Chapter Five
I took Stan out onto the moors to try to clear my head. The day was bright and the wind had dropped, giving us a tiny foretaste of what summer might have to offer, always supposing we had a summer since the weather this far north showed a distressing tendency to drop us straight from chilly spring into damp autumn. Stan plodded along, happily undisturbed by my attempts to chivvy him into a canter and I soon stopped trying to ride seriously and let my thoughts wander.
I’d have to do something soon. My savings were being eaten at a remarkable rate by the necessities of rent, bills and food; they’d probably only float me for another couple of months and then . . . something would have to change.
I loved working for Mike, writing for the magazine, but he couldn’t afford to pay me much more than the basic freelancer’s rate. I’d been trying to knock out a few articles for other magazines, even a couple of short stories, but my lack of confidence was clearly showing, everyone had turned me down. They may have given me more consideration if I’d sent them my CV, but that would mean putting my head above the parapet, maybe drawing the attention of people that I’d rather not see — hell, stop being so mealy-mouthed Molly, it might draw Tim’s attention.
So there was my choice. Pull myself together, flaunt my past experience and stand a chance of making a living or keep my head down and starve. No, not starve, Caro would never see that happen. She’d already offered to let me move into her place, work in the stables in return for my keep if I had to give up the cottage, and a tiny part of me was tempted.
But another part of me wasn’t. The part that knew the whole of my life in Riverdale was only temporary. The part of me that was driven by the ambition to write, seriously write. To unpack facts that so many people would just ignore, to examine, understand. The part of me that had pricked up its ears when I’d heard that Phinn was an astrophysicist, and had surged to the surface when Link had thrown in his comment about the UFOs.
The lights. Maybe he had seen them too.
Stan stumbled and I almost rolled off over his head. Even given his total lack of temperament of any kind, this inattentive riding could be dangerous, so I pulled myself together and shortened up the reins. I forced him into an energetic trot until we’d circled the dale and were moving along the ridge overlooking Howe End, where, to Stan’s relief, I let him mooch back into his customary amble and then drew him to a standstill.
Below us the farmhouse stood bathed in full sunlight. Although the front was screened from my view by the undergrowth that had concealed my approach that morning, the back of the house faced onto an open paddock, currently grazed by half a dozen sheep which had broken through the hedge from the next-door field. In this open space I could see two men standing.
Their figures were indistinct at this distance but, since one was dark and the other fair, I would have taken any bets that it was Phinn and the mysteriously-named Link. A vanishing puff of grey showed that one of them was smoking a cigarette and they were facing each other, seemingly in serious debate. I strained my ears but couldn’t hear more than tones, changes in volume or the odd, staccato laugh.
I let Stan lower his head to the grass and watched the men. Tall and skinny, short and slightly chubby, it looked like the number 10 having a falling out. There was clearly an argument going on, the cigarette trail came and went, accompanying upraised arms and the voices came more distinctly for a moment before descending down the register again. After a moment the shorter figure moved a few paces back and the streak of dark, which was obviously Phinn, disappeared into the house, punctuated a moment later by the bullet-like sound of a slammed door.
Link stayed put for a minute. The smoke died away, I saw the bright flare of a lighter, and then Phinn was back. Smoke was replaced, voices raised again, then fell to a mutter, the figures moved closer together for a moment as though confidences were being exchanged and I saw Link reach out, whether the gesture ended in a blow or comfort I couldn’t be sure. Beneath me Stan moved and I had to gather the reins to turn him back around, and by the time I had him facing the right way again, the two men were gone. Back inside the house? Or had they walked around the outside and gone elsewhere? The sheep moved, jerkily, through the overgrown gardens, occupying the silence that had fallen, and I wondered what the men had been arguing about.
* * *
‘Well . . . sort of spying, I suppose,’ I said, laying the table. ‘But they were out in the open, anyone could have seen them.’ I opened the oven and took out a stew, carefully manhandling it to the table wrapped in an overlarge tea towel. ‘I just happened to be passing.’
Caro screwed up her face. ‘Yeah, anyone that happened to be on an old track that no one uses, whilst they were in a private garden — course you were spying.’ She plonked a jacket potato onto her plate and helped herself to a ladleful of the steaming stew. ‘This smells great, by the way. What is it, chicken? Mmm, tarragon in there too.’
‘I found a clump sprouting in the garden.’
Caro went still. ‘Oh. Yes. Dad was a great gardener, I’d forgotten. Herb patch, everything. Funny how things like that slip your mind, isn’t it?’
The cottage had belonged to Caro’s father, who had died two years before. She’d refitted the place, intending to use it as a summer let, and then I’d come along.
