Beyond Repair by Susie Tate

Author:Susie Tate
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
Published: 2015-10-10T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

An angel from heaven

‘Mrs Howell?’ Katie shouted, banging on the door for the third time. Sam was leaning against his truck, watching her with his arms crossed over his chest. Once she’d finished knocking, she bent down to shout through the letterbox – it was not her first rodeo as far as gaining access to this particular house went; normally either the TV was so loud that Mrs Howell would have been happily oblivious to a nuclear attack on South Wales, or the sheer volume of ‘stuff’ piled in her corridor and her living room simply blocked out all sound. Requests that she put in a key safe had been met with the same answer as those regarding cleaning out her house: it was always ‘now, in a minute, cariad’. And in Mrs Howell’s case this meant a firm ‘when hell freezes over’. Despite all the soundproofing, when Katie did lift the letterbox she could just about hear a reedy voice calling out from inside.

‘Hello? Is someone there? Help me, please.’ Mrs Howell sounded frightened and in pain.

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Howell, we’ll come in to help you now … in a minute.’ Katie’s words were met with a groan of pain, and she closed her eyes tight in frustration before straightening up and opening her bag to dig out her mobile.

‘Problem?’ Sam’s deep voice asked from beside her, causing her to jump about a foot in the air and spill half the stuff in her, admittedly already chaotic, bag onto the floor.

‘Dammit,’ Katie swore, her worry for Mrs Howell and her frustration making her unusually snappy. ‘I can’t get in and she’s in pain. I’m going to have to try to call her niece because I know for a fact Mrs Howell won’t have given a key to her neighbours: she thinks Mrs Jones in number forty-five is a Russian spy, and don’t even get me started on –’

Katie broke off and lifted her head from her bag at the loud crash from the front door. She stared up at Sam, open-mouthed.

‘Door’s open, doc,’ he said simply, stepping back from the thick oak now hanging off its hinges.

‘I … I … maybe we need to go over a few current UK laws, Rambo. Not sure what goes down in Somalia but –’

‘Hello? Is that you, Dr Katie, dear?’ Mrs Howell’s shaky voice echoed through the corridor.

‘You want to talk legalities or do you want to see to her?’

Katie shook her head; she’d worry about replacing the door later. As she stepped into the corridor the smell hit her and she tried not to breath through her nose. Mrs Howell had lived in this house all her life, and in her ninety-two years she had managed to accumulate a lot of stuff, all of which she seemed loath to part with; Katie had come across an electricity bill from 1937 on one visit. She was tempted to frame it – must have been one of the first of its kind. Now, the smell: that was a by-product of the overabundance of cats in residence.

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