It wasn’t until she came back for Christmas that Kate had begun to understand what was really going on with Mum. By then it was too late.
Anyway. She shook her head, determined to put all that stuff back in its box. It was Friday and a weekend of Buntin’s regression beckoned. Why the hell not? She’d had enough fear and misery to last a lifetime. She deserved a break. So did Francis.
‘Kate!’ called out a gravelly Essex voice and Gary stepped towards her, arms wide, skin leathery, hair improbably highlighted. The snarky old bugger looked just the same and she gave him a hug, grinning.
‘Still mixing and fuckin’ mingling?’ she asked.
He pushed her away and looked her in the eyes, and that’s when she saw there were tears in his.
3
‘Oi! Look! It’s one of those fuckin’ twig-wavin’ weirdos!’
Lucas Henry sighed. It was hard to concentrate now the local Thick Short Plank Brigade had turned up. He’d been aware of the gang of teenagers for the last half hour, well before he laid eyes on them. You didn’t need to be a dowser to pick up the miasma of Lynx body spray, roll-ups and sexual desperation, even at twenty metres. He had hoped they would bugger off to nick beers from the local Co-op before he reached the end of the field, but they had not.
It was a warm Friday afternoon in late May, and he guessed they’d come over here right after school. There were five of them, hanging around a fallen tree close to the perimeter of the Stokeley Lodge Estate. If the gamekeeper found them, there would be shouting and rifle waving. It was private land.
‘What you lookin’ for?’ shouted another one of them.
He decided to pretend he was deaf. He really wasn’t in the mood for this. Taking the job had been a mistake. He should be working on his next art collection back in Wiltshire instead of mapping the subterranean levels of Lord and Lady Botwright’s extensive grounds in Norfolk. With the amount of rain they’d had over the past week, there was a short answer to how much water lay beneath their grassy acres. A fuckload, was the correct term, he believed. They would need to site their new guest lodges pretty carefully to avoid the structures sinking into ground. Creating decent foundations in the Fens was a nightmare and the astute project manager of their new venture had advised some extra help in locating the driest ground for building. Her ladyship had heard about Lucas Henry’s talent from a mutual friend, and had offered him stupid money. Stupid to turn it down, at any rate, even though he’d sworn off dowsing last November. It was too dangerous. And he’d more or less kept to his pledge. Trouble was, money was running out, and…
‘Oi! You deaf or summint?’
Lucas finally had to look up and let out another sigh as three of the group started capering around in front of him, holding out their hands in a mockery of his dowsing pose. Two of them had even been clever enough to pick up some twigs, which they were waving towards the shallow basin of turf they were dancing on. He slotted the long ends of his steel rods into his jeans pockets and let his hands drop to his sides. He normally used Sid, his blue glass pendulum, for dowsing, but there was a lot of ground to cover and he wasn’t being paid by the hour. Pausing every few steps to still Sid on his chain and take a fresh reading would have taken two or three times as long; rods were a quicker option. Sid still sat against his chest, though, directing from above like a bottle-stopper general.
‘I’d get off that patch if I were you,’ said Lucas.
The youths looked at each other, full of grins and uncertain swagger. They were bored and itching for a dust-up of some kind. The shortest one, with thick spiky brown hair and a stud in his eyebrow, waved his twigs aggressively. ‘If you can do it, we can do it. We can wave twigs as good as you. We might even find water! That what you’re after? You lookin’ for water?’
‘You might very well find water,’ said Lucas, mildly, pushing the straggly dark hair off his brow and fixing the youths with a sad smile. ‘If you don’t move across from where you’re standing.’
‘This is — what — dossing?’ sniggered Stud Brow. ‘Or tossing? Are you out here tossing?’
‘It’s called dowsing,’ said Lucas, feeling a vibration through the glass stopper. ‘Really… you need to move.’
‘Or what?’ said another youth, stepping in to join the other three. The vibration in Sid went up a pitch.
‘You’re in danger,’ said Lucas. ‘Seriously — move back towards the log if you don’t want to—’
‘We’re in danger? What? Are you gonna take us all on, bro?’ The second boy, his hoodie drawn in tight around his pale, acne-speckled forehead, started leaping about, making stabby hand movements towards the earth, as if he was a performing hip hop artist. Looking more like Scooby-Doo than Snoop Dog, he didn’t quite pull it off.
‘I’m not going to take any of you on,’ sighed Lucas, beginning to feel
