The stream skirted through the copse that lay between the home park and the farmland. Rue had seen her first kingfisher there, and, on one never-to-be-forgotten occasion, an otter playing sleekly with the water. The stream had always been a place of magic to her, and emotion left over from her childhood when she had quite happily played on its banks, but today… She remembered that the shots she had heard had come from this direction.
No matter how much she called his name and strained her ears, there was no familiar sound of the heavy, clumsy body panting through the undergrowth.
Almost frantic with fear, she reached the stream and saw at once the paw-marks in the soft mud at the edge of a particularly high piece of banking. She ran up to it and looked down towards the stream.
Horatio was lying on a tiny island of grass and mud, the stream abnormally swollen from the previous night’s rain. He whimpered when he saw her and tried to lift his head, yelping suddenly in pain. As he moved, Rue saw the trickle of blood matting his fur on his hind quarters.
She went cold with shock and disbelief. Part of her had been prepared for this, and yet part of her—by far the larger part, she recognised sickly now—had not been able to believe that Neil would do such a thing. That he could hurt her…yes, she could understand that…but to hurt Horatio, who virtually worshipped him…to cold-bloodedly shoot her dog…
She raised her hand to her face to push angrily at whatever it was that was obscuring her vision and discovered she was crying. She scrambled down the bank and waded out to Horatio. The dog whined again and thumped his tail.
His flesh was torn where the bullet had hit him, and he was bleeding from the tear. He whined again and tried to stand up, collapsing with a whimper of pain when his leg refused to support him.
It wasn’t broken, Rue decided, and as though her presence gave him a surge of strength he managed to stand up and balance himself against her. He couldn’t walk home, she acknowledged, hugging him fiercely in her relief that his injuries seemed relatively minor.
He was not a brave dog, and he was shivering now, so glad to have been rescued. She would have to carry him back to the house.
He was a heavy dog, and she was only small. She looked at the steep bank and acknowledged that she couldn’t climb up it with him. She would have to walk downstream until she could find an easier way out.
It wasn’t easy. Her boots slipped on the moss-covered stones underneath the water, and more than once it swirled in over the top of her wellingtons, soaking her socks and feet. More than once she feared she was going to lose her balance, and more than once she had to stop to rest her arms, but at last the bank shelved down and she was able to stagger out of the stream and on to the footpath.
All she had to do now was to cross the park, and then climb the stile, and then…but one task at a time, one goal at a time.
The stile proved the hardest part, and she wished bitterly that all she had to negotiate was a gate.
The relief of being back on her own land turned her legs weak, but she couldn’t stop now. She had to get Horatio back to the house. She had to ring the vet and get him out to see what damage had been done and most of all she had to report Neil Saxton to the police, she thought bitterly.
By the time she had reached the gate from the fields into her own garden, she was so exhausted that it was only instinct and sheer stubborn determination that kept her going. Her arms ached so much, she felt as though the muscles were on fire, as though they were being relentlessly torn from their sockets. Her back threatened to break in two and her legs were trembling so badly that she dared not stop to rest in case they gave way beneath her.
In her arms Horatio whined and whuffled. The blood from his wound had flowed over her arm where the water from the stream had washed it liberally all over her. Once she had lifted her hand to push her hair out of her eyes, and a streak of blood smeared her face.
Totally exhausted, almost blinded by the tears of fear and tension she dared not shed, she realised suddenly that she had almost made it to the back door. The cottage wavered in front of her, somehow dipping and lifting in the most odd way, and then her knees buckled beneath her, and as she cried out in protest a pair of strong arms reached out and lifted her burden from her, while above her head Hannah’s familiar voice exclaimed in horrified accents, ‘Rue…my dear! What on earth’s happened?’
Hannah? Rue focused on her friend with difficulty and then on the man at her side. The man holding Horatio, soothing him…watching her with such an air of anguished concern that she could not stop herself from saying harshly, ‘If you really want to know, why don’t you ask him?’
She saw the look Hannah and Neil exchanged and demanded bitterly, ‘Go on, ask him. Ask him why he tried to make love to me last night and why he tried to kill poor Horatio…’
‘Rue…’ She heard the warning note in Neil’s voice, but she ignored it.
‘I’ve got to get Horatio to the vet…’
‘I’ll take him.’
The curt male voice seemed to reach her over a distance. She was conscious of a tremendous sense of weakness and despair, and an equally strong need to fight it.
‘So that you can have another go at killing him?’ She was shaking now, tears pouring down her face. ‘Not much of a shot, are you? Put my dog down… Do you honestly think I’d let you take him anywhere?’
He was standing right in front of her, but in some peculiar way she couldn’t focus properly on him, his shape was becoming a dark blur which moved frighteningly.
She heard him saying grimly, ‘Hannah, I think you’d better call a doctor…’ And then the world faded into blackness, suffocating and engulfing her.
When she came round, she was lying upstairs on her own bed. Hannah was standing beside her, watching her worriedly.
‘It’s all right,’ she told her. ‘You fainted. And no wonder, carrying poor Horatio all that way. Neil’s taken him to the vet,’ she added, seeing the concern darkening Rue’s eyes. ‘Oh, Rue, you don’t honestly believe that Neil shot him, do you?’ she asked worriedly, dropping to her knees at the side of the bed.
Rue turned her face away from her friend, reading in Hannah’s eyes her inability to share her belief, but then Hannah didn’t know him as she did…didn’t realise how ruthless and cruel he could be.
‘I’ve sent for the doctor,’ Hannah told her quietly. ‘I think that should be his car now.’