Murder by the Book (Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries 4) by Debbie Young

Author:Debbie Young [Young, Debbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Hawkesbury Press
Published: 2018-04-21T05:00:00+00:00

“How come no-one in the village has ever mentioned Horace to me? Is he some kind of black sheep who’s been drummed out of Wendlebury?”

It was easier to ask Hector once we were on the motorway, staring at the lights ahead of us in the queue of traffic. It’s always easier to ask tricky questions in a car, when you’re isolated and intimate but can’t make eye contact.

Hector smiled slightly at the second question. “No, he’s all right. He’s just been abroad for years, and, like he said, all his village mates have long since moved away. There’s no reason for him to come back to Wendlebury since Mum and Dad moved to Clevedon. He’s in a different orbit now.”

“Apart from you,” I said, trying to gauge his reaction out of the corner of my eye. “Do I take it Horace doesn’t know about Hermione Minty?”

He shifted down into second gear as the traffic slowed up the hill. I looked back over my shoulder at the vast, flat expanse of fields behind us, twinkling in the late afternoon sunshine. Fleetingly I wished we could turn round at the next junction and head back down south, to find another quiet little seaside resort and take a break there, away from the village, away from his family, all by ourselves. We’d never been away together as a couple before.

“No, not even Dad knows about Minty. Only Mum. And Horace the He-man is the last person I’d want to know. He’d never take her books – my books – seriously. As it is, he makes fun of her without even knowing she’s me, reading aloud from Mum’s copies of the books in a silly high-pitched voice that he’s developed especially for the purpose. Can you imagine what he’d be like if he knew I wrote those books? He’d have a field day.”

As the traffic slowed to a halt, Hector changed into neutral and applied the handbrake.

“Not that it matters to me as a writer. I mean, he’s hardly my target audience, and I believe what I write is good stuff of its kind. I just don’t want to have his voice in my head, teasing me as I write each new book. It may sound pretentious, but he’d kill my muse. Catch it and keep it in his crocodile trap. I don’t want him to put me off.”

I could see what he meant. “What sort of books does Horace read?”

“He doesn’t. He prefers real life to books.”

Now that the sun had gone down and there was no cloud cover, the cold was descending. Hector flicked a switch on the dashboard to turn on the heating.

“That’s one reason he’s living in Australia now – the availability of rugged sports and adventure all year round.”

He said ‘rugged sports’ as if it was a perversion.

“Does he have a steady girlfriend?”

“He has girlfriends all right.” Hector’s face turned grim. “Very often someone else’s.”

I wondered whether that had included Celeste. Perhaps what Hector had told me about Celeste leaving him for another woman was a smokescreen.

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