A Place of Hope (13 page)

She gave a wry smile. It wasn’t actually her he was pursuing; it was her money.

Would he stop? Somehow, she doubted it.

Oliver stopped the car by the side of the road that led up across the Pennine range, the backbone of northern England. He pointed ahead. ‘You can see The Drover’s Hope from here. Look up the slope in that direction!’ He pointed. ‘That’s it, sitting on the rise to the right of the main road.’

Emily leaned forward to study the building – no, several buildings. Mine now, she thought, and something warmed inside her.

The house was far larger than she’d expected, even after Oliver’s description, a sprawling, uneven mass of dark slate roofs on a stone building that was two storeys at the front. She couldn’t see the rear clearly from here. The building wasn’t of any particular style, but she found its irregularities interesting.

Since the traffic heading over the Pennines towards Todmorden was very light, Oliver slowed down to a crawl before they got to Minkybridge. He pointed to a house set back from the road, modern and of a comfortable size. ‘That’s my home, but I’ve been thinking of buying a renovator’s dream now and working on it.’

‘Are you good at do-it-yourself stuff?’

‘Hopeless, but I’m sure I could
organize
tradesmen to work on a renovation project. I love watching those home improvement programmes on television. Jeremy – my son – pulls a face when I talk about doing that. But if I ever find an old place that speaks to me, I’ll buy it and have a go at renovating. The only good thing about being widowed is that you can please yourself completely about what you do.’

He sounded deeply sad, and there was always a warmth in his voice when he spoke of his wife. Emily liked that.

Oliver speeded up again and shortly afterwards pulled off the road into a typical pub car park, a large, square expanse of crumbling tarmac between the main building and the road. It had potholes here and there, and the edges were crumbling badly. There was no inn sign hanging outside on the wooden post, but the hooks for it were still there in the square frame at the top. There was a smaller sign by the door that read
The Drover’s Hope
.

‘I like the look of the place,’ Chad said. ‘It’s a real mix-up of architectural styles, but somehow they look attractive together – or they would do if the door and window frames were painted and some of those cracked roof tiles replaced. Shouldn’t be a difficult job.’

‘You sound as if you know what you’re talking about,’ Emily said when he fell silent.

‘I felt as if I did.’ He sounded faintly surprised.

Oliver switched the engine off, then flourished one hand. ‘Emily, meet The Drover’s Hope. Drover’s Hope, this is your new owner, Miss Emily Mattison.’

‘Ms,’ she corrected automatically.

‘Sorry. I usually try to remember. That really matters to you, doesn’t it?’

‘Yes. My marital status is no one else’s business, and when some people say “Miss” to an older woman, they get a slightly sneering look, as if it’s wrong not to have been married. It was my choice not to marry, because I’ve never met anyone I felt I could commit to for the rest of my life.’

She had tried living with a couple of men, and
she
had left them, not the other way round. Both times she’d hoped the relationship would come to something before it was too late for her to have children, but it hadn’t. She’d grown tired of the men, decent sorts but not
right
.

Sometimes she mourned the fact that she didn’t have any children, but you had to take life as it came. At least she’d had an interesting job, involving travel at times, one that had given her the option of retiring early. To the rest of the world she’d been a secretary, but her job had involved so much more.

And what was she sitting here reminiscing for? Chad and Oliver were waiting for her. She opened the car door and got out to join them, studying the house –
her
house now.

She didn’t want to travel any more; she wanted to settle somewhere and put down roots, big deep roots. As she looked at the old house, a voice seemed to say
Here!
in her head, and a warm feeling of coming home had her moving towards it without waiting for the others.

For all its imperfections, she fell in love with the place as quickly as that.

‘What do you think?’ Oliver asked when he caught up with her.

‘I love it. There’s something . . . I don’t know, appealing about it. I feel it needs to be cherished, so that it can come into its own again, though as what, I don’t know. I’d not like to run a pub.’

Silence greeted her remarks so she turned to Chad. ‘What do you think?’

‘I agree absolutely. I love the look of the house too. It sounds silly, but it feels like a real home.’

