The Piper (12 page)

‘Is that right? Well, I can’t say I’m entirely surprised. I’ve told Arthur often enough that he needs to get her away from that place. But he never listens.’ He gave Adam another long, meaningful look. ‘You give her my best wishes,’ he told Peter.

‘I will, sir.’

‘And how exactly are things at the Grange?’ he asked.

‘Umm. Good,’ said Peter. He didn’t think he could talk about the strange happenings that had been going on to a virtual stranger, especially with Adam there.

‘Got quite a history, that place,’ said the professor. ‘Devoted a whole chapter to it in my book.’

‘You’ve written a book?’ cried Peter, impressed. He’d never met a writer before. He found himself wishing that Daisy was with him. He imagined how impressed she’d be when he told her.

‘Well, just a modest volume of local history,’ admitted the professor. ‘Not exactly station bookstand material, you understand. But quite well received when it was first released.’

‘Not everyone was so pleased with it,’ muttered Adam under his breath; but if he heard, the professor paid no attention.

‘And of course, there’s plenty of stuff about the canal,’ added the professor. ‘A special area of interest for me. One might say, a bit of an obsession. To my mind, it’s one of the greatest accomplishments of military history.’

Adam grunted. ‘That’s your opinion,’ he said. ‘And I expect you’re entitled to it. Some other folks think it was a waste of time and money.’

The professor smiled. ‘Not everyone,’ he said calmly.

Peter wondered why Adam was being so rude to the old man – quite unlike the pleasant, good-natured fellow that he had come to know over the past week.

‘Of course,’ continued the professor, ‘there’s also a chapter in the book about the link between the canal and the Grange.’

‘What link is that?’ asked Peter, his curiosity aroused.

‘You shouldn’t be raking up stuff from the past,’ Adam warned Professor Lowell. ‘Some things are better left alone.’

‘I disagree,’ said the professor coldly. ‘And I’m perfectly sure the boy would like to hear about it.’ He looked down at Peter. ‘Isn’t that so, young man?’

Peter shrugged, uncomfortably. ‘Er… I … don’t mind,’ he said. It was clear that there was some kind of bad feeling between Adam and the professor and it was hard to know what to do for the best. He felt torn between pleasing the stranger, who had given him money, and his ill-tempered host, who just seemed to want to shut the old man up.

‘Good lad!’ said the professor. ‘But where to start? That’s the question. Well, to tell the story properly, I have to take you all the way back to the early eighteen hundreds. At that time, the rise of Napoleon had given the powers-that-be the very real fear that we were open to invasion by sea. So some bright spark came up with the idea of making a natural defence here in the south of England.’ He waved a hand in the general direction of the canal. ‘In 1804, the first sod was dug out from the ground to form the Royal Military Canal and the work continued for the next four and a half years. As you can imagine, it was a monumental undertaking …’

‘Waste of effort if you ask me,’ grunted Adam, but again the professor ignored him.

‘Something like one thousand, five hundred men were employed on the various stages of the work. Hereabouts, it was carried out by French prisoners of war. There were around twenty troops under the command of a certain Captain Jean Micheaux. He was—’

‘That’s enough,’ snarled Adam. He stopped walking and turned back to confront the old man. ‘We ’aven’t got time to listen to this nonsense. You be about your business now.’

Peter was astonished by the change in Adam. He looked angry now, his eyes bulging, his hands bunched into fists. The two men stood there glaring at each other in silence for a moment. Then the professor seemed to back down.

‘Well, I can see you’re not in the best mood for company today,’ he said. ‘So I’ll leave you to it.’ He nodded to Peter and began to turn away. Adam swung round and continued walking, but the professor, sensing an opportunity, reached quickly into his knapsack and pulled out a slim book. He pressed it into Peter’s hands. ‘Read it,’ he whispered urgently. Peter took the book and, glancing guiltily at Adam’s back, he slipped it into his own knapsack.

He got it hidden away just in time. Adam paused and looked back at the professor. ‘Are you going or what?’ he asked bluntly.

‘Of course, I’m going. Good day to you, Adam. Hopefully I’ll find you in a better mood next time we meet.’ He began to walk away, but hesitated when another thought seemed to cross his mind. He turned and looked enquiringly at Peter. ‘Tell me, lad,’ he said. ‘Are you here on your own?’

