False Pretences Read Online Free Page B

the garden. At each window she paused, now looking out over the quiet street, and now across the back garden and up through the branches of the sycamore tree to the steeple of St Mary Abbot’s church. Hamilton had loved that view. She liked it, too.
    Backwards and forwards . . . The house was quiet around her. The youngsters went out; she heard the front door bang once and then again. Good. She didn’t want them coming in with cups of tea, asking if they could do anything to help. To and fro. The church clock marked the hours, and so did she.
    Would she sleep tonight? Perhaps. Perhaps not.
    Only, if she didn’t, she’d be good for nothing in the morning.
    Saturday morning
    â€˜Pretty around here,’ said Oliver, in the driving seat. ‘It’s what I think English countryside ought to look like.’
    â€˜A painting by Constable?’ said Bea. ‘Complete with broken-down cottage and poverty-stricken but happy peasants?’ She’d slept for a few hours, but her mood was still on the cusp of dangerous.
    Oliver grinned. ‘Define “peasant”.’
    â€˜Someone on social security?’
    Oliver laughed out loud. ‘Come off it. The peasants worked hard and received a wage and a tied cottage in return. By that definition I’m the modern peasant, and you’re my tight-fisted employer.’
    Zander, sitting in the back, didn’t smile. Lost in his own thoughts, he may not even have heard the exchange.
    Oliver had bullied Bea into getting a satnav, so he was threading his way through the country lanes without any difficulty. Substantial, brick-built stockbroker type houses flitted past the car windows. Tall beeches almost met shadowed lanes. There were passing places here and there for the occasional car, and horses at pasture. Down an escarpment they went, past an inn which looked popular. Up a steep, curling hill. They hung a sharp left by a church squatting among ancient yew trees and passed along a tree-lined lane to be met by a gate marked ‘private’.
    Zander would have got out to open the gate, but Oliver insisted it was his job as acting chauffeur. The gate swung open without a sound. The immaculate private drive now branched right and left. To the right you went through an archway which was decorated with a charming blue-faced clock – unfortunately not working – into a stable yard. There were no horses to be seen.
    To the left, you swished round to the front of a building which looked as if it might have started in Saxon times as a large farmhouse and thrown out a wing here and a wing there in subsequent generations. The roof had recently been re-tiled, and the lath and plaster walls had been painted white between silvery-grey oak timbers.
    There was a stunned silence in the car.
    Zander shook his head. ‘I thought it would be a small stately home with a portico, perhaps Georgian.’
    â€˜I imagined a Tudor building with barley-sugar chimneys,’ said Oliver, peering up at the uneven roofline.
    Bea got out of the car, and stretched. ‘Manor house, umpteen generations, the owner probably owned all the land around here at one time. I wonder if the doorbell works.’
    She told herself she could go through with this, of course she could, and put out her hand to steady herself on the oak front door with its original studs. The door was the genuine thing, accept no substitute.
    There was a heavy iron bell pull, which roused the neighbourhood. The sound seemed to echo from the surrounding hills. At that point she realized she had a ladder in her tights and had chosen the wrong shoes for a foray into the country. And of course, it was a bad hair day. Well, there was nothing to be done about her appearance now. And did it matter, anyway?
    â€˜No dogs,’ said Zander, at her elbow with the cardboard box, ‘or they’d be barking like mad.’
    The door opened. ‘You’re late.’
    A heavy-set woman