Mrs. Malory and the Festival Murder by Hazel Holt

Author:Hazel Holt
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: rural england, cosy mystery, female detective, mrs malory, cozy mystery, murder mystery, british detective, hazel holt
Publisher: Hazel Holt
Published: 2010-06-29T15:01:48.935571+00:00

‘My thoughts hold mortal strife,

I do detest my life…’

I remembered Will sitting beside me weeping. My mind was in a whirl of misery and confusion. After a while I got up and took one of the sleeping tablets I hadn’t used since the days just after Peter died, and after a while I fell into a troubled sleep.

Chapter Nine

I felt awful the next morning. I was still half dopey with the effect of the sleeping tablet. As I dragged myself around the kitchen getting Michael’s breakfast and opening tins for the animals, I resolutely tried to put out of my mind the disturbing thoughts that had spoiled my rest. After all, it was pure conjecture. Indeed, it would surely have been too much of a coincidence if Adrian had been Lucy’s lover.

‘What’s up, Ma?’ Michael asked. ‘You look like death!’

‘Oh, nothing. I had a bad night, that’s all.’

He looked at me quizzically but said nothing, swirling honey onto his toast in patterns in such a way that trails of it fell on to the tablecloth.

‘Oh Michael, really!’ I snapped. ‘How can you be so childish and clumsy. Now that cloth will have to be washed and it was clean on yesterday!’

‘Sorry, Ma. Stupid of me.’

He finished his toast and coffee and got up to go. As he passed my chair he put his arm around my shoulders and gave me a hug.

‘Cheer up! Whatever it is, it’s not the end of the world.’

I felt rather ashamed of my bad temper, but when the post arrived I found that I had cause for more irritation. There, lying on the table before me, its red lettering somehow a personal insult, was a final demand for the electricity bill.

I always pay my bills by standing order, so obviously the bank had made a stupid muddle. It suddenly seemed the last straw and I snatched up my bag, thrust my arms into my coat and drove straight into Taviscombe to give them a piece of my mind.

It didn’t improve my temper when I discovered that, since the bank had only just opened, there were long queues. I tried to choose the shortest one but found myself (as I always do) first behind a shopkeeper paying in large sums in endless coins, and then someone who was engaged in a complicated foreign exchange transaction which involved much plying of calculators. Eventually the counter clerk went away entirely and showed no signs of coming back.

‘Has she disappeared completely?’ A voice that sounded as irritable as I felt revealed itself as Enid Palgrave.

‘So you’re back, then,’ she continued. ‘I have been trying to get in touch with you about the Meredith papers.’

‘Well,’ I said, trapped in the queue and unable to wriggle out of the situation. ‘I am rather busy at the moment.’

She ignored my feeble reply and went on.’

‘There is a great deal to be done in the way of sorting and classifying. From what I have managed to read through already, the papers seem to fall into two periods.

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