House of Echoes by Barbara Erskine

Author:Barbara Erskine
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
Tags: Psychological, Fiction
ISBN: 9780007280780
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
Published: 2009-07-06T23:00:00+00:00

Clothes. Quickly. Quickly. Bra. Shirt. Panties. Jeans. A protection. Armour. Outside. She must get outside.

The kitchen was empty. Throwing open the back door she looked out into the courtyard. ‘Luke?’

The Bentley had been pulled out of the coach house. It stood gleaming gently in the sunlight, strangely blind without the two huge headlights which still stood on a trestle table just inside the open double door of the coach house.

‘Luke!’ She ran across the cobbles and stared in. ‘Where are you?’

‘He’s gone out for a walk with the others, Mrs Grant.’ Jimbo appeared suddenly from the shadows. ‘With his Ma and Pa being here and that, he thought he’d take the chance.’

‘Of course.’ Joss forced a smile. ‘I should have thought of that.’ She was conscious suddenly of how hard Jimbo was staring at her. The young man’s face had fascinated her when she first saw it. Thin, brown, with strangely sleepy slanted eyes, the planes of the cheeks and brow bones were flattened into Slavic features of startling dramatic cast. She could never see him without picturing him on a pony, a rag tied round his head, a gun brandished in one hand as he galloped over the plain. It had been something of a disappointment when, unable to resist it, she had asked him if he could ride and he had looked at her askance with the unequivocal answer, no way.

‘You all right, Mrs Grant?’ The soft local vowels did not fit the hard features. Nor, she had to admit, did the eyes: the strange all-seeing eyes.

‘Yes. Thank you.’ She began to turn away.

‘You look tired, Mrs Grant.’

‘I am.’ She stopped.

‘The boys been keeping you awake, have they? I heard them when I stayed at yours with my mum when I was a lad. She says they always come back when there are folk in the house.’

Joss turned and stared at him. ‘Boys?’ she repeated in a whisper. He wasn’t talking about Tom and Ned.

‘All the lost boys.’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Like Pe’er Pan. I didn’t like the house. My dad said I might get taken too, but Mam had to caretake here some times for Mrs Duncan before she packed up and went to live in Paris, and I had to come too then.’

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