A Body in the Village Hall by Dee MacDonald (non fiction books to read TXT) 📕

the fact that it took an hour to get to some decent shops. And they both agreed that they wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.

‘Where do you live, Woody?’ Kate asked.

‘Lower Tinworthy, of course!’ he said. ‘Right opposite you, on the slope up towards Penhallion. You probably pass my place every time you walk the dog.’

‘Really?’ Kate was astounded. She’d seen several houses and cottages across the little valley but never dreamed he lived in one of them. She’d better not tell Angie, who was quite liable to get out her binoculars to study all the windows.

‘I bought it five years ago,’ he said, ‘when I came to live down here. I used to come to surf, you know, and then I saw this cottage up for sale and I thought, hey, why not? I’d been with the Met up in London for over thirty years and figured it was time for a change. There was a vacancy for a detective inspector in this area, and here I am. I think they were glad to put me out to grass.’

‘And you’ve no regrets?’

‘None at all. Mind you, I did think that coming here would be a nice sleepy prelude to retirement but nobody told me that the locals would be stabbing each other with bread knives or drowning each other. Perhaps I should have gone to the Outer Hebrides or somewhere, but I wasn’t too sure how good the surf would be up there.’

Kate laughed. ‘They saw you coming!’

‘They sure did! But tonight we’re not going to discuss who might have killed whom, or anything else to do with what’s been going on. You OK with that?’

‘Yes, I’m OK with that,’ Kate said, although she’d really have liked to discuss her list with him. But what was a hobby for her was his everyday job and she respected his desire to get away from that.

It was becoming dark now as they headed up and away from Higher Tinworthy, the road meandering through rocky outcrops, with occasional sheep grazing by the roadside, towards Bodmin Moor. They drove in silence for a few minutes before he turned into the car park of an ancient, rustic, rambling one-storey building.

‘This looks like the sort of place where smugglers might arrive any minute,’ Kate observed, ‘or even Poldark!’

‘Well, apparently it does have a history of smuggling, a bit like Jamaica Inn,’ Woody said. ‘I guess you’ve been to Jamaica Inn?’

‘Oh, I have,’ Kate said as she got out of the car. ‘It was exploring all the locations of Daphne du Maurier’s books that got me wanting to live in Cornwall in the first place.’

‘She didn’t get round to writing about The Edge though,’ Woody said, ‘but I reckon it’s her kind of place.’

He shepherded her into the warmth of a long, low-ceilinged candlelit restaurant, with a bar in the middle and an open fire at both ends. They were shown to a well-polished oak table for two, with sparkling glass and silverware and a tiny tubular vase containing one real white rose.

‘Lovely!’ Kate looked round at the rough stone walls and the oak beams overhead. The restaurant was three-quarters full and the only sound that could be heard above the low buzz of conversation was some Spanish guitar music; possibly John Williams. Beautiful, and quite unexpected.

She liked everything on the menu but settled for a seafood starter and a fillet steak. She declined a cocktail and settled for a large glass of Malbec, while Woody contented himself with a small beer because he was driving.

‘What a great place!’ Kate enthused again, once their starters had been delivered to the table, wondering how many other ladies Woody might have brought here.

‘I bet you’re wondering if I bring lots of dates here,’ Woody said with a wicked grin.

‘Of course not!’ Kate lied.

‘Only a couple,’ he went on, ‘and one of them was my sister who’d come over on vacation.’

Kate wasn’t about to ask who the other was. She liked his brown eyes and lustrous lashes. How come it was the guys who got the long lashes? No justice in the world. She liked the way his eyes crinkled at the corners too.

‘And the other was my younger daughter,’ he continued, ‘who’d come down from London for a weekend. Talking of which, I’m going up to London to spend Easter Sunday with her, if I can manage to take one day off. Like I said before, I rarely bump into anyone from the Tinworthys up here, although I did see Fenella Barker-Jones with Dickie Payne on one occasion.’

‘You did?’ Kate was fascinated by the fact that they’d actually appeared in public together, having imagined Dr Dickie Payne scuttling in and out of Pendorian Manor under cover of darkness.

‘Oh yes, they went lots of places together, well away from home. I think she ended up costing him a lot of money.’

So, Kate thought, perhaps that was why he tried to end the relationship. Maybe she was bleeding him dry financially as well as physically.

‘Tell me about yourself, Kate,’ Woody said, cutting into her thoughts at the same time as cutting into his steak, which was so rare it was practically running around the plate.

‘Oh, I’m not very interesting,’ she said as she sliced into her own medium-rare filet.

‘Of course you are! Tell me!’

Kate told him about growing up in a small village in rural Berkshire, about nursing at St Thomas’s Hospital in London, about marrying Alex Palmer and then going out to Singapore for two years. ‘That was when I realised he was a serial philanderer,’ she said. ‘But Tom, my older son, was born out there and, when we got back to the UK, Alex swore to me that he’d changed. No more women, no more lies. I was pregnant with Jack when I realised that, not only was he being unfaithful, but he was still seeing the same woman he’d been having an affair with in Singapore. She’d come back as well.’

‘You’ve had it really tough,’ Woody