I nearly jumped right out of my skin. I whirled to see a woman several inches shorter than me with silver-blonde hair. It was hard to tell how old she was, with her big, blue eyes and waiflike figure. She looked beautiful but fragile, as if she’d been made out of the same bone china as Lionel’s little teacups.
I gave a nervous laugh. “Sorry, love—I was looking for the loo. Think I must have taken a wrong turning somewhere.” I smiled at her, trying to hide the pounding of my heart.
She smiled back. “The bathroom’s just down the hall, the second on your right. You’ve come to see Lionel, haven’t you?”
I nodded. “Are you, er, Mrs. T.?”
“Patricia, please.” She held out one tiny hand, and I took it carefully, paranoid I’d crush it with my plumber’s grip. “Delighted to meet you.”
“Yeah, same here. Oh—I’m Tom, sorry. Tom Paretski. Did you make those shortbread fingers? Because they were lovely. Best I’ve ever tasted.” I managed to stop babbling, eventually.
A tiny flush of pink appeared in her cheeks, and her smile deepened. “I only followed my mother’s recipe. But I’m so glad you enjoyed them.”
There was a moment’s pause.
“Still, I mustn’t keep you.” Her cool, soft fingers slipped away from mine, and I carried on mechanically towards the bathroom she’d pointed out. Bloody hell, she was unreal. Unearthly. She was the sort of woman you could imagine slaying dragons for, or launching a thousand ships . . . I shook my head. What kind of effect did she have on a straight bloke, for fuck’s sake?
The bathroom was big and plush, and completely bare of dirty secrets, unless you counted that Lionel didn’t bother to clear his pubes out of the drain after a shower. Mrs. T.—Patricia—was still audibly pottering around upstairs, so although I stood on the landing for a moment, listening, I didn’t try to look in any more rooms.
God, Phil was going to love me.
When I got back downstairs, I got the feeling the interview was over. Lionel and Phil were standing by their chairs, and all the shortbread was gone. Bastards.
Lionel shot me a sharp look. “I hope you didn’t get lost?” The implication and steal a few priceless knickknacks on your way hung in the air between us.
I gave him a carefree smile. “Ran into your missus, actually. Lovely lady.”
Lionel’s expression softened, though he still looked a bit wary. “She is indeed. Her father was a High Court judge, you know.”
I wasn’t sure what that had to do with the price of fish—did he wish he’d married the judge?—but I nodded and tried to look suitably impressed.
“Well, as I was saying to your colleague, I’m afraid I have to ask you to leave. An appointment with my solicitor, you know how it is. Sorry to cut things short—but, well, I’m sure the police can only be days away from arresting that young man in any case.”
Phil didn’t look happy. “Before we go, could I just ask you—”
Lionel cut him off. “Sorry—I really do have to go.” He steered us firmly out into the hall, managing without any of the little shooing motions the Rev had used. There was no doubt about it, the bloke had presence.
“Are your guests leaving so soon, Lionel?” Again, the melodic voice seemed to come from nowhere, without warning.
We all turned to look up at Patricia, who was standing halfway down the stairs as if she’d been posed there by MGM. I glanced at Lionel. As he gazed up at his wife, he gave a gentle, seemingly unconscious smile that made him look about ten years younger. “Oh, you know, darling. That wretched appointment with Cameron.”
“Oh? I thought that wasn’t until four thirty.”
“Change of plan, my dear. He has another client who’s being difficult, so . . .” He shrugged.
“Of course.” She wafted down to stand on the bottom step. “Well, it was lovely to meet you, Mr. Paretski.”
“Tom,” I said, stepping up quickly and taking both her hands, because weirdly, it seemed the only proper thing to do.
She smiled. “Tom, then. And your friend . . .?” She glanced over at Phil.
“Morrison,” Lionel said. “He’s a private investigator.”
Patricia’s eyes widened. “That must be very exciting.”
“Mostly routine,” Phil said, like he couldn’t give a toss what she thought. I wondered what the hell his problem was.
“Mrs.— Patricia,” I blurted out. “Don’t suppose I could trouble you for that shortbread recipe?”
“Of course you may. Would you like me to get it now?” She looked delighted.
Lionel, on the other hand, wasn’t a happy bunny. His bushy eyebrows lowered like storm clouds over eyes that were getting ready to shoot out lightning bolts. “Darling, I really—”
“Nah, that’s okay.” I didn’t want to cause any domestics. I dug in my pocket for a card. “All my contact info’s on that. Don’t want to make your hubby late for his appointment.”
