her own home.
Lucy slowed down as she approached the cottage. It was set back from the main road in its tangled, untidy garden, surrounded by green fields. It should have looked a pleasant spot, but instead…
Lucy sighed as she surveyed it. Upstairs a window yawned emptily where apparently the distorted frame had fallen out in the winter storms. The black polythene which had been used to cover it did not present an attractive sight. The remainder of the window-frames were warped, what paint there was left on them blistered and flaking off. Grimy net curtains covered the downstairs windows. There was an ominous bulge in the wall at the side of the cottage where apparently there were some serious structural defects, and on the other side a lean-to of sorts had been constructed with a corrugated-iron roof, which was now rusting and even holed in places.
It was in there that Eric Barnes stored the coal for his fires, and he had complained to Lucy that the holes in the roof were making the coal almost too damp to use.
In the garden, overgrown shrubs and brambles almost but not quite concealed several rusting piles of rubbish, items which Eric Barnes claimed had been in the house when he had taken up occupation. The wooden gate fronting the lane was hanging off its hinges and rotting.
Her heart heavy, Lucy drove on. Even without its unpleasant tenant it would have been difficult to sell the cottage. Sell it! It would have been difficult to give it away in its present state, she admitted.
Her hands clenched on the steering-wheel. She tried to force herself to relax. She was fine-boned and slim, but recently friends had begun to comment that she was looking a little too drawn, a little too fragile.
That was the cost of her outward serenity, the fact that inwardly she worried and that that worrying cost her weight she could not afford to lose.
It was almost six o’clock and she realised that her detour had meant that she was going to have to rush to be ready when Tom came to pick her up.
She decided to take a short cut through the new business park.
The mayor had opened it less than a year ago, and she had to admit that it was well designed and laid out, or at least it would be once the newly planted trees started to mature.
Now, on a Saturday afternoon, it was relatively quiet. Most of the units were quite small; this was not a big industrial area, after all, and none of them was above three storeys in height.
One of the largest units was the complex taken up by Niall Cameron for his software company.
She had been a little surprised when Don had first told her about Niall Cameron. ‘Why on earth is he relocating down here?’ she had asked him.
‘Personal reasons,’ Don had told her. She presumed now, after listening to Verity, that those personal reasons must in some way concern the woman with whom he was living. Perhaps, since she was presently working in New York, her work took her abroad a good deal and they were reasonably close to the airport here, and Manchester Airport was expanding rapidly to provide most international flights.
Without being aware of what she was doing, she had slowed down slightly as she had approached the Cameron complex. A brand-new Discovery was parked outside it. Lucy grimaced to herself as she surveyed its gleaming paintwork.
It wouldn’t stay like that for very long if he actually moved into the farm. The lane to the farm was rutted and invariably muddy whenever they had any rain.
She stiffened as she saw a man emerge from the building and walk towards the Discovery. He was tall, bare-headed and in his mid-thirties, his dark hair lifting in the breeze. Those immaculately polished shoes wouldn’t last very long in that state either, she decided sardonically as she watched him. He was dressed in city-smart ‘casual’ clothes—a leather blouson jacket, immaculately pressed trousers, a fine-checked wool shirt—all very smart and all very expensive. Her top lip curled a little.
The right clothes, the right accent…Oh, yes, she could see why Verity was so impressed by him. He had stopped moving and he was, she realised with a small stab of disquiet, watching her. There was no reason why she should not be where she was, but for some reason she immediately panicked, putting the car into gear and almost stalling it as she did so, her face suddenly hot and flushed, her breath coming far too quickly.
She didn’t like him, she decided as she drove jerkily away.
She did not like him one tiny, little bit.
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