A Christmas Cracker: The only festive romance to curl up with this Christmas!

TRISHA ASHLEY

A Christmas Cracker

Copyright

Published by Avon

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins 2015

Copyright © Trisha Ashley 2015

Trisha Ashley asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9781847562807

Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008133719

Version: 2018-02-08

Dedication

For Grace

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1: Bottled

Chapter 2: Picture This

Chapter 3: Bang to Rights

Chapter 4: The Prisoner’s Friend

Chapter 5: Engagements

Chapter 6: The Quality of Mercy

Chapter 7: Life of Pye

Chapter 8: Clouded Mirrors

Chapter 9: Rumbled

Chapter 10: Crumbs!

Chapter 11: Cat Flight

Chapter 12: Christmas Lists

Chapter 13: Sleeping Beauty

Chapter 14: Cat-Flap

Chapter 15: Ghost Mice

Chapter 16: To the Point

Chapter 17: Reanimated

Chapter 18: Potent

Chapter 19: Brief Encounters

Chapter 20: Fishy

Chapter 21: Well Spiced

Chapter 22: Thin Air

Chapter 23: Fine-Tuned

Chapter 24: The House of Mirth

Chapter 25: Going Spiral

Chapter 26: Lukewarm

Chapter 27: Queen for the Day

Chapter 28: Winding Up

Chapter 29: Thrown

Chapter 30: Unfettered and Free

Chapter 31: Four-Legged Friends

Chapter 32: Out of the Box

Chapter 33: Give Peace a Chance

Chapter 34: On the Tiles

Chapter 35: False Start

Chapter 36: Charm Offensive

Chapter 37: An Absolute Cracker

Chapter 38: Give Me a Ring

Chapter 39: Sweet Liberty

Chapter 40: Missed Connections

Chapter 41: Spats

Chapter 42: Not Waving

Chapter 43: Christmas Every Day

Chapter 44: Snowed Under

Chapter 45: Guilt-Edged

Chapter 46: Picture Perfect

Chapter 47: True Lovers’ Knots

Chapter 48: Santa’s Little Helper

Chapter 49: On the Case

Chapter 50: Fireworks

Chapter 51: True Lies

Chapter 52: Daggers Drawn

Chapter 53: Advent

Chapter 54: Box of Delights

Chapter 55: Hasty Pudding

Chapter 56: The Big Picture

Chapter 57: Crowned

Recipes

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About the Author

By the same author

About the Publisher

Chapter 1: Bottled

‘You mean you’ve known for ages that your boss at Champers&Chocs was passing off bottles of cheap fizz as vintage champagne, and you haven’t done a single thing about it?’ Kate exclaimed incredulously, her pale blue eyes wide and a cup of herbal tea the exact colour of cat pee suspended halfway to her rose-tinted lips.

Kate was my opposite in looks, being small, fair and cute, though she wasn’t as cute as she thought she was, unless you were really fond of rabbits. And speaking of rabbits, she should long since have put her penchant for pale pink fluffy jumpers behind her, even if the angora had been ethically sourced, which I doubted.

I sighed and stirred my Americano, starting to wish I hadn’t said anything about it because, after all, she and her husband were Jeremy’s old friends, not mine, and she’d been less than welcoming when we’d first got engaged. But sometimes Kate and I would meet up for coffee and, that day being one of those occasions, my worries had spilled out of me the moment we’d sat down.

It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been able to tell my best friend, Emma, but since she’d remarried she’d increasingly been having problems of her own with her husband, Desmond, so I hadn’t wanted to burden her with mine.

Still, at least she wouldn’t have gazed at me in the sad, accusing way Kate was, when I looked up.

‘The idea that anything fraudulent was going on never crossed my mind until I found out by accident,’ I explained. ‘I mean, I don’t think I’d even seen a real bottle of champagne, other than on the TV, until I got engaged to Jeremy.’

