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

He laid the card down on the arm of the chair and took a quick check at the rest of the pack. ‘This card has two cats. The others have one.’

‘Yes.’ The black cat that was the characteristic companion of the Queen of Wands was, indeed, squaring up to the grey one that had drawn her to the deck, the two of them with their backs arched, their tails bushed out, their ears back. ‘The black cat signals domestication. That’s one interpretation for the card.’

In front of her, the card offered the most oblique of warnings. There were many tarot decks and this one was so different to any other that she’d seen that it almost made interpretation impossible. The usually-benevolent depiction of the Queen had no place here. Her narrowed eyes made her aggressive, thorns studded the stems of the flowers she held in her left hand, and she tilted the staff she gripped in her right towards the battling cats like a weapon.

‘Domestic discord,’ he said, reviewing the card again, this time sitting back for a different perspective. ‘A very strong woman.’

Had he seen what she’d seen? ‘Yes. It’s usually a card associated with benevolence, but this particular depiction doesn’t look very benevolent to me.’

‘And what should I learn from that?’

‘Nothing. It’s a thought to hold. Something for you to turn over in your head and come back to when you have an issue.’

‘Come back to when I have an issue. Right.’ He laughed. ‘Is it me, or does she look like our new Super?’

‘I thought that, too.’ So he had seen it. Now, then, was the moment to confess, offered to her on a plate by a cheap pack of cards, bought at random in a junk shop. All she needed to do was find the right form of words. She picked up the card and looked at it, at the narrowed eyes that so clearly represented Faye’s expression when they’d met outside the canteen, at the confrontational body language, even at the short dark hair and the unrelenting scowl. ‘And do you know the funny thing about Faye?’

She said it quietly so that it was a whisper and she’d turned away from him as she spoke. He didn’t hear, and perhaps she hadn’t really wanted him to.

‘I’ll take that as a warning to mind my Ps and Qs,’ he said, still looking at the card. ‘Or I should say, a reinforcement of the warning she’s already given me.’

For all her authority and confidence, Faye was insecure. That might be the reason she’d rushed into a same-sex relationship with a junior officer. From a position of power, she could pretend they were equal partners and yet exert a measure of unspoken control. There was a hint of insecurity behind the Queen’s scowl, too, a woman who would choose a pre-emptive strike rather than wait for the past to catch up with her. ‘What warning?’ Did Faye know about her and Jude? Was the warning to her as well?

‘She’s concluded I’m over-promoted and the beneficiary of privilege. As such, she doesn’t need my entitled presence getting in the way of her new order.’

‘It’s just what she’s like.’

‘We don’t know what she’s like. She’s only been in post for one day. That’s my point. She doesn’t know what we’re like, either. I’ve no issues at all with anything she said, in principle, but the woman could at least have given me a chance to prove I’m in the job on merit.’

He was young for the job and his rapid rise through the ranks had almost certainly been facilitated by a preference for the traditional, but he delivered. Maybe there were others who could perform equally well, but you couldn’t argue that he wasn't capable. ‘She’s a bit sensitive about her position. That’s all.’

‘She’s no need to be.’ He looked down at the card and his scowl turned to a smile, most probably at the sight of that feisty grey cat. ‘Let’s put her back in the pack. I don’t want to talk about her just now.’ He shuffled Faye Scanlon, Queen of Wands, back into the deck, replaced it on the bag and dropped it on the floor beside the sofa.

She should tell him about Faye now, while the subject was up, but her courage failed her. Instead she put a hand on his forearm to tease him. ‘What have you been up to while I’m away? Chatting up all the chicks?’

He slid his arm around her. ‘I was thinking while you were away. It’s maybe time I took you along to meet my mum.’

‘You think?’ It was a curse to be born sensuous, to love smell and touch and colour. She closed her eyes and pressed her face against his chest. They’d been together for four months and if it had begun as a fling, an affair for each of them to get an obsession out of their system, it was taking a long time to clear.

‘Yes. It’s Mikey’s twenty-first in a few weeks and I’m going to have to show up. I thought I might take you along for some moral support.’

Jude’s relationship with his brother was rocky at best, but she suspected that wasn’t why he’d want her with him. The real source of his annoyance was the ex-girlfriend, who was bound to be there. He wouldn’t be human if the Queen of Wands, with her hints of at jealousy, hadn’t made him think of her, just as every card Ashleigh turned up when she carried out a reading for herself always hinted at the loss of Scott, her only love. ‘Will Becca be there?’

He pulled her closer. ‘Yes. But she doesn’t bite.’

Becca Reid didn’t bark, either. She was the mildest-mannered pillar of her community. There was nothing to fear from her. ‘Then it sounds like a plan.’

‘Good. Maybe