‘Don’t be silly. They’re not coming near you.’ She crouched to comfort him but Rudy didn’t respond with his usual friendly nose-nudge. Instead he lunged towards the Labradors, then barked, then hid behind her legs, as if he couldn’t work out what to do.
Lorna didn’t know what to do either; it panicked her. She scooped him up, tucking him into her coat. She could feel Rudy’s heart beating through his ribs, and the hot scared gasps of his doggy breath as he wriggled. His coat was so fine that the trembling in his muscles made it ripple, and even though she couldn’t understand why he was so scared when the dogs were miles away, a fierce urge to protect him overwhelmed her.
‘It’s fine, Rudy,’ she said, spinning on her heel. ‘We’ll go somewhere different.’
She marched back down the street until the dogs were out of sight, then set him down again outside a smart artisan cheese shop that definitely hadn’t been there seventeen years ago. He was heavier than he looked. The town was starting to wake up now, and a man inside the shop pointed to the sign, thinking she was waiting for him to open.
Lorna shook her head. A woman walked past on the other side of the street, thankfully without a dog, and the smell of grilling bacon drifted out of a café. Rudy was sniffing the air. Any moment now, she thought, a bicycle’s going to appear and it’ll be the same all over again. She didn’t want that. She didn’t want to see his fear again.
Lorna looked down at the dachshund, and he looked up at her.
‘You can’t go on like this, Rudy,’ she said. ‘We need to sort this out.’
He wagged his thin tail hopefully, then cowered as a car honked its horn, streets away.
The trouble was, she hadn’t the first clue how to help him and it ripped at her heart.
She sighed. ‘Come on, wee man,’ she said. ‘Let’s go home.’
The one advantage of their early start was that Lorna was in the gallery’s back office by ten, ready to tackle her monstrous to-do list. Rudy curled up on a pile of bubble wrap by her feet. His first walk, at least, was one thing ticked off it, Lorna thought, watching him snoring away happily, even if it had added another set of problems to the list.
Her main task of the day was to write a brilliantly persuasive letter to Joyce Rothery, convincing her to come out of retirement to relaunch the newly invigorated Maiden Gallery. There was very little information to be found on the internet about Joyce herself, but the passionate paintings made Lorna stare into her laptop, lost in their stories. How could paint on canvas make so many other pictures and emotions spring into her mind, she wondered, gazing at a moonlit row of terraced houses or a lone boat bobbing on a silvery sea. Paintings this good made her feel even more stupid for trying to paint herself. What a waste of time that Fine Art course had been – you could either do this, or you couldn’t.
Dear Mrs Rothery , she typed, checking that was how Mary had addressed her in the past. It was still Mrs Rothery. Clearly being the main point of contact for her work hadn’t loosened up the formality.
Forgive the intrusion, but I’ve recently taken over the management of the Maiden Gallery, and I would love to talk to you about the possibility of holding a retrospective of your work. I am a great admirer of your art, and understand that this year will be the thirtieth anniversary of your first solo exhibition …
Lorna wrote and rewrote the letter until she was happy she’d struck the right note of friendly professionalism, then printed it out on the headed paper, decided it would be better handwritten, copied it out again using an actual pen, and addressed the envelope according to Mary’s page in the desk diary.
Then she slipped out and dropped it in the red postbox immediately outside the gallery, went back into the office and started making notes on all the other artists she had to introduce herself to. There were, according to Mary’s files, nearly a hundred of them. Not all of them, Lorna hoped, were obsessed with barnyard animals and fruit.
She wasn’t expecting an immediate response from the notoriously reclusive Joyce, but by Friday there’d been no phone call, and no reply in the post. What Lorna did get, however, was a chirpy email from Calum Hardy from the council, in response to her own about Art Week. It was constructed almost entirely from jargon.
Calum was very keen to talk to her about her plans regarding Joyce Rothery, as well as her other, madder, suggestions. It was only when she got to the part of the email when he suggested she set up a lunch for the three of them that Lorna began to wonder if she’d perhaps overplayed her hand.
