Chapter 24
It was completely and utterly dark. I couldn’t even see the outlines of the furniture. ‘Isobel?’ I whispered, almost inaudibly past the sound of the rain. ‘Are you here?’
‘Wait a minute, I’ve got a lighter.’ Ross fumbled alongside me. ‘My phone battery is flat.’
‘You don’t smoke, do you?’
There was a click and a small sad flame threw a meagre light that didn’t do much more than illuminate his hand. ‘No, but I regularly have to set fire to my ambition and burn it to ashes.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Sorry.’ He held the lighter up and the circle of light rose to show the tattered couch, bare of anything but Ross’s jacket folded carefully and laid across the back. ‘Well, the bird has gone. It’s pooed liberally on my collar, but it’s gone.’
I pulled out my phone torch and we looked around. There was no sign of Isobel, either sitting or lying on the floor. There were, to my great relief, no birds either.
‘This place is grim,’ I said, looking at the greatly increased damp stain down the wall. ‘How did she stand it?’
‘Maybe she was in the woods when I arrived and by now she will have gone over to the site office,’ Ross said, his face a mask of shadow. ‘I told her where it was so she knew she’d be safe there.’
We both turned to the window where the water was streaming down forming a scale model of an estuary. ‘But why would she be out in this anyway? Why not sit it out in here – being in here is still safer than running through the woods. What if a tree falls on her?’
‘Then I think,’ Ross said with heavy certainty, ‘that it would bend and break on her iron will.’
‘She is a bit scary, isn’t she?’ I pushed his arm so that the aloft lighter threw its dim illumination into the far corner, and backed it up with my phone light. ‘Scary, but not here.’
Ross lowered the light and walked across the room to where the bird had been. ‘Her things are gone,’ he said. ‘Her tin box where she keeps everything, that’s gone, and all her little bits.’
‘Then she’s gone to the site office.’
‘But she must have known we’d come looking, because she’s left my jacket here.’
I gave the room one more look-over. ‘It’s a clue. She left the jacket so that we’d see that she’s taken everything else.’
‘Oh bugger, we haven’t got to play Murder Mystery have we?’ Ross crossed the room and put an arm around me. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the strength at this time in the morning.’
‘No, it’s good. It means that she left of her own accord, she’s not lying dead in another room.
’ I leaned against his arm for a moment and it felt good.
As though, for a change, everything wasn’t down to me to sort out.
The roof groaned again as some more wind got between the slates and the rafters.
‘Shall we go to the site office and look for her there?’
Ross rested his cheek on the top of my head.
It felt very intimate, an odd gesture when we were standing in a house that seemed to want to come down around our ears, but perhaps that was the point.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose we should.’ But he didn’t move and neither did I, we just stood together and listened to the weather.
‘Ross,’ I began, and stopped. I hadn’t known what I was going to say, I just wanted to say his name.
‘I know.’
‘What?’ I moved now and turned to look up at him. ‘What was I going to say?’
He sighed. ‘How are we going to make it work when you’re a single mother and I’m a strung-out house builder? When I’ve got a TV thing coming up and you need to find somewhere to live?’
‘Oh,’ I said, realising that was probably what I had been going to say. It had been what I was thinking anyway. ‘Maybe. Some of that.’
‘I’m going to kiss you now, is that all right? I don’t want to push my luck, but if you’re going to start thinking stuff like that then I’m a bit worried that I might not get a look-in so I want to take my chances while I can.’
He really was ridiculous, I thought as his mouth moved on to mine and his hands cupped into my hair to hold me steady.
Ridiculous, but a very good kisser. Actually…
yes, actually quite sexy for someone who acted as though they were tightrope walking along the edge of a breakdown.
But, while a lot of my reading material had assured me that having sex while in the moment of danger was perfectly reasonable behaviour, the reality of being in a house which might come down around our ears and when my daughter was being babysat by a neighbour made passionate sex as distant as the Sahara.
‘We need to go,’ I whispered against Ross’s skin. ‘We need to find Isobel.’
Clearly also surrendering thoughts of something more in-depth and detailed, he gradually stepped away. ‘You’re right.’ His voice was also a whisper, with a husky low note that made my skin hum. ‘You’re very practical, Libby.’ He sounded more normal now.
‘I have to be practical, I have a toddler.’ I tidied my shirt. ‘Come on.’
