After Tom had parked the Hudson, they made their way up the alley alongside the churchyard that led to Mr Hargreaves’ cottage. A gas lamp stood close to where Tom had parked the car, but within a matter of yards the footway was in darkness and, when Fran’s foot found a puddle, it splashed water up her stockings as far as the knees. To their left a series of grey, indeterminate shapes melted into the general blackness of the churchyard, while to their right rose the solid wall of the first cottage in the High Street. When they reached Mr Hargreaves’ gate, they could see that the cottage was in darkness.
‘No lights showing at all,’ Tom said, his normally cheerful voice subdued. ‘I don’t like the look of this.’
They entered at the gate and approached the front door.
‘The curtains aren’t drawn, I don’t think,’ Fran said. ‘But it’s really difficult to tell in the dark.’
Tom banged on the door, and after the shortest of intervals followed that up by calling ‘Mr Hargreaves?’ through the letterbox, which also elicited no reply.
At that moment, Fran gave a squeak of fright, cut off almost immediately, as she looked down and made out the shape of a cat weaving round her ankles. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I felt something brush against my legs and it startled me.’
She put down her hand and stroked the cat, who mewed rather desperately and butted her calf with its soft furry head.
‘Sounds hungry,’ she said.
Tom tried the front door. ‘It’s unlocked,’ he said, stepping inside as he spoke. ‘Mr Hargreaves … Mr Hargreaves, are you at home?’
Before Fran had time to question the propriety of entering uninvited, Tom had already crossed the threshold and she could sense, rather than actually see, him feeling around the walls.
‘Can’t find a light switch. He’s probably not connected. Blast, I wish we’d thought to bring the torch out of the car. Hold on … Now look out, puss cat, you’re going to trip someone up if you go on like that … Ouch! Now my foot’s gone slap into a chest of drawers or something.’
‘Mr Hargreaves,’ Fran called from the doorstep. ‘Are you there, Mr Hargreaves?’
‘There’s sure to be a candle and some matches, if he’s got no electricity. No, wait, here it is.’
As Tom spoke, the little room was swathed in the yellowish light of a forty-watt bulb, which was suspended from twisty brown flex in the centre of the room. He and Fran stood blinking at each other for a moment, while the cat increased the volume and frequency of its complaints.
‘Stay here,’ Tom said. ‘I’m going to have a look round.’
It took him only a moment to mount the rickety wooden staircase, which climbed out of the principal downstairs room.
‘No one up there,’ he said. ‘And no sign of anything amiss. What’s through here, I wonder? Aha, the kitchen. And the back door is standing open – and has been for quite some time, judging by how wet the kitchen flags are. Can you see a torch anywhere? I think we’d better take a look outside.’
‘There’s one here, by the door,’ Fran said.
‘Good show. Don’t want to waste time fetching mine from the car.’
Tom switched on the torch and swung the beam to and fro across the width of Mr Hargreaves’ back garden. Although the cottage itself was extremely modest in size, the garden ran a long way back and was evidently employed as a productive plot. Cane wigwams, waist-high fruit bushes and the shape of an ancient apple tree momentarily glistened damp and dark as the beam passed over them. Tom began to advance down the central cinder path and, although the rain had begun to beat down a little harder, Fran followed him, not least because she had no desire to be left in the cottage on her own.
‘Oh, no!’
Even as she heard Tom’s exclamation, Fran saw him drop to crouch beside what looked for a moment like a pile of old clothes. There was no room to get alongside him without clambering into a cold frame, so Fran could only ask, ‘Is it Mr Hargreaves?’
‘It must be. He’s still breathing. Quick, run to the nearest house and send for Doctor Owen.’
She did not need to be told twice. Fran raced back through the cottage and down the alleyway, heedless of the puddles, barely checking when she almost fell as her foot encountered a loose stone and slid sideways. Beneath the street lamp, the Hudson stood oddly serene, as if it belonged to another, calmer world. In the dark it was very difficult to see which, if any, of the houses had telephone wires running into them, and in this part of the village she thought the chances of finding someone who was a subscriber were very low. The nearest large property was the vicarage, but she remembered just in time that Reverend Pinder had told them only that afternoon that he was not connected. Therefore, following Tom’s urgent instructions, she ran up the path of the first house in the small terrace, whose wall enclosed one side of Mr Hargreaves’ alleyway. As she stood panting on the step, she grabbed the knocker and gave the door the battering of its life.
It seemed to take an age for anyone to come and as she waited it flashed through her mind that, although she hadn’t driven for a long time, Cec had taught her, in their father’s car, back when she had still been in her teens, and she supposed she could probably manage the Hudson in an emergency such as this. Tom did not know that she could drive. If he had, perhaps he would have told her to fetch Dr Owen herself. She took the idea no further, for at that moment an elderly woman, whom she half recognized as one of the congregation at the parish church, appeared on the doorstep, looking bemused.
‘Please can you help?’ Fran said. ‘My friend and I have just found Mr Hargreaves lying in his garden. He’s in a very bad way and I need someone to fetch the doctor.’
To her relief, the woman on the doorstep immediately took in the urgency of the situation and, without hesitation, roared in a voice louder than Fran would have thought possible, ‘Jackee … JACKEEEE!’ Turning back to Fran, she said, at normal volume, ‘Lucky my grandson’s here, miss. He’ll go. He’s right fleet of foot, our Jack is. He’ll have the doctor here in two ticks.’
‘Jackee,’ she instructed a slender boy of about ten or eleven years old who had appeared beyond her shoulder, ‘get yourself to Doctor Owen and tell him he’s needed at Mr Hargreaves’ at once.’
