Finders and Keepers Read Online Free PDF Page B

Joey came upstairs with an ambulance driver and his mate.
    â€˜Can one of us go with him?’ Joey pleaded.
    The doctor shook his head. ‘Straight to the isolation ward,’ he ordered the driver before finally looking Lloyd and his brothers in the eye. ‘I’m sorry, you can’t go into isolation but you can go to the main desk in the infirmary and ask after Edyth. But there’s no point in you going there for an hour or two. I won’t know anything until she has been X-rayed. I’ll meet you there.’
    Harry stood back helplessly as the men carried his grandfather out. A few minutes later he heard the sound of a bell again when the second ambulance drove away from the house. He looked around the room. So many happy memories had been overshadowed by this one traumatic incident.
    He gathered the blood-stained tablecloths and trailed miserably down the stairs behind his father and uncles.
    â€˜I counted thirty-five piglets the last time I called. There’s only thirty in the field.’ Bob Pritchard, agent for the largest absentee landowner in Breconshire, and universally known as ‘Bob the Gob’ because his word was law to the tenants from whom he collected rent, glared at Mary.
    She wound a strand of black curly hair around her finger. ‘The sow rolled on three and crushed them to death.’
    â€˜And the carcasses?’
    â€˜We fed them to the dogs. They were so broken and bloody they weren’t fit for anything else.’ Mary slipped one hand behind her back and crossed her fingers. Her father had told her that a lie wasn’t a lie if you made the sign of the cross when you told it.
    â€˜And the other two?’
    She intertwined her fingers until they hurt. ‘Were runts. We tried to save them but couldn’t.’
    Bob pulled a notebook from his suit pocket. ‘How many lambs have you ready for market?’
    â€˜A hundred and forty, they’re in the lower pens in the fields next to the road.’ David earned himself a glare from Mary for speaking out.
    â€˜A hundred and forty. You’ve over four hundred ewes.’
    â€˜We lost sixty ewes and over a hundred lambs last winter. It was hard -’
    â€˜You don’t have to tell me how hard last winter was, boy,’ Bob snapped. ‘I see it every day in the diminishing return on my employer’s investments.’
    â€˜We should be replacing the ewes but you always take all the lambs.’
    â€˜I take all the lambs, Mary, because you have rent arrears of over one hundred and twenty pounds,’ he interrupted brusquely. ‘I warn you, the landlord won’t stand for much more. I’ve tried to argue your case with E&G Estates, but I’ve had strict orders from above that the moment your arrears reach one hundred and fifty pounds, I’m to call in the bailiffs and put you, your brothers and sister out on that road in the clothes you stand up in. They wanted me to put the lot of you out when your father topped himself and your mother died, rather than take a chance on a nineteen-year-old girl trying to run a place this size. If I’d had any sense I would done just that, instead of asking them to give you some leeway. But I’ve always been too soft for my own good. Not that you appreciate what I’ve done for you. You’ve given me nothing but trouble since the day you took over the lease on the Ellis Estate.’
    â€˜I know the law. If you put us out you’d have to give us the tools of our trade as well as our clothes.’ David jutted out his chin with a boldness that was pure bravado.
    â€˜What tools?’ Bob sneered.
    â€˜My dog, the farm tools -’
    â€˜The dog is livestock,’ Bob contradicted.
    â€˜Please, David,’ Mary begged. ‘If we carry on working hard and paying what we owe, Mr Pritchard won’t put us out. Will you, sir?’
    â€˜That depends on what else you have to send to market when the