(1990) Sweet Heart by Peter James Read Free Book Online

in, a beefy girl with a bucktoothed smile. ‘Would you like some tea, Mrs Witney?’
    ‘My mother seems a bit feverish,’ Charley said standing up.
    The nurse hurried over, felt her pulse then pressed the back of her hand against her forehead. ‘She’s on some new medication. I’ll ask the doctor to come in.’
    Charley lowered her voice. ‘I think I’ve upset her. I told her we are moving to the country and maybe she thinks it means I won’t be visiting her so often.’
    The nurse gave her a reassuring smile. ‘No, I really don’t think she’s able to register anything these days. I’m sure it’s just a chill or a reaction to the medication. We’ll get the doctor as quickly as we can.’
    The nurse hurried out and Charley waited anxiously. In the park a woman was pushing an infant in an old black pram; the traffic rumbled and hooted. Charley turned. Her mother’s eyes were closed, the trembling was subsiding. She was sleeping.

Chapter Eight
    They moved on Wednesday 12th September.
    Charley felt an air of unreality about the drive down from London. All her life she had wanted to live in the countryside, yet she could not quite tune into the fact that today, unlike the half-dozen previous occasions when Mr Budley had loaned them the key, she was no longer coming as a visitor.
    The Citroën’s engine drilled loudly, the air of the baking late summer day barely cooling her face through the sunroof. She overtook a tractor then slowed as she crested the hill, glancing in the mirror, waiting for the removals’ pantechnicon to catch up. Tom’s Audi, in front, slowed too.
    ‘ELMWOOD. TWINNED WITH BEIZE-LES-AIX.’ A groundsman was rolling the cricket pitch. A kid came out of a newsagents drinking a Coke and behind him a Wall’s Ice Cream sign rocked in the breeze. She was already familiar with the mini-roundabout next to the petrol station, the sight of the church ahead up a steep lane and the bustling high street to the right, with bric-a-brac on the pavement in front of an antiques restorer. She’d seen a promising-looking butcher and found a good farm shop.
    A mile past the village Tom turned off the main road and drove in through the gateway at the end of a cluster of farm buildings. Several signs were fixed in a linedown one gatepost: MANOR HOUSE. THADWELL’S BARN. ROSE COTTAGE. ELMWOOD ANGLING CLUB. The bottom one, rotted and barely legible, said ELMWOOD MILL.
    The pantechnicon loomed in Charley’s mirror and she turned into the cloud of dust kicked up by the Audi. The little Citroën banged through a pothole with a jar that threw her up against her seat belt and she cast a worried glance at the cardboard box on the passenger floorwell.
    The track dipped steeply, then levelled out past a large modern red-brick house in a garden that was still maturing. A blonde-haired woman in Wellington boots and a bikini strode out of a loose box towards a Range Rover. In the garden was a swimming pool surrounded by stark white busts on Grecian columns. Naff. Tom had christened it Yuppie Towers.
    There was a stagnant pond, then a wooden barn neatly converted into a house with a dilapidated corrugated iron workshop adjoining it that jutted out to the edge of the track. An elderly saloon car was parked on the hard, and through the open doors of the workshop she could see a pair of feet underneath a jacked-up car. The trail of dust from the Audi stung her eyes. The pantechnicon laboured behind.
    There was one more building, a stark grey stone cottage with a white picket fence and a neat garden. An old bicycle leant against the wall and an ancient Morris Minor sat in the driveway. The track narrowed and dipped again, the tall straggly hedgerow on each side pressing in on the Citroën like the brushes of a car wash. She felt a twinge of claustrophobia. The hedgerows had grown rampantly in the past three weeks. A bramble clawed at the window and the aerial twanged and juddered.
    A cow stared down over the hedge beside an