Stormy Petrel Read Online Free PDF Page B

seen a candlestick, left ready on the mantelpiece, presumably as insurance against just this event. I crossed to the uncurtained window and peered out. The wind was stronger than ever, and fistfuls of rain hurtled against the glass. A wild and nasty night.
    I finished the section I had been writing – an idea left in mid-paragraph tends to vanish very quickly – then took myself and my candle early to bed.
    The walls of the cottage were thick enough to shut out the worst sounds of the storm’s buffeting, and even the creaking of doors and rattling of windows could not keep me awake for long. But something, some sharper, unaccustomed sound, brought me out of my first deep sleep into listening wakefulness.
    The storm was still raging, more fiercely now than before. I could hear the crash of waves on the shingle, and the intermittent shriek of the wind as it tore through the gaps in the kail-yard wall.
    But the sound that had startled me awake was different. It came from within the cottage, a quiet sound, but cutting through all the noise from outside. The closing of a door; the back door, I thought. And then sounds from the scullery. A tap running, and the echo of metal as the kettle was filled.
    Crispin? Against all expectation, all possibility, had my brother managed to make his way here, and cross to Moila in spite of the storm?
    Too bewildered by sleep to think just how impossible it was, I slid out of bed, pulled on my slippers, threw my dressing gown on, and opened my bedroom door. There was a light on downstairs, and as my bedroom door opened, all sounds ceased from inside the house. For a moment I thought I had been mistaken, and that perhaps I had left the switch on after the light failed, but no, I was sure I had switched it off. And I had locked the back door. I ran downstairs.
    He was just turning from the sink, kettle in hand. A young man, tallish, slenderly built, with dark hair dragged into a tousle by the wind, and a narrow, pale-skinned face. A good-looking face; blue eyes, straight nose, cheeks flushed with cold and wet with rain, and with tomorrow’s stubble already showing dark. He wore a navy fisherman’s jersey and gumboots, and a heavy anorak, shiny and running with wet.
    I had never seen him before in my life.
    I stopped dead in the doorway. He stood, rigid, gripping the kettle.
    We both spoke at the same time, and, inevitably, the same words.
    â€˜Who the hell are you?’

5
    He set the kettle down with a rap on the draining-board. He seemed even more taken aback than I was, and this heartened me. I said, with a reasonable show of calmness: ‘You’re welcome, of course, to take shelter from the storm, but do you usually walk into someone else’s house without knocking? Or did you knock, and I didn’t hear you? I thought the door was locked, anyway.’
    â€˜Your house?’ He asked it without any apparent sense of its being a stupid question.
    â€˜Well, yes. Temporarily, anyway. I’ve rented it for a fortnight. Oh, I see. You know the owners? And you thought you could just walk in—’
    â€˜As a matter of fact, I thought it was my own house. I was brought up here. See?’ He put a hand in a pocket and brought out a key, the duplicate of the one I had been given, which fitted both front and back doors. ‘I’d no idea the place had changed hands. I’m sorry.’
    â€˜I’m sorry, too.’ An awkward silence. He stood by the sink, dripping quietly onto the scullery matting. He showed no sign of offering to go, and, hearing the wind outside hurling fistfuls of rain about, I could hardly blame him. I cleared my throat. ‘Well, this is a bit awkward, isn’t it? The people who lived here moved away a couple of years ago, so I was told. I don’t know where they went, but Mrs McDougall at the post office could probably tell you, if you wanted to get in touch again. I think she said the name was