Murder in the Cotswolds Read Online Free Page B

listen to your wife, West? She has twice your brains.” He left quickly, dodging any comeback Ted might hurl at him.
    As the front door slammed, Ted said viciously, “He still thinks he’s a cut above me, even though he got the push.”
    “Oh come on, love. Bruce means no harm.”
    Ted threw her a suspicious glance. “Fancy him do you? Is that it?”
    “Oh, Ted.” She came and clung to her husband seductively, her hands roaming. “You’re enough for me. You do believe that, don’t you, you daft thing?”
    He pushed her away. “Leave off, Linda. Go and see to my breakfast. I got to get back to the horses.”
    “Oh, bugger the bloody horses.”
    But when she put bacon and sausages in front of him, he seemed to have lost his appetite. He shoved the plate aside after a couple of mouthfuls and stood up.
    Alone, Linda listened to her husband’s footsteps crossing to the stable yard. For a while she stood motionless, then she went through to the small front parlour. Under a corner of the carpet square was a short length of loose floorboard. She prised it up and felt around in the dark space underneath. Drawing out a large brown envelope, she spilled its contents on the carpet. A chased silver snuffbox, a gold hunter watch, a pair of silver earrings, and a ring ... a far grander ring than the one Aunt Daisy had bequeathed to her. The ice-blue sparkle of diamonds flashed in a thin shaft of sunlight from the window; the large emerald in the centre was a glow of green fire. Linda slipped the ring on her finger as she gazed at it lovingly, longingly, fearfully. Then, with a sigh, she took it off and replaced her little hoard in the envelope, tucking it even deeper into the space under the joists.
     

Chapter Two
     
    Converted from a row of seventeenth-century almshouses, the Chipping Bassett police station was horrendously inconvenient. The quickly improvised Incident Room was a suite of dark offices (once bedrooms) leading off a dank-smelling passage. To provide sustenance for the army of officers who would be coming and going, the nearby Crusty Loaf Cafe had been called in to augment the station’s meagre catering facilities.
    By late morning an all-stations hunt for the hit-and-run car was in progress. All garages with repair facilities had been alerted to be on the lookout. Scenes of Crime had narrowed the target very considerably. According to them it was a fairly heavy vehicle with rear-wheel drive and, from minute chips found on the victim’s body, with dark blue paintwork. The vehicle would show signs of impact damage at bumper level, possibly the rear wheel arches would be spattered with mud (pale brown) and torn grass. Most revealing of all, something that would give almost positive identification, would be the tyres—a Dunlop radial on the offside front wheel, and Pirellis on the other three.
    “It gives us something to go on,” Detective Superintendent “Jolly” Joliffe had said, when Kate reported to him on the phone. He’d been dubbed Jolly when he first joined the South Midlands Force over thirty years ago, on account of a permanently lugubrious expression which, helped along by a ponderous wit, concealed an undoubted sharpness of mind. Kate felt a proprietorial interest in his nickname, it having been coined by her late father, then a sergeant. As a small girl, she’d often heard him chuckling with her mother about this grim-visaged but astute young PC.
    “Let’s hope,” Jolly added now, “that it’s a local vehicle we’re looking for.”
    “I’ve a strong feeling that it is, sir.”
    “I prefer facts to feelings, Chief Inspector. What is the situation regarding the husband?”
    “I’m expecting the Mets to report back anytime now.”
    As Kate had hoped, the keyholder at Precision Plastics, the works foreman, had come up with the name of Latimer’s London hotel—the Cranbourne in Kensington. “I’m arranging to have him escorted back here.”
    “I seem to recall meeting Matthew