Free False Money by Veronica Heley Page A

you.’
    â€˜No fear! I’m partying tonight,’ said Maggie, making up her mind to it. ‘What, sit in a cold concert hall all night, when I could be out having fun?’
    â€˜They tell me that fun and music are not incompatible. What sort of music do they play at your parties nowadays?’
    Bea and Maggie responded to his lead as best they could. It would be hours before they had any firm news, wouldn’t it?
    Sunday morning
    Bea awoke to the music of the Hallelujah Chorus still ringing in her head. A talent for playing music hadn’t run in her family, although her grandfather had had an enormous collection of seventy-eight records, which he’d played on an old wind-up gramophone. As a child, one of her jobs had been changing the discs every four minutes for him. He’d loved the Messiah , and they’d played something from it at his funeral. Bea couldn’t remember hearing it much since then, but the tunes had all come back to her last night.
    She’d tried to shut out all thoughts of Tomi lying dead in the country while the music washed over her. Only when Piers urged her to her feet did she remember that the audience always stood for the Hallelujah Chorus. Tears came then, unbidden, as that great melody thundered through the vast concert hall. She’d thought at the time: this is a requiem for Tomi.
    Which was absurd. She’d never even met the girl and wasn’t at all certain of her death. Nevertheless, she’d wept. And, waking with the music still pounding through her head, she knew she now desperately wanted to find the girl, alive or dead.
    A girl’s body had been found in a country lane. If it was Tomi, then what had she been doing there?
    Bea threw her arms above her head and stretched, thanking God for her own robust health. Also for good friends, and for work.
    She could feel in her bones that this day would be difficult, so she prayed aloud, ‘I trust You to see me through it.’
    The morning light seemed different. She pulled back the curtains. Ah, so it had snowed in the night. It wouldn’t last long, of course. She lingered to marvel at the patterns which the snow had made on the sycamore tree, and how it had placed a soft white cap on every bush in the garden below. There were footprints in the snow; a fox? Birds had hopped here and there, and so had a cat.
    The bedroom door opened, and Maggie brought in a cup of tea. ‘Chris is here. Hung over and in a panic. Wants to borrow the car. As if! I said you weren’t up yet.’
    Bea glanced at the clock. It was a good half hour before the time she usually rose. She pressed her fingers to her eyes. ‘Did he spend the night on the front doorstep?’
    Maggie shrugged. She was wearing what looked like a man’s woolly pyjamas, and huge bunny rabbit slippers. Her eyes were shadowed, and her hair was all over the place. She hadn’t slept well, either. ‘He’s in a terrible state. Do you think he wants to confess to murdering her or something?’
    Little fingers of dread played around the back of Bea’s spine, and she shuddered. ‘Unlikely. He’s overreacting, as usual.’
    Maggie nodded and left. Bea drank her tea, showered, and dressed. It was Sunday morning and she’d intended to go to church. She didn’t often go – perhaps once every six weeks – but this was one day she’d intended to do so.
    Surveying her still trim figure in the pier glass, she wondered if this particular shade of greyish-green – almost eucalyptus – really suited her. A cream jumper with a cowl neck was fine over her new dull green trousers, but the gold-embroidered waistcoat was perhaps too much of a good thing? Too upbeat for what the day might hold? She changed it for a brown suede jerkin.
    Chris would play the Tragedy King, of course. He might even convince himself that he was responsible for Tomi’s death. Blame himself for