Believing the Lie - Elizabeth George [237]
“I beg your pardon?” Freddie was the one to speak. He didn’t know George Cowley and while Manette knew him by sight, she’d never actually spoken to the man.
“He’s got Big Plans, he has,” Cowley said, using uppercase by means of his intonation. “We’re finished here, me an’ Dan. We take our sheep with us, and let him see how he likes it. And let him see his way to finding another farmer willing to rent the land and live in that hovel over there and pay through the nose for the pleasure. Him and his wife and family.”
Manette wondered if the cottage was actually large enough for a man, his wife, and a family as well, but she didn’t say anything. Just, “Is Tim here, Mr. Cowley? We’re looking for him.”
“Don’t know, do I?” George Cowley said. “Something wrong with that kid anyways. And the other’s an odd one, ’s well. Jumping on that trampoline for hours. Bloody glad, I am, to be gone from this place. You see that bollock licker, you tell him I said so. You tell him I don’t believe his nonsense for a bloody minute, no matter what he’s got up his sleeve.”
“Certainly. Will do,” Freddie said. He took Manette’s arm and steered her to the front door. Under his breath he said, “Best give him a very wide berth, hmm?”
Manette agreed. Clearly, the man was a bit off his nut. What on earth had he been talking about?
No one was at home in the old manor house, but Manette knew where a spare key was kept, beneath a lichen-covered concrete mushroom half-buried in the garden at the base of an old wisteria, leafless now with its massive trunk climbing towards the roof. Key in their possession, they entered. The door took them through a passage and into the kitchen, where everything was pin-neat and the old woodwork of the sagging cabinets had been polished to a glow. The place looked better than it had looked prior to Ian’s death. Clearly, Kaveh or someone else had been at work upon it.
This gave Manette a feeling of disquiet. She was of a mind that devastating grief should produce in someone an equal devastation of spirit, of the sort that precluded doing one’s house up as if in the expectation of visitors. But nothing was out of place in this room, not a single cobweb clung to the heavy oak ceiling beams, and even in the hidden area high above the old fireplace where meat had once hung to be smoked and preserved during long winters, it appeared that someone had used a mop and a cleaning agent on the smoky walls.
Freddie said, “Well, no one can claim he’s letting the place go to ruin, eh?” as he looked round.
Manette called out, “Tim? Are you here?”
This was mostly for effect, since she knew very well that even if Tim was present, he was hardly going to come leaping down the stairs or in from the fire house, open-armed in greeting. Nonetheless, they checked the place systematically as they went: The hallan was empty, the fire house was as well. Like the kitchen, every room into which they popped their heads was neat and clean. It all looked as it had when Ian had been alive, only better kept up, as if a photographer might be arriving at any moment to shoot pictures for a magazine article on Elizabethan buildings.
They went up the stairs. A building of this age would have hidey-holes aplenty, and they did their best to search them out. Freddie voiced his opinion that Tim was long gone and who could really blame him after what he’d been going through. But Manette wanted to make absolutely sure. She looked under beds and poked into wardrobes and even pressed on some of the ancient paneled walls to see if there were