The Girl by the River Read Online Free PDF Page A

the hospital. He found himself walking towards the stonemason’s yard. Herbie would be there, and Herbie would help him.
    Without his lorry, he had nothing. No way of earning to keep his growing family. The bright eyes of baby Tessa sparkled in his mind. Ethie’s eyes. Had she come back through this tiny new
being? Had she sent the sparrowhawk? Was it a curse? A curse encrypted long ago from the white hot metal of jealousy, a curse carried across time by an embittered, angry woman, Kate’s sister,
Ethie, drowned in the Severn River. She was dead. But it wasn’t over.
    Freddie had hypersensitive hearing. Years of listening to the deeper sounds of the countryside had given him a unique ability to detect secret dramas in the natural world. He
could stand close to a hedge and hear the crack of an eggshell as a baby bird hatched. The language of the wind in the trees was clear to him; each tree had a different voice, and there were
conversations between them, the ripple of poplar and the roar of oak, the whisper of beech and the singing of pine. In spring, he could even put his ear against a tree and hear the sap whistling up
inside the heartwood.
    So now, instead of heading down the road to Herbie, Freddie found himself listening again. He was sure he could hear his lorry, far away, parked, with the engine throbbing. And voices around it,
arguing. A fast high-pitched, scolding voice that was firing questions, and between the questions was a monosyllabic grunt in reply.
    Freddie turned around and followed the tyre marks, glad that the wheels had been muddy from his recent trip to the alabaster quarry. With the road covered in mud and horse manure, it
wasn’t difficult to follow the curve of his lorry’s tracks, down a narrow lane that led through woodland and on towards the Levels and the river. He knew the lane well and strode down
it, still shaking inside, spooked by what he might find round the next bend, the sound of the lorry’s engine growing louder and closer with the quiet thud of his footsteps.
    At the bottom of the hill two scraggy dogs charged at him barking. Dogs didn’t faze Freddie. He saw their fear and how it turned up as fierce barking. ‘Now you quieten down,’
he said in his quietest voice. ‘What’s all that fuss about? Eh?’ He’d discovered long ago that if you asked a dog a question it would usually stop barking and sidle up to
you, its tail flipping apologetically. And it worked with these two. Once they’d smelled his hand and accepted a gentle stroke, they trotted dutifully beside him. As the lane narrowed into a
sharp bend, Freddie felt like a dog himself, his hackles rising, knowing that whoever was round there had heard his voice and fallen silent, awaiting his approach. A smell of wood smoke and soup
hung in the air.
    His lorry was there, awkwardly parked with its nose in the hedge, the driver’s door flung open, and no one inside. ‘Now you calm down.’ Again the voice whispered to him, and
strength steadied his mind. In slow deliberate strides, Freddie reached inside the cab and turned the engine off. He took the can of distilled water from the back, opened the bonnet and sensed the
state of the engine. It was too hot to touch, and it had a sooty smell, like a steam train. With his hanky wrapped around his hand, he unscrewed the water tank and poured some in, the hiss of steam
clouding his glasses. The glug of the water going in was oddly comforting as the thirsty engine creaked gratefully.
    Only then did he turn to face the two pairs of eyes watching him. The young man, now staring sulkily at his boots, was sitting on the steps of a brightly painted gypsy wagon parked on a wide
grassy layby, the skewbald horse tethered and munching at the grass and bramble leaves.
    Standing over him was a tiny, birdlike woman with a frown clenched into her brow, two spots of crimson on her cheeks. ‘Say you’re sorry to the gentleman!’ She aimed a slap at
the young man’s