I pressed the card into her cool little hand, and we left.
“Bloody hell,” Phil muttered out of the side of his mouth as we crunched back to the car. “Did you see Treadgood’s face when you were chatting up his wife? Enjoy living dangerously, do you?”
“I wasn’t chatting her up! But I’ll tell you what, if I was straight . . .” I sighed. “She’d still be way out of my league.”
“She’s just a woman,” Phil said, sounding amused.
“No, she’s a lady. There’s a difference.”
“Yeah, and it’s made of paper and lives in a bank. Come on, Romeo, time to bugger off before the lord of the manor sets the dogs on us.”
“You know, class is nothing to do with money,” I told him as we strapped ourselves into the Golf.
“So what are you trying to say? We should all know our place and not get above ourselves, is that it? Can’t take the council estate out of the boy? Thanks a fucking bunch.” The gears complained as Phil put the car in reverse a bit too viciously.
“That’s not what I meant. I just meant . . . Patricia Treadgood’s a lady, that’s all.”
“Fine. I hope you’ll be very happy together.” We drove out onto the road to play hunt-the-pothole again. “Course, you might have to bump off hubby first, but I’m sure she’ll forgive you for that. It’d be the classy thing to do.”
“You know, right now I’d like to do something really classy to your arse.”
There was an excruciating silence that lasted through several potholes. Okay, so maybe I hadn’t meant it to come out quite like that.
“Listen,” I said quickly, trying to break the tension that was crackling through the air. “There’s something I ought to tell you.”
“Like what?” Phil sounded cautious, but then we were just getting to the worst bit of the road.
“It’s about the case. And the Rev. I went to see him again yesterday—I wanted another chance to search the place.” I paused. If I was waiting for a pat on the back, it was a good job I wasn’t holding my breath.
“You what? On your own? You twat!” Phil’s face darkened, its lines hard. “Have you forgotten this is a murder investigation? And the Rev’s a sodding suspect?”
“He didn’t do it,” I said earnestly. “I found what he was hiding, and it’s nothing to do with Melanie or her death.”
“And how the bloody hell do you know that? If you’ve got something to hide, you can be blackmailed about it. That’s how it works.”
I was shaking my head. “You didn’t see it. It was, well, it was a bit pathetic, really. Just a few really tame gay books and some old letters and pictures.”
“Who were the letters from?” Phil asked.
I shrugged. “Dunno. I didn’t read them. They were old. They obviously weren’t anything to do with Melanie.”
“Have you even been listening? People have been blackmailed over stuff that’s fifty years old.”
“You what? The Rev isn’t even fifty years old.”
“You know what I mean. Please tell me you at least looked at the photos to see if there was anyone in them we know.”
“Look, I’m sorry, all right? They weren’t rude or anything. It just didn’t seem relevant.”
“Nobody knows what’s relevant or not, at this stage. I can’t believe you didn’t look at them.”
“I don’t like prying, all right?”
“Don’t like . . . It’s what you do, for fuck’s sake!”
“No, it’s what you do. I’ve got a so-called gift I never asked for. I didn’t choose this—not like you did. You’re the one who decided to make a business out of poking your nose into other people’s lives.”
“So basically,” Phil said, a frown creasing his forehead and an edge to his tone I didn’t much like, “what you’re saying is, my job disgusts you.”
“That’s not what I . . .” I trailed off. Maybe it was what I’d meant. “I don’t know, all right? All I know is, I don’t feel comfortable doing it.”
“Feel more comfortable watching Graham go down for his girlfriend’s murder, would you? While the bastard who did it looks on and laughs? Would that be all right with your holier-than-fucking-thou conscience?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! That’s not what I’m bloody saying, and you know it.” We’d turned onto Brock’s Hollow road, and I’d had enough. “You can let me out here. I’ll get a bus back or something.”
“Don’t be so bloody stupid. I’m not leaving you stranded here on your own,” Phil snapped, as if I were a none-too-bright ten-year-old who’d never quite got the message about stranger danger.
“Worried the Rev’s going to pop up to have his way with me and bury me in the churchyard? Actually, hang on a minute,” I said, my anger draining away as I thought about it. “If the Rev killed Melanie, why wouldn’t he do just that? Why not hide a body with a whole lot of other bodies? Wouldn’t it be way riskier taking the body somewhere else? I mean, he’d have to get it there, and it was always going to get found eventually, up on Nomansland Common. The whole bloody village walks their dogs up there. Even the Girl Guides go up and build dens there.”
