I gave a silly flustered smile and spoke through the glass. “I’m sorry, Mr Hitchen, I’ve changed my mind. Might I come with you after all?”
“I thought we’d settled on Adam.”
“Adam, then.”
He hesitated. But then, without another word, he reached across and tugged on the handle to the passenger door. In the time that it took to swing open, I had stepped around the car and then I was climbing in beside this irritated stranger, just as the train gave a formal whistle to indicate that the party was over.
With a rather less elegant chuckle, the car’s engine rose to match it, smothered it, and then we were away in this Rover 10 that came from Brighton and accelerating along the high winding ridge towards Aberystwyth.
The reason it mattered so much that the car was from Brighton was that it wasn’t from Gloucestershire – or, to be precise, the market town of Cirencester. It meant they hadn’t found me again. And it meant that I hadn’t made a terrible mistake in getting into this car.
Cirencester had been my home until my divorce and it housed the gallery where Rhys had still been living and working until those final few hours that had ended here. At least one of the demands levied by those two men had tenuously referenced the gallery and, although the details had grown muddier through the course of my bewildered wanderings in that hospital bed, they had certainly decided to take me somewhere. Reason told me it was the gallery. The alternative was that they’d simply decided to carry me away to some secluded spot where they might dispose of me, but I didn’t dare think about that for long.
Either way, this car mattered. And so did the risk I was taking now. Aberystwyth gave me hope. In Aberystwyth I stood a chance of uncovering a few meagre hints about Rhys’s last movements and through them a glimpse of what awaited me at the gallery. It could all vanish in a heartbeat if it turned out I’d made the wrong choice by tentatively deciding to believe this man beside me was what I thought he was.
We were at least heading in the right direction; west towards the coast where the sun was already dipping. Adam was driving smoothly but with a degree of seriousness that implied conversation would be unwelcome, even if I could have made myself heard over the noise from the road. He was wearing driving gloves. This was perhaps an alarming development since it meant he would leave no fingerprints. But actually, on the assumption he wasn’t planning to throttle me, even I could understand why he should want them. The view northwards to the foothills of Snowdonia was glorious but the car was immensely draughty, the canvas roof thrummed overhead and I was grateful when he reached one of those gloved hands onto the back seat and drew forward a thick woollen blanket for me to drape across my knees.
The road ran high along a ridgetop. Every turn offered a fresh spectacular panorama of the wide glacial valley below, filled with leafless trees and pasture fields and sparse hills turned the colour of burgundy by old heather. I caught sight of the distinctive spread wings of a buzzard once and I lifted my hand to point it out to my companion but he only gave it a cursory acknowledgement now that he didn’t feel the need to disarm me. That is to say, he glanced upwards and nodded his appreciation and then returned his attention to the curling road. It was actually quite pleasant to be travelling with a man who understood the value of companionable silences. Then the worst happened. The car suddenly checked as if to stop.
We were passing through a small hamlet; a little plain cluster of five or so workman’s cottages typical of the area. They meant nothing to me; at least nothing beyond the vague familiarity of having travelled this road once or twice in the course of my marriage. Now I turned to my driver. He wasn’t looking at me. He was peering beyond me at a set of two grey cottages that squatted a short distance away from the road. Quite automatically, I pressed back in my seat to give him a better view, and it was barely acknowledged before he identified the one he wanted and steered the car to a halt on the verge.
Now he turned to me. He looked very different in this dull light. He wouldn’t have known it but the cold had ruffled his hair and drawn his features into dramatic relief. It hardened him and made him a stranger all over again. He was drawing off the leather gloves with measured tugs on long fingers. They would have dwarfed mine. The cold must have been working on my face too and making my eyes very large because when his gaze found mine, it seemed to throw him for a moment. Then he covered it by reaching past me into the cramped space of the back seat for a jacket and a discarded hat.
He said, “Are you in a hurry to get back?” His gaze was angled into the footwell; his posture held that air of distance which for a time had disappeared.
My voice wasn’t working very well. “N—no?”
“Good,” he said. “You won’t mind then if I just nip in there for a few minutes? You can come if you’d like? Or stay in the car; it’s up to you.”
He was already pushing open his door. I stayed in the car. It seemed to be what he wanted and politeness was acting as my defence again. I do believe if he’d asked if I minded a spot of abduction I probably would have given him a tactful reply to that too.
As he climbed out, I asked in a voice made even more rapid by the shadow of his own tension, “What are you doing?”
He paused in the act of shutting the door. “Research,” he said.
Then, by way of an afterthought, his head ducked below the doorframe. He added, “Here, put these on. Your hands will thaw in a moment. It’s not that cold out here now that the car’s stationary, I promise.”
He’d dared to glance at me at last. The swift gleam of those grey eyes was shy but the humour there was genuine. He was bemused by his own brusqueness and by my reaction to it. It was a sudden simple reassurance. He knew he’d confused me and he meant me to know everything was fine with this little act of kindness. I took the gloves. Then he shut the door.
I watched as, shrugging his way into the coat and conventionality, he stepped across the grassy verge towards the nearest of the low run-down cottages. The unkempt door with its peeling red paint and the dilapidated coal shed certainly fitted my idea of what constituted sinister. Adam rapped lightly on the wood, waited, then peered through the glass at the side before knocking again. Someone must have seen him because with a change to his posture he waited until the door finally opened and then, with a quick unsmiling glance back at me, he stepped inside. The other man had been ordinary and old and crabbed.
I sat there for about ten minutes, watching the road behind in the single driver’s side wing mirror in case it should turn out that this was a simple way of arranging an exchange with those men, but no other car appeared. A pony-cart crossed the road ahead from one field into another with a lean sheepdog trailing dutifully behind, but nothing else happened that could possibly be an excuse for alarm and finally I was forced to admit that his stop was exactly as he implied – nothing to do with me.
With a grimace at what amounted to yet another painfully unnecessary display of doubt, I rummaged in my bag to drag out the little sketchbook. I waited a while longer but then, laying the gloves upon his seat and clutching my pencil and pad like a shield, I decided firmly that if he could do research, so could I. I climbed out of the car and drifted artlessly around the wide curve of the road.
Beyond the corner I found a gateway overlooking a promising field where broken hedges and ancient trees straggled down the tussock-strewn slopes. The solitude was glorious. But I wasn’t alone. A sheep gave a surprised grunt and lumbered quickly to her feet as I appeared and I quickly sketched her head before she could decide to run away. She had half a bramble thicket trailing from her fleece and I sketched that too before slowly but surely moving onto the hints and touches for the field’s other occupants as they rolled gently downhill to the floodplain at the bottom.
“I