The Shooting in the Shop Read Free

house?’
    ‘I’ve no idea. That’s why it’s called an open house.’
    Carole couldn’t be doing with this. ‘You must have
some idea . . . roughly . . .’
    ‘Well, I can guarantee it’ll be more than ten and
less than a thousand.’
    Jude was being far too skittish for her neighbour’s
taste. ‘But surely you have to think in terms of catering?’
    ‘There’ll be plenty of nibbles and things.’
    ‘And hot food?’ asked Carole, hoping for an answer
to the sit-down meal question.
    ‘Oh yes, some hot food,’ replied Jude, with infuriating
lack of precision.
    ‘And drink?’
    ‘Certainly drink. Plenty of wine.’
    ‘But the invitation says “until the booze runs out”.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Well, the time at which the booze runs out is
going to depend on how many people are there,
isn’t it?’
    Jude nodded and immediately went into a parody
of an old-fashioned maths teacher. ‘If it takes three
men twenty-five minutes to empty a seventy-five
centilitre wine bottle, how long will it take twenty-five men to empty the same bottle and, working at
that rate, how many bottles would be required to keep
a party of sixty-three people going for three hours and
seventeen minutes?’
    ‘I do wish you’d treat this seriously, Jude. And,
incidentally, you clearly have done a numbers check.
You said you were expecting sixty-three people.’
    ‘No, I didn’t. That was just a random example for
my pretend mental arithmetic challenge.’
    ‘Oh. Well, you should have thought about it. Your
open house is the day after tomorrow, you know.’
    ‘Yes, I do know. But come on, it’s only a party,
nothing to get hung up about.’
    Though Carole Seddon would never be heard to
use the expression, for her a party was exactly the
sort of thing to get ‘hung up about’. She sniffed. ‘Well,
I would want a bit more information about numbers
for any social event I was catering for.’
    Someone of less benign character might have
made some sharp riposte to that, but all Jude said
was, ‘It’ll be fine, I promise you.’
    And you’re confident you’ll have enough to
drink?’
    Jude grinned mischievously. ‘I’ll have enough till
it runs out.’
    ‘But you don’t know when that’s going to be. Suppose
someone arrives at the party after it’s all run out?’
    ‘I promise you, there’ll be plenty.’ Jude ran a
chubby hand through the blond hair piled up on her
head. She was dressed, as ever, in an array of draped
garments which embellished rather than disguised
the contours of her ample body. ‘I’ve got plenty in,’
she went on, ‘and a lot of people will bring bottles,
anyway.’
    ‘Oh, is it a “bring a bottle party”?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘It didn’t say it was on the invitation.’
    ‘It didn’t say it was because it isn’t. It’s just that
when you invite people to a party, a lot of them do
instinctively bring along a bottle.’
    Another thing of which Carole would have to
make a note. And another moral dilemma. What kind
of bottle should she take along to the open house?
Jude, she knew, had a preference for Chilean Chardonnay,
but would her other guests like that? And
then again, what sort of price level should one aim
for? Carole rarely spent more than five pounds on
a bottle of wine, but when her contribution joined
the others on the Woodside Cottage sideboard, she
didn’t want to be shown up as a cheapskate.
    ‘Anyway,’ said Jude, slurping down the remains of
her coffee and picking up her tatty straw shopping
bag from the ultraclean floor of the High Tor kitchen,
‘I must get on. Bit more shopping to do.’
    ‘For the open house?’ asked Carole, still intrigued
by the stage management details of the forthcoming
event.
    ‘No, I’ve got most of that. A few presents outstanding,
though.’
    ‘Oh, I’ve done all mine,’ said Carole, instinctively
righteous. ‘Well, I’ve done Stephen, Gaby and Lily.
Those are the most important ones.’ The