Free The Magic of Christmas by Trisha Ashley

things had been left. How Machiavellian he’s becoming!
    After this, I unpacked Annie’s candyfloss machine to distract myself from worrying until Jasper arrived safely home. The instructions absolutely forbade me to use any natural essences or colourings other than special granulated ones designed for the purpose, which was disappointing from the point of view of making Cornish Mist, until I discovered one of the tubs in the box was lemon.
    Fascinating how the floss forms inside the bowl like ectoplasm, and you have to wind the near invisible threads onto wooden sticks. Fine, sugary filaments drifted everywhere, and the kitchen took on the hot, sweet, nostalgic smell of funfairs.
    It was really messy but fun, which Jasper said was a good description of
me
, too, when he got home and saw what I’d been up to, though by then I was sitting among the debris, writing it all up for the
Chronicle
.
    Maybe I’ll have ‘messy, but fun’ as my epitaph.

Chapter 6: Driven Off
    I wonder if plastic bags of fluffy white candyfloss labelled ‘edible Santa beards’ would go down well with children at Christmas? I expect they would try them on and get terribly sticky, though.
    The Perseverance Chronicles: A Life in Recipes
    There was still no sign of my car next morning and, in a furious temper, I rang all of Tom’s friends that I knew about, or who I had mobile numbers for although trying to contact his surfing buddies down in Cornwall was always like waking the dead, and I got little sense out of them even when they did answer the phone.
    The first time or two he went missing for a few days I also rang the local hospitals and the police, but after that I learned my lesson.
    I woke Jasper early and saw him off by bike to the dig, then I called Annie to tell her I was without transport; but luckily she only wanted me to exercise the two Pekes and a Shitzu belonging to one of the more elderly members of the
Cotton Common
cast, Delphine Lake. She’d bought one of the expensive flats in part of the former Pharamond’s Butterflake Biscuit factory in the village and I’d walked her dogs several times before.
    Uncle Roly sold the Pharamond brand name out to a big conglomerate years ago for cash, shares and a seat on the board, which was both a smart and lucrative deal; so now the factory has been converted to apartments, a café-bar called Butterflakes, and a museum of Mosses history.
    Delphine’s dogs may be little, but they loved their walks, so it was late morning before I got back to the cottage and found a female police officer awaiting me on the doorstep. An adolescent colleague sat biting his fingernails behind the wheel of a panda car.
    I immediately thought the worst, as you do. ‘
Jasper?
’ I cried. ‘Has something happened to Jasper?’
    ‘Mrs Elizabeth Pharamond?’ she queried solemnly.
    ‘
Yes
!’
    ‘I’m Constable Perkins and I’m afraid I have some very bad news for you.’
    She paused, and I was just about to take her by the throat and shake her when she added,
    ‘About your husband.’
    ‘Oh — thank
God
!’ I gasped devoutly, then burst into tears of relief.
    Wresting the keys from my nerveless fingers, she ushered me into my own home, where she broke the news that Tom had had a fatal accident. He’d driven off the road into a disused quarry, which was odd in itself, since there’s only one place within a radius of about fifty miles where he could have managed to perform that feat, and it’s up a little-used back lane.
    While her colleague made me tea, she spoke to me with skilful sympathy, though my reactions clearly puzzled her. But all I was feeling was an overpowering sense of relief that it wasn’t Jasper.
    And then I got to thinking that this was all so blatantly unreal anyway, that it couldn’t be true: it must be just some dreadful nightmare!
    This was a very calming idea, since I knew I’d wake up
sometime,
so I agreed quite readily to go and identify Tom’s body. My head seemed to be