Lots of Love (17 page)

Ellen was very hot and bothered. Even wearing the thinnest of cotton shirts and a long, wafer-light yellow skirt, she felt as though she was wrapped in tin foil and stewing in her own juices. She longed to throw herself into the sea.

The cool, air-conditioned interior of the Merc was a poor second best to icy brine and surf. Dark, leathery and intimate, it smelt of aftershave and anticipation.

As Lloyd’s long thighs and muscular calves pumped the pedals into a flashy reverse out of the drive, Ellen stole a covert glance at him out of the corner of her eye, hoping to cheer herself up and relax a little. He was just as drop-dead dishy as she remembered – more so because he had dressed to impress. The very thin grey silk sweater wrinkled like oil over his broad shoulders and muscular chest; the black designer jeans were beautifully cut for his long, athletic body. With a glistening signet ring on his finger and gleaming Chelsea boots on his toes, his turnout was as impeccable as a guardsman’s. Lloyd was iridescent with good health, good looks and bad intentions. Then the Demerara eyes slid sideways to meet hers and he winked.

This, Ellen deduced with a hammering heart, had been a very, very bad idea. She’d let her hormones rule her head when she hadn’t argued against meeting him for dinner, but she hadn’t anticipated feeling so angry at being kept waiting for five days. Now she just felt like shouting at him. She couldn’t even face small talk. She was gunning for a fight. She also badly needed a cigarette, the nicotine cravings from a week of abstinence at their peak.

‘Good week?’ he asked her, as they pelted rather too fast along North Street.

‘I’ve had better,’ she admitted, and stopped herself saying more. Five days of cleaning and hunting for a lost cat hardly made for scintillating conversation. Apart from Pheely, she had barely talked to a soul or felt inclined to. She had kept her telephone chats with her mother to a bare minimum, hadn’t answered Richard’s text messages, and had avoided the scrutiny of the village shop. This retreat into herself was, she was sure, a form of delayed shock. She had to close down three-quarters of her brain to stop herself mulling over her split from Richard.

‘Got out and about much?’ Lloyd asked.

‘Oh, I’ve popped over to my neighbour’s a few times,’ she muttered, entertaining a quick, murderous thought about Hunter Gardner. ‘We have a shared interest in chickens.’

‘Chickens?’

‘Yes. He breeds them, my dog chases them.’

He laughed and Ellen forced a smile, knowing that she really should loosen up.

The evening before, walking with Pheely, she had promised that she would try to enjoy her night out. Overexcited at the prospect of having Daffodil home for the weekend, Pheely had refused to allow a single dark cloud to pass through the blue sky above Oddlode. She clearly found Ellen’s glum mood extremely boring. ‘You must see the positive side!’ she’d enthused. ‘And the funny side . . . I mean, you have to admit that Hunter’s face was hilarious.’

If the week had started badly with getting locked out and flashing her bottom at her parents’ neighbour – not to mention half a dozen other spectators – it had worsened when Snorkel had taken a fancy to Hunter’s prize Cochins. These giant feathered ornaments, the koi carp of the chicken world, fascinated the clown-faced collie. Having spent two days gazing at them through the chicken wire while Ellen threw herself into cleaning the cottage, Snorkel had fashioned a way into their pen. The first Ellen knew of it was Hunter’s strangled cries of anguish as he chased her around trying to evict her.

No matter how much Ellen apologised and explained that Snorkel was trying to play with them, not eat them, Hunter remained unforgiving. He told her in no uncertain terms that if her dog set foot (or paw) on his property again, he was within his rights to shoot her for worrying his poultry. He then set up watch with his cafetière, binoculars and an air rifle. Ellen thought it a huge overreaction and tried to keep more of an eye on her dog. But it was far too hot to keep her inside, and by then she’d embarked on a never-ending cleaning campaign that she bitterly regretted.

It was only as a result of all the coffee Hunter was knocking back that Snorkel got away with her second visit to the Cochins. He had popped inside his house to answer a call of nature when she slipped under the wire and joined her mesmerising new friends with their feathered bell-bottoms and giant Renaissance-wig crests. Hearing squawks and barks, Ellen dashed into the pens and extracted her in the nick of time – they threw themselves behind the hedge just as Hunter came bellowing outside to investigate the din. After that, Snorkel had to be monitored at all times.

