Free The Watchful Eye by Priscilla Masters Page A

week.
    He was beginning to realise that a few things had disturbed him recently. Sometimes it took until the weekend to have time to ponder. He was concerned about Anna-Louise Struel.Recently there had been a plethora of articles in the medical press as well as a graphic television programme which had clearly shown mothers deliberately harming their children. Did Vanda simply fabricate these stories to gain attention or was she really harming her own daughter? He must speak to Caroline Letts, the forensic psychiatrist he knew, and learn some clues that could alert him to the truth. He knew the basics – that situations like this invariably meant some pathology in the mother. Which would put Anna-Louise further at risk. Daniel sighed. The silly film had finished and he was getting maudlin. He knew he was going to have to share his concerns with his partners and they would all have to be vigilant. It was an added pressure to an already busy job. And now there was Anderton’s silly story, which was altering his perception of this chocolate-box town. It wasn’t simply the minor theft from the policeman’s washing line that was troubling him. It was that he knew Anderton’s perception of these minor events was coloured by his previous experience. On top of that he was worried that when Anderton caught the perpetrator he would explode.
    So now, for him, the town was spoilt – less than perfect. For him Eccleston had always held the magic of a storybook place, almost a film set. It was why he had jumped at the chance to join the practice here. Now he could see that there was something contrived – almost unreal – about it. One of the first things he had done when he and Elaine had moved here had been to seek out the local historians through the library. So he knew that the Georgian façades and prolific hostelry existed because in the eighteenth century Eccleston had been an important coaching post en route to Chester, itself an important city. The decades had wrought their change. But there had been adeliberate attempt to conserve the High Street and now the entire area had a conservation order slapped on it. There was still a butcher and a baker. All, he thought, with a sudden chill, but the candlestick maker. For the first time since he had come to live here he wondered whether this perfection came at a price. The next moment he was telling himself the obvious truth that here, as everywhere else, whatever the superficial appearances might suggest, people were people. Good, bad, clever, stupid, kind, cruel.
    Anna-Louise, Guy Malkin, Arnie Struel. These were the
real
inhabitants of Eccleston. Maud Allen’s day was well over. The last of her generation, she would leave behind a legacy of a world which had been vaporised.
    And so, only slightly disgruntled, he went to bed.
     
    He was woken on Sunday morning by the peal of the church bells from the Holy Trinity. As there was no movement from Holly’s room he made his coffee and returned to bed, mug of coffee and Sunday paper in hand, to listen to them. He even opened his bedroom window to hear them more clearly. Wherever you go in the world you will hear specific sounds which relate to the religion of the populace. As the muezzin calls the faithful to prayer in Muslim areas throughout the world, the Buddhist is summoned by handbells, so you hear the call for Christians in a peal of church bells. Inevitably it reminded him of poetry –
    ‘What passing bells for those who die as cattle?’
     
    ‘Stands the church clock at ten to three
    And is there honey still for tea?’
    He drank his coffee, scanned the paper and reflected how seduced he had been by village England, how hard he had fought to become the country GP, how very much he had wanted to be the family man, old tweeds, digging the garden. And instead here he was, snarled up in modernism, divorced, an absentee father, plucking up courage to trawl the Internet for someone who would share his dream.
    Suddenly he felt