hillen Hall and, as usual, she came bearing an offering from her garden, this time a plastic pot of daffodil bulbs, their green tips already well sprouted.

‘They’re coming up early this year,’ she said. ‘It’s been so mild. Oh and isn’t the house looking lovely,’ she added, wandering into the drawing room. ‘You’ve made
such
a difference here.’ Over coffee, Liz chatted about her plans for her garden, pressed Alex again – with undimmed enthusiasm but no more success - to join some club or other, and remarked on Theo’s absence gently, as one might bring up the subject of an illness in the family, curious to know more about it but reluctant to cause upset.

‘He’s back next week,’ Alex replied. ‘He got back from a cruise and then met up with an old friend in London. Someone he went to Cambridge with. They’ve been doing some catching up apparently.’

‘Oh good.’ Liz was clearly glad that there had been no rift. ‘By the way,’ she added, delving into her capacious leather handbag. ‘I’ve been doing some clearing out of boxes in the attic and I found these.’ She pulled out four old-fashioned school exercise books, trapped into a bundle with an elastic band. ‘These were Bill’s notes for his local history. He had grand plans for writing up a book on the area some day but of course…’ Liz smiled and offered them to Alex. ‘I thought you might be interested to have a look through them - if you can understand his writing, that is. It’s terrible. I just glanced through – you know how you do – and I noticed Hillen Hall mentioned a couple of times so I thought, since you’re thinking of restoring the old place, there might be something relevant in there. Anyway, they’re no good to me. Do what you want with them when you’ve finished with them. I keep far too many things as it is.’

‘Thank you,’ said Alex, taking the bundle and pulling the band off. She flicked through one of the books at random. The script was cramped and sloping with crossings out and occasional notes crammed in the margin or the text. ‘They’ll be interesting, I’m sure,’ she said politely.

It was evening before Alex picked up the books again and began to idly glance through them, doubtful of finding anything of real interest. The word ‘history’ conjured up for her boring lessons at school and mind-numbing repetition of kings and queens, battles and dates and the ultimate tedium of the industrial revolution: ‘Spinning Jennys’ and Watt’s steam engines. But Bill Franklin had at least interspersed the dry information with the occasional anecdote, comment or story though his notes were haphazard and illogical, information on the region in prehistoric times rubbing shoulders with medieval land husbandry, tin mining up river alongside the first power boats on the Kella. Information was scribbled down as he came across it with additions crammed into odd gaps on the page and asterisks or other marks to indicate cross referencing elsewhere. Over successive evenings, Alex picked through them, trying to find items of interest.

Hillen Hall, she found, was actually a corruption of the name Hellyon. The Hellyon family had lived there unbroken since the sixteenth century but the name Hillen had developed because it was easier to say and quite simply because the house stood on a hill. The estate, it seemed, had once been far more than just the house and garden with the Hellyons owning everything in the village which didn’t belong to the church. Bill had added this caustic comment in the margin:

The Hellyons, with unbounded wealth, access to education and contacts with other people of note in the realm, would have been the equivalent of our modern day celebrities, highly regarded and imitated, and treated with a respect which their behaviour didn’t always justify.

By the third night, yawning, she’d become bored with the detailed information of tenancies and social unrest, shipwrecks and land laws, and was on the point of putting them aside when another reference to Hillen Hall caught her eye:

The Hellyon family was undoubtedly brought to its lowest point when Julian, the eldest son and heir of Richard and Sarah Hellyon, was tragically drowned in the River Kella
when he was just fifteen years old. It is said that he was playing with his younger brother and his cousin one evening when some stones gave way on the famous Stepping Stones across the river. As the tide comes in and mingles with the Kella, difficult underwater currents and eddies are set up. Julian was quickly washed away and out to sea. It was a tragedy from which the Hellyon family struggled to recover. They left Hillen Hall a few years later.

In the margin, Bill had scribbled an extra note:

Julian’s cousin is Simon Brook, rapidly rising in the classical music world as a conductor and composer of note.

Alex stared at it, amazed and shocked. Simon had been there when Julian had died? But he’d never once mentioned it.

Susie was a good early warning system but Mick had never thought of her as a guard dog. She was wary of strangers but never nasty, circling them, growling, preventing any movement until Mick told her to stop. To a stranger she was convincing but he suspected that she looked on these encounters more as a game than anything else. Susie, intelligent and easily bored, liked to have a challenge.

But the snarl Mick could hear this morning contained a note he hadn’t heard before and it set the hairs up on the back of his neck. The noise was punctuated by a man’s voice shouting. He left the shed where he’d been oiling his tools and, still with a scythe in his hand, cautiously circled the carriage. The man standing in the clearing, kicking out at the dog, was tall and muscular, and wearing the kind of casual clothes that came with a fancy price tag. As Mick straightened his shoulders and stepped forward, the visitor called out again.

‘Hey you, call this bloody dog off.’

‘Suse. Here.’ Susie didn’t move and Mick was obliged to call her again. When she was back at heel, still growling under her breath, the man brushed himself down, swearing like a trooper in a smart, public school accent.

‘I could have you prosecuted for keeping a vicious dog,’ growled the man. ‘They’d have her put down like that.’ He snapped his fingers crisply. He was flushed and sweating.

‘She’s not vicious,’ Mick said quietly, jaws clenched tight.

The man smirked and took a few steps closer, glancing down warily at the dog whose growl got louder.

‘Quiet Susie.’

The smirk grew.

‘No? That’s not my impression. And who do you think the authorities would believe? Respected member of society of longstanding local family, or itinerant tramp living in a railway carriage? Mm? I’m Theo Hellyon by the way. Mr Hellyon to you.’

‘I know who you are.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Lucky guess.’ They stood square on, staring at each other, neither giving ground. ‘What do you want?’ Mick asked coldly.

Theo slowly surveyed the ground around them before transferring his gaze back to Mick. He swept his eyes up and down Mick’s wiry frame with a look of contempt.

‘I understand that you’ve been encouraging Miss Munroe to help you out on this patch of wilderness I believe you call a reserve. It doesn’t seem appropriate to me to expect her to soil her hands by helping you.’

Mick frowned and continued to stare Theo out, the muscles in his cheeks twitching.

‘Alex does what she wants to do,’ he said. ‘I haven’t encouraged her to do anything.’

Theo took a step nearer, glancing down at the dog who rose to her feet again. Mick, his right hand still holding the scythe, took hold of her collar with his left. Theo smiled superciliously. He stood four or five inches taller than Mick and was significantly broader. He looked down on the older man and slowly nodded.

‘Miss Munroe to a shitty ex-con like you.’

Mick paled and pulled harder on Susie’s collar as her growling got louder again. His hand clenched on the handle of the scythe too, his knuckles turning white.

‘Oh yes, I know,’ said Theo softly, his face close to Mick’s. ‘I know all about you.’ He glanced towards the scythe. ‘But you’re not going to touch me are you? That would really make the shit hit the fan wouldn’t it? And let me tell you this: if you don’t stop Miss Munroe coming here – God only knows what you were thinking of doing with her; it’s disgusting to think about – I’m going to make sure that everyone else round here knows all about you too.’