His Little Girl. Liz Fielding

      CHAPTER ONE

      SOMETHING woke Dora. One minute she was sleeping, the next wide awake, her ears straining through all the familiar night noises of the countryside for the out-of-place sound that had woken her.

      She had fled to the country for peace, but after the constant traffic noise of London she’d found the quiet almost eerie the first night she’d stayed alone at Richard and Poppy’s cottage. Soon, though, her ears had adjusted to the different sounds of the countryside, and she’d realised that what had at first seemed like silence was subverted by all manner of small noises.

      Now she lay quite still, listening to the familiar night time orchestra. The gentle gurgling of the small river less than a hundred yards from the door of the cottage as it swirled through the reeds; the slow trickle of rain along the guttering; the sombre dripping as the trees shed the water dumped by a passing scurry of rain.

      Punctuating these watery sounds there was the irritable grumbling of a duck, itself disturbed by something. A fox, perhaps? The first time Dora had heard the unearthly rattle made by the night-time hunter her blood had run quite cold; after a week at the cottage she was not so timid.

      She swung out of bed and crossed swiftly to the window, ready to fling abuse, and whatever else came to hand, at the marauding intruder. But the landscape, momentarily bleached by a high, white moon as the scudding rainclouds cleared, revealed the dark humps of sleeping ducks. On the surface the riverbank seemed peaceful enough. Not a fox, then.

      She propped her elbows on the window ledge for a moment, resting her chin on her hands, and leaned forward to breathe in the night air. It was full of the rich, mingled scents of honeysuckle, stocks and the roses climbing against the wall beneath her window, underscored, after the sudden shower of rain, by the heavy sweetness of damp earth. It was such an English smell, she thought, something to be treasured after the stomach-churning horrors she had encountered in the refugee camps.

      Then, in the far distance, there was a glimmer of lightning followed by a low rumble of thunder moving away with the rainclouds. Dora gave a little shiver and pulled the window shut. It was undoubtedly the thunder that had woken her, and, trapped in the Thames Valley, it would be back. The thought raised gooseflesh that shivered over her skin.

      She rubbed her arms and turned quickly from the window to reach for her silk wrap, knowing that with thunder on the loose she wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep. Downstairs she could switch on the hi-fi to drown out the noise, and she could always catch up on sleep later—one of the many pleasures of being entirely on her own, with a telephone number that no one but close family knew.

      She raised the latch on the bedroom door, stepped onto the landing. She’d make some tea first and then...

      And then she heard the sound again, and knew that it hadn’t been thunder that had woken her.

      It had sounded almost like a cough, a harsh, crackling little cough—the kind a sick child would make—and it had been so close that it could have been inside the cottage.

      But that was ridiculous. The cottage had a comprehensive security system. Her brother-in-law had fitted it after a vagrant had got in and made himself at home. It wouldn’t happen again, and any casual burglar would be put off too. And she was sure she hadn’t left a window open.

      Almost sure.

      She leaned forward over the stairs, listening for what seemed an age. But there was nothing, only a quiet so intense that the nervous thudding of her heart began to pound in her ears.

      Had she imagined the sound? She took one step down. The cottage was miles