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  She benevolently smiled down at him, “Play rugby.”

  His jaw dropped open, “Rugby?”

  She shrugged, “Why should the men have all the fun? Play full-back for Brandon Rugby club.”

  She flexed her arm, “Bet you work out.”

  He nodded, “Gym three times a week.”

  She flashed her eyes around, “A gym here?”

  “Nah, only a rowing machine and a…”

  He stopped and looked at the clock. Squabble or not Maria always had half an hour on the treadmill at four o’clock. The treadmill was in the room above the room they were in and made a dreadful wheezing noise, but all was silent. He looked at Julia, “Just excuse me for a moment.”

  He padded softly in his stockinged feet and peered into the lounge, it was empty and nothing was out of place. He crept upstairs and checked every room one by one, again no-one and nothing out of place. He came back downstairs and met Julia standing in the back lobby, “What’s wrong?”

  He eyed her suspiciously, “No-one’s around.”

  “Perhaps they’ve gone out.”

  He rolled his eyes, “And perhaps the Queen is Adolph Hitler in disguise.”

  From somewhere he pulled out a huge flick knife which sprang open and glistened with an oily sheen in the electric light. “Stay here.” He commanded.

  He crouched by one of the doors off the lobby and then barged it open with his shoulder. It was a large utility room, and it was empty. Buster turned round, there was only the dining room left. Julia watched him repeat the same process, She noted that when he barged the door open he did not enter the room but slid behind the door frame. He looked into the room and she saw the blood drain from his face. He put his knife away and she sidled up to him and peered over his shoulder. Maria and Jeremy were lying slightly apart, but their respective pools of blood met in the middle.

  Chapter 7

  Holding On

  Rupert eventually sat up and pulled away from Sarah. He was obviously totally drained, both physically and emotionally. He took in a sharp intake of breath and trembled, “Thank you.”

  He stood up and gazed down at her, “I mean what I say, use Anna’s room and any of her possessions that you need to.”

  She realised that he was trying to banish demons and hoped that her staying in that room would be a start. “If you say so. Can I cook you dinner?”

  He clenched his fists, the tension in his taught fingers plain to see. “That would be good of you. There is plenty of food in the freezer, though tonight I’d rather you cooked it in the kitchenette.”

  He meant that he’d had enough for one day. Sarah stood up, “Excuse me asking, but is there a TV?”

  He stood tottering on the top of the stairs, “No, I threw it out of the window the day she died, that dreadful smug female news present said that the police suspected suicide.”

  He swiftly turned and entered what must be his bedroom and Sarah sat back down on the stairs and hoped fervently for a warm spell, one that was just long enough to get her out of here.

  Julia looked at the bodies on the dining room floor, somehow it all seemed unreal, especially as she had never ever met Jeremy or Maria in the living flesh.. “Are they..?”

  Buster didn’t move, “Yes.”

  “You haven’t checked.”

  He gave her a withering look, “Believe me they’re dead.”

  She looked dubious and Buster edged himself across the room and staying just outside the pool of blood reached over and felt Maria’s wrist. He repeated the operation with Jeremy. “Dead, no pulse.”

  Julia took a couple of steps into the room, “What happened?”

  Buster looked around at the blood spattered floor, “On first look it would seem to indicate that she stabbed him, and managed to hit some vital organ, while he hit her with the statue and broke her skull.”

  Julia detected a note of suspicion in his voice, “But you don’t believe that?”

  He shook his head while he sat down, “They rowed continuously, but they were never violent and the knife comes from the kitchen while the statue lives in the lounge not in here.”

  He saw Julia’s frightened face, “Oh I’m not saying that it’s impossible, just improbable.”

  Julia looked around, “But how?”

  Buster nodded, “How did they get in – through the front door I guess.”

  “You mean he was let in?”

  Buster wrinkled his nose and said, “Might be a she, but I doubt a woman could overpower them both,” while thinking that the woman he was with was certainly fit enough. He then decided that the timing was wrong for Julia to be the killer as the bodies were not cold enough.

