Devil Take The Hindmost

Chapter Five

The fuel gauge on my Beetle hovered over the ominous capital letter E by the time I turned onto the drive back at the farm in Pebble Deeping. I would need to dip into petty cash to fill her up if I was going to be traipsing all over the West Midlands tracking down auctioneers.

I stuck a mental post-it note to the fridge door of my mind to sort that out in the morning, but my focus was soon distracted by the welter of oddity I had experienced at the Wyntham Estate.

I knew I needed to determine how much of the weirdness I would actually have to untangle in order to establish what happened to the clock, and how much of it I could just chalk up to experience.

Clearly, the antique hadn't been stolen, at least not in the manner Sylvia Distain and Molly would have me believe. One or more of the women I had met knew so, too. That was a matter I would need to address, but there were a plethora of other questions and issues that perhaps I could just let slide for the sake of an easy life.

Sylvia, and latterly Trish, had been kind enough to furnish me with a neat list of auctioneers and as leads go it seemed churlish to ignore that in its entirety. The fact that these were clues so clear-cut and so elementary even the short-sighted Molly could have followed them without her glasses was another wrinkle begging to be smoothed.

I sat in my car, parked in the cobbled farmyard, and wound the driver's window down to allow the cool autumn night air in. A heavy dew was setting, and I could smell the almost metallic tang of the moisture as the meadow and the woods beyond exhaled, relaxing into the blue-black night.

I closed my eyes, slipped lower in the seat and rubbed my eyelids and temples to press out some of the tension creeping unbidden from the periphery.

After a few moments, I became aware of two noises drifting like the mist of my breath on the cool evening air. First, the intermittent but rhythmic oooh, hoo-hoo of a Tawny owl calling from somewhere in the woodland bordering the farm on three sides. It was a female, and she had started her night song pretty early. It was a melodic and haunting noise drifting across the meadow to the farmyard where it met and somehow harmonized with the second sound with which I was more intimately familiar.

The resonant strains of a cello echoed from the stone sides of the farm buildings like delicate butterflies seeking the single open window out of a greenhouse. Sophie was practising, and I'd developed an ear for how much of herself she put into a performance. This melody brooded, heavy with intent and burdened by emotion. I sighed quietly.

That didn't bode well for her state of mind.

I followed the sound of the cello and made my way into the farmhouse, pausing at the foot of the stairs. Sophie was up in the bedroom in which she liked to practice and, with depressing regularity, in which she had taken to sleeping.

My hand gripped the worn oak banister and pondered at the hundreds of years of human drama the thick stone walls of this building must have witnessed. My current relationship bump with Sophie must pale in comparison with generations of folk scratching a living from the land. But I was here, now, and they rested under the earth rather than being concerned any more about what it might yield.

I overcame my hesitation and climbed the stairs, crossed the landing, and silently opened the door to her room. Sophie sat on a stool with her cello held between her knees and her bow, clasped in a white knuckled grip, slashing across the strings like the flashing blade of a master fencer engaged in the fight of her life. Her eyes clamped shut in fierce concentration, and she swayed slightly as she rode the dizzying whirl of her own music.

I stood and watched her for a while and reminded myself as to how attractive I found her.

It was more than her looks, although her fine features, ice-blue eyes and platinum hair, were easy on the eye. She possessed a combination of intellect and naiveté, emotional vulnerability and determined steel that all seemed paradoxical. One facet of her persona I struggled to relate to, however, were the flashes of artistic temperament that governed music as the great passion of her life.