“I finally agreed to visit Howie in Jakarta. Life’s too short, don’t you think? I also baked you a loaf of my favourite sourdough bread, fresh this morning. And you may not use this today, but I make my own apricot jam and marmalade. So I’ve brought jars of both.”
“You’re a woman of many talents. Let’s go and meet the others.”
* * * *
Adrian stood between the kitchen and the terrace, leaning against the sliding door, watching the revelry of a house-warming party in full swing. Around the verdant lawn, each of the trestle tables had been decorated with a simple white tablecloth and a small posy of colourful flowers picked from the garden. Guests sat around chatting with one another, people who either knew Lenny or Adrian or both, and now got along like old friends. How on earth Lenny had managed to drum up almost fifty people had been nothing short of a miracle, but not only was the driveway currently packed with cars, many had parked along the lane leading to Bryn Bach.
Luckily PC Morgan had made an appearance in the morning and given them the okay to park along one side, as long as they left space for others to enter and exit.
Finally meeting Lenny’s employees had been a hoot, hearing stories about his work life, little idiosyncrasies about the man. Everything was said light-heartedly, the people who worked for Lenny clearly adoring him. Lenny’s cousin Eric and his wife had brought Lenny’s mother and his Aunt Marcie from Drayton. They had also given Adrian’s mother a ride and, by some miracle, had all arrived not only intact but the best of friends.
Right now, the serving staff negotiated the back garden with fresh platters of food, while artfully dodging Kieran and Kennedy’s two kids and their ball of ginger lightning that passed for a dog, snapping at their heels. Megan and her husband Dave had been invited as guests and enjoyed the fun, although Megan couldn’t stop herself from helping out in the kitchen now and then, or pointing out things that needed to be done—much to the annoyance of her daughter.
Had the house ever known such merriment?
Adrian hoped so. If not, it would have been a tragedy, because Adrian could not help smiling and chuckling just hearing the walls echo with lively chatter and laughter, the squeals of children giggling coming from the garden, the occasional jangle of a wind chime on the balcony and the yapping of the pooch. Mid-June and they couldn’t have picked a more glorious day, sunshine streaming in through the open patio doors, the smell of gardenias and jasmine from the balcony boxes wrestling with the aroma of sausage rolls and quiches baking in the oven.
If a house could breathe a sigh of contentment, he thought as he looked on, then that’s precisely what Bryn Bach would be doing right now.
But at one point, two weeks before, everything had hung in the balance.
Thank goodness for PC Morgan’s experience and quick thinking, because within half an hour Adrian had been temporarily patched up by one of the emergency services professionals and carried off to a waiting ambulance with an ashen-faced Lenny glued to his side. Another hour later—and with pain medication dulling his senses—Adrian had been wheeled into the accident and emergency ward of a nearby public hospital.
Fortunately he had been standing some way off when Darlington fired the shot, and the shell had hit the left side of his chest, knocking him over. As he’d fallen, he’d hit his head on an errant log, knocking him unconscious. Despite losing blood and having pellets lodged in his shoulder, he had not been seriously injured. More concerned about him having a concussion, the doctors had kept him in a hospital bed for two nights for observation.
Matthew Darlington had landed in chest-high water but being unconscious had almost drowned—which under the circumstances might have been poetic justice. In fact, the chill water had brought him back to consciousness, before the police had descended into the hole and hauled him out. Apart from a mild concussion—no fracture or more severe injury—he had been kept in hospital for a couple of days. Right now he was being held in custody on charges of carrying an unlicensed firearm, threatening behaviour, threat to kill and a whole list of other misdemeanours, including a potential charge of manslaughter.
Lenny’s new state-of-the-art security system did indeed record both image and sound, much to everyone’s relief.
Both police constables wrote up Freya’s actions officially as self-defence, and privately as an act of bravery. And Adrian and Lenny concurred while also vowing never to get on her wrong side.
“What’s the average sentence for manslaughter?” Lenny asked PC Morgan. Although both had been on duty, he and PC Lewis had popped along that morning for a quick glass of orange juice and to wish them well.
“Depends on the severity of the offence. In Darlington’s case with Max Williams, nothing was premeditated, everything done in the heat of the moment, so it’s really hard to say. Sometimes a judge will take a more lenient approach to first offenders, but your cousin has a string of previous minor misdemeanours. Already having a record together with subsequently threatening your life and admitting to trying to torch your premises isn’t exactly going to work in his favour. At a guess, I reckon he’s looking at three to five years, maybe more.”
“And what about Lenny’s dear Auntie Malevolent?” asked Adrian, making Lenny chuckle.
“Not sure what will happen there, son,” said MC Morgan. “She’s bound to get called to testify, but a lot will depend on the son’s confession. They could charge her with failure to act on her son’s crime on the grounds of omission. But I doubt that will stick.”
Adrian knew Lenny didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, she had already built a prison around herself. They had chatted a little more about the day in question, with PC Morgan telling them some of the things they didn’t know, like how Freya had punctured both tyres on Matthew’s motorcycle before coming to find Leonard, and how incredibly clear the security footage—both audio and video—in the house had been.
“I would normally ask people throwing a party to keep an eye on the noise,” said PC Morgan as they had both readied to leave. “But the beauty of this location is there’s nobody to hear you for miles around.”
“Not always a good thing,” said Lenny, raising an eyebrow.
“Point taken, son. Luckily for you, on that particular day we were already on the pathway when we heard Darlington mouthing off. Otherwise we’d have carried on down to the Hughes farm.”
“Freya knew,” said Lenny. “Not sure how things might have turned out if you hadn’t been there as a distraction. Matthew thought he was being clever, taking me to the secret spot. But apparently they all knew about the sinkhole.”
“Is she coming?” asked PC Morgan.
“She said she would. I’m glad, because I want her to see the house.”
“I must say,” said PC Lewis, at the front door, “you’ve done amazing work on the place since we were last here. Even the little touches, like the pictures and the new nameplate above the front door.”
* * * *
Throughout the afternoon, as people came into the house and wandered around, nosing around the bedrooms and bathrooms, Adrian felt pride that he had been part of the team to put the house back together again. A couple of times he even acted as a tour guide, showing the nice, minimalist bedrooms with the antique wardrobes and chest of drawers. He enjoyed pointing out the lack of radiators because of the underfloor heating Lenny had agreed to install and the huge family bathroom with a free-standing cast-iron tub and separate shower stall, all done with modern fixtures and fittings.
