Lamb to the Slaughter Read Free Page B

acknowledge the empty threat. ‘Barney didn’t want to come?’
    ‘No, I suggested he might, considering what’s at stake, but—’ She shook her head.
    Barney had looked at her as if she were mad. ‘How can I? I’m going out on the bike with Dylan,’ he said with the ­elaborate patience of one explaining to a small child with learning difficulties.
    ‘You wouldn’t have the bike if it wasn’t for the business,’ she’d pointed out, knowing she was wasting her breath. She hadn’t wanted him to get it anyway, given the shocking death toll for young riders, but it was never easy to make ‘no’ stick where Barney was concerned. He didn’t scruple to play the resentment card because she’d walked out on his father to take up with Pete, and once Dylan Burnett persuaded Ellie to get him a bike, Romy knew Barney wouldn’t give up. It was smarter to stick it on the credit card at the start and save weeks of aggro.
    Dylan was a bad influence – there was no doubt about that. Well, what could you expect? His father was a showman in a funfair; Ellie had stuck with the travelling lifestyle for a couple of years but once their informal partnership broke up, such contact as Dylan had with his father had been casual at best. It was tough, being a single mother, and her worst enemy couldn’t call Ellie forceful. She doted on Dylan so that he was thoroughly spoiled, so no wonder he ran wild.
    Romy had been strict enough with Barney as a child, but she was worried about him now. He spent holidays with his father, and the occasional weekend, but that didn’t give him the paternal discipline that a young man needed. Pete certainly wasn’t about to take on the role. His attitude to Barney was detached, to say the least. Sometimes Romy suspected there was actual dislike there, though it was hard to tell with Pete.
    Still, she had other, more pressing problems at the moment. She turned again to scan the hall. There were probably seventy people here now, but there was still no sign of Andrew and she felt a little lurch of disquiet. Surely he couldn’t have forgotten?
    Alanna Paterson appeared, panting, at her side and collapsed into a chair. She’d shut up her potter’s workshop at the Craft Centre just before Romy left, but she didn’t seem to have found time to change. She was still wearing clay-smeared jeans and a grubby-looking top and her grey hair was wild.
    ‘I thought I was going to be late! I had a couple of phone calls.’
    ‘Better late than never. Andrew hasn’t arrived yet. I can’t think what’s happened.’ Romy was starting to get nervous.
    Alanna seemed surprisingly unmoved. ‘Oh, I expect he’ll turn up. What about Ossian – did he say if he was coming?’
    ‘He’ll probably only come if he can sit staring at Ellie. He’s hardly going to be worried about losing the studio. Mummy and Daddy will write the cheque for another one,’ Romy said acidly. She didn’t have much time for Ossian Forbes-Graham; the oils he produced from his Craft Centre studio were beginning to be taken seriously by the art establishment in Edinburgh and even London, but it was all about image, in her opinion. He’d seen La Bohème once too often, probably, from the way he behaved, and he seemed to her weird and getting weirder.
    ‘Oh well,’ Alanna said, a little uncomfortably, ‘everyone’s got their own take on this.’
    Romy gave her a sharp look. Was it possible that Alanna, too, had been got at by the enemy? And perhaps even Ellie had been made an offer she couldn’t refuse? You could produce crochet work anywhere and there she was now, her head bent over some coloured wool and her fingers flashing. But Romy had so much to lose – the perfect workshop, the expensive equipment – and when Gloag had phoned to try to talk her round, she’d told him in no uncertain terms that she wouldn’t drop her opposition to the project.
    But Andrew – surely not Andrew too, Andrew who had been her saviour and whom she