The Hiding Places by Katherine Webb

Author:Katherine Webb [Webb, Katherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2017-05-03T16:00:00+00:00

7

The Roots of Things

The run of fair weather had gone on so long that people had begun to take it for granted – there was no need to look out for signs the night before to know how the morning would dawn. The thundery rain that had fallen on the day of Alistair’s murder seemed to have been accepted as unnatural, just like his death; some people even said it had been nature’s response to the killing. Now, again, the sunshine could be relied upon. Blue skies, high white clouds, the river getting a little shallower each day, the water slowing down as though tired. The whole By Brook valley seemed to be slowing down – the baby birds had all fledged and breeding was over, so the dawn chorus was a half-hearted affair; the marsh marigolds along the riverbanks had softened from their first vibrancy into a kind of leggy languor. Slaughterford basked; its residents basked; nothing was done in a hurry now that haysel was over and harvest not yet begun in earnest. In times past, mill production would have suffered with the lowering water, but Slaughterford Mill was immune to that now, with its boilers and steam generators, and production was back to normal just a handful of days after the hiatus for Alistair’s funeral. George Turner was supervising the day-to-day running of things, as he had done before, and when he came up against a decision that Alistair would have made he consulted Nancy instead, who told him to do whatever he thought best.

Down by the privy at the back of Spring Cottage, the rhubarb was half as high as Pudding, with leaves two feet across in places. The stalks were a violent magenta, gone too thick and tough to be eaten, and in the dank shade underneath, slugs gorged on the soggy ruins of rotted leaves. The garden was criss-crossed with their silver trails – and those of snails as well. The hostas and carnations had been eaten into oblivion. Louise Cartwright no longer cared to keep up her war on the creatures – once, she had collected them in a bucket and walked them down into the valley to tip them into a hedge, ignoring Ruth’s suggestion to apply a brick to them and have done. By the middle of the afternoon, when the sun was at its hottest, buzzards rode the thermals over the hills, so high up in the blue that their faint, triumphant cries could be heard when they were too distant for the eye to make out. It was glorious. It should have been glorious.

Pudding caught herself imagining the summer as though Alistair hadn’t been killed – as though he were still alive, and Donny were at home, and life were going on as it had before. It hadn’t been perfect, she reminded herself, but by God it had been better than it was now. The eleven days since his death had been like a bad dream in which familiar things looked wrong, and frightening.

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