It's Raining Men (20 page)

‘Er . . . yes.’ Obviously the village-drum system of communication worked efficiently then.

‘My name is Raine.’

She had the voice of someone who had been smoking fifty cigarettes a day for the same number of years, but her pronunciation was almost genteel, like BBC announcers from long ago.

‘Nice to meet you, Raine,’ said Clare. ‘Do you live alone up here?’ She wondered how long Raine had been cooped up in the house. There was no road to speak of and no way
of negotiating those woods in a wheelchair.

‘Since my husband died, yes, I live alone.’ Raine sipped at her water again with surprising delicacy.

‘Do people bring you shopping and things?’

‘Yes, the villagers are very kind. I did have a girl who came to clean for me – Colleen – but she left to go to work in a city. Who can blame her? The ladies who come to help
me are nearly as old as I am. And it takes them an age to get here through Spice Wood because the terrain is treacherous. They try to help, bless them, but they can’t do much of the heavy
housework.’ She sighed. ‘I’m too old to care much about that, though.’

‘Are you from around here?’ asked Clare, suspecting old Raine might be lonely and in need of a natter, and she could spare five minutes to do that with her, at least.

‘No,’ said Raine. ‘I’m an offcumden too. But my husband was a local man.’

‘It’s a very pretty village,’ said Clare.

‘It is,’ said Raine. ‘So tell me, my dear. What brought you to Ren Dullem?’

‘A mistake,’ said Clare.

‘A mistake?’ repeated Raine.

‘Yes, we should have been at Wren Cottage in Wellem, not Well Cottage in Dullem. A stupid holiday agency mixed it up.’ She had wanted to curse them when they first arrived, but then
she had found the lagoon.

‘You found the lagoon,’ said Raine, as if dipping into her thoughts. She smiled.

‘Yes,’ said Clare. ‘I’m going to be in trouble with the landlord. I ripped off quite a bit of wallpaper to open the door. I hope I can slide the wardrobe back to hide it
when we leave.’

Raine patted Clare’s hand, and despite the leathery skin and the yellowing teeth and strangely coloured eyes, Clare felt a very sweet vibe coming from her. Poor old thing. She must be very
lonely and a bit batty.

A pure white cat leapt up onto Raine’s lap and scared the living daylights out of Clare. The cat had a green eye and a blue eye, except they weren’t very bright in colour, being
clouded with cataracts.

‘Poor old Albert,’ said Raine, giving him a long stroke down his back. ‘He’s been deaf since day one and now he can’t see much either. And he’s as arthritic
as they come. It would be a kindness to let him go but the time isn’t quite here yet.’

Clare thought of how she’d never met anyone with eyes like hers, and suddenly there was a room full of them.

‘Where did you find him?’ she asked, leaning over to give him a tickle behind the ear.

‘He found me,’ said Raine. ‘He turned up at the door one day, twenty years ago, miaowing, thin as a reed. No one in the village knew anything about him. They wouldn’t
have abandoned a cat like him.’

‘You mean with his eye colour?’

‘People have old ways in Ren Dullem,’ said Raine. ‘Superstitions.’

‘Someone in the village called me a witch today,’ Clare confided. She recalled the crush of Val Hathersage’s body against her own and a naughty thrill tripped down her
spine.

Raine threw her head back and laughed. ‘Yes, well, we’re rare and wonderful creatures. Aren’t we, Albert? Us
two-colours
.’ The old cat was purring like an
engine.

Clare glanced at her watch. The message she had left for the others said she was just popping out for some shopping. She ought to get back in case they were waiting for her.

Just as she was about to say that it had been very nice to meet Raine, and that she was going now, a huge wave of sympathy for the old lady with the old blind cat engulfed her. Especially one
living in a house that could have done with a really good clean

‘Look, the day after tomorrow,’ she began, hardly even believing herself what she was about to promise, ‘can I come back up and give your house a once-over for you?’

‘Oh, no. That’s very kind of you but—’

‘Really.’ Clare held her palms out as if pushing the denial back. ‘Anyone who knows me knows that, if I’m not swimming, I’m at my happiest with a cloth in my hand.
I would really love to do it for you.’

