Free The Devil`s Feather by Minette Walters Page A

longest DIY cable they make but, at a rough guess, it’s a good hundred metres to the main bedroom. You’ll have to link them in series…which means adaptors…plus another handset, of course.”
    “Is it a broadband connection?” I asked, dry-mouthed with anxiety as I wondered how I was going to be able to work. “Can I access the Internet and make phone calls at the same time?”
    “No.”
    “Then what am I going to do? Normally I’d be able to use my mobile as well as a landline.”
    “You should have gone for a modern house. Didn’t the agent tell you what this one was going to be like? Send you any details?”
    “A few. I didn’t read them.”
    I must have looked and sounded deeply inept because she said scathingly: “Christ! Why the hell do people like you come to Dorset? You’re frightened of dogs, you can’t live without a phone—” she broke off abruptly. “It’s not the end of the world. I presume you have a laptop because I didn’t see a computer in the car?” I nodded. “What sort of mobile do you have? Do you have an Internet contract with your server?”
    “Yes,” I said. “But it’s not going to work without a signal, is it?”
    “How do you connect? By cable or Bluetooth?”
    “Bluetooth.”
    “OK. That gives you a range of ten metres between the two devices. All you have to do is raise the mobile high enough—” she broke off abruptly in face of my scepticism. “Forget it. I’ll do it myself. Just give me your bloody phone and bring your laptop upstairs.”
    She refused to speak for the next half hour because I hadn’t shown enough enthusiasm for groping around the attic every time I wanted to send an email. I squatted on the landing beside a loft ladder, with my laptop beside me, listening to her stomping about the attic before she came down the steps and repeated the exercise in the bedrooms. After a while she started shifting furniture around, angrily banging and scraping it across the floors. She sounded like an adolescent in a sulk and I’d have asked her to go if I hadn’t been so desperate for Internet contact.
    She finally emerged from a bedroom at the end of the landing. “OK, I’ve got a signal. Do you want to try for the connection?”
    It was a Heath Robinson set-up—a stepped pyramid built out of a dressing-table, a chest of drawers and some chairs—but it worked. It meant crouching under the ceiling to make the link but, once established, I was able to operate the computer at floor level.
    “The signal’s stronger in the attic,” said Jess, “but it’ll mean climbing up there every time the battery runs down or you want to log off. I didn’t think you’d want to do that…and you’d probably get lost, anyway. It’s not very obvious which room you’re above.”
    “How can I thank you?” I asked her warmly. “Perhaps you’d like a glass of wine or a beer? I have both in the car.”
    She showed immediate disapproval. “I don’t drink.” And neither should you, was the firm rebuke that I took from her expression. She was even more disapproving when I lit a cigarette as we went back downstairs. “That’s about the worst thing you can do. If you get bronchitis on top of a panic attack, you’ll really be struggling.”
    Delayed maturity and pointy-hat puritanism made a lethal combination, I thought, wondering if she’d cast me as dissolute Edwina from Absolutely Fabulous with herself as Saffy, the high-minded daughter. I was tempted to make a joke about it, but suspected that television was a focus of disapproval as well. I had no sense that there was room for fun in Jess’s life or, if there was, that it was the sort of fun anyone else would recognize.
    Before she left, I asked her how I could contact her. “Why would you want to?” she asked.
    For help… “To thank you.”
    “There’s no need. I’ll take it as read.”
    I decided to be honest. “I don’t know who to call if something goes wrong,” I said with a tentative smile.