‘How long should I give Joyce to get in touch?’ Lorna asked Mary when they were eating chocolate chip cookies in the back office. ‘I’m worried this Calum is going to show up and want to see her.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t take it personally,’ said Mary. ‘The mayor wanted to give Joyce the freedom of Longhampton last year and she refused to answer a single communication about it. Not even when he went round. Banging on the door for ages, he was.’
‘You don’t think I said something to offend her?’ Had she somehow worked out that Lorna was another artist’s daughter? Had there been a rivalry she was unaware of?
‘No! You’re so polite. I’m sure you didn’t.’ Mary peered at a portfolio from the Art College, open by the side of the desk, and recoiled at the contents. ‘Ooh. Is that … what I think it is?’
‘Yes,’ said Lorna. She’d found a whole box of portfolios, sent in on spec and ignored, so far, by Mary. Lorna didn’t intend to ignore them, even if some of the subject matter was a bit … risqué. The gallery needed fresh blood. Maybe not quite as literally as this artist was proposing. ‘You know what? I’m going to go and see Mrs Rothery myself.’
‘What harm can it do?’ Mary replied, but she didn’t look convinced.
Chapter Four
For a dog who’d barely been inside a car for the first six years of his life, Rudy took to Lorna’s Fiat very enthusiastically. He was secured on the back seat in a new car harness, but it seemed to Lorna that he’d prefer to be behind the wheel, ideally honking the horn at passing dogs and giving them the Vs.
They’d driven about five miles out of town, and so far Rudy had barked at everything. The bigger the dog, the louder his bark. Lorna was starting to wonder if Betty had left her the medal in advance for the bravery she’d need to introduce him to polite society. If they could go everywhere by car, Lorna reasoned, Rudy would be fine. He was much bolder behind a windscreen than he was outside.
They’d left Much Yarley some way back, but the satnav was insisting that Lorna’s destination was right ahead. There was nothing right ahead. Just trees. And sheep. They’d passed a few farm buildings, but on both sides of the road all Lorna could see were the usual greenish fields and, ahead, an orchard of dwarf apple trees, the bare branches starkly outlined against the pale sky. She didn’t recognise it from her years in the town, but then their family had never been one for countryside picnics.
Lorna pulled into a lay-by, hoping that no one with a dog would walk past them and set Rudy off again.
‘So where’s the house?’ she said aloud. She’d learned that the sound of her voice seemed to calm him. ‘Is Joyce Rothery one of those back-to-the-land people who live in tents? Did she give the gallery a false address? Did her house get demolished to make way for cider apples?’
Lorna swivelled awkwardly to see if Rudy was hanging, rapt, on her words. He wasn’t: he had his paws up on the back seat and was eyeballing an approaching man and his dogs, another two Labradors that had appeared out of nowhere. They were black and identical. Rudy’s sturdy brown tube of a body was quivering with tension, then he let fly with a volley of hysterical yapping. She glanced in her rear-view mirror, and spotted a lane that she hadn’t seen before.
‘This really isn’t the answer,’ she told Rudy as she flung the car into a three-point-turn, ‘but it’ll do for now.’
Half a mile down the pot-holed lane, just as Lorna was beginning to fear for her suspension, a house appeared behind a row of trees. She sl
owed, and then pulled over on to the grass. There was no other car parked outside, and no sign of life behind the dark windows. Only the beautifully carved wooden sign hanging from the iron gate suggested that she’d accidentally found Rooks Hall, the home of Joyce Rothery.
Rooks Hall was small, much smaller than the name suggested, but with a sense of grandeur, sitting in a magnificently wild garden that lapped around it like a queen’s skirts. The thick black outer beams emphasised its higgledy-piggledy construction – there were no right angles anywhere, and if it hadn’t been standing for about three hundred years already, Lorna would have assumed it was on the verge of collapse. A climbing rose circled the door, skeletal and flowerless now, and a faint air of neglect hung about the place, but not in a careless way – more a sense of nature running riot in good soil, flourishing too fast for a gardener to keep up with, even in the depths of winter. Leaves were scattered over the path, and white snowdrops and the very earliest purple-streaked crocuses were nosing through the borders.
Lorna turned to the back seat. Rudy was gnawing his paws.
