Claire's Candles Mystery 04 - Rose Petal Revenge by Agatha Frost

Author:Agatha Frost
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Pink Tree Publishing LTD
Published: 2020-11-29T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Claire closed the door to the sitting room softly, leaving Rina with DI Ramsbottom and her mother, Janet. After securing the scene, the DI had suggested they take Rina somewhere comfortable and away from prying eyes to calm down. Instinctively, Claire had suggested her parents’ cottage, and though her mother had initially acted like they were intruding with it being so late, she’d quickly changed into her best clothes and laid out a spread fit for a royal visit.

After creeping out the back door, Claire bounced across the paving stones in the grass down to her father’s shed at the bottom of the immaculate garden.

“I don’t think so,” she said to Sally after squeezing inside. “Get your own seat.”

Sally went to laugh, but she stopped when Claire didn’t join in. She got up and moved to the other end of the shed, leaning against a stack of plant pots lodged between two rusting filing cabinets. Claire only needed one plant pot, the one in the corner that had been hers for as long as she’d had the ability to sit up straight on her own. Her bottom had long since outgrown it, but she’d mastered the art of the perfect perch.

“How is the poor woman doing?” Alan asked as he leaned back in his battered office chair in front of his potting desk. “She was in quite a state when you turned up.”

“The wailing’s quietened down. I don’t think she had much choice but to stop when Mum started force-feeding her biscuits.”

“I can do one better than biscuits.” He opened the top drawer of the desk and pulled out a shiny packet of pink and yellow fondant fancies. “Don’t tell your mother. She’s on the sugar offensive again. Seems to go out the window when there’s guests or a WI bake sale, mind you. What she doesn’t know won’t hurt.”

Alan shot Claire a playful wink as he peeled off the wrapper and offered her one. While Claire loved her parents wholeheartedly, it was for different reasons. She found her mother’s strange ways amusing even when they didn’t see eye to eye, but there was no one she more clearly saw eye to eye with than her father. Not only did they look similar, with their short wide frames and shared ‘Harris nose’, but they were also tuned into the same frequency. While Claire understood her mother’s frequency, static interference often got in the way.

“This new stabbing,” Alan said after licking crumbs from his lips, “I assume you think it’s connected to the incident at the convention?”

“It has to be, doesn’t it?”

“Bit too weird for a coincidence,” Sally mumbled after taking a bite of her fancy. “You said it yourself about that love quad-thingy. Two corners have been stabbed, and now one is dead. I know they keep saying knife crime is on the up, but this is a bit much.”

“Love what-now?” Alan asked.

“Quadrangle,” said Claire. “It’s a love triangle with four people but triangles only have – it doesn’t matter, but Rina seems to be at the centre of several men’s overlapping affections.

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