Blood on the Wood by Gillian Linscott Read Free Book Online

laughter.
    â€˜Well, the old scoundrel. I do believe it’s the best thing I’ve ever heard about Uncle Olly’
    â€˜You can hardly expect us to see the joke.’
    â€˜I suppose not, but you must admit it’s ripe. Then putting the blame on Christie’s. You have to hand it to the old chap.’
    â€˜You can hand him anything you like as long as he hands over the picture to us. If he doesn’t, this could end up in the law courts.’
    That stopped him laughing at least. ‘If you do that the lawyers will only get it all, and the scandal rags will have a field day’
    â€˜Precisely. So what can we do to avoid it? I thought you and your brother might have a serious talk with him and suggest that if he really can’t bear to part with the picture, we’d accept a cash equivalent.’
    He whistled. ‘Not sure about that. I think cash may be a bit tight with Uncle Olly at the moment.’
    â€˜It’s a bit tight with us all the time. It’s not as if we want it for our own selfish purposes. You must know how expensive political campaigning is.’
    â€˜Money, money, money’ His voice was bitter, no laughter in it now. ‘What a hideous system this is, when you’re not supposed to paint pictures or make music or be kind to people or fall in love or do anything human without thinking about money’
    â€˜I’d like a better system as much as you would, but it doesn’t come by just wishing.’
    I thought I’d got his measure: spoilt young man mistaking his own itch of discontent for revolutionary fervour. But perhaps I’d misjudged him, for now he apologised.
    â€˜Yes, I suppose we’ll have to try to get Uncle Olly to see reason. Trouble is, Adam and I aren’t on the best of terms at the moment. I might ask Carol’s advice. She’s usually the one who sorts things out. I’m relying on that in any case.’
    He went quiet, as if there were other things on his mind. We passed a couple of farms and came to the main part of the village. It seemed mostly to consist of one wide main street with a public house called the Crown at one end and a horse trough and pump in the middle, opposite a general store and post office in a cottage so lopsided that the thatch almost touched the ground on one side. A church was set back on a little hillock with a graveyard round it, and a school and schoolyard stood on more level ground on the other side. We walked past them and almost out of the far side of the village. At a forge on the right a big shire horse was standing patiently while the smith heated a shoe. Opposite was a rectangular stone building that looked like a barn recently altered for other purposes with a big window let into one side on the ground floor, a smaller window above. A yard on the far side was piled with stacks of timber. On our side was a door with a porch and a neatly lettered sign: ‘Visitors Welcome’. A gentle humming noise came from inside.
    Daniel opened the door and we stepped into a room of normal height at the front but the full height of the original barn at the back, stretching up to shadowy beams where sparrows twittered. The humming came from a pole lathe with a man standing at it, operating a treadle and holding a chisel to a revolving cylinder of wood. Behind him, fading into the shadows, were more pieces of furniture like those up at the Venns’ house but in various stages of being made – bedheads propped against walls, chests without lids, chairs without seats. There were three people in the room.
    The man who’d been working at the lathe stopped and straightened up as we came in. He was in his thirties, big and square-shouldered. His eyes were blue, face strong in the jaw and broad in the forehead, hands brown and workmanlike with some lines of old scars. A good-looking man who seemed mercifully unaware of the fact, shy even. ‘Hello, Mr Sutton,’ Daniel said. The