She was on her way to the door when Andrew said, “You haven’t come across a folded paper with a black seal on it, have you?”
“No,” Stashe said. “Important, is it?”
“Very. I think,” Andrew said. “If you do find it, let me see it at once.”
“Right,” said Stashe. “Priority for the black seal then.”
“Oh, and Stashe,” Andrew said. Stashe stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “Do you know anything about counterparts here in Melstone?”
“Not really,” Stashe said. “But you’ll find a lot of your grandfather’s memos are about counterparts. He seems to have been in a major row about them with Mr Brown down at the Manor. To do with power, it looks like. Dad might know. Ask him.”
“I will,” Andrew said. “Is he likely to be coming here today?” But he found he had said this to the closed door after Stashe had gone. He sighed and clicked off the screen saver. Work.
The phone rang.
The caller was his lawyer’s secretary explaining all over again that Mrs Barrington-Stock was away and would contact him as soon as she came back next month.
“And what good is next month?” Andrew asked the air. “I want Mr Brown put in his place now.” He turned back to his computer and found that the screen saver had come on again. He was just about to click it off once more, when Mrs Stock put her face round the door.
“That woman’s back,” she said. “At the front door this time, wanting you.”
“What woman?” said Andrew.
“The one that prowled yesterday,” said Mrs Stock. “Changed her hairstyle but she still looks the same. Thinks I don’t know her by her walk, doesn’t she? I told her to wait outside. I don’t trust her.”
Sighing, Andrew got up and went to the front door.
The fat woman standing on the doorstep glowered at him. She was wearing what was, possibly, a uniform. But the main thing Andrew noticed about her was that she was remarkably like Mrs Stock’s sister Trixie, that is if you imagined Trixie hot and bad-tempered and smelling quite strongly of armpits.
“Are you in charge here?” she demanded.
“I own this house, yes,” Andrew said cautiously. Without thinking, he took his glasses off and cleaned them. The woman looked even more like Trixie to his naked eyes, right down to her blonde hairstyle. Her face was the same shape and so were her prominent blue eyes, but her mouth was pursed with bad temper and there were lines of ill nature all over her fat face. The word “counterpart” came into Andrew’s mind and made him very cautious indeed. “What can I do for you?” he asked her politely.
The woman snatched a card out of her breast pocket, waved it quickly at him and put it away again before Andrew had a chance to see what the card was. “Mabel Brown,” she announced. “I’m looking for Andrew Craig. I’m his social worker.”
A social worker would surely have Aidan’s name right, Andrew thought — if it was Aidan she was after. And did social workers wear a uniform? This uniform was old and tight. The almost official-looking jacket must have taken major traction to button up. It strained over Mabel Brown’s massive bosom.
“There is no one called Andrew Craig in this house,” Andrew told her truthfully. “I think you must have come to the wrong address.”
Mabel Brown lowered her blonde eyebrows and half-shut her bulging eyes. The result was a poisonous glare, full of anger and suspicion. She kept the glower on Andrew while she hauled at a tight lower pocket and fetched out a crumpled notepad. She turned the glower on one of its pages. “Alan Craike,” she read out. “Adrian Gaynes, Evan Keen, Abel Crane, Ethan Gay. He could have given any one of those names. Is he here or not?”
“No,” Andrew said. “No one by any of those names is here. My name is Andrew Hope and I think you must have confused someone else with me. As you can see, I have no need for a social worker. You have come to the wrong house, madam. Good morning.”
He shut the front door crisply in Mabel Brown’s face and stood there cleaning his glasses all over again, while he waited for signs that the woman was going away. He heard muttering on the other side of the door. It sounded like swearing. At length, after what felt like ten minutes, he heard heavy footsteps crunching away down the drive. Andrew dodged to the narrow hall window to be sure. And there, to his relief, was the large back view of Mabel Brown plodding away from him, looking as if her feet were on either side of a wide plank.
“Phew!” Andrew said, putting his glasses on again as he went back to his study.
“Who was that?” Stashe asked brightly, dodging out of the box room full of curiosity.
“Someone looking for Aidan — I think,” Andrew told her. “She said she was his social worker, but I don’t think she was. I shouldn’t think they trust people that unpleasant to look after children. At least, I hope they don’t. And she couldn’t even get Aidan’s name right.”
