And no one remembered to call me Kat instead of Katie. No matter how many times I asked them to.
I kept reminding Mum and Dad when they moaned on about how they were victims of the boomerang generation (that’s me, apparently) that I wasn’t exactly back home by choice.
But my long term relationship turned into even longer term financial difficulties when my Ratface boyfriend dumped me and ran off, not only with my ex-best friend, but the car that was half mine, and my signed photograph of David Tennant as Dr Who.
Then, a week later, my dream job turned into a nightmare when I had the ‘we’re having to let you go’ and ‘this is hurting me more than it’s hurting you’ talk from my about-to-be ex-boss at the radio station.
In no time at all, the strain of keeping up the rent on the ace, not-quite city centre flat I’d shared with Ratface, while I tried in vain to find another job, led to financial meltdown.
After which I’d been forced to go back to my parents, with my tail as firmly between my legs as the dogs at Saturday afternoon’s rain soaked not-much-fun dog show.
I’d been back in Much Winchmoor for just over a year now. And if jobs in a buzzy city centre are hard to find, in a back-of-beyond Somerset village they are rarer than hens’ teeth. Especially without the half a car that I used to own.
Mum was very sympathetic and was in no hurry for me to move out. And why would she be? She had a live-in helper in the salon whenever she needed one. But Dad was always dropping hints about how it was time for me to be moving on.
In the past year I’d been dumped twice (initially for my ex-best friend and, more recently, for a pregnant sheep), sacked twice (once from the radio station and I’d still prefer not to think about the second one) and now my Dad wanted my room for a snooker table.
Even when I began to think that maybe, just maybe, I had something going with Will, this guy I’ve known forever and who I used to think of as a brother until my feelings towards him turned decidedly un-sisterly, what did he do after standing me up?
Nothing.
No phone call. No text. Nothing.
And yes, I knew he was a farmer, and that he was in the middle of lambing. But there I was, last Saturday night, all glammed up in this dead cool sparkly top and my best pair of jeans that I hadn’t worn since the Ratface era, watching the Eurovision Song Contest with Mum and Dad. Because, of course, Mum didn’t lend me her car. And even if she had, I didn’t really fancy going to the concert on my own, whatever I might have said to Will.
Much Winchmoor? Not-Much Winchmoor, more like it. This village is buried so far in the depths of Somerset even the postman has to use SatNav to find us.
Back when I went to primary school here, Much Winchmoor had four farms, a post office-cum-general store, a butcher, a pub and, of course, Chez Cheryl. Now the school was on borrowed time, there were no shops and there was only one farm. Or two if you counted Abe Compton’s cider farm, which I didn’t because his cider was disgusting stuff that addled your brain and turned your knees inside out.
The High Street’s higgledy-piggledy houses with their tiny windows and wonky rooflines were mostly all holiday cottages now, with names like ‘The Old Post Office’, ‘The Old Forge’, ‘The Old Bakehouse’ and, before long no doubt, ‘The Old Village Pub’ – although The Winchmoor Arms had enjoyed a brief but ghoulish surge in trade recently.
“Where did you say Sandra was today?” Olive Shrewton’s question jerked me back to the Monday from hell, where thankfully they’d finished with my love life and were now picking over the mystery of Sandra’s absence. “She’ll be that upset when she hears Clint the chiropodist has upped and gone. She reckons it’s only his magic fingers that do keep her going.”
I had to hurriedly turn my snort of laughter into a cough, which wasn’t difficult as I was rinsing off her perm lotion at the time and the fumes were hitting the back of my throat. Conscious of Mum’s eyes boring into me, I refrained from commenting that Clint’s magic fingers must have kept Sandra going a bit too well, seeing as how she’d skipped off to Torquay with him. Mum had sworn me to secrecy, although goodness knows why. Trying to keep a secret in Much Winchmoor is about as futile as attempting to keep a ferret in a paper bag.
“Olive’s ready for you now, Mum,” I said, but as I did so, Mum’s phone rang. She took it out of her pocket, frowned, then answered it.
“Look, I can’t talk at the moment,” she said in such a snippy voice I thought the person on the other end of the line must be trying to sell her a stair lift or maybe one of those walk-in baths. “I’m up to my eyes here at the moment,” she went on. “Can I call you back?”
