CHAPTER NINE
‘You’d better get over here right away,’ Daniel said.
Louise was gasping at the other end of the phone. She’d run out of words.
‘Did you hear me? Right away.’
He was determined not to panic. Trouble was, he’d never heard Louise sound so desperate. Not cool and collected Louise. Her frosty moods and ice-axe tongue had destroyed half a dozen relationships. He disliked Stuart Wagg, and it wasn’t the end of their affair that spooked him, but the fear in his sister’s voice. As if something terrible had happened, something she dared neither describe nor explain.
‘All…all right.’
The line went dead.
‘A problem?’ Arlo Denstone’s dark eyes glinted with curiosity.
Daniel took a breath. ‘My sister, she’s…’
‘Yes?’
‘A little upset.’
Lame, but what else could he say? Arlo evidently relished gossip, preferably laced with scandal. Daniel didn’t want Louise becoming the talk of the Lakes.
‘Of course, you must look after your sister. Believe me, you’re so lucky to have her.’ Arlo consulted his watch. ‘If she is coming here, I’d better get out of your hair. So much to do back at the office, it’s all go. Our timetable is tight; let’s speak again the moment you finish the Festival paper.’
‘Sorry about-’
Arlo extended his hand. ‘Nothing to apologise for. I hope Louise isn’t in any difficulty. She’s a sweet person. I’d like to help. If there’s anything I can do, you will let me know?’
‘Thanks, but I’m sure everything will be fine.’
As the door closed behind his visitor, Daniel hurried up to the guest bedroom and flung open the window. Rain pounded outside, but the room needed airing. What had happened between Louise and Stuart Wagg? Arlo Denstone’s phrase flitted through his mind:
Not the most tactful message to give to the brother of Wagg’s latest squeeze, but perhaps Arlo thought Daniel needed to know. Or did he have an ulterior motive? The faintly camp manner didn’t count for much. Arlo might have taken a shine to Louise himself. He hadn’t long been back in the UK, and, despite rebuffing Wanda Saffell, he might hanker after female company. Someone intelligent, attractive, self-sufficient.
He slammed the cupboard door. Louise’s life was difficult enough right now. She didn’t need Arlo Denstone making it any more complicated.
The phone trilled.
Jesus, what now? He sped downstairs.
‘Is that Daniel Kind?’
He didn’t recognise the caller’s voice. A slow-speaking man. Elderly, well-educated, Irish accent.
‘Speaking.’
‘It’s about your sister.’
Daniel checked the screen. The number of the caller’s phone was familiar. It was Louise’s mobile.
Fear clutched his throat. When he spoke, his own voice sounded scratchy and unfamiliar.
‘Who are you?’
‘My name’s O’Brien, but that doesn’t matter. I’m calling about your sister.’
‘Is she all right?’
‘She’s had an accident, but-’
‘For God’s sake!’
He had to force himself not to scream. Impossible for Louise to die. He couldn’t cope without her. In that instant, he realised how much she meant to him, even though he’d never acknowledged it, even to himself. But he’d lost his father, and later his mother. Then Aimee. Even bloody Miranda had left him, but Louise was always there. Intense and prickly, yet the one person he could trust. The one person who understood him.
‘Keep your hair on. She’s alive and kicking, thank goodness. She asked me to let you know. Car’s a write-off, I’m afraid. The police are here and a couple of paramedics, but-’
‘Where are you?’
‘On the Brack Road, half a mile from the village.’
‘I’m on my way.’
‘We all had a lucky escape, if you ask me. A very lucky escape.’
O’Brien was a talkative Dubliner in his early sixties. He and his wife, a tiny woman with dyed red hair who sat knitting in the passenger seat of their ancient Vauxhall and kept her thoughts to herself, probably the result of long marital experience, had been spending the New Year with their daughter and son-in-law at their bungalow in Brack. They were driving off to the Holyhead ferry when Louise’s Mercedes skidded as it raced round a bend and finished up on the wrong side of the road. Steering into the skid at the last moment, she had caught the Vauxhall’s front bumper a glancing blow before finishing up in a shallow ditch.
‘Too right.’
It was a miracle that she was still in one piece. The front of the car was crumpled like a used tissue, but she’d clambered out with no more than a twinge in her shoulder and a bruised elbow. O’Brien had been driving at a sedate twenty-five miles an hour and had kept his car on the road. The damage looked superficial and neither he nor his wife seemed to have suffered whiplash. The paramedics had checked Louise and the O’Briens, and they all briskly declined the offer of a more thorough examination at A amp;E in Westmorland General.
The rain had paused for breath, and patches of lightness softened the sky. In a field beyond the hedge stood a spiky, wind-blown oak tree, back bent by a century of gales roaring through the narrow valley. A quartet of Herdwick sheep surveyed the activity of the emergency services with bemused fatalism. In the distance, mist cloaked the corrugated ridges of the fell tops that made up the Kentmere Horseshoe. The air was filled by the hum of the recovery wagon, as it hauled the Mercedes out of the ditch.
Louise waited on a sodden verge of grass and mud. For a woman who had made such a frightened phone call and then come within kissing distance of death minutes later, her apparent calm was surreal. Daniel’s knees felt as though they might give way with sheer relief. She was charming a tubby middle-aged constable in an attempt to convince him that this sort of accident could happen to anyone in treacherous weather conditions, and that it would be absurd to contemplate a charge of driving without due care and attention. From the constable’s sympathetic nods and failure to get in a word edgeways, Daniel suspected she might just get away with it.
‘So, your sister lives with you here in Brackdale?’ O’Brien asked.
It struck Daniel that he and Louise had never lived together, just the two of them, with nobody else in the house. How would it work? Even after Ben deserted them, their mother was always around.
‘Um…yes.’
‘You seem more shocked than she is.’ O’Brien rubbed his hands with theatrical vigour, as though an anorak and chunky sweater weren’t enough to keep him warm. ‘Tell me, do I know your face from somewhere?’
At least it was better than: ‘Didn’t you used to be Daniel Kind?’ Daniel’s instinct was to brush away questions about his years as a media tart. He’d come to the Lakes to escape from that stuff. But he didn’t want to be rude. All things considered, O’Brien was a model of Christian forgiveness. Daniel guessed that he prided himself on remaining calm in a crisis.
‘I’ve done a bit of television.’
‘History!’ O’Brien beamed in triumph at his feat of memory. ‘Thought as much. I never forget a face. I’ve always been interested in the Second World War, myself. The Dunkirk spirit, we could do with more of that these days.’
Daniel made polite conversation as the car was towed away. He supposed Louise regretted that, in the first moments of shock after the crash, she’d begged O’Brien to send for him. She always liked to be in charge. But she needed a lift to Tarn Fold. That squashed Mercedes was destined for the crusher.
By the time she was ready to go, the chime of the clock in Brack village marked one o’clock. The police
