DECOY (Kindle Single) Read Online Free PDF Page A

third housed a bright yellow Lotus Evora. She guessed that the missing car belonged to ‘he’, and that the sporty number was the little woman’s runaround.
    Kate’s price had just gone up another two-fifty.
    She parked up, got out of the car. The distant buzz of a lawnmower sounded from a neighbouring property, screened off behind the trees. Sprinklers twitched on the grass and made rainbows in the sunlight. An ornamental path ran up the side of a lawn just about long enough to land a light aircraft, winding up to the ivied stone house. Kate drew a deep breath and climbed the front steps.
    Julie Hawkins opened the door even before Kate had found the bell, as if she’d been waiting in the hallway. She was in her late forties, with neat dark hair and pearls. She greeted Kate with an edgy smile. ‘Thank you so much for coming.’
    The inside of the house was as tasteful and expensive-looking as the outside. None of the furniture looked less than a century old. Burnished walnut and mahogany everywhere, resting solidly on Persian rugs that probably cost more than Kate’s car. Mrs Hawkins invited Kate into a living room that was twice the size of the whole flat in Jericho. ‘Would you like a drink? Grape juice? Lemonade? I’m afraid we have nothing alcoholic in the house.’
    ‘I’m fine, thanks.’ Kate settled into one of a pair of facing Chintz sofas to which her client showed her. Julie Hawkins sat opposite, perched on the edge of the cushion with her hands restless in her lap. ‘Oh, my,’ she said with a worried grimace, as if she was about to have all her teeth pulled out. ‘I’ve never done anything like this before.’
    ‘Please be assured everything you tell me is confidential,’ Kate said.
    ‘If anyone sees you here—’
    ‘Then I’m a design consultant you’ve hired to help redecorate your lovely home,’ Kate said with her best reassuring smile. Sometimes she even impressed herself. ‘Now, how can I be of service?’
    As had been fairly evident from the start, the subject of the meeting was Mrs Hawkins’ husband, to whom she’d been married for sixteen years. His name was Geoffrey, he was fifty-two and he was a successful antiques dealer. That explained the furniture, Kate thought. He had shops in Swindon and Reading as well as the one in Summertown in north Oxford, which Kate had often passed but never thought of entering. Somehow, the idea of blowing a whole month’s pay on a coffee table had just never been top of her list of priorities.
    ‘Geoffrey has his ways,’ Mrs Hawkins explained, still as nervous as a bird in a roomful of hungry cats. Kate wished she’d stop glancing out of the window all the time. ‘I mean, all men do, don’t they?’ Mrs Hawkins went on. ‘He keeps some things to himself. Doesn’t like to talk about his work, for example. Gets very touchy if you ask him the wrong question. But I always believed he never had those kinds of secrets. I mean, I always thought he was, you know, faithful to me.’
    ‘I’m assuming you now suspect otherwise, or else you wouldn’t have called me.’
    Julie Hawkins pursed her lips and then picked up a handbag on the sofa next to her. ‘There’s something I want to show you,’ she said. The handbag was expensive-looking, like everything else in the house. Out of it she took an envelope, and reached across to pass it to Kate.
    Kate opened it. Inside was a glossy photo print of Geoffrey Hawkins. He was fat and bald and didn’t look much of a Romeo, but then he was presumably wealthy enough not to need to. Also inside the envelope was another item, which rolled out and fell into Kate’s lap. It was a lipstick tube printed with a leopard-skin design, bearing the logo BAD KITTY. The lipstick was an even more flamboyant red than the one Kate had bought to lure Kev the Key, as if he’d needed any encouragement.
    ‘I see,’ Kate said. It certainly didn’t belong to Julie Hawkins.
    Julie Hawkins looked at the lipstick and sighed.