Grave Stones (The Falconer Files Book 9) Read online

  ‘But we need some petrol money for the weekend,’ Kevin informed her, a wheedling whine entering his voice.

  ‘Look in the usual place then,’ she suggested and, when Keith asked them where that might be, informed them that the best place was down the back of the sofa or the armchairs. ‘Never know what treasure you’re going to come up with down there,’ she added, switching her attention back to what she had in her store cupboard that would not only solve the problem, but which might also be nearly out of date, thus using up something she might otherwise have to throw away if she didn’t find it soon.

  ‘Mother!’ exclaimed Kevin with disgust. ‘Don’t you have any real money? I’m fed up going to the shop for a newspaper with a handful of coins from the small change jar.’

  At this, another of life’s little stings, Krystal swiftly removed her head from inside the cupboard, incautiously banging it in her haste, and raised her voice, to inform her two needy teenaged sons, ‘I haven’t had a penny from your father since he left. I’m well into my overdraft, even though it’s only the beginning of the month, and I have no other means of getting my hands on hard cash. What do you want to do? Send me out onto the streets and pimp me?

  ‘Why don’t you get in touch with your father instead of whining at me, as if I were some sort of cash-point. I’m potless! Don’t you understand the situation? He’s done a bunk and taken his nice regular salary with him. Go and whinge at him, if you think it’ll do you any good. If not, it’s the sofa or nothing.

  ‘And if you’re bored, the lawns need mowing, the flower beds need weeding, and you could do a lot more around the house to help me, instead of just lying in bed half the day then playing your damned music for the rest of it while stuffing your faces as if you were constantly starving.’

  ‘Bor-ing!’ both lads chorused in unison.

  ‘Boring it might be, but it’s all got to be done, and I don’t see why I should have to be the only one who does it when there are three of us living in this house. If you want money, go and see if you can get some bar work; wash cars, ask people if they want any gardening done. The Bank of Mum and Dad has closed down until further notice, and you’ll just have to find a different source of cash. This cash-cow is milked dry. The end.’

  Kevin and Keith slouched off back into the living room with sneers on their faces. So much for this being the house of their dreams: nightmares more like, the way things were going from bad to worse.

  Krystal put her head back into the depths of the cupboard, thinking how spoilt the twins had been in the past. Ken had had a six-figure salary, and they’d never wanted for anything. Now he’d gone, she had no idea how on earth she was going to find the wherewithal just to keep the house going, never mind pay next term’s tuition fees for them both. At least they’d be out of mischief tomorrow night DJ-ing the music for the parish party.

  With a muffled yell of glee, she laid hands on two boxes of cake mix and a packet that promised a perfect lemon meringue pie; and both of them were nearly out of date. Perfect! Six months ago she could never have imagined that such meagre finds could instil her with so much triumph, but she was learning to adapt. She had no other choice.

  For a few guilty seconds she remembered the appointment she had made with Wanda Warwick for the next day, and what that would cost her but, in the long run, she considered that it could prove to be money well-spent, if she could get some guidance as to the right path to take in her straitened circumstances.

  A similarly desperate situation was going on in the house of Jasper and Belinda Haygarth. They lived in a detached house, situated at the junction of the Downsway Road with The Green, then surrounded still further by a narrow lane that joined the aforementioned roads, creating a triangle, and it was in this triangle that their house was perched, isolated from other residences and aptly named “Three-Ways House”.

  They had started a textiles business when times were booming, and had made a fair bit of money from it; enough, certainly, to relocate to this postcard-pretty village, away from the urban sprawl that they had so hated. Times had changed, however, and the business was now struggling to break even, let alone make a profit, and was in a state where they had to decide if it was possible to revitalise it, or just walk away from it and cut their losses.

  Belinda had had the temerity to start making a shopping list, and ask Jasper if there was anything he needed, at a point where he was contemplating the yawning financial abyss, and thus drawing out of him an unexpected tirade about her spendthrift ways, and how she was going to have to learn to live a more frugal life for the foreseeable future.

