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  “Thank you for helping us, you won’t regret it, I promise”, I said to Ralph, but instead of replying he just grunted and patted the shotgun, as if reminding me of who was in charge and what would happen if I tried anything.

  As if it was something I was likely to forget. I knew, for better or for worse, that no matter what Harriet might think, we were completely at her husband’s mercy and should he decide that we were too much of a risk, there wasn’t much we could do to stop him from putting us in the ground.

  Chapter 10

  We pulled up in the yard of a medium-sized, two storey cottage that looked to have been built around the turn of the last century. It was built of solid-looking red brick, with ivy liberally covering the wall nearest to us, two small windows peeking out from between the leaves.

  The yard itself was large enough to park half a dozen cars, with an open-sided stable that had been converted into a garage for a car that was currently covered with a dust sheet.

  On the far side of the cottage, I could just make out some kind of vegetable garden, plants growing in neatly ordered rows with some clinging to a framework of bamboo. Just past that, I could see another shed, and from this came the lowing of a cow seemingly disturbed by the sound of the engine.

  As I opened the door of the car, a black and white border collie began to bark excitedly, running up to sniff at me, tail wagging as one blue and one brown eye looked up at me with fierce intelligence and a questioning look.

  “Maggie, quiet!” Ralph snapped at her, and she stopped barking, instead growling low in her throat even as her tail wagged and she continued to sniff every part of me she could reach.

  “I take it she’s friendly?” I asked, easing myself out of the car and leaning against the door while she investigated my injured ankle.

  “Friendlier than some who don’t think you should be here”, he said, then collected his shotgun and stood with it casually tucked under his arm as we waited for Harriet and Jerry to catch up.

  I spent the time looking at the cottage and the fields surrounding it, realising that the reason we hadn’t seen it from the road was the gentle roll of the ground, forming a natural dell with a small hump in the middle upon which the building stood.

  The yard itself was made from concrete, the only mud on it from the tracks the car had made coming in. The rest of it was scrubbed bare and clean, with nothing in the yard so much as an inch out of kilter.

  Jerry and Harriet came into the yard a few minutes later, chatting and laughing like old friends. I wondered how someone as friendly and likeable as Harriet had married someone as grim and forbidding as Ralph, but I knew from experience that some marriages just worked and some didn’t, no matter the demeanour of the participants.

  “Ralph Morris, have you left that poor man standing in the cold with an injured ankle?” Harriet demanded as soon as she saw us standing there. “Honestly Ralph, have you no shame?”

  He stiffened and glared at me as if it was my fault that he was being dressed down by his wife.

  “Not when it comes to your safety, no. I wanted to make sure that your man there behaved himself”.

  Harriet shook her head in frustration and came around the car to me, brushing an excited Maggie out of the way.

  “I’m sorry dear, let’s get you inside and get that foot seen to. Welcome to Bramble Cottage”.

  With her on one side and Jerry on the other, I was almost carried inside while Ralph followed behind, out of sight but still obvious by the stony silence he carried with him.

  The door they led me through opened into a large kitchen with a parquet floor, in the centre of which stood a table more than large enough for the eight chairs that sat around it.

  Every wall was covered in shelves, and all the shelves were packed with jars, bottles and packets of things I couldn’t identify in the light of the torches Jerry and Harriet carried.

  Three of the walls had doors seemingly nestled between the shelves, while the fourth had a long, low cooking range finished in dull enamel, from which two large pipes emerged and ran up the wall to disappear into the ceiling.

  The range gave off a warmth that instantly made it feel homely, and as they placed me carefully in one of the chairs I could smell a dozen different spices and the faint scent of cooking meat.

  Maggie had followed us in and immediately made for the range, curling up in front of it on a tattered old blanket while Harriet bustled about and lit several oil lamps, their glow surprisingly bright.

  Throughout this, Ralph stood by the back door as if at attention, clearly unhappy about the turn of events but unwilling or unable to cross his wife as she welcomed two strangers into his home.

