Read Online The Vacant Casualty by Patty O'Furniture - Free Book Online

looked bemusedly over at Sam, who was doing his best to appear thoughtful while trying to make his mouth large enough to admit two squares of gingerbread at once. ‘I always thought
that identical twins had a special . . .’
    ‘No!’ shrieked the little woman, looking at Bradley without noticing her outburst made Sam choke on an even larger slab of cake. With her spare hand she unconsciously plucked two
knitting needles from a ball of yarn and stabbed them deep into the upholstery with a squeaking sound. Then, at the thought of her sister, some awful emotion overcame her. The men exchanged a
glance, wondering whether what they were about to uncover might have anything to do with Terry Fairbreath’s disappearance.
    ‘You see,’ said Emily, ‘my sister is a
terribly vicious bitch
!’ And she kicked the air with one of her sharp little feet. Sam’s eyes bulged stupidly and he
made gasping noises as Emily tottered to the window.
    ‘Look,’ she said. ‘It started with the objects being thrown over the fence – a dead cat, a rusty wheelbarrow, the Mayor of Oxley. Then she paid ruffians from the
slaughterhouse to scatter animal entrails all over the garden.’
    ‘Ruffians?’ asked Bradley.
    ‘Slaughterhouse?’ croaked Sam.
    ‘
Entrails!
’ whispered Emily. ‘The shitguts!’
    Sam threw himself over the back of his chair and coughed a chunk of cake across the room into the glowing fireplace, where it landed with a sizzling splat. ‘How absolutely offal,’ he
said, looking unduly pleased with himself for a second as he straightened up, rubbing his diaphragm before falling back, wheezing, onto the seat. ‘Offal, eh?’ he repeated, looking
around, disappointed with the reaction.
    ‘Hmm,’ he thought. ‘I think I may still be drunk from last night.’
    ‘
Look
,’ said Emily.
    ‘Oh,’ said Sam, joining her at the front window.
    ‘She tries to ruin everything I do.’
    In the carefully tended garden outside, which was divided up into neat squares and oblongs devoted to separate fruits and vegetables, a number of plants had been gouged out of the earth in an
aggressive fashion, then smashed up. The whole production might have been intended at first to indicate that it was the handiwork of an animal, but it seemed the person responsible had enjoyed
themselves too much, for shoe prints were clearly visible in the mushy remains of a particularly large and fleshy marrow.
    Looking Emily up and down and judging that she wouldn’t see seventy again, Sam suddenly pictured a bitter history of sibling hatred that spread back to the second Churchill government at
least. He surmised that her sister’s vindictive act could not be the first, and almost certainly there had been retaliations. ‘You take this sort of thing lying down?’ he
asked.
    ‘Christ, no!’ declared the old lady. ‘I had a male rattlesnake imported from New Mexico last spring and let it go in her house but she got lucky and trod on its head with her
stiletto.
Slut
!’
    ‘So your vegetables are important to you?’ asked Bradley. ‘You enter them in competitions?’
    Emily simply looked at him.
    ‘That’s a yes,’ said Sam in his ear. The writer, ever intrepid and eager for danger, was already chewing another slice of ginger cake. ‘Local flower show, you
know.’
    ‘I’m not averse to a bit of gardening myself, Mrs Q, I don’t mind telling you,’ said the detective. ‘I’ve had some melons in my time . . .’
    This was, however, but a hollow distraction from the sight now unfolding in front of them, for a truck was unloading what looked like ten or twenty tonnes of compost directly onto Emily’s
garden. Both men stared open-mouthed, but as the oozing brown liquid cascaded down and squeezed among the trellises and pots and nets, the old lady was no longer watching. She had turned away and
tapped a speed dial on her phone.
    ‘Terence,’ she said sharply, ‘we have a code red. That’s right – the eagle must raid