  ‘That’s all you ever do; spend, spend, spend! How on earth do you think we’re going to cope with virtually no income, when you just let it run through your fingers like sand?’ he yelled, quite unreasonably, in Belinda’s opinion.

  ‘I’m going out to get some food!’ she stated, more loudly than she had intended. ‘If I don’t buy any, what do you propose to live on? Cockroach stew and cobwebs? You know I’ll get as many things on special offer or reduced as I can find, and we don’t exactly live high on the hog these days, do we?’

  His reply was unreasonable and illogical, but he couldn’t help himself. ‘Why the hell are you always buying food? How on earth do we manage to get through so much of the stuff when there’s only the two of us?’

  ‘I go once a week to the supermarket, and always when I know they’re going to be reducing things, and the reason I’m ‘always buying food’, as you put it, is because eating is a daily occurrence, and I emptied my emergency store cupboard some time ago. We don’t have any food stockpiled like we used to. And anyway, you eat like a horse. I honestly believe you’ve got hollow legs. I’ve never known anyone to pack away as much as you do; and three times a day to boot.

  ‘You spend little enough time on the business these days. Why don’t you get up off your well-fed arse and dig up that back garden? That way, we could at least grow some of our own stuff. And no, it won’t be ready for some time, but later is better than never.’ With that sobering suggestion, that he actually do something practical, instead of moaning all the time, his wife flounced out of the house, just in time to miss his indignant protest at the size of his backside, and the voraciousness of his appetite.

  Belinda’s mind was more concerned with how she could take something appetising to the hall tomorrow for next to no outlay. If she could find a pack of bacon offcuts, maybe she could make an egg and bacon quiche. That always went down well and wouldn’t cost her much, if she bought own brand eggs (hopefully near their sell-by date and reduced to clear) and flour, and bought a pack of bacon off-cuts, which may even be reduced too. It was certainly the right time of day for the supermarket employees to be swanning round the store with their price-guns. She just might strike lucky.

  She drove off, determined to do her best to spend as little as possible, and to prod her husband to make a start on growing their own food. The latter was not an instant solution, but if he never started, the idea would never come to fruition.

  In the house anachronistically named Khartoum, Maude Asquith was also going through her own store cupboards, to gather together the ingredients she would need for the jam tarts and madeleines she intended to bake on Saturday morning, fresh for the party later in the day.

  She was an elderly spinster who still lived in the house she had been born in, and in which her father had also first drawn breath, as had his father before him, his widow naming the house in memory of his honourable death in the ill-fated massacre of the Anglo-Egyptian Garrison in 1884-5.

  The furniture bore witness to the lack of change that had locked the house in a time-warp in the latter years of Queen Victoria’s reign, the family never having been wealthy, and believing that if an object was still functioning there was no need whatsoever to change it. Thus horsehair sofas still adorned her sitting room, and her dining room furniture was of the sturdy style that would probably withstand a nuclear attack.

  The bedroom
s were similarly furnished, with brass bedsteads, mahogany dressing tables and wardrobes, all lovingly polished by their current owner, and cherished in her memory as a sign of stability in the unchanging tenor of her life.

  Not for Maude the fitted carpets and leather furniture of the modern sitting room; no chrome and glass dining table with chrome and leather chairs. It was not that she wouldn’t have entertained the idea, had she been sufficiently well-off to consider such a vast change, more a case of always having to survive on limited resources, especially since her parents had died. The loss of their pensions to the household’s running costs had been a major blow, as they had died within six months of each other, and she had found it hard to make ends meet ever since.

  She soldiered on though, as she had been raised to, making do and mend; taking care of the good quality clothes that she had owned for years, and appearing to care not a fig for fashion, even if it was all an enormous bluff. Sometimes she used to sit and daydream about having untold riches and planning what she would do if she were ever in control of a fortune.

