‘Come on, what’s really wrong?’

‘Oh God, this is going to sound so stupid,’ Nuala blurted out, ‘and I know you and Maddy don’t get on, but she’s my best friend. The thing is, she told me something in confidence the other day and now she’s mad with me because she thinks I told someone else.’

Kate felt sick. So that was why Maddy had come storming over here.

‘And ... did you?’

Standing patiently, like a child being undressed by its mother, Nuala waited for Kate to free first her good arm, then her head, before carefully unrolling the T-shirt down over her immobile shoulder. Finally she shook her head.

‘I can’t remember doing it. I wouldn’t hurt Maddy for the world, but there’s no other way it could have got out. It must have been me. I keep racking my brains,’ Nuala went on in desperation, ‘but I honestly can’t remember it. God, it’s like having that thingy disease, you know, that whatjacallit ...’

‘Alzheimer’ s.’

‘You see? You see?’ Nuala wailed. ‘That could be what’s wrong with me! Either that or I’m going completely mad.’ This was the moment to come out and say it, to set the record straight and put poor Nuala out of her abject misery.

This was the moment .. .

OK, one, two, three, here it comes, here it comes .. .

‘I’m sure you didn’t do it,’ said Kate, realising that these weren’t quite the words she’d had in mind. Deeply ashamed of her lack of moral fibre but not ashamed enough to blurt out the truth, she went on, ‘It’ll be OK. Now, d’you need a hand with this bra?’

Nodding, Nuala turned her back. Kate unclipped the bra and helped Nuala into her dressing gown. Still racked with guilt — why couldn’t she say it, why? — she jumped as they both heard Dexter bellowing, ‘Hey, new girl, where are you?’

The next moment he appeared in the doorway.

‘What’s going on up here then?’ demanded Dexter. ‘Hot lesbian sex?’

‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘Too bad it’s all over now. You missed it.’

‘Has it occurred to you that I’m trying to run a pub here? I’ve just called last orders and there are punters queuing three deep at the bar, so why don’t you get your ... self down there and start serving?’

He’d corrected himself, Kate realised; having been about to tell her to get her fat backside downstairs, he’d actually bothered to modify his language.

‘Fine,’ she told Dexter. ‘Keep your hair on.’ With a sweet smile she added, ‘What’s left of it.’

Chapter 24

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ wailed Maddy the next morning. ‘I just want to kill myself, I can’t believe I said all those horrible things, of course you didn’t tell Jake about me and Kerr.’

‘I didn’t? Really? Oh, thank God for that!’ Clutching her chest with relief, Nuala sank sideways against the door frame. Last night she had slept terribly, racked by dreams of herself clambering onto the pub roof, calling the entire village to attention and announcing through a megaphone that Maddy was bonking Kerr McKinnon but that ... sshhh ... nobody must breathe a word because it was TOP

SECRET.

After that, being woken by the doorbell at seven thirty had come as a welcome reprieve.

‘What can I tell you?’ Maddy’s hair was looking distinctly bird’s-nesty, as if she hadn’t slept well either. ‘I’m so ashamed.’

Since she hadn’t been too ashamed last night, Nuala said, ‘What changed your mind?’

‘Jake, of course. He’d gone to bed by the time I got back. Deliberately, so I couldn’t interrogate him.

Then this morning I told him what I’d said to you and he went, "Oh, it wasn’t Nuala." Just like that, the bastard, as if I’d been trying to guess the mystery ingredient in a casserole. So I said, "Oh fuck," and of course that was the moment Sophie came into the kitchen and said, "That’s a very rude word, Mrs Masters says only stupid people say fuck." Which was, of course, the very reason I was saying it,’

Maddy concluded, ‘because I had been stupid.’ Looking anguished, she added, ‘I’m sorry. Really and truly. Will you still be my friend?’

