Free Small Town Shock (Some Very English Murders Book 1) by Issy Brooke

two different things, and
when you did one thing, person A said ‘well done’ and when you did the other
thing, person B gave you a cake, who will you want to please?”
    “Person B. Cake, always.” Penny could already see where
Drew was going.
    “If Kali is motivated by food, use that motivation. She
won’t get fat if you adjust her main meals. If she puts the head-collar on,
give her a treat and take it off again. Bit by bit she’ll learn that the head-collar
means good things.”
    “But if I give her treats for everything, I’ll be feeding
her all the time!”
    “At first, yes, you will. Use her meal as treats. Why not? Then
reduce it. Anyway, she’ll soon learn that the head-collar means walks. Please,
do try it. Otherwise you’ll be telling her off more than you reward her, and
how can that make her happy?”
    It wouldn’t make anyone happy, she thought. It made sense.
“Okay, I’ll try it, I promise. Thank you so much.”
    “Great.” He got to his feet and grinned. “Rewards always
work better than punishment.”
    “How’s work? Where do you have you … uh, what’s it called?
Smithy? You said you were a blacksmith, sort of.”
    “Yeah, I have a smithy. Actually it’s an industrial unit at
the end of the High Street.”
    “How marvellous! I’d love to look round one day. If that
would be okay.”
    “You think it’s going to look like a romantic Victorian
painting, don’t you?” He laughed. “You can certainly come round. Work is quiet
though. I don’t shoe many horses, and I tend to travel to do that on-site. Horses
aren’t my thing, to be honest. Their teeth are enormous. No, I mostly end up
doing ornamental ironwork. And I’m competing against imports, and it’s a tough
business.”
    She looked again at him. The jeans were no-brand and faded,
his socks had holes, and his sweater was baggy in the wrong places. “I’m sorry
to hear that. How do you mean, that you’re a ‘sort of’ blacksmith?”
    “Ahh, well, I realised I needed to diversify, you see. If
smithing isn’t paying – and it’s not – I decided to make a change. I’ve been
developing some field-craft sessions with the local hotel, The Arches. It’s
kind of a conference centre too, and they already do things like hawking and
off-road driving.”
    “That sounds amazing! So you’re like a tracker or
something?”
    “Yes, pretty much. Oh – now, that’s beautiful. It can’t be
local…”
    His eye had caught the stack of sketches that she’d left on
the kitchen table.
    “No, that’s somewhere in Kent.”
    “Did you draw these?” He got closer but was too polite to
reach out and touch them.
    “I did. But it was years ago.” She felt embarrassed and
exposed. Showing someone a picture she had deemed fit for public view was one
thing – having her half-formed sketches spied upon was like being caught in
your worst nearly-wash-day underwear. She wanted to scoop them up and hide
them.
    He smiled. “You have a talent. I love being out in the
countryside, walking, but I can’t even take a decent photo of what I see. Hey. Would
you like to try Kali with the head-collar?”
    “It’s raining.”
    “It’s easing off, and you’ll not dissolve, I’m sure. Are
you made of sugar? We don’t have to go far. I’ll show you how to persuade her
it’s a good thing. Have you any ham you could chop up for treats?”
    Less than ten minutes later, they were walking slowly
through the light rain but not going the usual way towards the centre of town.
Instead, Drew turned left out of her cottage and took them towards the end of
the row, which Penny thought was a dead end. She’d never even walked that way,
because she would have felt daft getting to the end, and turning around.
    “There’s a path here,” he told her. “It cuts down to the
river and under the bridge where the kids hang out in summer. And then out into
hillier land, westwards.”
    It didn’t matter that the rain was soaking everything. The
sky