Enchanted Glass (15 page)

“Oh,
honestly!
” Aidan said, as Rolf threw himself at Aidan’s feet yet again. “I
told
you. You don’t
belong
to me!”

This time, Rolf’s reply was to turn round and round. Chasing his tail, Aidan thought. Round and round, dizzily, so fast he became a yellow blur. Then he was a yellow fog, billowing beside Aidan’s shoes. Aidan backed away a little. This was really strange. He took off his glasses, but Rolf was still a yellow fog to his naked eyes. Then, watched by a ring of placid, interested sheep, the fog hardened into a different shape and stood up as a small boy. Aidan put his glasses back on and Rolf was still a small boy. His hair was a pelt of gold curls, the same colour as the dog’s coat, and he was wearing a sort of romper suit made of golden velvet. He stared beseechingly at Aidan with the dog’s soulful brown eyes and threw both arms around Aidan’s legs. He looked about five years old.

“Oh,
please
take me with you!” he said. His voice was much gruffer and lower than you would expect from a five-year-old. “Please! I haven’t got a home. I ran away when they tried to put a collar on me and make me into Security. Please!”

“You’re a
were
-dog!” Aidan said. He supposed this did make a difference.

The small boy nodded. “I’m Rolf,” he said. “You knew my name. Nobody else did. Let me come home with you.”

Aidan gave in. It was those yearning brown eyes he supposed. “OK,” he said. “Come along then. But be very
polite to Mrs Stock. I think the others will understand, but I don’t think she will.”

Rolf gave a cry of joy and dissolved into yellow fog again. Next second he was a large golden dog, far more comfortable as a dog than a boy, Aidan could tell, as Rolf tore round and round Aidan, frisking, cavorting and giving little barks of delight. Every so often he tried to lick Aidan’s hands and feet. Aidan had to keep pushing him off all the way across the field.

Andrew, meanwhile, was trying to get on with his book. With the computer working and Stashe in the room next door, where he could call on her for help at any time, conditions seemed ideal for work. He was getting out all the stuff he would need when it occurred to him that he ought to check up on Shaun first, in case Shaun was up to anything that would result in more large parsnips. He got up and went round to the yard.

The first thing he saw was the lawnmower. It had been pushed into the middle of the yard and surrounded by old paint tins, broken garden chairs and two halves of a stepladder. Good. That seemed to mean Shaun was at work where he should be.

The next thing Andrew saw was Groil. Groil was
leaning over the shed roof, carefully cleaning the coloured panes in the window there. He looked like an optical illusion at first in Aidan’s enlarged clothes: a very large boy cleaning a very small shed. Andrew blinked at the sight. Then Groil was a giant cleaning a normal-sized shed.

“Good God, Groil!” Andrew exclaimed. “I didn’t expect
you!
”

Groil turned round. The roof creaked as he leaned one hand on it. He gave Andrew a huge, shy grin. “I can reach the window, see,” he said.

Shaun heard their voices and came to the shed door. “I got a friend to help me,” he said. “Don’t mind, do you?”

Both he and Groil gave Andrew the same half-proud, half-guilty grins. Looking up at Groil and downward at Shaun, Andrew had no doubt that the two of them were what Mr Brown had called counterparts. Apart from their size, that was, and Shaun’s new hairstyle. Groil’s hair was a shaggy mop. The other differences were that Groil seemed cleverer than Shaun, and Shaun seemed older than Groil. Odd that. Groil was, to Andrew’s knowledge, at least as old as Andrew was himself, but he looked a child still.

Andrew’s mind shied away here from whatever this had to do with Mr Brown. “No, of course I don’t mind,” he said heartily, “so long as you remember to be specially
gentle with the cracked panes, Groil. And there’ll be a parsnip for you later.”

He pushed Shaun gently aside and took a look at the interior of the shed. It was full of the smell of wet grime, where Shaun was in the middle of washing down one of the carved walls.