‘Stay there,’ she said, nerves fluttering in her own stomach. ‘I won’t be long. Just hide in the footwell if anything comes.’
Rudy gazed back at her from under his eyebrows, as if he’d never so much as open his mouth without permission. Then he gave a half-sigh, half-groan and curled himself into a ball on the back seat, hiding his nose under his paws.
Lorna shouldered her bag, and crossed the road to the front gate. Up close, she could see flakes of paint scabbing off the iron curlicues, and when she lifted the sneck, she had to shove hard to get in.
The front door was half bobbly glass, half green wood. It seemed too dark inside for anyone to paint, surely? The glass was almost black with lack of light, and further obscured by a cross series of stickers warning off door-to-door sellers, junk-mail distributors, Jehovah’s witnesses and carol singers.
Lorna blinked at the ‘carol singers’. If carol singers came this far out of town, they deserved some Quality Street at least.
She knocked again, and this time yapping erupted from inside the hall, but she couldn’t make out any movement. Someone was in, but if they were, they weren’t rushing to answer to the door.
Lorna bent down and lifted the letterbox. It was stiff and protected on the other side by a vicious spring, but she managed to push it open enough to see a grizzled Border terrier on the other side, bouncing up and down. There were a few letters scattered on the mat but the rest of the hall was in shadows, and she couldn’t see further.
‘Hello?’ She tried to make her voice sound friendly. To the dog, and anyone else who might be listening. ‘Hello, there? Anyone in?’
The Border terrier responded with a series of yaps so loud its whole body quivered. Then, without warning, it launched itself at the letterbox, white teeth bared. Lorna yanked back her hand as fast as she could and nearly toppled over.
The flap snapped shut and the dog carried on yelping indignantly.
She stood up and rubbed her hands together. This wasn’t going as planned. Maybe Joyce Rothery wasn’t in. Or maybe she didn’t answer the door, just like she didn’t answer her post. Lorna had, in the past, had days when she couldn’t face people either, and had refused to let anyone into her room. Until Jess had more or less barged the door down, because technically it was her room too.
I’ll leave a note, Lorna thought, and reached into her bag for her notebook.
She was trying to think how to start when suddenly, without warning, the letterbox snapped open again, from the other side, revealing four spiky fingers.
‘Who the hell are you?’ came a voice. It snapped like the letterbox.
Lorna jumped backwards, startled, dropping her book.
‘Hello,’ she said and then her mind went blank. The sense of expectation emanating from a few inches away was very disconcerting.
‘If that Kia’s sent you, you can bugger off,’ the voice went on. It was an elderly voice but it bristled with pluck, much like the Border terrier. ‘I’m fine . I’ve been feeding myself for nearly eighty years, and I don’t need any more patronising about drinking enough bloody tea, then about how often to go to the loo. So, off you toddle, young lady. Go and find some old dodderer who needs your help, because this old dodderer doesn’t.’
‘I’m not …’ Lorna started, but the letterbox had slammed shut again.
She stood up, awkwardly. Indistinct movement on the other side of the glass suggested that Mrs Rothery had concluded the conversation was ov-ah and was shuffling back down the hall.
Lorna was reluctant to admit Mary had been right but it was clear Joyce didn’t welcome visitors. However, she wasn’t Kia. She presumed Kia was the unlucky social worker assigned to keep an eye on Joyce. Lorna had met a few patronising social workers in the course of her volunteering, and a few had talked to the volunteers as if they were senile, never mind the old people. But Lorna wasn’t there to patronise Joyce – she was there to talk about her art.
She wobbled, then thought of the George Medal, sitting on her bedside table where she could see it every morning. Betty Dunlop wouldn’t put up with this. Betty would remind her that she’d more or less promised Calum Hardy that she’d deliver a Joyce Rothery retrospective and she’d better get on and jolly well deliver it.
She opened up the letterbox, steadying herself with her free hand. ‘I don’t know who Kia is,’ she called through into the hall. The air smelled of dust, and green plants. ‘My name’s Lorna Larkham. From the gallery? I wrote to you a few days ago – Mary Knowles suggested I come and talk to you about your work?’
There was a pause. The shuffling stopped.
