Authors: Judith Cutler
Cold Pursuit (24 page)
The full moon lit the vicarage as if it were about to feature in a ghost movie. Side by side, Fran and Mark leant on the front gate, contemplating it. Imagine having put in a firm offer, without all the preliminaries. And now, proud owners – they would certainly outbid any other offers that might come in, whatever they were – they had to see it again on their own, without the astonished estate agent.
‘It needs a hell of a lot of work. Look at that roof.’
‘There are probably grants available for a house that age.’
‘What the brickwork will be like under that ivy God knows.’
‘Pointing’s not all that hard a job. I could do some of it.’
‘It’s probably riddled with dry rot, wet rot and every other sort of rot.’
‘They built to last in those days. The timber’s probably as sound as that in your place or mine.
But the gutters’ll need replacing – and with a house this old you can’t use your average B&Q plastic.’
‘Who’d want to?’
‘Listen!’
‘I can’t hear anything.’
‘Exactly. No motorway, no barking dogs, no ghetto blasters, no factory.’
‘Imagine trying to uncover that garden!’
‘We’ll pretend we’ve got a Roman villa underneath it all and get the Time Team in.’
‘Yes. Or no. Once it’s ours we can do anything. Anything we want.’
‘Now we’re together, there’s nothing we can’t do.’
They clasped hands.
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Prize-winning short-story writer J
UDITH
C
UTLER
is the author of nearly thirty novels, including the successful crime series featuring Fran Harman, police woman extraordinaire. Judith has taught Creative Writing at Birmingham University, and has run writing courses elsewhere, including a maximum-security prison and an idyllic Greek island. She now lives in the Cotswolds with her husband, fellow author Edward Marston.
The Chief Superintendent Fran Harman series
Life Sentence
Cold Pursuit
Still Waters
The Josie Welford series
The Food Detective
The Chinese Takeout
The Tobias Campion series
The Keeper of Secrets
Shadow of the Past
Scar Tissue
Drawing the Line
Allison & Busby Limited
12 Fitzroy Mews
London W1T 6DW
www.allisonandbusby.com
First published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2007.
This ebook edition published by Allison & Busby in 2014.
Copyright © 2007 by J
UDITH
C
UTLER
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–1649–4