  “Now”, she said once the lamps were lit. “I’ll make us all a nice cup of tea and then we’ll have a look at your ankle, see what we can do”.

  Jerry sat next to me, his chair half pulled out so that he could keep an eye on the still-armed Ralph while he spoke to me.

  “Looks like we’ve landed on our feet, if you’ll excuse the pun”, he said quietly. “Harriet told me on the walk over that Ralph likes to posture, but she said he’s got a heart of gold”.

  “Yeah, I can see it on his sleeve”, I said, eyeing the shotgun.

  “No, really. Apparently he’s just protective over her since they had a burglary a few years ago and he slept right through it, so he’s suspicious of anyone who turns up at night now. She told me he’ll relax when he’s sure we don’t mean any harm”.

  He kept his voice low, and I could see Ralph straining to hear what we were saying. Realising that we weren’t helping ourselves by muttering to each other, I raised my voice and addressed the couple.

  “I want to thank you again for helping us”, I said loudly, “like I said earlier, I’m trying to get to Manchester and find my daughter, Melody. She’s only eleven, and her mum isn’t exactly practical, if you know what I mean?”

  “You got a picture?” Ralph’s gruff voice surprised me; I was expecting Harriet to answer.

  I obediently pulled out my wallet and slid out one of the pictures I always kept in it, this one showing Melody laughing in the sun as she ran along the pebbles on Hove beach, her long brown hair sweeping out behind her and her blue eyes shining with joy. It was my favourite, taken only a few months before when she’d come down for one of her hurried visits.

  I slid it across the table and Ralph broke the barrels on his shotgun before placing it on the counter next to the sink, then crossed to pick it up and squint at it.

  “Cute girl”, he said eventually, “where did you say she is?”

  “Manchester”, I said as Harriet brought several mugs and a bowl of sugar over to the table, “she lives up there with her mum, we split up a couple of years ago”.

  “Marriage should be for life”, Ralph said, sitting at the table but within easy reach of the shotgun, “it only seems to last five minutes nowadays”.

  “You haven’t met my ex-wife”, I said with a smile, and Ralph surprised me by giving a short bark of laughter.

  “So how come you two are travelling together then?” He asked, relaxing slightly as his wife brought over a steaming iron kettle, its wooden handle wrapped in a tea towel.

  Jerry looked at me and I waved for him to explain.

  “I, uh, I sort of predicted that the flare would hit, and that it would be bad”, he began, “and I called Malc because I wanted him to go to the media but, well, anyway, he came to see me while I was up on the downs taking measurements, and that’s when the flare hit. Did you see the lights in the sky around midnight?”

  Ralph shook his head. “No, we go to bed at about nine, and get up with the dawn, usually. Lifetime of habit is hard to break that way”.

  Jerry waited while Harriet poured tea for us all, disappearing through one of the doors and coming back a few moments later with a clay jug of cool milk. I raised an eyebrow as she poured milk into my mug.

  “It’s fresh from the cow each day”, she said in answer, “unpasteu
rised. We still use the old larder from when the cottage was built, the freezer is down there now, of course, but it’s built into the foundations so it still stays cold even on hot days. Between that and the Rayburn stove”, she pointed the jug at the cooker, “burning wood to provide heating and to cook with, we’re pretty much self-sufficient so power cuts don’t bother us much”.

  “Then you’re perfectly placed to survive what’s coming”, Jerry said, sitting forward as he warmed to his subject. “Because it could be weeks or months before the power comes back on, and without supplies coming in to the cities and towns, people will spread out looking for food. My advice would be to board up your windows and doors and only go out when you absolutely have to. It’s only been a few hours since it hit, so everyone is still probably waiting for the lights to come back on. Give it a day or two until they realise there’s no more food coming, and people will start getting desperate”.

  “Do you really think it’s as bad as all that?” Harriet asked, worry creasing her already lined forehead.

