Folly Read Free Page B

truth. She wouldn’t have been surprised if she had passed out or thrown up – or both.
    Warmth from the fire, and from bodies pressed into the space around the bar, felt good to Alex. The smells of beer and piping hot meat pies were comfortingly familiar.
    â€˜I say, Alex,’ Major Stroud boomed. Foam speckled a mustache rolled out along his upper lip like iron-gray Velcro. ‘We’re all on your side, y’know. Not one of us thinks you were more than an unlucky witness, but you do need to bring the rest of us up to date. Was there as much blood as they say?’
    Cathy Cummings gripped the edge of the bar, her eyes filled with tears.
    The brandy had already started to calm Alex down. She rubbed Cathy’s back and shook her head at the major. ‘You don’t know. Maybe my formerly secret hobby is knocking people off in the woods.’
    Someone laughed – big Kev Winslet – and a communal snicker went up.
    â€˜I shouldn’t joke,’ Alex said, embarrassed. ‘Some of us get shaken up and then we’re silly at the most inappropriate times. Sorry about that. There’s nothing for me to tell, Major’ – the police had been sure she knew to keep her mouth shut – ‘we’ll hear what the authorities want us to hear soon enough.’
    Going to work beside Cathy, Alex served customers and kept pork pies, Cornish pasties and sausage rolls – standard pub fare – popping in and out of the microwave at a great rate. She forked pickled onions and Scotch eggs from giant jars filled with vinegar and pickling spices. But she repeatedly needed to pull her attention back to what she was doing, trying not to see images of the man with the terrible wound in his neck, or to think how he had bled out on the frozen ground, alone except for a little dog.
    Goosebumps shot up her arms.
    â€˜I say,’ Major Stroud said. ‘Aren’t you going to tell us at least something about it? Man or woman, that much at least? How was the killing done?’
    Alex shook her head. ‘We’ll all know more than we want to before long. I was told not to discuss anything. The police will be stopping by with questions soon enough, not that I can think anyone here knows anything.’
    There, that was already more than she needed to report. Alex shut her mouth firmly.
    â€˜I should think so,’ old Mary Burke said from her chair beside her younger sister Harriet’s. ‘Gossiping never did anyone any good.’ Although Mary had been known to spill a few beans on occasion. The sisters, both retired teachers, ran a tea shop that also offered books and handcrafts for sale.
    Through an archway into the small restaurant, Alex could see her mother at the reception desk. Lily met her daughter’s eyes and smiled encouragement, then went back to poring over the reservation book and behaving as if nothing unusual had happened. Quietly turned out as long as Alex could remember, Lily was professional in her black dress, and in her manner. A handsome woman, statuesque beside Alex, with a light hand when it came to make-up, Lily knew how to manage any situation.
    â€˜I expect they called Doc Harrison up there,’ someone said.
    â€˜Would that be James or Tony Harrison?’ Major Stroud said, and looked put out at the laughter that followed.
    Kev Winslet, who worked as gamekeeper on the Derwinter estate, said, ‘Doc James, I expect, unless Doc Tony is treatin’ humans now.’ He joined in the mirth.
    Tony Harrison had, so it was told, disappointed his father by choosing veterinary medicine rather than joining the senior Harrison’s practice. When they’d both been teenagers, Tony and Alex had become friends, two of a kind, both quiet and determined people. Tony was several years older and had left for university before Alex got a scholarship to prestigious Slade Art College in London.
    Up on the hill that morning, both James and Tony