left shoulder. Cold air on the back of his neck told him the front door of the church was open. He stepped back and turned.
Gillian stood in the open doorway. For a second Harry thought she was going to faint. Then it looked as though she might hurl herself at them in rage. She did neither. She simply turned and ran.
67
MILLIE WAS IN THE DOORWAY, WATCHING SOME CHICKENS strut up and down in the lane. Across the drive, her mother was unloading shopping from the car. She straightened up and headed for the door.
‘Will you go back inside?’ she said to the toddler, bending down towards her. ‘It’s freezing.’ She squeezed past the child and disappeared. A moment later her hands caught hold of Millie round the waist. ‘I mean it,’ she said, as she lifted her daughter up and took her out of sight. ‘You’ll fall down those steps.’
For a moment the doorway was empty and then the mother appeared again. She crossed quickly to her car and found the last of the bags. As she straightened up and pressed the button on the thing in her hand that would lock the car, the child appeared in the doorway again. She stole a brief, sly look at her mother before turning to the chickens that had wandered into their garden. Then she climbed down the steps to the drive.
The car hadn’t locked itself. The mother pressed the button twice, three times and then gave up, using the key to lock the car instead, just as Millie set off across the lawn. The mother crossed the drive and went inside. The front door closed. Silence.
Nothing to see, nothing to hear for a minute, maybe two. Then the front door was pulled open and the woman, her face white and her hands clutching her upper arms, appeared in the doorway. ‘Millie!’ she called, as though afraid to shout too loudly. ‘Millie!’ she called again, a bit louder this time. ‘Millie!’
68
‘WHERE DID YOU FIND THESE?’ ASKED HARRY.
‘Environment Agency archives,’ said Gareth Fletcher. ‘Watch those crisps, I’ll get throttled if I get grease on them.’
Harry put his crisp packet down and leaned over the maps. ‘Catchment maps,’ he said. ‘I’ve never heard of them.’
Gareth lifted his pint and drank. A week before Christmas, the White Lion in the middle of Heptonclough was busy and even at nearly five o’clock in the afternoon the two men had been lucky to get a table. Harry almost wished they hadn’t, that he and Gareth Fletcher had been forced to reschedule the chat they’d had planned for days. He’d wanted to help Evi find and talk to Gillian. That was not something she should have to face on her own.
‘No reason why you would,’ said Gareth. ‘The water authorities produce them. They show the countryside from the point of view of the water resources.’
‘And that means what, exactly?’ asked Harry. Across the room, a party of office workers were in high spirits. Several wore paper hats. When they stood up, most seemed unsteady on their feet.
Evi had refused to let him go with her. Gillian was her patient, she’d said, her responsibility.
‘Most maps are about roads, towns and cities, right?’ said Gareth.
‘Right,’ agreed Harry.
‘This one is about rivers. See, this is the river Rindle. Starts as a spring way up in the hills and gradually makes its way down to where it joins the Tane. All these other streams and rivers are its tributaries.’ Gareth leaned across the map, pointing out faint, wiggling lines with his finger. ‘They all feed into it and it gradually gets bigger and bigger. The area they all cover is called the catchment.’
‘OK, got that,’ said Harry, who’d been watching a dark-haired girl with a purple paper hat who reminded him of … how soon could he phone her? Was she with Gillian right now? ‘And the water authorities need these because …’ he prompted, forcing himself to concentrate.
‘If a stream dries up, if it gets polluted, if there’s a fish kill, or a flood threatening, the authorities need to know where it is and what other water-courses it’s going to impact upon.’
‘OK.’ I could be struck off for this, Harry, she’d said to him, as they’d argued at the church gate. You have no idea how serious it is.
‘The modern maps are easier to read, all the different catchments are coloured differently,’ Gareth was saying. ‘This one must be eighty years old. It does, though, have something the more modern ones