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squeezed her hand and grinned.
    ‘It’s just the locals’ way of keeping visitors in their place, letting on they know a bit more than we do,’ I said.
    ‘What? Oh, him. No, he doesn’t bother me. Flora Chaldean was probably the token eccentric hereabouts, someone they could all have a chuckle over because she was different from them. She was probably just a lonely old woman with no family, who kept very much to herself. No, I was thinking of Gramarye itself.’ She sipped her orange juice.
    ‘You’re not so keen now?’
    She looked startled. ‘Oh, I’m more than keen. It’s just that there seem to be conflicting elements in the cottage.’
    My turn to be startled. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’
    ‘The peculiar emptiness of the place . . .’
    ‘It’s been unoccupied for a long time.’
    ‘Yes, but didn’t you notice? There were no spiders or their webs, no insects of any kind in there. No signs of mice even. There weren’t any birds nesting in the eaves of the roof, and the cottage is surrounded by woodland. Gramarye is just an empty shell.’
    I hadn’t noticed, but she was right. It should have been a haven for creepy-crawlies and nesting birds.
    ‘Yet,’ she continued, ‘the round room was so vibrant. You felt it; something happened to you in there.’
    ‘Sure, I felt dizzy for a moment, that was all. Probably hunger.’ I looked longingly back towards the inn.
    ‘No more than that?’
    I didn’t want to get into this. ‘Like what? If you must know, I think the sun hit me hard when I came up those stairs. The glare disrupted signals going to my brain.’
    She studied me for a second or two, then said, ‘Okay.’ Simple as that. No arguments, no further discussion. She’d either accepted what I’d told her, or accepted that I didn’t want to delve further. That’s what made Midge easy to live with.
    I drained half of the bitter and Midge watched me. Tilted eyes, dark-haired, and delicate little pointed chin. Yeah, that’s why sometimes I called her Pixie.
    ‘So where do we go from here?’ I asked, wiping the back of my hand across my lips. ‘You know I’m worried about how much it’s gonna cost to put the place right.’
    ‘But you like the cottage, don’t you?’ She leaned across the table and her words were almost a conspiratorial whisper. And she was fixing me with that smile again. ‘Don’t you think the location is ideal? Imagine the work we’ll do there. My paintings, your music. Mike, you’ll do so much, I just know it. And maybe you’ll finally get around to writing those children’s stories for me to illustrate. We’ll make a wonderful team!’
    I mulled it over. Sometimes Midge escaped into a world of her own, on a plane far removed from choking cities and avaricious mortals, and she had the ability to draw others into it, too – that is, if she wanted them along. I had to remain the pragmatist most of the time, although it never ceased to amaze me how down-to-earth practical she could become when the occasion truly demanded.
    ‘Look, I’ll tell you what we’ll do,’ I said. ‘We’ll go back to the agent and lay our cards on the table. We’ll point out all the faults, major and minor, and put in a lower bid to cover our costs. If Bickleshift goes for it, all well and good; if not – well, we’ll have to face up to the facts of life.’
    She could hardly argue with that, but I couldn’t help disliking myself for putting anxiety behind her eyes.
    So that was what we did. We finished our drinks and drove back to Cantrip, me with a grumbling stomach and Midge in a moody silence. When we passed Gramarye, her eyes locked onto the cottage and once more she craned her neck until it was out of sight.
    It was well after lunchtime when we reached the village and we found Bickleshift wondering how to occupy the rest of his day. I explained our position, telling him we loved the cottage, were extremely keen to buy, but that there were certain nasty faults