  Julia shivered despite the high temperature in the house, “So we call the police?”

  Buster sat still, “And how are they going to get here?”

  Julia’s eyes opened, “We must call the police.”

  Buster sat still, a million thoughts were whirring around his mind. If they had killed each other then what of all the cash that Jeremy kept? If they had been killed by an outsider then the killer was still at Trembine Halt, unless they had a team of huskies, and so would expect Buster to call the police. He glanced at Julia and wondered if she was up to a bit of subterfuge.

  Jenny Flosse dumped a mug of tea on the kitchen table and ignored the over-spill on the table. “Sometimes Harry I wonder if you ever use any of the brains that God gave you.”

  He crossed his arms, “A man’s got to have principles.”

  She looked him in the face, “And are you stupid principles worth alienating our children! Colin’s good for the farm you know it and I know it. I also know that you’re not getting any younger and you let him drive the big tractor because of you arthritis. Drive him away and you can kiss you farm goodbye. Sometimes Harry I despair. Bill and Mark have made good lives away from the farm and are a credit to you, I have no doubt – no doubt – that Norman can do the same. But our one son who really loves farming you’ll hardly pass the time of day with over some stupid out of date principle. We all make mistakes and I’m not saying that Colin didn’t make a mistake, but believe me your making a bigger one now.”

  Harry picked up his mug of tea, in forty years he had never seen her so mad; he began to reflect if he could possibly have done anything wrong.

  Julia looked at Buster, “Are you suggesting that we clean this place out of money and pretend that nothing’s happened?”

  Buster shrugged, “They’ve got no children , I don’t know if they’ve made a will, I do know that they have pots of money and he likes to keep most of it in cash, that way the Inland revenue never get to have their slice. And I’m out of a job, minders that lose their clients are regarded with suspicion.”

  “So you won’t try to find who killed them at all?”

  “Of course, it’s a matter of honour, but one takes what one finds in this sort of situation.

  She blinked, an hour ago she’d just gone out for a walk, now she was in a room with two bodies and a man she’d never met was proposing some sort of heist.

  Despite Rupert’s final plea to cook in the kitchenette and leave the kitchen alone Sarah just had to rescue a couple of dishes from the kitchen before she stacked the Aga with wood and closed the door. She’d decided, in about three milliseconds, that using any of the kitchenware in the kitchenette could be hazardous to her health, so she was preparing dinner in the rescued utensils when Rupert wandered into the lounge. He still looked like a man on the edge of a breakdown, but at least his face had lost its parchment look. He wandered over to the window and ruffled Hoof’s ears, “Still snowing Hoof, hope the power lines hold out.”

  It was almost as if Sarah wasn’t there. She turned back to her cookery. In fact she normally didn’t have much time to practise her culinary skills as weekdays she ate in the canteen in Norwich and at weekends went in for convenience food. She turned saucepan number one down to a simmer and started on the spaghetti.

  Julia sipped he
r coffee and realised that Buster must have retrieved it from the back lounge. “We can’t just pretend that nothing’s happened, we’ve got two bodies and somebody must know that they are here – your helicopter pilot for a start.”

  Buster shrugged, “Perhaps; Jeremy liked to keep his whereabouts secret, that way he could drop in unannounced on one of his casinos.”

  “One of his casinos?”

  “He’s got two, one in Birmingham and one in Manchester.”

  Buster hesitated, just how much should he tell this woman? “Two legal ones that is.”

  He suddenly leant forward, “It works like this see, people like Jeremy and Maria often disappear. People assume that the police are on to them and that they’ve made enough money to make a new life somewhere else. I’m not even sure that Jeremy is his real name, he popped up five years ago from seemingly nowhere with loads of cash and just bought the Manchester casino from under the noses of the local syndicate. If he disappears the sort of people he works with will assume that he’ll pop up somewhere else with a new name and a new identity, believe me they won’t care; once they know he’s gone they’ll be fighting over who gets what before you can shake your toothbrush dry.”

