Bay Tree Cottage Read online

  Back at the office, Emil let himself in and locked up again. He went through to the rear room, which was partly kitchen and rest room, partly storage area. He’d better check out where he’d be living. He went up two flights of stairs, as he’d been told, feeling tired now. He still wasn’t fully recovered from the operation.

  On the way, he passed what looked like an office and a couple of interview rooms. He could check them out later. He needed to see where he’d be living, make sure it was suitable.

  They’d moved to this building after he’d gone to work in Australia to broaden his experience, so he’d never been here before. Unfortunately, he might have to spend more time in the office itself than he’d originally planned, now that George was dead, poor chap. He just hoped the woman who also worked here was up to scratch on everything.

  At the top of the stairs he looked round. There was a skylight but it was small and everything was dim because of the weather. Luckily the light switch was where you’d expect it to be, so he turned it on to show a landing with a row of cupboards under the eaves at one side.

  At the other end of the landing was the entrance to the flat. He went in but though it had two dormer windows, it wasn’t much brighter than the landing. As he looked round the room, he grimaced.

  ‘There’s a studio flat, where you can stay whenever you’re in the area,’ his father had told him. ‘Fix it up and charge the company. Come and visit us if you get lonely.’

  ‘Studio flat’ was a fancy phrase for what people used to call a bed-sitting room: this one consisted of a large room, old-fashioned and dusty, with a tiny kitchen area to one side. The only internal door was at the far end and presumably led to the bedroom and bathroom. He sighed, wishing he could turn and walk out again. He’d spent two years in places like this when he was at university and hadn’t expected to have to live so meanly again.

  Especially now, with his own health problems to deal with on top of everything else.

  More rain pounded against the dormer windows and the sky outside was charcoal grey, even though it was only late afternoon. ‘Welcome to Sexton Bassett!’ he muttered, fumbling for the light switch.

  The living room looked only marginally better once he’d turned on the central light – he’d have to get a bigger bulb for that. He saw a very ugly lump of a lamp squatting on a side table and turned that on too, nearly tripping over the frayed edge of a rug on his way across to it.

  To his relief the door did lead to a bedroom, a bit bigger than he’d expected, and a tiny shower room. Someone must have checked it out because there was a brand-new bed, still with the plastic wrapping on the mattress. There was an unopened packet of sheets and pillow cases on it, sickly cream in colour, and a folded duvet, but no cover for that. The only pillow was a limp thing, well past its use-by date. He definitely wasn’t putting his head on that. He tossed it off the bed in disgust.

  The shower looked adequate and there was an old-fashioned washing machine in the bathroom. The towels were new, mid-grey of all the boring colours to choose. Whoever had bought the new furnishings had a great sense of colour – not.

  He went back into the living room and switched on the fridge. After a few hiccups it condescended to start cooling its contents. Only it didn’t have any contents. Nor did the cupboards. Someone had half-heartedly dusted the furniture but dust was thick in the corners. How long was it since anyone had used this flat?

  Raindrops hurled themselves against the windows as another heavy shower passed through and he shivered. A quick check showed no sign of a heater of any sort, so he added that to his shopping list.

  He had no choice, would have to go out and get some food, as well as some pillows.

  He left the flat and ran across to the car. Then he had to run back, because the heavy rain had distracted him and he’d forgotten to lock the office up. Strange how you automatically left a business expecting the door to shut itself.

  He remembered seeing a shopping centre on the outskirts of town as he drove in and managed to find his way there.

  It was full of bright lights and bedraggled people. He filled a shopping trolley with basic food supplies and a couple of bottles of wine, put everything in the car and then decided to find a duvet cover in some bright colour. And two new pillows. And a heater.

  His final purchase was some takeaway food, because he didn’t feel like cooking. There wasn’t much choice by this time, so he settled on garishly coloured chicken tikka from the food hall. It’d fill the great cavernous hole inside him, even if it wasn’t the healthiest-looking dish on the planet.

  When he got back, the reception area of the office seemed so unnaturally quiet and shadowy that it felt rather spooky. Shivering, he went up to the flat, glad he’d left the lights on there. Something made him lock the flat door behind him.

  He shoved the frozen food into the freezer, and the dry goods into the nearest of the two kitchen wall cupboards, then warmed up the curry in the microwave and opened a bottle of red wine.

  Wiltshire on a stormy day was a long way from the warm weather and companionship of Australia. But the county was reasonably close to his parents and sister, who lived in Hampshire, and he’d always meant to come back to England to live, so he wasn’t too worried about the weather.

  Well, he had a few personal problems, didn’t he? And they made weather seem a very minor thing.

  He suddenly remembered Abbie Turrell and wondered what she was doing now. She must be feeling sad to have lost her father, even if she’d been estranged from him.

  He raised his glass in a silent toast to the dead man. His father had had a lot of respect for George’s skills. Without the man to brief him, Emil was going to have to rely on his deputy. He hoped she knew her job. He wasn’t the sort to sit all day at a desk.

