Free The Drowning Ground by James Marrison

at all?’
    I shrugged. ‘Maybe he just didn’t want people to know what he’d done to the back of his house.’
    â€˜Yes,’ Graves said, ‘there must be laws against that kind of thing. You can’t just do whatever you want to a house, even if you do own it.’
    Cleaver said bitterly, ‘Took a year before the council gave me permission to build a conservatory for the missus.’
    â€˜I bet it looks absolutely horrendous,’ Graves said, before adding politely, ‘Hurst’s house, Cleaver, not your wife’s conservatory.’
    â€˜Bloody terrible job,’ he said. Ironically, Cleaver himself had the look of one of those cowboy builders who knock on your door and tell you cheerfully that your roof is about to cave in.
    â€˜He must have really lost it,’ Graves said in awe. ‘Wonder what else he’s done to the place.’
    â€˜Looks like we’re about to find out,’ I said, suddenly in a hurry to get going. ‘If we can find a way in, that is. You got a couple of torches in that car of yours, Cleaver?’
    Together, Graves and I walked towards the gates as Cleaver rummaged loudly in his patrol car for a couple of torches. Then, after handing them over, he switched on the car’s headlights so that they were shining through the bars of the gates towards the house. Dashwood Manor probably still looked all right by daylight, but now, in the dark, I could only think: Christ Almighty, but it’s grim. The barred front door was like a big yawning mouth full of teeth. You could see the signs of slow decay: the wet, crumbling stone lintel above the front door; the roof patchy where the tiles had slipped off; the gutters blocked by fallen tiles and God knew what else. Ivy had crept along the walls of the house and wrapped itself around the windowsills. There had been flowerbeds on each side of the driveway, but the weeds had taken over and smothered them, while large clumps of grass had managed to find a foothold in the driveway’s gravel.
    And through the bars you could just make out dark piles of what looked to be newspapers, as if Hurst had piled stacks and stacks of them behind the windowpanes. It was all wrong somehow. The bars made it wrong, of course, but there was something else too, apart from its strange and unsettling remoteness. But right now I didn’t know what that was.
    Less than a mile away were homes and shops and cars and people. There were televisions and radios and houses and people buying stuff in supermarkets. I thought of the pub on the green. I thought of families in their homes, gathered round comforting pools of light. I thought of plastic penguins tumbling into a pale blue papery sea and disappearing beneath the water. All of it seemed very far away now and somehow unreal.
    It was as if we had stumbled upon something that had stood here for years, silent and watchful but yet unnoticed as it had slowly deteriorated in its isolation. I suddenly seemed to see both myself and Graves as if from above: two small figures preparing for a long journey to a place where neither of us particularly wanted to go.
    â€˜Are you ready?’ I said.
    Graves nodded, but now he too looked tense and uncertain. Cleaver pushed open the gates for us, and we set out on the gravelled driveway towards the house.

9
    Near the front door we slipped a little, almost colliding with Hurst’s Land Rover. Then we took the narrow path at the side of the house, leading to the garden at the back.
    I used Cleaver’s torch to get a good, long look at the garden. There was a kind of carefully maintained ruggedness to it, and Hurst had, with some sustained determination, kept it up. This was rather surprising, given the general air of abandonment that pervaded the rest of the place, and it pleased me now to see that Hurst had not let it go completely to ruin.
    I lifted the torch higher and its strong beam revealed the low wall on the other