He went into his study, where his computer gave a whining sort of sigh and went blank.
“Stashe!” he shouted.
Stashe came and had a look. She leaned over Andrew — which he found very pleasant — and tried this, then that. Eventually the screen saver reappeared. “At last!” said Stashe. “I don’t know — it seems to have had some sort of power surge.”
“That woman—!” Andrew said.
They stared at one another, almost nose to nose. Andrew had to struggle not to grab Stashe and kiss her.
“Then she definitely wasn’t a social worker,” Stashe said. “With the amount of protection your grandfather had round this place, it would take someone hostile a huge surge of power to even get inside to the driveway. Put some more wards up.” Then, to Andrew’s disappointment, she went away.
Andrew got back to work, trying not to think of Stashe. Mabel Brown went out of his mind so completely that he did not even try to remember how to put up wards. He had dim memories of Jocelyn telling him more than once how this was done, but he was too busy with other thoughts even to try to recall what his grandfather had said.
A couple of hours later, Mrs Stock put her head round the door again.
“It’s a policewoman now,” she said. “And me in the middle of cooking your lunch. Something’s going to burn if you don’t get rid of her quickly.”
The policewoman was short, stout and grim. The hair under her cap was brown and so were her eyes. “Mr Hope?” she said. “WPC92. I’m looking for a twelve-year-old boy called Adam Gray. Five foot two, brown hair, wears glasses, no other distinguishing marks. We have reason to believe he came to this house.”
Andrew snatched off his glasses. The face of WPC92 blurred. So did her uniform. It became much too tight for her and lost some of its policewomanishness. Inside the blur of her face, Andrew could just pick out a shape that reminded him of Trixie. He was almost certain that Mabel Brown and WPC92 were the same person. There was even the same smell of armpits.
“No one called Adam Gray has ever come to this house,” he said.
“Are you sure?” the policewoman demanded. “It’s against the law to harbour a criminal.”
“Criminal?” Andrew said. “What crime?”
“The boy absconded from London with a wallet containing at least one hundred pounds,” WPC92 replied, in a toneless, official voice.
Stashe spoke up suddenly from behind Andrew. “What are you talking about? We don’t harbour criminals here. Your computer’s gone down again,” she added significantly to Andrew.
“And I’ll thank you to get off my clean doorstep and stop pestering the professor!” Mrs Stock said. She came up on the other side of Andrew, swinging a large iron ladle.
WPC92 winced back from the ladle. “You’ll be in trouble,” she said, “threatening a member of the police force in pursuance of her duty.”
Stashe said sweetly, “Then if you go away, she won’t need to threaten you, will she?”
Large boots clumped noisily from either side of the house. Shaun loomed up from the yard, saying, “Is it lunch yet, Auntie? Something
wrong?”
And from the garden side of the house came Mr Stock, walking much more loudly than usual. “What’s going on here? Need some help, Professor?”
“I think so,” Andrew said. “This person claims to be a policewoman, but I’m pretty sure she’s a fraud.”
“Now that’s against the law,” Mr Stock said. “Impersonating the police.”
The blurred face of WPC92 turned a fierce red. “I am here,” she intoned, “to arrest Adrian Cork for the theft of a wallet containing an estimated hundred pounds.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, woman!” said Mrs Stock. “Don’t you use that toneless official voice at me! It won’t make you any more real.”
“Or your nonsensical accusation!” added Stashe.
Shaun’s face wrinkled under his hairstyle as he tried to make sense of this. “I know what,” he said, unwrinkling. “I can run her off for you, Professor.”
“You dare!” said WPC92.
“I’m stronger than you,” Shaun pointed out. “So’s Mr Stock. He’s all, like, wires. And Auntie’s got an iron ladle.”
WPC92 eyed the ladle nervously and backed away from the doorstep. As she moved, Tarquin O’Connor came up the drive behind her, helping himself speedily along with his one crutch. Andrew nearly laughed. It was ludicrous the way everyone seemed to have turned up to help him. But he was impressed — almost honoured — all the same.
Tarquin took in the situation with one piercing look. “You’d better leave,” he said to WPC92, “before things get ugly. It took you quite a push to get in here, didn’t it? I felt it from my car. So now you get out, before we all push back.”
