Midnight is a Lonely Place Read Online Free

centimetres thick.

IV 
    Diana Lindsey’s plump figure was swathed in a thick pair of trousers, an anorak and a vast lambswool shawl as she stood in the doorway of Redall Cottage watching her eldest son lighting the fire. She was a small fair-haired woman, pretty, with light green eyes and reddened, work-worn hands.
    ‘Hurry up. Lunch will be ready soon, Greg. I’ve already wasted enough of this morning with all your fuss.’ She cast a professional glance around the small living room. Watery sunlight poured through the window, illuminating the bright rag rugs on the floor and the small sofa and chair which had been pulled up around the fire. She was pleased with the room. They had only had twenty-four hours to tidy the place, to move Greg’s belongings out of it and to replace them with a few pieces of respectable furniture: a table and two chairs for the kitchen; a small Victorian nursing chair for the bedroom where the double bed had been the only fixture; sheets, towels, a box of basic groceries – Bill’s idea and well beyond the landlord’s brief, but she had agreed with him that the place would be cold and lonely enough without finding there was no food or coffee in the cupboards and no shops for miles, and those there were, not open until Monday morning. The final touch had been to light the woodburner which was settling now to a steady roar, and fill a vase with winter jasmine for the kitchen table.
    Greg latched the burner’s doors and stood up. His burly presence filled the small room and he had to bend his head beneath the ceiling beams. ‘Right. Satisfied now, Ma? Lady Muck will be comfortable as a bug in a turd here.’
    ‘Don’t be vulgar, Greg.’ Her reproach was automatic. Bored. She went through into the kitchen and had a final look round there, too. The pots and pans and plates were almost unused – Greg had never bothered to cook anything except coffee as far as she could tell. The knives and forks and spoons she had brought over from the farmhouse. ‘Right. Let’s get back. Bill phoned to say they would probably be here by tea time. He wanted her to settle in before it got dark.’
    ‘How wise.’ Greg pulled open the front door. Behind them the flames in the woodburner dipped and flared and steadied behind the blackening glass of the doors. ‘Shall I call Allie?’
    Leaving his mother to head for the Land Rover parked at the end of the rutted track which led through the half mile or so of bleak woods separating the cottage from Redall Farmhouse, he turned and walked around the side of the cottage. The small, timber-framed building, painted a soft pink, nestled in a half-moon of trees. Behind it, short rabbit-cropped turf formed an informal lawn which straggled towards the sand and shingle spit separating the estuary of the River Storwell from the beach and the cold waves of the North Sea. It was a windy, exposed site, even today when the sun was shining fitfully from behind the broken cloud.
    ‘Allie!’ Greg cupped his hands around his mouth and bellowed for his sister. As his mother opened the door of the Land Rover and climbed in, he disappeared around to the far side of the cottage into the teeth of the wind.
    Alison Lindsey, fifteen years old, her blonde hair tightly caught by a rubber band into a pony tail tucked into the neck of her yellow windcheater, was crouching in the lee of one of the shingle and sand dunes which stood between the cottage and the sea. She glanced up as her brother appeared and raised her hand, the wind whipping tendrils of hair into her eyes.
    ‘What have you found?’ He jumped down the small sandy cliff to stand beside her. Out of the wind it was suddenly very quiet, almost warm in the trapped sunlight.
    ‘Look. The sea washed the sand away here. It must have happened at high tide.’ She had been scrabbling at the sand; her fingers were caked with it. He could see where she had caught her nail. A small streak of blood mingled with the golden red grains