World's End in Winter by Monica Dickens Read Free Book Online Page A

had finished the cake, and the thrush and sparrows had polished off the currants and crumbs, including the ones on Michael’s chin, she showed them how to take an empty soup tin and knot odd ends of string to make a net round it. You then slipped out the tin and kept it by your kitchen sink and put into it every bit of bacon grease and rind, fat off plates, vegetable scraps, breadcrumbs, potato, damp dog biscuit. You mixed in peanut butter and oatmeal and sunflower seeds as you went along and when it was full and the fat congealed, you cut out the other end and pushed the cylinder of bird food out into the tin-sized net.
    You threaded string through the top, with long ends to hang it far enough from a branch to be safe from cats, wrapped it in red cellophane, tied it with a bow made from a bright piece in the rag bag, and Lo, you had a Christmas gift you could sell house-to-house and make almost a hundred per cent profit.
    While they were knotting nets round the cans, Miss Etty sat with a bird in her hair and another on her huge thumb pulling ends of string out of her fist. A bird called outside and Theo the thrush in her hair lifted his head and answered, ’Cheerily, cheerily.’
    Em said, ’He’s saying, “This room is mine.”’
    ’The other one’s saying. “Then stay out of my tree,”’ Carrie said.
    ‘He’s calling “Danger from cats,”’ Michael said. ’I saw Caesar following us in the long grass.’
    ‘He’s saying, “I’m Lester Figg, trying to sound like a robin.”’ Miss Etty found some cake in the pocket of a tooth and chumped her comfortable dewlaps. ’He can fool Theo, but he doesn’t fool me.’
    ‘How did you know we were here?’ Carrie opened the wide back door. Lester wasn’t there.
    ‘I am the All-seeing Eye.’ He was in the branches of the tree where it grew out of the roof.
    ‘You asked at my house.’
    ‘I haven’t been there.’ He jumped down. ’I’ve been at Brookside. Keeping watch.’
    When there was an interesting situation, Lester kept watch silently, like an Indian. Most of what he knew he had learned by watching and listening. He had once overheard three men behind a hoarding plotting to rob a bank. Instead of telling the police or the bank manager, he had hidden in a dustbin all one freezing night and got pneumonia. But the bank was not robbed, which proved either that he had foiled the three men, or imagined them.
    ‘How’s Bristler?’ Michael tightened the last knot with his teeth and drew out the soup tin.
    ‘Abandoned.’
    ‘To her fate?’ Michael leaned across the table with his eyes bulging and his jaw open. The sparrow who was pecking at the string flew on to his shoulder and very delicately picked a lardy cake crumb from the corner of his mouth.
    ‘Not quite. She’s been left with a keeper. The Agnews have gone to Old Boys’ weekend at Victor’s school. Mr Agnew is playing rugger for the Old Boys.’
    ‘He would,’ Carrie said.
    ‘Don’t be narrow,’ Miss Etty said sharply. ’Everyone can’t have your advantages. Have you heard the ghost yet?’ she asked Lester.
    ‘We’ve heard ... things.’
    ’A baby?’ Her shrewd black eyes looked at him sideways over the hills of her cheeks.
    ‘Perhaps.’ Miss Etty loved mysteries, so he didn’t tell her it could have been Priscilla.
    ‘The poor little baby ... yes ... yes ...’ Miss Etty nodded, as if she were remembering. ’A hundred years ago or more, it must have been. My grandmother told me. Our family used to live in that village, you know, in the mill cottage, until the damp of the stream got to my grandmother. Then my mother. I was the first one had the sense to move.’
    ‘What did your grandmother tell you?’ They had stopped working to watch her. Theo went to sleep in her hair. Lester picked up the crippled crow and perched on the table round the tree trunk, stroking him with one finger.
    ‘Long, long ago, it was. Long before Brookside was built. They didn’t know about old