Free The Boat House by Stephen Gallagher Page B

area.
    Well, at least the place had atmosphere. It had something of the look of a decaying Italian palazzo , stone urns and all.
    "Anybody home?" Pete called out, and then two things happened very close together.
    Firstly, a couple of birds were scared up out of a nearby bush by his call; and secondly, there was a detonation so loud that he almost felt it as a physical shockwave. The birds squawked and flapped, and the very top of the bush seemed to be flicked by an invisible hand which knocked a few shreds of leaf out into the air. Pete didn't know whether to duck or run, and the choice was fairly academic anyway as for the moment his body seemed to be about as responsive as a sack of rocks.
    A woman with a shotgun stepped out onto the path some way ahead.
    Diane Jackson, the woman he'd come to see.
    "Sorry about the bang," she called, much as someone might apologise for slamming a car door too loudly, and she started to walk towards him. "It's the bloody pigeons. They've been driving me mad ever since I moved in, but as soon as I come out with a gun they all disappear. See up there?" She pointed. "Pigeon shit," she went on, without waiting for Pete to reply. "The roof's covered in it. I was going to blast a couple and then string them up to scare the others. Do you think that would work?"
    "It would with me," Pete said.
    He was pretty sure that she hadn't recognised him.
    Well, what could he expect… he'd been no more than another face around the yard on the two or three occasions that she'd been by, no reason that he should have made any lasting impression on her at all. She'd been polite, and he'd been too quick to imagine that it might signify something more. No big deal, it had happened in his life before; but suddenly he was intensely, intensely relieved that Wayne had stayed in the van and couldn't see this. And better he should get the hard lesson now, than later.
    She breezed on by, presumably expecting him to follow; she was heading for a side entrance to the house that was reached through an overgrown kitchen garden. At the second attempt, he got himself moving. His ears were still ringing from the gunshot. On the evidence of her marksmanship so far, the safest place to shelter would probably be squarely before the target.
    "I tried the bell at the front," Pete said as they went in through a whitewashed scullery. This led into a Victorian-style kitchen with a tiled floor and copper skillets hanging in the middle of the room.
    "It doesn't work," Diane Jackson said. "Like most of the estate staff who were supposed to have been keeping the place straight. I seem to be doing nothing but making lists of things that need fixing."
    She kicked something in the gloom, and stopped briefly to pick it up. It was a Speak & Spell .
    "Jed's," she explained. "He's going to be a litterbug when he grows up."
    There was more evidence of Jed's presence on the pinup noticeboard alongside the kitchen door. It was covered in paintings and crayon drawings, obviously by a child of preschool age. The largest and most colourful of them showed a woman with a shotgun, blasting away at Red Indians.
    Stopping to look was a mistake. By the time that he'd stepped out of the kitchen and into the main hall, he'd lost her.
    The hallway was of a fair size, high ceilinged and with an oak stairway that led up to a gallery style balcony. The floor was of black and white marble tile, some of them cracked and none of them even. The few pieces of furniture looked old, solid, and unprepossessing, the kind of stuff that Pete would have expected to see at the bargain end of a market-town auction. The light, as soft and grey as evening snow, came from an ornate wrought-iron skylight at the ceiling's centre.
    Her voice led him to her. "I'm not a great shot," she was saying, "but I'm getting better. There's an old clay range up in the woods, and I've been practising on that. I'll turn myself into a countrywoman yet."
    She'd gone on into a book-lined room which