The Knapthorne Conspiracy by Malcolm Ballard

Author:Malcolm Ballard [Ballard, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Crime Fiction, Mystery, Thriller, cold case
Published: 2021-03-08T22:00:00+00:00

After she had left no-one spoke immediately. It was almost as though her departure had left a vacuum making the very act of breathing, let alone speech, difficult. In the resulting stillness each of them in their own private way were coming to terms with the fact that something from the past, something they had all by mutual consent consigned to history, had clawed its way back into their consciousness. The spectre of Willow Cottage had come back to haunt them.

Chapter Fourteen

The old silver birch had a bifurcated trunk, devoid of any branches in its first two or three metres, giving its base the appearance of a giant catapult. Surrounded by chestnut, oak, sycamore and laurel, it stood, unobtrusively, in the densely wooded area on the right-hand side of the driveway facing Willow Cottage. The ground cover was thick with the lush green foliage of fern and bracken enjoying unbroken tenure of the area for decades, undisturbed by human intervention of any kind. Until this moment the most intrusive invader had been that insidious infiltrator of the English countryside with the most contrasting of qualities. It was yet another of nature’s quirks that provided the blackberry with its fast-growing, thorny creepers and a harvest of small, sweet berries. The figure that leaned against the gnarled, silvery trunk watching the cottage, rubbed at the smarting area on the top of his foot where it had been raked by thorns. Although the wounds were tiny they were annoying him exceedingly. No paths existed here and he had had to forge his way through the undergrowth to reach his objective, the effort of getting to the tree sucking the breath out of him. In the filtered sunlight that penetrated the canopy sweat glistened on his broad, jutting brow and along the rough, stubbled skin above his upper lip. Pain and misery plagued him, clearly reflected by the anguished look in his moist, grey eyes. His upper body was never still moving, almost imperceptibly, backwards and forwards, backwards and forwards, as if in time to some inner, rhythmic beat. The air was damp, humid the cloying atmosphere adding to his discomfort but he knew that he had to wait. Her bright red car was parked directly in front of him about thirty yards away outside the cottage and he never took his eyes off it willing her to come out, get in, and drive away. It would have been impossible for anyone coming out of Willow Cottage to have spotted him, cloaked as he was in the dark, shadowy confines of the wood and the thought gave him comfort. His nerves were on edge though and a sudden, raucous sound close by made him start as a cock pheasant burst from the cover of the trees its wings beating furiously to lift it over the fields and up, up into the bright blue sky overhead.

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