Read Dead Woman's Shoes: 1 (Lexy Lomax Mysteries) Online
Authors: Kaye C Hill
Dead Woman's Shoes: 1 (Lexy Lomax Mysteries)
... it is good to see a publisher investing in fresh work that, although definitely contemporary in mood and content, falls four-square within the genre’s traditions.
- Martin Edwards, author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries
Creme de la Crime… so far have not put a foot wrong.
- Reviewing the Evidence
First published in 2008
by Crème de la Crime
P O Box 523, Chesterfield, S40 9AT
Copyright © 2008 Kaye C Hill
The moral right of Kaye C Hill to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published.
No cats or dogs were harmed in the writing of this book.
Typesetting by Yvette Warren
Cover design by Yvette Warren
Front cover image by Peter Roman
ISBN 978-0-9551589-9-5
eBook ISBN 9781906790578
A CIP catalogue reference for this book is available from the British Library
Printed in Poland by Polskabook Ltd
www.cremedelacrime.com
Contents
About the author:
Kaye C Hill is married with one cat and lives in Guildford. A career involving steel-capped boots, chainsaws and railway embankments somehow inspired her to start writing crime fiction.
Thanks to…
… my mum for teaching me to read before I started school, and setting this whole thing in motion.
I am also very grateful to Lynne, my publisher, for a phone call that changed my life.
Particular thanks go to Jane, and the other members of my writers’ circle, who regularly laugh at my work, even though I keep telling them it’s not meant to be funny.
My eternal gratitude also to the rest of my family and friends far and wide, for their unconditional support.
I should also mention the shed, where I had my first inspiration.
But my biggest thanks of all go, of course, to Nick, who knew I could do this. He also put my all my apostrophes in the right places – and if someone can do that, you know you’re on to a winner.
This is for my dad, Roy Hill.
He always enjoyed a story about a private eye.
A harmless, necessary cat.
-
The Merchant of Venice
, William Shakespeare
1
Somewhere in the log cabin a phone started ringing.
Lexy Lomax jerked upright in the unfamiliar bed, blinking in the sunlight that stabbed through a pair of faded chintz curtains.
She sat, confused, listening to the persistent
tring-tring.
Couldn’t be her mobile – that played
Born Free.
Anyway, she’d chucked it into the River Orville the previous afternoon. Not exactly environmentally friendly, but satisfying, nonetheless, watching it arc through the air, with Gerard’s voice still bleating out of it, and hearing the resounding splash that signified the end of the conversation.
So who was ringing now? She hadn’t even noticed a phone when she’d arrived at Otter’s End late the previous night.
A small but pointed bark sounded from the end of the bed.
“Yeah, all right pal. It’ll stop in a moment.”
But it didn’t.
Lexy shifted uncomfortably. The sound was starting to unnerve her. Reluctantly, she swung her legs, still encased in jeans, over the side of the bed and eased herself up, aware of a stinging sensation in her left arm.
She padded down a short, dingy hall and pushed open the door at the end.
The living room was flooded with morning sun, making her blink violently. Dust loitered on every surface of the room – dust which must have accumulated over a much longer period than the eight weeks the place had lain empty. Not quite Miss Havisham’s wedding, but getting there.
Lexy made her way across the threadbare carpet to a corner table. The green plastic phone was tucked behind a dead pot plant. Hand hovering over the receiver, she hesitated. Her husband couldn’t really have tracked her down already, could he?
No. Impossible. But Lexy felt a jab of anxiety. The note she had left, some twenty-four hours earlier, on the mantelpiece of their flat in South Kensington informed him she had left him for good and gone to the Far East.
Now, stuck in this log cabin in Suffolk, with the sea rattling the pebbled beach outside, and the phone implacably ringing, she began to regret her words.
When Gerard discovered what had happened, he was hardly going to leap on the next plane to Hong Kong. He would realise straight away that she wouldn’t be able to get through customs, that she would have to stay in Britain. So instead he would be methodically tracing her last movements. At that very moment he might be pondering over the note she left. She could just imagine him muttering
“Far East, Far East
,” and reaching for a road atlas. He would find her, there was no doubt of that.
Not that he would want her back or anything. He’d just be missing his five hundred grand.
The phone must have been on its twentieth ring.
Lexy closed her fingers over the receiver, then jerked them away again as an integral answering machine kicked in.
It was a recording of a mature, rather fruity, female voice.
“Thank you for calling. Please leave your name and number and I’ll get back to you.”
Lexy took a step back. The recorded voice must belong to the previous occupant of the log cabin. The one who didn’t own a duster. The one who’d died.
Her name had been Doyle. Mrs Glenda Doyle.
