A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas!. Trisha Ashley

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СКАЧАТЬ threatened me and said if I went to the police he’d tell them it had all been my idea – and since I was the one who worked the extra shifts packing the special orders, I was implicated anyway.’

      ‘It certainly wouldn’t look good,’ Kate agreed helpfully.

      ‘But it’s his company and I’m just a warehouse packer, doing a bit of overtime. I told him they wouldn’t believe him but he said they would when he explained that we’d been having an affair and I’d reported the fraud out of spite because he’d ended it.’

      ‘Gosh, it’s like some low-life soap series! But it serves you right for not having gone to the police as soon as you found out,’ she said righteously. ‘That’s what I would have done.’

      ‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ I said. ‘In the end I told him I wouldn’t shop him, but gave him a month’s notice and said I wasn’t doing any more overtime. He said he didn’t care, so long as I kept my mouth shut.’

      ‘Which you haven’t, because you’ve told me,’ she pointed out.

      ‘Only because I was so upset that I was desperate to talk it through with someone and, if you remember, you promised to keep what I was going to say secret.’

      ‘I hadn’t realised it would be something criminal, though,’ she objected.

      ‘But you will keep it secret, won’t you?’ I asked.

      ‘I suppose so, but more because it would hurt Jeremy immensely if all this came out,’ Kate agreed. ‘I know you haven’t told him anything, or he’d have confided in me and Luke.’

      That was true, and it was what had stopped me confiding in Jeremy in the first place, but now I suddenly seemed to have blabbed it out to Kate, cutting out the middleman.

      ‘Now you’ll have to find another job,’ she said.

      ‘Well … maybe not. I know Jeremy doesn’t think my artwork is anything other than a hobby, but I’ve been regularly selling designs to greetings card companies, and now I’ve got my first one-woman exhibition in Liverpool I really think I might be able to earn a living out of it.’

      In fact, I’d have left Champers&Chocs long before, had it not been for Jeremy’s insistence that I not only continue to pay rent on the flat, which I mostly used to store my things and as a studio, but also my share of the expensive meals out that he, Kate and Luke enjoyed so much.

      ‘But you know what Jeremy’s like – he thinks I should pay an equal share of everything, even though he’s earning a lot more than I am.’

      ‘Well, teachers aren’t that well paid, you know,’ Kate said defensively.

      ‘They get a lot more than my minimum wages, that’s for sure,’ I said. ‘And more holidays – plus the three of you are always going off abroad on school trips.’

      ‘Being responsible for a coach full of adolescents is not exactly a fun holiday,’ she said, tossing her smooth blond hair back in a Miss Piggy kind of way. She often streaked her hair with a bright pink when she was out of school, but I can’t say it really did anything for her.

      ‘You’d be better off training for a proper career,’ she added, ‘but I’ll be at the exhibition, rooting for you, anyway. Luke can’t come; he’s off on a training course that day and won’t be back till too late.’

      ‘Thank you,’ I said, surprised, because when I’d initially invited them, she’d said they couldn’t make it. ‘My friend Emma doesn’t think she can come either, so I could do with some support. I do hope it’s a success … and then just after that I’ll have worked out my notice at Champers&Chocs and it won’t be my fault if Harry gets found out.’

      ‘Turning a blind eye doesn’t exactly qualify you for sainthood, you know,’ she said. ‘Still, I suppose you can’t do anything else now. Have you told Jeremy you’ve handed in your notice?’

      ‘No, I thought I’d wait until after the Papercuts and Beyond exhibition, because if I sell lots of pictures, he’ll be able to see that I could make a living from it.’

      The owners of the small gallery had been really enthusiastic about my pictures, which had been like a light at the end of a dark tunnel after Harry’s threats to implicate me. I’d been carrying a heavy burden for months, but soon I would be free and earning my living by doing work I loved …

      ‘Come on,’ said Kate, putting down her teacup decisively. ‘Let’s go and find you something to wear for this exhibition. You can’t go through life dressed in black jeans and tops.’

      ‘I don’t see why not,’ I said mutinously, following her out, but I did end up buying a jazzy silk tunic at her insistence, even if I did intend wearing it with narrow black trousers and flat pumps rather than the leggings and high heels she considered appropriate.

       Chapter 2: Picture This

       Randal

      ‘You know, these are really good,’ I said, examining the nearest pictures on the wall of the small gallery. ‘The artist’s taken traditional papercutting and collage techniques to a whole new level.’

      ‘I’ll take your word for it – all this arty stuff isn’t my cup of tea or why I’m here,’ Charlie Clancy replied absently, scrolling through his phone to find a photograph of the woman whose work was being exhibited and whom he hoped to meet that evening. ‘I just need to get Tabitha Coombs to believe I’m interested in including Champers&Chocs in an article on successful local internet businesses, and I’ll be in there.’

      ‘But you might learn something useful, because her work is very revealing when you look beyond the flowery paper lace borders,’ I suggested. ‘The subjects can be quite dark – see this one?’ I pointed to the nearest. ‘At first glance, it’s a park scene by a duck pond, with people sitting on the bench, but if you look closer, they’re clearly homeless and one is drinking from a bottle.’

      ‘Never mind the artwork,’ Charlie said impatiently. His mischievous expression under his mop of dark curls was exactly the same one he’d worn when we were schoolboys and he was plotting some prank that would get us into deep trouble. Nowadays, as an investigator and presenter for the long-running TV programme Dodgy Dealings, it was other people he dropped into the soup. We were in a similar line of business, though generally it was the big holiday com-panies’ shortcomings I exposed.

      ‘There’s Tabitha Coombs over by the archway through to the other room, the tallish one who looks like Cher on a bad day,’ he added.

      At a guess, the woman was somewhere in her mid-thirties, her waist-length cocoa-brown hair worn loose, with a fringe that framed her face and touched straight, black brows. She had high cheekbones, a narrow, aquiline nose, pale complexion and a generous mouth.

      ‘She’s quite striking, in a slightly witchy kind of way,’ I said.

      I was certain that the gallery was too crowded and noisy for her to have heard me, but something made her glance our way at that moment, her gaze direct from eyes of a surprisingly light, almost lilac, СКАЧАТЬ