Chapter 28: The Boathouse

I didn't answer her on the quay.

"Give me till Wednesday," I said. "I'll come north and answer you in the hall. Where it should be answered."

The eldest elder nodded.

That night, in his bed under the sloping ceiling, Jago didn't ask me what I'd say.

He lay on his back with his arm round me and looked at the ceiling.

"You could do it," he said. "You'd be good at it. You'd be the best Alpha in the north inside a year."

"I know."

"Proud as a cat, you are."

"You're thinking it, though. What happens to us."

"I'm thinking it." He was quiet. "I'm not saying it. It's your pack. You built it."

I lay with my head on his chest and listened to his heart, and I didn't say anything either.

I drove north on Tuesday on my own, in the MG, four charging stops, an egg sandwich in Yorkshire.

The sign at the bottom of the lake road still said Night Whispers in my own handwriting.

I waited for the pull.

Nothing. Just a lake, and the hills, and a place I knew very well.

On Wednesday morning the great hall was full.

Three hundred wolves, the six elders, the same jam jars on the sills. Somebody had put flowers in them.

The Alpha's chair at the top table was empty, and so was the chair beside it.

Somebody had taken the pink cushion away.

I walked up the middle of the hall with a cardboard folder under my arm.

My four girls were in the front row again.

My payroll clerk had brought her boy, who was three, and he waved a toy tractor at me.

I stopped at the top table and turned round to face them.

"First," I said. "This."

I opened the folder.

The council had seized every account Harrow Fell held on Saturday night.

What Clive hadn't spent of the pups' fund was in them.

The rest had come from a farmhouse at the head of the lake.

It had sold on Monday morning, forty acres and a walled garden, to a family from Hexham.

"One million, two hundred thousand pounds," I said. "Back in the pups' fund. To the penny. Paid in at nine o'clock this morning."

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