  Julia trembled, “Just because he was running on the edge of the law doesn’t mean that we have to…”

  She paused as a dreadful thought crossed her mind. Suppose she refused to join Buster, would she become a third body on the floor?”

  Buster watched her face. He may not have had a fancy education, but he was good with people and could often see what they intended to do before they started, that was what made him a good minder; he often intervened before any damage was done, not after. He reached into his pocket and tossed a mobile phone over to Julia, “Phone the police if you want to, no skin off my nose.”

  Julia held onto the phone, “Just how much money are we talking about?”

  He shrugged, “Can’t say, if we clean out the safe and sell jewellery I suppose a few hundred thousand – each.”

  Julia sat and thought, this was exactly the sort of moral dilemma that she loved to feed the pupils she taught, but this one was for real.

  The spaghetti, meatballs and cook in tomato sauce had all disappeared with great alacrity down Rupert’s throat and if he had any misgivings about her using the kitchen they obviously did not extend to the food prepared in utensils from it. She wordlessly emptied the remains from the dish onto his plate and he polished them off in several slobbering appreciative mouthfuls. She picked up the plates and took them to the kitchenette, returning a few seconds later with two dishes of bread-and-butter pudding; his twice the size of hers. Throughout the entire meal they had not spoken, except for him to say grace. This silence should have made the meal an uncomfortable experience, but somehow it did not, rather it made it a companionable experience. Pudding finished she went to rise to get some coffee, but he held up his hands and croaked something that indicated that getting coffee was his job. Sarah placed the tray she had been eating off of beside her on the settee and partially opened the door to the wood-burning stove. Now it was getting dark the temperature outside was obviously plummeting, she began to worry about the state of her locomotive’s batteries.

  Julia expertly manipulated the controls of the ditch-digger on the back of the old tractor and swung another bucketful of pebbles onto the ever growing pile beside her. She’d phoned her parents to say that she was eating at Ambrose House with Buster and then retrieved the old tractor from its current resting place in the church car-park. Her father always parked it there in bad weather, just in case of emergencies. She was now digging the pebbles out of an enormous soakaway that lay between Ambrose House and the adjacent, and slightly higher, fields. They’d chosen this soakaway as it was not only in the lee of the house, but also out of sight of the farm. As she manipulated the controls she felt two sensations, firstly the thrill of doing something illicit and secondly the penetrating and biting cold – this tractor had an open cab and no heater.

  They’d drunk their coffee, and a refill, before Rupert spoke, even then he didn’t make much sense. He sort of mumble at her; “Thanks for the… Don’t like to… Food was wonder… It’s just unusual… I’m not used to…”

  Sarah nodded at him, “You don’t have to speak Rupert, I’m content with silence.”

  He seemed to relax and leant back into his settee. Hoof sighed and rolled over; silence reigned interspersed by the crackle of wood from the stove.

  Julia stamped her feet up and down while trying to get her frozen fingers to hold onto the warm cup. It had taken then roughly ninety minutes to dig out the pebbles and some of the sub-soil underneath, drop in the bodies and then scrape the pebbles back into the hole. She’d then gritted her teeth and driven the back wheels of the tractor along the soakaway to level it off before taking the tractor back to its resting place. Now she was trying to thaw out, but even the warm atmosphere of Ambrose House was taking it’s time to penetrate. Buster seemed immune to it all. He’d wrapped the bleeding bits of Jeremy and Maria in cling-film, carried them out and placed them in the hole and finally, jumped into the hole to arrange the bodies into one last long embrace and cover them with a large brown horse-blanket. He suddenly appeared and thrust a huge bowl of steaming hot-pot into Julia’s still freezing hands. He gave his crooked grin, “Haute Cuisine Hot-pot specially prepared in London by top chefs.”

  She surveyed the bowl, “There’s rather a lot.”

