What Dread Hand? by Christianna Brand Read Free Book Online

He told me he’d had another message. ‘I’ll come along with you,’ I said, turning back my bike.
    ‘I don’t want no protection,’ he said, a bit stiff.
    ‘Well, you’re going to get it,’ I said. ‘An undersized little rat like you,’ I says, codding him along a bit, ‘you’d never have a chance against them louts from Baker’s farm: and that’s what it is, I bet you, them boys of Baker’s, ganging up against you because of that argument with them last year, about the hay.’
    ‘I never thought of that,’ he says. ‘And there’s four of them. All right, come on.’
    ‘Not exactly falling over yourself with gratitude, are you?’ I says.
    ‘Well, considering it was you let me in for the trouble with Baker in the first place,’ he says… So that’s what thanks I get for going along with him to meet a bunch of roughs.
    When we came to the copse, we got off and he propped his bike against the stile. ‘Wheel it in a bit further,’ I said, shoving mine ahead of me. ‘If they see it, they’ll bust it up for extra.’
    So we wheeled the bikes in and I hid them, shoving them in among the brambles, in case anyone saw mine with his before I got away. ‘I’ll take this along with me,’ I said, fishing out a whacking great spanner from my tool kit. ‘It might come in handy.’
    ‘Oh, well, they’re only kids,’ he said. He always was soft.
    Of course there was no one in the wood. ‘The whole thing’s a hoax,’ he said. ‘It’s the last time I’ll be such a fool as to come.’
    And he bent down to get a drink from the little stream that runs down, cool and clear, between the trees.
    So I let him have it with the spanner, like I planned, and washed my hands and the spanner in the stream, and it ran as cool after that, but not so clear. And I shoved the letter in his pocket and made sure I took the right bike, and pushed off home.
    But it’s like I said—our police are wonderful. It took them about five minutes to discover what had been going on under my nose for years. Of course Lil vowed and swore she never wrote no letter about no jealous husband, but I guess they reckoned she’d say that anyway.
    I suppose I’ve just got too decent a mind, that’s the truth, ever to have thought of it. I mean, my own brother and my wife! But there you are—in my innocence I make up this ‘jealous husband’ to murder my brother; and all the time I’m supposed to have been a jealous husband myself.
    George and Lil! You wouldn’t believe it, would you?—the rotten things people do.

3
The Merry-Go-Round
    L INDA HARTLEY WAS SKIPPING with the Bindell twins, singing, to the well-known old tune, a verse of their own improvisation: a game at which Joy and Roy were, through long practice, past-masters.
    ‘One, two, three and four,’ chirped Joy,
    ‘Father locks the office door.
    Five six, seven, eight—
    He pretends he’s working late.’
    She tripped over the rope and Roy leapt in.
    ‘Nine, ten, eleven, twelve—
    He’s not working by himself!’
    They all three stopped skipping and burst into giggles. Joy took the rope and skipped by herself, changing the theme.
    ‘Pig, dog, cat and cow
    Mother knows and what a row!
    Horse, goat, rat and boar—
    I was listening at the door.’
    Linda was not so accomplished as the twins at it but she took the rope and had a go herself.
    ‘Sun, moon, day and night
    My parents also had a fight…’
    But she gave up and resorted to prose. ‘My mother said my father had got to make your father make your mother get me into Hallfield.’ Hallfield was the posh girls’ school of Linda’s aspirations: Joy was going there in the summer term. Mrs. Bindell was on the Board of Governors and, since she disapproved of Linda and looked down upon her mother, only too likely to oppose her election.
    ‘Stove, grate, fire and hob,’ sang Linda, skipping again, ‘Your mother is an awful snob.’
    ‘Awful,’ agreed the twins, not singing. It must be ghastly for poor Linda,