Deadly Stuff Read Online Free

coffee cups now in hand, and she slowly made her way around, shamelessly earwigging for comments about the food. There were plenty of them, and all of them favourable.
    Well, apart from one sad individual who clearly didn’t know how Lyonnaise potatoes should be served. It made her shake her head sadly.
    All in all, however, Jenny was pleased.
    She helped herself to a spare cup of coffee which weren’t rationed apparently, and found herself drawn to a loud, pontificating voice.
    The owner was a man in his early fifties, Jenny guessed, with that previously lean and fit physique that was just going slightly to fat. Notwithstanding that, he was still a very handsome figure, with distinguished and lushly thick salt-and-pepper hair and a well-maintained goatee beard that actually suited his somewhat foxy-shaped face. His bright blue eyes were startlingly alert in a lightly bronzed face. Either he’d been abroad recently, Jenny mused, or he was one of those men who hit the tanning salons – or maybe the tanning lotion – regularly.
    He had a captive audience comprised mostly of women, she noticed with a somewhat wry smile and, because he wasobviously the kind who liked to hear himself talk, she couldn’t help but listen to what he was saying.
    ‘Of course Hutchings will always be one of the best. Started in 1860, by the great Victorian taxidermist, James Hutchings. His sons James, known as Fred, Walter and even his daughter Poppy followed in their famous papa’s footsteps needless to say. They’re famous for their foxes, of course, but also rare birds, shot in Cardiganshire.’
    ‘Now I never knew that,’ one brave soul ventured to interrupt the great man in his lecture.
    ‘Oh yes. Their shop was on Bath Street, and later on Corporation Street.’
    ‘Is this in York? Or Leeds?’ a petite pretty-but-fading blonde woman, asked, frowning. ‘I don’t recognize the names. Or have they been renamed by now?’
    The big man regarded the woman with a mixture of pity, contempt and sexual interest. It immediately set the hackles on Jenny’s own back rising, but the blonde woman merely simpered and preened a bit under his, admittedly dazzling blue gaze.
    ‘Neither, my dear Marjorie. Hutchings were established in Aberystwyth.’
    Most of the group tittered at their compatriot’s lack of knowledge.
    She turned a becoming shade of pink, and said off-handedly, ‘Oh. Wales.’
    ‘Don’t worry, Marjorie,’ her friend, a rotund redhead in an unfortunate spandex top, commiserated with her. ‘Nobody knows more about Hutchings than Maurice here does. He’s related to one of them you see.’
    ‘As he will keep on saying,’ Jenny heard somewhat mutter under their breath wearily, and turned away with a grin.
    ‘Only distantly, alas, only distantly,’ Maurice Raines demurred modestly. ‘Of course, the thing that most peoplefind fascinating about the Victorians is their obsession with the macabre, and Hutchings were no different. They were known for their stuffed oddities, such as a calf with two heads.’
    Jenny, having heard more than enough, shuddered, and moved on. She finished her rapidly-cooling coffee and put it down at an empty table, and glanced at the plates. It pleased her enormously to see that practically every one of them was cleared. She hated to see food wasted, as a matter of principle. Especially food that she herself had cooked. It always smacked to her as less of evidence of people being on a diet, and more of an unspoken criticism of her culinary skills.
    But the goat’s-cheese blueberry and citron cheesecake had obviously been a hit, since very little evidence of it remained.
    ‘Oh no, he’s not still going on about his famous ancestors, is he?’ she heard a woman drawl to her companion over to her right. Jenny turned, her eyes softening slightly as they spotted the tall handsome man she’d noticed earlier, talking to a well preserved, slightly dumpy woman with a mass of long honey-coloured hair, and