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

the issues in her present, that might hint at the significance of something she’d overlooked. The Saturday-stillness of the early morning frayed at the edges as a car made its way down Norfolk Road. A bird, wide awake and looking for a mate, screamed from a perch somewhere out of sight above the window. The low rumble of a northbound train rattled the windows and died away towards Plumpton.

‘The present,’ she reminded herself, turning over the card, knowing all too well what the issues were. On the table in front of her the Chariot, with its black and white sphinxes facing in different directions ahead of the stern Charioteer warned of a long and hard fight. ‘Who knew?’ she said, lightly, though joking with the cards was a high-risk strategy. Was this about Faye, or about life in general?

Or work. Somewhere out there Len Pierce’s killer was at large and the only consolation she could draw from it was that the card was upright, indicating eventual success. Was the murderer satisfied with a mission completed, or waiting for another victim to stumble across his path?

She shook the thought off. The cards were for personal problems. You’d have to be a special kind of fool to try and use them to solve a crime.

She stopped for a moment to think what her present expectations might be before turning the card that would shed light on them. She’d arrived in Cumbria an emotional refugee and she hadn’t hoped for anything except a new start. The World, a positive card, made her smile, reflected exactly that. It implied a beneficial journey, a new start. So far, so good. Maybe Faye had changed, wanted to wipe the slate clean as Ashleigh herself did, and only a lack of courage prompted her silence and prevented an apology.

Maybe. It had been a short relationship, but she thought she knew Faye’s weaknesses.

The next card made her frown. It represented the unexpected, but it was anything but, a card that came up too often in her readings to be a surprise — so often that she’d once checked the deck to make sure there wasn’t a duplicate. Jude would have an explanation for its repeated appearance, no doubt — that she’d somehow subliminally marked it so it always came out of the deck, or it was question of perception and it came up no more often than any other. No matter: here it was in front of her, the Three of Swords, a card that spoke too often of Scott, of infidelity and divorce, betrayal and incompatibility.

This time something else struck her about its grim and gaudy iconography. She didn’t need the image of its bleeding heart to remind her of Len Pierce, skewered by a six-inch blade.

‘That wasn’t helpful,’ she said, to herself rather than the deck. ‘You can do better than that. What am I looking out for in the immediate future?’ She turned over the fourth card.

‘Seriously?’ The High Priestess was one of her favourites, a confirmation of what she thought and believed, that instinct took its place alongside reason as an equal. Jude would have mistrusted it. She smiled at the thought, but the smile faded. In the picture on her card the figure of the High Priestess, like the Queen of Wands in Jude’s tarot deck, was looking out with exactly the same steely glance Faye Scanlon turned on everyone around her. I’m making this up, she chastised herself, seeing things that aren’t there.

That bloody woman, living rent-free in her head where Scott used to. Today the negative attributes of the card were there to see when she’d previously only sensed its positive ones — egotism, selfishness and a ruthless drive for success. It dawned on her, then, that after everything that had passed she didn’t particularly like the woman who was now very much her senior officer. With this uncomfortable thought, she approached the final card, the long term, with trepidation. The Page of Swords came up, reversed, another figure who was unreliable and unstable, warning of deception. She shook her head at it. More swords. ‘I’m in the police. I see people like that all the time. For God’s sake, unstable and unreliable probably describes half my colleagues!’

Looking at the cards in frustration, she shuffled the five back into the pack and reached for her coffee. A shadow in the doorway caught her eye and she turned to find Lisa standing there, clutching her shabby dressing gown round her skinny body and staring, a mug of coffee in her hand.

‘My God,’ Lisa said, cheerfully. ‘That was a bit of a show. You could make a better living doing that at fairgrounds than you do catching criminals. Did you realise you were talking to yourself?’

Sighing, Ashleigh folded the pack back into its gauzy shroud. ‘There’s no-one else to talk to at this time of the morning.’

‘Your man’s very dedicated, isn’t he? I’m sure if I was him I wouldn’t want to be sneaking out of a nice warm bed at this time on a Saturday morning, especially not with you still in it.’ Lisa came and sat next to Ashleigh on the sofa, peering at the silk-wrapped pack, but if she thought about requesting a reading, as she periodically did, she thought better of it.

‘It’s not like we never see each other.’ A bit of distance was probably a good thing, but Jude’s company hadn’t begun to grate on her just yet and neither, as far as she was aware, had hers on him. ‘We’re both off on Wednesday. I’ll see plenty of him then.’

‘I just love a job that’s five days a week.’ Lisa watched as Ashleigh sipped her coffee. ‘Shall I rustle us up some breakfast? I’d suggest going out but we’re such early birds there’ll be nowhere open.’

‘I’m not hungry.’

‘Okay,’ Lisa said, after a fractional pause. ‘What is it?’

Denial was