Free The Saint Zita Society by Ruth Rendell Page A

door at number 7. June waved to her great-nephew, seeing noreason why she should conspire with them in their intrigue. Rad just raised one hand in a feeble wave. From the basement window of number 8 Miss Grieves also watched Rad leave. Two hours before she had watched him arrive.
    Studying wheelchair advertisements in the newspaper, the Princess turned briefly from the page. ‘Don’t forget to get that canned set tomorrow, will you? You won’t remember if you don’t write it down.’
    ‘Boxed,’ said June absently.
    F or Rabia a weekend at the Stills’ country house was always something to look forward to. Until they took her to Gallowmill Hall she had never seen anything of the English countryside, let alone stayed there,
slept
there. She had discovered in herself a rapturous love of the fields and woods, the little stream which ran through the grounds and where there were ducks and moorhens, sometimes a swan and once an otter. Butterflies, red and black and white, abounded. Thomas could lie on a blanket on the lawn while the sun shone above and fluffy clouds drifted across a pearly-blue sky.
    It was some weeks since her first visit but now they were going again and, Lucy told Rabia, such a stay would be impossible without her. Who else could manage the children? So indispensable was she that in the car going down – a rented minibus so that all could be accommodated – Lucy apologised to her nanny for the house being so near to London and in
Essex
.
    ‘It wouldn’t be so bad if it was only Hertfordshire, but Essex makes people laugh as soon as you utter the name, doesn’t it, Press?’
    ‘Not the people I utter it to,’ said Preston.
    Rabia didn’t know what they were talking about so she just smiled. Thomas had fallen asleep next to her. If she could onlybe with him until he grew up or they sent him away to one of those wicked boarding schools, if only she could be with Thomas she would want nothing else, no second husband, no home of her own. If only. The girls were bickering. They had been made to wear trainers for the country instead of their new shoes and had shuffled their feet out of them as soon as the minibus was off.
    ‘Your shoes stink,’ said Matilda.
    Hero pinched her on the arm. ‘It’s yours that stink. My sweat doesn’t smell, I’m not old enough. You are.’
    ‘If you pinch me again I’ll kick you.’
    ‘Now that is enough.’ Rabia admonished them because their mother never bothered. ‘We want none of that while we go away to enjoy ourselves.’
    They obeyed her, they usually did. It took half an hour to get out of London and on to the M25, then along a turning through Epping Forest where there was little traffic and the air smelt fresh. The day was bright and cold, the woods golden, leaves falling or blowing off in the gusts of wind. Gallowmill Hall was approached by a long drive between yellow trees, half of whose leaves lay underfoot. In the meadow on the left-hand side a stag and three or four hinds, property of the deer farmer who rented a few of Preston’s acres, grazed on the lush green grass. A hawk hovered overhead.
    Thomas woke up, whimpering, and put his arms round Rabia’s neck as Preston drew up on the sweep in front of the house. If Lucy described it to her friends as ‘nothing much to look at, one of those two-a-penny late-eighteenth-century places’, to Rabia it was a gorgeous palace. That one family could live in such a place, and not even live but just come there sometimes to stay a couple of nights, was to her unbelievable, a dream. But it was real. The previous time they had been there, when the children were in bed, she hadcrept downstairs and come outside to touch the grey-gold stonework, half expecting it to dissolve in her hand. It was real. The rooms with their high ceilings and pale green or ivory walls were real, and the sweeping staircase, twice as wide as the one in Hexam Place, its banisters filagree silver, that too was real. The paintings were