Read Online Murder in Style by Veronica Heley - Free Book Online Page A

for some reason.) Ellie didn’t buy many biscuits nowadays. The Cordovers had pretty well cleaned out the tin yesterday, but apparently Susan had decided to bake some chocolate-chip cookies today. Hurray. Ellie took one and pushed the tin at Susan.
    Investigating the biscuit tin had given Ellie time to consider how to approach the vexed question of the forthcoming wedding.
    Lesley Milburn – Susan’s aunt – was marrying a pleasant young man who taught at a local primary school. Bride and bridegroom had asked suitable members of the family on either side to act as bridesmaids. Susan had been invited, had tried to decline and been overruled. Susan was a solid-looking girl with capable hands and sandy, frizzy hair drawn up into a no-nonsense knot. She had a large bosom of which she was ashamed, and which she tried to disguise by wearing black T-shirts with silly slogans on them. Susan was not, and never had been, a size nought.
    The bridegroom had a young sister, Angelica, who
was
a size nought, and who was glorying in the fact that, as bridesmaid, she would be in all the photographs and the centre of attention after the bride. Angelica had long blonde hair, long black eyelashes and a sylph-like figure.
    The contrast between the two girls set one’s teeth on edge and, to make matters worse, Angelica had been allowed to choose the bridesmaid’s dresses, which were to be a floating chiffon overdress in peach, with the tightest of figure-hugging sheaths underneath. This revealing style could never in a thousand years look good on Susan.
    Susan had refrained from murdering Angelica, but the iron had entered into her soul. Lesley, going straight from the Cordover affair into a sordid case of child abuse, and distracted by the last-minute hitches that can occur in the weeks before a wedding, was unapproachable.
    Susan knew she had to put up and shut up, but the thought of being held up to view as a laughing stock was ever on her mind.
    Susan munched a biscuit and said, indistinctly, ‘I’ve been off my food lately. Perhaps I’m going down with something catching. Salmonella. Something like that. Then nobody would mind if I wasn’t a bridesmaid.’
    â€˜Have you asked your mother for help?’
    â€˜Humph. She’s making the most of the menopause. She says nobody ever thinks of her problems, which are far worse than anyone else’s because she’s still suffering from her hip replacement, which hasn’t worked, and how she’s to walk down the aisle she doesn’t know and the young never realize what she has to put up with. Which is true, but doesn’t help solve it for me. I’m definitely going down with something catching.’
    Ellie munched a biscuit, too. Yum. She’d never been very interested in what she wore, but she had conscientiously tried to understand what was in fashion so that she didn’t look completely out of date. It wasn’t that she cared what other people thought of her, but she was the public face of the charitable trust, and that meant she had to be appropriately – if not fashionably – dressed on occasion.
    She said, ‘I know it’s tradition, but I don’t see why you and Angelica have to wear the same style. Why can’t you choose a dress for yourself? In the same colour, perhaps? You wouldn’t want to outshine the bride by wearing white, but something in blue? An Empire-line dress with a low cleavage would suit you to perfection.’
    â€˜Angelica was told she could choose what she liked to wear.’
    â€˜So the same must go for you, too?’
    Susan slanted a look at Ellie, and managed a giggle. ‘You mean, I should rot her up by choosing something that doesn’t make me look like an overweight Jelly Baby? Go on! Where would I get something that wouldn’t make me look like a freak, especially as Lesley is paying for the dress and she’s not exactly made of money?’
    Ellie