Malice in the Cotswolds Read Online Free

balanced shapes. The windows were set at exactly the right points, the roof suitably weathered, the size ideal for an ordinary family. Everything about it looked perfect. Only Yvonne’s excesses had spoilt the rooms inside, making them hazardous in the clutter of fragile objects and unrestful to the eye.
    She was just deciding that it must be almost time to feed the cats, when the telephone rang from the hallway, a few feet inside the open front door.
    Yvonne had left no instructions regarding messages, but common sense ordained that she must answer it.
    A man’s voice burst loudly in her ear, before shehad managed to utter more than a syllable. ‘Vonny? Where the hell are you? I’ve been watching out for hours now. You said you’d be here by two. It’s nearly five, and there you are, not even left yet. Couldn’t you have called me, instead of keeping me hanging around here all afternoon? I have got things to do, you know.’
    ‘This is Thea Osborne, the house-sitter,’ she eventually succeeded in telling him. ‘Yvonne left here at eleven.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘She left Snowshill at eleven. Even with Saturday traffic, she ought to be in London by now.’
    ‘Of course she ought. There’s no problem with the traffic. The silly cow’s probably got herself lost.’
    For six hours ? Thea seriously doubted that. ‘Surely not,’ she said mildly. ‘She would have called you.’
    ‘Precisely. That’s what I said .’
    ‘But sometimes it can take ages, if there’s an accident holding up the traffic. I assume she’s using the M4. You know what motorways can be like.’
    ‘She’s not answering her mobile. I tried it. Three times.’ Only now was he starting to sound worried. ‘Where the devil has the idiot woman got to, then?’
    ‘As far as I could tell, she had every intention of driving directly to you. I mean, she’s gone to the trouble of employing me to watch over the house. I really don’t know what to suggest.’
    ‘Well, I don’t see how she can be lost. It’s easy enough to find.’
    ‘But she hasn’t been there before – is that right?’
    ‘Actually, no.’ His voice faltered. ‘No, she hasn’t.’
    ‘Oh, well …’ Her own voice was losing conviction. Six hours really was a long time to spend trying to get to north London. Nobody went silent for that long in these days of perpetual communication. Except when they couldn’t get a mobile signal or the battery died. That could happen, of course. ‘There’s probably been some sort of hold-up,’ she repeated feebly, thinking that unless Yvonne herself had been injured, she had no justification for allowing so much time to pass without making contact. Although she could very easily have lost her nerve, changed her mind … been abducted? Of course not. There was no need to invent wild explanations of that sort.
    ‘Thank you for your help, anyway,’ he said, suddenly formal.
    ‘Will you ask her to call me when she turns up? Just to put my mind at rest?’
    ‘Of course,’ he said, leaving her doubting that he would do anything of the sort.
    She spent the next hour restlessly moving from kitchen to living room, upstairs to her bedroom and out into the garden, holding her phone as if it were welded to her hand. Yvonne or her husband would use the landline in the house to call her, but somehow the mobile made her feel connected to the wider world – a feeling she had acquired only in recent months. Before that she had regarded it as more of an irritation thansomething useful. Since her daughter had given her a new model last Christmas, she had been discovering more and more functions in its repertoire, designed to give her access to virtually everything that was being done, thought or said across the entire globe. Almost against her own nature, she was finding it intoxicating. There were apps for things she had never dreamt could be provided so quickly, and for so little cost.
    ‘Hello again,’ came a man’s voice, the second time she