The Winter Ground by Catriona McPherson Page A

to me that the washing might win and the fire lose, because the air was soft and sweet with steam and the painted walls were beaded with moisture.
    ‘Kolya, my husband, is gone take girls to see the village,’ said Mrs Prebrezhensky. Then she hesitated. ‘Kolya says to me to say nothing, not to bring trouble to ourselves. He forbids me to speak. But he is wrong.’
    ‘What is it?’ I asked her. Perhaps it was her accent, terribly glamorous in a sepulchral kind of way, or perhaps Mrs Prebrezhensky’s flair for dramatic presentation was not reserved for showing off her girls in the ring, but I could feel my pulse quicken.
    ‘Last evening,’ she said, ‘we have found Topsy’s swing.’ She bent down and opened one of the panelled cupboard doors. Various jars and bottles of richly coloured foods, pickles I thought, had been shoved roughly to the back and one of them had fallen over and broken, releasing a sharply pungent smell. In the space thus made was a jumble of rope with a gold lacquered stick mixed up amongst it.
    ‘Well, that’s a relief,’ I said. ‘Topsy will be pleased to have it returned.’ I quite saw that it was not ideal to have lost property turn up in one’s cupboard, but still I could not account for her sombre face, nor for the secrecy. There was no great harm done, surely.
    ‘But look,’ said Mrs Prebrezhensky, and pointed one of her long painted fingers at the bundle. I stepped closer to peer at it and could see that just where she was pointing the rope had been cut halfway through.
    ‘It was not me,’ said Mrs Prebrezhensky. ‘It was not us.’ In her voice there was a note of real fear, not just drama now. I stared at the rope and tried to think quickly.
    ‘Well, of course it wasn’t,’ I said, after a minute or two. ‘Or you’d hardly have hidden it in your own caravan, would you?’ Her breath came out in a long, hissing sigh. She pressed a hand to her heart.
    ‘Thank God,’ she said. ‘Thank God you are here to help us.’
    I knelt down and extracted the bundle from the cupboard, careful not to upset any more jars as I did so. Then I peered at the cut, but it told me nothing. Perhaps a sailor, or a butcher, might be able to glance at it and sketch the knife that made it, but not me.
    ‘Nasty,’ I said. I started to roll the bundle up as neatly as I could, but that was not very neatly, I suppose, and Mrs Prebrezhensky took it from me and began twisting it with practised hands. ‘Who would want to do such a thing?’ I asked her. ‘Do you know?’ I wondered how wide the suspicion of Ana might be. She shook her head. ‘And why, after cutting it, would someone hide it? And hide it here? It doesn’t make any sense.’ I wanted to ask if Ana had any reason to do so, but did not like to drop her in it with so little ceremony, no matter what Mrs Cooke might have told me. Mrs Prebrezhensky was beaming at me.
    ‘You good clever lady,’ she said. ‘You see real things. I told Kolya is very bad if we hush this, but he does not listen to me.’
    ‘Well, he has a point,’ I replied. ‘Obviously, someone wanted to make things bad for you, Mrs Prebrez—’
    ‘Zoya,’ she said. ‘I am Zoya, please.’ She shook her head slowly. ‘How could this make bad for us? Someone wants to make bad things for Topsy.’ That was unarguable. She had finished twisting and the swing was now a tight lozenge of coiled rope with just a glint of the golden stick peeping out of each end. She handed it to me. ‘And if I listen to Kolya,’ she said, ‘and say nothing, no one ever would know. Not clever trouble put it here in my cupboard closed for many weeks and weeks. If the jar not smash and we smell something, who knows how long a secret?’
    ‘Unless there had been a search,’ I said. ‘If Pa Cooke had ordered a search and it had been found here, that would have been trouble enough.’
    ‘But such a thing would never happen,’ she said, glaring at me as though I had just suggested it.