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

‘When did you come out?’

‘When I was twenty-one. I thought they ought to know.’ It had spared his mother the futile exercise of hoping he’d find himself a nice young woman, though not the disappointment of realising she'd have to look to friends for the surrogate pleasure of grandchildren.

‘Were they disappointed?’

‘That’s an understatement.’

‘Angry?’

‘Not to my face.’ On reflection, perhaps they’d taken it well. His father had worked in the shipyards and to him it was a shame, akin to siring a son who was a criminal. It didn’t change the love they had for him, only the way it was expressed. He’d no doubt his father had been angry — blamed everybody else, for sure — but the love between them, always unspoken, had been strong enough to survive.

‘No. Mine neither.’ Tyrone looked beyond him, out of the window and down towards the shallow river to where a couple of smokers, sitting outside, huddled their jackets around them and puffed away in discontent. Following his gaze Doddsy, undertaking a crusade against a quarter of a century of chain-smoking and succeeding only in cutting down, weakened enough to want to join them just for one quick smoke, but Tyrone was abstemious and clean-living so he stayed where he was. ‘My mum gave me a hug and told me she was proud of me. She knew, of course. They always do. And I can see why she was disappointed. Not because she minds, not really. It’s because they don’t have a daughter and she always hoped I’d bring someone home that she could have that sort of relationship with. Optimistic, I dare say. But that’s what I think she wanted.’

‘And your dad was different?’ If only Phil hadn’t been anywhere near the site of Gracie’s murder, or had arrived just that little bit later, when she was dead, so that he wouldn’t have tried to intervene and he wouldn’t have disturbed the body and ended up soaked in the woman’s blood and looking like her butcher.

‘He’s a great guy, Dad is.’ Tyrone sighed. ‘When I told him I was gay he went quiet for a while, avoided me for a week or so, then started talking to me again. Never said anything. Never explained. Certainly never apologised. But he dropped the stuff about poofs and men being real men and so on.’

But had Phil changed his mind? ‘And you reckon he meant it?’

‘He’s a traditional old stick, is Dad. He won’t change what he thinks. He might change the way he talks, because he know other people find it unacceptable and every now and then something comes up. You should have heard him when he and Mum were at church and people were talking about this Rainbow Festival. No place for that in the church. It wants to stop meddling with people’s private lives. None of this woke nonsense.’ His mimicry of his father was clever but fond. ‘He’s traditional enough, thank God, that he still thinks blood’s thicker than water.’

‘I expect he’s wondering what he did wrong.’ Gloomy at the folly of his fellow humans, Doddsy in his turn looked outside and the antics of a couple of ducks, scrabbling in the shallows for bread that the smokers tossed to them, cheered him up.

‘Yeah, I expect so. But he needs to loosen up.’

‘We all do, to an extent.’

Tyrone chopped his slice of cake into neat pieces and Doddsy found himself staring in fascination at his long, thin fingers. ‘I don’t think he killed Gracie Pepper, you know. But I wonder if that’s what I want to think. It’s easy to delude yourself. We all do it, all the time.’

‘Did he know her?’

‘Better than he lets on. I don’t understand why people can’t be open about their sexuality.’

Doddsy knew. It wasn’t easy being an older generation. It made it harder to be at ease with yourself. He had more sympathy with Giles Butler than either Jude or Ashleigh had managed to muster. Sometimes you just wanted to make life easier. And the implications of what Tyrone had just said caught on. ‘What did you say?’

‘Gracie. She’s a lesbian.’ Tyrone beamed across the table at him. ‘Hey, Doddsy. Don’t tell me you didn’t know. I just assumed you did but no-one was saying anything.’

‘I’d no idea. Where did you hear that?’

‘Not so much hear as overhear. I was leaving this morning and Mum and Dad were talking about it. He said something not very complimentary about Gracie being a dyke.’ He crinkled his face in distaste. ‘Excuse my language. I thought about going back and saying something but Mum tore a rare strip off him for me, so I didn’t need to stay and get involved in the aggro. When I went out she was lecturing him about the language he used and he was banging on about political correctness making people think it’s cool to be gay when they should just get on with the way they were born, or something like that. I left them to it.’

Gracie, gay. It looked as if Faye had been right after all. And the note, which he’d taken seriously at first and then managed to write off as an ill-judged prank, suddenly became more that that, morphed on the instant into a very real threat to himself and others. ‘Quite right.’

Tyrone’s anxious eyes searched his face. ‘I thought it must be common knowledge. If it isn’t that doesn’t look good for him does it? If he’s right, I mean. But it didn’t look good for him anyway.’

The last thing Doddsy needed – the very last thing – was Phil implicated in two murders. He pictured the look on Jude’s face when he heard. ‘You know I can’t talk about it.’

‘I’m not sentimental, mate.’ Tyrone’s anxiety had transmitted itself from face to fingers, and he