Viridian Tears. Rachel Green
bit early?”
“Not by the time I cook it.” Graham fished in the box. “Look. I got a bottle of Lambrusco to go with it. A touch of elegance, yeah?”
“Elegance?” Michelle was about to launch into the definition of elegance when she saw the look on Graham’s face. If she crushed him now he might never recover and, more to the point, he might realize she would never be in love with him and leave her high and dry. That would be the end of her burgeoning business as a spiritualist because she’d be forced to go back to office drudgery just to cover the rent.
“Tell you what.” She stepped closer and straightened his lapel. “I don’t really fancy battered cod. How about you take me to that Italian restaurant I like, eh? I really fancy a plate of fettuccini.” She tapped his cheek playfully. “Who knows? There might even be fellatio for you afterward.”
Graham turned his nose up. “I don’t really like Italian food. Couldn’t we do that another night? I right fancy cod and chips.”
“Pizza? You like pizza.”
“Yes. Can we have pizza? “
“You can have pizza at Corleone’s. They open at six so we’ll have time to eat before we go to Shirley Burbridge’s. I’ll book us a table, shall I?”
“All right.” Graham began to unpack the groceries he’d bought, putting the bag of fresh cod straight into the freezer with a heavy sigh.
Michelle stood over him and lightly kissed the top of his head. “We’ll have your cod tomorrow, eh? Maybe with new potatoes and peas and a butter sauce. You like butter, don’t you?” She shook his shoulder lightly and he grinned. “You do, don’t you?”
“Yeah. I like butter. ‘No buts, it’s got to be butter.’” An advertising slogan tripped off his lips.
“There you go. Italian tonight and I’ll cook tomorrow.”
“Okay.” He stacked the rest of the food in the cupboards, somewhat cheered and Michelle phoned to book a table relieved she’d averted an emotional disaster. When she replaced the phone on the cradle she picked up her honey and lemon again. It was long cold but the whisky still burned her throat as it went down. She popped a couple of paracetamol to be on the safe side.
“Have you thought of anything for the séance tonight?”
Graham turned and pressed the palm of his right hand to his cheek. He’d been raised by his aunt and Michelle could remember the woman having the same gesture. “It depends if they give us any time alone in the room.” He dug into his pockets. “I’ve got fishing line to move curtains and stuff. Puffers for cold draughts. Epsom salts if there’s a fire.”
“Nothing obvious. We can’t afford for them to twig it’s all fake.”
“’Course not, Shell.”
“See that they don’t.” She looked at her watch. “It’s quarter to five now so that gives us an hour. You get in the shower while I get dressed. We have to look our best for Mrs. High-and-Mighty, don’t we?”
“What should I wear?”
“Put on a shirt and tie. And trousers, not jeans, and shoes instead of those ratty old trainers.” She smiled at him. He was a genial man and a lot of women would be pleased to have him looking after them. He just wasn’t exciting. She needed a man who would make her heart beat faster every time she looked at him. Someone who would woo her with romance and make every night a wild ride of lust and passion. She nodded at Graham as he trooped up the stairs. Graham’s idea of passion was having chocolate sauce on his ice cream.
The boom of the shower going on upstairs shook her out of her momentary reverie and she sat at the computer again. She typed Federico Poverelli into the search engine and was rewarded with links to his Facespace page, a blog account and a newspaper article.
She scanned the latter. It was an account of a trial in Laverstone court where Federico had been accused of poisoning a woman called Emily Robbins. He’d been acquitted on the testimony of Edward Burbridge, who gave Federico an alibi for the day of the poisoning.
Michelle added the page to her bookmarks folder and turned to the blog. Federico was an ad-hoc blogger, interspersing pictures he’d taken of Laverstone with others of dishes he’d prepared and observances of English life from the point of view of an Italian man. She added that site and turned to the Facespace page. There he was, twinkling eyes and pencil moustache smiling out of the page. She hovered the mouse over the Add Friend button for a moment. On the one hand, she didn’t want to reveal her interest but on the other, she couldn’t see his complete profile without him friending her.
She clicked the button just as she heard the shower stop.
Chapter 8
Meinwen sat on one of the questioning trees at the edge of the crooked forest and opened a new page of her sketchbook. It was a curious area of Hobb’s Wood, where a series of pine trees had been bent to a ninety degree angle at their base. The area had become a tourist attraction although the reason for the odd growth pattern–and indeed the method–had been lost for years.
Meinwen knew. She’d explained it in her book Wood and Stone: The Curious Desire to Affect Nature due out in the new year and decided the entry merited a drawing. Not that she was a very good artist. She could make a fair facsimile of what she saw in front of her but she’d be the first to admit her work lacked passion. The trees had been bent deliberately in the nineteen thirties by placing boulders from the nearby river Laver on their developing trunks, then removed again a few years later to allow the saplings to develop the natural curves they now portrayed. The boulders were still visible in the walls of the nineteen forty-six Provincial Insurance building in King Street.
She’d found the original plans for the Masonic Grand Hall when she’d been researching the whereabouts of the seven missing ring stones. The trees were bent to make the timbers for a bow roof; the theory being that the naturally curved pines would produce a vaulted ceiling without the need for bracing struts. Unfortunately the outbreak of the war prevented frivolous construction and the plans had been lost with the death of the architect, leaving the curiosity of the crooked forest as a legacy for generations to come.
Washes of ink from a shaggy ink cap mushroom brought a sense of menace to the drawing. She had precious few tubes in her little art box and she’d forgotten water, so her travel box of pigment pans was all but useless. She’d let it dry and ink over the drawing at home. It was too light as it was and wouldn’t scan well enough for her to embed it in the document otherwise. The cluster of mushrooms on the edge of the track had been a lucky find. Two to eat and one already gone to ink.
She packed up her art supplies and headed back into town. She paused to cut a chunk of honey fungus from the fork of a sycamore at the edge of the wood, inhaling the sweet scent it gave off under her touch. There was a good base meal here. If she could find a few more edible mushrooms she could partake of a veritable feast of nature.
The gloaming was already deepening into twilight when she left the main path and took the smaller track that led to the edge of the wood about a mile north of Laverstone manor. As familiar with them as she was, she had no desire to be in the woods alone after dark. She’d seen too many things that couldn’t be easily explained. Besides, she believed in the spirits of wood and water, the naiads and dryads and the old forest creatures. Just because she’d never seen them with her own eyes didn’t mean they weren’t real.
The track led past the old quarry. Chalk used to be dug from the stone here until the last war when the quarry fell short of able-bodied men and closed. It had become economically impractical after that and had been abandoned, though despite the signs warning of unstable cliffs people still came her to look for fossils.
A small fire sputtered in a ring of stones and she detoured to see who’d lit it. The figure working by its light sat on a tree trunk, using a small blade to chip away pieces of chalk from a fist-sized lump. A short distance away a tarpaulin was rigged