Lamb to the Slaughter Read Free

Cat’s eyes filled. ‘Oh, if it’s so important – just Dylan Burnett and Barney Kyle. So now can I go – or did you want to grill me some more?’
    ‘Go if you want to.’ Recognising a losing situation, Bill shrugged in his turn and his daughter didn’t give him time to change his mind. They could hear her crying as she went back to the house.
    ‘Hormones,’ Marjory said. ‘That’s her going to phone her friend Jenny to tell her she’s got, like, the world’s cruellest parents.’
    ‘How many years before she leaves home?’ Bill was saying as Cammie emerged from the house eating a brownie.
    ‘What was with the bikes?’ he asked.
    ‘Friends of Cat’s,’ Marjory said. ‘Dylan Burnett and Barney Kyle.’
    Cammie’s eyes widened. ‘They came to see Cat? Wow! They’re seriously cool.’
    ‘Oh, are they,’ Bill said drily. ‘What does being “seriously cool” involve?’
    ‘Well, they’ve got the bikes. And they do crazy things.’
    ‘Like what?’ his mother asked him, but he didn’t seem to know. Just ‘everyone said’ they did crazy things.
    Later, as they were putting away the garden furniture, Bill said to Marjory, ‘I suppose it would be unethical for you to see if there’s anything on them in the files?’
    Marjory laughed. ‘I’m sure it is. And in answer to the ­question you haven’t asked yet, first thing in the morning.’
     
    Romy Kyle had arrived early at St Cerf’s Church Hall in Kirkluce High Street, hired for the public meeting about the superstore which Councillor Norman Gloag had arranged – not that she was even remotely inclined to cooperate with the nasty little man. But he’d have managed to get people together and she was going to see to it that they heard the other side.
    There was a lot of unease, even anger, in Kirkluce. To the traditionalists, its atmosphere was unique and precious: an old-fashioned town centre, where greengrocers and bakers and butchers served the population in the way they always had since Kirkluce had been a village, where each day you ‘went for the messages’ and met your friends in the High Street. A superstore would drive most of the local shops out of business.
    Ranged on the other side were the working mums, who found the little Spar supermarket inadequate for their needs, allied to those for whom tradition was a dirty word and the young who longed for the excitement of change and the ready availability of seventy-five different flavours of crisps as opposed to the half-dozen on offer at the moment.
    The battle-lines were drawn and the plans were being made for committees and pressure groups, but it was early days yet. It was common knowledge that Colonel Carmichael could refuse to sell the land that was needed and it would all come to nothing. Only those most directly affected, whose immediate livelihood was threatened, were ready to make trouble.
    The Church Hall was a clever choice of venue. In the sober atmosphere, with the hall’s dark cream and brown gloss-painted walls and splintery floor, strong passions would seem out of place. Well, Romy Kyle was prepared to do a bit of rabble-rousing, if that was what was needed.
    A stocky figure in jeans and a burgundy cotton fisherman’s smock, she walked down the aisle between the rows of stacking chairs, her square jaw set as she made her way purposefully towards the table where Gloag and the representative from the superstore would sit. She nodded, unsmiling, at a couple of people who had arrived even earlier and took her seat right in the middle of the front row, where Gloag couldn’t pretend not to see her when she wanted to speak.
    She set her well-worn leather tote bag down on the chair next to her to save it for Pete, her partner – and where the hell was he? She’d reminded him about the meeting this morning but when she got home from the Fauldburn Craft Centre he wasn’t there. She and Barney had eaten alone and there was still no sign of Pete when she left. Gone to the