At Risk

13

Pruning shears in her gloved hand, Anne Lakeby moved purposefully along the bank of ornamental sedges and grasses at the foot of the front lawn, cutting back the dead stems. It was a fine morning, cold and clear, and her Wellington boots left crisp imprints in the frosted turf. The shoulder-high grasses prevented any sight of the beach below, but the brownish glitter of the sea showed beyond them.

In her youth, Anne had been described as “handsome.” With age, however, her long features had contracted to a benign gauntness. Robust and unfussy-a pillar of local charities and good works-she was a popular figure in the community, and there were few events in and around Marsh Creake at which her loud neighing laugh was not to be heard. Like the Hall itself, she had become something of a landmark.

In thirty-five years of marriage Anne had never developed much of a fondness for the grey late-Victorian sprawl which her husband had inherited. The house had been built by Perry’s great-grandfather, to replace a much finer building which had burnt down, and she had always found it severe and uninviting. The gardens, however, were her pride and joy. The weathered brickwork, the sweep of the lawn to the shore, the subtle interplay of textures and colours in the mature borders-all of these brought her deep and lasting pleasure. She worked hard to maintain them, and opened the grounds to the public several times a year. In the early spring, people came from far and wide to enjoy the display of snowdrops and aconites.

Perry had brought the house to their marriage, but it was all that he had brought. Born to a local landowning family, Anne had inherited on the grand scale when her parents had died, and had made it her business to keep her personal accounts separate from her husband’s. Many couples would have found such a relationship unsustainable, but Anne and Perry managed to rub along together without too much friction. She was fond of him, she enjoyed his company, and within limits was prepared to indulge him in the little things which made him happy. But she liked to know what was going on in his life, and right now she didn’t. Something was up.

A cold sea breeze rustled the sedges and agitated the feathery heads of the grasses. Pocketing the secateurs, Anne proceeded towards the path which led to the beach. This, like the lawn, was still frosted hard, but Anne noticed that it had recently been considerably churned up. That bloody man Gunter, she supposed. She didn’t see him in person all that often, but she saw signs of his presence all the time-cigarette ends, heavy footprints-and it was beginning to annoy her profoundly. Given an inch, Ray Gunter was the type to take a mile. He knew that she had never liked him, and he didn’t give a damn. Why Perry put up with him tramping backwards and forwards through their property, night and day, she would never know.

She turned back to the house. The bank of grasses and sedges marked the end of the garden proper. The lawn was bordered by frozen beds of closely pruned old roses. The whole was enclosed by a pair of brick walls, above which maples and other deciduous trees stood starkly against the winter sky. The sight gave Anne a moment’s profound satisfaction before reminding her of the second reason for her irritation, which was that Diane Munday had decided to open her own garden to the public on precisely the same day that Anne herself had.

What had possessed the woman, God alone knew. She knew, or she damn well ought to have known, that the Hall always threw its gates open to the public on the last Saturday before Christmas. There wasn’t a great deal to admire in the garden at that time of year, but it was a tradition: people paid a couple of pounds to wander round the gardens-all profits to the St. John Ambulance Brigade-and then, believers or no, went on to the carol service and mince pies at the church.

But there was no telling people like the Mundays. They had a decent house, granted. Several million pounds’ worth of elegant Georgian manor house on the other side of the village, to be precise, all paid for out of the lavish salaries and bonuses that Sir Ralph Munday had seen fit to award himself in his final years in the City. And the gardens at Creake Manor were OK too-or had been before Diane had got her over-manicured hands on them. Now it was all Sheraton-style coachlights and fancy trelliswork and horrid little fast-growing conifers. And that swimming pool, which seemed to think it was part of a Roman villa, and the pink pampas grass… One could go on pretty much indefinitely. When the Mundays opened their garden to the public the event had nothing in the world to do with horticulture, and everything to do with a crass display of wealth.

Which was fine, Anne supposed-not everyone had been born with one’s social advantages. And one didn’t want to appear boringly snotty and stuffy. But the silly woman could have troubled to check the date. Really, she could have bothered to do that, at the very least.

Her thoughts were interrupted by the crackling roar of fighter jets. She looked upwards as three US Air Force fighters drew cursive trails across the hard blue of the sky. Lakenheath, she supposed vaguely. Or Mildenhall. How many miles to the gallon did those things do? Pretty few, she supposed-rather like Diane’s ridiculously oversized four-wheel drive. Which reminded her that police cars had been whizzing backwards and forwards in front of the house since well before breakfast. Extraordinary. The place was like Piccadilly Circus at times.

Anne walked down the path towards the sea. The Hall and its gardens occupied an elevated spit of land flanked to east and west by open mudflats. At high tide these were covered by the sea but at low tide they lay shining and exposed, the domain of cormorants, terns and oystercatchers. At the far point of the spit, beyond the garden, was the seventy-yard bank of shingle known as the Hall Beach. This was the only navigable landfall for a couple of miles in either direction, and as such afforded Anne and Perry Lakeby considerable privacy. Or would have done, mused Anne grumpily, had it not also been the place where Gunter kept his boats and nets.

The shingle crunched underfoot, and the brine was sharp in the air. There had been a bit of a blow the night before, Anne remembered, but the sea had settled. For a moment she gazed out towards the horizon, and surrendered herself to the ebb and wash of the tide. Then something caught her eye on the wet shingle at her feet. Bending, she lifted a tiny silver hand, a charm of some kind. Pretty, she thought absently, and slipped it into the pocket of her puffa jacket. She had taken several paces before she stopped dead in her tracks, wondering where in Heaven’s name it had come from.