Auld Acquaintance by Sofia Slater

Author:Sofia Slater
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: And Then There Were None;Agatha Christie;Ruth Ware;In a Dark Dark Wood;The Hunting Party;Lucy Foley;The Guest List;Scottish island
Publisher: Swift Press
Published: 2022-10-10T10:30:35+00:00

Chapter 14

In the kitchen we each leaned against separate surfaces, quiet and wary. The only sounds were the kettle boiling and the wind battering the house. I smelled of blood. Bella’s hair had stained the front of my pullover.

The kettle clicked off and we all watched James make the world’s most deliberate pot of tea. Four bags went in: one, two, three, four. He stirred. Four cups came out of the cupboard, making four separate china chinks on the side. When he got out the sugar, Bella began to object, but he silenced her.

‘For shock. It’s customary. But I’m glad to see you can think about healthy eating again. You must be coming back to yourself.’

A tiny corner of my mouth wanted to twitch into a smile. But then Ravi flashed through my mind again, bloodied and broken open. The smile died.

Finally, all the tea was poured and milked and sugared, and we were sipping and looking at each other warily.

‘I can start,’ said James, breaking the silence, which had begun to thicken. ‘It’s relatively simple. I came back here to clear up the tea and toast things, and when I came back out I found you… at the top of the stairs,’ he finished euphemistically.

‘And what time was this?’ asked Winston.

‘I don’t know. I don’t obsessively check the time.’

‘Nonetheless, we ought to try to establish it, roughly. The police will be wanting a coherent narrative when they arrive.’

‘Let them establish it, then,’ I said, feeling defensive of James. ‘Shouldn’t we leave it to the professionals?’

‘But I am a professional.’

‘I can try to guess.’ James screwed up his face to indicate hard thinking. ‘I did see the time when we were making tea. That was around three o’clock. And what is it now?’

We all swivelled our heads towards the clock over the doorway, which stood at just past twenty to five.

‘Right, so we had some tea, and Millie left pretty quickly, and then after a while I came back in here to clean everything up. Maybe that was quarter to four? I didn’t hurry about washing up, and then I stayed here browsing the cookbooks for a while, torturing myself really, since the cupboards are bare. Then I heard the door open – the front door – so I figured Millie was back, and I thought I’d come and see what everyone was up to. That was, I don’t know, fifteen minutes ago?’ He looked at Winston, shrugging as though to apologise for the inexactness of his calculations.

Winston nodded and worked his fingers, calculating.

‘Very well, let’s accept that you were out of sight for… perhaps thirty-five minutes, starting from ten to four. Until that point you were with the rest of us in the library. Well, not all of the rest of us.’ He looked at me, expectant; I hoped not accusatory.

‘I don’t know when I left. I don’t know how long I was outside. I don’t know anything. I don’t understand why any of this is happening!’

I had started

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