Lots of Love by Fiona Walker Page B

prey.
    ‘Who’ll start me at fifty?’ she suggested eagerly.
    Pru’s watercolour lessons were peddled for just forty pounds in the end, which Ellen guessed hardly covered the materials. She was, according to Pheely’s sotto voce asides, run ragged by three of Giles’s many children, knocked back Valium like Smarties and was known as something of an ancient mariner when it came to her problems. ‘Whoever’s bought that will find themselves trapped on a hill slapping yellow ochre on to rag paper and listening to Pru’s tales of woe. Talk about Watercolour Challenged.’
    As the lots came up in turn, she cheerfully gave Ellen the low-down on donors and recipients, whispering through her ventriloquist’s smile to avoid being mistaken for bidding again.
    ‘That’s Lily Lubowski – from the shop,’ she hissed excitedly, as the bidding hotted up for a week in a villager’s second home in France. ‘Married Joel when he was based at Upper Heyford with the US Airforce, then found herself stuck in Little Rock, Arkansas, for twenty years. When he retired, she dragged him back here. She’d always dreamed of running a tea room in Lower Oddford, but for some reason they ended up with a failing post office in Oddlode, hence the vast array of cakes on sale and the baseball bat hidden behind the counter.’
    Lily looked innocuous enough, despite the rather startling peroxide blonde hair and obvious face-lift. Ellen wondered why Pheely called her a complete weirdo. ‘Does she sell Little Rock cakes?’ she asked.
    ‘Lily’s convinced that every customer is going to stage a hold-up,’ Pheely whispered. ‘She once even accused poor Dilly of shoplifting. I’d just sent her in there to fetch my paper, which yet again hadn’t been delivered that morning, and the next thing you know Lily has the police crawling all over Oddlode. When the constable asked darling Dilly whether a parent or guardian could be contacted, she tried explaining that her parent was lying in bed at home waiting for her Guardian, and mad Lily got the wrong end of the stick and contacted social services. Having lived on a diet of US reality TV for two decades, she thinks we’re all candidates for Jerry Springer or America’s Most Wanted. She won’t let her paper-round kids near me now. I read Pixie’s Telegraph after she’s finished with it.’
    It seemed that there were few people in the village Touchy Pheely trusted, or with whom she hadn’t fallen out at some point, although Ellen sensed that affection lay behind the mischievous nicknames and heated feuds.
    ‘Your neighbour, Hunter Gardner.’ Pheely pointed out a familiar bullish figure, who was bidding for a day’s shooting at the Lower Springlode artificial grouse moor. ‘Great chums with your mother.’
    Ellen recognised the stiff-backed, ex-military man and village complainer, tonight kitted out immaculately in a tweed suit and golf-club tie. His Field Farm land divided the Goose Cottage paddock from the manor’s fields and consisted of neatly clipped enclosures housing rare poultry and miserable-looking snowy-white show sheep. He and Jennifer had happily conspired in many a campaign, including the one that had closed the footpath across their combined land. Hunter, as her mother was proud of pointing out, had a torch-bearing soft spot for Jennifer Jamieson. Theo loathed him.
    ‘I might bid on his lot.’ Ellen looked at the description, which offered a month’s lawn-mowing courtesy of Hunter Gardner’s gardener, Gary. She badly needed some help with sorting out the Goose Cottage meadow.
    ‘Don’t!’ Pheely hissed. ‘Gary is the Oddlode poisoner. He’ll napalm everything he can’t hack to within an inch of ground level.’
    Pheely had reasons why Ellen shouldn’t bid on any of the lots, which was perhaps not such a bad thing because Ellen hardly had the money to match some of the ludicrous sums being offered. It seemed that there was an unofficial competition going on as to who