‘Many people who didn’t read before are reading those stories,’ Emelie replied. ‘It is like a blood transfusion into the book world. It can only be a good thing.’ She pushed at her old, creaky gate. ‘Marnie, don’t forget where I live. Come and see me again soon. The door is always open and the kettle is always on.’
‘I will,’ said Marnie, looking up at the apple tree that stood in Emelie’s front garden and imagined her hanging from the top bough with a bag of Saxa in her hand.
Herv’s bedroom curtains were open when she passed. Come on, chop-chop, get home. Nothing to see here, said a bolstering voice in her head. She walked across the green and heard someone shouting at her, a male voice that she didn’t recognise. Not her name but ‘Hey, you there’, as if he was telling her off for trespassing on his land. She wasn’t surprised to turn and find the owner of that voice was Titus, walking towards her with a quick step. She prepared herself for battle.
‘We haven’t been properly introduced,’ he said, holding out a large hand with short stubby fingers. ‘Titus Sutton. Heard about you, obviously. Hope you’re settling in.’
The last time Marnie had seen him, he’d been purple-faced with rage at the will-reading. He must know by now what she had found in those ledgers. Or maybe he thought she hadn’t broken his coded handwriting yet. He didn’t look like a man expressly worried as he stood before her with his oily smile. She didn’t buy this super-matey routine, but she was intrigued by it. She’d bring him down soon enough, when she was ready. She shook his hand. ‘Marnie Salt, pleased to meet you at last too.’
‘Been meaning to say hello and reset, start off on the right foot,’ he said. ‘Shame Hilary isn’t with me. She goes off to stay with her sister once a month. She’s not been well for years. Hilary’s a southerner. Alas,’ and he guffawed, there was no other word for it. ‘Anyway, very glad to have bumped into you. Must dash.’ He made a pretence of walking off only to turn on his heel after a couple of steps. ‘Meant to ask. Update of parish records, Lionel needs your date of birth. I’m just on my way to see him actually, I could tell him for you, if you like.’
‘May the first, nineteen eighty-four.’
She saw a nerve in his cheek jerk.
‘May Day, eh? And George Orwell’s finest work. That’s quite a statement birthdate, if I may say so.’
‘I hadn’t really thought about it,’ said Marnie, which wasn’t true.
‘Splendid,’ and with that, Titus set off in the direction of the church.
As she walked the remainder of the way home, she began to wonder if Lionel genuinely had asked for her birth date. It was an approximate one anyway, seeing as no one knew exactly when she had been born because her birth had never been registered by a parent. But Titus didn’t need to know that detail. Parish records or not.
Titus didn’t go to Lionel’s, instead he thundered into the shop where Kay Sweetman was reading the latest Women by Women magazine behind the counter.
‘You all right, Titus?’ she greeted him, wondering why he was huffing like an old steam train.
‘No, I am not,’ he replied. ‘Packet of my usual. I need something to calm my nerves.’
Kay opened the cabinet behind her and got out a packet of Titus’s favoured brand of cigarettes. ‘What’s up?’
‘That bloody woman,’ he chuntered.
‘Oh, her,’ sniffed Kay. She knew exactly which bloody woman Titus meant. ‘She’s wrecked Una’s marriage, have you heard?’
Titus hadn’t, so Kay took great delight in filling him in with all the details.
‘I wish she’d bugger off back to where she came from,’ she remarked.
‘I don’t think there’s much chance of that.’ Titus gave a bark of humourless laughter. ‘There is no mysterious owner of the estate. It’s her, playing stupid games. I’d put my life savings on it. I knew there was something else to this story.’
Kay was all ears. ‘Oh, what makes you think that then?’
So Titus told her.
Marnie took her book out into the garden along with a can of ice-cold cherry cola and an egg mayo sandwich. She’d found a little wooden table hidden in an overgrown rose bush which she’d washed down and positioned in front of the bench. The stream looked thirsty; the banks were dry and crumbly and she thought they’d welcome some rain. She looked ahead at the wood and wondered if Margaret Kytson’s grave was within her sights. The wood surrounded Wychwell on all four sides and unless they dug the lot of it over, they weren’t going to find it by design. Sometimes, when she was down at the bottom of the garden, Marnie thought she detected movement out of the corner of her eye but it was just a trick the sunlight played when it found an opening through the leaves and dived through them. She decided she wouldn’t have minded if it had been the witch, peeping behind a trunk watching her.
The second book in the Country Manors series was much better than the first. The characters were more rounded and the action pacier, and it was very racy. There was a woman featured called Kate Sowerby whom Marnie wanted to punch. She reminded her of Kay Sweetman in the shop. They even had the same thin-lipped mouth set in a perma-sneer.
The heat began to make Marnie drowsy. She read until her eyelids felt too heavy to keep open and gave in to the tiredness. It was so peaceful here. She hadn’t imagined she could ever feel such a level of calm, especially with all that she had going on: making enemies of everyone in Wychwell as she prepared to put up their rents, slash their bonuses, split up their marriages. She didn’t want to raise Emelie’s rent but she might have to, just a little so as not to mark her out as a special case and bring the wrath of the villagers down on her too. Then all thoughts of rents and Emelie and witches were washed away by tides of sleep creeping up on her, dragging her down into their warm waters of oblivion.
She had no idea how long she’d been asleep when she was suddenly awoken by the chill of a shadow falling across her. She was jerked from the depths of unconsciousness so quickly that she almost got the bends.
Kay Sweetman was bearing down on her, arms akimbo, measly mouth a downward arc like a croquet hoop.
‘Can I please ask you what’s going on between you and Herv Gunnarsen?’ There was nothing polite about Kay’s demand, despite the please.
‘I beg your pardon? And what are you doing here?’ It hadn’t got past Marnie that Kay would have had to walk through her house to reach her.
‘I knocked and when no one answered I came in,’ said Kay, as if this was a perfectly reasonable explanation. ‘So?’
‘What on earth has it got to do with you?’ asked Marnie, beyond affronted. How bloody dare she?
Kay’s head pushed forwards and one hand left her hip to start waggling a finger at Marnie.
‘I’ll tell you what it’s got to do with me, shall I? My daughter’s very upset, that’s what it’s got to do with me.’
Does trouble have me permanently on the end of a fishing rod, thought Marnie.
‘She’s had to go to the doctors for some tablets to stop her crying, because of you,’ Kay went on.
‘Because of me?’ squealed Marnie. What the actual . . . ? She really was getting absolutely sick and tired of never being able to escape from hassle. If she lived on a cartoon desert island with only a palm tree for company, they’d end up falling out with each other.