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  Slightly later Rupert put down the telephone handset and shuddered. He’d just informed the police of Ma Jones death and now had to phone her daughter. He set about trying to think how to break the news, but was distracted by the sound of the radio coming from the kitchen. He fiddled with his perpetual calendar, he didn’t mind being charitable to Sarah, but he found her presence in the house disconcerting, most disconcerting. Not because she was female, but because he liked his solitude and the quietness that came from living alone. He put his head in his hands, after lunch he’d go up to Flosse farm, surely Jenny Flosse would be able to take her off of his hands.

  Meanwhile Sarah was steadily working her way through a rack of hen’s eggs. So far she’d cracked open six out of the ten on the egg-rack and of those six four had been bad. She cracked her way through the other four and found one bad. She studied the egg-shells, all the bad ones had been white and all the good ones brown. She decided that he’d probably mixed up two sets of eggs and started whisking. Once she had a sufficiently fluffy mixture she set about chopping up some tomatoes, half a pepper and added some cheese of dubious vintage. Then she set about studying the microwave controls. She had considered frying the omelette, but there was no way she’d eat anything out of the only frying pan she’d found until it had been both sandblasted and boiled for at least a month.

  Buster checked his small suitcase. He didn’t believe for one moment that a helicopter would actually land and take them back to London. He actually preferred it here for two reasons, firstly he quite liked the countryside and secondly it was easier for him to keep an eye on both of his employers. In theory he was employed by Jeremy to protect Maria, but in reality he watched over both of them. Not that he was kept busy, just the odd disgruntled punter and, once, a malevolent competitor. But Jeremy worked in a world where there were often underhand dealings and unusual transactions that were at the margins of the law, so the potential for harm was never very far away. He wondered about calling his sister, just too check if she was alright, but smiled at the absurdity of his thought. While he was battling mounds of snow, his sister was living on the edge of a Californian beach. He effortlessly picked up his suitcase and set off for the lounge.

  Rupert pushed away his plate and energetically licked his lips, “That was magnificent, how did you make it so fluffy?”

  Sarah smiled as she’d seen the speed with which the omelette had disappeared down his throat. “Microwave for forty-five seconds then stir and another forty-five seconds and so on until the right consistency is reached.”

  After much frowning Rupert took an apple from the fruit-bowl and Sarah watched him as he dissected it to remove both blemishes and a dead maggot. “Always lived alone?” She asked.

  He paused between mouthfuls and took on the look of a haunted soul, “No, only for the last four years, since…” He voice tailed off and then resumed in a sort of flat tone; “since my sister and her son died in a car crash.”

  Sarah realised that she was treading on forbidden territory, but decided on one further question. “So she used to look after you?”

  He nodded, “She wasn’t married and our parents were dead, seemed logical that she’d live with me.”

  They sat in silence for a moment and before Rupert gave out the sort of sigh that encapsulates sorrow, sadness and resignation all in one. He deliberately changed the subject, “How about you, any children?”

  Sarah laughed, “No fear.”

  Rupert nodded sagely, “And how does your husband feel about that?”

  Sarah sat deadly still, Rupert had obviously noted that she was wearing a wedding ring, and an engagement ring, on the second finger of her left hand, but should she tell him the truth? She swallowed, she could not lie to this man, after all he was a vicar. “Actually I’m not married, these are my grandma’s rings, I wear them to fend off the lecherous so and sos I work with. Remember I work in a virtually all-male environment and a single woman would be fair game.” She hurried on, “And in answer to your next question I have a small flatlet near Grantham city centre and I live alone and I like it that way.”

  Rupert sensed a high degree of prickliness in her reply and shied away from and further questions. He stood up, “Would you mind washing up as I’d like to try and get to Flosse Farm.”

  She nodded and he added, “There is a dishwasher in the utility room if you want to use it, I never do – doesn’t seem worthwhile for one.”

  Sarah looked around, “Where’s the utility room?”

  “On the other side of the dining room.”

