‘Can’t we come with you?’ he pleaded, but Tom shook his head.
‘Best not,’ he said gently.
‘But I want to help look for her!’
Sensing his need to do something, Janey squeezed his hand.
‘If she’s gone to a friend’s house, Tom will find her.’
‘And if she’s run away, he won’t,’ said Josh. ‘Will you come out with me, Taney? I want to look for her too.’
The rain was torrential by the time the two of them set out on foot to investigate the wooded areas bordering the narrow lane which led away from the house. The woodland, dark and forbidding, separated the lane from the clifftop a quarter of a mile away. Janey, who had borrowed one of Maxine’s hopelessly impractical jackets, was soaked to the skin within minutes.
‘If we move too far away from the road we won’t be able to hear Tom sounding his siren,’
she warned. This was to be the signal that Ella had been found.
But Josh, already clambering over fallen branches and pushing his way through the woody undergrowth, didn’t stop. Turning, he glanced up at her from beneath his drooping yellow sou’wester. ‘If she was close to the road she would have come home.’
Janey wiped the rain from her face. The trees grew more densely here and there were no clear paths, yet Josh was moving purposefully on ahead. She almost said, Do you come here often? but caught herself in time. Instead, catching up with him, she turned him back round to face her once more. ‘josh, do you know where you’re going?’
For a second, the dark blue eyes flickered away. Josh drew a breath. ‘Well, we’ve been through here a few times. It’s a short cut to the top of the cliffs, but Dad told us we weren’t allowed to come through the wood, so ...’
He shrugged, his voice trailing away.
‘... So you know this area like the back of your hand,’ Janey supplied, giving him a brief smile and refusing even to think about the clifftop ahead. ‘Don’t panic, I’m not going to tell you off; come on, Josh, lead the way.’
They found Ella fifteen minutes later, lying in a small crumpled heap against a fallen tree.
Cold and extremely wet, her face was streaked with mud and tears.
So relieved she found it hard to breathe, Janey said unevenly, ‘Here you are then. We wondered where you’d got to.’
But for Josh, who had been fearing the worst and blaming himself, relief took another form.
Unable to control himself, he shouted, ‘How dare you run away! I didn’t mean what I said ...
How could you be so stupid!’
When Janey tried to help her to her feet however, Ella let out a piercing shriek. ‘I didn’t run away, I tripped over a blackberry branch and hurt my ankle ... ouch, it hurts!’
Carefully investigating the ankle, Janey saw that it was badly swollen but probably not broken. ‘It’s OK, sweetheart. Put your arms around my neck and let me lift you up.’
‘Stupid,’ repeated Josh, choking back fresh tears. ‘Serena’s mad as hell, and we called the police in case you’d been murdered.’
Ella, clinging to Janey, shouted, ‘Well I wasn’t murdered and I hate Serena anyway. I went to the shopand bought some sweets and on the way back ‘I saw a rabbit going along our secret path so I followed it, to give it some chocolate. But then I fell over and the rabbit ran off and it started raining. If you hadn’t told me to go away,’ she added, her voice rising to a piteous wail,
‘we could both have gone to the shop and I wouldn’t have been all on my own when I fell over.’
The Walton it wasn’t.
‘OK, OK,’ Janey said soothingly, struggling to get a secure grip on Ella and mentally bracing herself for the trek back through the woods. ‘Stop arguing, you two. Josh, you’ll have to go before me and hold the branches out of my way. And Ella’s very cold; why don’t you take off your oilskin and drape it round her shoulders?’
‘Because I’ll get wet.’
‘He’s a pig,’ sniffed Ella. ‘It’s all Josh’s fault anyway. I still hate him.’
‘And you’re a litter-bug,’ Josh retaliated, pointing an accusing finger at the Rolo wrapper and shreds of gold foil on the ground. ‘I’m going to tell the policeman you left that there. You’ll probably have to go to prison.’
The time had come to be firm. Janey, whose arms were aching already, said, ‘All right, that’s enough. Josh, pick up that sweet wrapper and stop arguing this minute.’
‘I’m c-cold,’ whimpered Ella, whose blond, raindrenched hair was plastered to her head.
‘And take off that oilskin. Your sister needs it more than you do.’
‘I thought you were nicer than Maxine.’ Obeying at the speed of mud, Josh gave her a sulky look. ‘But you aren’t.’
* * *
Maxine returned to the house at eight-thirty, by which time Tom Lacey had left, the local doctor had also been and gone and the only physical reminder of the afternoon’s events was a neat white pressure bandage encasing Ella’s left ankle, of which she was fast becoming inordinately proud.
‘What’s going on? Why’s Janey’s van parked outside?’
Looking puzzled, Maxine dropped her coat over the back of an armchair. Serena, hogging the sofa as usual, was apparently engrossed in a frantic game show on the television. An ancient skinny man, having evidently just won