Lexy had bought the cabin cheap from Mrs Doyle’s nephew, from an advert he’d put on the Internet.
“Fabulous little place,” he’d said smoothly when she rang him. “Ideal for doing up. Right on the beach, of course. That is,” he amended, “only about a hundred yards from the steps down. All on its own, lovely retreat. Needs a bit of work, you understand. But a perfect holiday home.”
“Is that what your aunt used it for?” Lexy asked. “A holiday home?”
“No. Actually she lived there,” he replied, shortly. “Her choice. Seemed to want to be somewhere remote. Sold her house in Bury St Edmunds and…”
Lived off the proceeds? Lexy could tell that Derek Flint was somewhat put out that his inheritance had dwindled from solid bricks and mortar in a well-heeled town to a run-down log cabin.
“I’ll send you the photos,” he said.
They were printed from a digital photograph, blown up to ten by eights. OK, she could see that Otter’s End was old, and most of the struts were missing from the veranda, and it needed a lick of creosote, and the windows looked like they would clatter in the wind, but it had bolt-hole written all over it. And she needed a bolt-hole. Lexy had cashed in her savings there and then and bought it.
It hadn’t bothered her moving into a place where someone had recently died. She wasn’t into all that ghost-buster stuff. Even so, it was oddly discomfiting now to hear Glenda Doyle’s disembodied voice emitting from the answering machine.
She’d have to wipe that message. She bent over the phone, but before she could even start fiddling with it, there was a click, followed by the inarticulate sound of a throat being cleared.
Lexy remained frozen in position. Someone was leaving a message.
“Er… yes – I’m calling about the advert in the
Clopwolde Herald.
Your discreet services.”
It was a man’s voice, soft, well-modulated, hesitant. Not Gerard, then. He put a particular emphasis on the word
discreet
.
He recited a mobile number. “I’ll be available until one, if you… er… wouldn’t mind calling me back.” There was a click as he replaced the receiver.
Lexy let out a long breath, grinning at her own idiocy. Had she really thought it would be her husband? It was just some bloke calling about an advert in a local paper.
She pressed the menu key, tried to find a quick way of deleting the message, but couldn’t. She’d disconnect the damn thing later. She didn’t need a phone anyway. She headed abruptly for the kitchen. What she did need was a cup of tea.
She filled a decrepit beige plastic kettle with water and put it on to boil, took a chipped mug from a hook, rifled through a small bag of provisions she’d left on the worktop the previous night, and realised that she hadn’t brought any teabags with her.
Cursing under her breath, Lexy started yanking open the orange formica cupboards. One contained a pot of elderly plum jam. Beside it stood a barrel-shaped tin with scenes from Gilbert and Sullivan operas on it. Lexy picked it up and shook it. Bingo. Thanks, Glenda.
She paced around the kitchen while she waited for the kettle to boil, trying unsuccessfully to stop the events of the previous day drip-feeding into her mind. Maybe she should have gone to the police after all, rather than take matters into her own hands? Perhaps she should have confronted Gerard as soon as she had found out? Or maybe she should have contacted an insider, someone who could have helped her without asking too many questions? But Lexy found she was unable to concentrate fully on these vexed issues, because something else was bothering her, something unrelated to her obnoxious husband, a small, insignificant thing that nevertheless had its hand up in the air.
She frowned.
It was that message she’d just heard on the answering machine. What had the bloke been after? Discreet services?
Discreet
services? What kind of discreet services were we talking about here? Surely not…
With an expression of disbelief, Lexy turned and stared back through the open kitchen hatch into the living room, with its dust and chintz, pink velvet curtains faded to a mouldy green in the creases, and the row of cheap pottery policemen on the mantelpiece above the mock-flame gas fireplace.
It didn’t exactly scream bordello.
And she hadn’t even started on the bedroom.
OK. Try this. Perhaps Mrs Doyle took her discreet services to her clients’ own homes. Wearing the stout brown leather shoes that had been left by the front door of the cabin.
No, that didn’t work, either. Lexy shut her eyes momentarily to dispel the image.
Whatever services she offered, it was clear from the message that the local newspaper was still running Mrs Doyle’s advert.
Well, great.
Lexy stalked back into the living room, and turned to a caramel-coloured chihuahua, source of the earlier pointed bark, who was now sitting like a miniature Sphinx on the arm of the grubby sofa.
“Better sort this out right now, Kinky, or we’ll be getting calls from every neglected husband between here and Lowestoft,” she said grimly. “And somehow your name doesn’t help.”
She picked up the receiver and punched out the number the man had left. She’d send him packing, then ring the local paper and cancel the advert.
The phone was picked up almost immediately.
“Hello?” It was the same civil, tentative voice.