BLINDFOLD Read Online Free Page A

features; pleasant enough, if not quite film-star material. Now his sun-bleached thatch of long dark-blond hair framed a disaster area.
    The edge of the door had left him with an inch-long vertical cut rising from his left eyebrow, surrounded by a spectacular purple bruise. With a cut and swelling below his eye too, he looked like a failed title-fight contender. Blood had run and crusted blackly. With a handful of moistened cotton wool, he set to work.
    Half an hour later, bathed and shaved and feeling slightly more
    human, Gideon made himself toast and scrambled eggs, which he ate leaning against the Aga for warmth.
    Considered in the light of day, the events of the previous night still failed to make a lot of sense. He had eventually reached home just before four in the morning to find that, thankfully, the front door was open. He was mildly surprised that Curly hadn't taken the opportunity to make his life even more difficult, but quite possibly in this age of almost universal Yale locks, he'd taken it for granted that the door would lock itself. The heavy, old-fashioned key lay inside, on the floor near the wall, where it had fallen when Gideon had been attacked.
    The stout, oaken door seemed to have survived its rough treatment with no ill-effects and Gideon had closed it behind him and turned the key with something between a sigh of relief and a groan of exhaustion. On the hall table he'd found the tumbler containing the remains of the Cognac the tall man had offered 'him, and had swallowed it gratefully before giving the house a cursory check and heading for his bed.
    Now, making coffee after his late breakfast, it was hard to believe what had happened. It was almost as though, for two or three hours last night, he'd swapped lives with someone else. It just wasn't the sort of thing that happened to your average, fairly law-abiding person. His bruised face and shoulder, tender ribs and throbbing feet, though, said different. For the first time in his stay at the Gatehouse, Gideon wished he had some painkillers in the house.
    Collapsing into the one comfortable chair in the kitchen, he displaced his Abyssinian cat, who glared at him accusingly.
    `I'm sorry, Elsa. But my need is much greater than yours,' he told her.
    She refused to be mollified and after licking her beautiful lioncoloured coat, as if to indicate that human contact had dirtied it, sauntered gracefully out of the room.
    Gideon shrugged. `Suit yourself.'
    He liked the company of the cat; she was quiet and undemanding. No trouble when he was painting and a balm at times when he'd had a difficult day with someone's stressed-out horse or delinquent dog. She suited him.
    Shortly before one o'clock, Gideon rode the Norton, helmetless, up the gravel driveway that led from the Gatehouse to the Priory itself. He felt faintly silly as he turned under the stone archway into the stableyard after a journey of only two or three minutes, but it couldn't be helped. His normal preferred modes of transport for the short distance, namely his push bike or his own two feet, required rather too much pressure on his bruised soles for comfort.
    Graylings Priory was a sixteenth-century manor house that nestled in the Dorset countryside on the edge of the Cranborne Chase, near Tarrant Grayling. It took its name from a much earlier building that had presumably fallen foul of Henry VIII's reformatory zeal. Giles Barnngton-Carr, an old schoolfriend of Gideon's, had inherited it soon after his thirtieth birthday four years ago, when his parents were killed in a car crash.
    Gideon had seen little of Giles since leaving university some ten years before, until a chance meeting at Salisbury- races six months ago had thrown them together again. Gideon had been there discussing a possible future portrait commission with an owner, and on hearing that he was temporarily between lodgings, Giles had offered him the Gatehouse for as long as he needed.
    Now, as Gideon stepped off the bike and