Tainted Love. Alison Fraser

      CHAPTER ONE

      IT WAS summer when Clare was released, but it might as well have been winter. The sun did not touch her. Nothing did. They’d called her cold-hearted and she’d become so.

      The day of her job interview was especially hot. In Oxford, summer students paraded tanned limbs in white T-shirts and shorts. Clare wore black. Black jacket. Black skirt. Black court shoes. The only relief was a cream-coloured blouse. She’d aimed for respectability and succeeded to the point of drabness. She didn’t care.

      Need alone had prompted her to go for the job. Her prison visitor, Louise Carlton, had a brother who needed a housekeeper. She believed Clare might suit the post. Clare didn’t. She didn’t think the brother would either, but Louise had badgered her into an interview.

      She walked from the rail to the bus station, caught the two o’clock to Chipping Haycastle and got off at the Old Corn Mill as instructed. She walked for perhaps quarter of a mile, before she reached two iron gates set in a six-foot-high wall. ‘Woodside Hall’ was etched into the stone.

      She peered beyond and saw only a tangle of woodland through which a tarred drive disappeared. She pushed at the gates. She’d been told they would be open. They weren’t. There was no chain on them and she wondered if they were electronically operated. She pushed again and they gave a little. She looked downwards to discover they’d been tied shut with string.

      She bent down to untie the string and heard a sound. She glanced round her but saw no one. She started to unpick the string and heard the sound again. This time there was no doubt. It was the sound of a child’s laughter and she caught a glimpse of a head bobbing up from a clump of shrub on the far side of the gates.

      ‘Hello,’ she called out to tell the child he’d been spotted.

      There was no response, just the rustling of bushes as the hidden figure made a getaway.

      That, she assumed, would be Master Miles Marchand. A sweet boy according to his aunt Louise. Clare wondered if tying the gates together came under the category of ‘sweet’.

      The string had been knotted many times and it took her about ten minutes to untie it. The next hurdle was waiting for her round a bend in the drive. She could hardly miss it—a piece of twine, a foot off the ground, running from a tree on one side of the road to a tree on the other. Presumably she was meant to trip up on it and take a flier.

      Instead she stepped over it and called out, ‘Sorry. Too obvious, I’m afraid.’

      This time there was no response, not even a rustle of leaves, but she was still sure he was watching her. She sensed it as she went up the winding drive to the house.

      It was an early Georgian manor house of considerable size: six windows wide and three storeys high. She knew Louise was wealthy. It seemed her brother was, too.

      She passed a Jaguar and a Mercedes saloon, and went up to the huge oak door. She pulled the bell at one side, and waited. And waited. And waited. Assuming it hadn’t been heard, she rang it again. By her third attempt, she decided it couldn’t be working.

      She lifted the lion’s-head knocker on the door, and it came away in her hand. She was left wondering how the heavy lead object could possibly have unscrewed itself from the door. Then she heard the sound of childish laughter again.

      It was clear that one member of the household definitely didn’t want a new housekeeper, and she wasn’t sure if she wanted to volunteer for the post, either. It wasn’t as if she knew much about children. Just Peter, and that had been a long time ago—so long she could almost think of him without pain.

      She felt this other boy’s eyes on her as she circled the house, searching for signs of life. She heard the drift of voices coming from an open French window, and came closer. She recognised Louise’s as the female voice. The other she assumed belonged to Fenwick Marchand, the eccentrically named master of the house.

      Clare approached the doorway, intending to announce her presence, but got as far as lifting her hand to knock before the man’s voice arrested her on the spot.

      ‘Honestly, Lou, you don’t really expect me to give this woman a job,’ he declared. ‘Charity’s one thing. Ask me for a donation—fine, you’ll get one. But if you think I’m going to open up my home to some...some...whatever the hell she is.’

      ‘She’s a very nice girl who’s had a rough time of it,’ Louise Carlton replied in a soft, kindly tone that contrasted sharply with her brother’s. ‘If you knew what has happened to her—’

      ‘Well, I don’t, do I?’ Marchand jumped in again. ‘Because you refuse to tell me.’

      ‘Only because you’d get the wrong idea, Fen,’ his sister went on calmly, ‘and what she was convicted of is irrelevant.’

      ‘To you, maybe,’ the man countered. ‘But then you aren’t about to share your home with some thief or drug addict or murderer. Possibly all three, for all I know.’

      ‘I’ve told you. She was innocent,’ Louise said with utter conviction.

      It drew a scoff of laughter in response.

      Clare pursed her lips. She couldn’t see Marchand, because he was seated in a high armchair. But she saw Louise Carlton, standing before him, looking upset and flustered as she tried to appeal to her brother’s better nature.

      Clare could have told her not to bother. The owner of that deep, sarcastic voice had no better side, and Clare felt no compunction about eavesdropping.

      ‘Clare has never discussed her case with me,’ Louise Carlton claimed in perfect truth. ‘She has never asked anything of me, either. I was the one who suggested this post to her, knowing she needs work and you need a housekeeper.’

      ‘Need, yes,’ he agreed, ‘am desperate for, no. And I’d have to be to employ this woman. I ask you, do you really want Miles exposed to her influence?’

      ‘He could do worse,’ Louise said, on the defensive.

      ‘He already has done,’ Fenwick reminded her. ‘I don’t think I fancy him adding lock-picking or safe-cracking to his list of other doubtful interests.’

      This time Louise didn’t respond, but her face gave her away, colouring slightly at the reference to safe-cracking.

      Her brother was quick to spot it. ‘So that’s what she is—a professional thief.’

      ‘No, don’t be ridiculous,’