‘Go on then.’ Nuala was just glad it was all over, dizzy with relief that she hadn’t let slip the secret to Jake when, in all honesty, she could so easily have done. ‘You’ll have to help me get dressed though – ow!’ she winced as Maddy threw her arms round her like an over-enthusiastic bridesmaid catching a bouquet.

‘Sorry, sorry!’

‘So who did tell Jake?’ Nuala was bursting to hear.

‘I don’t know! He won’t say! What am I going to do?’

‘ Finish with Kerr?’ Nuala ventured.

Maddy’s face crumpled. ‘I don’t think I can.’

‘OK, so you have to tell Marcella.’

With a shudder Maddy said, ‘I definitely can’t do that.’

‘Only one other thing for it, then. Find out who told Jake and hire a professional assassin.’

‘Excellent. Much the best way. And afterwards,’ Maddy said hopefully, ‘they could assassinate Jake.’

Monday night was darts night at the Fallen Angel. It was also discovery night for Maddy.

Every time she looked over at Kate working behind the bar, Kate hurriedly looked elsewhere. The real giveaway, however, was the expression on her face. With a jolt like accidentally sitting on an electric fence, Maddy knew that the person who had told Jake was Kate.

‘You’re wrong, it can’t be.’ Nuala, her eye by this time a dramatic explosion of magenta, inky-blue and yellow, was going for the sympathy vote tonight, perched on a high bar stool with her white denim skirt riding up to reveal tanned thighs. Revelling in the attention she’d been getting from the visiting team, her cheeks were pink and her eyes bright. Now, though, she shook her head. ‘Kate was with me last night, she knew why I was so upset. She would have said something if it had been her.’

Maddy doubted it. She still hadn’t the faintest idea how anyone, let alone Kate Taylor-Trent, could have found out about herself and Kerr, but somehow it had happened.

The bad news was that she had planned on speaking to the instigator privately to explain how vital it was that Marcella shouldn’t find out and generally appeal to their better nature. Well, what a waste of time that would be, seeing as Kate Taylor-Trent didn’t have one.

‘Let me get you a drink,’ one of the visiting team offered Nuala. ‘Who blacked your eye then?

Jealous boyfriend?’

Dimpling, Nuala said, ‘I tripped and fell down the stairs. And thanks, I’d love a white wine spritzer.’

Dexter, serving behind the bar, glanced at Nuala’s legs. ‘Fasten the buttons on that skirt,’ he said curtly. ‘You look like an old tart.’

‘That’s a coincidence,’ Kate chimed in, ‘you sound like an old fart.’

Nuala spluttered with laughter. Even Dexter, initially taken aback, managed to crack a smile.

‘See?’ Nuala whispered to Maddy. ‘She’s all right really. Not as bad as you think.’

Seriously? Was Nuala right? Maddy looked across the bar at the girl who had belittled her for so many years. For a split second their eyes met and Maddy wondered if, just this once, Kate might acknowledge her with a brief smile.

Who was she kidding? It didn’t happen. Whether out of guilt or indifference or plain dislike, Kate turned away and Maddy knew two things for sure.

Kate was the one who had told Jake about herself and Kerr.

And Nuala was wrong; Kate was every bit as bad as she thought.

Just the sound of Kerr’s voice on the phone had the ability to melt Maddy’s insides like chocolate.

She loved ringing him so much she couldn’t imagine how she’d ever managed to get through life without it.

‘Change of plan,’ she murmured from the back room of the delicatessen, having triple-checked that no customers had ventured into the shop. ‘I can’t make six o’clock. Marcella just rang Jake and left a message for the two of us to meet her at six.’

‘When you say the two of us,’ said Kerr, ‘you don’t mean—’

‘No, not you and me and Marcella with a shotgun.’ Maddy smiled because, miraculously, when she was talking to Kerr nothing else seemed to matter. ‘She wants to see Jake and me. No idea why, but apparently she sounded fine, so it can’t be anything too scary. Anyhow, I’m sure it won’t take long, so I’ll be over by seven.’

‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ said Kerr. Maddy’s stomach flip-flopped like a landed fish. ‘The bad news.’

‘I still haven’t gone off you.’

Bastard! Overcome with relief, she said, ‘And the good news?’

Kerr’s voice softened. ‘You haven’t gone off me.’

Maddy made her way back through to the shop with a dopey smirk on her face. Juliet, carefully slicing up a kiwi-lime torte, said, ‘You’re going to hate me for saying this, but it’s all going to end in tears.’

Stubbornly, Maddy said, ‘Don’t be such a pessimist.’

‘Take it from me, a secret is only a secret if nobody else knows about it. Even a secret shared between two people can be risky. It only works if they both have watertight reasons for wanting it kept.’

‘I know, I know, but we’re managing.’ If there had been any sand around, Maddy would have stuck her head in it.

‘I’m just warning you, that’s all.’ Juliet’s dark eyes were luminous with compassion. ‘You and Kerr know. I know. So does Nuala and Jake. And now there’s someone else as well. You think it’s Kate Taylor-Trent but you’re not completely sure. At this rate there aren’t going to be many people left in Ashcombe who aren’t in on the secret.’

Not wanting to hear this, Maddy reached for the silver tongs and began placing rum truffles from the glass-fronted case into one of the glossy cream boxes. Rum truffles were Marcella’s favourite.

Having weighed the box, she said, ‘Six pounds fifty,’ so that Juliet could add the extra amount to her slate.

‘That’s what a guilty husband does when he’s been spending too much time with his mistress,’ said Juliet. ‘Stops off at a garage and grabs a bunch of orange carnations for the wife.’

‘Is that what Tiff’s father used to do?’ Maddy felt mean, but she couldn’t resist the dig. Life was complicated enough right now, without being subjected to lectures from well-meaning friends who hadn’t exactly led blameless lives themselves.

‘I’m sure he did,’ said Juliet with a faint smile. ‘Although I’d like to think he did a bit better than a few grotty carnations smelling of petrol.’

Juliet had never deliberately set out to steal another woman’s husband, Maddy knew that. She hadn’t discovered until it was too late that he had a wife at home, and by then Tiff had been on the way.

‘Do you miss him?’ said Maddy.

‘You mean do I wish we could still be together, like a normal happy family?’ Juliet slid the torte back into the chiller cabinet and moved towards the till as a retired couple came into the shop.

Lowering her voice, she murmured, ‘No, I don’t. Tiff and I are fine together.’

‘Just the two of you? Don’t you ever want anyone else?’

‘We can’t always have what we want, can we?’ said Juliet. ‘Sometimes we just have to settle for what we can get.’

The bus trundled along Main Street, finally slowing up as it reached the war memorial. Marcella would normally have collected her bags together by now, made her way to the front of the vehicle and chatted to the driver while she waited for the bus to come to a halt.

This time she stayed in her seat, clutching her pink raffia bag to her chest, until the bus stopped running and the door opened.

‘Thought you’d fallen asleep,’ said the driver when she finally reached the steps.

‘Not me.’ Marcella smiled absently at him. ‘Thanks, Mickey. See you.’

‘What happened to all your bags?’ He looked surprised; one of life’s great shoppers, Marcella was invariably loaded down like a packhorse.

She shook her head as she climbed down and waggled her fingers at him. ‘Didn’t buy anything today, Mickey. Nothing caught my eye.’

It wasn’t true of course, but she could hardly show him the one item she had bought; there were some things it just wasn’t appropriate to share with your friendly neighbourhood bus driver.

Still in a bit of a daze, Marcella waited until Mickey had driven off along Ashcombe Road before turning to face Snow Cottage. It was hard to believe quite how drastically life was about to change.

‘Mum!’ Her gaze shifting to the upstairs window, Marcella saw Maddy waving at her. ‘Come on, we’ve been waiting for you! You’re late!’