Death at Rainbow Cottage, Jo Allen [top 100 books of all time checklist .TXT] 📗

as usual, the idyllic English county town apparently unmoved by the loss of one of its own. He parked on Boroughgate, slipped the parking disc onto the dashboard and got out of the car. The flag of St George fluttered from the church tower and a traffic warden moved from car to car outside the market hall, from which two rows of sandstone buildings scaled the hill like a stairway to heaven.

The Cosy Cupcake Cafe was on the square and he paused outside it to contemplate the menu (all dishes home-made). A card in the steamed-up window announced that it was business as usual and inside every seat was full.

The smell of good coffee was first to greet him when he pushed open the door, with the fragrance of an all-day breakfast hot on its heels and a meaty scent — lasagne? — trailing in their wake, ushering him in from the chilly afternoon. Inside the cafe a knot of interested customers clustered around the counter.

Appleby’s citizens, seated and standing, turned and froze as one as he came in, as if he’d walked into the wrong Glasgow pub, expecting him. Used to that kind of reaction, frequently in more threatening situations, Jude offered the general population an iron-clad smile and sidled up to the counter. Doddsy had been right about the chintz and the tea cosies, but the wholesome smells of the place made his mouth water and gave him a moment of regret for the petrol-station sandwich he’d snatched on the go as an excuse for lunch. If the home cooking was Len’s it must be a fine tribute to him but the cakes on display had a distinctly mass-produced look, a sad stop-gap for something authentic. ‘I’m looking for Mrs Skinner.’

The knot of humanity unravelled to reveal a short, solid woman behind the counter, and she emerged to meet him. She was clad in an appropriate amount of black, her mourning leavened by the pinny imprinted with comic ginger cats that was unravelling from around her waist. He put her in her mid fifties, a twinkling and active woman, quick on her feet. Her face had the same shape as her brother’s, the same mouth, the same square forehead and something in her eyes — life — gave him a clue as to what Len Pierce might have looked like had he lived beyond Sunday afternoon. ‘I’m Maisie Skinner. You’re Detective Satterthwaite?’

He flashed his warrant card in confirmation and she looked from it to him and back again as if she mistrusted it until, seeming satisfied, she stepped back. ‘Come through the back.’ She turned back to her customers. ‘You lot can look after yourselves. But make sure you leave the cash on the counter for me. And behave. We’ve got the law in here.’

Under the keen stares of the onlookers, Jude followed her into the back of the cafe, through a small area where the paraphernalia of sandwich-making littered a steel-topped unit, and into a tiny office. She closed the door behind him and motioned him towards the only chair. For herself, she pulled a stool from under the desk, removing a sheaf of invoices from it and dropping them on the floor. A shaft of light filtered through a dirty window and onto a desk covered with box files whose labels showed ten years’ worth of paperwork. Maisie Skinner’s loss looked as if it might be financial as well as personal.

‘You want to talk to me about Lenny.’ She settled her broad backside precariously on the narrow stool.

‘Yes. I imagine you’re very upset by the whole business—’

‘But you need to talk to me to find whoever killed him. Yes.’ Her bottom lip trembled and she folded her hands on the desk like a schoolteacher. ‘Poor Lenny. He was such a lovely man. But I did warn him. If you mess with the kind of people he mixed with, this sort of thing is always going to happen. It’s like consorting with prostitutes.’

Maisie Skinner was, Jude recognised, one of those people with an old-fashioned view of sexual morality and a clear idea that virtue was the only guaranteed protector. ‘I’m not looking for moral judgements, Mrs Skinner.’

‘No, you're right.’ She surprised him by laughing. ‘I might as well be honest with you. Someone else will tell you what I think if I’m not. I didn’t approve of his lifestyle. Not at all. But that didn’t mean we didn’t get on. We did. Just because he made the wrong choices didn’t mean I didn’t care.’

Wrong was relative, and Jude didn’t bother to challenge her because he was policing to the law not to someone else’s prejudices. Anyway, he knew exactly what she meant because he’d come across the exact situation with Mikey, whose idea of harmless fun had nearly led him into very serious trouble. Jude disapproved of his young brother’s approach to life just as Maisie Skinner had disapproved of hers, though in a different context. ‘When did you last see him?’

‘Saturday evening. He came to cash up and take the takings away. We never leave money in here overnight, even in an honest place like this.’

‘You own the business jointly?’

‘Yes.’ She waved a hand at the paperwork and her face creased in perplexity. ‘God knows what happens now. It’s not the sort of thing you plan for, though maybe we should have.’

‘And the shop?’

‘It’s rented. The business just about washes its face but it’ll struggle without our Lenny’s baking.’ She shook her head. ‘Him and me have been in this business nearly thirty years. Now look at it.’ She pulled a paper tissue from a box on the desk and dabbed at her eyes. ‘Nothing left of him but a freezer full of beef stroganoff and a double chocolate cake that never got finished on Saturday. I don’t know how I’ll bear to throw it out. We joked about