‘No, I don’t suppose there are champagne bars on every corner of council estates,’ she said snidely. ‘Just cheap booze shops.’

For the last years of her life, Mum and I had shared a specially adapted council bungalow on a very nice estate, but Kate always talked as if I was dragged up in a slum and had made some giant social leap by getting engaged to a member of the teaching profession.

‘Oh, forget it,’ I snapped.

‘No, you can’t just leave it there without telling me how you found out and why you didn’t report it to the police,’ she insisted.

‘Because I thought it had stopped. It was before last Christmas, when I was packing special orders one evening and my boss and I were the only people there. There was a phone call and I walked into his office to tell him—’

‘I have wondered about those late nights, just the two of you …’ she said suggestively.

I stared at her in astonishment. ‘You don’t mean you thought I was having a fling with Harry Briggs? I mean, apart from his being twenty years older than me and not my type, I’m in love with Jeremy and wouldn’t dream of cheating on him.’

‘Well, you have to admit it looked a bit odd.’

‘I don’t see why. Harry said I had the nicest handwriting for the personal messages that went in the box with the champagne and chocolates, and I was the most careful packer for the expensive orders.’

It was a pity, I thought, that those had turned out to be the fraudulent ones.

‘Jeremy said you started doing casual evening packing work there while your mother was still alive,’ she said. ‘Harry paid you cash in hand.’

‘Yes, because luckily our lovely neighbour was always happy to sit with Mum in the evenings for a couple of hours and the money was useful. A carer’s allowance doesn’t go very far.’

‘I suppose not,’ she said disinterestedly. ‘But go on, you walked into Harry’s office and then …?’

‘He was sticking labels onto bottles, which seemed odd, but he explained that sometimes they got damaged and then he had to replace them.’

‘And you believed that?’ she asked pityingly. ‘You think it’s that easy to get hold of extra labels?’

‘Not when I’d thought about it a bit, especially since it was the most expensive champagne we stocked. Most of what we sell isn’t actually champagne, it’s Prosecco, but that’s made clear on the website.’

‘So, did you say anything to him at the time?’

I nodded. ‘When I was going home and he came out to lock up after me, I told him I’d realised he was fraudulently passing off cheap booze as expensive stuff. He said his supplier had forgotten to label one batch and he’d had to do it himself, but he was very sorry I’d seen it—’

‘I bet he was!’ she interrupted.

‘And he’d only started the scam when the firm was going through a rocky patch,’ I finished.

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Well, call me naïve, but when he swore he was going to stop that very night, I believed him,’ I said defensively. ‘He was very contrite so in the end I said I wouldn’t tell anyone if he really did mean it.’

‘That was so wrong of you,’ Kate said censoriously. ‘I would have got my coat and gone straight to the police the moment I realised what was happening. Not that I’d have been doing a packing job at a factory anyway,’ she added, unable to refrain from another dig.

‘There’s nothing to sneer at in doing any honest job,’ I said.

‘It didn’t exactly turn out to be an honest job, though, did it? And I assume he didn’t keep his word about stopping the fraud, either. You were very credulous to think he would.’

‘I wanted to believe him. In the last couple of years when Mum was so ill, he was really good to me, letting me work as and when I could, then offering me a permanent job on the afternoon shift after she died. It wasn’t like I was qualified for anything else.’

As Mum fell further and further into the grip of aggressive multiple sclerosis I’d missed a lot of school and though I’d started a graphic design degree course, I’d had to drop out of it after only a year. Of course, I didn’t begrudge a moment of the time I spent with Mum, but after she’d gone I was left with no money, qualifications or even a home, since the specially adapted council bungalow was urgently needed for someone else.

So I’d gratefully accepted Harry’s offer and found a tiny but cheap flat over the garage attached to Jeremy’s house, which was how we’d met.