  The TV was working but he didn’t have a TV guide, so flicked through the channels and came to the conclusion that there was nothing worth watching. He got out a book that had caught his eye in the supermarket, admiring the cover again. He liked this author’s mysteries and he preferred real paper books to ebooks. They felt right in your hands, somehow, as if they truly linked you to the story.

  He realised how cold it had grown, so unpacked the new electric heater he’d bought and switched it on. There was a pop and the electricity went off abruptly.

  ‘Hell and damnation!’

  He found the fuse box but couldn’t get anything working again, so had to phone an emergency electrician. Unfortunately it was midnight before the guy reached him and all that time Emil had to sit in the front office with a blanket round his shoulders waiting to let him in.

  The man set up a temporary fix and gave him a lecture about the need to rewire old houses unless you wanted to risk a fire.

  Emil needed no prompting to book him to come back and do a complete rewire. He was quite sure his father would approve.

  By the time he’d locked the front office up again and trudged back upstairs, he had no trouble whatsoever getting to sleep.

  Abbie took Louis to the hospital, explaining what had happened.

  ‘So I don’t have a granddad at all now?’

  ‘No. ’Fraid not.’

  ‘But I still have a grandma?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Only she doesn’t live nearby, does she?’

  ‘No. Not now.’

  He was silent for a while, then said thoughtfully, ‘I read this book last term, and the boy in it didn’t have a family, so he went round choosing some uncles and aunts and cousins. Can we do that?’

  ‘No. We don’t know anyone suitable, so we’ll just have to manage on our own.’

  He gave her one of his sulky looks that said he didn’t agree with her.

  The patient affairs officer Abbie saw at the hospital was very reassuring. Her father had, it seemed, worn a medic alert bracelet stating that he had a heart problem and giving the name of his doctor.

  ‘We were able to contact the doctor and check your father’s condition. Fortunatel
y, he’d seen your father only a couple of days ago, so establishing the cause of death was very straightforward. A heart attack and massive stroke, as they told you.’

  Abbie was relieved that there would be no need for an autopsy, declined to see her father’s body and took the official paperwork away with her to complete in the required time.

  It wasn’t till Louis was fast asleep that she could sit down and try to come to terms with today’s events.

  Damn her father! Never there when her mother needed help in the house. Never there for Abbie’s school functions when she was small. The only thing he’d done steadily was provide money and pay off the mortgage so that her mother would be all right when he walked out on them.

  Only her mother had met someone else and left years ago, so his beautiful plans had come to nothing.

  Damn! Her father couldn’t have picked a worse time to die. Abbie had just started a new job and now she’d have to take time off to make the funeral arrangements and do whatever else was needed. Well, who else was there to do it? She had a list from the patient affairs officer and would check it in the morning.

  Great way to make an impression on her new employers, that would be.

  She hoped her father had left enough money to cover the costs, because she didn’t have anything to spare, was only just managing to get by.

  She felt guilty that she was more annoyed than upset by his death but there you were. He hadn’t been a particularly lovable person, had he? She’d often envied her friends their close, loving relationships with their fathers.

  She could have murdered a glass of wine tonight, but she’d decided after Louis was born that alcohol was an extravagance and had rarely bought any. She was sick and tired of watching every penny, and if she could have traced her ex-partner, she’d have put the hard word on him about maintenance for his son.

  Sighing she went through her nightly routine, unfolding the studio couch and making up her bed. She was fed up of sleeping in the living room, too, having to make up her bed every night and put it away in the morning. She could usually settle into a book as she lay in bed, but not tonight. Tonight the book seemed stupid, and she tossed it aside. She lay there for a long time before she could get to sleep, her mind churning over the implications of what had happened.

  At last she admitted it to herself: she wished she hadn’t quarrelled with her father the last time she’d seen him, wished she hadn’t been so stubborn when he tried to make it up.

  But she’d seen him let Louis down after promising faithfully to attend his school’s grandparents’ day in just the same way he had let her down so often when she was a child. She’d heard her son crying about it in bed, so she’d confronted her father and told him to stay away from them until he could absolutely guarantee to keep his promises to his grandson.

  He’d said no one could ever guarantee that, in his usual literal way. Why was everything always black or white with him?

  And now it was too late to mend matters.

  It didn’t feel right for someone to die on you without a quarrel being settled, though.

  She didn’t let herself make a noise as she wept, kept wiping away the tears that would trickle down her cheeks with the corner of the sheet.

  Damn her father! He’d done nothing but let people down all his life, and he’d even died in a way that left her with unfinished business.

  Chapter Four

  Ginger found the journey south more tiring than she’d expected, or perhaps her poor night’s sleep was showing. She stopped only twice on the way to Wiltshire, anxious to get there before dark and find a bed and breakfast for the night, preferably a cheap one.

  She had an anxious few moments when her car started misfiring but just as she’d decided to turn into the next services and see if someone could look at it, the misfiring stopped and the car began chugging smoothly along again.

  ‘Oh, thank goodness!’ She had no one to turn to for help getting to Wiltshire if it broke down.

