The Devil's Feather - Minette Walters [92]
IT’S EASY to be wise after the event, but that’s to ignore the froth of adrenaline that spurs you on at the time. I had so much confidence in Jess and her mastiffs that I didn’t think we were behaving in a particularly reckless fashion. Despite everything she’d told me—about her panic attacks and the wrist-slitting episode—and my experience of her obvious alarm on the day I phoned her from the kitchen, I never thought of her as someone who was easily frightened. That was my role. It was Connie Burns who cowered in corners, not Jess Derbyshire.
The idiocy was, there was nothing to be afraid of. It was Peter surrounded by mastiffs, not MacKenzie, and predictably Jess gave him hell for scaring us. She called off the dogs and lambasted him for not phoning first to say he was coming. “I could have brought this down on your head,” she said furiously, brandishing the axe in front of him.
He looked equally furious in the light spilling out from the open back door and the kitchen window. “I would have done if I’d realized you were planning to set those blasted animals on me,” he said. “What’s got into them? They’ve never barked at me before. It’s bloody terrifying.”
“It’s supposed to be,” she retorted scathingly, “and you’ve never come sneaking up on them before. What do you want, anyway? It’s nearly eleven o’clock.”
He took several breaths to calm himself. “I was on my way home from a medical do in Weymouth, had no luck at the farm, saw Connie’s lights were still on and thought you were probably here.”
“You’d have frightened the wits out of her if I hadn’t been,” Jess snapped.
“Your Land Rover’s in the driveway. Where else would you be?” He turned to me. “I’m sorry about this, Connie. Would you rather I left?”
I shook my head.
He relaxed enough to smile. “To be honest, I could do with a double whisky after being savaged by that pack of brutes.”
I put a hand on Jess’s arm to forestall another tirade. “Let’s go back inside. I don’t have any whisky, I’m afraid, but I do have beer and wine. Have you had anything to eat?”
If I’d stopped to think about it, I’d have remembered how easy it was to be lulled into a sense of false security. Fear has such strange effects on the human body. It keeps you at a pitch of concentration while danger’s in front of you, then sends you into carefree mode afterwards. I think I was the first to laugh because Jess looked so disapproving when I offered her a glass of wine, but within a few minutes even she’d lightened up enough to smile. Hysteria was very close to the surface in all of us.
Tears came into Peter’s eyes when I tried to explain what the plan had been. “So let me get this straight. You were going to break my kneecaps while Jess sank an axe in my head? Or was it the other way round? I’m confused. Where do my goolies come into it?”
I snorted wine up my nose. “They get chopped off along with your dick.”
Laughter ripped out of him. “What with? The axe?” He turned a twinkling gaze on Jess. “What do you think I’ve got between my legs? An oak tree?”
The spark between them was unmistakable. It fizzed like an electric charge. Jess came as close to giggling as I’d ever seen her. “More like a Christmas tree,” she retorted. “The balls are for decoration only.”
Peter grinned at her. “You can’t chop men’s dicks off, Jess. It’s not the done thing at all.”
I tittered into my drink, happily playing gooseberry. I couldn’t tell how successful Peter’s courtship had been—they might never have got beyond the teasing stage, or they might have been rogering each other stupid every night—but they were comfortable to be around because I didn’t feel excluded. It reminded me of the relationship I’d had with Dan—easy, affectionate and all-embracing—and I wondered if he and I would ever be able to rekindle that closeness,