  He stood up, gave a cross between a smile and a scowl and left in the general direction of the front door. Sarah gathered the plates, picked her way across the dining room, carefully avoiding the little bits of paper on the floor, and opened the door at the other end. Rupert’s description of the room as a utility room was a massive understatement; it was a full blown kitchen complete with an Aga and a quarry tile floor. It was also freezing cold. She quickly glanced around and was peering at the washer/dryer when Rupert spoke from behind her using his peculiar emotionless flat intonation. “Anna used to use this as the kitchen, but I prefer the kitchenette in the lounge.”

  He turned away and said off-offhandedly, “Light the Aga if you want to, there’s plenty of wood stacked by the fire.”

  With that he left leaving Sarah wondering as to just how you light a wood burning Aga.

  Rupert set off for Flosse farm at a fearsome rate. He was annoyed at Sarah for disturbing his peace and annoyed at himself for being offhand with her. He was just not used to women in the house, lest not since Anna died. He suddenly stopped dead and, ignoring the freezing cold wind and the near blizzard conditions, and thought of Anna. He’d always been a loner, never made any real friends at school and fewer at University. Once Anna moved in with him he knew that he’d come to rely on her as the one person with whom he could feel close to without any obligations or strings. And then she had left to take young Peter to school and never come back; and he’d never said goodbye or thanked her for looking after the house or… He burst into tears again, he always did when he thought of Anna. It was ironic really, he often told people that they would never forget the one they’d lost, but that they would learn, in due course, to move on and live again. Only he’d never moved on, he still felt the loss of Anna as severely now as he had the day she’d died. Eventually he managed to quell his tears and soldier on towards the farm. He hoped beyond hope that Jenny Flosse could look after Sarah as he didn’t think that his emotions could take all the reminders about Anna that she provided.

  Chapter 5

  Digging In

  Sarah sat back on her haunches and watched the flames start to consume the wood in the Aga. In the cupboard next to the Aga she’d found one of those small gas-cylinder blow-lamps and had used that to get the wood burning. She stood up and looked around the kitchen and decided that it was as big, if not bigger, than the lounge in her flat. It was in fact just what she imagined a farmhouse kitchen to look like, with a plain scrubbed table in the middle and cupboards and work-tops around the edges, plus the four most essential items on her list of things to have. An American style refrigerator, a washer/dryer, a deep-freeze and a dishwasher. The deep freeze turned out to be huge and packed to the brim with food. The washer/dryer looked easy to use and both the refrigerator and dishwasher were full of black-spot mould. She found some dishwasher powder and set the dishwasher to wash at its hottest setting and then decided to clean the whole place up. She knew that this was displacement activity as it gave her something to do without interfering any more in Rupert’s normal routine; she could also not bear to see such a wonderful kitchen covered in the dust of studied neglect.

  Rupert was also in a farmhouse kitchen, that of Jenny and Harry Flosse. He was sitting at their scrubbed wooden table drinking tea and eating farmhouse cake while Harry outlined the current problems due to the snow. Harry, a wiry man with a pinched face and with the ingrained disposition of a taciturn
introvert, was speaking at a rate that Rupert had never heard before. Jenny, the epitome of a well-built farmer’s wife with ruddy cheeks, cheerful disposition and a keen intellect butted in, “But if all the roads are snow-covered and it’s still snowing heavily how are we expected to get to Methwold Hythe to help them out?”

  Harry nodded, “That’s the nub of it dear. I could try and dig my way there with the tractor, or try and cross the open fields where the snow has blown away, but that means traversing at least four large ditches and frankly I don’t think it’s worth the effort.”

  Rupert nodded, “And if they are all in St Georges then they’ll be OK for a good few days. It’s out only church with a purpose built kitchen and it’s heated by oil and there was a delivery last week.”

  Harry nodded, “And Old Freddy has shipped in a propane driven gas-cooker so they can have hot food.”

  Rupert nodded again, “Well I say leave be, you could get stuck getting there and even if you made it then what? You couldn’t get them to Brandon or bring them back here, so they’d be no better off.”

  Harry sighed and agreed. Jenny looked at Rupert, “Harry says there’s a train in the station.”

  “Freight and the drivers in my house for the moment, but I’d like to get her billeted somewhere else.”

