The Warden

She runs four hundred acres, a car park, a tea room she despises and a barn that has been condemned for four years. Nobody on the Devon coast looks at her twice. Which is why she notices everything. Ruth Kerslake has been the warden at Stonecombe for twelve years. She knows the wording of all thirteen interpretation boards. She knows which step on the cliff path is loose, which gull is which, and exactly how the car-park machine likes to jam. To the visitors, she is part of the scenery. The trouble with scenery is that it sees everything. So when a man takes shelter in her condemned barn through six weeks of the worst weather in years, Ruth notices. He gives a name she doesn't believe. He fixes a fence he was never asked to fix. He asks her nothing. She also notices the fishing boat reported lost up the coast, the drowned man the sea leaves in her cove, and how quickly the town decides the missing crewman was trouble. But nobody asks the warden. Least of all the detective, who keeps mistaking her for someone with nothing to say. Ruth has spent a lifetime not being seen. Now she has to decide what to do with the one thing she has seen more clearly than anyone, and whether some things are better left to the weather, and the barn, and the tide. Very slow. Very dry. Very tender about the things we choose not to say. A completely standalone novel told by the watcher at the edge of the frame.