And because Raine wanted to see Clare again, because she couldn’t quite believe that a woman who had arrived at full moon, and had eyes like the shifting colours of her lagoon and swam
like a ribbon in the sea could just be an ordinary holidaymaker, she relented.

‘That would be wonderful,’ she said.

Lara awoke to find an empty house. There was a note from Clare to say that she had nipped out for some shopping and a note from May to say that she had nipped out to find
Clare. Lara got dressed with the intention of nipping out to look for them both and hopefully finding them in Jenny’s café. In the bathroom, she pulled on the string to turn on the
light and a loud bang ensued. The bulb had blown and taken all the electricity in the house down with it, as Lara discovered when she tried to switch on various other lights. And where the hell was
the fuse box?

‘This is all I need,’ she huffed to herself, knowing that if she didn’t find it she would once again have to go down to misery guts’s house and ask for some help. After
looking in all the obvious places she still hadn’t found it and so instead of searching out her friends, she would have to pay the unjolly giant Gene Hathersage a visit.

When she knocked on his door there was no answer, nor did the old dog bark, but his scrappy old truck was there, suggesting that he was in and ignoring her.

‘Hello,’ Lara called, walking around to the back of the house. There was a beautiful walled garden there and more furniture made from twisted pieces of wood: a table and two chairs
and various arches covered in roses and possibly peaches. It was overgrown but probably only by one summer. Maybe Mr Hathersage had been too busy hiding from people to come out and do some
gardening, Lara mused as she knocked on the back door. No answer. She knocked twice more with hard knuckles, but no success. Bloody man. She looked in his truck just to make sure that he
wasn’t lying down behind the seats trying not to be spotted; he wasn’t there either.

There were various outbuildings near the house and Lara picked her way through the long grasses running riot over the path and looked through the cobwebby window of the first one – a small
shed-like structure full of logs. There was a larger, newer building behind it, with a large metal door slightly ajar. Bingo, thought Lara. She pulled it open, walked inside and whistled. Facing
her was the most beautiful carved horse. To one side of it the crude shape of a dog lying down, its head resting on its front paws, was emerging from the wood. This must have been the piece
currently being worked on as there were fresh cuts of wood around it. Behind the horse was an enormous high-backed seat made to the same twisted-wood design as the furniture in the walled garden.
There were more carvings – large and small – dotted around the space, exquisitely detailed pieces sitting beside the expertly crafted rustic furniture. Surely these couldn’t be
from the hands of Gene Hathersage? He didn’t look the type to have the patience to create such beautiful things.

There was a sudden rumble to her side, followed by the revving rasp of a chainsaw. She spun around to see
him
, clad in an industrial apron, holding the saw.

Jesus H. Christ, she said to herself. It’s Leatherface. I’ve had it.

She was sure he must have been able to hear her heart thumping over the sound of the machine. He turned it off when he realized he had given her enough of a scare – and a little bit
extra.

‘What are you doing in here?’ he barked.

‘Looking for you,’ Lara replied. ‘Did you make all these?’

‘This is private property and that’s my business.’

‘I’m not exactly asking you what size underpants you wear,’ growled Lara.

‘Yes, I did make them. Hopefully that answers your question sufficiently.’

‘Are you always so rude to lodgers?’

‘You’re the first I’ve had,’ he replied, his brown-black eyes challenging hers to maintain contact.

Lucky you’re not asking me for repeat custom, thought Lara. She smiled her sweetest smile and said, ‘All our lights have blown and I can’t find the fuse box. I knocked on the
door to your house but you weren’t there and I didn’t know if you were in because I didn’t hear your dog . . .’

Gene dropped the chainsaw noisily on the table behind him.

‘I’ll get my toolbox,’ he said. ‘I’ll meet you at the cottage in five minutes.’

He turned from her, stripping off his apron, and Lara was left to go back up to Well Cottage on her own, presumably because he didn’t want to walk with her. Well, that was fine, because
she didn’t want to walk with him either.

He must have taken one stride for every two of hers because she arrived at the cottage only seconds before him.

‘Would you like a cup of tea?’ she asked politely.

‘Going to be a bit hard boiling a kettle with no electricity,’ grumped Gene. ‘What are you going to do to the water, breathe on it?’ He didn’t wait for an answer.
He lifted a chair, took it into Clare’s room, surveyed the displaced wardrobe and all the paper torn from the wall, and then climbed up to reach a box high on the wall. Lara winced. If
Clare’s efforts to expose the doorway didn’t give Gene Hathersage a legal right to keep their extortionate bond then nothing would.

