Free Cold in the Earth by Aline Templeton Page B

certainly grateful. We sort of acted as bodyguards for her for the rest of the festival.
    ‘My father said if she ever wanted a job to let him know – we were always needing people after my mother left. None of them lasted long. When he discovered you only got a slave by marrying one he’d lose it with them and then they’d leave.’
    The tables around them had emptied and the waiter had brought them coffee. At last they were getting to the point where he might have useful information for her.
    ‘So when Dizzy – Di – got fed up with living at home, she called your father to ask for a job?’
    ‘That’s right. She came in – oh, October, November, was it? I know she left in January.’
    In her eagerness, Laura leaned forward across the table. ‘Look, I need to know every single tiny detail. There may be something you saw, something you don’t even know you know, but that might give me a lead to follow on what she did next.’
    It was a mistake. She could see his withdrawal immediately. He had been facing her squarely, meeting her eyes as he talked; now he shifted to sit sideways at the table and he looked past her as if his attention had been caught by something in the empty courtyard.
    ‘Well, hey, that’s a pretty tall order. We’re talking fifteen years ago here.’ His voice was once more rising at the end of the sentence. ‘Glad to be of service, like they say, but total recall’s a bit off the scale.’
    He’d slipped behind the shield again, as uncertain people, too directly challenged, tend to do. Laura tried to regain lost ground.
    ‘Was she a good Girl Friday?’ she asked, smiling. ‘I don’t remember her being very domesticated.’
    ‘OK, I guess. She got across my aunt, though – they’d a couple of up-and-downers. She’s always sticking her nose in.’
    ‘Does your aunt live with your father?’
    ‘Not exactly. It’s kind of weird – there’s the farm office and the study and the main kitchen and so on, then the rest of the ground floor is our flat – my father’s, I should say – and my aunt and my meathead cousin live upstairs. Enough to drive anyone to leave home, don’t you reckon?’
    Laura had spent enough time listening to his family problems. ‘If you can’t remember anything, do you think your father would?’
    Max laughed, shortly. ‘You’d better give him a miss. Women seem to have a habit of disappearing around him.’
    But his father, perhaps, might have a different version of the story Max had told her. Laura persisted. ‘Can you give me his phone number?’
    ‘I think it’s changed since I left home. I could try and get it for you, I suppose. Give me yours and I’ll call you.’
    She’d be moving shortly anyway; with only slight misgiving, Laura gave it to him, then got up to go. He was staring at her again. ‘So like Di,’ he murmured. ‘Really takes me back.’
    They climbed the steps from the pub together. He was going back to work; he did something vague as a broker, putting companies and investors together. He went on to the Tube station while Laura walked more slowly along the rows of shops. There was something comforting about the brightly lit windows, the scent of toiletries, the elegant, expensive nothings on display. She felt she had walked long enough with the ghosts of her sister’s past today; she needed to escape that twilight world.
    The temperature had dropped overnight, low enough to bring a powdering of snow to Chapelton, three hundred feet above sea-level on the exposed uplands where stunted trees grew with flattened tops as if they had been trimmed by the cutting edge of the wind. The wide arch of the sky was still cold and clear but over in the east a red winter dawn was firing clouds massing on the horizon with a muddy, sullen glare.
    Conrad Mason pulled the collar of his thick navy pea-jacket closer about him as he came down the front steps of the big Victorian house. He was theoretically on the early shift today but before he