pleaded.
'If it was, someone must have taken care of him.'
Ellen parked near Tovey's and walked back to the market, where she left the children at Stargrave's nearest equivalent to a bookshop – everything exchangeable and mostly second-hand with a dozen or so new shrinkwrapped best sellers – while she tracked down the news. Gossip blocked the aisles between displays of wide-eyed fish, of shoes like so many pricked-up ears, of Christmas cards and decorations and cheap toys which the season had caused to flourish. Beside the home brew stall Stan Elgin was saying to old Mr Westminster 'She'd no business having such a big bugger, she could never keep him under control.'
'He near dragged her under my wheels once, as if the streets weren't already full of sheep on two legs looking for a short cut to heaven.'
'What's happened?' Ellen said.
'Edna Dainty took a fall in your woods and froze to death.'
Ellen shook her head sadly. 'Where did they find her?' she asked, disliking herself for hoping it wasn't too close to the house.
'Up near the moors,' Stan Elgin said reassuringly. 'It looks as if her dog dragged her off the path.'
'But that's at least a mile. What could have made it run so far?'
Mr Westminster gave a bubbling cough and spat behind the stall. 'Like as not trying to escape a woman's prattling.'
'If you ask me,' Stan Elgin said, 'he was after something. Those dogs were bred to hunt. Deep down we're all still what we were before we were born.'
'I wouldn't ask except my little boy will want to know, but what happened to the dog?'
'They stuck a needle in him and carried him off to Richmond,' Mr Westminster said with relish.
'He'll be taken care of,' Stan Elgin said.
Ellen wasn't sure if he was saying that for Johnny's sake or hers. When she passed on the message Johnny cheered up at once, and Margaret was tactful enough not to express her dubiousness except in a momentary frown. As she bought next week's provisions, Ellen couldn't help wondering if anyone held her responsible for Edna Dainty's death. She hadn't known the woman well enough to mourn her except as an eccentric who had been part of the town, but the notion that Ellen might have revived some dislike of the Sterlings by doing her best to make the townsfolk welcome in the forest seemed capable of reducing her to tears.
'Whatever they think,' Ben said that night, 'they'd better keep their hands off. They've no right to touch a single tree.'
'I shouldn't think they would.'
'Better be sure,' he said, and must have realised that he seemed to be angry with her. 'Mrs Dainty didn't need us to lead her into the woods, she'd have gone where she wanted to go. At least now the place will be a bit quieter.'
Perhaps nobody except herself blamed Ellen. 'Nobody worth knowing,' Kate West and Ha trie Soulsby responded almost in chorus when she confided to them that she felt as if someone might do so. They wouldn't let her go until they were convinced she believed them – until she managed to conceal the anxiety which still hovered over her like the shadow of the forest, which every day brought closer to the house.
Ben must have sensed her unease. On Wednesday evening he said suddenly 'Would you rather I didn't go?'
Was she secretly nervous because he was going away for two nights when he'd never left her and the children alone before? 'Don't even think of it,' she said. 'You've got to tell the world that the Sterlings are coming for Christmas.'
Since he would leave before dawn, he was in bed before her. She found him asleep on his back, his fingers interwoven on the duvet. He looked as if he was meditating, his face almost symmetrical with calm. She climbed in beside him, burrowing her face into the angle between his neck and shoulder, telling herself that she wouldn't be nervous if he weren't going away so soon after Mrs Dainty's death, which was no reason for nervousness.
She slept, and wakened to find herself alone in bed. She felt as if she might have been roused by a goodbye kiss, though surely Ben's lips couldn't have left her forehead so cold. She padded to the window and saw that the car had gone. Perhaps that was its light beyond the moor, where lingering snow made the horizon glimmer, or was that a low star? The more she squinted at it, the less certain she became that the light was there or ever had been. 'Go carefully,' she murmured, wishing she had been awake to tell Ben so, and retreated into bed, where the chill kept her awake until dawn.
TWENTY-EIGHT
At first Ben thought he knew what was wrong with him: he was setting off for London before he was fully awake. He'd risen before he had planned to, having wakened from a dream which had seemed too large for his sleep to contain, but which he'd forgotten on the instant of waking. He'd crept through the sleeping house for coffee and a shower, only to fail to realise until he was towelling himself that he'd forgotten to turn on the hot tap. At least the cold shower ought to help him wake up, but no wonder Ellen and the children had shivered when he'd planted kisses on their foreheads. He'd found himself wishing that he didn't have to leave them, a wish which was momentarily so intense it felt like fear. It would do them no good if he cancelled his appointments, and perhaps the appointments were the source of his nervousness, which if it was true was ridiculous. He grabbed his overnight bag from the foot of the stairs and let himself out, hoping that the open air would clear his head.
It was just after four o'clock. The darkness seemed to be congealing icily about him. Behind the house the crowd of white still figures stood like a vanguard of the forest, the pale mass like an earthbound cloud which had yet to release its storm. When he climbed into the Volkswagen and switched on the headlamps, their beams looked as though the weight of the darkness was about to extinguish them. He released the handbrake and let the vehicle coast down the track so as not to waken the family, and started the engine when he came to the road. He drove under the bridge and onto the moor.
Chunks of the night flowered as the headlamp beams slid over them, patches of snow seemed to expand as the light found them. After most of an hour the glare of Leeds put out the stars. He drove through the empty streets, whose lamps made his eyes ache, and down to the motorway, where lorries bigger than he'd ever seen in daylight roared through the dark. From the sky the lights racing up and down the spine of England must look like nervous energy rendered visible, he thought, and then the need to concentrate on the traffic brought him down to earth.
By the time the sun wounded the horizon to his left, he felt as if the car was driving him. Certainly some compulsion was – not his appointments in London and Norwich. Perhaps his next tale was demanding to be told, which would explain why these two days seemed to be in his way. As daylight brought traffic swarming onto the motorway he was able to lose himself in driving, and once he reached the outskirts of London he found plenty to distract him: learner drivers leading slow processions along streets narrowed by parked lorries which dwarfed the shops they were stocking; pedestrians forced into the roadway by scaffolding and demolition; holes in the road planted with workmen in various stages of growth, no more than talkative heads protruding from one trench, men from the waist up sprouting from another. He lost his way at a diversion in Crick-lewood because of a burst water main, and it took him the best part of two hours to reach Soho, where he parked beneath the Firebrand building and emitted a yell of relief.
Despite the delay, he was almost an hour early for his first meeting. He walked through Soho – where there seemed to be fewer sex shops than in January but more handwritten notices beside doorways – to look for The Boy Who Caught The Snow-flakes in the bookshops on Charing Cross Road. He braced himself as he marched into Foyle's, but he wasn't prepared for the sight which greeted him. Every shop which sold children's books had his and Ellen's on display, and two of them had both The Boy Who Caught The Snowflakes and their other titles in the window.
He gazed at the second window display as lunchtime crowds hurried by. In Foyle's he'd wanted someone to buy the book while he was watching: he'd felt like a child, eager for his work to be appreciated. Now he wished Ellen and the children were here to see. Their delight would surely have communicated itself to him, but each time
