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

He walked up the path and rang the bell. DI Dodd answered the door, ushered him over the threshold. They hugged, and the door closed.

A wail of a siren alerted her. Natalie flung the car into gear and shot out of the estate without looking, turned right, turned left and dived up a side road, and down a farm track. When the blue lights had turned up towards the estate and a second and third car had headed up towards Rainbow Cottage, she drove out of the farm track and began to thread her cautious way through the network of narrow country lanes towards Penrith.

Chapter 25

Faye lived in a tall sandstone terrace in Brunswick Square, a location Ashleigh noted with a certain degree of discomfort. It was halfway between her house and Jude’s, so that when she moved between one and the other she’d have to be prepared to bump into her boss.

Once she’d done what everyone had gone on at her to do and cleared the air, there would be no need to care about it. Nevertheless, her courage wavered. A bird sang in the trees and an early and confused butterfly hunted for scant pickings, a bright spot in the dull greys and greens of a flower bed. Nothing scares me, she reminded herself, but it wasn’t true. What had always scared her was her own capability for screwing up every relationship that mattered and Faye, through the part she’d played in the final rift with Scott, had precipitated the ruin of the most important one of them.

But it was done. Her marriage had already been on course for the rocks. All Faye’s intervention had done was give Scott another grievance and make Ashleigh feel foolish when she preferred to think of herself as smart, modern and intuitive. With that thought in mind, and the knowing images of her tarot advisers in her head, she pushed open the gate and walked up the short path.

Faye must have been as much on edge as Ashleigh herself, and let her sweat for a moment on the doorstep. Her footsteps inside the house were slow and deliberate, and the blurred signs of movement visible through the opaque glass pane in the door showed her crossing the hall and back again before she answered. When the door creaked open it did so without welcome. ‘Ashleigh, hi. Come on in. Sit down.’

It was an unsettled house. Ashleigh glimpsed piles of plates and lines of wine glasses on the table in the dining room and when Faye showed her through to the living room it was overflowing with boxes of books piled up next to empty bookshelves, with pictures stacked up against the skirting board. Faye’s taste in art was mainstream, good quality prints of well-known landscapes and the books that showed themselves on the top of the boxes were paperback fiction and hardback popular history.

Ashleigh sat on the edge of a hard, new sofa and tried to look as if she was comfortable. ‘Thanks for finding the time to see me.’ As if she were a supplicant.

‘Coffee?’ said Faye, an offer which begged refusal since there was already a steaming mug by the armchair opposite the television.

‘No, thank you.’

Faye sat down, lifted her mug, prolonging the pause until it generated tension, exactly as Jude sometimes did with a reluctant witness. ‘Tell me what you want.’

She always cut straight to the point. That was something, at least. ‘This interview that was in the paper. It’s nothing to do with me. You’ve nothing to fear from me.’

Faye raised an eyebrow. ‘I should hope not.’

How had she ever found this woman sympathetic. ‘Can we clear the air?’ That was what she’d come for. ‘Right. We had an affair. We both thought it was a mistake. It’s over, but it happened. Let’s not pretend it didn’t.’

‘I’m pretending nothing.’ That was a twisting of the truth. ‘But I prefer not to talk about it.’

‘Me, too. But that’s not the same as hiding from it. That makes us look guilty of something. We aren’t. At least, I’m not.’

‘Ashleigh.’ Faye turned the mug in her hands. If it was hot enough to hurt, she gave no sign. ‘I’m in a senior position. I can’t afford to compromise it by having people talk behind their hands. Gossip does nothing but damage.’

But people never paid any real attention to gossip, and Faye herself could hardly have listened to a word of the ill-fated workshops she’d insisted would make them all kinder and more inclusive. In the office, her behaviour towards Ashleigh had come closer than Claud would have considered acceptable to bullying. ‘Claud’s quite right. It doesn’t matter. If we hide what we are it’s tantamount to being ashamed of it.’

‘I’m not ashamed of anything.’

Her attitude was cold, her tone clipped and hostile. ‘Nobody cares what we did in bed.’

‘If nobody cares, why are you here?’

It didn’t need to be difficult but Faye would make it so. It was in her interests to set up a situation in which one partner was subordinate to the other. Ashleigh fidgeted with the cuff of her shirt. ‘Let’s at least admit we knew each other before we came here?’ That would have been the easy option, in the first place. ‘Someone will find out about it.’

‘I know you’ve told your boyfriend,’ said Faye, freezing her with a look.

‘I’m entitled to tell him.’

‘You aren’t entitled to tell anybody my private business.’

God, the woman was even more stubborn than Ashleigh had given her credit for. ‘I should probably tell you. The journalist who ran that article.’ A ridiculously trivial article, too, in the end, not worth the trouble. ‘She did call me before she wrote it.’ She raised a hand to stop Faye’s intervention. ‘I refused to speak to her. I’ll do the same if she rings back. I just thought