Death in Nonna's Kitchen by Alex Coombs

Author:Alex Coombs [Coombs, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: No Exit Press
Published: 2024-03-21T17:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Nine

On Friday, I helped Sam with some prep, had my meeting with Jess, showered, changed, put the things that I would need in a container and got into my car. Life outside of Nonna’s Kitchen was still going on.

It was the last day of June. Time to meet the witches of North Bucks, as arranged earlier but not on a blasted heath, rather in somewhere called Paeony Close in that hot-bed of New Age Spirituality that was Milton Keynes.

Driving up the M1, I thought about what Bryony had told me and how it impacted on what I already knew or suspected. I no longer thought Jean-Claude had anything to do with Giorgio’s death. He’d obviously had other things on his mind while that drama was being played out – and he’d certainly had his hands full – but I still liked him as a possible suspect for the blackmail. He also had nothing to do with the attempt on Octavia’s life. He definitely hadn’t been in the kitchen.

Who was the person who had locked her in the freezer? And why?

I turned my attention to the Feast of Litha as the motorway wound interminably on.

An hour or so later I was in Milton Keynes. North Bucks seemed a very different sort of place to South Bucks, less hilly, many more open fields, a sparser population density. Milton Keynes itself remained an elusive mystery to me. In the old days, armed with a road atlas for navigation, I’d have got comprehensively lost and doubtless seen a lot more of the town than I wanted to as I drove around and around in circles. It was like a maze whose centre I would have never reached, a town straight out of Jorge Luis Borges, but whose paths were wide tarmac roads punctuated by endless roundabouts and signs for places that you had never heard of. After a while, you lost all sense of reality. It was strangely featureless.

But now, in these satnav days, I was at my destination directly, not seeing any of the place, which only disclosed itself by peeping over the grassy parapets of the sunken dual carriageways that took me to the quarter that Chris lived in. Did I miss the romance of uncertainty of the old days, when going to a new town to find an address carried the almost cast-iron certainty of getting lost?

No, I didn’t.

Following the warm, Radio 4-style tones of the satnav, I turned into Paeony Close. It was an odd choice of address for a prominent witch and ageing Goth, I thought. If we were going floral, Mandrake would have been more appropriate. Chris lived in an executive housing estate. The houses were modern, red-brick and cedar-stained wood, the lawns and shrubs well-tended. The cars parked outside were BMWs and Audis. Sensible cars for sensible people with well-paid jobs. Doubtless Chris’s wife fell into this category. I wondered what Chris himself did for a living. He had never mentioned a job. Maybe he lived off his wife’s salary.

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