Free The Corpse at the Haworth Tandoori by Robert Barnard Page B

empty?”
    â€œDerelict, more like. Ashworth hasn’t been worked as a farm since just after the war.”
    â€œSo he had them done up and let them to admirers?”
    â€œYes, bit by bit. Sometimes they did the renovations themselves: Chesney did, and my mother did all the interior decorating. People use words like ‘striking,’ which is their way of avoiding saying it’s embarrassingly awful.”
    â€œAnd they all pay him rent?”
    â€œOf course. Ranulph likes money and Melanie adores it. The rent they charge isn’t exorbitant, but it’s certainly at market level.”
    â€œI’m beginning to get the picture. He needs admiration, and currently he needs money as well. He’s managed to get both. And have Martha and Stephen always lived with her father?”
    â€œPretty much so, I think.” She wrinkled her brow and looked very young indeed. “Certainly since Stephen’s father took off. But I’m not sure they weren’t all living with him and Melanie even before that.”
    â€œHe keeps his hold on people,” commented Declan.
    â€œNot on me, he doesn’t,” piped up Mary Ann. “I’ve escaped.” She beamed around. Declan wondered whether escape was possible: whether she might still be chained byhatred and opposition, like Stephen, or whether she might simply have jumped from one bondage to another.
    â€œBut what are we talking about us for? You’ll find out everything about us soon enough, and by then you’ll probably want to leave. Tell me about yourself.”
    But Declan wasn’t going to tell her any more about himself and his family than he had told the other Ashworth people. That was something he always preferred to keep under cover. And he’d found that if he talked about Ireland—about small Irish villages, about the priest and the schoolteacher, the pub and the church—he could flannel most people into thinking he’d been telling them about himself. In general folks were interested but had little idea about the country, apart from notions picked up from Ballykissangel on television. They usually liked his stories, and Mary Ann certainly did. The topic lasted them through another half for Declan, and on the walk back to Ashworth. But as Declan watched Mary Ann inserting her front door key into the door, she said, “You really must tell me about yourself some time.”
    As he waited till she was safely in, then turned back toward the farmhouse, Declan meditated that the fact that the girl had got a bad dose of fundamentalist religion shouldn’t lead him to assume that she was stupid.
    His working hours as well as his free time were developing into a routine. Outdoor work, which came before and after his sessions with Byatt if it was fine, came to be a matter of seeing what needed to be done and doing it. Melanie and Martha did not intervene, unless there was something needed doing, like repair of furniture in their bedrooms, which he could not know about. His independence seemed to suit not just him but the ladies as well:they had their own business and their own preoccupations, though Declan had no idea what they were. So he pottered around the house, mending things that were broken, giving emergency first aid to things that were going in that direction, and on fine days he gratefully took himself out into the open air.
    In the gardens and field, though he was often bent double, he could better observe what he still thought of as “the community.” He was also more exposed to advances from its members. These advances did not change his opinion of the essential loneliness of everyone at Ashworth: it was because they were solitary that they pestered him with unwanted attention. But he also began to get the idea that each of them had some kind of function in the group of acolytes. From glimpsing the mail on Mellors’s table when he had been there, and from seeing him drive