Nine Ten Begin Again: A Grasshopper Lawns affair Read Free

a smile of thanks, and he craned his neck as he passed behind Betty to see the small screen.
    ‘That’s my aunt, the slim one. She’s written a script for a TV series that’s about to go into production, with any luck. Miss Marple was in her eighties. Edge has twenty years, more, to go. She’s great.’
    Betty peered at the group image of four people and two dogs. ‘Oh aye, she looks like you.’ She frowned and bent closer. ‘I ken the bloke on the end! He was part of a murder investigation when I was just starting out. What’s his name, Duncan something? An actor.’
    ‘Donald MacDonald. I looked the case up after I met him. The husband did it as far as we were concerned, but walked. Good memory!’
    ‘Oh aye.’ Betty handed the iPhone back, looking complacent. ‘I remember now. Husband tried to say she committed suicide after an affair with MacDonald. He was a real looker back then, but as it turned out, a bit of an arse-bandit. Still is. Good looking, I mean. I like that Paul Newman type. So they’re friends?’
    ‘Very good friends, all four of them. If you take on the liaison, two things you should know: there’s a bulldog type of dog, Maggie, you should never trust near your handbag, she steals purses, and there’s a man called Major Horace you should never trust near any part of you. You can’t miss him. You spot a man brushing up his moustache and looking determined, back away fast. I mean it. The man is a walking advertisement for sexual harassment.’
    Betty grinned, fully restored to good humour. ‘Noted. I’ll take Stuart with me for protection.’
    ‘I dinnae like dogs!’ Stuart shook his head vigorously and Kirsty smiled at him as she picked up the first of the folders stacked on her desk.
    ‘You love sci-fi, though. That big bloke in the photograph is William Robertson, if you read sci-fi you must know his stuff, he’s really well known. That’s Vivian Oliver with him. The one that—um—that the Chronicle was calling our very own Susan Boyle earlier this year.’ She glanced slyly at Betty. ‘She’s not exactly an old dear either.’
    Kirsty had very nearly said that Vivian was indirectly the reason she was on her current exciting assignment, but caught herself in time and Betty hadn’t noticed her momentary hesitation. To avoid any more slips that might threaten the restored entente cordiale , she focused her full attention on the file she’d picked up. It was, as it happened, a murder case, but the Onderness police were only being kept updated because the lad’s father lived in the town. James Kirby had died in seedy circumstances in Glasgow and had, it seemed, been an accident waiting to happen all his short life. She knew his father Hamish, who was the usual bursar at the Lawns, and scanned the few details with a practiced eye, knowing her aunt would be asking for them. Nothing there for the amateur sleuths. She picked up the next folder and stifled the faintest of sighs. Racist graffiti in the Forth-side town might be a far cry from her involvement on a multi-corpse forensic investigation, but eventually the assignment would end and she would be back full-time in Onderness—which, in fairness, definitely had its own moments of high excitement, and the last one not that long ago. She picked up her tea and immersed herself in the report.

    On the train
    ‘That was an incredibly sexy kiss,' Edge said admiringly on the train back to Linlithgow, and Donald nodded in acknowledgement, his eyes creasing.
    ‘Art kisses, we called them in my acting days. The trick is to move your jaws but keep your lips still, so it looks as though we’re playing tonsil hockey but in fact I’m not even smearing your lipstick. Did it work?’
    ‘Oh, yes, she was completely impressed. Said she’d had a different mental image of me, expected me to arrive in a woolly jumper, my knitting in my bag. And I’m going to ask for a copy of the photographs. I hope he got that sexy little throat