Fate Worse Than Death by Sheila Radley Page B

Lois. If anything, it deprived her of a really good reason for giving her husband a piece of her mind. If she’d had to put up with Charley twice in one day, or if she’d been run off her feet by an early-evening coachload of unexpected customers, how she would have been justified in letting fly at Phil when he returned!
    But at six-thirty the Flintknappers Arms was still empty. Lois went to the open doorway. The street was empty too. The whole of Fodderstone village, now that the day workers had returned home, had an air of exhaustion, as though it had been baked into silence by the unclouded sun.
    She flounced back into the bar, her neat medium-high heels clicking on the floor. It was such a complete waste of time, hanging about waiting for customers. The children had brought home two rumbustious friends, and she had had to leave them to forage for their own tea; heaven knew what they were all up to. But if she journeyed to the kitchen to sort them out, someone would immediately materialize in the bar and shout for service. Damn the customers, damn the Flintknappers Arms …
    By six-forty when her first customer – a young, fair, sharp-featured stranger – appeared, Lois could have screamed at him. ‘Yes?’ she snapped, her hamster cheeks crimson above the lilac pie-frill of her blouse.
    â€˜Is the landlord anywhere about?’ asked the man.
    Lois would have enjoyed announcing exactly what she thought of her husband’s absence, but loyalty and discretion made her guard her tongue. ‘I’m afraid my husband isn’t in,’ she said, putting a belated welcome into her voice, though her neatly rounded buttocks were quivering with the effort of restraint. ‘He had to go into Breckham Market to see his accountant this afternoon, and he must have been held up. I’m expecting him back any moment.’
    Martin Tait told her that he had come about his aunt’s brandy. Lois recalled Mrs Schultz as an occasional buyer of a bottle of sherry, but she knew nothing about the brandy. Tait, who was in no hurry, bought a half-pint of lager to drink while he waited for the landlord to return, and carried his glass out into the sun.
    There were no benches outside the Flintknappers Arms, which fronted directly on to the quiet village street. He leaned with consciously negligent grace against the doorpost and watched a young woman who was dismounting from a fine black horse. She hitched it to a convenient garden fence and then walked across the street towards him, making straight for the pub.
    Tait moved away from the door with what appeared to be nothing more than casual courtesy, though the blood had begun to shift through his veins at an unprecedented gallop. He couldn’t remember when he had last seen a combination quite as stunning as this: natural ash-blonde hair, dark-blue eyes, slim body inside nothing but a thin shirt and cream-coloured stretch jodhpurs; and over all an air of expensively bred self-assurance.
    She stepped through the door without appearing to notice his existence, let alone returning his smile. Tait was momentarily crestfallen, realizing that he’d just been on the receiving end of an upper-class put-down. But to hell with that: she was probably no more than upper-middle, and he was middle class himself – only middle-middle, perhaps, but old middle-middle, with family silver to prove it. His public school, Framlingham College, might not be in the Eton and Winchester league, but it had a good solid reputation in East Anglia. And with a university degree behind him and a Chief Constable’s appointment somewhere up ahead, he had no intention of being put down socially by anyone.
    He followed her into the bar, where she was buying cigarettes.
    â€˜You’re not, by any chance, Charlotte Spencer-Davenport?’ he asked, inventing a name that sounded like a pedigree.
    â€˜No,’ said the horsewoman, picking up the packet of cigarettes. The