‘She can’t still be away, surely?’ Laura protested huffily down the line.
‘Well, she’s not responded to any of my messages, and I must have left, what – four now?’ Fee’s voice had risen an octave, a clear indicator that she was stressed, although whether that was because of Laura’s bad mood or the queue of ADHD kids in front of her wanting to go on the water flumes was open to question.
‘But I need to get on. I’ve seen two people on the list now and I was supposed to see her first,’ she argued, jumping as an HGV whistled past the lay-by she was sitting in, causing Dolly to rock like a boat.
‘Jeez, where are you?’ Fee complained. ‘It sounds like you’re sitting in the middle of a runway.’
‘I’m near Slough, looking at futons for Urchin. There’s a factory clearance sale.’
‘Mmm, well, I don’t know what to tell you,’ Fee murmured. Laura could hear her opening the till and handing over fifty-pence pieces for the lockers. ‘I can’t ring the woman incessantly. I’ll get done for harassment.’
Things still hadn’t quite returned to normal between them since their argument at Tom’s the week before and she knew Fee was sulking because she’d called Paul a ‘potato’.
‘Look, can you just text me the address? I may as well see if I can talk to her in person whilst I’m over this way.’
Two minutes later, her phone beeped and Laura looked up the village on the Surrey map she’d bought at the service station last time she’d been here seeing Orlando. Brampton Oakley appeared to be close to Kitty’s village. Just a few miles away, in fact.
Leaving it spread out on the passenger seat beside her, Laura pulled out of the lay-by and headed west towards Guildford, determined to pin this woman down once and for all.
Dolly sat idling as Laura looked up at the elaborate wrought-iron gates from the far side of the road. The Parsonage was carved into stone slabs set in each of the tall, dusty brick pillars on either side of the drive, and although she couldn’t see the house from here – the drive swept around and away from the road – she had glimpsed an impressive stack of chimneys beyond the fir trees on her approach. So far, so imposing.
Turning the engine off and getting out of the car, Laura crossed the road and pressed the button on the keypad. She took a step back, expecting a voice to bark back at her. Instead, a low whirr of motors started up somewhere nearby and the gates – with stately slowness – began to open.
Laura turned back towards Dolly in surprise. She wouldn’t be able to pass through the gates before they closed again. Clutching her bag closer to her, she stepped on to the private property.
The lawn spread out like a sheet, flat and smooth, before her as she followed the gentle meander of the drive up to the main approach. It wasn’t a long drive, maybe six hundred yards or so. From the street it looked as if it could have extended for half a mile, but the house was standing before her almost prematurely.
It was tall and reasonably narrow, built in a plum-coloured brick with high sash windows and a porticoed front door that was reached by a short sweep of steps. In the window above the door, she could see an antique bow rocking horse, and all the curtains appeared to be drawn and draped to exactly the same degree.
Laura shivered as she looked up at it. For all its desirable symmetry and impressive ceiling height, it looked forbidding, cold and reproachful. She could just imagine secrets lurking within it, trapped in the corners by sticky cobwebs and heavy locked doors.
She walked up the steps and rang the doorbell. Far inside the cavity of the house, she heard the jangle of a small brass bell, wall-mounted in the old servants’ quarters, no doubt. She waited.
But no one came. She tried again.
Nothing.
Bending to the side, she peered in through the front windows. A stack of boxes stood at the back of one of the rooms, a velvet wing chair the only piece of furniture in there. In the room on the other side was an oval dining table with eight chairs around it and an intricate candelabra with the remaining stumps of six mulberry-coloured candles.
Laura walked back down the steps and sat on the bottom one, pulling her notepad out of her bag. She thought for a moment about what to say.
Dear Mrs Tremayne,
I dropped by hoping to arrange an appointment for an interview with you, regarding the charm necklace Rob Blake has commissioned me to make for your sister’s birthday. Please would you call my studio on 01728 662490 at your earliest convenience.
Yours sincerely,
Laura Cunningham
She folded the sheet of paper and dropped it through the letterbox. She was just starting back down the drive, eager to leave the deserted house, when a sudden noise came to her ear.
Laura stopped and listened. It had come from the side of the house, in the gardens.
She walked tentatively around the building, almost tiptoeing. Part of her wanted to jump in Dolly and get on the motorway and back home. The sun had barely got out of bed today and it was bitterly cold. But ‘150 miles’ kept blinking in her brain, and if she could just get this meeting over and done with, it would mean an extra day in the studio with Old Grey for company and the tides as her clock.
Laura passed an old lean-to glasshouse with several broken panes, rounded a corner and stopped abruptly at the sight of a long shadow moving ahead. She inched forwards. A woman was kneeling by a flowerbed at the edge of the lawn, weeding the bare, hard-crusted beds vigorously. Laura watched her, transfixed. Her hair was beautiful, a true golden blonde that shone in the late-afternoon light, her thin frame visible beneath her pansy-patterned needlecord dress and jumper as she grabbed, pinched and pulled the weeds from the soil. Oversized suede gardening gloves emphasized her thinness further.
‘Excuse me,’ Laura said.
The woman twisted round to look up at her, her pale face visibly draining of colour at the sight of Laura.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to alarm you,’ Laura said quickly. ‘I rang the bell but no one answered. I’ve just dropped a note through the door. I was leaving when I heard you back here.’
The woman stared at her in silence. Her face was plain and devoid of make-up, and she looked nothing like the slick, body-con, sexualized women at the Cube. She was nothing like Laura had imagined Cat Blake’s sister to be.
‘You are Olive Tremayne, aren’t you?’ Laura asked. ‘My name’s Laura Cunningham. I’m a jeweller. Your brother-in-law has commissioned me to make a necklace for your sister’s birthday . . . I’ve been trying to contact you for a couple of weeks now.’
The woman continued staring at her, and Laura wondered whether she had understood. Maybe she was just a worker here, or perhaps she was foreign?
Slowly, the woman got to her feet and walked towards Laura, her palest-blue eyes pinned on her visitor like a sparrow hawk hovering above an unsuspecting mouse.
‘Did you . . . did you get any of my messages?’ Laura asked, repressing the urge to step back from the woman’s intense scrutiny and the small fork in her hand.
The woman stopped twenty feet away. ‘Go.’ She swung her arm out like a hinge towards the gate. Laura followed the point with her eyes.
‘But if you could just let me explain,’ Laura began. ‘I didn’t mean to trespass. But I live awfully far away and as Mrs Tremayne hasn’t returned any of my calls, I just thought I’d try to make contact directly.’
‘Go,’ the woman repeated in a lower voice. Her chin was dipped down towards her chest and Laura could see tremors rippling across her dress like wind over water. ‘You are not welcome here.’
‘But Rob ask—’
The woman silently repeated her gesture towards the gates.
Laura sighed. ‘Fine. I’m going,’ she said, holding her hands up and beginning to walk backwards. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’ She turned away, marching quickly down the drive. It felt so much longer on the way out than on the way in. As she passed the sensor and the gate’s motors started up, Laura turned round. The woman was watching her, and her arm was still up, pointing the way out. She looked like a statue in her eerie stillness.
Freaked out, Laura began to run through the opening gates and back to Dolly. She started the car up immediately and pulled away from the kerb with a squeal of tyres, the vision of the woman’s stony stare still chasing her down the street like a hound.
Not until she was back on the motorway did her pulse settle down enough for her to begin to realize what this meant. If that woman had been Olive Tremayne – and it seemed more than likely that she was – she clearly had no intention of contributing to her sister’s gift. Rob Blake was going to have to go back to the drawing board on this. His big romantic idea wasn’t going according to plan.