Unforgettable (Gloria Cook) - By Gloria Cook Page 0,3
boy a couple of times. It seems they like to keep themselves to themselves. I feel sorry for anyone living in that sorely neglected old cottage with its terrible history. They must be down on their luck. He’s smartly dressed. Perhaps he’s been to The Orchards looking for work. He must be the same age as Sam Lawry.’
‘Well, let’s say hello to the young chap then,’ Greg said.
It became obvious the Templeton boy had slowed his steps and was keeping his head down.
‘He seems very down in the dumps and plainly doesn’t want to speak to us,’ Dorrie said, feeling sorry for the boy. Charlie Lawry had a full workforce on his premises that produced many kinds of fruit and vegetables. He took on jobless ex-servicemen who pleaded for even a few hours’ employment a week. It was unlikely the Templeton boy had been successful if he had been seeking work. ‘We’d better get on, don’t want to embarrass him.’
The pair set off to their right at the crossroads on to Newton Road, the route to the village. Dorrie soon diverted off for tree-covered Shady Lane, a sheltered footpath. The stream meandered off underground from Sunny Corner to flow in dark seclusion under the crossroads and emerged to greet daylight several hundred yards along Shady Lane, just inside Newton farmland. She would have preferred to go straight across up the slightly rising sun-dappled Meadow Hill for a change, the route the Templeton boy would take, but Corky did not fare well in the heat. Greg carried on briskly for the village.
Twenty minutes after the sister and brother had separated a young woman arrived on their doorstep. Heaving a hefty sigh, she flung down her heavy suitcases and tried the door. The greeting she was about to propel inside was stalled rudely on her pink painted lips.
‘Oh, damn it!’ She kicked the nearest suitcase. To avoid the village nosy parkers she had alighted from the stuffy rattling coach that had brought her from Wadebridge, outside Nanviscoe’s boundary. She sensibly wore flat shoes but under the weight of her overstuffed luggage the walk had turned into a shoulder-aching trudge. The front door was locked and that never happened unless her aunt and uncle were going to be out for more than half an hour. Following a brutal double murder some years ago, they hid a spare key outside but changed the secret place once a month. It could be wedged in under an ornamental stone or one of the dozens of flowerpots, anywhere.
Verity Barnicoat clenched her fists. ‘Oh, where are the pair of you when I really need you?’
Two
‘Mum, I’m back,’ Finn Templeton shouted up the bare stairs in Merrivale cottage. ‘Where are you? Don’t tell me you’ve gone back to bed? You promised me you’d make the effort!’
Finn met continuous silence, which hung ominously in the musty air. His mother’s lack of response was nothing new. She had been down and depressed for months, since his council official father’s conviction for fraud and prison sentence of four years. She was pining for the man who had left her pregnant. The unexpected event to Finn, after spending sixteen years as an only child, was a horrifying prospect that grew worse as the birth approached.
‘You’d do better to forget him, Mum. He’s turned his back on us. He’s forbidden you to visit him in prison and hasn’t even replied to your letters. He doesn’t care about anyone except himself.’ Finn’s frustrated viewpoints always fell on deaf ears.
‘But he’s the love of my life, Finn, and I know he loves me!’ she would wail. ‘He loves all of us. He said he was really looking forward to us having another child.’
Finn believed she had conceived this baby in an attempt to cling on to his thoroughly rotten father. If his mother were not so fragile Finn would tell her exactly what he thought of his father – that Aidan Templeton-Barr, who had thought himself such a big shot, had carried out at least three adulterous affairs. Finn had learned this through the spiteful tongue of a town hall clerk. On Aidan’s arrest Fiona had hidden away in their elegant four-bedroom house in Wadebridge, and she didn’t know about the taunts thrown in Finn’s face at school and in the neighbourhood.
Most days it was a hard task to get Fiona to drag herself out of her present ghastly bedroom or even to get her to eat and drink. She did nothing about the dilapidated place.