“Who sent you?” I shouted above the whistling wind and the roar of the Fergie’s engine.
“What?”
I knew from my own experience that he was stalling for time.
“What?” he said again, as if I hadn’t heard him, which made me suddenly and inexplicably furious.
“It was Father, wasn’t it?”
But even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that I was wrong. There was no more chance that Father would telephone Dieter than that the Man in the Moon should ring up the rat catcher.
“Inspector Hewitt!”
I was clutching at straws. The Inspector was equipped with his own official transportation, and would never send a civilian on one of his errands.
Dieter shoved up the throttle in its quadrant and the tractor slowed. He pulled off into a small lay-by where a wooden platform was piled with milk containers.
He turned to me, not smiling.
“It was Ophelia,” he said.
“Feely?” I screeched. Had my sister sent Dieter to follow me? All day?
How dare she! How doubly-damned dare she! This was an outrage.
That I should be thwarted—torn away—kidnapped, virtually, from an important investigation—by my own sister made me see red.
Bright red.
Without a word, I jumped down from the tractor’s hitch, lifted Gladys onto the road, and set off walking down the hill, my head held high and my pigtails swaying.
When I got far enough away to remember it, I put one foot onto a pedal and mounted, shoving off shakily, but recovering enough to begin an offended but dignified coasting.
Moments later, I heard the tractor’s engine rev up, but I did not look back.
Dieter pulled alongside, driving precisely to keep pace.
“She was worried about you,” he said. “She wanted me to see that you were all right.”
Feely worried about me? I could hardy believe it. I could count on one finger the times she had treated me decently in the past couple of years.
“To spy on me, you mean,” I shot back.
It was a mean thing to say, but I said it. I quite liked Dieter, but the thought of him being under my sister’s thumb made me livid.
“Come on, hop up,” Dieter said, bringing the tractor to a full stop. “Your bicycle, too.”
“No, thank you very much. We prefer to be alone.”
I began pedaling to get ahead of the tractor. I suppose I could have pulled over and waited, then climbed aboard for a graciously accepted ride into the village.
But by the time I thought of it, I was already halfway up the high street.
I was disappointed not to find Dogger at work in the greenhouse. It was always such a pleasure to slip in, sit quietly down beside him, and fall into easy conversation, like two old gaffers on a bench beside the duck pond.
Second choice, when I wanted information, was Mrs. Mullet, but as I discovered when I stepped into the kitchen, she had already gone home for the day.
I’d have given anything to be able to pump Daffy about the Hobblers, but something kept me from asking any more of her. I still hadn’t taken my revenge for her part in the cellar inquisition, even though I had already twice broken my injured silence to ask her about Poseidon and about Hilda Muir—or Hildemoer, to be more precise—and the pixies.
It seemed to me that you couldn’t possibly win a war in which you were forever going over to the other side for advice. Also, fraternizing—or whatever you call it when sisters do it—with the enemy diluted one’s resolve to kick them in the teeth.
My head was fairly fizzing with information, and there had been little time to sort it all out.
Some of the more interesting points had already begun to come together in my mind, clustering and curdling in much the same way that silver chloride (good old AgCl) forms a sort of chemical cheese when a soluble chloride is added to silver nitrate.
Soluble! That was the word. Would I ever be able to solve this complex tangle of puzzles?
One thing was immediately clear: I needed to know more—much, much more—about the Hobblers, and it was clear that no Hobbler of my immediate acquaintance was going to make my life easier by spilling the beans.