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

with the homicides. A word out of place and all the speculation starts doing us damage and people get hurt. That’s what really worries me.’

Chapter 13

Becca Reid, bending down to place a bowl of cat food beside the back door, knew immediately who was at the door. Jude’s taste in cars was expensive and distinctive, and she’d learned to recognise the throaty roar of his Mercedes as it hummed through the village of Wasby when he came to visit his mother. Then the doorbell rang and Holmes confirmed Jude’s arrival, interrupting his lunge in towards his supper and performing some particularly improbable contortion to slide around her ankles and head to the front door.

Becca followed his grey shadow into the hall. Animals always knew, and the treacherous Holmes had always seemed to regard himself as Jude’s cat rather than hers. Though common sense warned her to avoid her ex for the sake of her heart, she continually fell into the trap of engaging with him in the hope that the persistent tension between them would subside. It never quite worked out like that, and even if their best efforts to be polite fooled other people, the low level tussle they engaged in was profoundly unsatisfying.

It was as well they weren’t still together. ‘Jude.’ She snapped the door open more smartly than she’d intended and Holmes shot through it with a chirp of ecstasy and rubbed round Jude’s ankles.

‘You don’t want to be out on a night like this, old lad.’ He bent and picked the cat up. ‘Sorry to bother you, Becca. I was passing, and wondered if I could have a word.’

‘Of course.’ She stepped aside to let him in. ‘You know where to go.’

Still carrying Holmes, he headed through to the living room and sat down, stretching his legs out towards the fire she’d just lit. Holmes, on his lap, set about settling, kneading with claws out. ‘Busy today?’

‘Yes. And you must be, too.’ The two murders that had rocked the town were his problem. He’d be worrying at them, digging for information, turning every stone to see what lay beneath. This wouldn’t be a social visit. ‘Coffee?’

‘No, thanks. I won’t stay long. I wanted to ask you if you knew Gracie Pepper.’

‘Yes. I work out of the hospital. But you know that. She worked in the elderly care ward.’ He would know that, too. ‘She hadn’t been here long but she made an impact. She was very…’ She paused to search for a word that fully encompassed Gracie’s love of life, and failed. ‘Bubbly.’

He nodded, his expression sombre. ‘I’ve just been up in Carlisle. At the post-mortem.’

She tried to read his expression. There had been so much talk. How much of the truth would he tell her? ‘Did she suffer?’

‘No.’ He rubbed behind Holmes’s ears, frowning. ‘Off the record, of course, but it was fairly straightforward. One knife wound, just next to the heart. Not instant, but very quick. If that makes it any easier to think about.’

‘We’re all so shocked. She was just so…so alive.’ Ten years of nursing, most of it as a district nurse calling in on the old and the terminally ill, had left Becca accustomed to death, sometimes to sudden death, but some lives left a greater echo when they were lost and the shadow of malice aforethought always deepened shock. ‘And in the churchyard, too.’ She cut through the path at the bottom of it on a regular basis, on her way down to Adam’s if she was walking down there from work or if they were coming back to his house after an evening out. ‘Right in the heart of the community.’ It strikes at us all, one of her patients had declared, and Becca had agreed with her even while trying to dampen down the drama.

‘Yes.’ He was looking at her, his grey eyes serious. ‘I was nearby, as it happened. A few of us were having a drink in the Board and Elbow. Someone called us down there and someone else said it was a nurse. For a moment I was afraid it was you.’

She leaned forward and poked the fire, which didn't need it, and when she sat back up again the heat of the flames had brought a scarlet flush to her face and the red glare of the embers danced in front of her eyes. ‘We should both be used to dead bodies, shouldn’t we? But it never gets any easier.’

‘Ain’t that the truth? I didn’t come here to upset you. I just wondered if you could tell me anything about her.’

On reflection, Becca was surprised how little she did know. That had been the thing about Gracie. In the couple of months she’d been at the hospital everyone had been aware of her whenever she was present, and had talked about her when she wasn’t. She’d quickly become the one to lighten the gravest situation with a dash of bitter humour, often crude but always funny, the one whose witticisms were quoted and repeated, central to every anecdote told in the aftermath of a work night out even though she never stayed for more than the quickest of drinks. And yet somehow what she knew about Gracie, other than that, was sketchy, as if she’d kept her real self hidden behind that bright mask.

Lots of people did that. Sometimes she wished it was a gift she had herself, rather than betraying what she thought and she felt to anyone who had an iota of understanding, just as she was betraying herself right then to Jude. ‘She lived up in Castletown, I think. On her own. She wasn’t married, didn’t have a partner or anything.’

‘Do you know of any close friends?’

‘No. She was friendly to everyone but not especially close to anyone.’

‘Do you have any idea what she was doing in