Peter shook his head. ‘No, sir, my sister Daisy’s with me.’

The professor’s mouth fell open. He looked as though something terrible had just occurred to him. ‘How old is your sister?’ he gasped.

But then Adam came marching back again, his face contorted with anger. ‘Enough!’ he roared, and he raised an arm as though to hit the professor, prompting the old man to take a couple of steps backwards. ‘You be on your way now, or I won’t be responsible for my actions.’

‘But … Adam, you can’t …’

‘Be gone!’ This time, Adam actually threw out an arm and pushed the professor hard in the chest, nearly sending the old man sprawling. Then he grabbed Peter’s wrist and dragged him on along the path. The professor made no attempt to follow, but he shouted after them.

‘Peter, you keep a close eye on your sister, do you hear me? Don’t let her out alone, especially at night. It’s not safe.’

Peter looked back over his shoulder, but Adam was too strong to resist. The professor was standing there, his expression grim. He shouted something else, but Peter couldn’t quite make out what he was saying. He looked up at Adam.

‘Why did you push him like that?’ he gasped.

‘Because he’s mad,’ grunted Adam. ‘Away with the blummin’ fairies. He’s written a load of nonsense in that book of his and he’s started to believe it.’

‘But … something strange
is
going on here,’ insisted Peter. ‘You must know that. I’ve heard music! A flute playing. You say you can’t hear it, but I can and I know I’m not imagining it.’

Adam stared straight at him. ‘I ain’t never heard nothin’ like that,’ he said. ‘Not never.’

‘But I’m not making it up! And … last night, there were girls dancing in the garden. Dancing to the music in the middle of the night.’

‘What if there was?’ snapped Adam. He laughed derisively. ‘I told you strange things go on around here, didn’t I?’ He looked intently at Peter. ‘But dancing girls is one thing,’ he said. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in the direction the professor had taken. ‘What he talks about, that’s another.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to understand,’ Adam assured him. ‘The Marsh does as the Marsh thinks fit. You and me, we just ’ave to get on the best we can.’ He was striding onwards, his gaze fixed on the way ahead. The stern expression on his face suggested that he did not want to discuss the matter any further. He raised an arm and pointed.

Now Peter could see up ahead of them the distant white blobs of a large flock of sheep spread out across the far horizon. He glanced back again and saw that the professor had turned away and was trudging dejectedly back in the direction of the canal. Peter didn’t know the old man, but he was sure of one thing. He wasn’t mad. And he had warned Peter that Daisy was in danger. Before he left home, Peter had promised his mother that he wouldn’t let anything bad happen to his little sister. He knew in that moment that he would do whatever it took to protect her. No matter what the cost.

Now they had finally found the sheep, Peter couldn’t help wondering why they had bothered. The creatures stood around, baahing and munching grass, great woolly lumps with stupid faces and crescent-shaped black nostrils. There must have been a couple of hundred of them, ranged across the landscape, pretty much as far as the eye could see. They took little notice of the two humans who had travelled such a long way to find them.

‘What do we do now?’ asked Peter.

‘Do?’ Adam gave him a look. ‘Well, we checks ’em over, don’t we? We makes sure none of ’em ’as any problems.’

He began to stride through the midst of his flock and they parted on either side of him, like two woolly waves dividing to admit a latter-day Moses.

Peter trudged grimly along in his wake. ‘How often do you have to do this?’ he asked.

‘Once a week, sometimes twice. And every day in the lambing season. You see, sheep ain’t the cleverest of creatures. You’ve got to keep an eye on ’em. Otherwise, they’ll just follow along.’

Peter frowned, puzzled. ‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he said.

‘Well, I remember one time, there was this one sheep, she’d come to this place where the ground dropped away sharpish like. Sort of like a little cliff, it were, some ten or twelve foot high.’ He seemed in a better mood now he was on his favourite subject, Peter noticed. Adam looked around at the flat landscape and shook his head. ‘Lord even knows how she managed to find the one place in these parts where such a thing could ’appen, but sure enough, she did. Walked right over the edge of the drop and fell onto the rocks below.’ He shook his head. ‘Killed, she was. Stone dead.’ He sighed, remembering. ‘Well, that would have been bad enough on its own, but of course there was a whole load of other sheep following her, wasn’t there? You’d think they have the sense to see what had happened and back off, but no. Walked over the drop, one by one, they did. By the time it dawned on ’em, that it was a bad thing to do, must ’ave been a dozen of ’em had fallen, one on top of t’other. When I got there, it weren’t a pretty sight. They wasn’t all dead, mind, but the ones that had survived had broken their legs and all sorts. I ’ad to put ’em out of their misery.’

