‘Kate,’ I said.
She took another few stairs, and stopped again, keeping the high ground.
‘Cook,’ she said.
My adversaries appeared. They stopped in the doorway, like dogs that weren’t allowed past a threshold.
‘There’s a problem,’ the injured man said.
Kate sighed and looked at me.
‘I presume you’re the problem?’
‘He was waiting for us,’ the man said. ‘He had a gun.’
I admired his use of the English language. He hadn’t lied, just hadn’t specified who ‘he’ was. He was afraid of Kate. Didn’t want to be caught out in a lie. Needed some way of backing out of it.
‘Lucky I was there,’ I said.
‘Apparently we’ve got some catching up to do,’ she said, finishing her descent of the stairs and brushing past me. She shouted to the injured man.
‘Get that arm looked at. You’re no use to me like that.’
I followed her into the drawing room and stood awkwardly, unsure of how to regain the initiative. I’d come here expecting a fight, now I was being received. The drawing room smelt of coal from the fireplace. Too many years without having the chimney swept. I studied rows of untouched books on the shelves, thick with dust.
‘Sit,’ Kate said, as she herself sat on a couch in front of the fireplace. I studied the books for another minute, for form’s sake.
Kate rang a bell on a side table, and a uniformed girl appeared.
‘Tea,’ Kate said. A statement. Not a request to the servant, or a question to me. A woman who knew what she wanted and was used to getting it.
I sat. Opposite sides of the fireplace, a settee each, like two great nations facing off over a piece of disputed territory. She looked at me, not hiding her curiosity.
She was the same age as me. Forty. I’d always imagined she’d been living a refined life, the wife of a minor aristocrat. A success story for the daughter of a self-made solicitor, having clawed her way out of the middle class. I’d been wrong. The woman who sat in front of me hadn’t lived a life of ease. Her face was lined from years of outdoor work. Her hair was greying, pulled back in a functional ponytail.
‘I heard you’re a big landowner now,’ she said. ‘Riding to hounds with the local gentry.’
I shook my head. ‘Just a farmer, trying to make ends meet like everyone else.’
‘I don’t think you know the first thing about making ends meet.’
‘Is that what you’re doing with the Leckies?’ I asked.
‘I’m not doing anything wrong,’ she said.
The servant came in with tea. She pulled out a table and put it in the middle of no-man’s-land, leaving the tray on it.
I waited for her to leave. ‘Your sons beat two defenceless old people to within an inch of their lives, left them terrified, then came back today to finish the job.’
Kate poured. Handed me a cup and took one herself.
‘The Leckies were paying rent that was fixed during the last war. They’ve got a son in Wales. They said they’d go and stay with him. Get out of harm’s way for when the tanks arrive. Lots of people are leaving.’
‘From what I saw, there was some arm-twisting involved.’
She sipped her tea.
‘I give Victor autonomy to run things as he sees fit.’
