Read Online (1990) Sweet Heart by Peter James - Free Book Online Page B

and made him sit.
    ‘Are you Mrs Letters?’ she shouted above the terrier’s yapping.
    ‘Yes,’ the woman shouted back. She was a no-nonsense country type in stout brown shoes, tweed skirt and rib-stitched pullover. Short and plump, she had a ruddy, booze-veined blancmange of a face and straight, grey hair which was parted and brushed in a distinctly masculine style.
    ‘We’ve moved into the Mill. I’m Charley Witney.’
    ‘Ah, knew you were coming sometime this week.’ She glared at the dog and bellowed in a voice that could have stopped a battleship, ‘Peregrine!’ The dog was silent and she looked back at Charley. ‘Viola Letters. Can’t shake your hand, I’m afraid.’
    ‘I have a message from your husband.’
    The woman’s expression became distinctly hostile and Charley felt daunted. She pointed towards the valley. ‘I just met him and he asked me to tell you that he’s lost his watch and he’s going to be a bit late.’
    ‘My husband?’
    ‘In a tweed suit, with fishing tackle? Have I come to the right house?’
    ‘Said he’d lost his watch?’
    ‘Yes — I —’ Charley hesitated. The woman was more than hostile; she was ferocious. ‘He seemed rather confused. I think he may have hurt himself. He had a strip of elastoplast on his head.’
    The terrier launched into another spate of yapping and the woman turned abruptly and walked into the house, dragging the dog so its feet skidded over the paving slabs. She closed the front door behind her with a slam.

Chapter Ten
    The gardener turned up in the afternoon, small and chirpy with a hare lip, and tugged the peak of his cap respectfully.
    ‘I’m Gideon,’ he said with an adenoidal twang, ‘like in the Bible.’
    Charley smiled at him. ‘You’ve done a good job with the hedge.’
    ‘I wanted it to be nice for when you arrived,’ he said, obviously pleased with the compliment. ‘The old lady, she never wanted nothing done.’
    ‘Why not?’
    ‘I dunno; never saw her, ’cept rarely. She left me the money for cuttin’ the hedge and the grass out the back door.’
    ‘Didn’t she ever go out?’
    ‘Nope. Had everything delivered.’
    ‘Why did she do that?’
    ‘She were what you call a recluse. Mind, I’m not sorry. I know I’m not Robert Redford, but she really didn’t look that great.’ He glanced at the house. ‘Is there’s any jobs in the garden you want doing?’
    There were plenty.
    They walked around together, and agreed on a plot between the hen run and the paddock fence for the kitchen garden. The soil was moist and sandy, he told her, pretty well everything would grow. They could buyspring cabbage and broccoli plants, and he had some leeks to spare. They would be eating their own vegetables before the winter was over, he said.
    She bluffed her way through a discussion about hens, helped by a book she had read called
Poultry Keeping Today
which she’d borrowed from Wandsworth library. Gideon knew where to buy good layers, but the run needed fixing first to make it fox-proof and he’d get on with it right away. He charged three pounds an hour and she paid him for the work he had done on the hedge. Eight hours, which sounded about right.
    She tried to get him to tell her more about Nancy Delvine, but he did not seem to want to talk about her. He’d only seen the woman twice in ten years, and that was enough. Why, he would not say.
    The first call Charley received, after the engineer had tested the equipment and gone, was from Laura.
    The engineer had been right about the Aga. It had heated up and the smoke had gone. The musty smells of the kitchen faded a bit and the dominant one now was from the cartons of the Chinese takeway in the rubbish sack. She had spent the last three hours opening crates, unpacking and moving furniture around. It would have to be moved again for the decorators and the carpets, but at least it was beginning to look vaguely like home.
    ‘The flowers are wonderful,’ Charley said, caressing