Going It Alone by Michael Innes Read Free Book Online Page B

photographers prowling round Boxes on the hunt for him – and for the rest of you as well. Tim certainly wouldn’t like that at all.’
    ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ It was an index of the depth of Ruth’s anxiety that she seemed to embrace this rather remote possibility as a cheerful reading of the matter. ‘It would be quite something,’ she added with a momentary attempt at gaiety, ‘to have even one mysterious stranger prowling around Boxes with a camera or a notebook. We sometimes don’t see anybody for a week on end.’
    During this conference, brother and sister had been sitting on either side of the drawing-room fireplace: Ruth with her tea equipage still beside her, and Averell with his back to a tall French window a good deal obscured by a holly bush under imperfect control. And as Ruth uttered her last words her eyes suddenly rounded, and her gaze fixed itself over her brother’s shoulder.
    ‘And there is somebody!’ she cried.
    Averell’s was a high-backed chair, and as a consequence of this he had to jump to his feet and swing round before he could gain a notion of what Ruth was talking about. He achieved these movements, however, with a celerity that must have surprised him had he paused to think about it. But this he was far from doing, and he was halfway to the window before a holly branch swung across it – thereby obscuring the face, and even the presence, of somebody who had been peering into the room. And now there came a clatter from outside, as if a flowerpot or watering can had been kicked over, followed by the sound of rapidly running footsteps. Averell pulled open the French window in time to see an unidentifiable male figure vanish round a corner of the house.
    Averell, extremely angry, had no other thought than of hot pursuit. It was intolerable that his sister should thus be spied upon, even if nothing particularly sinister were involved. And it didn’t occur to him, despite the curious context in which this impertinence had taken place, that anything of the kind was so. His reading had persuaded him that peeping and eavesdropping (often achieved en plein air by an adroit exploitation of hedges and ditches) were staple employments among the humbler sections of rural society. And for some reason he was quite confident, as he himself rounded an angle of the building, that he was going to catch the offender. When he did so, and if the intruder proved to be of mature years, he could probably do no more than utter threatening words about trespass and the police. If a juvenile was concerned he could be told he was to be led off to his father for a good hiding. Not that Averell would in fact do anything of the kind, so all that he was achieving was vindicating to himself a certain capacity for action. And unfortunately it proved entirely unrewarding. The miscreant had vanished, and the first person Averell encountered was Gillian, returning from some evening chore among the poultry.
    ‘Good heavens!’ Gillian said. ‘Why ever so hot and bothered?’
    ‘Nothing in the least important.’ Averell had rather resented this description of himself, although it was fair enough. ‘Only some confounded yokel peering outrageously through the window at your mother and myself.’
    ‘Oh, come, Uncle Gilbert! He must just have been looking for the back door or something. We don’t go in for inquisitive yokels round about Boxes. They’re all too utterly absorbed in their own minuscule affairs.’ Gillian was clearly rather pleased with her command of this phrase. ‘And nobody,’ she added as an afterthought, ‘would hope for a glimpse of incestuous orgy through our drawing-room window.’
    ‘I suppose not.’ Averell turned back with his niece towards the house, chiefly concerned to conceal that he was a little shocked by this freedom of fancy on the part of a schoolgirl. But he was also wondering whether the episode just concluded had prevented Ruth from giving him any further useful