Blood on the Wood by Gillian Linscott Page B

that, for what was left of the night, she could reach out and grab me if the fear came back. As we were falling asleep again she murmured so softly that I could only just hear, ‘I thought he’d come for me. I thought he’d come to take me back.’ I whispered that he wasn’t there, that we’d all protect her. Like the rest, I knew it had been a nightmare. Unlike them, I knew from Daniel what her nightmare was.

Chapter Seven
    N EXT MORNING DAISY WAS PALE AND quiet but that was normal with her and nobody said anything about the scare in the night. We all trooped over to the old schoolhouse for breakfast of bread and tea. Harry Hawthorne shambled out of the men’s sleeping quarters like a dishevelled bear from its cave, drank three mugs of tea and teased Daisy gently about where her young man had got to.
    Around ten o’clock Daniel arrived with the look of a man who hadn’t slept much and a pocketful of tin whistles. It turned out that Hawthorne had ordered him to give the Scipians an illustrated talk on Everyman’s Music. As we all moved over to the big tent where lectures were held he trailed behind the others, obviously waiting for me.
    â€˜Well, is it tonight?’
    â€˜I shan’t know till later. The earliest anybody could get here with the other picture would be late afternoon.’
    â€˜How will I know?’
    I said I supposed he’d be down at the camp again in the evening and I’d try to get word to him then. Through a not very restful night I’d been giving some thought to my new career. Mostly to its drawbacks. ‘I suppose you realise,’ I said, ‘that I’ll be carrying a valuable painting through fields at the dead of night.’
    â€˜Can’t you cut it out of its frame and roll it up?’
    I knew that was what proper picture thieves were supposed to do, but the thought of putting a knife even to the edge of it terrified me. I could practically hear the squeals of the beautiful young man at Christie’s.
    â€˜No, I’ll take it in its frame. But it will have to be properly wrapped up and I can’t risk doing that in your uncle’s study.’
    â€˜So what will you do?’
    â€˜It’s a question of what you do. There’s a summerhouse at the back of your garden. It doesn’t look as if it’s used much.’
    â€˜It isn’t.’
    â€˜Could you leave me a sheet or a thin blanket there, and some string? A paraffin lamp and matches too, if you can.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Another thing – if the fake picture arrives this evening, I’m going to have to find somewhere to put it until after eleven when your uncle’s asleep. I thought the summerhouse for that too.’
    â€˜How will you get it there?’
    â€˜Up the fields and in at the back gate.’
    It would be a useful rehearsal for the more intimidating task of taking the real picture back down by the same route.
    By now everybody else, including Daisy, had disappeared inside the tent. Hawthorne called, ‘Come on, Daniel. We’re waiting.’
    I left him at the entrance, walked away with the chorus of John Barleycorn fading in the distance and spent the next hour or so making myself familiar with fields and footpaths around the village, plotting as inconspicuous a route as possible from the railway halt to the Venns’ back gate. It consisted of a few hundred yards of road, a cart track, four fields, three gates and a stile. The thought of all that twice over, once with the false Odalisque and again with the true one, was so discouraging that I’d have called off the whole thing if I hadn’t already sent the letter summoning her. Cravenly, I even hoped the blackberry hat girl had forgotten to post it. The next part of the preparations involved a trip to the village shop. It had occurred to me that oil lamps and valuable paintings might not be a good combination and a battery-powered flashlight