Free Small Town Suspicions (Some Very English Murders Book 3) by Issy Brooke Page A

someone who
holds a grudge that much? I’m surprised.”
    “Oh, eh! Is she ever? She’s
so beholden to what she thinks is right – and by that I mean, she always thinks she’s right – that she doesn’t change her mind very well.”
    “But I still don’t understand
why Steve is living with her and not his parents.”
    Agatha shrugged and picked
up a misting spray from the wheeled trolley next to her. “I think most kids out
of college don’t want to go live with their mum and dad again, do they, eh?”
    It was probably that simple. The problem with looking for clues and hints , Penny thought, is that
you get to thinking that everything is a clue . Perception, remember. She took a step back, mentally. “Yeah, you’re right,” she said.
    “How’s the hair?”
    “It’s great,” Penny said
with a grin.
    “I hardly touched it. You
only came in for the gossip.”
    “No, no, no!”
    But their eyes met in the
mirror, and Penny realised she was pinking just a little around her cheeks.
    “Yes,” she said,
crestfallen.

Chapter Eight
     
     
     
    Francine disappeared off on Friday morning for a walk with
Kali before Penny had even got out of bed. She left a note on the kitchen
table: “It’s so hot and I couldn’t sleep so I thought I’d be useful and take
Kali out.”
    She means well , Penny thought. But Penny was feeling
increasingly excluded from her relationship with her dog. She’d always
dismissed pet lovers’ talk of “bonding” as sentimental nonsense. Now, she found
it to be a strange and true feeling. She had even looked it up, worried that
she was one step away from becoming a “mad dog lady” and found a reassuringly
scientific article which claimed that dogs and their owners produced certain
feel-good hormones when they looked at one another.
    If it was science, it was easier to accept. She didn’t
follow the links in case it turned out to be cleverly disguised bunkum. She wanted to believe.
    Like Francine and her “manifesting her destiny.”
    Penny pushed it out of her mind. She had a job to do, she
reminded herself. She sat at the kitchen table and put the radio on low as
background company. The house felt curiously empty. She flipped open her laptop
and started to search online for Carl Fredericks, using the information Reg had
given her to narrow it down.
    And there he was. Fredericks’ Bulb Growers was a
horticultural business some twenty miles east, out on the flat fenlands. They
had a small and basic website, all square edges and misaligned boxes, and the
company seemed to cater to the wholesale trade. She scrolled through pages of
daffodils and tulips and irises. There was a bare “About Us” page with a blurred
photo of the owner, Carl Fredericks. He looked to be in his fifties, but she
couldn’t be sure how old the photograph was.
    She couldn’t find much else about him. If he was on social
media, he was pretty private: no one with the same name had a similar profile
picture. She had a quick check of some professional networks but nothing came
up.
    She didn’t see much point in digging further, but she
called Cath to fill her in on what she had learned so far.
    “Hey there!” Cath said, answering on the second ring. “I
was just going to call you.”
    “Have you got news?”
    “The lab says that Alec had ingested an alkaloid poison in
a level that was very, very unlikely to have been an accident.”
    “Murder, then?”
    “There are no signs that point to suicide. Yes, at this
stage, we are now considering it a murder investigation.”
    “Oh.” She paused, and spared a thought for the dead man.
“But who? Have you found any family yet?” She hated the idea that he might be
alone and unloved.
    “We haven’t, no. He was never married, never active
socially, nothing. He was sixty years old and he’d lived alone in Upper
Glenfield, in that house, for a good twenty years or so.”
    “Right. Do you have any suspects?”
    “We were rather hoping you’d have