cab, Carole squinted up at the pub’s sign, which in the confusion of the day before she had failed to register. The painted animals had almost a cartoon quality, the hare close-up, bright-eyed and mischievous, looking over its shoulder at a straggling pack of black and white hounds, whose tongues lolled with the effort of pursuit. Their hunt was doomed to failure; there was no chance they were going to catch the hare.
Like so much about the Hare and Hounds, the sign was out of keeping in its rural setting. Its archness seemed to be saying, Yes, you really are in the country, but don’t worry, there’s nothing threatening or remote about it. You’re still safely in the hands of a slick metropolitan marketing operation.
Carole crossed to her Renault, neatly parked opposite the pub, where she had left it the afternoon before, and was surprised to see that a piece of cardboard had been shoved under the windscreen wiper. On it, written in shaky but forceful capitals, she read: ‘THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY. IF YOU’RE INTENDING TO DRINK TOO MUCH AND NEED A LIFT HOME, DON’T BRING YOUR CAR IN THE FIRST PLACE!!! OR IF YOU DO, LEAVE IT IN THE CAR PARK!!! THE NOISE FROM THE PUB IS BAD ENOUGH – PARKING HERE IS AN INSULT!!!’
Carole looked at the side of the road where she’d parked. There were no yellow lines, single or double. Nor were there any ‘NO PARKING’ signs in evidence. She hadn’t left the car obstructing a garage or gateway.
She decided that she’d come in in the middle of a long-standing argument between the Hare and Hounds and the owner of the cottage opposite. She looked for the name. An iron plaque with a white heron across the top identified it as Heron Cottage.
But of its resident, the writer of the note, there was no evidence. The windows, double-glazed leaded units, looked blindly out at the pub.
Carole wondered for a moment whether the owner might be the old lady who had looked so suspiciously into her car the afternoon before. The woman with the purple hat and the black and white spaniel. The note under the windscreen wiper would have been in character. But it needn’t have been the same person. Perhaps, thought Carole wryly, everyone in Weldisham is equally unwelcoming to visitors.
She got into the car and immediately felt the dampness of the seat beneath her. Have to dry out the upholstery when she got back to Fethering.
And then a rather unpleasant thought struck her. Whoever wrote the note may have been generalizing, knowing that a car left overnight outside Heron Cottage meant someone had drunk too much to get home safely. But a much likelier explanation was that Carole had been seen parking the car and going into the Hare and Hounds. And she’d been seen being driven away in Ted Crisp’s Bluebird.
In other words, someone had been watching her every movement.
She shivered, and not just from the dampness of her seat. She knew that not much went unobserved in Fethering, but that constant surveillance must be even worse in a tiny village. Everyone knew everyone else’s business.
In spite of the beauty of the day, Weldisham suddenly felt claustrophobic.
The rest of Carole’s Saturday passed uneventfully. She gave the car a thorough cleaning, inside and out. She took her Burberry to the dry-cleaner’s. Gulliver’s foot seemed to be giving him less pain, so she took him for the most extended walk he’d had since the accident. She didn’t dare let him off the lead, which he thought to be a gross breach of canine rights, but his foot seemed to cope. His recovery was on track, according to the time-scale given by the vet.
At around six in the evening, Carole for a moment contemplated going to the Crown and Anchor for a quick drink. But that was madness. She was Carole Seddon, for heaven’s sake. Fair enough to go out for a drink with Jude once in a while, but she wasn’t the kind of woman who went to a pub on her own.
She put the idea from her mind and settled down to an evening of watching serious, historical things on BBC2.
As well as being vague about where she was going and why, Jude had also been vague about when she was coming back, so Carole was totally surprised to see her friend on the doorstep early evening on the Sunday. Jude wasn’t dressed for outdoors. She wore a drifty cream shirt over a drifty long burgundy skirt, and had a sand-coloured drifty scarf around her neck. Her blonde hair had been piled up into a cottage loaf on top of her head. Her face had more colour than when she’d left, though whether that was from wind or sun was hard to say.
Above all, she looked welcome. There was something reassuring, calming, about her ample feminine contours. Her wide brown eyes prompted trust. Jude always seemed rooted, wherever she was, in touch with some unseen source of energy. In her right hand, characteristically, she held the neck of a wine bottle.
‘Carole, hi. I just got back.’
‘How are you, Jude?’
‘Great.’ She waved the wine bottle. ‘Wondered if you fancied sharing this?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Or we could go down the Crown and Anchor, if you’d prefer.’
It was tempting. But no, that sounded rather unhospitable. ‘Come in, Jude. Are you sure about the wine, because I’ve got some . . .’
‘No, no, let’s have this. It was given to me.’
‘Where you were staying?’
‘Yes.’
In the kitchen Carole busied herself finding corkscrew and glasses. Gulliver was winsomely pleased to see Jude. He slobbered all over her outstretched hand. ‘You’re in the wars, aren’t you? What’s he been doing to himself?’
‘Cut his paw on a tin can on the beach.’
‘Poor old boy. All right now?’
‘He’s on the mend. Come through to the fire.’
When they were sitting in the warm, with glasses in their hands, Carole decided it was time to elicit a few basic facts. ‘Now, you never told me why you were going away. Was it business or pleasure?’
Jude grinned, but there was a hint of pain in her voice as she replied, ‘Bit of each, I suppose.’
Carole pressed on. ‘So where is it you’ve been? Abroad?’
‘Mostly,’ said Jude with an air of finality. ‘What’s been going on round here? Or is it the usual old “Nothing ever happens in Fethering”?’
‘I haven’t been aware of much happening in Fethering, certainly. Though, according to the Fethering Observer, plans for a new entertainment complex on the seafront have just been turned down. That’s about the biggest news, I think.’
‘What does an “entertainment complex” mean? Slot machines, arcade games, that kind of stuff?’
‘Probably. Very un-Fethering, anyway. The residents here don’t want anything to change, ever. Most of them moved to Fethering because they were looking for a place where time stood still.’
Jude tossed her loose bundle of blonde hair. ‘That’s not why I moved here. And surely it’s not why you moved here?’
‘Well . . .’ Carole thought about it. ‘I think it probably is why I moved here in the first place. That illusion people
