No Place Like Home by Jane Renshaw (the best electronic book reader .TXT) 📗

in the contract, in the section about the water supply, stating that we can’t be held responsible for failure of the supply.’

Oh, you bastard, Bram wanted to say. But he just nodded numbly.

‘That’s so helpful,’ sneered David. ‘Thanks a lot, pal.’

‘Dad,’ said Kirsty.

‘You’ll need to sink a borehole,’ Andrew added. ‘Which is a simple enough procedure. Cost a bit, mind you.’

‘But what are we going to do in the meantime?’ Kirsty was standing with her back to the worktop, also with her arms folded.

‘Come and live with us,’ said David.

‘And we’ve got the housewarming on Saturday,’ Kirsty continued, as if David hadn’t spoken. She was making eye contact with Bram, looking at him in the way she did sometimes, as if she knew he would sort it, she knew he would make it all right.

‘The stream,’ he found himself saying. ‘We can get water from the stream in buckets, for flushing the loos and washing the dishes. Bottled water to drink.’ In glass bottles, though, not plastic.

‘What about showering?’ from David.

‘We can survive on sponge baths for a while. Or a dunk in the stream. With the odd visit to you for a hot shower. Just until the borehole can be dug. I’ll get onto that today.’

Sylvia was staring at him, her eyes filmed with tears. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she repeated. ‘Is it really a good idea to be going back and forth to the stream all the time, with whoever is doing this still out there…? It’s so scary, the way everything’s just escalated suddenly. And all that cruel trolling stuff on your blog.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s like that awful case a couple of years ago, do you remember it, that poor couple who moved into a house in the country in Perthshire? The locals took a dislike to them for some reason, and they were victimised for months without the police taking any action, and one of their children ended up being killed?’

Bloody Nora.

It made sense to relocate the cameras from the wood to the house. When everyone had gone, and Kirsty had taken the Discovery to pick up bottled water and get the kids, Bram psyched himself up to go back into the wood. It would only take half an hour to remove the six cameras. Scott was right – whoever was doing this, their intention seemed to be to freak them out, no more. The way to deal with it was not to freak out.

Once they saw that their scare tactics weren’t working, they’d stop.

Would they?

Or would they step it up a gear?

But their best chance of putting a stop to it was definitely the cameras.

Bram had been on the point of asking Scott if a police officer could stay behind and help him relocate them, but then he’d remembered the conversation with Willie in the bar about the bush telegraph. As things stood, the only people who knew about the cameras were Bram, Kirsty, the kids, David and Linda. Best it stayed that way. He would check the SD cards to see if they’d picked anything up, and only if they had would he tell the police about the cameras.

Funnily enough, as he carried his toolbox along the path through the paddock, he found that not too much psyching himself up was required. He was still running on adrenaline, he supposed. That surge of anger he’d felt last night – he found he could still tap into it as he approached the wood. He had his phone at the ready, with the camera function primed. He hoped he did see someone. This time he’d get a proper shot of the bastard.

The rage that had consumed him last night – and it had consumed him, as he stood there in the Room with a View with Max and Phoebe, with who knew what on the other side of that door – it had swept away all rational thought. He guessed it was primeval. Instinctive. There was probably a special neural pathway that lay dormant, that might lie dormant all your life, that was only activated if the lives of your children were threatened.

Okay, so with his rational mind, with the evolved, intelligent, logical part of it, he now accepted that the kids’ lives had never actually been in danger. No one had tried to get into the room, to smash through that door, to burn the house down like the Big Bad Wolf coming after the Three Little Pigs. It was probably just some messed-up kid who’d never had the life chances Bram had been privileged to enjoy, who didn’t have a loving family to set him on the right path. Someone to be pitied, not condemned.

But the primeval part of his brain wasn’t rational. And those neurons were still sparking off a signal whenever he thought about that bastard.

That complete and utter bastard.

Was that all that was happening, though? He was tapping into some primitive instinct? Wasn’t it possible that the rational part of his brain was in agreement with the primitive bit? Was he having a Road to Damascus moment, only in reverse? Was this Bram Hendriksen reluctantly confronting the possibility that David McKechnie’s repellent world view might be closer to reality than his own? He’d begun to worry about David’s influence on Max, his gentle, sensitive boy who seemed to be starting to buy into David’s mindset… But what if Max, clever Max, was weighing the two of them up and coming down on David’s side because the evidence suggested that David was right?

David was always accusing Bram of being hopelessly naïve. Hopelessly liberal and gullible and in denial about the underlying dog-eat-dog nature of human interactions. And Bram, in his arrogance, hadn’t even stopped for a second to consider the possibility that David could be in any way, shape or form right. He’d been completely dismissive of and dismayed by what he’d thought of as David’s unreconstructed right-wing views.

But could David have a point, about this at least?

Bram had, after