The Best of Friends by Alex Day (accelerated reader books .txt) 📕

wavering and I can’t stop crying and this will only frighten Luke even more than he is already.

I’m facing up to the fact that it’s over with Dan, if it ever even began. I was stupid and gullible and I’ve been taught a lesson, big time.

But I didn’t poison them. I wouldn’t make that mistake twice.

Chapter 43

Charlotte

You walk off, leaving me standing on the road outside the shop, seething with undiluted fury.

The only satisfying thing about the whole exchange is that several people overheard. People who know who I am, and probably who you are, too. I’m not proud of my language – that was rather coarse and not the kind of image I like to portray of myself. But desperate times call for desperate measures and all that. I’m sure, once everyone knows the whole story, they’ll understand my use of a few fruity phrases.

I walk back to the house, head held high in righteous belief that I am the injured party here. I trusted you. I confided in you. Most of all, I didn’t see you for what you are and that is almost the worst of it. I always prided myself on being a good judge of character. Well, you’ve thrown that by the wayside good and proper.

At home, Dan is blindsided by the whole episode. He still can’t believe that anyone would want to poison him. That you would want to poison him. And he’s horrified that you’ve still got the gall to show your face around the village. We hunker down in the kitchen, me making chicken soup to aid his recovery, Dan in an armchair beside the Aga, wrapped in a blanket whilst making phone calls and hammering out emails. Not even a brush with death can keep Dan away from work for more than forty-eight hours.

‘I didn’t see it in her,’ he tells me again, as he has done many times already. ‘I just didn’t see it. She always seemed so nice, so kind, so …’ He falters, presumably aware that showering you with compliments is hardly the right approach right now. But I know what he means. It’s not just Dan. No one would have taken you for a murderer.

‘I’m so sorry, Charlotte,’ he says, for the umpteenth time.

I pause in my stirring of the pan and turn to him. ‘Forget it,’ I say, light-heartedly. ‘That’s what I want to do, and I recommend you do too.’

Of course this isn’t possible. There’ll be more questioning by the police, I’m sure, and then of course giving evidence at the trial. However much I wish it would all be over, that’s not going to happen for a while. In the meantime, I want to concentrate on me and Dan, on our marriage and our relationship. As if to seal this commitment, I bend forward to kiss his forehead.

The staccato ring of the doorbell makes us both jump. For a second, the fear washes over me and then I remember. Remember that it’s all sorted now, that there’s no one out to get me any longer, if there ever was. Quickly washing my hands and brushing them dry on my apron, I go to the front door and open it. Two police officers stand on the doorstep, one man and one woman. I smile at them and greet them warmly, inviting them in. They must need more information, confirmation of the details we’ve already given.

‘Don’t mind your shoes,’ I say indulgently, as if they are rare and favoured visitors, as I lead them down the hallway. I hesitate for a moment between taking them into the kitchen or the drawing room. In a split-second decision, I opt for the former; it’s homelier, cosier. It will plainly reveal to these officers of the law that we are a loving family that someone – you – has callously attempted to rip apart.

Pausing beside the door, I stand aside and gesture for them to go in. I smile, a bigger, more emphatic one now as their lack of response has begun to bother me. They don’t return the friendliness.

Typical police, I think, can’t reveal anything, can’t show any emotion, can’t indicate in any way whatsoever whose side they’re on.

In the kitchen, Dan’s armchair is empty. He’s clearly made a hasty getaway through the other door, presumably wanting to leave the coast clear for me to tell what I know. I imagine it’s not too nice for him to hear, over and over again, that the woman who threw herself at him, when rejected, tried to kill him.

‘Please sit down,’ I say, pointing at the chairs around the large table. That seems more suitable than asking them to sit at the island breakfast bar. The male officer is large, the female one even larger. An image of them perched on high stools and swinging round and round the way the boys sometimes do to annoy me pops into my mind. I look away whilst I suppress the smirk.

When I turn back, the residual smile slowly wanes away as I register their expressions.

‘Mrs Hegarty,’ begins the woman, sounding self-consciously and irritatingly officious. ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of attempted murder. You do not have to say anything …’

Chapter 44

Susannah

Charlotte has been charged with attempted murder.

I am devastated, obviously. That anyone could have tried to kill Dan, that he nearly died – and that it seems that his own wife, my erstwhile friend, was responsible. But in another way, why should it matter to me? He’s sloughed me off like an old, outgrown outfit he has no use for anymore. Even before the ‘incident’, he’d been about to move back in with her – or at least, that’s the word she put about in the short period before her arrest, what she said the two of them had agreed during their curry-fuelled soiree.

His words to me as he seduced me – Charlotte doesn’t understand me, I can talk to you in a way I can’t to