The dog’s third visit had been her downfall. As well as their evening dog-walks together, Pheely had taken to popping into Goose Cottage for a coffee
en route
to check Daffodil’s horse (‘Lord knows why I bother – I go there every day and the stupid thing just stands there, swishing at flies and eating grass. Never changes’). On Wednesday she brought Ellen a lunging rope to tether Snorkel in the garden. In less time than it took to boil a kettle for two cups of Nescafé, the collie had figured out how to undo Ellen’s double granny knot and had made her way to the Cochin pen, trailing the rope behind her.

‘What’s that?’ Ellen had turned to Pheely in the kitchen, listening to an unpleasantly familiar squawking.

There followed an equally familiar bellow of fury from Hunter, a bark of excitement from Snorkel, the unnerving crack of an air rifle – and silence.

The two women had run outside in panic, to find Hunter crouching forlornly in his chicken coop, a huge bundle of feathers gathered into his arms. Even more disturbing, he was trussed up like a chicken himself, bound tightly in a long rope trailed by a confused, panic-stricken collie.

Hunter might act as though he had seen more military action than a foot-soldier’s blister plaster, but his brief spell in the forces had been, in fact, as a cartographer. He could pinpoint a radio mast to within a yard, but he couldn’t shoot it even at point-blank range.

As a result, he had accidentally planted his airgun pellet in the backside of his favourite Cochin and, as the vet later explained, was lucky not to have killed her. He now kept watch day and night, had set traps and bought a high-precision magnifying sight for his air rifle. Snorkel’s death sentence hung over her like a black cloud. She could no longer bound through the paddock chasing butterflies or patrol the garden morning, noon and night searching for her friend Fins. Instead, she spent her days tied to the dovecote at the end of a triple-knotted ten foot rope, barking tetchily. Ellen took her on long walks to make up for it – mostly routed via Orchard Close to try to flush out the Wycks.

‘So, you’ve been getting to know some of the village characters, then?’ asked Lloyd.

She nodded. ‘I learn more about them every day.’ The elusive Wycks had still failed to make an appearance and Ellen now found the line permanently engaged when she called; she suspected that they had deliberately left the phone off the hook. Each time she’d visited the house on Orchard Close, she had been greeted by nothing but Fluffy barking her head off through the letterbox.

To her frustration, she’d spotted Reg’s ancient pick-up tearing around the village daily, with an ever-changing assortment of goods in the back – one day two old fridges, another day enough greenery for Malcolm’s army to approach Dunsinane unspotted, and today enough stones to build Fred and Wilma a two-storey extension. But no amount of waving and cat-calling had attracted his attention. Dot was no easier to track down. Pheely claimed that she was a regular sight in the village on her bicycle, but either she moved at the speed of a Tour de France sprinter, or she had a flat tyre that week.

Ellen knew when she was being avoided.

Which was why, as she and Lloyd made the short journey from Goose Cottage to the Duck Upstream, she found it impossible to shake off her bad mood. It was also why, when she spotted Reg and Dot together, on foot, talking outside the village shop, she screamed, ‘Stop the car!’

‘Sorry?’ Lloyd turned to her in surprise.

‘I have to talk to those people – urgently!’ She craned round as they cruised past the Wycks, noticing that they appeared to be having a fight. Dot was swinging her handbag around as if it was a mace. ‘It won’t take a moment. Please stop.’

‘Oh, right – fair enough.’ He laughed. ‘Sounded like you were having second thoughts there.’

Ellen sprang out of the car as soon as it had stopped and ran back towards the shop.

She could hear the couple’s argument from fifty yards away, Dot’s deep, gruff voice belting out accusations: ‘—won’t let you go over to that pub until you’ve handed over that hundred quid Lady G give us. I ain’t having you drink it all, and we owes Saul thirty.’

‘Goodfornothing layabout buggered off come lunchtime,’ Reg cackled, in a voice that made his wife’s sound refined. ‘I ain’t giving him nothing.’

‘He did most of the dry-stoning! Hand it over. I need to get another key for the ’lectric tomorrow.’

Ellen waded in: ‘Hi. Sorry to interrupt, but I really have to have a word. Ellen Jamieson – I called last weekend.’

