Читать книгу Fear No Evil - Debbie Johnson, Debbie Johnson - Страница 8

The next day dawned bright and crisp and way too soon. Watery sunshine was fingering its way through the blinds, and I forced myself up and out of the duvet, dragging on my running gear.

It was late September and we were experiencing one of those beautiful autumnal weeks where the world feels fresh and perfect. I pounded along the dockside paths, completely alone apart from a few other poor joggers and the occasional delivery man wheeling crates of booze into the back doors of the bars.

The sky above the city was a flawless pale blue, streaked white with seagulls gliding and circling over the river. On the home stretch I passed the marina, where Scouse millionaires had moored their yachts, masts bobbing and flags fluttering in the gentle breeze. By the time I showered and left, I was two coffees and a three-mile waterfront run in. By my reckoning that earned me at least a two-doughnut breakfast on the journey.

The drive was relaxed and easy – apart from the traditional disagreement with the snooty bitch in my sat nav, who was constantly insisting on me doing a U-turn. Does telling your dashboard to fuck off and hitting it with a rolled up newspaper make you crazy? I have my suspicions she secretly wants me to end up dangling from my seatbelt, upside down in a ditch. She reminded me of Rose Middlemas.

Eventually I pulled up into the driveway of a stone-built cottage. Not a chocolate-box cottage, but a ruddy, rugged, sturdy cottage, weather-beaten and solid. It was built of blocks of rock that looked like they’d been hewn from the centre of the earth by prehistoric midgets covered in woad. The kind of building that would still be standing when the rest of us had disappeared up our own globally-warmed backsides.

There was a neat, small garden outside – no flowers, no fiddly pots, just grass and a few small shrubs. And no, I can’t tell you what they were. I’m a city girl and I don’t do greenery. I’ve been known to have trouble sleeping at night without the sound of sirens and breaking glass, and I was already starting to feel a bit edgy surrounded by all this green space and nature. There was just so bloody much of it.

I made a quick check of appearance before getting out. Never good to do these things with lettuce between your teeth or panda eyes from last night’s mascara. Growing up with five older brothers made it nigh on impossible to escape a whole day without being told I was looking, acting or sounding like an idiot, so I’ve learned to pay attention to such matters.

I’m thirty-four, look roughly thirty-three and a half in my opinion, and have shoulder-length dark brown hair and green eyes. I’m told that my best quality is my smile, which features a set of dimples I’ve never come to terms with. Dimples equate with cute, and I wasn’t even cute as a child, never mind in my thirties. I tried dumping them as a teenager, when I managed not to smile for a whole year, but they proved resilient. Despite extensive research, I’ve yet to find a way to remove them permanently.

I have to admit, they have their uses when charm is needed. Father Dan would probably be a wrinkly, old-school Catholic. That was good, because wrinkly old-school Catholics always loved me. And my dimples.

I climbed out and beeped my keys to lock the Suzuki. Okay, I know it was unlikely to get stolen from the garden of a priest in the sleepsville that was the Lake District. But when you’ve seen cars go walkabout from petrol stations with the pump still in them, old habits die hard. Maybe I could programme the sat nav cow to shriek at anyone who touched it – that’d be the alarm to end them all.

I strolled over to knock on the door – inches thick wood painted a deep and shining blue, with a brass knocker that I could hear echoing inside as I slammed it up and down. No response. I squatted down, held open the flap of the letter box and stared through. A wide hallway, black and white tiles on the floor, a coat stand draped with all kinds of outdoorsy gear. Raincoats, umbrellas, walking boots lying on their sides. But no people, no telly, no radio. No Rottweiler either, which was encouraging. Dimples are no defence against a mad dog.

I stood up and knocked again for good measure. Still no answer. Hmmm. Well, I hadn’t come this far for nothing, I thought, glancing around to make sure a dog-collared octogenarian hadn’t mysteriously appeared from the bushes bearing a trowel. Shielding the door with my body, I tried to turn the handle. Locked. How very suspicious of Father Dan – bearing in mind we were in a very isolated spot. Maybe he had something to hide.