He frowned as he turned to stare at the moors that stretched away into the distance, his eyes following the road as it wound higher and higher over the treeless slopes. ‘You know, there’s something familiar about this sort of scenery. I must have visited Lancashire before.’

‘You don’t have a Lancashire accent. Yours has a bit of the south-west in it, I think. Not Cornwall or Devon – Somerset or Wiltshire, perhaps.’

‘Do you think so?’ He stared for a minute longer, then rubbed his temple, as if it ached. ‘Damn! Some memory was hovering – I could almost catch it – but it’s gone again.’

‘Shall we go inside now?’ Oliver had been waiting patiently, allowing them time to take things in, but now he moved past them, pulling out a key. It was a huge, old-fashioned metal object like something out of a fairy tale. ‘I hope nobody’s broken in. It’d be child’s play to pick this lock, but Penelope wouldn’t let me have more modern locks installed, let alone a security system.’

‘If we can do it without damaging the door, I’d not object to putting better locks in and installing a security system as well,’ Emily said. ‘I’m a big believer in prevention where my own safety is concerned.’ Leon had taught her that. She hadn’t put an alarm system in her house in Kings Langley because she’d been intending to sell. How strange that she’d instantly wanted to protect this place!

As Oliver continued to fumble with the lock in vain, she held out her hand for the key. It felt comfortable in her hand, as long as her palm and fingers combined, made of rough, blackened iron, very old. It slid easily into the big keyhole and she felt a sense of satisfaction as it turned with a dull clunking sound.

She pushed the door open and stepped inside, then turned to hold out her hand to Chad. ‘Come and explore our new home with me.’

He took her hand and they went inside.

Having him here felt right, too, she realized. Very right.

The minute George’s car had turned out of the street, Rachel threw the remaining bits and pieces into her own vehicle, switched on the security alarm in her house and set off for Lancashire.

She kept an eye on the vehicles behind her, checking in the rear view mirror to make sure George wasn’t following her. She kept just as careful an eye ahead of her, in case he was taking the same route. But to her relief, she saw no further sign of him.

After a few minutes she settled down to enjoy the drive, not pushing herself too hard. She stopped once for a coffee and snack, and she met no traffic jams, thank goodness, though the traffic was heavy as she circled Manchester on the M64 ring road.

It was late evening when she got to Littleborough. She slowed down to admire some old stone buildings, then followed the satnav’s instructions to Emily’s pub.

She didn’t know Lancashire very well, but she intended to explore it while she was here. She really liked the sight of the moors, great curves of land rolling away into the distance. It didn’t overpower you as the French Alps had on her first and only visit there.

She flexed her hands one after the other as the traffic slowed almost to a halt. She’d be glad to stop driving. It had been a fraught couple of days and it had taken all her energy to cope.

When she went into work on the Sunday, Pauline was furious to find that her two most lucrative patients had run away during her weekend break. She called an emergency staff meeting at once.

‘How could you let
one
patient escape?’ she demanded. ‘Let alone two?’

‘It happened during the night,’ someone muttered, sounding aggrieved. ‘
We
weren’t on duty.’

‘And I shall be speaking to the night staff about this, you can count on that. But those two must have been planning this, and I mean to get to the bottom of how they managed to do that without anyone noticing.’

Dead silence. They were avoiding her eyes. She’d hand picked this group of staff, people who’d been in trouble before, who’d do anything rather than upset her or get another black mark on their records. Even Jackson, the most uppity of them all, the one who’d tried to protest about the way she did some things, had been in trouble for insubordination before he joined the unit.

She scowled into the distance. Jackson. Yes, he must have been involved. It’d be typical of him. Too soft by far, that one. Or had he been feathering his own nest at her expense? Had they paid him to help them escape? She’d have to find out where he’d been during the weekend.

When the silence had gone on for long enough, she asked, ‘How do you think this reflects on our unit? Badly. Very badly. If any other patient gets out, I’ll make sure those responsible lose their jobs instantly, if not their professional accreditation.’ She let that sink in, then waved one hand towards the door. ‘You may go. Oh, wait a minute. When’s Jackson coming back on duty?’