As if reading her thoughts he said, ‘I’ll be charging for the damage to that wall. Unless you put it right.’

‘Whatever you have to do,’ drawled Lara, and then under her breath she added, ‘another three million quid won’t matter.’

‘Why would you want to go moving the wardrobe?’ Gene threw over his shoulder.

‘My friend lost an earring.’

‘Oh, I see.’ He didn’t turn around but she watched him nod whilst he did something with pliers. ‘I always start moving wardrobes and ripping off wallpaper when I’ve
lost jewellery.’

Lara didn’t dignify his sarcasm with an answer but she felt duty bound to be polite.

‘Can I get you a cold drink in the absence of house electricity?’ she offered, forcing politeness. ‘Milk, water?’

‘Nope, I’m fine thanks. I’ll only be a couple of minutes and I need to get back. Not all of us are on holiday.’

‘I would have thought that as your first customers you might have been a little more courteous to us,’ said Lara, her temper breaking free of its leash. She had to have a lot of
patience in her job and she was only glad that she didn’t have to deal with Gene Hathersages every day. They’d be worse than gropey Giles Billingleys.

‘I should never have opened up Well Cottage,’ he muttered.

‘Why? Because – God forbid – tenants might complain that you’ve charged them a hundred and fifty pounds for a lump of cheese and the ingredients for three bacon butties?
Or because they just might want to find the fuse box to put a light on because your electrics haven’t been serviced properly?’

Gene Hathersage twisted to face her. He looked extra enormous standing on the chair, half electrician, half giant. His legs looked eight foot long in those faded, distressed jeans.

‘No one wants strangers here. It’s caused all sorts of bad feeling.’

‘Trust me, Mr Hathersage, I would never have willingly booked this cottage. Not in a million years.’ Lara’s voice began its crescendo as her temper not only slipped its lead
but ran straight past the huskies, fell down a mountain and started gathering snow to itself, like a massive destructive snowball. ‘We thought we were heading for a fortnight of R & R in
a luxury spa with massages and pools and first-class cuisine, not a cottage in the back of beyond, luxury hampers that are about as luxury as a toilet seat made out of broken glass, a sky full of
clouds, no mobile reception, no Internet, no civilization and a village full of people that look at us as if we’re from the planet Arse.’

Planet Arse
? This from a woman named Best Industry Speech Maker the year before last. Clearly her standards were slipping.

Gene Hathersage speedily turned back to the fuse box. She thought she saw his shoulders shaking. He actually had the cheek to be sniggering at her. She flounced out of the room, picked up her
Kindle and threw herself on the sofa. Twice she reached the bottom of the screen and realized she hadn’t absorbed a word so she gave up. She had just turned it off when Gene came through the
door carrying the chair.

‘All sorted,’ he said.

‘Thank you,’ Lara replied, with the world’s worst impression of a genuine smile of gratitude. Oh, she couldn’t wait to fill in the feedback report.

‘Please do call again, Miss Rickman, if you encounter any other difficulties.’ Gene’s faux sweetness matched her own insincerity exactly. She noticed how straight and white his
teeth were as he gave his parody of a smile.

‘Thank you, Mr Hathersage. I do hope I won’t be troubling you again.’

‘Not half as much as I wish it,’ she heard him mumble as he left the cottage, closing the door ever so softly behind him.

When Clare walked in and saw Lara’s expression, she hardly needed to ask what was up.

‘Gene bloody Hathersage, that’s what’s up. Had to go and fetch him to mend the fuse . . . God, the cheeky git. How dare he?’
What are you going to do to the water,
breathe on it?
Lara had just worked out what he meant.

Then May made a breathless entrance. ‘Saw you coming up the hill, Clare, but I couldn’t catch you . . . What’s up?’

‘Lara’s had to go down to see Gene Hathersage again. About the fuse box, this time,’ Clare filled her in.

‘He called me a dragon,’ said Lara, and she relayed the insult to the others.

Lara expected a modicum of sympathy; what she got were her two friends laughing so much they had to lean on each other for support.