Death on the Lake by Jo Allen (early reader books TXT) 📗

‘Thanks mate. Mine’s a pint. One of us needs to keep the breweries in business.’ Interpreting the offer as a general one, Becca’s boyfriend, Adam, slid an arm around her and accepted with a beaming smile. As she’d expected, there was a frisson between the two of them. Ryan was overly in-your-face and Adam tended to the possessive, but the posturing was soon over and done with and the pint sealed the deal. Adam was officially in a good mood. ‘Move along, Becca. Let Ryan sit down.’

Moving along meant snuggling up close to Adam, something Becca was increasingly reluctant to do. When she summoned up enough courage and found the right moment, she’d need to sit him down and talk things through. A break from the relationship would be good for both of them. She needed a bit more time to get her head round her infernal jealousy of Jude and his new, blonde, curvy woman.

Not so new, either. It had been going on for a few months. When she’d first heard about it she’d imagined it would blow over in no time, because she thought she knew her ex pretty well and she’d have bet Ashleigh O’Halloran was the type of woman who’d catch his eye but not be able to keep it. It wasn’t the first time she’d been badly wrong about Jude, so maybe she didn’t know him so well after all.

‘Enjoying your visit?’ Adam resumed, once Ryan had delivered the drinks. The pub was busy, and the group had split between two tables, half of them to the left with Becca, Ryan and Adam at the second table to the right. In between, Mikey Satterthwaite, Jude’s much younger brother, sat on a wobbly stool, part of neither one conversation nor the other.

‘Yeah, it’s great. Reckon I’ve stayed in town long enough though. I might go down and stay in Howtown for a few days, where the folks come from. Get to know it a little bit better. When I get back to Oz I don’t know how long it’ll be before I get enough leave to come here again.’ Ryan laughed, uproariously.

‘For God’s sake, don’t try and talk to George again.’ Becca begged him. ‘I’d forgotten he and Frank didn’t get on. I did know, but I must just have assumed blood’s thicker than water.’

‘Brothers are always best friends, aren’t they? Eh, Mikey?’ Adam laughed.

Mikey lifted an eyebrow in a way that added fifteen years to his age and made him look, for a second, Jude’s image, but when the eyebrow dropped again and the smile returned, he was back to being himself. ‘Yeah, sure.’

Mikey was all right, and the continued socialising that Becca allowed herself with him was the sop to her conscience. He hadn’t long turned twenty-one, very much younger than the group he was with tonight, and she was fully aware that Adam nurtured their friendship just as he did his relationship with her, and she hers with him — to be a constant irritation to someone who no longer cared. When Jude and Adam had fallen out the one had moved on and the other, refusing to forgive, had not. Since coming out of prison Adam had turned over the newest of leaves, working in a charity for rehabilitating drug users, and Jude lifted a cynical eyebrow exactly as Mikey had just done whenever Becca reminded him of it.

‘Old George will come round,’ her cousin said with confidence. ‘I’m not my granddad. I’ll pop back some time before he’s had his tea and his tablets.’

‘I really don’t think you should.’

‘Christ, Becca, you don’t believe what he said about me wanting something from him?’ Ryan made a convincing job of looking hurt.

‘No, of course not. But it isn’t about what I believe. It’s about what he believes. And people sometimes get more entrenched in their views as they get older. George never could abide being argued with.’ She took a long sip of her Appletiser. ‘Bluntly, you’re much better off agreeing with whatever he says and leaving him be.’

‘I think it’s a great idea, staying with him.’

Becca thought not. If nothing else, George was entitled to his privacy, and Ryan had already shown himself to be a man who had no idea of how to behave on other people’s territory. Or rather, she thought he knew exactly how to behave in order to get what he wanted, manipulating people with a smile and a constant, subtle pressure. He’d done it to her, with great effect, targeting the person least likely to resist, but she was thirty-two and resilient and George was ninety-five, argumentative, and set in his ways. ‘I know it seems like it. But he won’t have it.’

‘There’s got to be someone down in Howtown who’d take me in. Cumbrians are supposed to be a welcoming bunch.’

Becca took that as an implied criticism but Adam, his hand on her sleeve as if he sensed it, laughed. ‘We are. But most of them down there aren’t locals.’

‘Is that right?’ Ryan drew the back of his hand across his top lip, and the foam from his pint collected on his fingers, which he wiped fastidiously on his jeans. ‘There are all those kids that come for the watersports, aren’t there? Where that girl died.’

‘Yeah, they come every year. You might find a space in the bunkhouse.’ Adam laughed again, good mood but bad taste. ‘If you don’t mind sleeping in a dead woman’s bed.’

‘What about up in Howtown itself? Any B&Bs?’

Becca shook her head. There was something troubling about Ryan’s fascination with Howtown, even though there shouldn’t be. It was his ancestral home, just as it was hers. ‘Maybe George was right. You should get a tent.’

‘Either that or kip down with the Neilsons.’ Adam shook his head. ‘They’re locals, though you’d never know it by listening to them. Or the way they