Death at Rainbow Cottage by Jo Allen (book club books txt) 📗

tempting but it only offered short-term gain. Ashleigh’s success as an interviewer relied, to some extent, to communicating to any witness the inevitability of being caught out and the comfort of conceding the truth early. And anyway Lisa was her friend, the best one she had and the one to whom she could trust even the secrets she wasn’t yet ready to reveal to Jude. ‘I never told you about what happened when I got back from holiday.’

Lisa tilted her head to one side with a questioning look. ‘Go on.’

‘I met my new boss. And she’s my old boss.’

‘Faye Scanlon?’ Thrusting the cup of coffee onto the side table, Lisa flipped her hands to her mouth in an exaggerated gesture of shock. ‘Oh my! Is that what you were talking to the cards about?’

Ashleigh nodded. There was no other source of sensible advice and one thing she knew about herself was that she couldn’t trust her heart.

‘Did she say anything?’

‘No. She pretended she’d never met me.’ That cold stare, that unspoken warning, rankled. Faye championed equality and fairness in the workplace but only for others. In personal matters ruthlessness and her own interests held sway.

‘That’s…manipulative.’

Ashleigh remained silent. It was possible to intimidate without words.

‘You’ve told Jude, though? He can–’

‘No.’

Lisa folded her arms, to the grave jeopardy of her cup of coffee. Her wide eyes said everything that needed to be said.

‘I know,’ Ashleigh defended herself, too quickly. ‘I know. And he’s not stupid. He knows she came from the Cheshire force and he knows I worked there. He did ask me, once, but I pretended I hadn’t heard. It’s just too complicated.’

‘Not as complicated as it will be if you don’t put a stop to it.’

‘I know. But right now it’s in the too difficult box.’

‘God, Ash. Use that finely-tuned detective’s brain for once!’

‘My finely-tuned brain doesn’t work well with my heart, okay?’

‘No, you’re the worst judge of your own emotional wellbeing of anyone I’ve ever met. So listen to me. Jude’ll be fine about it. He’s not possessive.’

He couldn’t be, with Scott still so large a presence in Ashleigh’s life and Becca in his own. ‘He knows some of it already. I told him I had an affair with a woman.’ Some men, Ashleigh knew, found that appealing. ‘He’s already had a bit of a run-in with Faye. They took against one another straight away. I don’t want to have to explain how bad it got.’ And you never knew with Jude. He might easily take up arms on her behalf against their boss and end by making matters worse.

‘Yeah, hiding it make things easier? He’s bound to find out at some point. It’s much better if you tell him when you’re in control.’

Lisa was never short of good advice, though she never seemed to ask for it or to take it herself. Robust common sense was her stock in trade. This time, once again, she was right. ‘I will. Later.’

‘You should do it right now.’

‘He’s at work right now. But I’ll do it as soon as there’s a right moment. okay?’

‘That’s something.’ Lisa spent a moment in thought, looking at Ashleigh, at her coffee mug, at the tarot cards in their purple silk shroud. ‘She’s not a pleasant woman though, is she?’

‘No.’ Ashleigh shook her head. That might be what the cards were trying to tell her — that running away from a problem, as she had done, wasn’t the answer. The problem had come after her. ‘She looked as shocked as I was. I don’t think she knew I was here.’

‘Oh, but she must have—’

‘I don't think she did. And I’m guessing there must have been some kind of scandal after I’d gone, because she’s a ruthlessly ambitious woman and she’s got a promotion but in a smaller force. That isn’t the kind of life plan she had, so something must have gone wrong after I left.’ Ruthless individuals made enemies, and there was always someone ready to see an ambitious woman fail. That rang a bell with her, as though Jude’s half-hearted interpretation of a cheap pack of tarot cards had held a warning for both of them. ‘I don’t like her and I’m sure she doesn’t like me.’

‘Ashleigh O’Halloran.’ Hands on hips, Lisa sounded exactly like Ashleigh’s mother, exasperated with her when she’d once again failed to make the break from Scott. ‘If you don’t even like the woman, what on Earth made you get into bed with her in the first place?’

Lisa had been a distant friend when Ashleigh’s world had gone dark, when Scott’s incurable infidelity had driven her to intense isolation at home and to an almost-catastrophic loss of confidence at work. ‘I was lonely.’ She was a gregarious soul, a lover not a fighter, a woman who detested the grim echoes of silence, and the one thing she hated more than anything else was loneliness. At the end of the short affair, she’d come out of it with her soul stained with self-loathing and the knowledge that sometimes the open ocean was better than the wrong port in a storm.

‘Oh, sweetheart.’ The tentative hand that Lisa placed on her arm was a huge compliment, because her friend had never been the touchy-feely type, and in consequence it felt warmer than the tightest hug. ‘I understand. And her?’

‘I don’t know for sure.’ Ashleigh paused to think of Faye, capable of offering sympathy and tenderness and then turning the coldest of shoulders. ‘I see what she’s like but I don’t understand why she’s that way. Which is weird, because I understand most people.’

After all it wasn’t so strange when she couldn’t understand herself. She could divine other people’s minds but when her own heart was invested her judgement failed her, every time. So it had been with Scott, so with Faye. So,