A Bitter Feast(101)

“Grace saw you.” Dropping the torch, Viv grabbed her by the shoulders and started to shake her. “What have you done with Grace?”

“Let me go!” Bea tried to scoot away from her grasp. “I’m telling you, I haven’t hurt Grace! Everything I did was for Grace! O’Reilly was going to ruin everything, don’t you know that? I only meant to make him sick.”

“What did you give him, Bea?” Gemma asked quietly. “Did you put something in his coffee?”

For a moment, Gemma thought Bea wasn’t going to answer. But then she shrugged and said, “Diet pills. It was just a few of my mum’s old diet pills. I took too many once and they made me ill—that’s all I thought they would do to him. And then he’d go away—”

Headlamps suddenly illuminated them as a car bumped down the drive, then another one behind it. Booth’s Volvo, Gemma realized, as he climbed out, and a panda car. Booth left the lights trained on them as he and two uniformed officers walked over. “Well, well, what have we here?” he said. “Miss Abbott. Where’s the child?”

Bea glanced right and left, then blinked up at him, looking cornered. “I don’t know.”

With a nod to the uniformed officers, Booth sent them to search round the cottage, but they came back shaking their heads. “No sign of the girl, sir,” said the female officer. “And both the cottage doors are locked. But we did find a Fiat pulled round behind the garage. The keys were in it. We checked the boot. Nothing there.”

Gemma felt a wash of relief. That had been her worst fear, that they would find Grace stuffed in the boot of Bea’s car. But Bea had been searching, too, which meant that she might be telling the truth about not knowing where Grace was.

But they still had a missing child.



Kit had been uneasy ever since he’d told Gemma about the things Grace had said. He felt like he’d betrayed a confidence and he wasn’t sure he’d done the right thing, or what the consequences of it might be for Grace. To make matters worse, Gemma and his dad had now been gone for hours. Melody and Doug hadn’t come back, either.

When he and Addie and the kids got back to the house after dropping Gemma at the pub, Joe had been waiting for Addie. They were closeted in her study for a long time. From Addie’s tight-lipped expression when Joe left, Kit gathered the meeting had not been a pleasant one.

When dusk came on early and still no one had returned, he found Addie in the kitchen making the little ones their tea. “Is it okay if I walk down to the village?” he asked. “I need to talk to Gemma about something.”

“I’ll run you down,” said Ivan, who had come in behind him. “I want to see what’s going on.”



“Oh, cool,” Kit breathed as he climbed into the restored Land Rover, and he and Ivan talked cars on the short drive down the lane to Lower Slaughter. When they reached the pub, Kit saw immediately that Viv’s van was gone, which seemed odd. Why would she go somewhere during dinner service? Melody’s little blue Clio was in the car park, however, so he hoped that someone was there.

Glancing in the kitchen as they went in, Kit saw Angelica, but not Viv. Ibby, however, was behind the bar, and Melody and Doug were huddled on the other side, all three of their heads together in what looked like a heated discussion. When they looked up, he saw a flare of hope in their expressions, then disappointment.

“I’ve got to give Angie a hand,” Ibby said, and went into the kitchen.

“What’s going on?” Kit asked, the feeling of dread growing. “Where is everyone?”

“It’s Grace,” said Melody. Although there were punters in the dining rooms, there was no one else in the bar at the moment. Still, Melody lowered her voice. “Bea Abbott attacked Mark Cain and set his barn on fire. Apparently, Grace was there. She rang her mum but the call was cut off. They’ve caught Bea, but they still can’t find Grace.”

“My mum and dad—are they okay?”

Melody gave him a surprised look but said, “Yes, Gemma and your dad are fine. They’re with DI Booth and the police. So is Viv. I didn’t mean to frighten you.”

“There’s rain coming,” put in Ivan. “Storms are building up again. What can we do to help?”

“Did they check Nell’s cottage?” Kit asked before Melody could reply. “Grace might have gone there, if she was scared.”

“That’s where they are now. And they’ve searched the farm. There’s no sign of her.”

“The village?” Ivan asked.

“We’ve looked,” said Doug. “Booth is organizing a search party. The girl just seems to have vanished into bloody thin air.”

Kit’s mind raced. “Do they know exactly where she was when she rang Viv?”

“No. She just said that Bea had hurt Mark, and that the barn was on fire. Then the call dropped. She—”

“Wait,” broke in Melody. “There were dogs barking. I could hear them in the background. But they weren’t too close. So—”

“I think I know.” Kit realized he was butting in, but he couldn’t help it. He was remembering the lane, and the bolt-hole under the gate into the pasture. And then the footpath that ran, dark and slippery, along the river. “Let me look.”