The Country Escape - Jane Lovering Page 0,28

café and went to sit at a table. I wasn’t sure if he wanted me to order at the counter, or whether it was table service, so I sort of hovered for a moment.

‘Hi, Gabe.’ There was a woman sitting at a desk in the other half of the room. ‘D’you want coffee?’ When she stood up I saw she was wearing the jacket and skirt uniform and name tag of the estate agent, and the apron of the waitress.

‘Two coffees, please, Maisy.’ He sprawled himself out in the seat, clearly comfortable with his surroundings.

The woman, keeping her eyes on me at all times as though I were about to go off like a hand grenade, shuffled around behind the counter and began pouring coffee into two tall mugs. ‘You keeping all right, then, Gabe?’ She was still watching me. Her gaze was fifty per cent judgement and fifty per cent suspicion, but that was fine. The city had trained me up on people judging me and my past had made me used to suspicion. I gave her a broad smile as she brought the coffee over; she had nothing to fear from me.

‘Pretty much. You all right?’ Gabriel addressed her with the ease of long association. ‘Dad all right? How are the boys?’

‘Ah, we’re going on fine.’ Two mugs arrived on the table. ‘This your friend, is it?’

Gabriel settled himself more comfortably in the chair. ‘This is Katie Gerauld. Harvest Cottage.’

‘Oh, ah.’ Her face became more animated. ‘How you finding it? Took us a while to sell that place, it did.’

I smiled up at her. ‘It’s lovely. Just right for me and my daughter.’

A laugh which, in London, would have been described as ‘tinkly’. ‘Not worried by the ghosts, then? I thought you was brave, taking it on when you takes into account its history, but then—’ she gave me a quick look up and down ‘—I s’pose if you’re into them arcane practices it’s just the right kind of place for that stuff, isn’t it?’

‘Maisy,’ Gabriel said in a warning kind of way.

I wasn’t quite sure what she meant by ‘arcane practices’. Or by the look. I was wearing jeans and a jumper and looked about as arcane as a brick. The only possibly esoteric things about me were my dangly earrings, which had a slight hint of ‘pentagram’ about them. They’d been a Christmas present from Poppy, who’d been going through her ‘Wiccan’ phase at the time.

‘I’m pretty sure Harvest Cottage isn’t haunted,’ I said. ‘Unless about a billion generations of slugs have left their mark, and I can’t see them doing much more than rattling the odd pot scourer in the sink.’

Maisy’s eyes widened. ‘They didn’t tell you about old Mr Coombes? It was his cottage, and he died in there and they didn’t find him for weeks!’

‘Are you a very successful estate agent?’ I asked. ‘Only that sort of information is a wee bit off-putting.’

‘Maisy,’ Gabriel said again. ‘Katie’s already bought the place. She lives there. With her daughter. You telling these stories really isn’t helpful.’ He lifted his mug and turned to me. ‘Maisy and I were at school together, where she excelled in creative writing, as you can probably tell.’

Maisy shrugged. ‘Just thought she should know people say her place is haunted. If you goes up there late of a night, there’s mysterious noises and all sorts.’

‘There’s mysterious noises everywhere,’ he said, with a small amount of exasperation leaking out around the edges of his words. ‘This is Dorset. Between the hedgehogs mating and the foxes shrieking and those bloody birds that make that whistling sound, even just the wildlife makes such a bloody racket it’s surprising that anyone can hear themselves think. Add in a bit of human expectation and some bits of plastic caught in a hedge – well. It’s just imagination and stories, Maisy, as you well know.’ Two swallows of coffee. ‘And it was two days before they found Alf Coombes, not weeks.’ He addressed me over the mug rim. ‘Milkman noticed he hadn’t taken his milk in.’

Maisy shrugged, and then the phone rang over on the desk and she bustled off to answer it in her estate agent persona.

‘She’s a bit of a fantasist,’ Gabriel said, lowering the mug. ‘Always prone to making something out of not much, our Maisy.’

I looked over. ‘God’s gift to estate agency, then.’ I sipped. The coffee wasn’t bad. ‘And thank you for trying to protect me from Harvest Cottage’s reputation, but I