swim or to play in the river that bounded the town in case the cold water brought on an attack.
Charlie Platt had very quickly discovered Guy’s fear, both of the river and, even more importantly, of other people’s discovering how he felt. Predictably he had made use of it.
Guy knew he would never forget the day Charlie Platt had held him under the water for so long that Guy had really believed he was going to die, probably would have died if one of his bigger and older cousins hadn’t happened to come along, seen what was happening and treated Charlie Platt to the kind of rough justice that boys of that age could mete out to one another, blacking his eye, bruising his pride and putting an end to Guy’s torment.
That summer, Guy had taught himself to swim, and after Charlie had left the school Guy hadn’t come across him again until they were both adults, by which time Charlie was already drinking heavily and gaining something of an unsavoury reputation for himself.
And now Charlie was dead. Guy couldn’t feel surprised, nor sorry, and he certainly had no desire to accommodate the terse telephone instructions he had received via his answerphone from the young woman who had announced herself as Chrissie Oldham.
Who exactly was she? She had sounded too crisp and businesslike to be one of the steady stream of women who, at one time or another, had shared Charlie’s roof. She must have been employed to sort out the estate.
Guy’s frown deepened. One thing Charlie’s death had done was to focus his own mind on the fact that he was close to forty with little to show for his life other than a healthy bank balance and a small group of friends.
Avril, his next to eldest sister, had complained to him at Christmas that it was high time he got married and produced a family of his own, as she watched him playing with her own grandchildren. Grandchildren!! But then Avril was fifteen years his senior.
He had no plans to follow her advice, though. There was no way he could share his life, commit his life...his self to another person without loving her to the point where life without her would quite simply be an untenable option.
And he had only once come even close to feeling like that and she... He got up and walked across to the window, then stood staring out at the view in front of him.
He had moved to his present house six months earlier. In a prestigious part of town, it was one in a small close of similar properties originally built to house local members of the clergy. Ruth, Jenny’s aunt-in-law, lived there, three doors down; several highranking executives from the town’s largest corporate employer, Aarlston-Becker, owned adjacent properties.
There were those who, Guy suspected even now, felt that such a house was far too grand, far too good, for a mere Cooke, even one like himself who had gone from grammar school to university and from there to all the art capitals of Europe before returning home to set up in business.
He glanced at his watch. He still had another hour before he needed to leave for Charlie Platt’s house, but he had a good two hours’ worth of paperwork on his desk in front of him, he reminded himself sternly.
Chrissie groaned as she straightened up and her aching back muscles protested. She had spent virtually the whole of her time since arriving in Haslewich cleaning her late uncle’s small house, a task she could only relate, in terms of stress levels, to the mythical job of cleansing the Augean stables.
Every racing paper that Charlie had bought during his tenure in the house—and there had been many of them—instead of being thrown away had simply been tossed in an untidy pile on the spare-bedroom floor. This was the very room that Chrissie had planned to occupy during her hopefully brief stay. And that was just for starters. Letters, bills, in the main unpaid, junk mail, you name it—Uncle Charles had kept it.
Chrissie suspected they must have grave doubts about her at the local supermarket when she had very nearly cleaned them out of their supply of rolls of black plastic refuse sacks.
Her initial idea had been to burn the waste paper on a bonfire in the terraced cottage’s small back garden, but she had soon recognised that there was far too much of it for such easy disposal and instead she had been forced to apply to the local authority for their advice and assistance on its disposal.
This morning, a couple of friendly workmen plus an open lorry had arrived in the street to remove the sacks of paper she had prepared for them.
The cottage was one of a terrace of similar properties built into what had originally been one of the town’s boundary walls using, Chrissie suspected, stone ‘reclaimed’ from the walls themselves and the castle, which had been virtually destroyed during the Civil War.
It could, she admitted judiciously, with a little imagination and an awful lot of determined hard work, be turned into a very attractive home for a single person or a young childless couple.
Several of the other cottages in the street had already undergone or were undergoing this process and the shiny brightness of their painted front doors highlighted the air of shabby neglect that hallmarked her uncle’s cottage.
Now that she had emptied the small second bedroom, she did at least have somewhere to sleep. Her mother would have been grimly approving, no doubt, had she seen the fervour with which she had scrubbed and sanitized both the bathroom and kitchen before allowing herself to use them. She still had her reservations, though, about the wisdom of using the ancient fridge, which had formerly been home to various, thankfully unidentifiable, mouldy pieces of food.
But the worst ordeal of her visit still lay ahead of her and that was her appointment tomorrow with her late uncle’s solicitors.
His clothes she had already consigned to another much smaller collection of plastic liners ready for collection by a representative of a local charity.
The house had, as she and her parents had already guessed, revealed no material assets likely to provide enough money to help to settle his debts, with the exception of a rather attractive small yew desk.
When Chrissie had mentioned this item to her mother, she had said instantly that the desk had originally belonged to her grandmother, Chrissie’s great grandmother.
‘Don’t arrange for it to be sold, Chrissie,’ she had begged her daughter. ‘We’ll have it valued instead and I’ll buy it from the estate. I asked Charles what had happened to it after Mother died and he said he didn’t know.’ She had given a small sigh. ‘I suppose I ought to have guessed that he’d keep it for himself. I’m just glad that he didn’t actually sell it. I suppose it’s too much to hope that he kept Nan’s Staffordshire figures, as well?’
‘I’m sorry, Mum, but they’re definitely not here,’ Chrissie had told her, promising that she would have the desk appraised independently as well as by the dealer she had arranged to come and value the small, and she suspected, mainly worthless bits and pieces she had found round the house.
The desk certainly was a very attractive piece, all the more so now that she had cleaned and polished it; sturdily made it was, at the same time, very prettily feminine.
Chrissie glanced at her watch. The dealer she had been recommended to contact by her late uncle’s solicitors would be here any minute. Once he had checked over and removed the bits and pieces she had placed on one side along with all the cottage’s furniture—apart from the desk that was in the front room—she could arrange for the estate agent to view the cottage and put it on the market.
Tiredly she stretched her body but at least she had the satisfaction
