Free More Deaths Than One by Marjorie Eccles Page A

and Kite was muttering about the back of beyond, another sign loomed up. Welcome to Morvah Pottery, it said, and there it was, a ramshackle Victorian brick cottage with some outbuildings at the side, one of them rather grandly announcing the fact that it was the Factory Shop.
    It was a bleak spot, as unwelcoming as the cold wind that sneaked round the house. As Mayo and his sergeant climbed out of the car two little boys, warmly wrapped against the cold in a random selection of woollen garments, stopped their playing in a small muddy garden mostly given over to vegetables and came to stare, in the dispassionate way of small children. When their mother came out of the doorway the elder of the little boys lost interest and ran away to clamber onto a swing suspended from the bare branches of an old apple tree. The smaller one clung to his mother’s skirt and stuck his thumb in his mouth, until she bent and spoke to him, removed his thumb, wiped his nose and tucked his hair under his woollen cap.
    He looked at her doubtfully for a moment, then ran off to join his brother.
    The girl – she was little more – led the way into a warm, untidy kitchen, where the window was almost obscured by climbing green plants. “If you don’t mind waiting a minute. I’m making bread and I can’t leave it at this stage. Sorry I can’t offer you a chair.”
    It was more of a scullery than a kitchen, unmodernised in any way, with a cracked ceramic sink and an old coal-fired range. A mound of dough was in the middle of a scrubbed deal table and she began kneading it in a gentle, haphazard sort of way that seemed part of her but didn’t promise well for the finished loaves. She wasn’t giving it a hard-enough time, Mayo could see, leaning against the doorpost. He remembered his grandmother making bread, punching and turning the dough energetically, leaving it in a large yellow earthenware bowl to rise, making the ancient sign of the cross in the middle, covering it with a clean tea-towel ...
    Presently she put the dough in a similar bowl and left it on a shelf above the range and then took them into a front room where the freezing cold was even more apparent after the steamy warmth of the kitchen, though she didn’t seem to notice, and the furniture was Oxfam second-hand, stuff so cheerless and depressing it was hard to see how anyone could have designed, never mind bought it, in the first place. But by now Mayo felt he could hazard a guess that this was mandatory to the girl’s way of life, whether she could have afforded anything else or not, a way of saying she wasn’t interested in material things. She was short and plumpish and her abundant hair wasn’t as dark as it had appeared in the photograph, more of a rich, glossy deep chestnut. Wide brown eyes regarded them, full of misery. She would have been pretty if her face hadn’t been so blotched with crying, if she’d bothered to dress herself in something other than a long, draggle-tail black cotton skirt and T-shirt, both greyed with too frequent washing, and a big droopy cardigan which dipped at the front.
    She went away and came back with coffee in thick stoneware mugs, presumably Morvah ware, and biscuits. Both were abominable, the coffee tasting as though it were made of ground acorns and the biscuits of chipboard shavings, or worse. Mayo wished he’d accepted the tea she’d offered as an alternative until she poured some for herself and he saw that it was a herb tea, red like wine, and smelling strongly of flowers.
    â€œMrs. Harper –”
    â€œIt’s not Mrs., it’s Miss, but please call me Bryony.”
    Bryony. Had she become what she was because of her name, a sort of self-fulfilling prophecy? Or was it the other way round – a case of adopting the name for herself to go with the life she lived? Either possibility seemed likely; she was a left-over flower child, too young to have been of that