Free Closed at Dusk by Monica Dickens

chin.
    â€˜Of course, my dear.’ Ruth seemed to like her. Williamwould probably like her when he got to know her. He was depressed now, and not interested.
    As Ralph’s party had left the restaurant after the Barrett Mayne dinner, William had asked him, ‘How is – how is Angela?’
    â€˜Shattered,’ Ralph said too easily, his host’s urbanity still operating. ‘She’s gone to her sister’s for a bit. Totally to pieces.’
    Angela
… my dazzling brief companion. You spun in and out of my life and showed me a vision. Now I can’t help you. Why should you need me?
    He did not try to ring Angela again.
    It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened in Frank’s ornithological life. He had suspected that the wilder reaches of The Sanctuary estate might yield good rewards. But even he, a dreamer, a visionary, had never hoped for a prize like this.
    The Friday after he and Faye had been at The Sanctuary and he had helped that funny little boy (‘Strange how you’re always so ready to butt into the lives of total strangers,’ Faye had said when he caught up with her in the car park), he had dropped her off at her afternoon job at the cottage hospital and gone back to the fabulous gardens. He paid his two pounds at the white wooden kiosk, scooted up the hill and crouched among the overgrown vegetation on the far side of the coppice. He saw a chiff-chaff and heard a willow-warbler’s liquid descending song; a pair of wrens were pecking about under some bushes as if they were looking for last year’s berries. And then he saw it – a long patch of off-white underparts – only for a moment, so at first he thought he might be mistaken. The little bird flitted back at once among the branches. When he saw the broad chestnut tail, his heart stopped in its tracks and then raced, and he had to swallow to cope with the rush of emotion that filled his throat.
    A nightingale. Once the poets’ familiar, now among the rarest of birds. Gone, long gone, Juliet’s nightingale – ‘Nightly she sings on yon pomegranate tree’ – because modern farming had destroyed most of the thickets and hedgerows. Last year, there were said to be no more than half a dozen pairs in Oxfordshire.
    But here was one, and it was his alone.
    Because he had to get to the shops before they closed, Frank had crept quietly away so as not to alarm this shyest of birds. He had pranced down the hill with a great grin on his bony mug. By the lake, little groups of visitors were walking, pointing things out to each other, stooping to peer at a label, sitting contentedly on a rustic bench to take in the whole satisfying English scene, with the strong stone house four-square in its idyllic setting.
    Two men with a barrow and an assortment of dogs were thinning out iris corms on a bank by the water. The taller one was lanky in old trousers and open blue shirt, the other balder, shorter, stockier, in clothes too clean and towny to be messing about with clumps of wet iris. They did not look like gardeners.
    â€˜Excuse me,’ Frank said when he came across a real gardener raking out a shrubbery bed. ‘May I ask who that might be?’
    The gardener straightened up and looked. ‘That’s Mr Taylor, Mr William Taylor, that is, who lives here, and that other, that’s his brother, Matthew Taylor.’
    The next day, after Frank had been up to look for the nightingale again, he saw the lanky one in a dinghy on the lake with the little lost boy and a smashing woman, so he could say jauntily, ‘Afternoon, Mr Taylor. Lovely day for a sail,’ and swing over the narrow hump-backed bridge as if he were a privileged customer.
    Which he was – oh, he was! Little did they know, those threepeople in the boat, laughing about nothing and looking up a little surprised when he greeted them so familiarly from the bridge, that he, Frank Pargeter, had been in the