No stair lift or bath salesman, then. But whoever it was had got right under her skin, as her cheeks burned scarlet the way they always did when she was annoyed.
Every ear in the room strained to hear what was being said on the other end of the line but Mum pressed the phone closer and turned her back. She listened for a while then said, “Oh no, I’m sorry to hear that.” Even though she sounded anything but sorry.
Another slightly shorter listen. More ear-straining around the room. Then she said: “Yes, yes. I can understand you’re upset. No. No, that will be fine. Of course. Bye.”
“Everything ok?” I asked.
“Yes, of course,” Mum said with a very unconvincing attempt at a nonchalant shrug. “Just one of those wretched nuisance calls.”
Needless to say no-one in the room bought that line. After all, you don’t offer to call nuisance callers back, do you? But it was obvious Mum had decided that whatever it was, she didn’t want it discussed by the massed members of the Much Winchmoor Grumble and Gossip Group.
“Bring Olive across, will you, Katie? I’ll be ready for her in a second.”
Olive’s wet hair made her look like a gone-to-seed dandelion that had got caught in the rain. Her soft grey eyes shone with curiosity as she prepared to quiz Mum about the phone call. I wrapped her in a towel and was leading her across to the chair in front of the mirror when the salon door crashed open.
The most irritating woman in Much Winchmoor stood there. The Monday from hell had just got a whole heap worse.
Chapter Two
A stick-thin woman with sleek blonde hair swept in, on a drift of expensive perfume. It was Margot Duckett-Trimble, our very own lady of the manor. Even though she was an incomer (you have to live in the place at least twenty years to be otherwise) she swanned about Much Winchmoor like she owned the place, which, come to think of it, she did. Or at least, a significant chunk of it.
Although, strictly speaking, it was her husband John (who was ‘something big in the City,’ as she was always at pains to point out) who probably signed the cheques.
Since the Duckett-Trimbles moved into Winchmoor Manor three years ago, every time one of the houses in the village came up for sale, particularly the little higgledy-piggledy cottages that overlooked the village pond, John would snaffle it up for Margot to turn into one of her ‘darling little holiday homes’. Including the one that used to belong to my gran, something that caused a fair amount of bad feeling in the village, not to mention long, angry silences between my mum and dad.
“Cheryl,” Margot announced like she was auditioning for the part of Lady Macbeth. “I’m desperate. My car is refusing to start. And the wretched taxi firm can’t get a car out to me in time.”
Mum looked confused. “I’m sorry. But I make a habit of not lending my car out. Not since a certain person—”
“Merciful heavens, I don’t want to borrow your car.” Margot looked horrified at the idea. “I was on my way to Bath to have my hair done. John’s bringing a group of important businessmen for dinner this evening and my hair’s a frightful mess. I was in a bit of a panic, but then I thought you could probably fit me in.”
Her satin-smooth blonde bob didn’t appear to have a single strand out of place. But what did I know?
“Oh, I see,” Mum said. “Well, I’m sorry but I’m really busy this morning.
I’ve already got Olive here waiting—”
Margot Duckface, as she’s known locally, looked down her long beaky nose at Mum’s four customers, all in various stages of the perm process.
“You’re Julie’s grandmother, aren’t you?” She inclined her head regally towards Olive.
Olive nodded, and I swear if she hadn’t been trussed up like an oven-ready turkey she’d have bobbed a quick curtsey.
“Julie’s such a sweetie,” Margot purred. “Always so grateful for the few hours light cleaning I find for her up at the Manor, especially now they have another little mouth to feed. She often says she doesn’t know how they’d manage if it wasn’t for the money I pay her. I don’t suppose you’d mind…?”
I couldn’t believe it. The wretched woman was only expecting Olive to give up her position in the queue to her, like we were still back in the Dark Ages when villagers tugged their forelocks and knew their place.
“Bless you, my dear, I’m in no rush,” Olive said placidly. “I’m sure young Katie here will fetch me a cup of tea – two sugars and a chocolate biscuit, please, Katie – while I’m waiting. You carry on.”
