The Cat and the Corpse in the Old Barn by Kate High

Author:Kate High
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Published: 2020-05-07T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 19

‘Remember to take care, darlin’.’ Sandra took her attention away temporarily from washing Micky to call to Clarice. Not wanting to frighten him, or wet his dressings, she had sat him on towels in a dry tub and was gently sponging him down to remove the dog shampoo. Micky’s eyes, large, adoring orbs, never moved from her face.

‘I will,’ Clarice called back as she withdrew from the room. Going to the car, she looked at the deep gouges along the sides. She’d told Jim about it and had suggested that she get it repaired the following week when both of them were less busy.

As she started the engine, her phone rang. Georgie came into her mind, but when she looked at the screen, she didn’t recognise the number. She pressed to accept the call.

‘Bitch!’ She immediately recognised the voice, guttural and aggressive, as Pete Smith’s.

‘How did you get my number?’ She tried to keep her voice calm, as if unaffected by his vitriol.

‘You don’t interfere with mine!’

‘If you mean interfering by giving your wife a lift, I thought I was being kind – it was chucking it down.’

‘She waits where I tell her to wait. If she’d done that, she wouldn’t have got wet.’

‘It wasn’t very nice for her to have to wait in the barn where her sister’s body had been found, and it’s hardly dry in there, with half the roof missing.’

‘None of your fuckin’ business, bitch. If you tell your dogs to sit, you don’t want some sod to give a different command to confuse them.’

‘OK, well if I see her again, I won’t offer her a lift.’ She realised he was baiting her. She wouldn’t respond to his suggestion that he treated his wife as she might a dog.

‘That’s not good enough.’

A frigid silence descended: a stand-off. Clarice cut the call without replying.

Minutes later, driving to the main road, she checked her rear-view mirror and quickly turned her head, back and forth, to search around in a circle. She didn’t want to admit to herself that she felt rattled. He was not a man who’d respond to reason; he would, she thought, work on plots of retaliation to feed the malice he nurtured. It was obvious from Jackie’s comments that he had taken a strong dislike to her. She remembered what Rick had said about Pete’s problems with alcohol and anger.

But the journey turned out to be uneventful, and the thought that Pete Smith might be pursuing her dwindled from her mind. The weather, after yesterday’s downpour, was dry, and a few hours later Clarice, having entered the postcode for the Sunnydale retirement home into her satnav, found herself driving directly through King’s Lynn to a long, low, single-storey building in a quiet street and next to a primary school, both probably built in the late 1970s.

At just after 2 p.m. the car park had already filled up, and she took the last unoccupied place. There were the usual indications that the building was used

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