A Restless Evil Read Online Free Page B

is by way of being a little interest of mine!’ the vicar had said apologetically.
    Living in Lower Stovey, a man would need a few interests to pass a long evening. Markby had to confess it was rather more cut-off than he remembered it. Surely, there had been more people about when he’d come here many years ago? There had been children running home from the village school. Women had stood gossiping outside a shop. Someone had run a shoe and bridle-repair business from a dilapidated lean-to by his cottage. Perhaps the lean-to had finally fallen down. There was no sign of it now. Also gone were school, store and inevitably children, as young families moved out given the lack of the first two. It had left a deserted wasteland of a place. An inhabited wasteland of second homes and prosperous two-car commuter couples, yet a wasteland nevertheless.
    They had an agreement, he and Meredith. They’d find a house and then they’d get married. At the moment he had a Victorian villa in Bamford and she had an end-of-terrace cottage. They’d tried living together in his house and it hadn’t worked. She was adamant it wouldn’t work in her house, either. It was that much smaller than his. They’d fall over one another at every turn. Yes, clearly the answer was to look for a new
house, but where to find one both of them liked? So far they’d viewed five. Not many, Markby supposed. But enough to be discouraging. For that reason, he’d pinned his hopes on the old vicarage at Lower Stovey. First sight of it today had disposed of his sanguine expectations. He didn’t blame Meredith for not fancying it. He just wished he could quell the secret suspicion he harboured that she might have another reason other than the house’s obvious flaws. She might, just might, be playing for time.
    He’d told himself this thought was unworthy and should be dismissed out of hand. It was preposterous. And yet he knew that the idea of marriage made her nervous. It had taken long enough to get her to say yes. He sighed. All he wanted was to pop over to the local registry office and sign on the dotted line. She had at long last declared herself willing to do the same. They were held up simply because they couldn’t find a house. Or not one they wanted to live in.
    He jolted to a stop and peered through the windscreen. The road had run out. It shouldn’t have come as a shock. Back on the main highway, where the turning for Lower Stovey was marked, a large and prominently placed sign warned the traveller No Through Road . But the abruptness with which the surfaced road ended was still quite startling. Before him was a patch of rough grass and a gate. Beyond the gate lay the trees. In the silence and stillness, the years slipped away. Twenty, no, twenty-two, years ago. So long? Yet little had changed here. It wouldn’t take much to make the dark mass of trees seem scary, looming as it did over him, even without memory to colour his imagination. He remembered the first time he’d been here, at this very spot, and gazed at the same scene. The memory was
so sharp, crystal-clear, it did indeed seem like yesterday and the emotion he felt hadn’t changed. He had never then, nor ever since, been anywhere which had so much inclined him – the most practical and in some ways unimaginative of men – to believe in magic. Not the beneficent magic of fairy godmothers and glass slippers, but the dark magic of lost arts and old gods.
    The years between had passed with frightening speed. What on earth had possessed him to return to Lower Stovey? To view a possible property? Or the promptings of his sub-conscious, even a morbid curiosity or the old, fatal lure of unfinished business? When he’d seen the police car pass by on its way to the woods, his pulse had raced and he’d felt the thrill of the chase and something more, a twinge of something like anticipation, even hope. Hope that an old secret