But there was nobody. Unless they’d immediately run back around to the port side, jumped back onto the dock and legged it to hide behind one of the upturned boats. Meredith decided she must have imagined it; they’d have had to be very speedy indeed to do that without being noticed.

Andrea was looking at her strangely. ‘I am worried about you,’ she said. ‘It must have been a duck or something.’

‘I’m sure I saw a foot, in a black trainer. Just a glimpse, and a shadow.’

‘A shadowy foot with no leg?’ Andrea asked in a faintly teasing voice.

‘Well, obviously the leg had already gone past,’ Meredith said, realising how silly this sounded. ‘On that little ledge thing round the side, what’s it called?’

‘The “cant”, I think it is. Come on. Let me spray your hair again. Won’t take long,’ she said, and they went back inside.

‘Just… lock up well tonight, won’t you Andy?’ she said, once she was seated back in the black chair. Their eyes met in the mirror and Meredith could tell Andrea thought she was being ludicrous. Their little dock community was so safe. Everyone looked out for everyone else; they had their own in-built neighbourhood watch. If some random stranger really had been tramping round the outside of Andrea’s barge, Meredith was pretty sure that Pete or Trevor or Johnny would’ve been standing on the dock by now, demanding to know who he was and what he was doing there.

Meredith was the isolated one, since the Earl and his family had moved out of the house. At nights just her and Leonard on the whole fifteen-hundred-acre estate, and if someone was prowling round her cottage, Leonard would be at least five minutes’ away, since her place wasn’t even on his rounds.

It had never bothered her before, but now she felt spooked.

She wanted to tell Andrea about Ralph, how something weird was going on. She had no idea what, and maybe she was being totally self-obsessed and narcissistic by thinking it had anything to do with her. She couldn’t help remembering the last time she felt like this, though, even though it was so long ago.

As if activated by her concern, the puckered purple scar over the hole on the back of her left hand started to burn and itch, and she had to press her right thumb down on it to keep the sensations at bay. Andrea, like most people, had always been too polite to ask what had happened, but Meredith saw the covert glances it received when she forgot to place her hand palm up, or cover it with her other hand. If anyone ever did ask, she had her story down pat: a knife, a late night, a drinking game that went horribly wrong…

But only Pete knew that this wasn’t the truth.

13

Meredith