Free The Country Escape by Fiona Walker

most of this weekend then.’ Kat hooked her arm through Dawn’s and headed back towards the house.

Chapter 5
    As soon as she met Russ, the vegan vigilante, Dawn sensed something potentially unpleasant cooking at Lake Farm, and it wasn’t the lentil dahl that had been left on the range too long and burned dry. It was obvious from the way heand Kat looked at one another that they were more than part-time house-mates with a casually kinky Tantric acquaintance, and equally clear that Russ, despite his meat-free diet, was full of cock and bull.
    ‘The public misconception that shooting game birds isn’t animal cruelty because we can eat them is just wrong.’ Russ clearly loved the sound of his own voice, which was admittedly deepand honeyed with West Country sweetness, but nonetheless monotonous after the third tirade on the monstrous waste of raising game to shoot, then bulldozing the carcasses into the ground. ‘Dair Armitage runs a pheasant concentration camp here. No more than that.’
    ‘He sounds a great character from what Kat’s told me,’ Dawn said cheerfully. ‘No disrespect, but I could murder some roast pheasantright now.’ Her stomach gave a supportive rumble.
    Kat shot her a pained look from the kitchen, where she was scraping smouldering dahl off the range, and Dawn felt a stab of guilt. She knew she should make more effort with Russ, however annoyed she was that their girls-only get-together had been hijacked by someone who looked like a Led Zeppelin throwback, lectured her non-stop, refilledhis own glass without offering the bottle around and didn’t lift a finger to help Kat.
    Having finally got the fire going by applying a blowtorch, then feeding it and the range constant logs, Kat had succeeded in warming the Lake Farm kitchen-cum-sitting-room from damp sub-zero to moist single figures, occasionally dashing outside to collect more logs and check animals, cheerfully dippingin and out of the conversation and trying to steer Russ away from his more extreme monologues on animal cruelty. It was no wonder she’d burned supper. Dawn’s ineffectual attempts to help had thus far put out the fire once, flattened two dogs underfoot and spilled rice all over the kitchen floor. Kat had banished her friend to a damp chair, where she was now weighed down by snoring terriers and listeningto Russ, thrusting her empty glass at him hopefully.
    ‘The pheasant murdering finished a fortnight ago,’ he was saying. ‘But they’re still massacring deer, if you’re a fan of wild venison, Dawn. They pick off the females because they’re the population drivers, always aiming behind a front leg to get the major organs, although it usually takes two or more bullets to get the fatal shot. Eventhen they can take an hour to die.’
    ‘That is really awful.’ Dawn was genuinely appalled and wished he hadn’t told her that.
    ‘All meat is murder, Dawn. There’s an animal’s death in every mouthful you eat.’
    He was obviously very intelligent, occasionally surprisingly funny, vaguely sexy in a grubby, hippie Russell Brand sort of a way, but Dawn didn’t understand what Kat sawin him. It wasn’t that Russ was ugly – far from it – but he possessed a face in which what should have been handsome features appeared in the wrong places. It was as though a child had taken a Mr Potato Head and crammed on Brad Pitt and Pierce Brosnan’s best bits in random order – the dark eyes were too close together, the vulpine nose too high and the full-lipped mouth off to one side. The white-tippedhair was weird. She thought he was opinionated and not a patch on Nick, the hard-working charmer with the heroic job and perfect manners.
    Since he’d arrived, he’d done nothing but expound his strong political beliefs from the confines of the one dry, comfortable armchair in the house, which he’d cranked as close as he could to warm his feet at the fire, now blocking the heat from the restof the room while a noxious odour infused