Guns in the Gallery Read Free Page B

women. Zosia had come to Fethering from Warsaw a few years before to investigate the circumstances of her brother’s death. She had stayed and her perky efficiency had totally transformed the running of the Crown and Anchor. Though Ted Crisp had been initially grudging about having a foreigner behind his bar, even he would now admit that he’d be lost without Zosia.
    â€˜Anyway, better leave you two ladies,’ he announced. ‘There’s a queue at the bar.’ There was. The pub was filling up with tourists as the April weather improved. ‘If I think of any more art jokes, I’ll be right back.’
    â€˜No hurry,’ said Carole, teasing again.
    For some minutes silence ensued, as the two women tackled their excellent seafood risotto. The Crown and Anchor’s chef, Ed Pollack, really was going from strength to strength. With him running the kitchen and Zosia the bar, the reputation of the pub was spreading even beyond the boundaries of West Sussex.
    Carole and Jude finished their food at the same time and both sat back, taking long swallows of Chilean Chardonnay.
    â€˜Jude, do you know Bonita Green?’ asked Carole.
    â€˜A bit.’
    â€˜Does that mean that she’s been to you for healing ?’ She could never quite keep a note of scepticism out of the word. To Carole’s regimented mind her neighbour’s practice of alternative therapies would always come under the heading of ‘New Age mumbo-jumbo’.
    â€˜No,’ Jude replied with a grin. ‘That’s not the only way I meet people, you know.’
    â€˜Of course not. Well, I met her this morning.’
    â€˜For the first time?’
    â€˜For the first time when we exchanged names, yes.’
    Jude couldn’t resist another grin. She never failed to be amused by her neighbour’s social subterfuges.
    â€˜So what do you know about her?’ Carole went on.
    â€˜Just that she’s run the Cornelian Gallery for many years. I think she’d trained at the Slade a long time ago and worked full-time as an artist. At some point she got married and had a son, maybe there was another child, I’m not sure. And the husband . . . I can’t remember . . . she either got divorced or was widowed and I think it was round then she started the gallery.’
    â€˜I met the son this morning. Do you know him?’
    â€˜I’ve met him casually.’
    That was the way Jude met most people. Complete strangers found themselves suddenly in conversations with her. She was very easy to talk to, a good listener, so genuinely interested in other people that she very rarely needed to volunteer much information about herself. Carole Seddon felt a familiar pang of envy. She couldn’t think of any occasions in her own life when she’d done anything casually .
    â€˜What do you know about him?’
    â€˜About Giles? Not a lot. Had some high-flying City job, got made redundant a few months back. And I think his marriage broke up round the same time. Local gossip has it that he’s moved back in with his mother on a temporary basis.’
    Again Carole felt peeved that she didn’t seem to hear the same quality of local gossip as her neighbour did. But she supposed that to access it she’d have to change the habits of a lifetime and start talking to people she hadn’t been introduced to. The kind of people to whom she gave no more than a ‘Fethering nod’ on her morning walks with Gulliver.
    â€˜Where does Bonita live then?’
    â€˜In the flat over the shop.’
    Carole pictured the High Street frontage of the Cornelian Gallery in her mind’s eye. ‘Can’t be much room in there for two of them.’
    â€˜No, I gather it isn’t an ideal arrangement.’
    Carole was alert to the implication. ‘You mean they don’t get on?’
    â€˜I wouldn’t say that, but I can’t think it’s an ideal situation for