Everett kicked one of the rear doors open and got out, helping Ardwyn after him. She was bleeding from a cut on her forehead and clutching a long cloth-wrapped object in her arms. Gar jumped out of the driver’s side and ran for the gate.
‘Who the hell taught you to drive?’ shouted Everett after him.
‘You!’ Gar shouted back.
‘Well, that’s the last bloody time!’
They scrambled through the hole in the fence and back to their own vehicle, which started up with a roar and disappeared into the labyrinth of small country lanes.
Sometime later the small pig-creature returned, and began to sniff around the Land Rover.
PART TWO
SOW THE SEEDS
1
DENNIE
DENNIE KEELING WOKE TO THE SOUND OF A LARGE dog whining.
Viggo was on his feet in the darkness beside her, his tail down, ears pricked forward, and nose within inches of the inside of the shed door; he was such a huge dog and the confines of her shed were so narrow that this put his head directly next to and above her own. She reached up and scrunched him at the back of the neck where he liked it.
‘Hey you,’ she murmured. ‘What’s your problem? Is it the Great Rabbit Uprising?’
Viggo licked her face with his great shovel of a tongue, but then resumed staring at the door. The noise he was making sounded pathetic for such a big lad.
‘Now that was just unnecessary.’ Dennie wiped the slobber off her cheek with one corner of the sleeping bag and batted about for her glasses which lay on a small shelf above her head. Putting them on, she peered at the luminous hands of her watch. It was a little after three in the morning. ‘Seriously?’
Viggo whined again and raised a paw to scratch at the door. Someone had once suggested to her that she install a dog-flap so that he could get in and out as he liked, but the Great Dane was so bloody big it would have been easier just to take the hinges off the side of the shed door and fix them to the top. Besides, her sleep was so thin these days that it was no great disturbance to let him out for his nightly manoeuvres. Dennie swung her legs out of her folding camp cot to sit up, and fumbled for the switch on the battery-powered lantern that sat beside her glasses. Then her hand froze, because Viggo wasn’t whining any more.
He’d started growling.
It was a low, loose muttering from deep down in his barrel of a chest which meant that he wasn’t scared – not yet – but there was something out there on the allotments that he wasn’t at all happy about. Something that wasn’t the usual kind of vermin.
She patted him again, the heavier kind to reassure him. ‘Good boy, Viggo, good boy,’ she whispered. ‘What is it, hey?’
Burglars, most likely. It wouldn’t be the first time that thieving little shitbags had decided to help themselves to the contents of her neighbours’ sheds. It would be unusual for February, though. Come spring, when folks were waking up their plots there might be some newly bought tools worth nicking, and then in autumn it wasn’t unknown for folks to have had entire shedloads of harvested produce stolen, but in Dennie’s experience your average thieving shitbag wasn’t too keen on going out in sub-zero temperatures in the early hours during the depths of winter.
It was none too warm in here either, now that she was sitting up, despite her thermal long johns. Fifteen years ago she’d insulated the shed with Styrofoam panels, carpeted it and double-glazed its one window with Perspex, and the combined body warmth of herself and Viggo meant that she didn’t have to mess around with heating, but outside of her sleeping bag it was chilly all the same. She reached for and found her down jacket and her trousers; she knew the location of every item in her shed by touch and didn’t actually need any light. Still, she was helped by a thin glaze of ambient town light that seeped between the curtains, picking out the tools hanging on the walls and the shelves cluttered with a lifetime’s bric-a-brac. She shuffled her feet into unlaced boots and picked up a two-foot length of broom-handle. Any thieving shitbag who wasn’t going to be deterred by a hundred and ten pounds of Great Dane certainly wasn’t going to be bothered by his sixty-five-year-old owner either, but it couldn’t hurt.
Viggo was still growling. Dennie shushed him and gritted her teeth against the flaring of old pain in her lower back and left hip as she stood up and clipped the leash to his collar. It was purely psychological; there was no way she could physically restrain him if he chose to go for whoever was out there. Or whatever is out there, she thought, and wondered where that thought had come from.
Dismissing it, Dennie unbolted the shed door and eased it open.
‘Where is it, hey boy?’ she whispered. ‘Show me.’
Viggo licked her hand and padded off, tugging her after him.
The other plots spread out around her in a jumbled shadow-patchwork of sheds, polytunnels, water butts, cold frames, fruit cages, and wired enclosures, their silhouetted shapes glittering with frost. Few of them were actively worked at this time of year, and many were blanketed in sheets of plastic to keep off the worst of the cold. Some were in better condition than others. There was the Pimbletts’ place, its big oblong planting beds made with old railway sleepers. There was the Watts’ place, all