  He grinned again, “Six helpings between us – one’s not enough to make a decent swallow.”

  He took a mouthful, “Where did you learn to use one of those digger thingummies?”

  She wondered if she could actually eat, considering what she had just been doing. “Spent four summer holidays cleaning out ditches on the farm. Round here ditches are important.”

  He nodded and she surveyed her steaming bowl of food again. Eventually hunger took over and she started eating.

  Jenny Flosse looked keenly at Mark, she was in full interrogation mode. “Are you sure she’s never mentioned this Buster fellow? Bit unusual for our Julia to go cavorting off with someone she doesn’t know.”

  Mark stopped chewing, “She’s a grown girl mum; doubtless she’ll tell you all about it over breakfast tomorrow.”

  Jenny wrinkled her nose, “Never tells me anything. I’m sure there’s something going on at her school she’s unhappy about, but I’ll probably be the last to know.”

  Harry seemed to come out of a trance, “She’s a good lass, don’t worry she’ll be alright, always falls on her feet that one.”

  He turned to Norman, “And I reckon I owe you an apology for flying off the handle like I did, it’s just that…”

  Norman’s eyes opened in amazement, an apology from his father and so soon!

  The tiny bedside light threw enough light for Sarah to sit on her bed and read. She’d found a copy of Steinbeck’s ‘Of Mice and Men’ in the bedroom and this was a book she had always intended to read, but had never got round to it. At the end of the first chapter she paused and surveyed the room, it was cosy, but not over-feminine; well laid out, but not regimented; creepy, but not frightening and warm, but not hot. She somehow knew that Anna had been happy here as it was not a sad person’s room. She pondered over a mother’s love for her children and affectionately remembered her own mother, or rather foster-mother, a woman of large heart and large bosom. She briefly wondered if she’d ever be capable of such love and started on the second chapter.

  Chapter 8

  Revelations

  Sarah woke up and rolled over to check her watch on the bedside table, it was nearly nine o’clock. She lay still for a moment to see if there was any noise, but all was quiet. She eased herself out of bed needing no reminding that she was in somebody else’s bedroom. She padded over to the window and shuddered. It was still snowing with a vengeance and judging by the angle of the snowflakes the wind had picked up as well. So much for her hopes of a small warm snap, by the look of
it she’d be stuck here for another day at least. She made for the bathroom and wondered what Rupert was doing.

  Mark looked up as Julia entered the lounge, Julia surveyed the scene. The four men were ranged around the lounge and judging by the sudden silence had been discussing something they didn’t want her to hear. She briefly wondered about joining them, but knew that she had other fish to fry. “Powwow?”

  Her father gave a sheepish grin, “Just talking over farm matters dear.”

  She decided to sit on the arm of a chair for just a minute or two, she hated being condescended to. Mark burst out laughing, “It’s all right Julia, we’re not trying to disinherit you, were talking about dad talking more of a back seat and letting Colin run things a bit more.”

  She stood up, “Sounds like a good idea to me.”

  She turned to Norman, “Can I borrow your cold-weather pull-ons for a bit?”

  Norman raised an eyebrow, Julia’s late night return from Ambrose House had already been a topic for discussion. “Surely you’re not planning to go out in this?”

  She shrugged, “Got a game of Scrabble to finish.”

  “Must be some game!”

  All the men laughed and Norman gave her the nod. What she had said was, in effect, true as Buster had pulled the scrabble set out just before she had left him the previous night and made her play a couple of words. His explanation rang in her ears, “Reckon you’re not used to lying to your family, you can now legitimately tell them you’ve been playing Scrabble.”

  She, in a funny sort of way, was now grateful for his provision of an excuse.

  As Sarah passed the dining room she stopped for a moment. Rupert was deeply engrossed in making a model class 59 locomotive out of cardboard. He suddenly looked up and stared at her as if she’d suddenly walked through the wall. He half smiled, “Make my living designing cut-out models.”