Slaughter in the Cotswolds Read Online Free PDF

new car and emerge in a fluid elegant movement. Emily was superficially like Thea, but four inches taller. Jocelyn, the youngest, was much fairer and heavier, plucking her genes from the Johnstonegrandmother, rather than Maureen’s slighter, darker, father, Grandpa Foster, a man they barely remembered, but who was immortalised in Emily, who was said to look exactly like him.
    ‘Don’t sit here,’ Thea warned. ‘It won’t take two. Every time I move it threatens to collapse.’
    ‘Hmm,’ said Emily. ‘The place seems a bit ramshackle.’
    ‘By local standards, it is – definitely,’ Thea agreed. ‘I quite like it.’
    They went in through the front door and Thea instantly saw the house through Emily’s eyes. It was dusty; the windows weren’t very clean; the rugs and stair carpet had endured spillages and damage that left indelible marks. The curtains at the front window were ragged at the edges where the parrot had climbed up them countless times.
    Ignatius was intently aware of a second intruder. ‘Lock the doors, Daddy! Lock the doors!’ it screeched, with impossible clarity. It was the first time Thea had heard him speak.
    ‘My God!’ said Emily faintly. ‘I see what you mean. It’s terrifying.’
    ‘That’s nothing,’ said Thea with relish. ‘There was a great big bat in my bedroom last night.’
    ‘No!’
    ‘I always thought I liked them until then. But it’s all true what they say – you get a real horror that it’ll tangle itself in your hair. I can’t thinkwhy, when they absolutely never do that, at least according to Carl. They move so irrationally, darting and swooping, and you know they can’t see you and don’t know what you are.’
    Emily shuddered. ‘I would have run right out and driven home on the spot.’
    ‘Well, I can’t do that, can I? Whatever happens, I have to stay here for a fortnight.’
    ‘Well, you’re a lot braver than me, that’s for sure. And braver than your dog, by the look of it.’
    Hepzibah was circling the parrot’s cage, eyes fixed on the bird, small squeaks emitting from her. ‘Lock the doors,’ said the parrot again, on a quieter note, sending the dog into further whining confusion. Distress was clear in every nerve.
    Thea laughed. ‘Come on, silly. It won’t hurt you.’ But Hepzie continued her patrol, thoroughly bewildered, but convinced she had some sort of protective role to play. Thea dragged her into the kitchen, where she made tea and engaged her sister in the conversation she had come to conduct. It wasn’t long before they ventured onto the main topic – the death of their father and their mother’s future. It ebbed and flowed, as they moved from kitchen to living room, and then outside to feed the dogs and ferrets. Thea spent half an hour in the kitchen, forbidding Emily from joining her as she set the pheasantssimmering in a casserole, with carrots and onions and herbs. They were still slightly frozen, but she hoped that a couple of hours in a moderate oven would see them tender and toothsome. Emily called through from the main living room, every few minutes: ‘Surely I can do something to help?’ and ‘I came to talk to you, not sit here twiddling my thumbs.’ But hard experience had taught Thea that to invite Emily to share cooking was to consign yourself to a barrage of corrections and scathing comments about your technique. Nobody sliced carrots to Emily’s satisfaction, and the idea of her discovering that the birds were not fully defrosted was too terrible to contemplate.
    ‘I’ll be right with you,’ she promised. ‘We can have an hour or more of quality time before I have to get some potatoes on.’
    The conversation had already verged on the overwrought at times. Awkwardly, Emily had voiced her sense of disconnection after the funeral, only the day before. ‘I’ve been trying to carry on as normal, especially with Grant going off to sixth form college in a couple of weeks. He needs all sorts of books and