“They polish up lovely when they’re dry,” Shaun said, pointing to a large tin labelled Best Beeswax Polish. “Auntie give me the rags to work it in with. But…” He pointed to the window in the roof with all its dangling spiderwebs. “…Groil has to do that.”

“How? Can he get inside here?” Andrew asked.

Shaun grinned. “He, like, squinges up,” he said. “He can go smaller than me when he wants. But then he gets all heavy.”

“Oh,” said Andrew, thinking, You live and learn. “Fine. You’re both doing fine, Shaun. Keep at it.”

He went back to his study and started up his computer. He assembled the stuff for his database. He made sure all his closely-written notes were propped on a lectern. Then he sat staring at the screen saver wondering about counterparts instead. How and why did they happen? Why was Mr Brown so much against them? Why did he blame Andrew for not stopping them? As if Andrew
could!
Shaun had been born years before Andrew came back to
Melstone. The more Andrew thought about this, the more he thought that the best way he had of getting back at Mr Brown for his politely rude orders was to
encourage
counterparts. If only he knew how.

He was still staring at his screen saver making coloured, diving patterns an hour later, when Stashe came in carrying a cardboard box. “Your grandfather wrote at least a thousand little memos to himself,” she said. “I’ve sorted out all the ones I’ve found so far and I think you’ll have to look through them. Some of them look important, but they’re far too cryptic for me.”

“Put them over in that corner,” Andrew said. “I’ll look at them later.”

He watched Stashe with pleasure as she carried the box to a free space on the floor and put it down. She really looked marvellous in that brief green dress.

“By the way,” she said, “Aidan’s gone out, poor kid. A whole lot of letters in the box I’m on turned out to be from his gran. That really upset him. I think he wanted to be alone for a while — you know how it is.”

Andrew nodded. His parents had both died while he was a graduate student. He knew how that felt. He sighed. “Let me look at those letters too, will you?”

“I’m going now to sort them into the order they were written in,” Stashe said. “Someone’s just bundled them into
that box anyhow, and they’re all mixed up.”

She was on her way to the door when Andrew said, “You haven’t come across a folded paper with a black seal on it, have you?”

“No,” Stashe said. “Important, is it?”

“Very. I think,” Andrew said. “If you do find it, let me see it at once.”

“Right,” said Stashe. “Priority for the black seal then.”

“Oh, and Stashe,” Andrew said. Stashe stopped with her hand on the doorknob. “Do you know anything about counterparts here in Melstone?”

“Not really,” Stashe said. “But you’ll find a lot of your grandfather’s memos are about counterparts. He seems to have been in a major row about them with Mr Brown down at the Manor. To do with power, it looks like. Dad might know. Ask him.”

“I will,” Andrew said. “Is he likely to be coming here today?” But he found he had said this to the closed door after Stashe had gone. He sighed and clicked off the screen saver. Work.

The phone rang.

The caller was his lawyer’s secretary explaining all over again that Mrs Barrington-Stock was away and would contact him as soon as she came back next month.

“And what good is next month?” Andrew asked the air.
“I want Mr Brown put in his place
now.
” He turned back to his computer and found that the screen saver had come on again. He was just about to click it off once more, when Mrs Stock put her face round the door.

“That woman’s back,” she said. “At the front door this time, wanting you.”

“What woman?” said Andrew.

“The one that prowled yesterday,” said Mrs Stock. “Changed her hairstyle but she still looks the same. Thinks I don’t know her by her walk, doesn’t she? I told her to wait outside. I don’t trust her.”

Sighing, Andrew got up and went to the front door.

The fat woman standing on the doorstep glowered at him. She was wearing what was, possibly, a uniform. But the main thing Andrew noticed about her was that she was remarkably like Mrs Stock’s sister Trixie, that is if you imagined Trixie hot and bad-tempered and smelling quite strongly of armpits.

“Are you in charge here?” she demanded.

“I own this house, yes,” Andrew said cautiously. Without thinking, he took his glasses off and cleaned them. The woman looked even more like Trixie to his naked eyes, right down to her blonde hairstyle. Her face was the same shape and so were her prominent blue eyes, but her mouth was pursed with bad temper and there were lines of ill
nature all over her fat face. The word “counterpart” came into Andrew’s mind and made him very cautious indeed. “What can I do for you?” he asked her politely.

