Asking for the Moon: A Collection of Dalziel and Pascoe Stories. Reginald Hill

      ‘She has to live there too.’

      ‘Not when Peter’s away she doesn’t.’

      ‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ he snapped. ‘She’s my sister, so leave it alone.’

      ‘And Peter’s your cousin. And you’re my husband. But what difference does that make to anything?’ she yelled after him as he stumped out of the kitchen.

      An hour later she took him a cup of coffee in his study.

      The light was on above his draughtsman’s drawing-board but he was sitting at his desk with his bird-watching journal. The writing was on the left-hand page. On the other he had sketched with a few deft strokes of a felt-tipped pen a pair of whitethroats in a sycamore tree. In the background loomed the bulk of Wear End House with its windows all shuttered.

      She put the coffee down by the drawing.

      ‘Are we going to Boris’s tomorrow night?’

      ‘I suppose so.’

      ‘Will John be there?’

      ‘He’s got the face for it.’

      ‘What do you mean?’

      ‘Oh, leave it alone, Stella!’

      ‘I think he deserves all our sympathy and support.’

      ‘Last time you said it was the biggest stroke of luck he’d had!’

      ‘I still think that!’ she snapped. ‘But the difference between thinking and saying is called civilized behaviour.’

      ‘OK. OK. Let’s drop it,’ he answered moodily. ‘I must try to get some work done or we’ll have nothing to put down the waste-disposal unit.’

      At the door she paused and said, ‘I don’t mean to nag, Geoff, but things …’

      ‘Yes, yes. I know.’

      ‘How’s your leg this morning?’

      ‘The same. And better.’

      ‘How can that be?’ she asked.

      ‘Nothing changes,’ he said, reaching for his coffee, ‘but you learn to live with pain.’

      4

      Arthur Lightfoot leaned on his hoe and watched the young woman in the telephone-box. Her Triumph Spitfire was parked with its nearside wheels on the wedge of carefully tended grass which lay in front of the village war memorial. Lightfoot made no secret of his watching. Generations of his family had lived and laboured in Wearton and there was as little chance of a native turning from the close contemplation of a stranger as there was of the soldier on the memorial dropping his rifle.

      Lightfoot was a man whose face had been weathered to a leathery mask beneath an unkempt stack of gingery hair. His deep-sunk eyes rarely blinked and his mouth gave little sign of being fitted for human speech. To age him between thirty and fifty would have been difficult.

      What nature had done for the man, art had done for the woman. She had blonde hair, a good but not over emphatic figure and a face which happily confessed to twenty-five but left you guessing about thirty-five. It had a slightly preoccupied expression as she came out of the phone-box and took a couple of uncertain steps towards the car. Then, as if feeling Lightfoot’s gaze upon her, she turned, looked back at him, and strode with sudden determination across the road.

      ‘Excuse me,’ she said, then, her eyes caught by a double row of staked dahlias close by the side wall of the old stone cottage, she exclaimed, ‘Aren’t they lovely! Such colours for a murky day.’

      ‘Frost’ll have ’em soon,’ said Lightfoot.

      ‘Are they … do you sell them?’

      Lightfoot made a gesture which took in the full extent of his smallholding.

      ‘I grow what I need,’ he said. ‘What I don’t need, I sell.’

      He did not look like a man who needed many dahlias, so the woman said, ‘May I buy some?’

      ‘Aye. Come in and take thy pick.’

      He held open the rickety gate for her and she walked along the row of blooms pointing to her choices which he cut with a fearsome clasp knife taken from his pocket. When she reached the angle of the cottage she stopped and said, ‘I see you had a fire.’

      The ground behind the cottage was scorched and blackened and a pile of charred rubbish looking like the remnants of several outbuildings had been shovelled together alongside a wired pen which housed three pigs.

      ‘Aye,’ he said.

      ‘Not too much damage, I hope,’ she said, looking at the back of the cottage which also bore the mark of great heat. The window-frames looked as if they’d been recently replaced and reglazed.

      ‘Enough. Nought that money won’t mend. Are you done choosing?’

      ‘I think so. Perhaps another pink one. They are gorgeous. Is it good soil?’

      ‘Soil’s what you make it,’ he answered. ‘Many a barrowload of manure and many a barrowload of compost I’ve poured into this soil. See there!’

      He pointed to where a broad pit which seemed to be full of decaying vegetable matter was sending coils of vapour into the dank autumn air.

      ‘Hot as a curate’s dreams in there,’ he averred, watching her closely.

      She glanced at him, amused by the odd expression.

      ‘It doesn’t look very appetizing,’ she said. ‘What’s in it?’

      ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘What pigs won’t eat yon pit gobbles up. Dustmen get slim pickings from Arthur Lightfoot.’

      His sudden enthusiasm made her uneasy and she was glad to hear the rickety gate shut behind her.