Death on the Lake by Jo Allen (early reader books TXT) 📗

George put his head to one side, considering. ‘Could have done, I suppose. No question of that. But if he’d done it he’d have hit her straight out and not cared who seen him do it. He doesn’t have the wit to pretend.’

‘The police are saying it’s an accident.’

‘You don’t think that?’

‘Oh, I don’t know. You see.’ She paused. ‘Do you know George, sometimes I’m scared.’ It was out, and she hadn’t intended to say it, but there was something about the cosy warmth of the cottage kitchen, the dimness of its enclosed walls, the dreamy strand of a climbing rose across the window, that made her feel secure. No wonder he loved it there. ‘Now you’ll think I’m ridiculous.’

‘The countryside can be a scary place,’ he agreed, setting the cup down and helping himself to a biscuit. ‘Owls. Sheep bleating. That kind of thing.’

‘When we first moved here I heard a fox crying at night and I thought it was a human being.’ That had upset her, so that even when she realised what it was she’d hardly slept for a week afterwards. At that point she’d almost told Robert the whole story but it had been too soon. Was now the right time? Or had she even left it too late, kept her secret so long the truth would damage her? ‘But that wasn’t what I meant.’ She couldn’t tell George the secret, either, but that was all right. There were plenty of other things that scared her. ‘Those boys of mine. Robert’s, of course. But I think of them as mine.’

‘They’ve fallen into bad company,’ he agreed, elongating the a in bad, until his voice mimicked the bleating of a sheep.

‘Yes. Not here, of course. But they have some friends I don’t approve of.’ And the friends would no doubt have found them whatever drugs they were taking, unless they’d done a deal with some disreputable Mancunian in a pub in Keswick or Penrith.

‘Their friends don’t come to the house, then.’

‘No. And obviously I can’t control what the boys do when they’re not here. At friends’ houses for example. Or when they were away.’ Their gap year would have been full of various sorts of exotica unfit for the ears of an older generation. ‘But for Robert’s sake I so want to make Waterside Lodge a refuge for them. Because the world can be a terrible place, a really tough one, and one day they’ll need it.’

‘Is it a refuge for you?’

She hesitated. ‘Yes.’

‘From terrible things?’

‘Not what you’d call terrible.’ George, she vaguely remembered, had fought in the War as a very young man. D-Day, the desert or the Western Front; it didn’t really matter. It was a safe bet he’d have seen worse things, and probably even done worse things, than she had. ‘I’m afraid I belong to a very spoiled generation. I increasingly find modern life very difficult and very challenging.’

‘You don’t work,’ he said, after a while.

‘I used to. I worked for a merchant bank. It was all about long hours, high expectations, and intense pressure. I suffered from burnout. A very modern problem, but it’s a problem nonetheless.’

‘And then a man came to rescue you.’ He was old enough not to regard that as in any way demeaning.

‘I wouldn’t say he rescued me. But marrying Robert meant I was able to do something different, more worthwhile, and take on the job of bringing up his boys. Which is why I’m so worried about them. That they might go off the rails.’ And so they’d got back to the point of the conversation. ‘I wanted to ask you. Your house is so wonderfully set, and you’re so acutely observant.’

‘I’ve an eagle’s eye.’ In Miranda’s experience all men responded well to flattery, and George proved himself no different.

‘Yes. So I wondered if you’d seen anyone strange in the dale recently.’

‘Strange!’ George laughed out loud so that the cup trembled in the saucer he was holding, and he slid it from his shaking hand onto the table. ‘Bloody place has been full of strangers, and you want me to tell you if I’ve seen any odd folk!’

She laughed at herself. ‘Oh, of course I don’t mean the police. Or even that poor girl’s family.’ She’d seen them, or the people she’d assumed to be them, getting out of a car at Howtown pier and heading with slow steps and bowed heads along the lake shore towards Kailpot Crag. ‘I meant anyone else. Anyone you wouldn’t expect to see.’

‘Apart from them carloads of tourists.’ George got up and shuffled over to the windowsill, retrieving a pipe, a tin of tobacco and matches. ‘Too old to give up,’ he said, as if a justification for not asking her if she minded.

‘Nor should you. It’s your life.’

He laughed, plucked shreds of tobacco out of the tin and began to stuff the bowl of the pipe as he thought about it. ‘There’s just one person you might be interested in.’

‘Oh?’ Miranda’s nerves tautened, as if they were the strings on a violin and a violinist was pulling them ever tighter, the pitch increasing. Any minute now and they’d start screeching, like the background music in Psycho. Plenty of tourists came to Martindale in a day but if George could pick one out as suspicious, she trusted his observation. ‘Who was that? And what were they doing?’

He tamped the tobacco down with his thumb once, twice, a third time. ‘Taking pictures of your house.’

‘What?’

‘Aye.’ He struck a match and the flame flared up in the gloom. ‘A woman. Parked up at the turning and then walked up to get a good view. She had a camera. Took a lot of pictures. I didn’t think she looked like a drug dealer, though. And I’ve seen her more than once.’

‘What did she look like? What was the car like? When did you see her?’

He considered, puffing slowly on the pipe. ‘A red car. I don’t know the make. I don’t drive now,