Nemesis of the Dead Read Free Page A

still using the one she had taken on honeymoon with her first husband, twenty years ago. It was a bit the worse for wear now but still perfectly serviceable – like its owner. Would she ever forget that ghastly ill-fated honeymoon? She had spent the whole turbulent two weeks in a bathroom in Provence. It was her first and only encounter with escargots. Confined to the primitive facilities of a rustic gîte , she learned that snails moved very much faster after you’d eaten them than they did when they were alive. It wasn’t a good start to the marriage and a year later, Tom left her for a robust Scandinavian fitness instructor with her own sauna and a digestion like an incinerator.
    Like many abandoned wives with bottle, Corrie dealt with the blow to her self-esteem by committing herself totally to work. Her catering business, Coriander’s Cuisine, became her top priority. She worked seven days a week and if the customer required it, late into the night as well. Her aim was to build up a stable of clientele who would support a gastronomically excellent but financially sound catering business. By the time she considered herself a success, she was more or less resigned to staying single.
    But life can always be relied upon to chuck in something unexpected. Corrie had been serving drinks and savouries at the cocktail party of a wealthy and influential turf accountant when the then Detective Sergeant Jack Dawes and his squad had burst in like something out of The Sweeney and nicked everyone. By the time Corrie had persuaded him she wasn’t part of the bookie’s money-laundering racket, just an innocent creator of canapés and an impaler of things on sticks, they were on first-name terms and she was cooking him intimate gourmet dinners.
    Afterwards, Corrie claimed that without her masterly intuition and tireless assistance throughout the investigation, DS Dawes would never have cracked the case and rounded up several of the nastier members of the underworld. She was equally convinced that it was thanks to her that he had been promoted to DI and transferred to the murder squad. At the time, he had been churlishly ungrateful, declaring that she mostly got in the way and even put herself at risk. She was lucky, he said, that her interference with dangerous criminals hadn’t landed her at the bottom of the Thames wearing a concrete apron.
    Then, to Corrie’s complete and utter amazement, he proposed. It was for her own protection, he said. She wasn’t safe out on her own and as a copper, he couldn’t take responsibility for releasing her on her own cognizance. Either she married him or he would nick her for interfering with a policeman in the course of his duty.
    The wedding, whilst eye-catching, would never have graced the pages of a celebrity magazine. Jack in uniform, six-foot-three and balding, with a big nose, jug-ears and an off-centre grin, his features having undergone considerable repositioning during his rugby-playing days. Corrie in ivory silk, five-feet-nothing, perilously short-sighted and on the wrong side of a size sixteen. Not Romeo and Juliet in any orthodox sense, but a loving, symbiotic partnership nevertheless.
    DI Dawes had never been a confirmed bachelor. Indeed, he had been a very reluctant one. Work had always sabotaged budding relationships, and girlfriends would get fed up with him not turning up for dates or, worse, rushing off just at the climax of something crucial. Eventually they left him for blokes in less demanding jobs. In Corrie, he had found a kindred, feisty spirit where work and partnership lived mostly in peaceful co-existence – as long as he could curb her compulsion to interfere.
    This second time around, Corrie had looked forward to a perfect spring honeymoon in Paris – with no snails. But the honeymoon gremlin struck again and they had scarcely popped a champagne cork when Jack was called back to duty to head a murder enquiry, all leave cancelled. It had developed into a long and