We tiptoed back out of the house and into the squalling rain, which I’d nearly forgotten about as it had been drowned out by the blood pounding in my ears while Ross had kissed me. So the violence of the storm came as a surprise all over again.
‘This way,’ he pulled me towards the almost invisible path through the woods.
‘Shouldn’t we drive?’ I looked over my shoulder to my car.
‘The road is flooded further up. We can’t get through in a car.’
I stared at him. ‘How did you get here then? Is your car up at the office?’
I got an almost pitying look before the wind threw his hair into his eyes and he had to blink and scrape it back. ‘I come in the other way.’
So maybe I wasn’t as practical as all that, I thought, as we began stepping our way single file along the tiny crushed-twig path.
Ross stopped now and then to smile at me over his shoulder and the smiles had the twinkle of someone who is actually enjoying themselves, which made me wonder about any masochistic tendencies he may have, because this was dreadful.
Branches pinged and fired water streams up into our faces or down our legs, any spare water came at us from above and although the darkness was giving way to a filtered grey sort of light, this wasn’t helping in the illumination stakes.
It was like wading through wet gauze. There were still no birds.
Nothing sang or tweeted; no cloud of black skirled overhead or flapped up from trees.
Not one single ‘kaa-kaa’ intruded on the sound of snapping twigs, squelching mud and occasional swearing.
My mind was wandering all over the place while my body was trying to go in a straight line.
That was a hell of a kiss. I hope Tilly isn’t driving Tia mad.
Is David going to pop up out of the woodwork and appear in front of me like some Marian apparition?
Where is Isobel? Are we going to be confronted by a shed bulging with birds?
I hope Tilly has eaten her breakfast. Maybe I should have sent her with an apple?
Why does Ross look sexier now than he did before?
What the HELL did I just step in? The mental processes were almost more exhausting than the walk and I was relieved to arrive at the far side of the wood.
The rain was dragging a veil of cloud over the distant fields and the horses were standing in the shelter of the hedge, their backs to the wind.
Here on the edge, the wind had got more of a hold and was flittering the branches like a solid force.
‘I can’t see her.’ Ross squelched towards the site office.
‘She might be asleep,’ I pointed out. ‘It is ridiculously early.’
‘She might have come over last night. I told her the place would be left open for her and we didn’t make definite plans.
I was coming over today to help her pack up and get her stuff moved but she might have decided to do it herself when the storm hit.
To have a non-leaking roof and electricity and everything. ’
We stared at the site-office-cum-shed. Its two smallish windows weren’t covered with feathers and the walls weren’t notably bulging with the presence of a flock of hell birds.
‘She might also have sent the birds into cover.’ I held a hand in front of my face to try to stop the rain getting in my eyes. ‘I suppose they can’t fly very well in this wind.’
Slowly, as though we feared the shed might rise up onto a pair of crow’s feet and run off to hide in the wood, we advanced and Ross knocked on the door. ‘Hello? Isobel? Are you in there?’
The knocks sounded hollowly through the structure and the lack of movement continued.
‘I’m going to come in, if that’s all right.’ Ross went on monologuing to the resolute silence and I followed closely behind him as he opened the door.
Isobel was not in the shed. Ross and I stared at one another.
‘Where the hell is she?’ I stepped inside as though I couldn’t quite believe that Isobel wasn’t hiding under the little table that Ross had left, with the kettle and a packet of biscuits on it.
Then, as I turned around, I saw something tucked into one corner.
‘She’s been here. Look, that’s her tin box. ’
We both stood and looked at the box as the grey dawn light edged past us to brighten the interior of the shed.
‘Why would she leave that here?’ Ross went over and picked it up. ‘Unless she’s just popped out for a minute.’
‘To where?’
‘I don’t know. Maybe she… No, you’re right. She knows we’re going to be looking for her.’ Cautiously, as though there might be a sudden explosion, Ross lifted the lid of the box. ‘Teabags, biscuits… Oh.’
I crept in closer and looked over his shoulder but couldn’t see whatever it was that had made him stop and go very still. ‘Ross?’
Slowly he turned, holding out the small box which held sugar lumps. ‘This has got your name on it.’
‘What? An old box?’ I took it from him. ‘What should I do with it?’
‘Open it?’
We stared at each other again. ‘I’m a bit afraid to,’ I confessed.