No Place Like Home Jane Renshaw (best books to read for beginners TXT) 📖

must have struck him and he was whimpering, whining, flinching away from Bram’s fingers.

‘Inside, now!’ Bram gathered Bertie up in his arms, and the dog yelped again in pain. ‘Go, Max. Go!’

‘I’ll help you carry–’

‘No. I can manage. Run inside and call 999! Don’t argue with me, Max. Go!’

4

‘What the…?’ David barrelled into the house, hammer in hand, as Bram and Kirsty were trying to get everyone out to the car – not an easy task with Bertie whining away in Bram’s arms, bleeding all over the towel Kirsty was holding to his shoulder, while Linda insisted on keeping her hand on the dog’s head at all times while simultaneously rubbing Kirsty’s arm comfortingly, and Phoebe clung to Kirsty.

‘Bertie’s been shot!’ Linda gasped.

‘What?’

‘Someone in the wood shot him,’ Kirsty elaborated, her voice oddly flat. ‘Can you get out of the way, Dad?’

The police had told them to stay inside, but they had to take Bertie to the vet, and Bram’s instinct was to get everyone out. If there was a maniac running around with a gun, he didn’t want to leave anyone behind in the house. The police said it might be half an hour at least until someone could ‘attend the scene’. He’d got the Discovery and driven it right up to the bottom of the verandah steps and left it there with the engine running. It wasn’t likely that the shooter would actually take aim at people, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

David bent over Bertie. ‘Okay, boy. You’re going to be okay.’ Bertie’s tail slapped weakly against Bram’s leg. ‘Looks like he’s been grazed by an airgun pellet.’ Then David was fixing Bram with steely blue eyes. ‘Why aren’t you out there going after the bastard?’

‘Let me past, David – we have to get Bertie to the vet.’

David stood aside to let Bram out onto the verandah, and Bram heard him rap out: ‘Where in the wood?’

‘In our bit of it,’ said Max. ‘Near the stream.’

‘Right.’ David pushed past Bram, hefting the hammer in his hand – Bram recognised it now as his own red-handled one from the shed, presumably fetched for some snagging issue with the house – and barrelled off down the verandah steps.

‘No! Dad!’

‘David, don’t be stupid!’ Linda cried out.

But David had gone.

That journey to the vet was a nightmare. ‘He’s going to be all right,’ Phoebe kept repeating between sobs. She, Max and Linda were on the back seat with Bertie lying across their laps, while Kirsty sat next to Bram in the passenger seat, dabbing a damp tissue at the blood on her top. Her expression had gone completely blank, in the way he remembered from uni, turning in on herself, turning away from the world.

‘I’m texting Grandad,’ said Max.

‘He shouldn’t have gone out there!’ Phoebe wailed.

‘No,’ said Linda tightly. ‘He shouldn’t.’

It felt weird to be driving through this gorgeous scenery, the sun dappling the tarmac in front of them, canopies of big old beech trees stretching over the road to the right, and to the left a view over fields to the enticing wilderness of the Grampian Mountains, as if the beautiful summer’s day was going on out there in another world in which nothing had happened, nothing was wrong, everything was fine.

‘He’ll be okay.’ Bram made his voice firm and confident, and reached over to squeeze Kirsty’s hand. ‘No one messes with your grandad. And the police will be there by now.’ Would they?

‘But the psychopath’s got a guuuuun!’ Phoebe’s wail filled the car.

‘Grandad thinks it’s just an airgun. And there isn’t any psychopath.’ Bram had to shout to make himself heard. Bloody Nora. Phoebe was meant to watch Linda and David’s Netflix only under supervision, but he knew she sneaked a look at all kinds of inappropriate stuff that David and Max watched, the latest one featuring a serial killer who dismembered his victims and left various body parts in children’s play areas. Phoebe hadn’t been near a park since.

‘There’s Grandad texting back,’ Max shouted. ‘He’s fine, Phoebs. For God’s sake shut up – getting hysterical isn’t helping Bertie, is it? We need to keep him calm.’

Phoebe’s noise immediately stopped, like Max had flicked a switch. ‘Sorry, Bertie,’ she gulped. And then, in a small voice: ‘That’s good that Grandad’s okay.’

‘What does he say?’ said Linda.

‘Uh, he uses a pretty bad swear word. “No sign of the blank.”’

‘Thank God,’ said Linda. ‘You text him right back, Max, and tell him he’s to get in the house and stay there. Tell him it’s a message from me.’

Bloody Nora. This went to show just how rattled Linda was. She was usually as easy-going as Max, and rarely laid down the law to David or, indeed, anyone else. She let David get away with far too much, in Bram’s opinion, although this was probably unfair of him. The only person responsible for David’s actions was David himself.

Georgia the vet, reasonably enough, wasn’t keen on all five of them accompanying Bertie into the treatment room, so Bram and the kids stayed in the waiting room while Linda and Kirsty went in with him.

When Phoebe wandered off to the shop area to choose a treat for Bertie, Max looked up from his phone. ‘Grandad says he’s searched the whole wood and there’s no one there now. That was pretty foolhardy of him, wasn’t it, going after them like that?’

Bram nodded. It was a source of secret delight to him and Kirsty, the way Max occasionally used old-fashioned words like foolhardy, but they never remarked on it in case he became self-conscious about it and stopped. Max was addicted to classic literature, particularly Dickens and George Elliot, as well as 1930s stuff like P. G. Wodehouse.

‘They could have been really dangerous.’ Max shook his head. ‘What is Grandad like? It’s as if he isn’t scared of anything.’

Bram wanted to say that only an idiot wasn’t scared of anything, but contented himself with, ‘He’s certainly not exactly risk-averse.’

Ten minutes later, a sorry-for-himself Bertie appeared sporting