Peter grimaced. ‘How did you do that?’ he asked.

‘Never you mind how I did it,’ Adam told him. ‘Let’s just say, I made it quick and easy for ’em and leave it at that. But that’s the kind of thing you ’ave to be prepared to do when you’re a Looker. It ain’t for the faint-hearted, I’ll tell you that much.’

‘Will
we
have to kill sheep?’ asked Peter, apprehensively.

‘Hopefully not.’ Adam gestured ahead of him. ‘We’ll head up to Thursby Lake now. Sometimes I ’as to pull drowned sheep out of that. That ain’t no picnic, when it ’appens.’

They continued walking through the massive flock. Peter found he couldn’t concentrate on the task at hand. He kept thinking about what the professor had said about Daisy. How she was in danger. Part of him wanted to turn round and run all the way back to the Grange, but he doubted that he’d be able to find his way there without Adam’s help.

‘When are we heading back?’ he asked.

Adam shrugged. ‘What’s the big ’urry?’ he asked.

‘I just wondered.’

‘We’ll be ready when we’re ready and not before.’

‘But we
will
be there before nightfall, won’t we? I mean, it’s not safe to be out after dark, is it? Even you and Mrs B said that when we first arrived.’

‘Well, of course not. You can have accidents in the dark, go off the road and blunder into a bog.’

‘And it’s not because of anything else? Like … ghosts.’

Adam snorted. ‘There you go again. That’s what you get for listening to the mad professor. He’s enough to give anyone the creeps.’

‘He seemed clever enough to me,’ said Peter.

‘Don’t you be fooled. He’s like all toffs. Thinks ’is la-di-da accent will let him away with whatever nonsense is in ’is head. But puttin’ somethin’ down in print don’t make it the truth. You’d do well to remember that, boy.’

‘You said yourself that lots of people think the Marsh is haunted.’

‘Aye, I said that and maybe it’s true.’

‘Well, then—’

‘Shush boy! I can’t even think with all your prattling!’

They reached the lake a little after midday. It looked inviting in the sunshine, the wide stretch of olive-green water surrounded by trees and rushes. Adam and Peter made their way slowly to the water’s edge, then worked their way around it in a slow circle, checking the shallows for any problems. Sheep were grazing nearby, but none of them seemed to have got themselves into trouble. It took them the best part of an hour to complete the circuit, but when they had come back to their starting point, Adam found a spot a short distance from the water’s edge and indicated to Peter that they should sit down.

‘We may as well ’ave our bait here,’ he said. He took off his overcoat and threw it down onto the grass, to act as a kind of blanket. He settled himself down on it and Peter sat beside him. He unslung his knapsack and took out his packed lunch, making sure that Adam didn’t get a glimpse of the book that the professor had given him. He was eager to have a look at it, but supposed he would have to wait for the right opportunity. Adam was hardly likely to sit there and let him read it. He unwrapped the brown paper parcel that Mrs Beesley had prepared for him to find a chunk of fresh baked bread, a bottle of water and a couple of slices of ham. He began to eat eagerly but noticed that Adam was rolling a cigarette and staring thoughtfully off across the lake.

‘Aren’t you eating?’ Peter asked him. ‘Mrs B’s made us a good lunch.’

‘Ain’t got no appetite for anything that woman does these days,’ muttered Adam. He finished making the cigarette, reached into his pocket for a box of matches and lit up. He blew out a fragrant cloud of smoke. Then he placed his knapsack down as a pillow and, lying back, rested his head on it. He lay there, gazing at the sky, smoking his cigarette. ‘Trouble with her is, she makes these plans and people like me are just expected to go along with ’em. Don’t matter what we think about it.’ He reached into the pocket of his waistcoat and pulled out a silver flask. He uncorked it and took a generous swig.

‘Still on the medicine, I see,’ said Peter.

‘Aye. Keeps the flu away,’ said Adam.

‘Why do you drink so much, Adam?’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘My father had a friend who was always drinking. And when Dad asked him why, he’d say he was drinking to forget. Are you trying to forget about something?’