“Thank you, Olive,” Mum, relieved, turned to Margot. “I’ll be two minutes finishing Millie, then I’ll be right with you, if you’d care to take a seat in the Reception area.”
Margot pouted, then glanced at her slim gold wristwatch and shrugged. With a rustle of silk she arranged herself on one of the spindly chairs that, along with a wobbly glass-topped coffee table holding a few dog eared copies of Hello! and Somerset Life, made up Chez Cheryl’s Reception area.
Margot smiled graciously at the two women waiting there, then at the room in general.
“I trust you’re all going to vote in next week’s parish council elections?” she intoned, in a voice that put me in mind of Maggie Smith’s dowager countess in Downton Abbey. “Suffragettes died for your right to do so, remember.”
The two women said of course they would, while Millie Compton nodded so vigorously, she almost had Mum’s styling comb up her nose.
“I’ll be there, Mrs Duckett-Trimble,” Millie twittered. “We need another woman on the parish council since poor Marjorie passed on.”
In case you’re wondering, poor Marjorie Hampton didn’t ‘pass on’ of her own free will. She was helped on her way by a murdering maniac who was now doing time for her killing.
“Can I count on your votes, ladies?” asked Margot.
She had been on the campaign trail for weeks. There was one seat up for grabs and two candidates. But talk about having to choose between a rock and a hard place. Will’s lunatic sheep dog, Tam, would have been in with a fair shout of getting elected if she’d chosen to stand.
With her high and mighty ways, Margot Duckface was as popular in Much Winchmoor as a bluebottle in a cake shop, while the other candidate, Fiona Crabshaw, was equally disliked on account of being married to Gruesome Gerald. He’d been a local councillor for years but was ‘invited’ to resign his seat on the District Council last year when he’d been ‘almost’ involved (as in, not proven) in an iffy land deal.
It wasn’t Fiona’s fault, of course, but the voters of Much Winchmoor were a cautious lot and were not keen on having another Councillor Crabshaw in the village.
Millie Compton, however, had no reservations about where to cast her vote. She was well pleased with her cauliflower-tight perm and, as Mum was making out the bill, she turned to Margot.
“You can count on my vote, Mrs Duckett-Trimble,” she simpered, then added in a low, hesitant voice. “I-I couldn’t help overhearing as how you’re having visitors up at the Manor tonight.”
“A business dinner,” Margot yawned, as her elegantly manicured hands flicked through Hello! and she pretended to be fascinated by a picture of some celeb’s new garden shed. “A terrible bore, of course, but it’s the price you have to pay when your husband’s something big in the City.”
“Oh, I know,” agreed Millie, who didn’t know because the only thing her husband was big in was making a nuisance of himself when he got trolleyed. “My Abe’s cider’s ever so good this year. The best yet, he says. It goes down a treat with the tourists in the Winchmoor Arms. ’Tis a proper taste of Somerset, they do say. So I wondered if you’d like some for your visitors? Foreigners, I hear they are.”
Margot’s finely drawn eyebrows shot up. “I intend calling on your husband soon about his cider.”
Millie glowed with pride while the rest of us gaped like a nest of baby starlings. Abe’s HeadBender cider was as rough as rough cider could get, and not for the faint hearted. Only a couple of nights earlier there’d been talk among the Winchmoor Arms regulars about how many rats and other livestock unlucky enough to wander into his barn ended up in the vats.
Abe’s cider, they reckoned, could strip the flesh of a piece of meat quicker than a shoal of piranhas.
But Millie’s glow vanished abruptly as Margot went on: “I’ve heard worrying reports about his poor hygiene practices and have strongly advised Mary not to sell it in the pub any more. The poor woman has enough problems running the place single-handed without risking prosecution for poisoning her customers.”
“But my Abe wouldn’t—”
“It’s people like your Abe who give not only Much Winchmoor, but our entire glorious county of Somerset, a bad name. When tourists ask for a glass of ‘scrumpy’, they mean the nice sparkling stuff they advertise on TV. Not that rough, cloudy muck that looks like washing-up water and tastes like battery acid. As for my guests,” she shuddered dramatically. “I wouldn’t be seen dead drinking it, least of all offering it to them.”
