The old Labrador seemed agitated. She could have sworn that, if anything, it was asking her to come inside.
Given what she had just found, common sense said to run and call the police. However, there was something wrong about the way that back door was wide open in the dead of winter. Her army training told her to assess the situation for risk, and investigate.
The curtains to the room beside the kitchen were only partly drawn. Torch in hand, her senses on hyper-alert, Rozie crept towards the window and peered through. The room beyond was similar to Katie’s living room in size, lit by a single table lamp with a wonky shade. The floor near the lamp was littered with dirty plates and a couple of empty wine bottles on their sides. She could just make out the stockinged feet of a man lying prone behind a battered sofa. The dog had gone back inside to sit beside him.
Rozie cautiously followed. The open door led into a small kitchen, where a shotgun lay on a table next to a neat array of cleaning rods and oils. More empty wine bottles neatly lined the skirting board in double rows. Beyond them, an open door gave on to the living room. Rozie saw the man as soon as she entered. She crouched down by his head and took in the pale, unshaven face.
She placed her fingers against his neck and found a faintly beating pulse. Whatever had happened to him, he wasn’t going to do her any harm, tonight at least.
The Queen looked up from the last paper in her boxes and watched as a swirling, eddying cloud of knot birds made its way across a pale grey sky. The little sandpipers, named after King Canute of advancing tide fame, always amazed her with the complicated patterns they created overhead, forming living shapes that bent and melted in front of one’s eyes. They were a reminder of the limits of a sovereign’s powers, and also the great outdoors, and the fact that she wasn’t in it. The latter was a situation that she decided to remedy.
Along the corridor, the main reception rooms were quiet. The family and their guests, it seemed, were all outside already. She had assumed they were all on a happy hack across the fields, only for Mrs Maddox to inform her that the younger ones had gone shopping in Burnham Market. The constant desire to be in small, enclosed, overheated spaces was something she had never fully understood, when one could be spending time instead with animals. No matter. It gave her an excellent opportunity to visit the stud again.
