I sense their presence before I open the door, despite their lack of scent. What’s the point of flowers without a scent? Just as I feared, I enter my kitchen to find it full of them. Asters. I hate the things.
They spill from vases and peer out of pots on the table, the floor, the windowsill. Some appear to be growing directly from the ceiling, strangling the light fittings and creeping down the walls. It’s a floral nightmare. Where have they come from?
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There’d been an atmosphere of suppressed excitement in the village that morning. The boy was glad to go into the solitude of the woods to search for the fox. It wouldn’t take long. Foxes didn’t hide their tracks, unlike people. He stopped to hoist the shotgun onto his shoulder, then moved stealthily forward. Most of his friends knew nothing about foxes, but the boy knew where they made their dens and when they were most active. He could even tell if they were a dog or a vixen from the muskiness of their scent. The fox couldn’t escape him.
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DCI Will Bailey eased his car into gear. The sun peered sleepily from behind its blanket of clouds as the six o’clock news pips sounded. The only other vehicle, a bin lorry, crawled up the street, its rhythmic beeping and flashing almost lulling Will back to sleep.
One of the bin-men, his old school friend Danny Hiller, waved as he passed. Will smiled. The great thing about living here his whole life was that no-one was a stranger.
His former school slid into view. He remembered playing in those fields, throwing down school jumpers for goalposts. When the jumpers inevitably got muddled up, the teacher would complain that no-one ever labelled their uniform. But the children were adept at identifying one another by smell, and the jumpers would quickly be tossed to their owners.
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