There was one of those horrible silences, like the time on the school bus when Will dared me to say this dead rude word. And I was the only person on the bus who didn’t know what it meant. Nor how very rude it was.
Poor little Millie stood there, her face scarlet, her newly permed head bobbing up and down like the little nodding dog in the back of my grandad’s hatchback.
“I-I just thought… so sorry to have troubled you…” she muttered as she fumbled in her big squashy bag. “I’m sorry, Cheryl, my purse is in here somewhere. If I can just—”
“It’s ok, Mum. I’ll sort it.” I put myself between Millie and the others in the salon to shield her from their not entirely sympathetic eyes. There were many women in Much Winchmoor with very good reason not to approve of Abe Compton’s HeadBender cider and its after-effects.
“So what’s it to be?” Mum asked Margot. “Something off the fringe, maybe? It is a little on the heavy side, isn’t it?”
“Good Lord, no.” Margot jumped like a startled thoroughbred. “Jean-Christophe would have a fit if I let anyone other than him near my hair with a pair of scissors. A shampoo and blow-dry will be fine. You can do blow-dries, I assume?”
Mum clamped her lips tightly together and those little red spots appeared in her cheeks again. She led Margot across to the basins and shampooed her, more’s the pity. I’d been looking forward to sending trickles of icy water down that long, elegant neck and seeing if I could get a dollop of shampoo to land smack on the end of that beaky nose.
Half an hour later, Mum was just putting the finishing touches to Margot’s sleek bob, and Olive was happily munching her way through her third chocolate Hobnob, when the front door crashed opened again. A vision in bubblegum pink Lycra with a cascade of strawberry blonde hair (think Dolly Parton without the frontage) stood there, with enough jangling bracelets to sink the Titanic.
Now, when I said earlier that Margot Duckett-Trimble was the most annoying woman in the village, that was before I was aware my Aunty Tanya was in the vicinity. She was married to Dad’s brother, Uncle Richard, and hated being called Aunty Tanya. Said it made her feel old and frumpy.
Which was precisely why I called out, “Hi, Aunty Tanya.”
She turned to me, her eyes cold and hard. “It’s you, Katie. For a moment I didn’t recognise you.”
She raked me with her hy
per-critical gaze, taking in my ripped jeans and the horrible pink gingham tabard Mum insisted I wore in the salon, before resting finally on my hair.
She turned to Mum, her face a study in false concern. “Oh my goodness, Cheryl. Did you have a rogue batch of colour? Still, at least it was Katie, and not one of the paying customers.”
“Katie’s hair’s none of my doing,” Mum said sharply, as a small wave of barely suppressed laughter rippled around the salon. “But heavens, Tanya, you must have flown to have got here so quickly. I wasn’t expecting you until lunch time.”
The mystery of Mum’s ‘nuisance’ caller was solved. So, too, was the change in her mood since taking it. Dad and his brother Richard were what Gran Latcham used to describe as ‘chalk and cheese.’ So, too, were their wives.
Relations between Mum and Tanya had always been a bit strained, although there was a time a year or so back when it looked as if they were about to get more friendly when they had a girlie weekend away together in Brighton or somewhere. I can’t remember exactly. But it didn’t come to anything and things were now as edgy between them as they’d always been.
So what was Tanya doing here? And why?
“I was just outside Dintscombe when I phoned,” Tanya explained. “I left at the crack of dawn. Couldn’t stay in that house another minute. Do you know what he—?”
“Why don’t you go on through to the living room and you can tell me all about it later?” Mum cut in, as the air in the salon crackled with curiosity. “Katie will bring you a cup of coffee and we can have a proper talk when I’ve finished here, which won’t be long.”
She then turned her attention back to Margot Duckface who was reaching in her expensive designer bag, making sure the distinctive Mulberry logo was in full view, as always, while she did so.
“How much do I owe you, then, Cheryl?” Margot asked as Tanya was about to squeeze past her.
“Excuse me…” Tanya began, then gave an exclamation of surprise. “Oh, hello. Fancy seeing you here.”
Rough And Deadly (A Much Winchmoor Mystery Book 2) Page 2
