He tried the front door and found it open. He recalled coming in here to pay for the tea. If you didn't notice the low lintel you paid with a bruised head as well.
Ahead was a narrow hallway with a kitchen off to the left. The cat trotted confidently in there.
'Anyone about?'
He was beginning to get that Marie
He called out again.
The silence was not helping his Monday gloom.
Rather than venturing into the private rooms beyond, he returned outside and explored around the back, thinking possibly he had heard some sounds from that direction.
The source was revealed. He looked over a low wall at a large sow. It eyed him and seemed almost to smile.
Then a voice behind him said, 'Lift me up, please.'
A small girl had come from nowhere, perhaps six years old, with fair hair in a fringe and dressed in a pink T- shirt and black Lycra shorts. As small girls go, she was not the most prepossessing. Pale, snub-nosed and gap- toothed. And barefoot.
He asked, 'Who are you?'
'Winnie.'
'Do you live here, Winnie?'
She shook her head.
'Just visiting?'
A nod. 'I want to see the pig.'
'It's here.'
'I can't see over the wall.'
He knew better than to lift up a child he didn't know, natural as it may have seemed. 'I can fix that,' he said, spotting a blue plastic milk crate. 'You can stand on that.'
'I'll fetch it.'
She was back with the crate very quickly and placed it in position herself and stepped up. 'I can see now.'
'Good.'
'I call her Mrs Piggy.'
'That's not a bad name,' he said. Talking seriously to a child was a rare treat.
'She can't be Miss Piggy,' Winnie said in a way that begged a question, and he wondered if he was about to be told something intimate, with the candour you must expect from small children.
'Why is that?'
'Get real. Miss Piggy is a Muppet.'
'So she is. And where's your Mummy this morning?'
'Shopping, I 'spect. Look at all her titties. Why's she got so many?'
He should have been expecting something like this. 'Those are for all the piglets. When she has a litter-that's baby pigs- they come in big numbers. Each one needs a place to suck.'
'Miss Piggy doesn't have all those titties.'
'Get real,' he said. 'Miss Piggy is a Muppet.'
She almost fell off the crate laughing.
If she were ours, he thought, mine and Steph's, we wouldn't leave her and go shopping. Some people didn't deserve children. 'Are you staying in the farmhouse?'
She shook her head, still watching the sow.
'Where, then?'
'Van.'
He'd seen a tractor and some farm machinery where he'd parked the car. No van.
'Over there,' said Winnie, gesturing in the general direction of the fields, but without taking her eyes off the sow.
He remembered seeing a caravan with a tent attachment on the far side of the field as he drove in.
She turned and jumped off the crate. She'd seen enough of the sow. 'What shall we do next?'
Such confidence. He said, 'I was about to leave. Aren't there any grown-ups about?'
'Don't know. Do you want to see the Muppets?'
'Watch TV, you mean? I'd really like to, but I don't have time today.'
'Not telly Muppets, stupid. Real ones,' said Winnie. She gave him one of those challenging looks children have for adults, daring him to disbelieve.
'Some of your toys?' This was not a good idea.
'No, silly. I'll show you.' She walked a few steps and looked round to see if he was following.
He took a last look at the scene. The whole yard was still deserted. Even the cat had gone. He let Winnie lead him away from the farm. Not, he discovered with some relief, in the direction of the caravan, but towards a spinney, following the mill stream.
The child ran ahead, obviously familiar with the path. Diamond had to step out briskly. Butterflies swooped and soared and a startled pheasant scuttled out of the cover and crossed his path.
The water mill came into view, just. It was well camouflaged by creepers, a building long since fallen into disuse. Once it would have been used as a fulling mill, making the local cloth stronger and more compact. Winnie ignored it and ran on.
She stopped finally at another ivy-clad structure that must have been associated once with the production of wool and cloth. The miller's cottage maybe. This building was better hidden than the mill, but Winnie was familiar with it from the way she ran confidently to a window and stood on tiptoe to look in.
'See?'
He caught up with her. Surprisingly, the window was intact. In fact, it must have been cleaned recently. The interior was dark, and he screwed up his eyes to make out anything at all. Then he felt a gathering of tension as he saw what so excited the little girl. The place was fitted out like a coat check, with stands and hangers, except that instead of coats suspended from the hangers, there were weird and mis-shapen figures with heads hanging grotesquely and limp, shrunken bodies.
His first impulse was to drag the child away from the ghoulish spectacle. But she was clearly exhilarated by it, and he saw that she had been right, for these were puppets with the faces of people, animals and fantasy creatures. Some were lifesize, some quite small. Further in, were wood puppets on strings.
Winnie was singing the theme music from the Muppet Show, swaying rhythmically.
'Who does this belong to?' Diamond asked, knowing the answer.
To the same tune, she sang, 'Don't know… Don't know. Don't know.'
'Have you seen the man who comes here?'
She didn't answer.
He walked around the building, trying to see in, but the other windows were boarded, the door fastened with a padlock. 'Well, you've solved a mystery, Winnie,' he said when he came back to her. 'I didn't need a grown-up after all.'
'Do you want to go in?' she asked, looking up at him with her steady brown eyes.
'In here?'
'He keeps the key under that thing.'
A boot scraper made of bristles mounted in wood. He looked underneath and found she was right.
The key fitted the padlock.
Winnie pushed past him when he drew the door open. 'Hold on,' he warned. 'We don't know what's in there.'
But Winnie knew. She was already inspecting the puppets, skipping up and down the racks, lifting faces and pulling strings, humming her tune again.
