Long Cold Death by Lynda Wilcox

Author:Lynda Wilcox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: British whodunit, Cozy mystery, School, Humour, Series, Female sleuth
Publisher: Lynda Wilcox
Published: 2016-11-03T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

I hung up my coat, poured myself a stiff vodka and lemonade and took a good gulp. It slid down like satin, the alcohol doing the trick and steadying my nerve after the day I’d had.

It helped me prepare for Jerry’s reaction when I told him that after only one investigation I was quitting the Cold Case Unit. Quite how I phrased my resignation, I hadn’t yet decided. Saying, ‘Hello, darling, I’ve gone over to the Dark Side’ wouldn’t exactly please him, but then, what would?

I worried over it while I checked the fridge and the kitchen cupboards wondering what to have for dinner. Whatever he said about my throwing in the towel, I was determined that he wouldn’t stop me going back to working full-time for KD.

Much to my surprise, he did not rant and rave when I broached the subject after dinner – but then he was full of oven-baked tuna with a Portuguese tomato salad.

“What’s brought this on?” He sat on the sofa and pulled me down onto his lap.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I just don’t think I can do this any more. I’m not cut out for working on cold cases. Besides, she was such a horrible person.”

“That doesn’t mean that her murderer should go unpunished.”

“Yet if they are—punished, I mean—it’s hardly justice, is it?”

“No, but it is the law.”

I gave the sort of smile that only a wife, married for two months to a man pledged to uphold that law, could give—tight-lipped and furious.

The law would take its course and justice could take care of itself. I thought I’d wanted the truth, now I wasn’t so sure.

“But, Jerry —”

“Look, beloved, we can’t always like, or have sympathy for, murder victims. I’ve known some right blackguards get topped and, believe me, I’ve cheered when they have been, but that doesn’t stop us from finding the culprit and bringing them before the law. Not all victims can be Marilyn Pearces or Jaynee Johnsons, you know.”

He was right, damn him. I’d started off thinking that Johnson, the glamorous presenter of a TV dance show who’d been stabbed to death in an empty house, was no more that a bimbo with no two brain cells that rubbed together. I’d been forced to revise that uncharitable opinion during the course of an investigation that had proved her to be rather clever indeed.

Hadn’t I done the same thing with Emily Rimmer, but in reverse — going from thinking her misunderstood and falsely maligned, to believing her as guilty as sin and as venomous as those that she’d worked with claimed her to be?

“I suppose you’re right.”

“You’ve not actually said too much about this case until now. Do you think you and Constable Bowles have made progress?”

If getting more than a monosyllable or a grunt out of my colleague was progress, then the answer was yes. Working together wasn’t easy for either one of us. In a sense Jerry connected us, but that connection also kept us apart.

Jerry knew nothing of this, of course.

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