While I am shamefully proficient at breaking and entering, I do try to save it for special occasions. Instead, I reached my arms up, pretending it was a travel-weary stretch, yawning in case anyone happened to be watching me from a passing spy satellite. I let my fingers do a surreptitious run along the top of the door ledge – no keys. There were too many plant pots to look under and maintain any level of innocence, so I decided to have a gentle snoop around the grounds.

Gravel crunching beneath my feet, I headed to the side path trailing around the bulk of the cottage. At first all I could hear was the sound of my own footsteps, but as I walked on, I paused to strain my ears – there was definitely something going on back there. A dull, regular thudding, with small beats between. It could be an active priestly type doing some DIY. Or hacking somebody’s head off with an axe.

On that pleasant note I proceeded, walking round into a large garden. Well, you couldn’t really call it a garden – it was vast. It was the wilderness. It was the kind of place Ray Mears would go to make first contact with native tribes. The clearing was set against the backdrop of a huge hillside, covered in pine trees so dense it looked like a prickly, deep green picnic blanket had been thrown from the sky. A stream tumbled downwards, gurgling and bubbling its way towards the lower ground, and sheep were dotted on the slope at improbable angles, like tiny balls of off-white cotton wool that could blow away at any minute.

The area immediately behind the cottage was obviously functional – a neat vegetable patch seemed to be producing carrots, potatoes and other green-topped mystery items. There was a small greenhouse. A well, with a wooden bucket dangling over its brick-edged rim. A weather-battered stone shed that probably contained tools I wouldn’t know how to use. And right smack bang in the middle of this rural idyll was a man. He was holding an axe, but thankfully he was chopping logs, not heads. Which was a real bonus on the health and safety front.

I say ‘a man’. But that wouldn’t be quite accurate. In all honesty, this wasn’t so much a man as a Greek god made flesh incarnate.

The sunlight was streaming down like a spotlight from the angels, splashing gold over a rippling, muscular back as he moved. Stripped bare to his jeans, he had the broad shoulders and narrow waist of a swimmer, and his arms were perfectly sculpted as they rose and fell with the axe. His Levis rode low on his hips, and a tiny trail of golden hair ran down his torso, over the six-pack (approximately – I didn’t count), and disappeared off into the denim waistband to…well, I can only imagine.

Getting a hold of myself as best I could, I coughed gently and he straightened up, using a lean, corded forearm to wipe the sweat from his brow. I was rationally thinking that with a body that good, he was probably cross-eyed or missing his front teeth – in my experience nature has a way of evening these things out. But no, nature was playing silly buggers with this one – he was truly blessed – arctic blue eyes, of the classic Paul Newman variety. Dark blonde hair, slightly too long, plastered down to his forehead and neck with sweat.

A strong nose, aquiline, saving him from prettiness. A wide mouth with sensual lips, skin lightly sun-kissed from all those hours outdoors – chopping wood, digging the soil, romping naked in the forest…

Dragging my mind out of the gutter and back into reality, I reminded myself this was a man of God and I was a very, very bad girl. The Almighty would definitely know if I was imagining one of His servants stark naked and spread-eagled on a Caribbean beach. Or even in a rent-by-the-hour hotel bedroom on the Dock Road.

‘Father Dan?’ I asked, not quite believing that it could be. A man who looked like this facing a lifetime of celibacy? I’d be forced to get a petition up, or write a letter of complaint to the Vatican. But maybe this was just Father Dan’s handsome gardener. Or his illegitimate son – come on, we all know it happens!

He swung the axe down, hard, to lodge it in the tree stump that was obviously its home. It wobbled slightly from side to side. I knew how it felt.

‘You can drop the Father,’ he said, ‘I haven’t been a priest for six years now.’