The Society Karen Guyler (best books to read .TXT) 📖

“What do you have there?” Something beneath Charles’ tone made Eva look up, made Lily freeze, one hand in her bag. Eva’s toast popped up in the perfect silence bounded by Charles’ demand and Lily’s guilt.

“My school bag, what else?”

“Show me.”

“You can’t go down my bag.”

“As I pay for it and everything in it, I think you’ll find I can.” Eva bit back her ‘what are you doing?’ It was hard sometimes to not contradict each other over Lily’s care.

“I’ve got rights, you know.”

“Give it to me.” Charles held his hand out.

“Mum.” A long drawn out wheedling do something.

“Charles, what do you think Lily’s got that she shouldn’t have?” Surely she was too young to be trying drugs or sex. But weren’t parents the last to know? Eva was certain she’d have told her mother everything if she thought she would listen. Doubtless making up for that, she’d told Lily countless times she’d always be there for her, no matter what, so she hoped Lily would confide in her when the time came.

Charles looked so uncomfortable at the sanitary pads he pulled out of the first side pocket he unzipped, Eva expected him to drop the bag.

“You want to take those off me, Dad?” Lily now in full teenager strop.

A selection of folders, a pencil case, hairbrush spilled onto the worktop. Charles rifled through screwed-up handwritten notes, a half-eaten tube of sweets, and a couple of crumpled tissues.

“Empty your pockets.” Something in his eyes reduced Lily’s protests to a huff.

“This will have to wait, Charles. Lily’s going to be late. Can we do this—”

“Now.”

Lily smacked her travel pass and house keys on the breakfast bar, her purse flew off the edge. The note its zip made as it smacked onto the floor was far too jolly a sound for whatever this was.

“Happy now?” Her sulky outrage was turning, Eva could hear the threat of tears edging it but Charles seemed oblivious.

Eva began repacking Lily’s bag. “Charles, this needs to wait.”

“That pocket. I can see it’s in there, give it back.” he insisted.

“I haven’t got anything of yours.” Lily yelled. “Want to search me?”

“Show me.”

“For God’s sake, you’re such a Hitler.” Lily yanked off her blazer and threw it at him.

He dug into her pockets. “What’s this?” He held up a silver chain, peering at the pendant on it.

“None of your business.”

He slammed it down on the worktop. “Have you been in the loft?”

“Are you mad?”

“It’s a simple enough question.”

“Up there with all the spiders? What do you think?” Lily snatched her blazer back. “I’ll miss my bus now so I’ll be late home every day this week with detention, thanks a lot. Hope you enjoy your father of the year award you’re never getting.”

She yanked her coat off the stand, swept up her overnight backpack and slammed the front door behind her in the best soap opera style.

“What was that about?”

But Charles ignored Eva’s question, his feet snapping at the tiles on the hallway floor in Lily’s wake. Eva followed him. “Did you have to be so hard on her?”

Charles snatched up his own coat and slammed the door too, with Eva’s reasonableness on the inside in the stained air, his and Lily’s anger on the outside in the frigid October day.

Today, really? She could bang their heads together.

Her turn to yank the door open, but her shout for Charles to remember a tux rebounded back to her from where it smacked into DI Smith and DC Truman standing on her doorstep.

6

“We usually have to knock.” DC Truman’s smile froze. “What happened to you?”

It took Eva a couple of seconds to realise what she was asking about. “Run-in with a cyclist. That’s why I haven’t been in to give my statement, I spent most of the night in A and E.”

“We have a couple more questions for you. Can we come in?”

Eva looked beyond them, but there was no sign of Lily or Charles in the street. She let the detectives in, waited for them to begin.

“You might want to sit.” DC Truman’s assertion made Eva’s heart jump. What now?

She led them into the kitchen, leant against the units.

“That looks nasty.” The woman detective gestured at Eva’s face.

“It doesn’t feel so great from this side either.”

“How did it happen?”

“Mistimed crossing the road.”

“We saw your husband leaving, he seemed to be in a bit of a temper.” And there it was. DC Truman let her accusation sit there.

“It was nothing, family stuff.” It sounded weak, an excuse, but she didn’t know what it was. Eva picked up Lily’s bowl and scraped the abandoned mush into the food recycling bin. Bending to put the bowl in the dishwasher made her gasp.

“Are you okay?” the detective persisted.

“I’m fine. What did you want to ask me? I have to get to work.”

DI Smith propped himself against the kitchen door frame. “Eric Hill, did he eat anything at the coffee shop?”

“A piece of chocolate cake, I thought I told you.”

“Did you have any?”

Eva shook her head. “I don’t like cake.” She half-expected the usual jokey outrage that followed that admission, but this wasn’t that type of conversation.

“You eat anything there?”

“No, why?”

“We believe Mr Hill was poisoned.”

Poisoned, but that meant—Eva dropped onto the nearest chair. Keep it together, she couldn’t panic in front of the police. It was only the tiniest chance, the most unlikely of explanations. “Poisoned, are you sure? Was anyone else taken ill?”

“Why d’you ask?” Was DI Smith testing her?

She grasped at the distraction of the coffee maker, making them drinks to give her time to think.

Its rumbling and the shrillness of grinding beans filled the kitchen. She let the machine blast the water, steam the milk, growl through the process again to make a cup for DI Smith, hoping they didn’t notice her shaking hands fumbling with the portafilter, mistiming locking it into the housing. Trusting they thought the screeching warning of no water in the reservoir where she forgot to check its level