I didn’t answer, because the reality of a long time of bird nightmares was horrifying, although the thought of waking to Ross’s sightly desperate brand of reassurance was pleasant. I put my hand on the doorknob to that dreadful room and turned it.
24
It was completely and utterly dark. I couldn’t even see the outlines of the furniture. ‘Isobel?’ I whispered, almost inaudibly past the sound of the rain. ‘Are you here?’
‘Wait a minute, I’ve got a lighter.’ Ross fumbled alongside me. ‘My phone battery is flat.’
‘You don’t smoke, do you?’
There was a click and a small sad flame threw a meagre light that didn’t do much more than illuminate his hand. ‘No, but I regularly have to set fire to my ambition and burn it to ashes.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Sorry.’ He held the lighter up and the circle of light rose to show the tattered couch, bare of anything but Ross’s jacket folded carefully and laid across the back. ‘Well, the bird has gone. It’s pooed liberally on my collar, but it’s gone.’
I pulled out my phone torch and we looked around. There was no sign of Isobel, either sitting or lying on the floor. There were, to my great relief, no birds either.
‘This place is grim,’ I said, looking at the greatly increased damp stain down the wall. ‘How did she stand it?’
‘Maybe she was in the woods when I arrived and by now she will have gone over to the site office,’ Ross said, his face a mask of shadow. ‘I told her where it was so she knew she’d be safe there.’
We both turned to the window where the water was streaming down forming a scale model of an estuary. ‘But why would she be out in this anyway? Why not sit it out in here – being in here is still safer than running through the woods. What if a tree falls on her?’
‘Then I think,’ Ross said with heavy certainty, ‘that it would bend and break on her iron will.’
‘She is a bit scary, isn’t she?’ I pushed his arm so that the aloft lighter threw its dim illumination into the far corner, and backed it up with my phone light. ‘Scary, but not here.’
Ross lowered the light and walked across the room to where the bird had been. ‘Her things are gone,’ he said. ‘Her tin box where she keeps everything, that’s gone, and all her little bits.’
‘Then she’s gone to the site office.’
‘But she must have known we’d come looking, because she’s left my jacket here.’
I gave the room one more look-over. ‘It’s a clue. She left the jacket so that we’d see that she’s taken everything else.’
‘Oh bugger, we haven’t got to play Murder Mystery have we?’ Ross crossed the room and put an arm around me. ‘I don’t think I’ve got the strength at this time in the morning.’
‘No, it’s good. It means that she left of her own accord, she’s not lying dead in another room.’ I leaned against his arm for a moment and it felt good. As though, for a change, everything wasn’t down to me to sort out. The roof groaned again as some more wind got between the slates and the rafters. ‘Shall we go to the site office and look for her there?’
Ross rested his cheek on the top of my head. It felt very intimate, an odd gesture when we were standing in a house that seemed to want to come down around our ears, but perhaps that was the point. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose we should.’ But he didn’t move and neither did I, we just stood together and listened to the weather.
‘Ross,’ I began, and stopped. I hadn’t known what I was going to say, I just wanted to say his name.
‘I know.’
‘What?’ I moved now and turned to look up at him. ‘What was I going to say?’
He sighed. ‘How are we going to make it work when you’re a single mother and I’m a strung-out house builder? When I’ve got a TV thing coming up and you need to find somewhere to live?’
‘Oh,’ I said, realising that was probably what I had been going to say. It had been what I was thinking anyway. ‘Maybe. Some of that.’
‘I’m going to kiss you now, is that all right? I don’t want to push my luck, but if you’re going to start thinking stuff like that then I’m a bit worried that I might not get a look-in so I want to take my chances while I can.’
He really was ridiculous, I thought as his mouth moved on to mine and his hands cupped into my hair to hold me steady. Ridiculous, but a very good kisser. Actually… yes, actually quite sexy for someone who acted as though they were tightrope walking along the edge of a breakdown. But, while a lot of my reading material had assured me that having sex while in the moment of danger was perfectly reasonable behaviour, the reality of being in a house which might come down around our ears and when my daughter was being babysat by a neighbour made passionate sex as distant as the Sahara.
‘We need to go,’ I whispered against Ross’s skin. ‘We need to find Isobel.’
Clearly also surrendering thoughts of something more in-depth and detailed, he gradually stepped away. ‘You’re right.’ His voice was also a whisper, with a husky low note that made my skin hum. ‘You’re very practical, Libby.’ He sounded more normal now.
