Free Keep Me Alive by Natasha Cooper Page B

sounded sullen.
    Will thought he’d like to take her for a forced march, pretty and fragile though she was, down all the miserable streets he’d trodden today.
    ‘Come on, Jess,’ Trish said. ‘You did see the packet Caro brought, didn’t you? I’m sure she said you’d helped her cook dinner.’
    Jess looked towards the friend who had been with her when Trish and Will arrived. She had a sad, elegant face and strands of dark-gold hair falling in sexy dishevelment from a loose knot at the back of her head. She was leaning against the Smeg fridge-freezer Jess had bought after her last television series was repeated. Was this the person who’d been in the flat when Jess had sounded so unlike herself on the phone?
    ‘Could it be those ones with the leaves on the label, Jess?’ she said. She had a remarkable voice, very deep for someone as slight as she, and beautiful. ‘They do look familiar.’
    The sausages to which she was pointing weren’t the plain pink sort, detestable for their smoothness and claggy taste, but a speckled mixture of dark-red meat and white fat, with dots of spice and flecks of herbs. Will ripped off the shrink-wrapping. A strong smell of gamy meat, mace, bayleaves and allspice was familiar enough to make Trish recoil. Jess backed right against the wall to get away from the contamination of her nostrils.
    ‘I suppose so,’ Jess said, sounding like a child forced to tell the truth after a long struggle. Her gaze slid away.
    ‘Sure?’ Will Applewood asked, tempting Jess with the other two brands he had brought with him.
    All three were attractively packaged and, Trish saw from their labels, almost equally expensive.
    ‘Yes. The box-thing was green. And Cynthia’s right: I do remember the leaves on the label.’
    Above the price, weight and sell-by date was a charming watercolour of a typically English country scene, with the word ‘Ivyleaf’ in elegantly austere roman lettering, and a border of dark-green ivy leaves around the edge.
    ‘Do you know anything about the makers, Will?’ Trish asked.
    ‘Not a thing. And that’s interesting in itself. I thought I knew all the meat processors in the country.’
    ‘How could you possibly?’ asked Jess’s friend from her refuge between the sink and the fridge.
    She was wearing a close-fitting cotton cardigan in a harebell blue that matched her eyes. It had a deep V-neck, which showed off her well-tanned cleavage, but she kept her arms tightly crossed over her body in an extraordinary mixture of come-on and defence.
    Will launched in with a resume of his case, adding, ‘So I phoned every single meat processor I could track down to find out whether they’d been screwed by Furbishers too.’
    A tingle of alarm kept Trish silent. She’d always known Will had been the originator of the action, but this was evidence of an obsession she hadn’t quite understood. She thought of the exchange of glares she’d seen in the hall of the Royal Courts of Justice. What could there be between him and Matthew Grant-Furbisher to explain such hatred?
    ‘I’ve known the other two makers for years,’ he went on, jabbing at one of the packages, ‘but not these people. I’ll look into it. How’s your friend doing?’
    Jess’s big eyes filled with tears. Her visitor moved away from
the fridge to offer support. Jess swayed so that her shoulder just touched the other woman’s.
    ‘They’ve taken her into Intensive Care.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘The infection’s in her blood now. You know – septicaemia. And both kidneys are affected. And they can’t control her temperature. She’s been catheterized, she’s being fed with drips, and they’re giving her intravenous antibiotics, but the infection isn’t responding.’
    Trish winced. She wanted to ask a question, but Jess was still talking.
    ‘And you know what they say about penicillin-resistant bacteria and hospital-acquired infections. There are more and more of them all the time. In the state she’s in,