The Shift Key Read Online Free PDF Page B

arms as though to ward off the kind of blows Moira had said her Declan rained on her.
    ‘Our room? You
are
mad! It’s mine and I pay rent to keep it private! Yours is the other side of the landing! Get out! Get out! Get OUT !’
    ‘What have I done?’ Miss Knabbe heard herself moaning as her sense of contented certainty evaporated.
    ‘Got rid of me!’ was Moira’s bitter answer. ‘In the morning I’m going to advertise for safer lodgings!’
    ‘But, darling Moira …!’
    Her expostulations were of no avail. Moira did not recall what she recalled – what she’d have testified to on her Bible oath – that they had shared this room for two whole years …
    Preparing to offer incontrovertible evidence, she gestured at the dressing-table, meaning to point out her own belongings on it, such as the silver-mounted toilet set she had been given for her twenty-first birthday.
    They weren’t there. Nor was anything of hers.
    Sobbing, Miss Knabbe fled as she was ordered to the other room across the landing, and switched on the light. There they were, all her possessions: shoes on the floor, dress and underwear across a chair … And the covers on the rumpled bed had been thrown back.
    The hideous suspicion crossed her mind: she might be wrong.
    And yet she could not make herself believe it. Her memories were much too real.
    She wept until the sky outside was light and there were no more tears. Distantly she heard Moira descending the stairs, going to the kitchen, moving around. At last she plucked up the courage to go down herself and beg forgiveness.
    It was to no avail. Moira was pulling on her coat, her face a frozen mask.
    ‘I’m going to tell everybody what you did!’ she promised. ‘And find a
man
to share my bed, if someone must!’
    And marched out, slamming the door.
    She kept her word.
    Outside the primary school, in the shops, in the post office (which doubled as the newsagent’s, tobacconist’s and confectioner’s), in the Marriage at Cana and the bar of the Bridge Hotel when those opened at mid-morning, rumours took root, and sprouted, and bloomed. Not in living memory hadthe people of Weyharrow had so much to talk about – not even when, last Midsummer Day, the police had descended on the hippies who had come here believing it to be a pagan site more ancient than Stonehenge, and taken off a bunch of them for drug offences. That had involved outsiders. It had been petty compared to the Knabbe scandal and the fight between Ken Pecklow and Harry Vikes.
    With deep content the local folk discovered they had sex and violence on their doorstep.
    It was to the general mood of excitement that Mr Jacksett, proprietor of the general store, ascribed his lapses in filling orders for his regular customers, all of whom seemed to have been given the wrong items. Shaking his head over the task of changing them, he wondered whether in fact it might rather be because he was worried about Boyo, his boxer dog, who had been missing since yesterday noon. He had been out until midnight calling and whistling. Presumably the brute had picked up the scent of a bitch and would return in his own good time, but the kids were crying for fear he might have been run over.
    All morning similar incidents kept cropping up, though some went unregarded, like the one at the Bridge Hotel.
    At the moment the hotel had no guests in residence – it seldom did after mid-September save at weekends – but last night the bar had been busy with the remnants of a birthday party. Having played the affable ‘mine host’ until his eyes began to cross with all the drinks the customers had stood him, Nigel Mender descended grumpily to the kitchen at ten-thirty, to find his chef, Tim Wamble, demanding why he couldn’t lay hands on the stocks he needed for today’s luncheon special. He was convinced they must have been thrown out with yesterday’s midnight garbage.
    ‘Today’s special?’ the landlord rasped, having heard hiscomplaint. ‘What do