  Fortunately, such idle and unrealistic daydreams did not occur too often, but were part of the reason that she, over the last year or two, had launched such a charm offensive on Lettice Keighley-Armstrong.

  She had known Lettice slightly over the years and never really considered it worth wasting her time with such a curmudgeonly old grouse. In more recent times, however, she had begun to realise just how much Lettice was worth, after calling there once with the Christian Aid collecting box as a favour to the dear old vicar, who had been such a sweet old man that one could never say no to him.

  On this occasion she had been asked in, to wait while Lettice looked for her purse and as she stood in the drawing room with the old woman pawing through her desk and enormous handbag, she had looked round at the dark furniture, and realised that it was not the same calibre as that which adorned her own home. Lettice’s had been fine Georgian pieces, with a few touches of William III. There had even been a couple of medieval coffers placed in the window bays, lurking there darkly and expensively.

  She had taken a peek into the dining room while Lettice had been thus occupied, and espied furniture that would fetch untold tens of thousands of pounds in the auction rooms, so rare were they, and of such antiquity.

  The floors of both rooms were also covered in huge rugs that looked as if they had been woven from money, and by the time that Miss Keighley-Armstrong had located her battered old pig-skin purse and carefully fed three pennies and six two-pence pieces through the slot of the collection box, Maude had decided that she had found a new best friend to cultivate.

  The woman was, after all, unmarried, and had no family as far as she understood, and would need a good friend to whom she could leave all her earthly belongings. Why shouldn’t that dear and trusted friend be Maude Asquith? She was only seventy-two to Lettice’s eighty-five, and had much more time to have a real spree in the autumn of her life, before winter set in.

  And so, began Operation Lettice, a charm offensive of such fervour and servility that Miss Keighley-Armstrong wasn’t taken in for a minute, much preferring the comfortable old friendship she had with Violet Bingham, a relationship that had existed for what seemed like for ever now, and was in no danger of fading away.

  Not realising that she had been rumbled right at the beginning of her plan and didn’t have a choc-ice’s chance in hell of being mentioned in Lettice’s will, Maude put on her light spring coat, adjusted her hat in the hall mirror, and left home to make the short trek down Church Lane to ‘Manor Gate’ to ingratiate herself, once more, with the old woman.

  As she crossed The Green, she noticed Wanda Warwick shaking a duster out of her front window, and waved to her, happy that she was on her way to a visit that might help her feather her own nest with some very fine down.

  Wanda Warwick had been having a bit of a clean-up, and noticed the sprightly elderly woman crossing the road, her cream coat and fawn hat catching the brightness of the spring sunshine. At least she didn’t seem to be on her way to see her, she thought as she waved with one hand and shook her duster furiously with the other. Company like that she could do without.

  She simply didn’t have the time for inane gossip and chatter. There were more important things going on in her life; like getting her small cottage clean and tidy for her appointment the next day with Krystal Yaxley. Then, on Sunday, she had a booth at a spring fair, which should bring in some much-needed funds, as her resources were running low. It had been a bad winter in her field of expertise, and she hoped the brightly optimistic weather would prompt people to seek her services now that winter was over and they could feel more positive about life, and optimistic about the future.

  Closing the window, she surveyed her small sitting room, trying to adopt the eyes of a stranger to the little property. What impression did it give to an outsider? she wondered. Were there a tad too many dream-catchers hanging at the windows? Were the signs of the zodiac on the ceiling a bit over the top?

  Remembering the state her kitchen was still in from the night before, she muttered, ‘To hell with it! It’s my home, and it should reflect my lifestyle, otherwise I might as well be living with someone, and spend most of my life compromising. This is how I like it, and if she doesn’t like it, she can do one!’