‘They’re beautiful paintings,’ Lorna went on. ‘Very powerful.’
She held her breath, and crossed her fingers.
Nothing happened. Then, after a long moment, Joyce shouted, ‘I don’t know what you mean.’
‘Mary’s retired and I’ve taken over the gallery.’
Lorna paused, wondering if this was really the most professional way to go about it, yelling a business proposal through a letterbox. Still …
‘Could I come in, maybe? And have a chat?’ she shouted hopefully.
Joyce didn’t reply, and Lorna wondered if maybe she’d gone too far, but then there was a sudden cry, and a mad thunderclap of barking.
‘Bernard! Don’t get under my feet !’ And a thud like someone falling against the wall, the slither of books, something hard tumbling on to the floor.
‘Are you all right?’ Lorna called. ‘Mrs Rothery?’
There was no response.
She pushed the letterbox further open and tried to see inside, but the angle was wrong. She could just make out the old lady in the hall, and the side table, and the dog bouncing around her, barking. Had she slipped? Was she hurt?
‘Mrs Rothery? Hello? Can you let me in?’
There was a cough behind her. ‘Can I help you?’
Lorna spun round. A man was standing by the gate, and for a moment she wondered if it was the dog walker she’d passed earlier – but it wasn’t. This man was about her age, in a black jacket with some kind of slogan T-shirt underneath, and a messenger bag slung over his shoulder. There was a red Prius next to her car; she hadn’t heard it pull up.
‘Actually, yes, I’m rather worried about this lady here,’ she said. ‘I think she’s fallen. We should probably call someone?’
‘Yes, me!’ he said. ‘I’m her social worker. Keir Brownlow.’
He was holding out a hand to shake, but Lorna wasn’t sure this was the time for formal introductions, not with a potential broken hip situation unfolding a few feet away. She shook it uneasily. ‘I’m Lorna Larkham. Shouldn’t we get in there and check she’s all right?’ She indicated the door.
‘Oh! Yes, of course. Hello, Joyce! Be with you in a minute!’ he called in a clear, rather patronising voice, and started searching in his messenger bag. ‘I’m sorry I’m a bit late,’ he added, ‘but
I wasn’t sure you were coming today. I didn’t have any of your details, just that you might be calling round before lunch. I’ve been out all morning with one of Jackie’s clients who’s just been admitted to hospital with pneumonia. Sorry if you’ve been waiting. Please don’t put in a complaint, we’re understaffed!’
What? She frowned. ‘I’m not sure I’m who you think …’ Lorna began but her words were lost in the sound of crashing from inside.
She spun and dropped to her knees to look through the letterbox again. ‘Don’t try to move! Are you all right? Joyce?’
‘It’s Mrs Rothery !’
The old lady had fallen against the side table and – from the jarring, jangling noise – pulled her old-fashioned telephone over with her. The dog was going mad, barking and leaping about. Her skinny ankles were exposed under her slacks, and she looked vulnerable and suddenly much less ferocious.
Lorna stood up quickly. ‘We need to get in there. Have you got a key?’
‘No, I haven’t. She’s able to open the door herself, and she refuses to give us a spare set.’
‘Then how are we going to get in? She’s not moving!’
Keir stepped back and started sizing up the small bay window at the front, masked with a set of dark curtains.
‘Good luck with that ,’ said Lorna. She thought she could hear the old lady groaning, and the dog was hysterical, bouncing around like a rubber ball. Apart from anything else, she couldn’t listen to that whining for a lot longer. He sounded like a boiling kettle. ‘We’ll have to barge the door.’
Keir gazed at her, horrified, through his thick glasses. ‘I don’t think that’s the first option, surely?’
‘It is if she’s broken her hip!’
‘No, I’m sorry, I cannot get authorisation to break someone’s door, just like that. It’s criminal damage. We’ve been taken to court for less …’
Lorna squinted through the letterbox. Joyce was slumped on the floor, one arm out, the other clutching her leg. The Border terrier had stopped yapping to lick his mistress’s nose with worried tenderness. ‘Don’t worry, Mrs Rothery,’ she called. ‘We’re on the case. We won’t be a second.’