The two faces drained of colour. Then, in less than a beat, Reg and Dot squared their shoulders fiercely and stared her out. They looked exactly as she remembered them – two small, weathered, stone-faced, sparsely-toothed characters that would not be out of place among Pheely’s gargoyles and goblins. Reg was still the same curious marriage of a young man’s body with an old man’s face. Years of hard physical labour had left him with arms and shoulders like a stonemason, the rest of him a wiry taper. His lopsided, battered face, seldom out of the sun, wind or rain, was as tanned and leathery as an old moccasin, and the bloodshot eyes as mistrustful and hostile as those of the Red Indian wearing it. Dot, despite the rusty-nail voice, was barely five feet tall with a tightly permed helmet of unnaturally chestnut hair and a Deputy Dawg expression, belied by sharp blue eyes. This evening they were at their sharpest as they shot her husband a warning look, then narrowed angrily at Ellen. Assuming identical, defensive expressions, the Wycks crossed their arms in front of their chests in unison and only just stopped short of snarling, like two guard-dogs caught napping.

‘What d’you want?’ Dot demanded, hackles rising.

This was going to be tough, Ellen thought. Having made sure that Lloyd was keeping the Merc’s engine running, she cleared her throat and modulated her anger. ‘I was hoping you’d be able to tell me why you haven’t been cleaning and gardening Goose Cottage for – well, for ages as far as I can tell. Is there a problem?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ Dot growled, setting her chin.

‘So why aren’t you doing it?’

The sharp eyes studied her. Apparently Dot was working out which part of Ellen’s face to bite off first. ‘We subcontracted that job.’

This sounded so ridiculous that Ellen battled not to laugh. ‘To whom?’

‘A business associate,’ Dot said pompously, her hackles creeping higher by the second. Beside her, Reg stared fixedly at the pavement, waiting for the command to attack. He was almost foaming at the mouth.

Ellen took a step back. ‘In that case it’s your business associate I need to talk to, isn’t it? Can you give me his details?’

‘He doesn’t deal with clients direct.’ Dot lifted her chin and glared at Ellen defiantly.

‘So who does?’

‘He does.’ Dot nudged the mute Reg, who carried on staring madly at the pavement. Any minute now Ellen expected him to attack his own shadow, although she suspected that his rabid, let-me-at-it expression had more to do with the proximity of the pub than the argument hotting up beside him.

Lloyd was reversing the Merc, slotting it into a parallel space just a few yards away. Dot jerked her head towards it. ‘Friend of yours?’ The sharp eyes blinked worriedly.

With its darkened windows and bullet-silver metalwork, the Merc did look rather stylishly sinister – part drugs-gangster, part FBI. How was Dot to know that its occupant was a perfumed, smooth-talking estate agent?

She nodded curtly, squaring her own shoulders and looking from growling terrier Dot to her slavering husband – the customer-service manager, it seemed.

‘Surely you must
know
that your “business associate” hasn’t been doing any work?’ she asked him. ‘The cottage is hardly inconspicuous – I’ve seen you drive past it this week. The grass is up to my knees.’

Reg sucked air menacingly through his few teeth, mad eyes darting around – mostly in the direction of the pub.

Ellen felt unpleasantly like her mother lecturing an unruly pupil at Market Addington College. ‘This just isn’t good enough,’ she said, and turned back to Dot. ‘My parents have been paying
you
to do the work – not hire some business associate who doesn’t look after it at all. Somebody was using the cottage without permission while it was empty. There was mess everywhere when I arrived and—’

‘How
dare
you accuse us of that? We ain’t done nuthink like that, have we, Reg?’ The handbag moved threateningly in Ellen’s direction as Dot readied herself for a fight.

‘I wasn’t accusing you,’ Ellen explained hastily. ‘I was going to say that had you been cleaning it every week you would have seen the mess and alerted my parents.’

‘I’m a cleaner not a security guard, ain’t I?’ Dot hissed angrily.

However much they knew that they had been caught out, there was no way Ellen would ever get an apology out of them and, as far as she was concerned, it simply wasn’t worth the effort. She might have found the fight that she’d been looking for all week, but now that she was being counted down for round one, she suddenly lost the urge to exchange blows. While spending long hours scraping layers of spilled food, drinks, cigarette ash and dust from the corners of Goose Cottage, she had angrily rehearsed the showdown she planned to have with the Wycks. She’d screamed all sorts of angry accusations at the Cif bottle, the Dyson and the block of Vanish. Now, though, having spent the entire week cleaning the spoilt princesses, she was too washed out to fight dirty. Even if Dot came to work tomorrow, there would be nothing left for her to do. Ellen still badly needed help with the garden, but something about Reg’s manic silence put her off asking him.