The Shooting in the Shop
The Fethering Mysteries #11
2010, EN
Christmas can be murder… Carole Seddon hates Christmas – it all seems rather a waste of time. So when her neighbour and best friend, Jude, drags her along to go shopping at a local store called Gallimaufry, she can feel her inner-Scrooge knocking. But the sales are on and even Carole can’t resist a bargain. Then, a few days later, Gallimaufry is burnt down and a body is discovered in the ashes. It seems like a tragic accident, but no-one can die of natural causes when a gun is involved. The victim was young, pretty and in a long-term relationship – who could possibly want her dead? With a host of suspicious characters – the infamous womanizer Ricky Le Bonnier with a string of ex-wives; Piers Duncton, a comedy writer who just isn’t that funny; or Anna Carter, the lonely dog walker – the lady detectives know they have their work cut out for them. And as they dig deeper they discover a host of half-truths and lies. It seems that someone in Fethering has a deep, dark, deadly secret – and is prepared to kill to keep it.
? The Shooting in the Shop ?
One
In a sense, the murder let Carole Seddon off the hook. All the social niceties she had been worrying about throughout December seemed much less important after someone had been killed.
For many years Carole had tried to ignore Christmas. As a child, she had observed it with the tense middle- class rigour that her parents had brought to everything they did. In the early years of her marriage to David the festival had been slightly less fraught and when their son Stephen was small they had gone through the required rituals with an attitude which at times approached the relaxed.
But Carole’s painful divorce from David had put an end to the idea of Christmas as a season of goodwill. The adolescent Stephen had reacted – as he did to most pressures – by burying himself in work, and as soon as his age made it decent for him to do so, had contrived to spend Christmas away from both of his parents.
But Stephen’s life had changed. He was now married to Gaby. They had an adorable daughter Lily. And for some months Stephen had been talking in terms of ‘a proper family Christmas’. It was a prospect that filled Carole Seddon with a sense of deep foreboding.
She wasn’t sure whether knowing that Jude would also be around over this particular Christmas made things better or worse. In previous years her neighbour had been away for the duration ‘with friends’ (into details of whose identity Carole didn’t probe). That was really all that was said about Christmas. Carole would be staying in Fethering, Jude would be away with friends. And by the time the New Year started, the last thing anyone wanted to hear about was the details of someone else’s Christmas. Which suited Carole very well.
Jude was the closest the tightly buttoned Carole had to a friend, and the knowledge that she would be next door at Woodside Cottage throughout the holiday should have been cheering. But Carole had never been good at seeing the positive side of anything, and Jude’s presence in Fethering over Christmas did present her with a lot of challenging questions.
For a start, how did Jude celebrate Christmas, if at all? Carole was properly wary of her neighbour’s New Age tendencies. Would there be crystals and joss sticks involved? And then again, how much of Carole would Jude want to see over the Christmas period? She was notoriously casual about social arrangements. Already Carole had had a card through the door of High Tor, inviting her to Woodside Cottage on the Sunday before Christmas for an ‘Open House, from twelve noon until the booze runs out’. This did not accord with any of Carole Seddon’s rules for entertaining. When was she meant to arrive (assuming, that is, that she actually went)? And, even more unsettling, when was the right time to leave? She liked party hosts to be very specific about such details. “Drinks 6.30 to 8.30” – you knew where you were with an invitation like that. Even better, “Drinks and Canapes 6.30 to 8.30” – then you knew you wouldn’t be getting a full meal and could have a little cottage cheese salad waiting in the fridge for when you got home.
But open house…that could mean anything. Was there food involved? Was there an actual sit-down meal and, if so, at what point during the time between twelve noon and the moment the booze ran out would the guests be sitting down to it? The whole thing made Carole Seddon very nervous. She couldn’t imagine a less appealing concept than that of an open house. Houses like High Tor should, in her opinion be permanently closed, with invited guests arriving by prearrangement only. If people started coming to your house any time they felt like it, the potential for embarrassment was unimaginable.
Amidst all her agonizing about the invitation, Carole wouldn’t admit to herself what was really worrying her. It was meeting Jude’s other friends. Her neighbour was currently working as a healer (a word from whose pronunciation Carole could never exclude an edge of scepticism), but it was clear that, before she moved to the middle-class gentility of Fethering, Jude had had an extremely varied and colourful life.
Carole had never quite got all the details of this life, just hints from things mentioned in passing. This was not because Jude was secretive – she was the most open of women – but because Carole always felt reticent about probing too overtly. This did not mean that she was not intrigued by her friend’s past, and she had pieced together quite a few gobbets of information about it. At various stages of her life Jude had been a model, an actress and a restaurateur. She had been married at least twice, cohabited with other men, and had a stream of lovers (more numerous in Carole’s imagination than they ever could have been in reality). But whenever Carole got to the point of asking for more flesh to be put on this skeletal history, the conversation seemed invariably to glide on to other subjects. Jude was not being deliberately evasive; she was just such an empathetic listener that people – even self-contained people like Carole – soon found themselves talking about their own lives and problems rather than hers.
But the thought of Jude’s friends was worrying. The thought of the other guests who might attend the Christmas open house. It wasn’t that Carole had never met any of Jude’s friends. The people who used her healing services often became more than clients and Carole had been introduced to some of them. She had even met one of Jude’s lovers, Laurence Hawker, who had lived out the last months of his life at Woodside Cottage.
But Carole was worried about the ones she hadn’t met. Worried about the kind of people they might be – positive, relaxed people like Jude herself. People for whom being alive seemed part of a natural process rather than, as it often felt to Carole, a challenging imposition. People who would think that Jude’s neighbour was irredeemably dowdy, with her antiseptically tidy house, her pension from the Home Office, her Marks and Spencer’s clothes, her sensible shoes, her straight-cut grey hair and rimless glasses over pale blue eyes. Carole Seddon knew that she could never compete with the faint aura of glamour which always hung about Jude.
With that perverse vanity of the shy, she was much more worried about what people might think of her than she was inclined to show any interest in them.
The other thing that worried her was that one of Jude’s friends at the open house might ask how she usually spent Christmas. Or worse, might find out how she actually had spent the past few Christmases.
In her bleakest moments Carole thought her ideal would be never to prompt any emotion from anyone. But now her granddaughter Lily was in her life, this was becoming a difficult stance to maintain. There was one emotion, however, which Carole Seddon never wanted to prompt in anyone, and that was pity.
When she had moved permanently to Fethering, raw from her divorce and smarting from her not-completely voluntary early retirement from the Home Office, she had known the risks of appearing pitiable. A woman the wrong side of the menopause, on her own in a seaside village…she was morbidly afraid of slipping into the stereotype of the solitary swaddled figure reading a magazine in a shelter by the beach.
It was to counter this danger that she had bought a dog. Gulliver was a Labrador and his original purpose had
