*Special Content only on my blog, Strange and Random Happenstance during Golden Summer (May-September 2013)Dandy and her dear friend Daisy are off to Queensferry to reconnect with an old classmate and to go to the Ferry Fair. Freddy, nicknamed Buttercup, has finally returned from her sojourn in A...
Two murders need two motives, I wrote, then I put my elbows on the desk and lowered my head, but stopped in time. It was not even ten o'clock in the morning, and I could not possibly put my head in my hands already. Sherlock, I am sure, never put his head in his hands before luncheon. That should...
After attending a luncheon with the Reverend Tait, Dandy finds herself traveling with the benevolent clergyman back to his home to attend a meeting of the Rural Women’s Institute. A stranger has been roaming the parish at night and pouncing on the ladies of the Rural, though this stranger only se...
The sea had come in silently, waves unrolling like bolts of silk across the sands, and now it was still and full, waiting for the turn, lapping only a little as it slid gently up and down against the base of the cliffs. And so when she reached the break in the rock, a natural cove where men had b...
I was hoping for gloves, even though gloves would suggest that Abigail Aitken had killed her child and had thought up a fiendishly devious way to get away with it, but the longer I considered of such a woman hatching such a plot the more convinced I was that it could not be. It would have taken s...
Lowell said. He shook his head and muttered at them for a while and then roused himself. “Jude, my dearest, you need to change and have a hot drink. I’ll make cocoa while you go and get into a dressing gown, and then let’s talk this over, shall we?” Jude shot a look at Edd...
I felt, once out, dried and dressed again, as though I could have lifted off from the stones of the terrace and floated over the valley floor on waves of … who knows what exactly. My woollen underthings felt like the softest silk against my skin; my lisle stockings too, and from the inside my fac...
It’s a bit like the start of Rhapsody in Blue from that film, and a bit like a fire alarm that doesn’t quite get going. There’s silence and then there’s a whooshing noise lifting up and then the computer sort of hums all day, except you don’t really notice until you switch it off at night. That’s...
Inside the old petrol station on the corner, Willie Byers was glad of it too. He was sick of them all, with their hints and their nagging. They didn’t even have to open their mouths these days; he could see it in their eyes, could easily imagine what they said about him. H...
I have always preferred carved slices and thin gravy eaten off a table in a dining room with the potatoes cooked in a pot out of sight in the kitchen somewhere and not plucked out of the fire on a long fork and thrown around the assembled diners with a flick of the wrist. Still, one does not like...
But on her first proper day, she was told that she was shadowing a picker.“What’s that?” Opal said.“It was in the induction,” the team leader said (like anyone had listened). “Picking” turned out be the Tesco word for shopping—they had to have a special word for it. Doing the shopping for all tho...
Alec called my name and I opened my eyes and gazed around the little room. It was awash with morning light and alive with dancing dust motes at which Bunty started snapping, trampling over the bed without regard to the tender parts of her mistress under her paws. ‘One moment,’ I called back and s...
I knew what that meant: it had snowed in the night. I groaned and slumped onto my back to stare up at the ceiling. But where the bed should have been behind me, cold and blank, there was a warm bulk stopping me from rolling all the way. I turned. Stig was propped up on one elbow watching me. &nbs...