‘Hey. He’d be glad it wasn’t going to waste, I’ll bet,’ I said.
‘Yes. Yes, he would.’ The sadness crowded onto her face, drawing her mouth down. ‘Still miss the old bugger, y’know. Lived in the village all his life. He’d have been able to tell you about the ghosts at Howe End. Born storyteller, he was. Every night he’d sit on the end of my bed and come out with some tale of a traveller lost in the fog or the mysterious noises from a deserted barn and then my mum would come up and slap him silly for scaring me so much I couldn’t sleep. He wrote a book once, my dad, about the folk tales of Riverdale, still got it around somewhere.’ Her eyes misted for a second, then she shook her head. ‘Ah, probably better off where he is now. At least he’ll be warm.’
Briskly she sorted out her cutlery and cut a long swathe of butter to put on her potato. ‘So? What were they arguing about? And who was naked this time?’
‘Both dressed, I think.’ I gave her a quick rundown of the lack of events at Howe End. ‘Don’t you think we’re a bit weird getting so caught up in what really isn’t any of our business, Caro?’
‘Mmmmf.’ Her mouth full, Caro waved a knife at me. ‘Firstly, it is , kind of, our business, being as how you pulled him down off Blackly Moor without a stitch on, and secondly, is there really anything on television these days?’
‘Clearly not.’
We ate silently for a bit, Caro obviously relishing a meal she hadn’t had to cook herself and me thinking.
‘You’re very quiet, Molly. Falling into daydreams about the gorgeous young men at Howe End? Because if you want any advice in that direction, you know I’ll be only too pleased to help you out, don’t you?’
‘I’m intrigued, that’s all. What the hell is a doctor of astrophysics doing squatting in a derelict farmhouse and having arguments with a bloke who has turned up out of nowhere?’
‘Mmmm.’ Caro chewed for a moment. ‘Particularly when said astrophysicist looks like an underwear model. Lovers’ tiff?’
‘Don’t think so.’
‘Okay then. Why are you so intrigued by him?’
I waved a piece of chicken. ‘Just as I was leaving his friend, Link, said something about UFOs, something that made Phinn twitchy. He’d been quite nice to me up till then, but he nearly shut the door on my head he was so keen to get rid of me as soon as UFOs were mentioned. That is intriguing.’
‘If you say so.’ Caro helped herself to seconds of the stew. ‘This is really very good, Moll. Where did you learn to cook like this? London?’
‘Yeah, Tim sent me on a residential cordon bleu course when we got engaged. Think he was sick of eating burned boiled eggs to be honest and wanted to be able to have dinner parties where the guests didn’t have to play “guess the meat”.’ I sighed. ‘So there were some good things to come out of that relationship, like an edible chicken stew, for example.’ Or maybe he’d wanted to get me out of the way. The realisation was new and made me grit my teeth against the current forkful of chicken. Bastard.
‘You don’t talk about him much. Does it still hurt? I mean, you broke up suddenly, it must have been hard, bad enough for you to run all the way to Yorkshire without knowing anyone here and bad enough for you not to want anyone to find out where you’re living.’ Caro dropped her eyes to her plate, almost as though she felt ashamed of probing so much. This was the most she’d ever asked me about the relationship.
‘It was . . . there’s nothing to say. We were engaged, we fell out. I came up here because he’d never think to look for me anywhere this far from a Waitrose.’ I tried to keep my tone breezy enough to prevent any more questions, but Caro was clearly on a roll.
‘So it was bad. Otherwise you’d at least have let him know where you were, in case he wanted to come grovelling back on bended knee with four hundred red roses and the entire diamond output of one large South African mine.’
I tried to imagine Tim grovelling, and failed. ‘It wasn’t that kind of relationship,’ I said.
Caro gave a hollow laugh. ‘Believe me, sweetie, at base they’re all that kind of relationship.’ She dug deep into her potato. ‘So, what was he like then, your Tim, if he wasn’t the kind of man to beg you to come back to him?’
Despite myself I smiled. ‘Clever. Funny.’
‘Older?’
I flinched. ‘Oh, yes. Twenty years older.’
‘Weren’t they all though? Any bloke you’ve ever mentioned, you’ve given the impression that he had one foot in a cheap Ferrari and the other one in the grave.’ Caro chewed at me.
‘Have I? I suppose . . . well, yes, men my age never really appealed to me.’
Caro grinned. ‘Figures. Your mum brought you up on her own, didn’t she? So, there you go, father-figure complex.’
I swallowed a lump of something that made me start to cough and choke and it took Caro five minutes of patting, slapping and a half-hearted attempt at the Heimlich manoeuvre before I could speak again, and I managed to restart the conversation on less inflammatory topics.