Her uncle glanced her way sharply. He pointed a finger at her and was beginning to speak when the curtain was drawn to one side once more. They turned as one to see the local constable, his heavy jacket flaked with snow, his tortoiseshell spectacles spotted with moisture. He wasn’t wearing a hat, and his ginger hair wore a cap of white crystals. He shook them off, running a hand back over his head.
“Well?” Townley-Young demanded. “Have you found him, Shepherd?”
“I have,” the other man replied. “But he’s not going to be marrying anyone this morning.”
WHAT DID THAT SIGN SAY? did you see it, Simon? It was some sort of placard at the edge of the road.” Deborah St. James slowed the car and looked back. They’d already rounded a bend, and the thick lattice of bare branches from the oaks and horse chestnuts hid both the road itself and the lichenous limestone wall that had been edging it. Where they were now, the roadside’s demarcation consisted of a skeletal hedge, denuded by winter and blackened by twilight. “It wasn’t a sign for the hotel, was it? Did you see a drive?”
Her husband shook off the reverie in which he’d spent much of the long drive from Manchester airport, half- admiring the winter landscape of Lancashire with its subdued blend of moorland russets and farmland sage, half- brooding over the possible identifi cation of the tool which had cut a thick electrical wire prior to its being used to bind together the hands and the feet of a female body found last week in Surrey.
“A drive?” he asked. “There might have been one. I didn’t notice. But the sign was for palm reading and a psychic in residence.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m not. Is that a feature of the hotel you’ve not told me about?”
“Not that I know.” She peered through the windscreen. The road began to slope upwards, and the lights from a village shimmered in the distance, perhaps a mile farther on. “I suppose we haven’t gone far enough.”
“What’s the place called?”
“Crofters Inn.”
“Decidedly, then, the sign didn’t say that. It must be an advertisement for someone’s line of employment. This is Lancashire, after all. I’m surprised the hotel isn’t called The Cauldron.”
“We wouldn’t have come had it been, my love. I’m becoming superstitious in my advancing years.”
“I see.” He smiled in the growing darkness.
Still, she looked tired — he knew she hadn’t been sleeping well — and her face was wan. A few days in the country, long walks, and rest were what she needed. She’d been working too much in the past several months, working more than he, keeping late hours in the darkroom and going out far too early on assignments only marginally connected to her interests in the first place. I’m trying to broaden my horizons, she would say. Landscapes and portraits aren’t enough, Simon. I need to do more. I’m thinking of a multimedia approach, perhaps a new show of my work in the summer. I can’t get it ready if I don’t get out there and see what’s what and try new things and stretch myself and make some more contacts and… He didn’t argue or try to hold her back. He just waited for the crisis to pass. They’d weathered several during the first two years of their marriage. He always tried to remember that fact when he began to despair of their weathering this.
She pushed a tangle of coppery hair behind her ear, put the car back into gear, and said, “Let’s go on to the village, then, shall we?”
“Unless you’d like to have your palm read fi rst.”
“For my future, you mean? I think not, thank you.”
He’d intended it as nothing. From the false brightness of her reply, he knew she hadn’t taken it that way. He said, “Deborah…”
She reached for his hand. Driving, her eyes on the road, she pressed his palm to her cheek. Her skin was cool. It was soft, like the dawn. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This is our time together. Don’t let me mess it about.”
But she didn’t look at him. More and more, at tense moments she wasn’t meeting his eyes. It was as if she believed that the act of doing so would give him an advantage she did not want him to have, while all the time he felt every single advantage between them was hers.
He let the moment pass. He touched her hair. He rested his hand on her thigh. She drove on.
From the palm reader’s sign, it was little over a mile into the small village of Win-slough, which was built along the acclivity of a hill. They passed the church fi rst — a Norman structure with crenellation on its tower and along its roofl ine and a blue-faced clock permanently displaying the time as three twenty-two — then the primary school, then a row of terraced houses facing an open fi eld. At the peak of the hill, in a Y where the Clitheroe Road met the west-east junctions leading to Lancaster or to Yorkshire, Crofters Inn sat.
Deborah idled the car at the junction. She wiped at some condensation on the windscreen, squinted at the building, and sighed. “Well. It’s not much to speak of, is it? I thought…I was hoping…It sounded so romantic in the brochure.”
“It’s fi ne.”
“It’s from the fourteenth century. It’s got a great hall where they used to hold a Magistrate’s Court. The dining room’s got a timbered ceiling, and the bar hasn’t been changed in two hundred years. The brochure
even said that—”
“It’s fi ne.”
“But I
“Deborah.” She finally looked at him. “The hotel’s not the point of our being here, is it?”
She looked back at the building. In spite of his words, she was seeing it through the lens of her camera, weighing each area of composition. How it was situated on its triangle of land, how it was placed in the village, how it was designed. She did it as a second-nature response, like breathing.
“No,” she said at last, although she sounded reluctant. “No. It’s not the point. I suppose.”
She drove through a gate at the inn’s west end and stopped in the car park behind it. Like all the other structures in the village, the building was a combination of the county’s tan limestone and millstone grit. Even from behind, aside from white woodwork and green window boxes that were filled with a motley array of winter pansies, the inn bore no truly distinguishing features and no adornments. Its most significant distinction seemed to be an ominous portion of concaved slate roof that St. James earnestly hoped wasn’t over their room.
“Well,” Deborah said again with some resignation.
St. James leaned towards her, turned her to face him, and kissed her. “Did I mention I’ve been wanting to see Lancashire for years?”
She smiled at that. “In your dreams,” she replied and got out of the car.
He opened the door, feeling the cold, damp air lap against him like water, smelling woodsmoke and the peaty odours of wet earth and decomposing leaves. He lifted out his braced bad leg and thumped it to the cobbles. There was no snow on the ground, but frost rimed the lawn of what would otherwise be a seasonal beer garden. It was abandoned now, but he could imagine it fi lled with summertime tourists who came to walk on the moors, to climb the hills, and to fish in the river that he could hear but not see, coursing noisily some thirty yards away. A path led towards it — he could see this as well since its frosty fl agstones reflected the lights at the rear of the inn — and although the inn’s property clearly did not include the river, a boundary wall had an access gate built into it. The gate was open and as he watched, a young girl hurried through it, stuffing a white plastic bag into the over-size anorak she was wearing. This was neon orange, and, despite the girl’s considerable height, it hung down to her knees and drew attention to her legs which were encased in enormous, muddy green Wellingtons.
She started when she saw Deborah and St. James. But rather than hurry by them, she marched right up and, without ceremony or introduction, grabbed the suitcase that St. James had lifted from the boot of the car. She peered inside and snatched up his crutches as well.
