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whose grip was too wary, for the fingers
cupped the midnight-blue glass lightly, as if it might burn. He raised it to
chest height and a foot away from his body, and stared at the contents.
Each item was innocuous in itself - a white shirt button; a lock of hair,
several strands separated from the main clump; a small set of steel dividers.
Their bed was not the bottom of the receptacle itself but a crumpled
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photograph, and all conspired to create an identity.
The button might have come from one of his own old shirts. The hair had the
same colouring as his own and could have come from his head. The small set of
dividers had lost their shine, the needles at the end of each arm almost black
with age, and they resembled the first set he had ever bought himself when he
had left college and was preparing to take up carpentry as a full-time
occupation (in fact he knew they were his, for he had measured wood and cuts
and grooves with them for so long that it was impossible not to recognize the
blemishes and scratches in their metal; because he'd had them for such a time
and
used them for virtually every job since day-one, they had become a kind of
good-luck mascot, a familiar tool he held in affection, no big deal, but a
simple and sentimental token of all the hard work he had put in over the
years).
What held the items together and made him sure they were all from the same
source - Thom, himself -
was the colour print he now reached in for with one hand. The other objects
slid off its rumpled surface as he drew the photograph out.
He placed the 'chalice' back on the altar and smoothed out the photograph with
both hands. One edge was torn, as if it was merely half or a part of a whole
and, although the photograph had obviously been taken many years ago, he
recognized himself immediately. It was slightly blurred, as if the
photographer had a shaky hand or had moved as the shutter had clicked, and
there was just part of another's elbow showing on the torn side, as if he had
been standing
close to someone. In the shot, Thom was fresh-faced, a teenager, his hair too
long, his clothes casual, and in the background was woodland. He could not
remember exactly when the picture was taken, but he was fairly sure that the
person who had been standing next to him, whose elbow was just in shot, was
Hugo. Perhaps it was old Eric Pimlet who had taken the photo. Thom could not
think of when he had last seen it, or if he had seen it at all, but assumed it
had laid around in a drawer somewhere at Castle
Bracken. Had Nell come upon it on one of her visits to tend Sir Russell? Or
had she deliberately searched it out?
A button from one of his shirts wouldn't have been too difficult to obtain -
easy to slip into the cottage while he was out and snip one off. The hair? His
teeth bit into his lower lip as he reflected. Yes. The other day, on her sofa
downstairs. She had sat next to him, an arm going round the back of the sofa.
Hadn't he felt a slight tug at the back of his neck when he'd leaned forward?
Had she had a small pair of scissors concealed in her hand? Easy to drop them
behind the seat or leave them on the windowsill after they'd done their work.
But the dividers?
He had never met Nell before he'd returned to Little Bracken to recuperate and
the little tool had gone missing long before that; before his stroke, in fact.
They had never been in daily use, but were kept in a special compartment of
his tool box along with compasses, Stanley knife, vernier gauge, sliding
bevel, squares and various other smaller tools of his profession. One day they
just weren't there and he'd assumed they had been left lying around somewhere
after a job and he had chided himself for such tardiness. They'd turn up
sooner or later, he told himself, but they never had. Until now.
How? Why? It didn't make sense. He was sure they were his, but Nell Quick
could never have had access to them. There was only one possible connection
between his London workshop and Bracken itself. Hugo.
Thom shook his head in dismay.
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Surely not. Yet Hugo had visited him a month or so before his stroke. And it
was a short time after that
that Thom had discovered the dividers had vanished.
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