At first he hadn’t been that keen on Pyewacket, my cat, but after a while he became very keen on me, so they learned to tolerate each other … just as I learned to accept Jeremy’s long-standing close friendship with Kate and her husband, Luke, who not only seemed joined at the hip, but all taught at the same huge, sprawling comprehensive school. Well, I say friendship, but it was more a trio of two adorers and Kate, who they think is wonderful, though I have no idea why …

‘When did you realise he hadn’t stopped the fraud?’ asked Kate, jerking me out of my reverie.

‘Only recently. He’d made sure I’d seen him carrying crates of what looked like the real thing into the storeroom, but one day when I was in a smart wine merchant’s shop with Jeremy they had a bottle of it – and it looked nothing at all like the ones I’d been packing. Last night I told Harry I knew.’

I shivered slightly because I’d seen a side to jovial, easy-going Harry that I hadn’t even suspected existed.

‘He threatened me and said if I went to the police he’d tell them it had all been my idea – and since I was the one who worked the extra shifts packing the special orders, I was implicated anyway.’

‘It certainly wouldn’t look good,’ Kate agreed helpfully.

‘But it’s his company and I’m just a warehouse packer, doing a bit of overtime. I told him they wouldn’t believe him but he said they would when he explained that we’d been having an affair and I’d reported the fraud out of spite because he’d ended it.’

‘Gosh, it’s like some low-life soap series! But it serves you right for not having gone to the police as soon as you found out,’ she said righteously. ‘That’s what I would have done.’

‘Hindsight is a wonderful thing,’ I said. ‘In the end I told him I wouldn’t shop him, but gave him a month’s notice and said I wasn’t doing any more overtime. He said he didn’t care, so long as I kept my mouth shut.’

‘Which you haven’t, because you’ve told me,’ she pointed out.

‘Only because I was so upset that I was desperate to talk it through with someone and, if you remember, you promised to keep what I was going to say secret.’

‘I hadn’t realised it would be something criminal, though,’ she objected.

‘But you will keep it secret, won’t you?’ I asked.

‘I suppose so, but more because it would hurt Jeremy immensely if all this came out,’ Kate agreed. ‘I know you haven’t told him anything, or he’d have confided in me and Luke.’

That was true, and it was what had stopped me confiding in Jeremy in the first place, but now I suddenly seemed to have blabbed it out to Kate, cutting out the middleman.

‘Now you’ll have to find another job,’ she said.

‘Well … maybe not. I know Jeremy doesn’t think my artwork is anything other than a hobby, but I’ve been regularly selling designs to greetings card companies, and now I’ve got my first one-woman exhibition in Liverpool I really think I might be able to earn a living out of it.’

In fact, I’d have left Champers&Chocs long before, had it not been for Jeremy’s insistence that I not only continue to pay rent on the flat, which I mostly used to store my things and as a studio, but also my share of the expensive meals out that he, Kate and Luke enjoyed so much.

‘But you know what Jeremy’s like – he thinks I should pay an equal share of everything, even though he’s earning a lot more than I am.’

‘Well, teachers aren’t that well paid, you know,’ Kate said defensively.

‘They get a lot more than my minimum wages, that’s for sure,’ I said. ‘And more holidays – plus the three of you are always going off abroad on school trips.’

‘Being responsible for a coach full of adolescents is not exactly a fun holiday,’ she said, tossing her smooth blond hair back in a Miss Piggy kind of way. She often streaked her hair with a bright pink when she was out of school, but I can’t say it really did anything for her.

‘You’d be better off training for a proper career,’ she added, ‘but I’ll be at the exhibition, rooting for you, anyway. Luke can’t come; he’s off on a training course that day and won’t be back till too late.’

‘Thank you,’ I said, surprised, because when I’d initially invited them, she’d said they couldn’t make it. ‘My friend Emma doesn’t think she can come either, so I could do with some support. I do hope it’s a success … and then just after that I’ll have worked out my notice at Champers&Chocs and it won’t be my fault if Harry gets found out.’