Phil’s knuckles were still white on the steering wheel, and he took a couple of deep breaths before he answered. “You might have a point,” he said, like it was being dragged out of him along with his fingernails. “But you’ve got to remember, people don’t always do the logical thing when they’ve got a body on their hands. Most murderers don’t plan to kill.”
“Yeah, but you said this one did, didn’t you? The phone call, I mean. That had to be planned in advance.”
“If it was the murderer who made the call.”
“Oh, come on—it’d have to be a bit of a coincidence, otherwise.”
“Coincidences happen. That’s why there’s a word for them.”
“There’s a word for unicorns too, but I haven’t seen a right lot of them prancing down the high street lately.”
“There’s a word for smart-arses, come to that.” Phil’s tone was still grim, but he’d eased up on the death glares, and he was keeping to the speed limit as we drove into the village.
I relaxed a bit. “Only one? I thought you had a better vocabulary than that. You need to stop reading the Sun and start buying yourself a proper paper. You know, one where you don’t just look at the pictures.”
“I can find all the words I need to describe you in the Sun, thanks.”
“What, like cor, what a stunna? I’m flattered—I never knew you saw me that way.”
Phil just shook his head, but he was smiling.
“Hey, are you doubting my abilities as a glamour model?”
“You do seem to be lacking a couple of essential qualifications,” he said, glancing at my chest.
“You haven’t seen me with my kit off. At least, not since school. I like to think I’ve filled out a bit since then.”
Now he was laughing. “To page three model standards? I bloody well hope not.”
“If you hate tits that much, how come you spent so much time at school hanging around with Wayne Hills and that crowd?”
“God knows.” There was a beat. “You know I—”
“Don’t,” I said. It was all water under the bridge, now. “That was a long time ago, all right? You’re not the same bloke you were then, and neither am I.”
He glanced at me as we turned into Four Candles Lane. “You reckon? Because I don’t think you’ve changed all that much.”
“Great, so now you think I never grew up.” And presumably, never got over that stupid crush I’d had on him.
“No, that’s not what I mean. You just . . . Forget it.” I opened my mouth, about to push him on it, when he beat me to it. “Do you— Fuck.” He shook his head again. “Sod it . . . I know this is a daft idea, but do you want to get dinner some time?”
I stared at him. After about a minute, I realised I still had my mouth open, so I shut it, quick. Then I opened it again. “You what? Are you asking me out?”
“Maybe.”
I couldn’t seem to get my head around the idea.
I think my silence got to Phil. “Look, forget it, I said it was a daft—”
“No!” I blurted. “I mean, yeah, I’ll go out with you. Um. For dinner, you know. I’m not saying I want to be your boyfriend, because obviously . . .” My mouth still wasn’t working properly. Or my brain, come to that, so I shut the one and hoped the other would sort itself out PDQ.
Phil looked a bit shell-shocked. I wasn’t sure if it was down to my babbling, the fact he’d asked me out, or that I’d said yes. It was probably just as well we’d got to the Four Candles, as I had a nasty feeling if we talked any longer, we’d bugger it all up again.
“Right,” he said, as he parked the car next to my van. “Tomorrow all right?”
Probably didn’t want to give either of us too long to have second thoughts. “Yeah, that’s fine. Why don’t I come out to yours, for a change, and we can walk into town from there?”
“My place is a bit of a mess . . .”
“So? What am I, a domestic goddess? Have you got any pets?”
“What? No.” He sounded baffled.
“So you win over me on the cat-hair factor, at any rate.”
“Fine, fine. Just don’t expect much, all right? I’ve only just moved in. You still got the address?”
“Yes, Mum.”
“Call me that while we’re out and you’ll be paying for your own dinner.”
I’d thought I would be anyway. God, this really was going to be a date. Phil Morrison was Taking Me Out For Dinner. An embarrassing little shiver ran through me at the thought, as if I were still at school, lusting after him from afar. Bloody hell, I was going to have to watch myself. At this rate, I was going to start doodling little hearts on my invoices and putting Tom loves Phil inside. I shook my head to clear it of the frightening image.
“Are you all right?” Phil asked.
“Yeah—fine. Um. See you around seven, seven thirty?”
He nodded. “Whenever you can get there.”
“Right. I’ll see you then, then.” I got out of the car, still not quite believing it. Me and Phil, going on a date.
I might even have something to tell Gary about, next time I saw him.