  Harry raised a thinning grey eyebrow, “Her?”

  Jenny laughed, “Women do drive you know dear.”

  Rupert looked at Jenny, who immediately wagged a wooden spoon at him, “Don’t ask! Try Ma Jones, I’ve already got four of mine here and we’ve collected a young woman estate agent called Petra and her client called Simon.”

  Rupert raised his eyebrows and Harry sighed, “Would you believe they came to view the old Trembine Arms, seems he’s thinking of buying it as some sort of retreat centre. Silly man tried to do a three point turn in the lane and dropped the back-wheels over the ditch.”

  Rupert screwed up his nose, “Couldn’t the front wheels pull it out?”

  Harry rolled his eyes at non-county-folk in general, “Front wheels are off the ground; too late now, damned thing is blocking the road and firmly stuck.”

  Jenny suddenly looked worried, “Do you think they’ll be alright?”

  Harry patted her arm, “Colin knows how to handle the big tractor.”

  He looked at Rupert, “Young Colin’s gone down to try and pull it out with the big ‘en Simon went with him to retrieve his laptop, would you believe that he’s worried about someone stealing it?”

  Rupert smiled at the absurd thought and stood up, “Thanks for the cake, you sure Daniel’s OK in your old cottage?”

  Harry frowned, “As OK as ever; when I visited him this morning he was trying his hand at snow-sculpture, I ask you is that any job for a grown man?”

  Jenny tut-tutted, “He’s an artist dear.”

  Harry rolled his eyes and opened the door for Rupert lowering his voice as he did so.

  “I’ll tell Jenny about Ma Jones later.”

  They both looked out of the door. The snow had temporarily stopped falling, but the wind was still stirring it up; from somewhere nearby came the sound of a helicopter. Rupert set off for his house and as he reached the bottom of the farm-track he met Colin, the male twin to Julia, driving the large tractor. Colin lent out of the window and bawled above the throb of the engine, “Road’s clear, we’ve put the Mitsubishi in the gateway to lower field, the exhaust pipe is flattened so it’s going nowhere.”

  Rupert raised a thumb and they drove by. Rupert nodded to himself, of all the Flosse children Colin always seemed happy to bumble about on the farm in all weathers. Rupert wondered if it was in the genes, ‘nature or nurture?’ He asked himself and pondered on the answer.

  Sarah stopped washing down the worktop and paused, she had that sixth sense that somebody was watching her. She turned round to see Hoof in the doorway looking at her with his head on one side in a quizzical sort of manner, almost as if he was trying to put two and two together. Eventually he padded into the kitchen, sniffed the Aga and lay down on an old rug in front of it. Sarah sensed that this had been his normal routine when the kitchen had been in use. She went over and rubbed him between the ears, he signed contentedly and rolled onto his side.

  Mr Gladbury, the area manager, on the other hand, was far from content, in fact he was having an extremely bad day and knew that it would get worse before it got better. The rail network was in chaos and as a result none of the Cargo-Haul trains were where they should be. Fortunately he only had one stranded driver, Sarah, and she was the least of his worries as Signal Control had informed him that her train was well and truly stranded, but stranded well out of harm’s way. Not only was Sara’s train snowed in, but there was a total signals failure on the line she was on and they could give no estimates of when this would be resolved. Mr Gladbury had made some tentative enquiries about getting Sarah out by road, but given the weather conditions that too was now impossible. With all the other problems on his hands Sarah was put to the back of his mind, although he resolved to ring her when he could.

