Joker in the Pack (Romantic Suspense, Completed, Watty Winner)

Chapter 8

"Are you sure this is the right place?" I asked Maddie. "It's bigger than I thought."

And a whole lot uglier.

Mickey held out the piece of paper with the address on it, and Maddie compared it to the map she'd printed out from the internet.

"Yep. Lilac Cottage. This is it."

The bottom of the rickety wooden gate scraped over the path as Maddie pushed it open, and we followed her towards the house. And when I say followed, I mean we shoved our way through overgrown bushes and stepped over the tendrils of ivy that criss-crossed the path like mutant spaghetti.

"Imagine what a mess this'll be in the summer," Maddie muttered.

"I don't think I want to."

Mickey reached out and rubbed the fragrant leaves of a rosemary bush between his fingers. "You enjoy cooking, right?"

"Yes."

"At least you've got garnish."

To me, rosemary came in a plastic bag from Waitrose rather than in tree format. Living in London my whole life, I'd never had more than a cluster of decorative pots and a barbecue area outside, even when I lived with my parents, and I couldn't deny my feeling of panic as I gazed around the jungle I was about to call home.

"Where do I start?" I spotted two beady eyes glaring at me from next to a tree. "Is that a fox?"

Maddie took my arm and led me towards the cottage. "One step at a time, Liv. Tackle the house first." She looked towards the roofline and back to the ground floor. "That might take a while."

"Why is the door made from plywood?"

The cottage may have seen better days, but plywood and a padlock rather than a proper front door? Even in my worst nightmares, I hadn't imagined that.

Mickey grimaced. "I didn't want to say anything..."

"What? What is it?"

"The ambulance crew had to break into the house to help Eleanor."

"She took ill in there?" I'd been so busy worrying about packing, and my landlord, and the endless paperwork, that I'd barely thought about how she died. A heart attack, according to her death certificate, but I'd assumed she'd passed peacefully in hospital. "Poor, poor Ellie."

Flowers. I should take flowers to her grave. Presumably, she'd been buried in the local churchyard, and in a village the size of Upper Foxford, that shouldn't be too difficult to find.

It would have to be a small bunch of flowers, though, at least for now. Without the need to pay rent, I could afford to live now, but things promised to be tight. Lilac Cottage would cost more to heat than my old flat, and I'd learned my lesson over the burst pipe.

Mickey held out the key. "Do you want to do the honours?"

As I took it, a flutter of excitement stirred in my belly. Would the inside be nicer? Until the paperwork was finalised yesterday afternoon, I'd barely allowed myself to think about the house, too afraid that the place would be snatched away from me by some administrative glitch at the eleventh hour.

But my luck had finally changed.

As we'd driven up from London, the three of us squashed into Maddie's Ford Fiesta, we'd tried to guess what Lilac Cottage would be like. Lilac... Even the name sounded pretty.

"My money's on seventies wallpaper," Maddie had said. "You know, with the big flowers."

Mickey grinned at us in the rear-view mirror. "That's making a comeback at the moment. My sister just used it in her lounge. But I reckon it'll have an avocado bathroom suite, dodgy carpet, and one of those old CRT televisions."