Dangerous Games by Sally Spencer Page B

man? Or did he seem to be leavin’ unwillingly?’
    â€˜I can’t say. I was in the middle of serving a customer, and by the time I’d filled his order, the two of them were already leaving. So all I actually saw was their backs.’
    Behind them, there was the sound of the double doors, which led in from the street, swinging open.
    The assistant manager looked over Woodend’s shoulder, and suddenly an obsequious smile filled his face.
    â€˜Who’s arrived?’ Woodend asked grumpily. ‘Calamity Jane an’ Billy the Kid?’
    The assistant manager ignored him completely, and the smile on his face grew even wider as he shifted to the left, so that the new customer could get a proper look at him.
    â€˜Good afternoon, Mr Hough!’ he called out brightly. ‘What a pleasure it is to see you again so soon.’
    â€˜Hough?’ Woodend repeated. ‘Would that be
Mark
Hough?’
    â€˜Yes, that’s right.’
    Woodend turned around to make eye contact with the man who Terry Pugh had supposedly been intending to meet the previous evening – and found he had a clear view right to the door.
    â€˜I’m down here,’ said a voice, and, from its tone, the speaker was clearly finding Woodend’s obvious surprise quite amusing.
    The Chief Inspector lowered his eyes a couple of feet, and saw that he had been right, and the man
was
greatly amused by his confusion.
    â€˜Mr Hough, I presume,’ he said.
    â€˜Well, I’m certainly not Dr Livingstone,’ the man in the wheelchair told him. ‘
He
had working legs.’
    When Bob Rutter had wanted to sell the house in which his wife had been murdered, all the local estate agents he’d approached had been less than enthusiastic about the prospect of having it on their books.
    â€˜What’s wrong with it?’ he’d asked one agent. ‘It’s less than two years old. Any other house on that street has been snapped up almost as soon as the For Sale sign’s been erected.’
    â€˜Yes, but it isn’t
any other
house on the street,’ the estate agent had said, awkwardly.
    â€˜No, it isn’t,’ Rutter had agreed, irritated. ‘This one has had an entire re-fit since the fire. It’s only the shell that’s two years old – the inside’s brand spanking new.’
    â€˜That may be true,’ the agent had agreed reluctantly.
    â€˜It
is
true!’
    â€˜But the thing is, Mr Rutter, most people have seen too many ghost films to be comfortable about moving into a house where there’s been a violent death, and I think I’d have real trouble shifting it.’
    â€˜It’s not haunted,’ Rutter had said firmly.
    â€˜Then why don’t you live in it yourself?’
    A good question, Rutter thought.
    Because, he supposed, for him – and him alone – it
was
haunted.
    He couldn’t walk into the kitchen without seeing Maria preparing food, her hands feeling what her eyes could not see.
    He couldn’t be in the living room without remembering how they had sat on the sofa in front of the television, with him providing a running commentary for actions on the screen which his wife could not have worked out from the dialogue alone.
    He couldn’t stand in the garden without recalling that everything he had planted there had been chosen for its smell alone, because though the colour and delicacy of certain plants had once given Maria great pleasure, it was a pleasure which her blindness had robbed her of.
    In the end, he had sold the house – though for considerably less than would have been paid for the houses on either side of it – and bought a large Victorian semi-detached at the other end of town.
    At the time of the sale, he felt as if a great weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
    Now, as he parked his car outside the house in which he hoped to make a new home for himself and his daughter, he was no longer