Page 70 of A Christmas Celebration
The strength of the wind carried my voice away and I knocked again, only harder. With no sight or sound of either Albert or Bella, I stepped across the border which ran under the front window and peered through the glass I still hadn’t got around to polishing. I could see Bella curled up on the sofa, but there was no sign of Albert. I stepped back and tried the handle, but the door was locked.
‘What’s wrong?’ asked Brodie as I retreated to the Land Rover and pulled out my phone.
‘I don’t know that anything is,’ I said, trying not to imagine Albert stuck upstairs having had a fall in the night. ‘I’m sure it’s nothing.’
I rang the house phone, but there was no answer.
‘Damn,’ I muttered as I cut the call off.
‘Shall we try the back?’ Brodie suggested. ‘There must be another way into the house besides the front door.’
As loathe as I was for him to come with me, I was too worried to insist he stayed put.
‘Yes,’ I confirmed. ‘There’s a door in the kitchen which leads into the garden.’
‘Come on then,’ he said, jumping out and letting a roar of wind in.
The strength of it pulled the driver’s door right out of my grasp.
‘This is locked too,’ I said once we’d shuffled around to the back and tugged at the door handle. ‘I think I’m going to have to break in.’
‘Are you sure?’ Brodie asked. ‘What if they’ve just popped out?’
It was a perfectly reasonable question, but I knew that Albert wouldn’t have just popped anywhere. I hadn’t been able to tempt him over the threshold, even with his new specs on, so he certainly wouldn’t have gone off on a jaunt in the middle of a raging storm.
‘They won’t have gone out,’ I told Brodie, but he wasn’t listening.
I turned to find him walking down a path I hadn’t noticed before.
‘Hey!’ I called after him. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’
‘What about down here?’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Could they be in this shed, do you think?’
Chapter 18
I’d never noticed that there was another building on the site, but Brodie was right. Tucked at the furthest end of the garden, and almost completely camouflaged by mature shrubs and trees, there was an ancient looking Nissen hut. Had the storm not torn a branch from the bottom of the tree planted closest to it, I’m sure it would have remained unexposed and unnoticed.
Once a common site across East Anglia, you were now more likely to find a converted hut trendily decked out and listed on Airbnb than housing aircraft on a military base, and I blinked hard, just to make sure my eyes weren’t deceiving me.
‘How cool is this?’ Brodie gawped when I reached him, the branch having thankfully not fallen across the path. ‘What’s it used for?’
‘I’ve no idea,’ I said, looking back towards the cottage. ‘I didn’t even know it was here. I think we should go back…’
Brodie put a hand on my arm and cocked his head.
‘I can hear music.’ He grinned. ‘I think we might have found whoever it is you’re looking for.’
‘That’s not possible,’ I began, but then stopped as I also caught a few notes carried on the wind.
‘What is that?’ Brodie asked, frowning in concentration. ‘Oh, hang on. I think I recognize it. It’s Glenn Miller, isn’t it?’
Before I could answer, he’d stepped up to the door, narrowly avoiding the long stems of the shrubs being whipped about in the wind.
‘Wait!’ I called after him but he didn’t stop.
His hand was almost on the door handle by the time I was beside him.
‘Wait,’ I said again, batting him away. ‘You can’t just go barging in.’
