Palmer-Jones 04 - A Prey to Murder Read Free

had never had a real boyfriend. She had been out with other boys at school, but no one she was serious about, no one who cared about her. Laurie was different.
    It was a hot shimmering day, the first very hot day of the spring. The Welsh mountains were hidden by a heat haze by mid morning. She had not known how to dress. She was always aware that she had none of the flair or style of her friends and that in comparison with them she looked staid and uninteresting. In the end she had decided on the clothes she would have worn for a walk on her own – jeans and a T-shirt and sandals. She went to the kitchen to pack a picnic. She had agonized too over that. Perhaps Laurie had only planned to spend an hour with her and to come prepared for a day would seem a foolish presumption. But he need never know. If he left her before lunch time, the picnic could stay in the rucksack.
    Laurie’s mother was in the kitchen, supervising the serving of breakfast. Mrs Oliver had worked at Gorse Hill since the hotel had opened and her mother had worked there before, for Eleanor’s parents. Helen had always been intimidated by the woman. She was stern and humourless and – helped by a couple of teenagers from Sarne – it seemed to Helen that she did most of the work in the kitchen. Eleanor and Veronica planned the menus and added elegant finishing touches but it was Nan Oliver, her face red from the heat, who chopped and kneaded and stirred according to their instructions. Helen wondered if Laurie had told his mother that they were meeting. If he had, Mrs Oliver made no comment, and only watched as Helen packed cold meat and salad into containers, helped herself to cakes from the tin in the larder.
    On her way out of the house she met her father who was coming out of the office. He was a tall man, with a long face, like a horse’s, and thinning sandy hair. It seemed to Helen that he looked strained and tired. It was a busy time of the year, the start of the season, and he did all the bookings and accounts, all the buying.
    ‘You don’t look very well,’ she said. He was so quiet and dependable that they took him for granted.
    ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘I’m fine.’ He looked at her rucksack, at the thin jacket she carried over her shoulders.
    ‘Will you be out all day?’ he asked. ‘ You know it’s the Wildlife Trust Open Day tomorrow. Your grandmother will expect you to be here to help.’
    ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’m going for a walk on the hill.’
    ‘On your own?’
    ‘No,’ she said and could feel herself blushing. ‘With a friend.’
    ‘Enjoy yourself,’ he said. ‘Really. Have a lovely day.’ He smiled at her. ‘ Stay out as long as you like. Eleanor will have to manage without you.’
    She had arranged to meet Laurie by the barn where the footpath started. The grass around the building was long and mixed with clover and buttercups. Before they had moved to Gorse Hill her father had run his own photographic business in Sarne and they had come to Gorse Hill every Sunday for lunch. She remembered picking huge bunches of clover and buttercups to take home to the town with her and being disappointed because they died in the car. She reached the footpath before Laurie, and sat on the grass where they had arranged to meet and waited for him. Everywhere there was a sickly scent of gorse.
    Perhaps she had fallen asleep for a moment or perhaps she was just dazed by the unaccustomed heat and the sunshine, because she did not hear him approach. She felt his hand on her shoulder and turned to face him, so shocked that she had no time to prepare the way she looked or to say the things she had planned. He had never touched her before. They had talked for hours but they had never touched. He stood above her, blocking out the sun. He was wearing jeans and a black T-shirt with a Greenpeace slogan on the front. In those few moments she thought she saw everything about him in sharp detail. Perhaps even then she knew that she