Clearly the entire family were quick on the uptake, for the boy was out of the door in a matter of seconds, still jamming a cap on his head.
‘Would you like to come in here out of the rain, miss, while you wait for the doctor?’
‘No, thank you. I ought to go back. There may be something I can do to help.’
‘You’re right, of course. I’ll follow you round,’ the woman said. ‘I’ll just get my coat and shoes on.’
When she got back inside Mr Hargreaves’ cottage, Fran paused to look for an improvement on the torch. Hanging on a nail in a cupboard under the stairs, she found an old hurricane lantern that still had some oil in it. There were matches on the mantelshelf, and she was therefore able to return to the back garden bearing a far superior source of light.
‘A boy from the house next door has run for Doctor Owen. How is Mr Hargreaves?’
‘Gosh, you were quick, well done,’ Tom said. ‘I’m afraid he’s in a bad way. He’s breathing, but he’s unconscious and very cold. He must have been lying out here for ages in the cold and rain.’
‘How awful!’ Fran said. ‘Do you suppose he’s been here all afternoon and evening, maybe each time we came to the house?’
‘I’m afraid so. I daren’t try to move him on my own, because if he’s broken something I might jolt him about and make it worse, but maybe we could try to get him a bit warmer.’
‘Of course. Have my coat – no, wait – our coats will both be wet. I’ll go inside and grab whatever I can.’
Having handed the lantern over to Tom, Fran ran back into the cottage. There was nothing obviously suitable in the downstairs room or the kitchen, so she ran up the stairs and into the main bedroom. She had been about to denude the bed of its coverings when she realized that a made-up bed might be needed, and turned instead to a big linen chest that stood at one side of the bedroom. Here she was rewarded with a whole pile of blankets, which she carted downstairs and out into the garden at top speed. As she hastened through the kitchen, she found that the woman from next door had let herself in and was filling a large kettle at the sink.
‘Tea is always what’s wanted in situations like this.’ The woman nodded, giving Fran a grim half smile.
Good heavens, Fran thought, from what Tom says I should imagine the last thing Mr Hargreaves needs just now is a cup of tea.
However, some forty-five minutes later, sitting with a hot strong brew warming her hands, Fran privately admitted to herself that Mrs Snook, as the next-door neighbour turned out to be called, was absolutely right. In the course of any emergency, the moment for a cup of tea would inevitably arrive.
Mrs Snook had also provided a towel from somewhere so that Fran could rub down the bits of her – hands, face, legs – that had got so wet while she held an umbrella over the doctor in the garden during his preliminary examination, prior to Tom and Dr Owen carrying the old man as gently as they could upstairs. Here Tom had left the doctor and the district nurse – summoned, on Dr Owen’s instructions, by the indefatigable young Jack Snook – still attending their patient.
‘The trouble is,’ Mrs Snook was saying, ‘that the garden’s not overlooked by anyone. It’s the churchyard on the one side and Major Fullerton’s orchard wall on the other, so once poor old Mr Hargreaves had fallen no one would see him.’
‘I wonder what he was doing out in the garden on such a nasty day?’ Fran ventured.
‘Ah, but it didn’t turn really bad until late on, did it?’ said Mrs Snook. ‘Mr Hargreaves was always out in that garden of his, in pretty much all weathers. Trimming and pruning, he’d likely be at this time of year, I expect, for his fruit crop is probably in already. Or digging potatoes maybe, or some other veg. He used to sell some stuff to Mr Winterton, the greengrocer, and a lot of it he just gave away. A nice man, Mr Hargreaves. I hope he’s going to pull through.’
‘We came to see him earlier on,’ Tom said, ‘but he didn’t answer the door. I’m afraid he may have already been lying unconscious outside.’
Mrs Snook was not convinced. ‘It might be as you say, of course. But Mr Hargreaves didn’t always hear the knocker if he was right down by his sheds. Folks who knew him mostly used to give him a shout and then walk through into the garden. They knew they’d find him there ninety-nine times out of a hundred.’
At that moment Dr Owen appeared at the top of the stairs. Before he was halfway down, Tom and Fran had chorused their enquiries and Mrs Snook had risen to provide the doctor with a cup of tea.
‘He’s still unconscious,’ Dr Owen said. ‘We’ve done what we can to make him comfortable, and Nurse Goodall is going to sit with him. The worst problem is the shock, brought on by lying outside in the cold and wet for so long. The head wound isn’t actually as bad as it looks.’
‘So what happened to him, in your opinion?’ Tom asked, as Dr Owen sat himself in a rocking chair that stood close to the recently kindled fire.
‘My guess would be that he missed his footing and fell, hitting his head as he went down. There’s a sort of decorative stone edging all the way along the path, and if you came a cropper against that you’d know about it. The initial knock on the head must have concussed him, or he may have been conscious initially but passed out later. It doesn’t seem all that cold to us, but an elderly person’s temperature can soon drop to a dangerously low level when they’re exposed to cooling temperatures combined with the shock of a fall.’
‘If he was working out in the garden,’ said Fran, ‘then I can’t understand why he was only in his shirtsleeves.’
‘Who said he was working in the garden?’ the doctor asked. ‘As he hadn’t got his coat on, I think it much more likely that he’d slipped outside to fetch something from one of his sheds, or had maybe gone to use the outside privy. You’d be much more likely to sustain a fall if you were hurrying to avoid getting cold.’
‘There’s no question of this not being an accident?’ Tom asked.
Dr Owen raised his eyebrows. ‘Are you implying that someone may have banged Mr Hargreaves over the head and left him for dead, Mr Dod? I think we must be careful not to let our imaginations run away with us, don’t you?’