  She let out a groan of relief when she arrived at Sexton Bassett and immediately found a friendly policewoman patrolling the town centre to ask about a bed and breakfast. Perhaps fate was on her side, for once.

  In her bedroom she took stock of what food she had left – enough sandwiches to manage for an evening meal with an apple for dessert, which would save spending any money.

  She felt stiff after so many hours sitting at the wheel, so took a brisk walk round the town centre. The air felt chilly and damp, and she was caught in a sudden heavy shower. Luckily, she found a shop doorway to shelter in till the rain eased, but she shivered as she looked out through a grey curtain of perpendicular rain. She could have done without this, she really could.

  She was so cold she had a quick shower to warm herself up and as she snuggled down in bed, she felt so tired, she was sure she’d sleep well.

  To her annoyance she woke abruptly at two o’clock in the morning and couldn’t get to sleep again. She felt slightly feverish and tossed off the bedcovers, then had to pull them up again as she began shivering. Perhaps she was starting a cold. Well if so, it’d better hold off till after the interview. She hadn’t got time to be ill and what sort of impression would it make to be sneezing or blowing your nose all the time?

  She wondered what Donny was doing, whether he’d even notice that she was gone. Yes, of course he would. There’d be no one to get him a meal, and to add insult to injury, she’d emptied the fridge and switched it off.

  On reflection, she should have simply left it switched on with one or two bits and pieces of food still available.

  And maybe her note hadn’t been all that tactful, either. But she meant it about him getting out of the house. She hadn’t told him where she was going, only that she was visiting a friend and hoped he’d quickly find himself somewhere else to live.

  The following day in Bristol, Michelle Cutler confronted her husband for the umpteenth time, ‘You’re mad applying for this residency, Warren! Do the sums, damn you! We need your wages to pay the mortgage, you know we do.’

  ‘If I get this, it could lead to better things,’ he said soothingly. How many times did he have to tell that to the stupid bitch?

  ‘No one makes a living from art these days. I’m not moving to the back of nowhere with you, even if you do get selected, and you’d better make sure it pays enough to keep up with your share of our mortgage. We worked hard to get the deposit on this house.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah! I know all that.’

  He could hardly bear to look at her when she was dressed in her work clothes. Talk about Mrs Ugly! If he didn’t need her to look after the house and help pay the mortgage, he’d have left her before now. As it was, he had difficulty finding the money to buy the sort of wood he needed for his sculptures and she was always complaining about the mess he made in what had previously been the conservatory.

  It wasn’t as if he hadn’t sold any of his carvings. He sold them regularly. They were up for sale in a local gallery, and last Christmas he’d sold some smaller ones cheaply from a stall at the market. Market stalls indeed! He was beyond that. The people organising the artists’ colony in this Saffron Lane place were going to open a gallery on site to sell the pieces people produced. How convenient was that?

  If he got the residency there, it’d be another step up the ladder he was determined to climb, and to hell with mortgages. And double hell to wives!

  Warren had a final few sharp words with Michelle when he spilt some coffee on the tablecloth, and was glad to see the back of her as she left for work. Stupid bitch! What had he ever seen in her?

  He packed things carefully in his car boot, wrapping each woodcarving in bubble wrap and then putting them into cardboard boxes. He wedged the boxes in a row with his rucksack, then closed the hatch door on them.

  He had plenty of time to get from Bristol to Wiltshire but he wasn’t leaving anything to chance, so he set off early.

  As he drove east along the M4 motorway, he listened to the radio in ca
se there were any hold-ups. It was a talkback show. What idiots people were, spilling out their private information for anyone to listen to. He’d never do that.

  The Dennings had sent him clear directions so he found his way across Sexton Basset to Saffron Lane without any difficulty. It didn’t look like a thriving artists’ colony to him, more like a building site, because there were workmen doing something to the end two houses. Still, at the very least a residency would give him six months’ rent-free accommodation – and away from his stupid wife, too. He made a triumphant fist in the air at the thought of that. And even better, it’d be a chance to produce a lot of work.

  If this place didn’t do well as an artists’ colony, he’d find somewhere else to go when his free stay was up. There were a couple of other things he’d been looking into.

  His own house had gone up nicely in value. He came to a sudden decision: he wasn’t going back to Michelle. She wasn’t even good in bed these days, she was always so tired. And she was putting on weight. What did she look like? He couldn’t bear any more of her inane conversation and stodgy cooking. As for the way she economised, agonising over every penny she spent and trying to control what he spent too, it was driving him mad.

  They could sell the house and take half of the money each. It’d gone up in value nicely.

  What was he doing thinking of her at a time like this? He should be preparing cheerful answers to possible questions. It always paid to be cheerful at interviews.

  His carvings would speak for themselves. He knew how good he was. But it never hurt to add value.

  He took a few deep breaths before getting out of the car and fixed ‘the smile’ on his face. He could summon it up any time he needed, because he’d practised it in front of a mirror. He intended to make an excellent impression today.