Reginald Hill - Asking For The Moon

'She has to live there too.'

'Not when Peter's away she doesn't.'

'Oh, for God's sake," he snapped. 'She's my sister, so leave it alone.'

'And Peter's your cousin. And you're my husband. But what difference does that make to anything?' she yelled after him as he stumped out of the kitchen.

An hour later she took him a cup of coffee in his study.

The light was on above his draughtsman's drawing-board but he was sitting at his desk with his bird-watching journal. The writing was on the left-hand page. On the other he had sketched with a few deft strokes of a felt-tipped pen a pair of whitethroats in a sycamore tree. In the background loomed the bulk of Wear End House with its windows all shuttered.

She put the coffee down by the drawing.

'Are we going to Boris's tomorrow night?"

'I suppose so.'

'Will John be there?'

'He's got the face for it.'

'What do you mean?"

'Oh, leave it alone, Stella!'

'I think he deserves all our sympathy and support.'

'Last time you said it was the biggest stroke of luck he'd had!'

'I still think that!' she snapped. 'But the difference between thinking and saying is called civilized behaviour.'

'OK. OK. Let's drop it,' he answered moodily. 'I must try to get some work done or we'll have nothing to put down the waste-disposal unit.'

At the door she paused and said, 'I don't mean to nag, Geoff, but things…'

'Yes, yes. I know.'

'How's your leg this morning?'

'The same. And better.'

'How can that be?' she asked.

'Nothing changes,' he said, reaching for his coffee, 'but you learn to live with pain."

Arthur Lightfoot leaned on his hoe and watched the young woman in the telephone-box. Her Triumph Spitfire was parked with its nearside wheels on the -wedge of carefully tended grass which lay in front of the village war memorial. Lightfoot made no secret of his watching. Generations of his family had lived and laboured in Wearton and there was as little chance of a native turning from the close contemplation of a stranger as there was of the soldier on the memorial dropping his rifle.

Lightfoot was a man whose face had been weathered to a leathery mask beneath an unkempt stack of gingery hair. His deep-sunk eyes rarely blinked and his mouth gave little sign of being fitted for human speech. To age him between thirty and fifty would have been difficult.

What nature had done for the man, art had done for the woman. She had blonde hair, a good but not over emphatic figure and a face which happily confessed to twenty-five but left you guessing about thirty-five. It had a slightly preoccupied expression as she came out of the phone-box and took a couple of uncertain steps towards the car. Then, as if feeling Lightfoot's gaze upon her, she turned, looked back at him, and strode with sudden determination across the road.

'Excuse me,' she said, then, her eyes caught by a double row of staked dahlias close by the side wall of the old stone cottage, she exclaimed, 'Aren't they lovely! Such colours for a murky day.'

'Frost'll have 'em soon,' said Lightfoot.

'Are they… do you sell them?'

Lightfoot made a gesture which took in the full extent of his smallholding.

'I grow what I need,' he said. 'What I don't need, I sell.'

He did not look like a man who needed many dahlias, so the woman said, 'May I buy some?'

'Aye. Come in and take thy pick.'

He held open the rickety gate for her and she walked along the row of blooms pointing to her choices which he cut with a fearsome clasp knife taken from his pocket. When she reached the angle of the cottage she stopped and said, 'I see you had a fire.'

The ground behind the cottage was scorched and blackened and a pile of charred rubbish looking like the remnants of several outbuildings had been shovelled together alongside a wired pen which housed three pigs.

'Aye,' he said.

'Not too much damage, I hope,' she said, looking at the back of the cottage which also bore the mark of great heat. The window-frames looked as if they'd been recently replaced and reglazed.

'Enough. Nought that money won't mend. Are you done choosing?'

'I think so. Perhaps another pink one. They are gorgeous. Is it good soil?'

'Soil's what you make it,' he answered. 'Many a barrow-load of manure and many a barrowload of compost I've poured into this soil. See there!'

He pointed to where a broad pit which seemed to be full of decaying vegetable matter was sending coils of vapour into the dank autumn air.

'Hot as a curate's dreams in there,' he averred, watching her closely.

She glanced at him, amused by the odd expression.

'It doesn't look very appetizing,' she said. 'What's in it?'

'Everything,' he said. 'What pigs won't eat yon pit gobbles up. Dustmen get slim pickings from Arthur Lightfoot.'

His sudden enthusiasm made her uneasy and she was glad to hear the rickety gate shut behind her.

'That your car?' asked Lightfoot as she regained the footpath.

'Yes.'

'Ah.'

He didn't offer to say more so she asked, 'Could you tell me the way to a house called The Pines? I've got a vague idea, but I might as well hit it first time.'

'Swithenbank's house?'

That's right.'

'Them dahlias for Mrs Swithenbank?'

'As a matter of fact, they are.'

'She's not fond of dahlias, Mrs Swithenbank,' said Lightfoot. 'She says they're a wormy sort of flower.'

'I'm sorry for it,' said the woman, irritation in her voice now. 'Can you tell me where the house is or not?'

'Second turn left, second house on the left,' said Lightfoot.

'Thank you.'

When she reached the car, he called after her, 'Hey!'

She laid the flowers on the passenger seat before turning.

'Yes?'

'Mrs Swithenbank doesn't like people parking on her lawn either.'

Angrily she got into the car, bumped off the grass strip in front of the war memorial, and accelerated violently away.

Arthur Lightfoot watched her out of sight. Turning to his wheelbarrow, he tossed in a couple of weeds prior to pushing the barrow towards his compost pit and tipping the contents on to its steaming surface.

'Feeding time,' he said. 'Feeding time.'

… wake and sigh

And sleep to dream till day

Of the truth that gold can never buy.

Pascoe relaxed in a commodious chintz-covered armchair whose springs emitted distant sighs and clangings like an old ship rolling at its moorings on a still night. He looked, and felt, extremely comfortable, but the watchful eyes were triangulating the man in front of him.

Swithenbank was a slightly built man, almost small, but with an air of control and composure which created a greater sense of presence than another six inches might have done. He had black hair obviously carefully tended by a good barber. Sorry, hair stylist, corrected Pascoe, whose own hairdresser was very much a barber, still more a butcher according to Ellie, his wife. Ellie would also have used Swithenbank's clothes as the occasion of more unflattering comparisons. Pascoe was smart in an off-the-peg chain store kind of way, while there was something about the other man's thin-knit pale blue roll-collar sweater that proclaimed without the need of a label that it was an exclusive Italian design and cost forty-five pounds.

Show me a poor publisher and I'll show you a fool, as Dr Johnson may have, ought to have, said, thought Pascoe, forcing his attention from the exquisitely cut slacks back to the man's features. Broad forehead, long straight nose, thick but neatly trimmed black moustache, small, very white teeth, which glinted beneath the dark brush as the man made ready to speak.

'Let's not beat about the bush, Inspector,' said Swithenbank.

'What bush would that be?' enquired Pascoe politely.