Bad Blood by Aline Templeton Read Free Book Online Page B

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    As the service bus pulled away Marnie walked towards it along the side of the main road, the Queen’s Way running from Newton Stewart to New Galloway. The rain, at least, had gone off, but it was damp and dreary and the sky was dark with purplish clouds. Pine needles clumped onto the soles of her shoes as she walked, deadening the sound of her footsteps. Across the track on the farther side of the house, a plantation had been felled leaving a massacre site of stumps and dead branches, making the house look curiously naked.
    Marnie had told herself that just going to the house she’d once lived in wasn’t going to achieve anything but even so she’d cherished a slender hope that the occupants might know what had happened after they left. It was something to do, anyway, while she waited for the police to get back in touch.
    She reached the five-bar gate. They had never bothered to close it and it stood open still, but rotting at the base and with the hinges rusted. The rough grass round about was untended, with clumps of bracken and nettles and brambles round the edges. No change there, then, and the paintwork round the windows was peeling as if it hadn’t been renewed since they left.
    There was no one around and the cottage had a deserted feel. The curtains at the windows were hanging limp and there was a big crack in one of the panes. Even so, she hesitated before she walked through the gate and when she reached the door knocked once then paused, listening.
    A couple of cars passed, their tyres swishing in puddles on theroad, but there was no responsive movement inside. She knocked again; the sound seemed to echo in emptiness and she stepped aside to look through the sitting-room window on the right, cupping her hand against the pane to break the reflection.
    It was weird, as if she’d opened a time capsule. She hadn’t expected the familiar furniture would still be here, yet there was the brown sofa, the wonky standard lamp with the orange shade, the cheap coffee table, now missing a great splinter of the wood veneer. It was the setting her flashback memories always produced – and yet it wasn’t. The familiar, grubby disorder had gone and it was almost clinically tidy and bare. The dissonance gave her a sense of confusion that was close to nausea.
    Their landlord must still own it. Who was he? Nothing came back to her, so she presumably had never known; her mother would have looked after all that. Certainly, it looked as if it had been empty for a long time. Who would want a run-down place like this, stuck out in the middle of nowhere?
    She wandered round the house. The other windows were too high to look into, and on an impulse she tried the back door – locked, of course. The front door no doubt would be too, but she went back and rattled the handle hopefully. It didn’t yield, but the lock looked as if it hadn’t been changed and a sudden thought struck her.
    The stone at the foot of the pine tree nearest the house was embedded in soil and moss but she was determined, scrabbling and tugging at it and eventually seeking out a smaller, pointed stone to use as a lever. As it came up small pale creatures scuttled and squirmed away from the light in panic but there, speckled with rust and earth, was the key they had always kept there.
    Marnie brushed it clean then went to the back door and turned the key in the lock. It opened with a squeal of unused hinges and she stepped inside with a stirring of expectation.
    The place felt full of ghosts. Images assailed her, one after the other,until she was dizzy and whimpering in dismay, ‘No, no!’ Shaking, she struggled to displace them with some rational insight, opening the doors one after another.
    There was nothing here. How could there be? It was just a shabby, gloomy, soulless place and it certainly wasn’t going to tell her anything about what had happened to her or where her mother had gone. She didn’t want to be here any more. She gave a shudder as