  Sarah was also on Rupert’s mind. He was sitting in St Mary’s vestry hunched up over an ineffective fan heater warming his hands while his mind ran through a list of options. It was obvious that he couldn’t billet Sarah at Flosse Farm. He wouldn’t contemplate requesting the inhabitants of Ambrose house to look after anybody and to ask her to sleep in Ma Jones cottage while Ma Jones’ body was in the outside loo was too macabre for him to contemplate. None of the other inhabitants of Trembine halt would have the space to accommodate her, that is apart from him; in theory he had four spare bedrooms and that was the nub of the problem facing him. Two of the bedrooms were uninhabitable in that they both had no beds and were full of bits and pieces. The third bedroom was his. That left bedrooms number four and five. He screwed his eyes up and almost burst into tears. Bedroom five was an attic that was tucked up amongst the eaves so it had reduced headroom; it had also been Peter’s bedroom. It still contained his tiny bed, most of his toys and a fair percentage of his personal possessions. Bedroom four had been Anna’s. It was more or less as Anna had left it. He had, with great emotional difficulty, cleaned it once a month and disposed of a few pieces of her jewellery to his only cousin, but that was all. The very thought of allowing Sarah to sleep in there seemed totally abhorrent and yet the logical part of Rupert’s mind screamed at him that that was the only reasonable solution. He burst into tears and hugged himself and rocked backwards and forwards moaning in a low despairing voice as tears coursed down his face. He remained in this desperate state for at least ten minutes and then fell on his knees and called out to God for help. He knew that he was an emotional mess and he also knew that he should have dealt with Anna’s bedroom long ago. He stayed on his knees, crying and talking to God, for a long time.

  One person with seemingly no worries was Buster, he was sitting quietly while trying to read the newspaper. He wasn’t doing too well as a high-octane verbal interchange between Maria and Jeremy kept pervading into his consciousness. Maria was doing her best to harangue Jeremy for not insisting that the helicopter landed, whatever the risks; while Jeremy was trying to give her a bombastic lecture for being too self-centred for her own good. Buster sighed and turned a page, if the normal cycle of event ensued they would argue for about an hour, snipe at each other for another half an hour and then withdraw from each other for a couple of hours. After that it would be make-up time and by dinner this evening all would be, supposedly, sweetness and light. Buster had worked for them long enough to know two things, firstly they could not live with each other and secondly they could not live without each other. Within this incompatible volatile mix Jeremy and Maria alternately fought each other and cherished each other. He sighed and mused on the strangeness of love and people in general.

  Over at Flosse Farm Julia, Mark, Norman and Colin Flosse were in a quiet huddle in Norman’s bedroom. Apart from the disparate ages ranging from Norman at 34 to Colin at 30 the three men could ha
ve been triplets. They were all huge at well over two metres tall with muscles like shot-putters, identical oval faces with chubby cheeks, blue eyes and delicately tapering noses all surmounted by a thatch of jet black hair. Mark sat back and crossed his legs, “It’s no good Norman, you’re just got to go and tell him. I know it’s difficult, but you’ve got to do it and the sooner the better.”

  Norman rolled his eyes, “Easier said than done, I know that you and Mark have escaped, but somehow me wanting to leave the farm feels like a betrayal.”

  Mark tapped leant forward and tapped him on the knee, “And if you stay here then what? You’d grow to resent him and the farm. Tell him, it’s not as if you want to do anything awful for goodness sake, you only want to leave the farm and take up acting. And this job offer you’ve got shows that you’re serious, most father’s would be proud of a son who turns up twice a week on TV and becomes a household name.”

  Norman smiled, “Oh yeah, nice and easy is it? At least you and Mark wanted to take up a profession, you with doctoring and Mark with architecture, but you know what dad thinks of actors, job offer or no job offer!”

  Julia butted in, “Once he sees you on TV I’m sure it’ll be OK.”

  Colin grinned and put of his father’s voice, “Layabouts and idlers all of them – money for old rope.”

  They all laughed nervously, but none of them ventured an easy way of breaking the news to their father that Norman wanted to be the third son to break away from the farm.

  Rupert eventually pulled himself together and went out the back of the vestry to a small cupboard against the wall of the church. He swept the snow away and was thankful that this cupboard was, for the moment, on the lee side of the church. He opened it up and busied himself with pouring paraffin into four pressurised lanterns called tilley lamps. He then checked that he had some methylated spirits and some matches in a tin and re-locked the cupboard. He sighed and for a moment rested his forehead against the door frame; he knew that he had to go home and deal with Sarah, but frankly he’d rather have dealt with a pack of wild wolves, at least they wouldn’t remind him of what he had irretrievably lost.