Free The Magic of Christmas by Trisha Ashley Page B

after he’d been missing for a few days.’
    He patted my hand. ‘There, there, my dear. Leave everything to me. I’ll be back with Jasper in no time.’
    Mimi phoned me up just after he’d left, but halfway through offering me her condolences in a graciously formal manner, she completely lost the thread and said she was too busy to talk to me just now. Then she put the phone down.
    But at least her call had jarred me into remembering to feed the poultry. It was a bit late, but when I called, ‘Myrtle, Myrtle, Myrtle — Honey, Honey, Honey!’ they all came running.
    Round the side of the big greenhouse I came unexpectedly nose to bare (except for the camouflage paint) chest of Caz Naylor, who indicated with a nod of his head and a raised eyebrow that he would like to know what was happening.
    ‘Tom’s driven off the quarry road,’ I said. ‘In
my
car.’
    ‘Dead?’
    ‘So they say.’
    ‘Car?’
    ‘That’s a write-off, too.’
    He grunted non-committally, then handed me a small blue plastic basket containing one slightly decayed mushroom. ‘Poison,’ he said, prodding it with a slightly grimy finger.
    ‘I know,’ I began, recognising it, but he turned and flitted off back through the shadows until he’d completely vanished into the woods.
    That was the longest conversation I’d had with him for ages … and what was the significance of the poisonous fungi in a punnet that looked suspiciously like the one Polly Darke had brought me full of field mushrooms … was that only yesterday? Perhaps she’d inadvertently picked a poisonous one? After my previous experience of Polly’s way with foodstuffs, I should have been more cautious in accepting them anyway!
    Or perhaps Caz had simply taken to giving brief nature lessons in his spare time.
    Jasper was very quiet and pale when he came in, and though we shared a long hug, said he’d like to be alone for a bit and vanished up to his room. I thought it best to leave him to talk in his own time.
    He did reappear when Annie arrived and seemed pretty composed by then, though he being the quiet stoical type it’s hard to tell, even for me.
    I thought I was quite composed too, but as soon as Annie walked through the door I burst into tears, as though her arrival was some kind of absolute proof that it really wasn’t all a ghastly nightmare. I left a full set of grubby fingerprints up the back of her lavender Liberty cotton shirt.
    She hugged Jasper too, something which he would normally go out of his way to avoid, even though he is fond of her. Then we all just sat around in a fuzzy cloud of disbelief and damson gin.
    It was the sheer unreality: Tom had gone missing so many times, it was hard to believe he wouldn’t just walk through that door at any minute with the TV remote control in his hand (he secreted it away somewhere in his workshop when away), and sit watching endless films on Sky, which he’d had installed soon after he got the giant TV.
    He’d always been supremely selfish. Even the Tom I fell in love with, charming though he’d been, really only thought about himself for at least ninety-five per cent of the time, which is why he always did exactly what he wanted and apologised afterwards.
    ‘Yes, I know,’ Annie agreed when I shared this gem with her, together with the rest of the bottle of gin, after Jasper had gone up to bed (or at least, back up to the Batcave). ‘But when he was around he seemed to cast a spell of charm, so people didn’t realise it until later. Or if they did, they didn’t mind, because they thought he wasn’t doing it intentionally to hurt anyone, it was just how he was.’
    The gin might not have been such a good idea after all, for my past life seemed to take on a darkly ominous pattern. ‘Why?’ I demanded. ‘What have I done to deserve this? Why do
I
have to lose everyone? I know I didn’t love Tom any more, but I didn’t want any harm to come to him either!’
    ‘We all have to die,’ Annie pointed out