The woman snatched a card out of her breast pocket, waved it quickly at him and put it away again before Andrew had a chance to see what the card was. “Mabel Brown,” she announced. “I’m looking for Andrew Craig. I’m his social worker.”

A social worker would surely have Aidan’s name right, Andrew thought — if it
was
Aidan she was after. And
did
social workers wear a uniform? This uniform was old and tight. The almost official-looking jacket must have taken major traction to button up. It strained over Mabel Brown’s massive bosom.

“There is no one called Andrew Craig in this house,” Andrew told her truthfully. “I think you must have come to the wrong address.”

Mabel Brown lowered her blonde eyebrows and half-shut her bulging eyes. The result was a poisonous glare, full of anger and suspicion. She kept the glower on Andrew while she hauled at a tight lower pocket and fetched out a crumpled notepad. She turned the glower on one of its pages. “Alan Craike,” she read out. “Adrian Gaynes, Evan Keen, Abel Crane, Ethan Gay. He could have given any one of those names. Is he here or not?”

“No,” Andrew said. “No one by any of those names is here. My name is Andrew Hope and I think you must have confused someone else with me. As you can see, I have no need for a social worker. You have come to the wrong house, madam. Good morning.”

He shut the front door crisply in Mabel Brown’s face and stood there cleaning his glasses all over again, while he waited for signs that the woman was going away. He heard muttering on the other side of the door. It sounded like swearing. At length, after what felt like ten minutes, he heard heavy footsteps crunching away down the drive. Andrew dodged to the narrow hall window to be sure. And there, to his relief, was the large back view of Mabel Brown plodding away from him, looking as if her feet were on either side of a wide plank.

“Phew!” Andrew said, putting his glasses on again as he went back to his study.

“Who was that?” Stashe asked brightly, dodging out of the box room full of curiosity.

“Someone looking for Aidan — I think,” Andrew told her. “She said she was his social worker, but I don’t think she was. I shouldn’t think they trust people that unpleasant to look after children. At least, I hope they don’t. And she couldn’t even get Aidan’s name right.”

He went into his study, where his computer gave a whining sort of sigh and went blank.

“
Stashe!
” he shouted.

Stashe came and had a look. She leaned over Andrew — which he found very pleasant — and tried this, then that. Eventually the screen saver reappeared. “At last!” said Stashe. “I don’t know — it seems to have had some sort of power surge.”

“That woman—!” Andrew said.

They stared at one another, almost nose to nose. Andrew had to struggle not to grab Stashe and kiss her.

“Then she
definitely
wasn’t a social worker,” Stashe said. “With the amount of protection your grandfather had round this place, it would take someone hostile a huge surge of power to even get inside to the driveway. Put some more wards up.” Then, to Andrew’s disappointment, she went away.

Andrew got back to work, trying not to think of Stashe. Mabel Brown went out of his mind so completely that he did not even try to remember how to put up wards. He had dim memories of Jocelyn telling him more than once how this was done, but he was too busy with other thoughts even to try to recall what his grandfather had said.

A couple of hours later, Mrs Stock put her head round the door again.

“It’s a policewoman now,” she said. “And me in the middle of cooking your lunch. Something’s going to burn if you don’t get rid of her quickly.”

The policewoman was short, stout and grim. The hair under her cap was brown and so were her eyes. “Mr Hope?” she said. “WPC92. I’m looking for a twelve-year-old boy called Adam Gray. Five foot two, brown hair, wears glasses, no other distinguishing marks. We have reason to believe he came to this house.”

Andrew snatched off his glasses. The face of WPC92 blurred. So did her uniform. It became much too tight for her and lost some of its policewomanishness. Inside the blur of her face, Andrew could just pick out a shape that reminded him of Trixie. He was almost certain that Mabel Brown and WPC92 were the same person. There was even the same smell of armpits.