  He nodded. “I’m afraid so, and even if I’m wrong it’s better to be safe than sorry”.

  He went on to tell them about what we’d seen, starting with the fires that had seemed to envelop Brighton, then the abandoned cars on the road, and finally the crashed plane and the groups of youths that had chased us for no reason.

  As he spoke, Ralph’s face grew more and more grim, and even Harriet’s usually cheerful face became drawn and worried-looking.

  They began to exchange concerned glances, and when Jerry was finally finished they were both clearly agitated about something, although I couldn’t tell what it was.

  Ralph’s thick, scarred fingers were wrapped around his tea mug as if trying to crack it, and Harriet was hugging herself tight.

  “Is everything ok?” I asked gently.

  Harriet shook herself and stood.

  “Fine, fine. Just a lot to take in, that’s all. Now let’s have a look at that ankle of yours and we’ll see how bad it is”.

  She shifted her chair round to the side of the table and lifted my foot, placing one of the lamps nearby as she fussed and tutted, moving my ankle gently and running bony fingers over the joint.

  I winced at every movement, but she ignored me, then directed Ralph to get her first aid kit from under the sink.

  “It’s not broken”, she said finally, “just a sprain I think, although it’s a bad one. You’re lucky”.

  She laid the first aid kit out on the table in front of her and took out a length of bandage, deftly wrapping it around the injured joint. When she finished, it was tight but not overly so, and when I put my foot on the floor I found that I could put more weight on it than I’d been able to before.

  “Thank you”, I said with a smile. “Looks like you’ve done that before”.

  She nodded as she packed the kit away.

  “Once or twice, I was a nurse for almost fifty years. Community stuff mostly, but I worked up in London in the sixties in one of the big hospitals. Now you need to keep it raised and use an icepack too. I saw that Jerry has got a few in his car, so you can use those. If things are as bad as you say I might be needing mine”.

  “Well thank you again, both of you”.

  Harriet smiled and Ralph grunted, then the old man stood and gestured towards one of the doors leading further into the cottage.

  “Suppose we can’t be turning you out in the middle of the night, so you can both sleep in the lounge. You’ll be comfortable enough with your sleeping bags, but no funny business. You, astrophysicist, how about you go and get your things while I show your journalist here where you’ll be sleeping?”

  Jerry obliged, heading out into the yard while Ralph and Harriet led me through to the lounge, a small, cozy room with bookshelves lining most of the walls while the centre was dominated by a pair of worn but well looked after sofas and a reclining chair.

  A small table sat between the chair and the sofa, littered with yesterday’s papers and a pair of reading glasses where the rest of the room was almost severely tidy.

  Jerry came back in a few moments later and laid out the sleeping bags on the floor. I didn’t even bother to undress, climbing straight into my bag and falling asleep even before Ralph had turned out the light.

  Chapter 11

  I woke to the smell of frying bacon and coffee. Light filtered through a crack in the curtains and I lay there for a moment trying to remember where I was.

  It all came flooding back as I moved my injured ankle and felt it throb, wincing as I sat up and unzipped the sleeping bag.

  I looked about for Jerry, but his sleeping bag was already rolled up neatly and tucked half under one of the sofas. I stood slowly, testing my weight on my ankle and realising that it would hold well enough to get me into the kitchen.

  The day was already hot. As I entered the kitchen rich, golden light streamed through the window, making me squint as Harriet immediately chivvied me over to the table and laid out a plate of bacon, eggs and mushrooms and a large mug of coffee.

  Jerry was already there, cleaning his plate with a piece of bread, and he looked up long enough to smile before wolfing it down, all the while watched by the mournful eyes of Maggie, sitting attentively at his feet in the hope of being slipped a morsel.

  “Morning”, Harriet said as I began to eat, my stomach growling with hunger, “I trust you slept ok?”

  I nodded, mouth too full of food to talk.

  “That’s good. Thought you could do with a proper meal before you head off”.

