‘The notorious drug baron!’
‘She believes him to be a Save the Children representative.’
‘And Burgo?’ Burgoyne was Sue’s favourite. Ebony-haired and pantherine, he spoke twelve languages, often simultaneously. He had violet eyes, an olive skin the beauty of which was enhanced rather than disfigured by a zigger zagger duelling scar, and a name respected and feared on the world’s international espionage circuit.
‘Suspended from his heels in a rat-infested bauxite mill somewhere on the Caymans.’
‘Ohhh . . .’ Sue’s eyes shone and she clapped her hands at the sheer extravagance of it all. ‘How absolutely wonderful!’
‘It’s not at all wonderful. That isn’t supposed to happen till page three hundred and something.’
‘Where are you now, then?’
‘Forty-two. I’ve got a riot of plot and nothing else.’
‘But Amy, that’s what bestsellers are.’
‘Really?’
‘You won’t give up?’
‘Good heavens, no. And neither must you.’
Amy got up and looked out of the window, something she had done several times since her arrival. Honoria had gone to the post office to collect a parcel of books from the London Library. She had gone in person this time as the need to harangue Mr and Mrs Sandell had yet again become paramount. A letter was recently delivered to Gresham House with a slight tear in the envelope and the flap barely secure. This could mean a ten-minute trounce or a lecture lasting half an hour and the length of the queue behind Honoria would have no bearing on the matter.
Even as she watched, Amy told herself what nonsense this surveillance was. After all she was not, technically, a prisoner. On the contrary she seemed to be out of the house as often as she was in. Running errands, delivering messages (or rather edicts), fetching and carrying. But always conscious that the time used was not her own.
And Honoria seemed to have a built-in radar that kept a most accurate track of her minion’s movements. If Amy went swiftly and efficiently about her business, looking neither to right nor left, deliberately depriving herself of the warmth of human contact, all would be well. But let her so much as stop briefly to comment on the weather, pat an animal or ask after someone’s health and before she had even stepped across the threshold on her return there would ring out, ‘Where have you been?’
Honoria knew nothing of Amy’s meetings with Sue. If she found out they would be stopped. How, Amy could not even begin to guess, but she was sure that it would be so. Even if Honoria knew they were a lifeline. Especially if she knew they were a lifeline.
‘There she is!’
Amy jumped away from the window, suddenly pale. Sue scrambled to her feet, catching the alarm, hating it when Amy so vividly demonstrated her subservience, uneasily aware that in the quick, dismayed movements lay a mirror image of her own.
As Amy moved quickly to the door, Sue shouted, ‘Wood! Wood!’
‘Gosh - I nearly forgot.’
Sue ran into the back yard, where a bundle of branches always lay ready. Amy’s excuse for her walk. They hugged goodbye on the step and Sue watched Amy race down the path and speed away, as if stapled to the wind.
She turned back into the house. It was not until she was packing her box for play school that she recalled the one thing above all others that had been worrying her and that she had meant to talk to Amy about. How could she have forgotten something that had occupied her mind so constantly? Now the question once more possessed her. Why, when Brian had simply walked briskly once round the Green on the night of Gerald’s murder, had he been absent from the house for well over three quarters of an hour?
Brian’s drama class had reconvened but was not going well. He had spent the first fifteen minutes trying to get them off the subject of murder. Starting with questions about Gerald the conversation had expanded rapidly to cover serial killers, the chain-saw massacre, vampirism and necrophilia - the latter dead boring, according to Collar.
In vain he had dragged them through a warm-up, got them pinching their cheeks to promote alertness, rolling their heads (‘let those cannon balls go’) and pretending to be clowns on unicycles to fire their imaginations. The minute it was over they were back on the same subject.
‘You being his friend, I reckon the filth would’ve let you see him.’
‘I didn’t want to—’
‘They say his head were well bashed in.’ Boreham’s eyes shone. ‘I bet his brains fell out.’
‘Different from you then,’ said Collar. ‘Bash you from here till Christmas your brains wouldn’t fall out.’