the receiver as if it were red-hot as she realised that she had just literally told the poor woman to ‘get on her bike’! What must poor Ella think of her?
It had been that particular message left on the answer-machine that had so unnerved her, of course, and she frowned as she rewound it, ready to play it back again, giving it her full attention now.
‘I tried your home number earlier and there was no reply,’ came the slightly reproving voice of the secretary of the amateur dramatics group Fin belonged to. ‘We have a catastrophe on our hands, darling,’ Delia continued heavily. ‘Gerald Dunn has thrown a wobbler and withdrawn from the production as our director! It’s just too bad of him at this stage of the proceedings,’ she complained waspishly. ‘But it means we shall have to call an emergency committee meeting Wednesday night—that’s tomorrow—to try and pull the thing back together. As a committee member, you have to be there, Fin.’ Again that autocratic edge entered the other woman’s voice. ‘Eight o’clock sharp, at my house.’ The message ended abruptly.
There had been no mistake; that was exactly what Fin had thought the message contained the first time she heard it!
There had been no one at home to take the call the previous evening because she had been out with Derek, and her mother and stepfather had been invited out to a dinner party.
And Derek wasn’t going to be at all pleased about the emergency committee meeting being called for tonight. Fin had been cast in the group’s latest play, and tonight had supposedly been one of the precious nights off from rehearsal for her, and Derek had intended taking her out for a meal. It would be no good suggesting they still go out for the meal after the meeting either, because if Gerald really had withdrawn from the play then they could be talking for hours about finding his replacement.
Just over three weeks before the play was due to go on at the local theatre and they had no director!
Fin had known Gerald wasn’t happy the last few weeks, having recently changed his job and feeling the strain of the uncertainty of that with a wife and baby at home to support; the added pressure of the responsibility for directing the play was obviously too much for him. And who could really blame him? Actually, they should all respect him for the fact that he wasn’t too proud to stand up and say he had made a mistake in taking on the job in the first place! It didn’t put the rest of the cast in a very good position, but at least it was honest.
Fin had begun to wish herself that she had never got involved with the production—Private Lives, one of Noël Coward’s highly entertaining dry-wit comedies; but, as Derek had complained repeatedly the last few weeks when she had been required to spend at least two, sometimes three evenings a week at the local village hall, rehearsing, a private life was something they didn’t have at the moment, and wouldn’t have until the play was over. She hardly dared tell him that as from next week those rehearsal nights increased to five nights a week and Sunday afternoons!
But at the moment Fin had something much more pressing to deal with than either Derek or the difficulties with the play; poor Ella was still ‘on her bike’ outside Rose Cottage, with a drunken stranger prostrate on the bed upstairs!
She switched on the answer-machine again and hurried out to the van parked outside, a new van now that business was so successful, much more reliable for getting around in, the old one having had a tendency to break down at the most inconvenient moments. Not that she managed to get out on jobs herself as much as she used to, finding that she was spending more and more time at the tiny office she rented in town, doing tedious paperwork that Derek, as her accountant, assured her had to be done for the efficient running of the business. Although she still had the dubious honour of walking the Siamese cat daily, its owner refusing to trust anyone else with it!
And so the unexpected trip out this morning, when she had thought it would be yet another two or three hours stuck behind her desk, was something of a treat for her. As long as she didn’t have to deal with a violent drunk once she got to the cottage!
Ella sat on the grey stone wall outside the picturesque cottage in this little Bedfordshire hamlet, although her bicycle was propped up against the wall beside her, just in case of a quick getaway being necessary, Fin guessed wryly.
The cottage looked peaceful enough from the outside; in fact, it looked lovely in the early-June sunshine, with a lot of the flowers in the garden in bloom, a wild rose trailing above the arched doorway and pretty pink roses blooming there; Fin couldn’t really take seriously the possibility that at any minute some drunken homicidal maniac was going to come lurching out of that green-painted door and attack them.
Ella obviously found it a little hard to believe too with hindsight, looking shamefaced as she climbed down off the wall to join Fin as she got out of the van. ‘Maybe I should just have woken him and—–’
‘No, no, you did the right thing in calling me,’ Fin told her with a reassuring smile, her short red curls gleaming in the sunshine, a sprinkling of freckles across her nose and cheeks, as she squinted up at the cottage.
She stood barely five feet in height even in her white track-shoes, was as slender as a teenager, and certainly didn’t look the twenty-one years she was, with her face bare of make-up and dressed in close-fitting jeans and a white T-shirt with a disparaging remark about mornings printed on its front.
‘Don’t worry,’ she laughed softly as she saw Ella’s look of uncertainty at her ability to deal with the ‘intruder’ with the disadvantage of her diminutive size, ‘I’ve taken a course in self-defence.’ It had been necessary when she’d first set up in business; some men had been mistaken about the type of ‘services’ she provided then, and hadn’t been prepared to take no for an answer! That didn’t happen very often nowadays, thank goodness, most people in the area knowing exactly what she was prepared to do and what she wasn’t. And that was one of the things she wasn’t!
‘I’ll come with you anyway,’ the older woman offered with a frown.
‘It really isn’t necessary,’ Fin told her with a dismissive laugh, but making no further protests when she saw that Ella was determined to accompany her, trailing behind Fin as she entered the low-beamed kitchen.
Everything looked as neat and tidy as usual in here, no porridge that was ‘too hot, too cold, or just right’, no chair that was ‘too hard, too soft, or just right’ either, and so Fin knew she had been right about the fairy-tales. Although she didn’t think Ella would appreciate her humour over the matter just now!
And Ella had been right about one thing: there was a man in the bed, Fin discovered when she looked in the nearest of the two bedrooms at the top of the stairs. It was Gail’s own bedroom, but there was indeed only one person in the bed. He was spread-eagled across the middle of it, and looked as if he had been so for some time, by the disarray of the duvet.
The room was in shadow, with the curtains drawn across the window, shutting out the bright sunshine, the man in the bed no more than an untidy lump beneath the duvet. A fact, Fin acknowledged with a frown, that must have been very disturbing for Ella when she had first arrived.
The man was big and tall—Fin could tell that much from the amount of space he took up in the bed—and his hair was thick and dark as it lay against the cream-coloured pillow-case. And his breathing was low and even, not quite a snore, as he slept. An alcohol-induced sleep, from the smell of whisky in the room and that empty bottle and glass on the floor, Fin guessed too.
Their entrance to the cottage hadn’t disturbed him in the least. And he was equally unaffected by their presence in the bedroom!
If
