Read Online May Contain Traces of Magic by Tom Holt - Free Book Online Page A

wasn’t in the mood for anything like this. ‘Look, for crying out loud, Jill, I’ll buy you another damn packet of biscuits, all right? But for the record, I didn’t eat—’
    â€˜I don’t care about the biscuits, I want to know if you looked in the bag. Well, I know you did,’ she went on (had he ever heard her this angry before? Not as far as he could remember), ‘what I need to know is exactly what you did.’
    This is silly, Chris thought. Jill and her stupid bloody carrier bags. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘I may have just glanced inside it quickly, as I was putting it down on the—’
    â€˜You just looked. You didn’t take anything out.’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜You mean, no apart from the biscuits.’
    From silly to annoying; evolution in action. ‘I didn’t touch the fucking biscuits. I don’t like plain digestives either. Just as soon eat plywood. And no, I didn’t touch anything in the stupid bag, all right?’
    Silence at the other end. Anybody else and he’d have construed it as sulking, only Jill never sulked. Mind you, Jill never freaked out about anything as trivial as biscuit theft, either. But when she spoke again, her voice was different. Not less agitated, but clearer in her mind, maybe. ‘All right,’ she said, ‘if you’re absolutely sure.’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Fine. That’s all I needed to know.’ Pause. ‘You haven’t got a cat or a dog or anything like that, have you?’
    â€˜You know we haven’t, Jill, because of Karen’s asthma.’
    â€˜Yes, of course. Mice? Rats?’
    â€˜No.’
    And this time - well, not relief, but the lowering of tension that comes with a mystery solved, even if the solution is unpalatable. ‘So, you really have no idea what could’ve eaten the biscuits?’
    â€˜No.’ As Chris said it, he frowned, and the question formed in his mind; so, if it wasn’t Karen, who the hell did eat the—?
    â€˜OK. Thanks for clearing that up.’ But I didn’t, he thought; there’s been something weird going on, and I can’t account for it. ‘Sorry if I came across a bit nasty - I didn’t mean to bite your head off.’
    Pause. Freudian slip, if that was the term he was looking for. At any rate, it could be taken as a perfectly valid explanation for Jill stressing out like that. ‘Talking of which,’ he said, his voice a little higher and falsely cheerful, ‘did you find the - well, the thingummy that did in poor Mr Newsome?’
    â€˜No.’ Definitely not happy about that. ‘By the time we got there, the trail had gone cold. We even tried scrying in water, but it knew what it was doing, covered its tracks very well.’ Long pause, then: ‘Is Karen there?’
    â€˜No, she’s out.’
    â€˜When you see her, maybe it’d be better not to talk about it,’ Jill said, sounding much more like herself. ‘Because of - well, you know, what happened. I happen to know it’s a very sore subject with her, she can get a bit extreme about it, and if she gets the idea there’s one on the loose out there, it could mess her up a bit. So, keep quiet about it, will you?’
    â€˜Sure,’ Chris replied without thinking, mostly relieved because Jill was back to normal. ‘And there’s no reason why the subject should come up, we’re not exactly a had-a-nice-day-at-the-office-dear kind of household.’ He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘Look, about your biscuits, I’ll get you another—’
    â€˜Forget about it,’ Jill replied, and she sounded quite normal. ‘Actually, your poltergeist or whatever it was probably did me a favour, I really can’t afford to go stuffing my face with biscuits unless I want to end up looking like a small whale.’
    End of conversation. Chris put the phone down, then looked