Chapter Two #2
She’d set her mind to it tomorrow. Tonight all she wanted was a hot water bottle and bed.
“Teazle!”
Short legs at full stretch, the dog raced past her into the passage, then skidded to a halt at the door to the stockroom. She sniffed suspiciously and gave a hopeful bark.
“No. If we really have mice again you can find them tomorrow, but I suspect it’s sheer wishful thinking. Come.”
They went upstairs.
In the morning, when Teazle came in after a brief airing, she had to be dragged away from the stockroom door and carried upstairs. Perhaps there actually were mice, after all. Jocelyn would not be pleased.
Eleanor breakfasted at the table that separated the small sitting room from the tiny kitchen, cleared up, and then wrote letters at her desk.
Though she had retired from LonStar’s overseas staff, she still felt responsible for the projects she had helped initiate.
Over the years, she had persuaded scores of villagers, elders, district governors, even ministers, wary of European interference, to allow Lon-Star to bring aid.
Forgetful she might be but she never forgot any of them.
In schools, clinics, and farming, fishing, and craft cooperatives all over the world, an encouraging word from her might lend new strength to people battling ignorance and hunger.
One did not give up just because a riot in Indonesia had slashed a hole in one’s life and heart.
Peter would have expected her to carry on.
She had run out of stamps and was thinking of popping out to the post office when there was a knock on the flat door.
Jocelyn’s pepper-and-salt head appeared around the door. “Eleanor? Oh there you are.” The vicar’s wife stepped into the sitting room. Her rather angular figure was admirably disguised by a beautifully cut tweed suit, worn with a pale turquoise silk blouse.
“Morning, Joce. Coffee?”
“No time, thanks. It’s nearly ten. I’m just going to open the shop.”
“Oh, is it your day today? Good. I’ll come down in a minute and help you sort the new stuff.” Though she was hopeless at pricing, she could bend and lift, unlike some of the stouter, less limber volunteers.
“Anything from Mrs Prendergast? Bless the woman! I’m hoping for a new dress for lunch with the bishop on Saturday. Lois can price anything I want to buy when she comes in this afternoon. Hello, Teazle. Are you coming down with me?”
“She’d better not go into the stockroom until I get there. She seems to have decided there are mice in there and you know what chaos she creates when she’s hunting.”
“Not again!” said Jocelyn crossly. “I’ll have to speak to Mary Todd again about clearing up the crumbs from her elevenses biscuits.”
“Must you, Joce? It’s so kind of her to give LonStar so much time. I expect Teazle’s imagining things.”
“We’ll see. It’d do Mary good to go without biscuits a couple of times a week. There’s no excuse for leaving crumbs about the place.” She glanced at her watch, which invariably had the correct time. “I must run.”
“I’ll be right down.”
Eleanor finished her letter and went downstairs. Teazle demanded to be let out, so Eleanor opened the back door and left it open. Going into the stockroom, she heard Jocelyn moving about in the shop, but the connecting door was still locked.
Eleanor had no key—she only helped in the shop itself in the direst emergencies, since the day she had so upset the cash register that the repairman had to be called. She knocked and called, “Joce?” then headed for the stack of “new” goods.
Muffled footsteps, the click of the lock, the creak of the hinges, were followed by Jocelyn’s annoyed voice saying, “I thought Nicholas oiled all . . . Ouch! Who moved that dratted table?”
As they inspected the vicious red mark on Jocelyn’s shin, Eleanor guiltily told her about Nick’s encounter with the table. “At least there’s no ladder in your stocking,” she consoled. “I’ll get a cold compress.”
“Fetch Nicholas, will you? I’ll find a place for that thing in the shop if it kills me, before it kills someone else.
And if no one has bought it within a week, I’ll buy it myself and donate it to Ye Olde Cornysh Piskie Curio Shoppe.
Brian and Mavis will love it. They can put china piskies and wishing wells on it. ”
Nose twitching, Teazle was investigating the table inch by inch, so Eleanor left her.
When she returned with Nick, Jocelyn was polishing away dog-nose smears with Brasso and a duster.
She had cleared a spot in a back corner of the shop, where no customer was likely to trip over the dolphins.
Between the three of them they carried the table through.
Nick and Jocelyn compared bruises, then he returned to his gallery.
“You never know when a millionaire art collector will walk in,” he said optimistically.
By some obscure connection of ideas, that reminded Eleanor of the jewelry in the safe upstairs. She was about to tell Jocelyn about it, when the bell over the shop door tinkled and a customer came in. The jewelry could wait. She went back into the stockroom.
In the far corner, Teazle was sniffing at some men’s shirts spilling out of a carrier bag on its side on top of a box. Her tail was between her legs and she showed none of the frantic excitement mice invariably aroused. Glancing round at Eleanor, she whined.
When Eleanor went over to her, she gave a perfunctory wag of the tail and backed off.
Puzzled, Eleanor bent down to right the bag and stuff the clothes back in.
Behind the box a pair of boots lay on their sides, one atop the other.
The leather, once black but now of no determinate colour, was cracked and the back of the heels, turned towards her, were worn down to the uppers.
“That’s odd,” she said to Teazle. “I don’t remember anyone giving those and I never would have accepted them. No one would buy such disreputable boots.”
She set the carrier bag to one side and shifted the box. As it moved, she saw bony, sockless ankles and the frayed, faded hems of a pair of filthy blue jeans. The boots were occupied.
Had some tramp crawled in among the goods? She really must remember to lock doors! In a way, she was glad that he had found shelter from the chilly spring night, but Jocelyn would be furious. Perhaps she could send him on his way before Jocelyn found out.
He must be drunk, or very sound asleep, not to have been wakened by the fuss over the table. She nudged at his thin ankle with a fastidious toe but failed to rouse him.
As she moved boxes and bags away from the prone form, a sick certainty that something was very wrong grew in her. She uncovered the rest of the jeans, a hand in a woollen glove unravelling at the wrist, a khaki anorak ripped under the arm. The man lay motionless.
And then the head, face to the wall: long, lank darkish hair; the angle of a jaw sprouting youthful fuzz; the angle of the neck—
“Joce!” Her call emerged as a strangled squeak. Backing towards the connecting door, she tried again. “Jocelyn!”
“Coming. I’ve sold . . . Eleanor, you’re white as a sheet. What is it?”
“I’m just afraid it’s Trevor.”
“Trevor?”
“The boy who comes to help when he stays with his uncle.”
“Eleanor, dear, calm down. I know Trevor. A scruffy, feckless creature he is, and none too clean either.”
“Was.” Her voice shook. “Oh, Joce, there’s a dead body back there and he looks very like Trevor.”