Bad Blood by Aline Templeton Read Free Book Online Page A

walked towards her car. She had a long drive ahead of her and it wasn’t as if she was looking forward to what awaited her at the other end.
    Her colleagues assumed she was saving to get on the housing ladder by living at home, on the edge of Stranraer, and she’d let them think that; it sounded so pitiable to be trapped by her family circumstances. Her mother Fleur had declared English an ugly language and flatly refused to learn it and her father, fluent in French himself, had never insisted. Once he died, Fleur had found herself helpless and friendless.
    But still intransigent. There was nothing, Louise reflected bitterly, as stubborn as a French mother who declared that at her age it would not be elegant for her to learn English like some little child. Louise could take over her father’s place as social facilitator.
    In the first devastation of loss, Louise had given up the flat she’d been renting in Kirkluce and come home. Once the formalities of sorting out her father’s estate had been completed, it seemed fairly obvious that Fleur would return to France. Naturally, it couldn’t be discussed while she was shocked and confused and clinging to her only child, but Louise would be leaving home again once Fleur got back to normal.
    Only she hadn’t. The confusion showed no signs of clearing and Louise never knew from one day to the next what she would have to confront when she got home.
    The house was a villa, white-harled and standing on the shores of Loch Ryan looking out along the sea loch between the low hills, a pretty house with a pretty view, but Louise didn’t even glance at it.
    ‘
Maman
, I’m home,’ she called in the French that was the only language spoken at home, and as her mother appeared from the kitchen at the back of the house Louise was struck, as she so often was, by Fleur’s beauty and elegance. The bloom was fading now but her face was still a perfect oval, with high cheekbones and delicate olive colouring, and she had pansy-brown eyes which even as she approached sixty remained luminous and unhooded. Her long dark hair, without even a thread of grey, was caught up in a clip at the back, with wisps slipping forward becomingly. But she was wearing a nightgown.
    ‘Darling, you are so late! But I made coq au vin, so it won’t have come to much harm.’
    Automatically, Louise glanced at her watch, though she knew it wasn’t three o’clock yet. She felt faintly sick. ‘
Maman
, it’s not bedtime. It’s still the afternoon.’
    A cloud came over her mother’s face briefly. Then she laughed, pointing through a window to the gathering gloom. ‘No, no, it’s dark – look! You work too hard. But come now and have your supper. I’ll have a glass of wine to keep you company and you can tell me what kept you so late.’
    She went to the kitchen. As she opened the door the delicious, winy smell of the casserole floated out but Louise really wasn’t hungry – and not just because it was four hours until supper time.

    There the cottage was, exactly as Marnie had remembered it, just a bit shabbier, and it had been pretty run-down even back then. The trees seem to have sidled closer, though of course they couldn’t have, really; they were still on the other side of the sagging wire fence. It was just that the great pine boughs had grown longer, as if they were reaching out in kinship to reclaim the wooden house.
    It was one of the cottages built for the workforce needed to plant the massive forests of the Galloway National Park, most of themredundant long ago. The bleached shingles that covered it were a dried-out silver-grey now and indeed rotting in places, Marnie noticed.
    Her memory of it was entirely accurate, of course; how could she have expected anything different? Yet with all the repetitions that had replayed in her head these last years it had taken on a sort of unreality, and it was somehow a shock to see it there, as if she’d stepped into an old movie she’d watched too many