  Wanda was a white witch, or follower of Wicca, and lived her life accordingly. Nature must have picked up on this important thread running through her life, for as she turned fifty her features had become more prominent than in the earlier decades of her life, and her nose, with its hooked shape had lengthened, and her chin grown until, now, the unwary would immediately think of a witch on first sight of her, their impression only enhanced by the fact that she dyed her hair an unbecoming and unlikely jet black.

  Her clothes were, by habit, black; her complexion pallid in the extreme, and she wore too much make-up, also a relic of her youth. She was quite an intimidating looking woman to anyone who did not know her, and had taken some time to be accepted into village life. After a few years, however, the other residents were used to her, and barely noticed how bizarre she looked when she went out in one of her black cloaks, looking for all the world as if she was off to either a Hallowe’en party or a Black Mass.

  An hour later, having tackled the squalor awaiting her in the kitchen, she returned to the sitting room, mug of herbal tea in hand, to sort through her tarot cards and just get the feel of them again for her appointment tomorrow, for reading these cards was another of her eccentricities. She had not done a reading for at least three months, and felt that she needed to get to know her cards again by handling them so that they would fall right for her the next day.

  As she sat shuffling, dealing, and laying out her tarot cards, wafts of lavender and herbs drifted down from tied bunches hanging from hooks on the central beam to tease her nostrils. Sitting thus in quiet contemplation, she let her mind wander to the reading she would do the next day. She knew very little about Krystal Yaxley, having had little to do with her since she and her family had settled in the village.

  The first time she had spared a thought for her was when the news got out that her husband had walked out on her and their teenaged twin sons on New Year’s Day, as if he had made a resolution to do so and not lost his nerve at the last minute. Both boys, she knew, were at university somewhere in the north of the country, and she imagined that Wanda’s comfortable, almost charmed life had been absolutely shattered by the sudden departure of her husband and the family’s only wage-earner.

  Dealing the cards one more time, she tried to capture the right frame of mind for divination. The woman would need advice and help, and a little guidance from the cards would not go amiss in pointing out the right path to follow for the best outcome for her in the future.

  In Manor Gate, once a rather grand gate house to the now demolished Georgian country house it had at one time, served Lettice Keighley-Armstrong sipped a cup of Darjeeling tea, relishing the spring-like
weather, her French windows wide open, letting in the delicious fragrance of freshly mown grass. Lettice sniffed greedily as she heard the mower buzzing away in what she assumed was Colin Twentymen’s rear garden. Very particular, he was, about the state of his garden; she often heard him at work in it, mowing, strimming, and trimming his hedges.

  She relished days like today particularly, because she comprehended that she didn’t have too many of them left. At eighty-five, she had no real health problems, but sometimes health was only skin-deep. Who knew what lay under the surface, gathering its strength to make an ambush? Many a friend of hers had died from an unexpected heart attack or a stroke. Even cancer camouflaged itself well until it was ready to reveal itself, ugly and gloating, as it spread to other parts of the body that had virtually no effective weapons to deal with it long term.

  Every morning when she woke up she decided it was definitely a good day, simply because she had woken up at all, and though she showed most people the rough side of her tongue when dealing with them, it was not out of any innate bad temper; merely that she relished her own company, solitude being a friend that had never let her down. It was just part of her nature to be alone, and only the visits of her old friend Violet Bingham filled her with pleasure these days.

  Her chair was turned towards the open French windows, so that she could watch the birds feasting at the feeders she had hung from the trees, within easy view of her armchair, this being one of her pleasures in life. With a sigh, she realised that spring was probably her favourite season, and mourned the fact that this one may be the last one she saw. This thought made her more determined than ever to enjoy every minute of it and not waste her time shut away with the doors all locked and the windows closed.

  As she watched the birds and listened to their shrill exchange of opinions, her hands played idly with a string of dull stones that hung from her neck; an odd contrast with the quality of her old silk blouse. At each wrist were strings of the same dull stones, which had the look of childhood acquisitions, if not that of cheap holiday souvenirs, but she seemed inordinately fond of them and they must have held some special memory for her, for she was never seen without them.