The Mysterious Miss Mayhew by Hazel Osmond

showground where the marquees were nearly all down and the rugby posts back up, then climbed the hill. Right again and he was on a lane of a few houses with his at the end.
    Hell of a commute .
    He stopped to look down at the view and could see the roof of the magazine building. At least it was still standing.
    There were a couple of new estates changing the shape of the village, but really it hadn’t altered much since he was a child. The Roman site was still trying to attract visitors by dressing some poor tit up in a centurion’s uniform. The river still got uppity in winter and ran amok in the low-lying car park. There was still a butcher’s and a baker’s and a fruit and veg shop. The thought of all that unchanging life wasn’t driving him mad this evening as it had at theshow. Stupid to feel grouchy when the swallows were diving and everyone was out in their garden with their shoes off.
    Correction, when everyone was in his garden with their shoes off. He came down the drive to see Rob’s car tucked behind his mother’s and as he pushed open the side gate, Hattie was shouting, ‘Look, Dad, Uncle Rob’s ready to put up a wall!’ She was jiggling about on a wooden platform built into the horse chestnut tree. It was the floor of her tree house and Rob pulled her leg that Tom and he had made it out of the sawdust Rob smuggled out of work down his trousers. As his company took huge swathes of conifer forest and converted it into chipboard, Hattie had believed him for a while.
    Rob wanted to crack on while the weather held and it looked as if he’d come straight from work. He had his back to Tom, but from the way he was kneeling and his shoulders moving, he was obviously fixing some brackets into the floor.
    Kath was sitting in one of the canvas chairs, a pair of barbecue tongs hanging from her hand. ‘Won’t be long,’ she said. ‘Your mum’s already given Hattie a snack, but we thought there aren’t many days you can do this.’ She pointed towards the barbecue with the tongs. ‘Had to fight someone for these sausages.’
    Tom used his laugh as cover for a surreptitious glance at Kath’s ankles to see how swollen they were. He wondered if he could subtly bring something out from the house for her to rest her feet on.
    ‘Hey, stop with the jumping,’ he heard Rob say, ‘it’s like working on a trampoline.’
    ‘Come here, you,’ he called to Hattie, knowing that ‘stop jumping’ was as effective a command as ‘stop breathing’.
    When she was down the ladder, he got a partial hug, her head turned back towards the tree house, amid a long stream of chatter about Rob letting her screw in some of the bolts.
    She looked like an unmade bed as usual, but he was pleased to see she was in her oldest clothes. He guessed her school dress would be festering away on her bedroom floor, complete with lunch/paint/soil decoration.
    ‘Behave at school?’ he asked the back of her head.
    ‘A bit,’ she said, skipping away, and he didn’t know if she meant a bit of her had behaved, or she’d been on her best behaviour for nanoseconds.
    ‘Just fix this last one in place, then you can give me a hand getting the wall panels out of the garage,’ Rob called back over his shoulder.
    A laugh from Kath. ‘Tom’s helping? So … finished by Christmas, then?’
    Hattie was back round his legs. A tug on his trousers. ‘It won’t take that long, will it?’ Her most appealing look; huge green eyes, freckles as if someone had flicked them on from a paintbrush.
    ‘Auntie Kath was joking, Hats. If the weather stays like this, it might be up by the weekend.’
    ‘No might about it,’ Rob cut in, one hand reaching behind him blindly and then obviously finding what it was searching for.
    Hattie was climbing up the ladder again.
    ‘What’s the view like up there?’ Tom shouted to her.
    On her tiptoes, scanning the horizon through the branches and leaves, she shouted back, ‘I can see the Spanish fleet.’
    That would