Free The Death of a Much Travelled Woman by Barbara Wilson

journalists and was holding forth in quite loud tones on the absolutely undeserved amount of publicity that Francine had gotten through her death. “I say, if you’re unhappy, take a course in weaving or a holiday abroad. Don’t stew in your own self-pity. And I tried to tell Francine that. All marriages go through difficult times, but Peter would have come back to her eventually. Men will be men. Instead she had to hide away in that little flat of hers and stop eating. Oh, I tried to talk to her, I even brought her a casserole one day—I could see she’d gotten thinner—but it never occurred to me, and I’m sure it never occurred to Peter, that she was deliberately trying to starve herself to death. And then he gets all the blame. It’s made a broken man of him, you know. Never recovered from the shock of it, he hasn’t. Ruined his career, his life. She should have thought of that when she did it, but no, always thinking of herself, that’s how she was right from the beginning. My mum and dad noticed it right off. ‘Seems a little full of herself,’ my dad said the first time Peter brought her to Dorset. ‘Talks too much.’ My mum felt sorry for her, of course. Francine didn’t have a clue about life, really, her head was in the clouds. ‘It will end in tears,’ my mum said. And she was right.”
    “I’ve got to get out of here,” Andrea muttered to me. “Or it will end in something redder than tears.”
    We left the tea shop and strolled through the village, which was scattered with posh cars and vans emblazoned with the logos of television stations, native and foreign. Peter Putter was over in the churchyard giving an interview to what appeared to be a German film crew.
    “It’s enough to make one lose one’s appetite entirely,” Andrea said and slammed the door to her little cottage.
    That night I was awakened from a deep sleep by the sound of a car driving down the road to the village. Normally it would not have been anything to wake up to, but I had a sudden odd feeling that it was the car I’d borrowed to come here. I staggered over to the little garret window, but saw nothing. I crept down the steep stairs and peeked into Andrea’s room.
    She was not there.
    I went out the back door and saw that the small Ford was gone.
    Since Andrea didn’t have a car, I supposed she’d taken mine. Perhaps she’d decided to visit the farm by herself to stake out the gravediggers; perhaps she’d heard someone else’s car driving down the road and decided to follow it. Whatever my suppositions, my actions were limited. The farm was a good four miles away, it was raining, and—I finally looked at the clock—four in the morning. I got dressed just to keep warm and paced around a bit, then remembered that Andrea had a bicycle out in the shed behind the cottage. With the feeling that there was nothing else to do, I steeled myself for cold and rain and set off into the dark night.
    With water streaming down my face, I pedaled furiously, wondering why roads that always seemed to be perfectly flat when you drove over them by car suddenly developed hills and valleys when you were travelling by bicycle. Still the cold rain gave me an incentive for speed, and I arrived at the farm in record time. There were no cars at the side road leading to the farmhouse, so I got off the bike and began to reconnoiter on foot around the hedges. There must be another road leading to the farm, but I would waste more time looking for it than going on foot.
    By this time my clothes were soaked and my boots caked with mud. I tried to retrace the steps Andrea and I had taken the day before, but in the darkness it was hard to see the difference between land and sky, much less between a rise and fall in the earth. Then, through the hedges, I saw a small light. I broke through and started staggering over the land toward it. It was joined by another small light.
    The lights seemed to be dancing together, or were they struggling? One of