Ninepins Read Free Page B

was Beth .
    â€˜Oh, yes. Don’t worry – we shan’t be cutting Willow completely loose. There’ll be regular contact for as long as it’s required. But it needn’t be intrusive, as far as you’re concerned. I’m based in Cambridge three days a week; Willow can drop by and see me there.’
    â€˜Wouldn’t a bedsit in town be more appropriate, then? In Cambridge, I mean – closer to your offices?’
    It was Willow who answered. ‘I saw the picture. I wanted to live by the river.’ She pushed back her chair and walked over to the kitchen window. From this angle, the water would be invisible, but she stared out anyway; what Laura could see of her profile appeared entirely impassive.
    â€˜Well, I think we’ve seen enough.’ Vince put down his mug and picked up the tenancy agreement. ‘Unless you have any more questions for us?’
    Laura shook her head. There were dozens of questions – but none she could ask.
    â€˜In that case, we’ll be on our way. And I’ll give you a ring in a day or two, if that’s all right – or do ring me if there’s more you’d like to know. Thank you very much for your time, Laura. And for the tea.’
    On the way out through the hall, Willow dawdled behind, looking at some old, framed photographs that hung along the wall. Laura came back to see what had caught her attention: a black and white snapshot of Ninepins with the lode in spate, water swirling close to the top of the dyke.
    â€˜Is it often like this?’
    Laura laughed. ‘No, thank goodness. This was well before my time. It must be taken in the ’fifties, I think.’ Though there was little enough to date it. The low horizon and the towering fen sky; the square-built, grey brick house; the top of the pumphouse chimney, jutting up above the dyke: the passing decades scarcely left a mark. ‘They seem to control the levels much better nowadays …’
    But Willow wasn’t listening; she drifted on towards the door.
    â€˜Goodbye, then,’ said Vince, extending his hand. ‘We’ll be in touch.’
    Five minutes later, when the mugs were washed and dried and hung back on their hooks, Laura had not heard an engine start. Glancing sideways through the window she saw the red saloon still parked outside her door. In the front seats, Vince and Willow were deep in conference, their heads bent close together.
Chapter 2
    Changing her work clothes for jeans and jumper always made Laura feel more at home. Not to mention warmer; the heating wasn’t set to come on until five o’clock, which was the earliest time at which either of them was normally home. Half past three now: it was far too soon to think about starting the supper, and she couldn’t face her study and the files in her bag.
    Beth. She’d drive to school and pick her up early from homework club for once. She hooked down from the peg the black and red striped scarf and wound it round her neck. The product of a primary school knitting craze, it was Beth’s first full-sized effort, bevel-edged and lumpy. Knitting was in Year 6, right after Scoobies and before the squashy juggling balls; they didn’t seem to have crazes in the same way at the college.
    On her way out to the car she paused, as she often did, on the top of the dyke and breathed in the open space. To her right, the lode cut straight as a furrow through the featureless fields, flanked by its twin dykes, as far as Elswell village three miles away; to her left it ran just as straight for the quarter-mile to the main road, and beyond that, through country equally unvarying, north and east to drain into the river Cam. That way, too, ran the plumb line of Ninepins Drove, hugging the foot of the dyke but itself slightly raised above the adjacent land. It was what she loved about the fens, as well as what she sometimes hated: the emptiness. But then a movement caught her eye. The