WPC92 tossed her head. “I’m going to prefer charges against all of you,” she said haughtily, “for obstructing the police when in hot pursuit.”
“You do that,” Tarquin said. “But you just do it as far away from here as you can get.”
They all watched WPC92, so called, turn and stump away down the drive. Mrs Stock said, “I don’t like that strange way she walks, feet apart. It’s not natural.”
Chapter Ten
Tarquin had arrived, it seemed, in hopes that Andrew could firm his missing leg up before he took Stashe home to lunch. “Got her some real delicacies today,” he said. “I do love to cook. What was that woman after? Aidan?”
Andrew nodded.
“Thought so,” Tarquin said. “She’s one of those that don’t use iron. Funny how you can tell. I’ve thought all along that it was those kind after the boy. You’d better give your wards a boost. You can do it on the computer these days. Get Stashe to show you how. She did it for Ronnie a while back when there was talk of someone trying to nobble his horses. Where is Aidan anyway? Did the woman get a sight of him?”
Andrew shook his head, concentrating on Tarquin’s leg. “He went out. I think his grandmother’s death has just hit him and he wanted to be alone.”
“Poor lad.” Tarquin propped his missing leg up along a sofa and chatted cheerfully away. “Grief’s a funny thing, so it is. I swear Stashe didn’t seem to notice her mother was gone for good until two weeks later when she ran across an egg cup my wife liked to use. Hidden in a cupboard it was. Then there was no consoling her. I thought she’d never get over it, to tell the truth.”
He chatted on. Shortly he was telling Andrew of further problems in the Fête Committee. It seemed that the famous cooking celebrity who was supposed to open the Fête had cancelled. “Got invited to go to America and it seemed he liked that idea better,” Tarquin said. “Left them all in the lurch, so he did. Looking everywhere for a replacement, they were, until someone said that Ronnie Stock was enough of a celebrity these days to do the job. So they asked him. And Ronnie’s that vain,” Tarquin said, “he’s agreed like a shot. It’s York Races that weekend and he’s got horses running at Bath and Brighton too, but he’s so darned flattered to be asked to open our little tinpot Fête that he’s sending his wife off to York in his place. Madness! Needs his head examined. But then, it always was a little swelled. Are you going to tell Aidan that these people have traced him here?”
Andrew nodded absently, although he was not sure at all. For one thing, he knew it would scare Aidan horribly. For another, Mabel Brown and/or WPC92 had sown seeds of doubt in Andrew’s mind. Aidan, according to Aidan’s own story, had absconded from London and did possess a wallet. It could well be that it was through this wallet that Mabel WPC92 had traced Aidan. It must give off a fair surge of power when it filled itself with money. So there was no doubt that someone was after Aidan. But there was no way of knowing who was in the right and who was in the wrong. Andrew had only Aidan’s word for most of it. He thought Aidan was honest, but he didn’t know. It seemed to Andrew that he might have been rather too trusting. He decided to ask Aidan a lot more questions when Aidan came in for lunch.
But when Aidan did come in it was nearer teatime than lunchtime, and he was accompanied by a large, gladsome dog, with a tail like a propeller that knocked things down all over the house. Everything everyone was doing had to stop while Mrs Stock made her feelings plain.
“I have enough to do without picking up after a great dirty dog!” she said, over and over. “I’m not used to dogs. Hairs and muddy feet! I can’t be doing with it! Is it house-trained? Is it? And you expect me to feed it, do you?”
Mixed in with this were Mrs Stock’s complaints about the time Aidan had come in. “And your lunch thoroughly spoilt! The nicest plate of liver and bacon you ever did see completely spoilt! Ruined! Look at it! Look at it!” She wagged the offending lunch under Aidan’s nose. It looked like a black shoe sole and some dog chews. “Just look at it!” Mrs Stock proclaimed.
“Rolf can eat it,” Aidan suggested.
“What a waste!” Mrs Stock retorted. “Feeding it to stray dogs because you treat the professor’s house like a hotel and come in at any time you please! And is he house-trained? Is he?”
