Since the lane leads down to a splash ford going to Fordleigh, the next village, not much traffic comes along it except for the milk float, sometimes a car risking the ford in exchange for rural scenic delights, and genuine visitors or people out for a walk or cycling. You can get to the village road again that way, but only with a bike or on foot. There's no way through for cars except by continuing on over the river.
Which sets you thinking.
The lane was empty as usual. You can hear cars approaching a couple of miles away. Nothing was coming, and with it being schooltime still, the children weren't yet out to raise hubbub at the chapel crossroads. Whoever intended to watch the cottage from a hidden position would have been wise to either come through the Fordleigh splash and appear in the lane at the copse, or pretend to be out for a quiet country stroll and walk down from the chapel toward the river. Whichever way they —she?—came, she could always duck into the copse and work her way near to the cottage among the trees. There was little likelihood of being seen so early anyway.
Yet there was one important proviso in all this. Does any
Ail of which meant that my watcher was not a villager, and had come toward my place by crossing the river. She had used a motorized cycle of some sort to ride within walking distance of the copse and pushed the pop-pop into cover while slinking closer to the cottage. Then she'd watched me, presumably to nip in and steal the instrument when it was safe.
I came to the copse gate. I'd not looked at it for years. You don't scrutinize what's familiar, though I must have passed it a hundred times. My hedge was only thick enough for concealment in two places and they were undisturbed. It had to be here.
My scalp prickled. The gate seemed untouched, but behind the rotting post brambles and hawthorns were crushed. A few twigs were broken and one sloe twig was quite dead, hanging by a slip of bark. Deeper inside, the ground was grooved and clods of dried mud still showed above the vegetation. Some scooters have quite wide tires. Those of the more orthodox bicycle shape have tires thicker than for ordinary bikes but thinner than the tires of, say, a mini-sized car.
I entered the copse with as much care as I could and knelt to examine the ground. It must be a motorized pedal-cycle or something very similar, I thought. The grooves were of a tire fairly thin but of a probable radius about bike size.
There's something rather nasty about being spied on. I once knew this woman friend of mine. We'd been out for an evening and on reaching her home for a light chat and a drink—her husband was abroad—found the place had been ransacked by burglars, whereupon she'd been violently sick. It seemed odd to me at the time, but now I felt nausea rise at the image of a silent watcher here among the trees near the cottage. The intrusion was literally sickening. There wasn't exactly a beaten path through the undergrowth, but the path the watcher had taken was pretty obvious if one assumed the purpose was to get near to the cottage. It took me about an hour of careful searching to find out where she'd waited.
The ground was dry and had that beaten look it gets from being shadowed by trees. One edge of my garden runs adjacent to the copse and it was about midway along it that the watcher had established herself, having a broken stump to lean on. There was adequate protection from being observed. I leaned on the stump myself. You could just about see my front door and the near half of the gravel path. The car was in full view, plus the side window looking into my kitchenette and there was an oblique view of the front two windows. They're only small, so the chance of actually watching me move about inside was practically nil, especially as I'm not a lover of too much light.
And, considering how it's my usual practice to draw the curtains as soon as I switched on, that must make it more difficult. What really displeased me was the horrid sensation—I was having it now on the back of my neck as I imitated my silent watcher— of having somebody peering in. I actually shivered.
Moving further through the copse, I found that the nearest the ground cover approached the cottage was about a hundred feet, maybe a little more. The trouble was you could see both front and back entrances from the copse. I could neither leave nor enter without being in full view, unless she allowed her attention to lapse, which in view of the trouble she'd taken wasn't at all likely. That was the most worrying feature of the whole business.
Taking care not to displace the brambles, I stepped out of the thicket. One pace and I was on my grass in full view of the cottage window. There had been a fence in the old days, long since rotten. I couldn't help looking back, seeing the copse and hedge in a completely new way. Before, everything had been almost innocent and protective, if not exactly neat. Now, even the odd bush in my lawn was somehow too near the cottage for comfort. And as if that wasn't enough, no sooner was I indoors than I began imagining odd noises, actually hearing them, which is most unlike me. The number of creaking sounds in an old cottage is really very few, but there I was like an apprehensive child full of imagination left alone for the night.
I examined the entire place minutely. The walls were wattle-and-daub, a common construction in East Anglia. These dwellings have been standing hundreds of years. In this ancient method you put sticks in wattle fashion as your main wall structure and slap mud between, adding more and more until it's a wall. Then a bit of plaster and you're home, providing you've a few beams and thatch for a roof. It's cool in summer, dry in winter, and offers the best environment for the preservation of antiques known. Not all the best preservation happens in museums and centrally heated splendor. In fact that environment's a hell of a sight worse for the really good stuff.
Like a fool I found myself peering at the copse from every conceivable angle. What I'd seen of the cottage from the murderer's stump told me it would be impossible, without the help of artificial light, for him/her to see much of me unless I was actually close to the window. The trouble was, whoever stood inside the cottage was equally blinded, because the copse formed a dark opaque barrier at the edge of the grass. Worse, there were two sides of the cottage I couldn't look out from.
I couldn't grumble, though I felt peeved at the mess I was in. I'd told Geoffrey the constable to get lost, alienated all my acquaintances, found myself discredited and scorned and regarded as a mentally sick buffoon without sense or judgment. To undo this would be the work of a lifetime. And it was no good grumbling that the cottage was an awkward shape, remote and rather vulnerable, because what I now regarded as its defects I'd always thought of as marvelous attributes, exactly the sort I needed for my antiques. And my hidden priest hole— now seeming so useless because it could have been made into a lovely airy cellar with a cellar door I could get out of—had seemed in my palmy days a perfect boon. It was private, hidden, and ventilated. Whoever had built the cottage had been wise in the way of country crafts. Two small ventilation shafts each about six inches wide ran from the priest hole to a point about a foot from the outside of the wall, ending in an earthenware grid set in the grass and partly overgrown. I kept the grids clear of too many weeds so the air could circulate. That way there was no risk of undue humidity, the great destroyer of antiques of all kinds.
The chiming clock struck four-thirty, which meant the village shop was still open. Suddenly in a hurry, I collected some money and rushed out to the car, remembering and cursing the locks and alarms for holding me up.
