Page 56 of Blow Down (The Plumber's Mate)
Huh. That hadn’t even occurred to me. Me and Phil live in Pluck’s End? No question, Cherry’s house was way nicer than we’d be able to afford any other way. Like Leanne said, it was dead posh round there. What would the neighbours think?
Heh. That was a selling point in itself. But it wasn’t like I didn’t have a perfectly good house of my own already. Okay, yeah, it was just a two-bed semi in Fleetville. But it was mine.
Course, it wasn’t a big house. If me and Phil ever had those kids we’d talked about, it might start seeming a bit cramped. And Pluck’s End was a nicer area for kids to grow up in, no question.
But all that was probably years down the line.
“Wouldn’t you rather rent it out to someone who’ll pay the going rate?” I hedged.
“Oh, the money doesn’t matter,” Sis said offhandedly.
Nice for some.
“It’d be worth it to know I had people in there I could trust not to wreck the place,” she carried on.
Phil would probably jump at the chance to move somewhere a bit more upmarket than Fleetville. I wasn’t sure why that thought gave me such a tight feeling in my chest.
Except . . . we’d just settled he was going to move into my house, and now it was all going to be up in the air again.
“Anyway, have a think about it, and let me know.” Cherry frowned at a jar of English mustard. “This is nearly a year out of date. Do you think it matters?”
I unscrewed the lid and took a butcher’s. Then I gave it a sniff. “Nah, I’m pretty sure it won’t kill us. I won’t tell if you don’t.”
Phil and Greg had disappeared by the time I made it out of the kitchen. Typical. I tracked ’em down in Greg’s study, where he was showing Phil his latest taxidermy project. It was only a less-than-half-done wire frame at the mo, but it looked suspiciously birdlike.
“Oi, you didn’t walk off with a feathered friend at the end of the fayre, did you?” I asked. “Or poison their birdseed?” I was joking, honest.
Mostly.
Greg guffawed, which was a bit on the ear-splittingly painful side in a room this small. “No, no. But the Swan Bottom people were most helpful in providing me with contacts, and by a fortunate chance, a specimen became available almost immediately.”
“Pretty sure that’s not how the bird would’ve seen it.”
Greg looked guilty. “Ah. Perhaps not. Still, for the suffering, death can be a release.”
I grinned. “You keep telling yourself that. Right, I think Cherry wants you in the kitchen.”
Actually, her words had been more along the lines of Tell him to stop showing off and come and do something, but hey, I was pretty sure she’d have been mortified if I’d repeated them word-for-word.
“Lunch must be going all right, if she’s let you out,” Phil murmured, taking advantage of Greg’s departure to pull me into his arms.
“Yeah, we’ll probably survive it.” Even with both of us fully clothed, I couldn’t help smiling at the feel of his body pressed against mine.
Even the glassy-eyed stare of Greg’s badger, who now had his own not-so-little alcove in the bookshelf, couldn’t dampen the mood.
“So was this all just a lesson in taxidermy, or did you get anything useful out of Greg? About the case, I mean.”
Phil huffed a laugh. “Greg reckons the bishop fancied Amelia.”
I pulled back to stare at him. “He said that?”
“Not in so many words. He just suggested Toby might have ‘experienced a moment or two of quiet regret’ he hadn’t met her before Alex Majors did.”
I frowned. “You mean, when she was still married to Sir Prancelot? Huh. So Uncle Aardvark was telling the truth about Toby being her mate, not Alex’s.”
“Maybe. Or maybe Greg just heard the same story we did. It fits, though—Vi doesn’t act like he’s an old friend of the family.”
“Nah, she seemed a bit creeped out by him, if you ask me.”
