‘Oh, nothing.’
‘Jasper’s a perfect guard dog he protects his home and his little family. He lets me know if anyone’s around.’
‘I’m sure he does,’ said Cooper, thinking of the bad-tempered yapping he’d heard from the yard earlier. ‘Do you keep him outside or inside mostly?’
‘It depends whether it’s safe,’ said Mrs Shelley.
‘He barks when he’s in the yard.’
‘Oh, Jasper barks indoors as well these days, bless him. But I’m a little deaf anyway. I turn the sound up on the TV, and it doesn’t bother me.’
Cooper was glad of the thick walls. He had heard neither the TV, nor the dog barking indoors.
‘Not that I have the TV on all that often, you understand,’ said
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Mrs Shelley. ‘There’s far too much news on it. I can’t stand news it’s always lull of people heing cruel to other people, and to animals as well. 1 turn it off straight away when the news comes on, and I talk to Jasper instead, so he doesn’t feel neglected.’
‘Come on, Auntie,’ said Lawrence. ‘We said we’d only he a few minutes, didn’t we?’
‘All right. Bye lor now, then,’ she said. ‘Duty calls.’
Then even Mrs Shelley was gone, hack to her house next door. The dog, which had been yapping in her backyard, went hack into the house, and everything was quiet again.
Cooper opened the kitchen window to let in some fresh air to disperse the smell of the disinfectant splashed around hy Kate and the girls. A tinge of aromatic wood smoke drifted in. One of his new neighbours was having a garden bonfire. It smelled like apple branches they were burning. From the window of his Hat, Cooper couldn’t see any trees. They must he in the gardens between Welbeck Street and the shops on Meadow Road were hidden from his view, except in the conservatory. He wondered if Mrs Shelley would let him knock a small window out of the back wall of the bedroom, so that he could see the apple blossom in the spring. Probably not. Maybe he would get used to seeing only tarmac and slate roofs.
He still had the telephone message in the pocket of his coat. Probably she had given up expecting to hear back from him hy now. He wondered what she as doing with herself while she was in Fdendale, when the people she wanted to talk to were refusing even to see her. Maybe Frank Baine had been showing her the sights.
Now seemed to he the best time. He rang the number of the hotel.
‘Can I speak to Miss Alison Morrisscy, please? She’s a guest there.’
‘One moment, please.’
There were still a couple of boxes of small items to unpack for the flat. One was a wooden figure of a cat, not unlike Miranda, black and overweight. Cooper had been given it many years ago, hut couldn’t remember now who the gift was from. It had stood in his bedroom at Bridge End Farm for over a decade.
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While he waited, he placed the wooden cat on the window ledge overlooking the street. Carefully, he adjusted the cat’s position so that it was looking into the room, directly towards the armchair where he would sit during the evening. He thought that he might find its fat little smile comforting.
‘Hello?’ Morrissey sounded cautious when she came to the phone. ‘Who is that?’
‘Ben Cooper. You left a message.’
‘Oh, right. I didn’t think you would call.’
‘I almost didn’t.’
“I wondered it you would he willing to meet with me. I don’t feel I’ve managed to explain myself properly to anybody. But you at least seem interested. I hoped you might listen.’
‘It would be entirely unofficial,’ said Cooper.
‘That’s OK by me.’
‘Tomorrow? I’m off duty then.’
‘Great. Can you meet me in the lobby of the Cavendish Hotel? About eleven thirty?’
‘Fine.’
For a few minutes, Cooper stroked the wooden back of the cat as he stared down into the street. He felt the need to familiarize himself with the minute details of his surroundings - the colours of the front doors on the houses opposite, the patterns on the curtains in their windows, the makes and models of the cars parked on the hard standings near the road. He noted which gardens had flowers growing in them and which were abandoned and weedy. He counted the wheclic bins standing at the entrance to a ginncl, and he noticed the Jack Russell terrier peering into the street from behind an iron gate. He wondered how long it would take before the place began to look like home.
‘So this is it, then? The new bolt hole?’
Cooper almost dropped the lamp. She was the last person he expected to sec. One of his new neighbours maybe, or another family member, coming to sec how he was getting on. But Diane Fry? She hovered in the doorway like a bailiff, running a critical eye over his possessions in case she had to value them for a county court summons.
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‘I was just passing,’ she said. ‘And I saw your car outside-. I figured this must be the place. It’s not exactly huge, is it?’
‘It’ll do for me.’
Cooper put the lamp down carefully on the table, suddenly conscious of the second-best crockery and the pile of his clothes on the chairs in the sitting room. Fry always made him feel like
O , .
this, as if he wasn’t coming up to expectations.
The books he had bought from Fden Valley Books were on
