Buffet for Unwelcome Guests by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online Page A

bastard,’ said Fred: he always did have a filthy temper, Fred.
    Well, I did regret it: and not so very long after. Fred and me shares a car between us—a heavy old, bashed-up, fourth-hand ‘family model’, but at least it goes. And one evening, when he’d slouched off, ugly and moody as he was those days, to poach the river down by the Vicarage woods, I picked up Lydia and took her out in it, joy-riding. Not that there was much joy in it. We hadn’t been out twenty minutes when, smooching around with Lydia, I suppose, not paying enough attention to the road—well, I didn’t see the kid until I’d hit him. Jogging along the grass verge he was, with his little can of blackberries: haring home as fast as his legs would go, a bit scared, I daresay, because the dark was catching up on him. Well—the dark caught him up all right: poor little bastard. I scrambled out and knelt down and turned him over; and got back again, quick. ‘He’s gone,’ I said to Lydia, ‘and we’d best be gone too.’ She made a lot of fuss, woman-like, but what was the point of it? If he wasn’t dead now, he would be mighty soon, there wasn’t any doubt of it: lying there with the can still clutched in his fat little hand and the blackberries spilt, and scattered all around him. I couldn’t do nothing; if I could have I dare say I’d have waited, but I couldn’t. So what was the use of bringing trouble on myself, when the chances were that I could get clear away with it?
    And I did get clear away with it. The road was hard and dry, the cars that followed and stopped must have obscured my tyre marks, if there were any. They found half a footprint in the dried mud, where I’d bent over him; but it was just a cheap, common make of shoe, pretty new so it had no particular marks to it; and a largish size, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary. No one knew I’d been on that road—everything Lydia did with us two was done in deep secret, because of Black Will. Will was doing time at the moment, for beating up a keeper who came on him, poaching, (we all spent most of our evenings poaching.) But he’d be back some day.
    And Fred promised me an alibi, when I told him about it: clutching at his arm, shaking a bit by this time, losing confidence because Lydia was threatening to turn nasty. ‘I’ll say you was in the woods with me,’ he said. And he did, too. They came to our door, ‘regulation police enquiries’; but Lydia wouldn’t dare to tell, not really. I could see that in the light of day, and they had no other sort of reason to suspect me, especially. And nobody did—it could have been any stranger, speeding along the empty country roads. Fred pretended to be reluctant to alibi me, cagey about saying where we was—because of the poaching. He managed it fine, it sort of threw their interest half way in a different direction. I thought it was decent of Fred, considering about me and Lydia. But brotherly love is a wonderful thing, isn’t it?
    Or isn’t it? Because it hadn’t been all for nothing. No sooner was I clear of that lot than he says to me: ‘Well—has she told you?’
    ‘Told me what?’ I says. ‘Who? Lydia?’
    ‘Lydia,’ he says. ‘She’s having a baby.’
    ‘Well, don’t look at me,’ I said, and quick. ‘I’ve only been going with the girl a couple of weeks.’
    ‘And her husband hasn’t been going with her at all,’ said Fred. ‘On account of he’s been in prison for the past five months.’
    ‘For half killing a man,’ I said, thoughtfully; and I looked Fred up and down. Fred and me are no weeds, like I said; but Black Will, he’s half way to a giant.
    ‘And due out at the end of October,’ said Fred.
    ‘Well, good luck to the two of you,’ says I. ‘It’s nothing to do with me. I had her for a couple of weeks, and now even that’s over. She reckons I ought to have stopped and seen to the kid: she’s given me the bird.’
    ‘She’ll give you more than the bird,’ he says,