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

workplace they’d had the same disparity in rank but this time Ashleigh was in a position of relative strength. Faye’s hostility would damage her only if she allowed it. She’d come through all this and was no longer dependent upon the goodwill of a superior officer. ‘All sorts of things. We talk. People do.’

‘You know exactly what I mean.’

‘I didn’t think you were talking about whether I take sugar in my coffee.’ She rattled the buttons on the machine, glad to have something to concentrate on. She’d allowed Faye’s presence to unnerve her during the briefing meeting when there was no reason why it should. ‘I told him I’m bisexual. I don’t keep secrets from him.’ Except that wasn’t entirely true. The secrets she chose to reveal would come out anyway. Surely Faye must know this one would never stay buried.

‘Very admirable.’ Faye’s tone crackled with sarcasm.

Aditi marched past them, carrying a piece of paper, as Ashleigh thrust her pound coin back into the machine with added force and this time it dropped with a satisfying thud. When Aditi had disappeared into someone else’s office and the corridor had returned to a semblance of quiet, Faye returned to the attack. ‘And what else does he know?’

‘He knows I had an affair with my boss. He knows my boss was a woman.’ Quite how much Jude suspected about the relationship was another matter. Maybe he’d guessed. ‘I told him a few months ago. We haven’t mentioned it since.’

‘It’ll be better for both of us to keep it like that.’

Sensible for both of them? It might suit Faye but Ashleigh was already aware that if she wanted the relationship with Jude to go anywhere — if she did — then secrets couldn’t be a part of it. The ridiculous affair with Faye could only hurt them if they identified it a problem rather than an incident consigned to history. ‘I thought we were having all these workshops to teach us not to be ashamed of what we are and to accept people who are different.’

‘The point is not what happened,’ Faye snapped. ‘Talk about extra-marital relationships in the workplace is distracting and gets blown out of proportion.’

And would damage her career, she meant. ‘In which case, isn’t it better to be up-front and honest?’ But Ashleigh, watching the thick brown liquid tricking into the second plastic cup, knew perfectly well that it wasn’t. Faye was by nature defensive and her ambitions were threaded through with an unhealthy paranoia, a conviction that everyone was her potential enemy.

‘On the contrary. If an individual’s private life doesn’t impact on their work they have a right to keep it private.’

The trickle of coffee stopped and the machine sighed and hissed itself to a standstill. ‘I’m not going to talk about it. You needn’t worry about that.’

‘And Jude?’

‘I haven’t told him yet, but I expect I will at some point. So what? He’s very discreet.’

‘I daresay. As long as it suits him.’

Lifting the second coffee from the machine, Ashleigh shrugged. Jude didn’t covet a Queen’s Police Medal for serving time at a desk. He’d made his way up through the ranks because he was good at the job and she suspected he had no ambition to go any further, but Faye’s blind spot wouldn’t let her see that. ‘Why don’t you talk to him about it?’

Aditi came out of the adjacent office, this time without the sheet of paper, and Ashleigh took the opportunity to extract herself from the uncomfortable conversation and fall into step beside her junior colleague as they headed back towards the incident room. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Oh, fine.’ Aditi held the door open for her, and closed it safely behind her before she said: ‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I find that woman scary.’

‘I imagine she’s a pussycat when you get to know her.’ Ashleigh set one coffee down on her desk and handed the other to Chris.

‘Pussy cat with claws.’ Chris said. ‘Weren’t you in Cheshire before you came here, Ash? Did you know her?’

‘In passing.’ At moments like this she understood how honest people became liars. It was easier when the consequences of truth were something they weren’t ready to cope with. She cared nothing if people knew she’d slept with a woman, but Faye’s grim resistance to the facts made it difficult. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘The Blackwells had a short spell in Crewe so I was running a few things past a mate down there.. He was asking me how we got on with her.’

‘She had a bit of a reputation for being fierce.’ Every step dug the hole deeper, but really — was it worth telling the truth when a lie was harmless?

‘I’ll say.’ Aditi rolled her eyes.

‘She left very suddenly, he said, and no-one seemed to know why.’

‘Maybe she had family issues.’ Now, at last, Ashleigh found a safe patch of ground on which to rest. There was no sign that Faye had brought her husband with her when she’d moved. Her sympathetic side asserted herself. She wasn’t in a position to criticise anyone for falling apart in the aftermath of a breakup.

‘Aye, maybe. But they call her Faye Scandal down there, apparently. The gossip is there was an affair and the husband threw her out.’

‘Watch out for your virtue then,’ Aditi jeered at him, and took herself off over to her desk, laughing.

*

It was four o’clock by the time Jude dragged himself back from Carlisle, bypassing the incident room for the sake of his own sanity and heading up towards Faye’s office instead. Outside the spring daylight had faded early and the shadows had gathered in her north-facing room. She was at her desk, frowning at the screen of her laptop and the pool of light from the desk lamp illuminated an empty M&S sandwich wrapper and