  I swallowed a mouthful.

  “Thank you. For this and for letting us stay. Where’s Ralph?”

  “He’s outside chopping wood for the stove, he asked to talk to you when you’ve eaten”.

  Something in her tone worried me but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “I can go”, Jerry said, pushing his chair back, but Harriet shook her head.

  “No, don’t worry, he wants to talk to Malcolm. Not to be rude”.

  Jerry shrugged but our eyes met as he spoke.

  “Not rude at all”. He raised an eyebrow at me but said nothing further, and the silence stretched as I hurried my breakfast, took a swig of coffee and then stood. I almost tripped over the dog, who had slunk under the table to sit at my feet now that Jerry’s plate was empty.

  “Which way?” I asked.

  Harriet gave me directions and I followed them, heading out into the yard then through the vegetable garden, past a chicken coop where several well-fed specimens scratched in the dust, and soon saw Ralph sitting on a thick, wide log with countless axe scars crisscrossing its surface.

  A pile of split logs sat on one side while on the other a rough shelter kept the un-split ones from the worst of the weather.

  As he sat, he idly ran his hands up and down the haft of a wickedly sharp axe. Despite the breakfast and Harriet’s friendly demeanour, I couldn’t help but think back to Ralph’s threats from the night before.

  “You wanted to see me?” I said, putting as much weight as possible on my uninjured foot while the other barely touched the ground.

  Ralph looked up and nodded.

  “First off, want to apologise for last night. Seems I put the wind right up you and your friend, and after we worked out you wasn’t burgling us I should have relaxed. Harriet tells me I’m too protective of me and mine, and maybe I am, but you’ve got a family and no doubt you’d do the same in my place”.

  I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. If I’d been him, I might even have sent us packing just to be safe, injured or not.

  “Well”, he continued, “that being said I reckon you owe us a favour now, what with us patching you up and feeding you”. He squinted up at me, trying to read my expression. I shrugged and gestured at him to continue, not sure what to say. It was true that they’d helped us out when they didn’t have to, but my most pressing need was getting up to Manchester and finding Melody and I didn’t want anything interfering with that.
r />   “I know you’re angling to get to your daughter as quick as you can”, he said as if reading my mind, “which is why I’m asking you this favour, ‘cause you know how important family is”.

  “Every minute I don’t know she’s safe just terrifies me more”, I said, hoping he’d catch the hint.

  He nodded. “Then you know how I feel. Our daughter, Emily, she lives just south of Guildford. It’s only twenty miles or so, but her car’s obviously not working or she’d be here already, that or something’s happened to her. I’ll not blame you if you say no, but the trip would only take an hour or so there and back”.

  The last words came out in a rush, and all the while he looked me in the eye, one father to another as he all but begged me to go and find his daughter.

  My heart sank. I wanted nothing more than to get in the car and head straight up to Manchester, but this man and his wife had helped us out and now he was asking for a return on that favour, albeit without any expectation that I’d agree.

  “Have you not got a car?” I asked, then instantly regretted it as he took my question for a no.

  “Landrover’s in the shop, supposed to be picking it up in a few days”, he said, looking down at the ground, “and the one in the yard is in pieces, more of a project than an actual car, you might say”.

  I realised how much it had cost him to ask someone he barely knew for something so important, and I was suddenly minded of my begging Jerry to take me to find Melody.

  “Where exactly is this place?” I asked, and there was a gleam of hope in his eyes as he looked back up at me.

  “It’s a village on the outskirts of Guildford, not far at all”.

  “But”, I said, “why ask me instead of Jerry? It’s his car after all”.

  He shrugged and stood, swinging the axe with practiced ease so the head sank effortlessly into the chopping block.

  “Not being rude to your friend, but not only is he not a parent, it’s clear that you’re the doer out of the two of you, and he’ll follow your lead. I may not know much but I know people, and I reckon if you say yes, he’ll agree”.