Free BLINDFOLD by Lyndon Stacey Page A

would be pleased.
    Gideon dutifully set out his easel and pastels, sat for a full twenty minutes staring at the paper with its half-completed painting and seeing nothing, and then got up and made a cup of coffee he didn't really want. Tramping upstairs with a cup for Rachel, he found himself telling her he was going out for a couple of hours.
    Rachel assured him she'd be all right, and within ten minutes he was on the Norton, bound for the wildlife sanctuary and his sister.
    Fleetingly it occurred to him that he might return to find Rachel gone and all his valuables with her, but the idea didn't seriously take root in his mind. Unless she had an accomplice with transport, she wouldn't get far with very much.
    What if she'd been planted by Curly and Co.? he wondered in an amused flight of fancy, and dismissed the thought just as easily. Rachel's big, expressive eyes were a mirror for her soul and in their troubled depths Gideon sensed traces of some unspoken fear, but they were the eyes of a frightened child, not a scheming criminal.
    Riding along the Dorset lanes in the bright sunlight, he couldn't have said with certainty just what had prompted him to visit Naomi again so soon. It wasn't anything she'd said; more what she hadn't said. Although they had spoken for almost a quarter of an hour, she had rung off without ever really saying why she'd called.
    It was possible, he supposed, that the lure of a ride on the bike on such a morning had influenced his decision to check on her but he didn't feel it was entirely that. Whatever the reason, he hadn't been in the mood for painting, and a visit to the Sanctuary was as good a way to spend the morning as any.
    He was barely a hundred yards from the place when it happened.
    Riding along the narrow lane, the Norton doing forty or so, Gideon was totally unprepared for the small figure that came hurtling out of a gateway to his left, almost under the wheels of the motorbike.
    He swore and swerved violently, the Norton skidding on the loose stones at the side of the lane as he tried to brake. Mounting the grassy verge, the bike pitched and bucked like an unbroken horse and finally succumbed to the forces of gravity, throwing Gideon off sideways into the hedge.
    He was not best pleased.
    He extricated himself from the brambles and broken twiggery, supposing he should be thankful there hadn't been a ditch, to find himself under the scrutiny of a scruffy, tow-headed and apparently entirely unrepentant child.
    `My brother says people shouldn't ride big bikes if they can't control them,' the child announced, looking from Gideon to where the Norton had come to rest, its engine still ticking over and back wheel spinning. `He says half of them should never be allowed on the road.'
    Gideon nearly choked. `And what does he say about running out into the road without looking?' he asked irritably, taking his helmet off and removing a hawthorn twig from the collar of his leather jacket.
    The lad stared up at him through narrowed, insolent eyes. `My brother's bigger than you,' he said with the air of one who thought that answered everything.
    `Well,' Gideon said, `if you want to get any bigger, you'd better start looking where you're going. I only missed you by inches!' `You were going too fast.'
    `And so were you!' Gideon retorted, unwarily allowing himself to be drawn into the childish argument.
    He reached down and switched the motorbike's engine off, pulling it upright with an effort. He was relieved to see that it seemed to have escaped serious damage. One bent mirror and quantities of grassy mud plastered in every conceivable nook and cranny appeared to be the extent of it. He removed the worst of the mud and straightened up to find that the lad was still watching him. `It's not a bad bike,' the kid said judiciously in his curiously sing-song voice. He stood there in denim dungarees and a nonetoo-cleanjumper, his blond, tousled head tilted slightly to one side and bright blue eyes regarding