Lamb to the Slaughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

herself on being feisty, but she was old now. Latterly her life had contracted more and more, and with this latest persecution she had begun to feel trapped and helpless. And what was the point of life as a prisoner? She was a countrywoman born and bred: she had a shotgun for herself and the animals no one else would look after if she wasn’t there, and she wouldn’t scruple to use it.
    It would only take her minutes to get back to Wester Seton, but the shadows were lengthening as she drove out of the car park. The rickety frame of the pickup shuddered as she floored the accelerator, disregarding the speed limit. This just could be a matter of life or death.
     
    ‘And what can have happened to Uncle Andrew, then?’ Fiona Farquharson wondered aloud as she left the hall with her husband.
    Giles Farquharson didn’t look at her. ‘I don’t know.’
    She gave him a look of barely concealed dislike. ‘It has to be a good sign that he didn’t turn up. Perhaps he’s changed his mind about the development after all. That ghastly Kyle woman was obviously rattled.
    ‘You didn’t go and see him this afternoon, did you?’
    ‘No. No, I didn’t.’ He marched on, staring straight ahead.
    ‘Oh – just as well, probably. You’d only have made things worse.’
    ‘It’s his decision, Fiona. There’s nothing either of us can do, anyway.’
    ‘You’d always take the easy option, of course,’ she said with a sneer, but he wouldn’t be drawn, lengthening his stride so that she almost had to trot to keep up.
    Fiona’s thin scarlet lips tightened in irritation at his feebleness, wondering yet again why she’d ever married him. But in those days, when she was a leggy blonde and he was a tall, fit young officer in the Coldstream Guards, he’d looked a good prospect, especially given his mother’s benevolent and childless older brother. Now, though her own legs were admittedly sturdier than they had once been and she only remained blonde at considerable expense, he was totally unrecognisable from the wedding photos. Giles, as Fiona’s mother was wont to say crisply, had run to seed; what had once been muscle was now fat and flab. The bright prospects had been dimmed by a succession of dead-end jobs, culminating in his present one as land agent for an estate about five miles to the north of Kirkluce, in the hillier countryside on the fringe of the Galloway Forest Park.
    When Fiona was having a bitch session with her two closest girlfriends once, she’d said Giles’s name should have been Sidam, since he was Midas in reverse: everything that he touched turned to dross. If Uncle Andrew hadn’t paid the boys’ school fees at Wellington, they’d have ended up at the local comp, unable to read and write. Not that you would think they could, given how seldom they contacted their parents.
    Uncle Andrew’s legacy was their only hope of a comfortable retirement – even a luxurious one, considering that the superstore would pay whatever it took. If he just hadn’t been so damned selfish, fussing about that pathetic little Craft Centre ... She felt deeply embittered about what she had been through, thanks to that.
    ‘Of course, none of this mess had to happen. If you had gone to him years ago, the way I told you, and got him to put the estate in trust to avoid death duties...’
    Her husband’s face had flushed. ‘There’s no point in going on about it. Where did you park? I’m up the side street here.’
    ‘In the Square,’ she said, but found she was talking to herself.
    The War Memorial was in the Market Square, just off the High Street, surrounded by self-important grey stone buildings which housed the council offices, the library and firms of long-established solicitors and accountants. When Fiona reached it, there was a group of the local neds and hoodies fooling about at the other side, clustered around three motorbikes with their engines running. It was a common gathering-place for them, and Fiona had wondered at