Free Come Easy, Go Easy by James Hadley Chase

looking around. I told myself this was just the kind of place I would like to own. The thought dropped into my mind that Lola was the woman I would like to share it with. I went back to the shed and continued to work on the cultivator. I kept thinking of her in the halter and shorts, and the picture I had of her in my mind made concentration difficulty.
    I had been working on the cultivator for an hour or so when a car pulled up right outside the shed in which I was working.
    It was an old, dusty Chevrolet. A tall, lean man in his middle forties got out of the car, followed by a thin, yellow dog of no particular breed that moved close to the man's heels, it's big, bloodshot shot eyes mournful.
    The man wore a pair of faded blue overalls, patched at the knees. Around his scraggy neck was a greasy red handkerchief knotted at his throat. At the back of his head he wore a high crowned straw hat, burned yellow by the sun.

    His face, the colour of teak, was thin and fiddle shaped. He had a long thin nose and thin hips. His eyes, under greying bushy eyebrows, were steady and piercing.
    There was something about him I didn't like. He made me think of a cop. Those eyes were prying, suspicious and distrusting.
    We looked at each other for a long moment, then I straighten up.
    "Something I can do for you?" I said. I had to make a conscious effort to meet those prying eyes.
    He leaned against the shed door, his thumbs hooked in the arm straps of his overalls. The dog sat by him, staring fixedly at me.
    "Maybe," he said. "Maybe you can tell me who you are and what you are doing here. Maybe you can tell me where Carl Jensen is. Maybe you can tell me to mind my own business."
    "Mr. Jenson is in Wentworth with Mrs. Jenson," I said. "I'm Jack Patmore, the new hand."
    "Is that a fact?" He shifted his position. "You mean, Carl has hired you to help out?"
    "That's right."
    "Well, well. I never thought he would do it." He shook his head. All the time his hard little eyes were running over me, taking in my stained, crumpled trousers, my dirty shirt and my scuffed shoes. "Never thought he'd take on help, specially when that wife of his is so set against it." He scratched the side of his face, continuing to shake his head. "I'm his brother-in-law. Ricks is the name—George Ricks."
    I guessed he wouldn't be Lola's brother. He must be the late Mrs. Jenson's brother.
    So I didn't have to go on meeting those suspicious little eyes, I squatted down beside the rotary cultivator, my back to him.
    "You said his wife went with him to Wentworth?" Ricks asked.
    "Yes."
    "So you're alone here?"
    "That's right."
    I heard him move forward, and he began to breathe down the back of my neck as I worked on the gearbox.

    "I bet Carl bought that as scrap. I bet he got it for a song. Wouldn't surprise me to hear someone paid him to take it away."
    I didn't say anything. This man was beginning to get on my nerves.
    "Carl's a smart cookie all right," Ricks went on. "He'll look at a lump of rusty iron and see profit in it whereas another guy would just see rusty iron. I bet he'll get that cultivator working again and make a big profit out of it. Yeah, he's smart when it comes to metal, but he's plain dumb when it comes to people."
    I made a grunting noise as I got the gear cogs out. I put them in a petrol bath.
    "What do you think of that wife of his?"
    I was glad I was bending over the machine so he couldn't see my face. I wasn't expecting that one. It jolted me.
    "She's all right," I said.
    I reached for a screw driver and began to dismantle the clutch plates.
    "All right? Is that what you think? I bet she doesn't want you here. She doesn't want anyone here. She doesn't want me here: her husband's brother-in-law. Never thought Carl would be such an old fool as to marry a tramp like her. She walked in here one day from nowhere and going nowhere. She's smart all right. She saw her chance and grabbed it. All she had to do was to wave her sex and her body in front of him,