‘He started his annual leave at the end of last week,’ one of the nurses reminded her. ‘So it’ll be three weeks.’

How could she have forgotten that? ‘Oh, yes.’

They exchanged glances and no one spoke.

‘Well? What else do you know that I don’t?’

‘I don’t think Jackson
is
coming back. He’s got another job.’

When they’d all left, Pauline sat drumming her fingers on her desk. Jackson Hosier
must
have been involved in the escape. It could only have been him. Why? Why should he care about two old people, who were useless to society?

She checked with HR and found out that Jackson was definitely not coming back to work in this hospital. He must have arranged this without telling her. Which meant the human resources people had been involved.

She noted down the place he was going to. She’d make sure they knew how unreliable he was. How he’d let two old people escape, or even helped them, though she couldn’t prove it. However, she was a master of innuendo, if she said so herself.

No one crossed her and got away with it. She’d been vulnerable once, wouldn’t let anyone get the better of her again. Never, ever again.

She was enjoying twisting the tail of the system that had denied her promotion. Oh, that gave her such satisfaction!

She had it all planned. Retirement as soon as she was financially secure and to hell with her so-called profession.

Emily stopped to stare round the first room they entered, which must have been the main bar. It was dusty and the shelves behind the bar were bare, but it was a spacious area, and from the windows on either side of the door there were wonderful views right across the moors.

Chad went across to the counter and rubbed a corner of it, studying the wood closely. ‘Oak. Years of polishing has gone into developing that depth of grain. You can’t get a patina like that overnight, or even in a decade of polishing.’

‘I don’t think Penelope can have lived in this part. Look at the dust,’ Emily said. ‘There are quite a lot of footprints in it. Are those all yours, Oliver, or do you think someone else has been in here?’

‘It looks as if someone else has been here.’

‘An intruder, do you think?’

‘Could be.’

‘We’ll have to be careful, make sure it’s locked up properly before night falls.’

‘I did check the rear part,’ Oliver said. ‘All locked up.’

‘Good.’ She smiled round her new home, still feeling a warmth, as if the house had welcomed her. Strange, that. She wasn’t normally fanciful, was noted for her practicality.

She appreciated the way Chad was waiting for her to go first, taking care not to obscure her view. It was a sign of respecting her ownership, well, she thought it was. Was it ridiculous to feel so comfortable with Chad? So safe? Had he always been such a quiet, self-contained person?

The front door opened again and she turned to see Oliver standing in the entrance with a suitcase, smiling cheerfully at them. She hadn’t even noticed him going back out again. He pointed. ‘The flat’s that way. Turn left into that passage and go through the door at the end.’

On one side of the passage was a small open space, only large enough to fit in two tables and chairs. The chairs were stacked now, and one table was piled on top of the other. It looked a mess, all dusty.

She paused before going along the passage to look towards the right and could see another bar behind the front one, a narrower space connected to the front by the serving area. ‘Two bars? It must have been quite a busy place once.’

‘We’ll have to ask the local history centre. The pub had closed by the time Trish and I came to live up here.’

Emily continued along the short corridor, opened the door at the end and stopped just inside. ‘Goodness! It’s like stepping from the eighteenth century into the twentieth.’ Not the twenty-first century, though. The room was like Emily’s grandmother’s house in style, with carpets, curtains and upholstery in such busy, contrasting patterns, it made her blink.

Oliver came to stand beside her. ‘Penelope had this part of the house converted into a flat when she first came here, but once that was done, she never changed a thing. There are several bedrooms upstairs, but I don’t think she went up there very often, if at all, in recent years. She found the stairs a bit of a trial because of her arthritis. She did have a new bathroom put in up there, though, so you and Rachel should be OK for showers, Chad.’

The living room was crammed with ornaments and knick-knacks. Every surface was covered with them. There was an electric fire with one of the armchairs set close to it, and a reading lamp positioned in just the right way to focus on a book. The whole room had clearly been set up for one person living alone.