Her tears dried and her father returned to the fringes of her vision and the heart of her thoughts.
Harriet slowly paced across the parlour to the coffin.
She looked at her father for the first time and cried. Neighbours who had earlier come to pay their respects had said that he had looked peaceful, but to her he looked horribly altered and dead. Her mother had done her best to wash and disguise the cuts and wounds on his face, but nothing could hide the fact that when the seawater had emptied from his lungs last night, it had taken with it whatever had made him her father. The lifeless man before her, who bore a passing resemblance to him, was without a soul.
Harriet held his cold white hand and continued to sob.
Minutes passed and her tears gathered in small pools on the floor.
Harriet wondered about their future. Was her Ma permitted to keep running the Black Horse by herself? Or would they now need to sell it? Could they even sell it?
Her thoughts were squashed to the back of her mind when the street door suddenly opened. It was Christopher looking a little sheepish.
‘Hello, Hattie. I weren’t sure whether to knock or not—’
‘It be fine, Christopher,’ Harriet interjected, spinning round from the coffin.
An uncomfortable quietness lingered between them until Christopher spoke: ‘It were Mr Woods,’ he said. ‘The body in the cottage, I be meaning. Poor Mrs Woods is without home, husband or living. I don’t be a-knowing what will come of her. She ain’t got nobody left now.’
Harriet began to cry again. Her upset wasn’t particularly with Mrs Woods’s loss—she barely knew the woman—but for the whole sorry situation.
Christopher moved forwards and pulled Harriet into an embrace.
She held on tightly, immediately calming in his arms. She exhaled as he gently stroked the back of her hair.
‘Everything will work out, Hattie,’ Christopher breathed.
She lifted her head from his shoulder and smiled.
He leant in and kissed her softly, transmitting a quivering sensation from her lips, unexpectedly rippling throughout her whole body.
Chapter Thirteen
The silver BMW bumped along some kind of long dirt track, which caused the driver to curse as he swerved erratically to avoid the potholes. Aside from his occasional outburst of aggravation, the journey so far had been quite quiet. As they had accelerated away from the archive, Morton had quickly thought about the kinds of questions that Juliette and the police would ask him—assuming that he wasn’t being led to his death—when he got home. The first question that they would ask would be about the men who had captured him and he had already failed on that count. Thuggish men in jeans. Early thirties. That was his description of them so far. Then the police would ask where he was taken, so he tried to plot the journey in his mind as best he could, attempting to keep count of the turns and the approximate time spent on each stretch of road. But it was a hopeless task: they had been driving for a good half an hour now and, after leaving the dual carriageway, they had taken a multitude of turnings and roundabouts that had disorientated him completely.
The car slowed and Morton felt from the way that the two men either side of him were growing twitchy that they were now approaching their destination.
Sure enough, the car drew to a halt and the engine was turned off.
Morton tried to control his breathing. He knew that whatever was about to happen next relied on him remaining calm. The feeling that he had strips of barbed wire lining his stomach intensified as fear began to grip him.
The doors either side of him opened and the two men jumped out. A rush of warm air, laced with the faintest farmyard whiffs, blew into the car and Morton knew at once that they were somewhere in the countryside: he had been deliberately bundled off into the middle of nowhere.
‘Tell Kevin we’re here,’ one of the men called, before Morton became aware of his presence beside him in the car. ‘Out,’ he ordered.
Morton blindly shuffled across the back seat as best he could and tried to swivel his feet out onto the ground, but instead caught them on the bottom of the doorframe and tumbled out, unable as he was to break his fall. He landed awkwardly, his right shoulder taking the brunt of the impact. He winced and bit his lip to avoid crying out.
The men around him laughed and then one of them grabbed his right bicep and yanked him onto his feet. ‘Walk,’ he instructed, shoving Morton forwards.
Morton followed the sound of the men striding in front of him, listening intently for any clues that might help to determine his location. But for the crunching of gravel under the men’s marching feet and some distant birdsong, there were no other sounds.
The footfall of the men suddenly changed. They slowed and the surface on which they walked altered. It was now harder, quieter.
Then he realised that the temperature had dropped and the acoustics around him had also changed: he was now inside a building. There was a slight echo when one of the men coughed. It was a large building of some kind.
A solid hand pushed down on Morton’s painful right shoulder and he yelped out, as he was forced down into a chair.
‘Take it off,’ a husky voice ordered.
The hood was unceremoniously whipped from Morton’s head. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. The room that he was in—a barn—was dimly lit by the shards of sunlight that spiked through thin gaps in the walls. The four men who
