La's Orchestra Saves the World by Alexander McCall Smith

been a policeman in a small town nearby, and the vicar, whom she had met briefly on the day after her arrival, had been born in a vicarage in Bury.
    After breakfast La walked over to Ingoldsby Farm. Mrs. Agg was shelling peas in the kitchen and called her in from outside.
    “I could help you,” said La.
    “You don’t have to,” said Mrs. Agg.
    “I want to. Please let me.”
    She sat down at the table alongside her neighbour.
    “I had an intruder last night,” she said. “In the garden. A man.”
    Mrs. Agg continued with her peas. She did not look up. “I see.”
    “Yes.” La had expected more of a reaction. Perhaps intruders did not count for much in the country.
    Mrs. Agg looked up briefly. “A gypsy, I’d say. Foster’s Fields. There’s a gaggle of them down there.”
    La remembered what Percy Brown had said. Gypsies were outside thieves. But surely not all of them; how could everybody be a thief?
    “Yes,” Mrs. Agg continued. “They come round here on the look-out for anything not nailed to the ground. Like ducks.”
    “So I shouldn’t be worried,” said La.
    Mrs. Agg shook her head. “Worried? Oh, no. They slink away pretty quickly if you shine a light at them. Like foxes, they are.” She paused. “You weren’t worried, were you? You can come over here if you’re worried. I’ll send Agg over with his shotgun.”
    They lapsed into silence. La felt relieved; if what Mrs. Agg said was true, and he had been a gypsy, then at least she could stop worrying about being watched. Gypsies stole, she had been told; they did not watch.
    They worked for a further ten minutes. Mrs. Agg was not one for unnecessary conversation, and La assumed that there was nothing to be said. When they reached the end of the peas, the farmer’s wife stood up and brushed at her apron. As she did so, a door behind her opened and a young man entered the room. He was about to say something, and had opened his mouth to do so, when he spotted La and stopped himself in surprise.
    “This is my Lennie,” said Mrs. Agg.
    La looked up at the young man. He was tall—considerably taller than his father—and well-built. He had a shock of dark hair and one of those broad, country faces that could so easily become, as it did in this case, slightlybovine. It was not an intelligent face, La thought, nor a comfortable one; there was resentment in it, she thought. Things were not quite right for Lennie.
    Lennie stared at La for a few moments before his gaze slipped away to the side. As this happened, though, Mrs. Agg’s eyes moved up and met La’s briefly, as if in enquiry.
    La forced a smile. “Hallo, Lennie.”
    “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”
    Mrs. Agg dusted again at her apron. “Those ewes, Lennie,” she said. “Dad says he wants them moved over to the big pasture.”
    Lennie nodded and moved off towards the back door. La noticed that his trousers, which were made of thick grey hodden, had patches of mud upon them, caked dry. On the sleeves of his shirt, which were rolled half-way up the forearm, there were dark stains that looked like treacle: they basted something dark on the hooves of the sheep—she had seen it—to protect them from foot-rot; Stockholm Tar, she thought it was called. Some of this was on Lennie’s shirt now. She noticed the skin on the back of his neck, just above the collar of the stained shirt; she saw that it was tanned by the sun, red-brown, leathery.
    With Lennie out of the room, Mrs. Agg glanced at her watch. “I have to let the ducks out,” she said. “We keep them in at night or the fox would get them.” She paused. “Lennie is a worry to me, you know. But what mother doesn’t worry?”
    La felt a sudden surge of sympathy for Mrs. Agg. “I’m sure that he’s …” She was unsure what to say, and she trailed away.
    “He’s twenty-three,” Mrs. Agg went on. “I sometimes wish that there was more for him to do round here, but there isn’t, you know. They have a dance in the village hall