Free La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

remembered how dark it became when she did so. The paving had been dark. It had.
    And now the door was slightly ajar and she did not have to turn the handle. This meant that the intruder had run round the side of the house and rather than running down the drive, as she had imagined he would do, he had gone into the house. She opened her eyes. She had forgotten thatshe had left a full kettle on the range and it was boiling vigorously now; its whistle had broken and it now let forth little more than a sigh. In the air there was the smell of onions; she had fried some onions earlier on to have with a piece of liver and there was lingering in the air that sweet, slightly pungent smell that took its time to fade. The thought occurred to her: he would have smelled that smell when he came in; he would have become party to that bit of her domestic life—her choice of dinner.
    She hesitated. She wondered whether she should telephone Percy Brown and tell him that she suspected that the intruder was in the house again. But the policeman would probably be asleep by now, and surely he would ask her why she thought that there was somebody in the house. If she explained that the back door was slightly ajar, then he would be bound to think that she was imagining things. Doors can be blown open by the wind; doors could swing open entirely by themselves if not hung true. There were all sorts of reasons why doors could be thought to have been opened by somebody else—and one of these reasons was the overactive imagination of a woman adjusting to the business of living on her own.
    She could not end up running off to Percy Brown every time she felt nervous, and anyway what had happened outside had shown her that the nervousness was on the other side. Yet, would a nervous man have run into the house? Hardly; what refuge would there be for him there?
    La closed the door behind her, slammed it for the noise, and then locked it. Radio Normandie was still playing dance music at the other end of the house. She walked down the corridor and went into the sitting room to turn off the radio. Now there was silence, and she listened to that silence, which is never really complete; there were sounds. She heard her own breathing, and her heart, too, she imagined; you could hear such things in a quiet house, if you listened hard, and were close enough. Now, though, she switched off the lamps in the sitting room, but left the light in the corridor burning, both for reassurance and in order to light her way up the first part of the stairs.
    Upstairs she again went from room to room, and found nothing. She opened the door of a large wardrobe in the spare room and looked inside; she peered into the bathroom cupboard and behind curtains in her room. She said to herself:
There is nobody in this house, but me. I am not afraid
.

Nine
    S UCH A BRIGHT LIGHT penetrated La’s bedroom curtain, and so early, as it was mid-summer, and the sun was already above the horizon. The birds had been in full throat from five o’clock, asserting their territory to anybody who cared to listen, announcing the beginning of the rural day. La was not a late riser, but five was too early, even for her, and she lay under her blankets for another forty minutes or so, drifting in and out of sleep, before she eventually slipped out of bed and walked barefoot into the upstairs bathroom. Through the bathroom window, a rectangle of old glass with a vertical fault-line of trapped bubbles, La looked out over the fields on the other side of the lane. The field nearest the house had Agg’s sheep in it, and a couple of his Jersey cows. The cows had been milked already, she could see; Mrs. Agg had told her that Agg gotup at four to do this, every day, month in, month out, and had been doing that since he was twelve. That was not uncommon in the country, where everybody seemed to have been in the same place, doing the same thing, for most of their lives. Percy Brown had told her that his father had