By this time, Andrew and Stashe had arrived in the kitchen and Shaun and Mr Stock were looking in through the window over the sink. Aidan began to hope that there would be a severe earthquake soon, to open a hole in the floor and swallow him and Rolf up. He knelt down in front of Rolf. “Are you house-trained?” he whispered urgently. Rolf stared pleadingly and gave a very slight nod. “He is house-trained,” Aidan said. But his voice was drowned out by the others’.
Shaun said, “It’s a lovely dog, Auntie.”
Stashe said, “I know he isn’t wearing a collar, but he’s in beautiful condition. He must belong to someone. You simply can’t keep him, Aidan.”
And Mr Stock said to Mrs Stock, “Oh, stop your noise, woman. Old Mr Brandon had his two spaniels for years. You never minded those dogs, not like I did. Used to bury their bones under my tomatoes, both of them. You used to give them the bones.”
Mrs Stock objected so loudly at this that Andrew took Aidan and Rolf out of the clamour and shut his study door behind the three of them. “Now look here, Aidan,” he said, “I know this is a lovely dog, but he almost certainly belongs to someone else and—”
“He doesn’t,” Aidan said. “He’s not a dog. Show him, Rolf.”
Rolf nodded, shook himself and briefly chased his tail. Next moment he was a billow of yellow mist swirling across a pile of history pamphlets, and the moment after that he was a small boy, staring at Andrew with big, anxious dog eyes. “Please keep me!” he begged in his growl-like voice.
Andrew took his glasses off and stared back. “Oh,” he said. “I suppose that does make a difference.”
“He’s a were-dog,” Aidan explained. “He can’t belong to anyone because he’s a person really. But he wants to stay here and I want to keep him. Please?”
“Do you prefer being a dog or a boy?” Andrew asked Rolf.
“Dog,” said Rolf. “It’s easier.” He dissolved into mist again and became a dog, pleadingly scraping at Andrew’s leg with one large, damp paw.
Well, Andrew thought, dogs were easier to explain than boys. He remembered sudd
enly that the second horse in the racing results had been called Dogdays. They were probably fated to have Rolf. And the third horse, Heavy Queen, had to refer to Mabel WPC92. Stashe’s method of foretelling really worked! “All right,” he said, resigned to Rolf. “I’ll go and settle Mrs Stock. If I can.”
Half an hour later, Rolf was allowed to eat Aidan’s spoilt lunch, which he seemed to enjoy very much, while Aidan himself ate most of a loaf with honey. Mrs Stock stayed only long enough to make Andrew cauliflower cheese from an old cauliflower that had been forgotten at the back of the pantry, before collecting Shaun and going off to complain to Trixie.
“Wish he was mine,” Shaun said wistfully over his shoulder as Mrs Stock hauled him away.
Mr Stock wagged an earthy finger under Rolf’s nose. “Any bones in my veg,” he said, “and I come after you with a spade. Understand?” Rolf nodded humbly, slightly cross-eyed from the finger.
Andrew then explained matters to Stashe. If anyone had told him a month ago, he thought, that he would be seriously telling a lovely young secretary that they now had a were-dog staying here, he would have been utterly scornful. And even more disbelieving that Stashe took the information quite calmly. She turned to Rolf. “Does this explain why our visitor always eats the meaty bits from our barbecue?” she asked. Rolf lowered his eyes bashfully and did not deny it. “So it wasn’t a fox after all,” said Stashe. “Well, you’re not living rough now. So behave.”
After that, Rolf and Aidan shared the cauliflower cheese. Stashe went home and Andrew was left contemplating the two immense parsnips.
“Did your grandmother ever teach you how to cook parsnips?” he asked Aidan rather plaintively.
“Oh, yes,” Aidan said, collecting empty dishes. “Creamed parsnip’s lovely. You boil them, then you put them in the mixer with pepper and salt and lots of butter and cream. Shall I show you?”
“Please do,” said Andrew. “Think of it as the way you earn Rolf.”
So Aidan washed the parsnips — which, he thought, was rather like giving someone’s legs a bath — and set one of them aside for Groil. Then he found Mrs Stock’s sharpest knife and tried to cut the other parsnip up. On the first cut, the knife sank into the parsnip and stuck. Aidan pulled and wriggled at the knife but it refused to move. “Can you help me?” he asked Andrew. Then, rather forgetting that Andrew might not understand things the way Gran did, he explained, “I seem to have excalibured this knife.”