‘Turning a blind eye doesn’t exactly qualify you for sainthood, you know,’ she said. ‘Still, I suppose you can’t do anything else now. Have you told Jeremy you’ve handed in your notice?’

‘No, I thought I’d wait until after the Papercuts and Beyond exhibition, because if I sell lots of pictures, he’ll be able to see that I could make a living from it.’

The owners of the small gallery had been really enthusiastic about my pictures, which had been like a light at the end of a dark tunnel after Harry’s threats to implicate me. I’d been carrying a heavy burden for months, but soon I would be free and earning my living by doing work I loved …

‘Come on,’ said Kate, putting down her teacup decisively. ‘Let’s go and find you something to wear for this exhibition. You can’t go through life dressed in black jeans and tops.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ I said mutinously, following her out, but I did end up buying a jazzy silk tunic at her insistence, even if I did intend wearing it with narrow black trousers and flat pumps rather than the leggings and high heels she considered appropriate.

Chapter 2: Picture This

Randal

‘You know, these are really good,’ I said, examining the nearest pictures on the wall of the small gallery. ‘The artist’s taken traditional papercutting and collage techniques to a whole new level.’

‘I’ll take your word for it – all this arty stuff isn’t my cup of tea or why I’m here,’ Charlie Clancy replied absently, scrolling through his phone to find a photograph of the woman whose work was being exhibited and whom he hoped to meet that evening. ‘I just need to get Tabitha Coombs to believe I’m interested in including Champers&Chocs in an article on successful local internet businesses, and I’ll be in there.’

‘But you might learn something useful, because her work is very revealing when you look beyond the flowery paper lace borders,’ I suggested. ‘The subjects can be quite dark – see this one?’ I pointed to the nearest. ‘At first glance, it’s a park scene by a duck pond, with people sitting on the bench, but if you look closer, they’re clearly homeless and one is drinking from a bottle.’

‘Never mind the artwork,’ Charlie said impatiently. His mischievous expression under his mop of dark curls was exactly the same one he’d worn when we were schoolboys and he was plotting some prank that would get us into deep trouble. Nowadays, as an investigator and presenter for the long-running TV programme Dodgy Dealings, it was other people he dropped into the soup. We were in a similar line of business, though generally it was the big holiday com-panies’ shortcomings I exposed.

‘There’s Tabitha Coombs over by the archway through to the other room, the tallish one who looks like Cher on a bad day,’ he added.

At a guess, the woman was somewhere in her mid-thirties, her waist-length cocoa-brown hair worn loose, with a fringe that framed her face and touched straight, black brows. She had high cheekbones, a narrow, aquiline nose, pale complexion and a generous mouth.

‘She’s quite striking, in a slightly witchy kind of way,’ I said.

I was certain that the gallery was too crowded and noisy for her to have heard me, but something made her glance our way at that moment, her gaze direct from eyes of a surprisingly light, almost lilac, grey.

‘Her friend Kate, my informant, is the cute blonde with pink streaks in her hair, standing next to her.’

‘Hardly a friend, now she’s blabbed to you?’ I suggested.

‘Tabitha Coombs thinks she is, that’s why she confided in her. But Kate says she and her husband were friends with Tabitha’s fiancé, Jeremy, for years before they got engaged and though they didn’t much like her they just had to put up with her.’

‘Generous of them,’ I commented drily.

‘She said Tabitha was probably cheating on her fiancé with the owner of Champers&Chocs, as well as being involved in the scam, so maybe she’s got some kind of axe to grind. But I don’t really care what’s driving her, so long as she’s willing to introduce us. Then the rest is up to me.’

Before Kate had contacted him, Charlie had already had a tip-off from a disgruntled Champers&Chocs customer about cheap fizzy wine being sold for vintage champagne, so she had given him an easy way into his investigation.

‘Never look a gift-snitch in the mouth,’ I said.

The two women parted company and Kate slowly drifted across in our direction in a casual sort of way, talking to one or two people en route.

When she reached us, Charlie introduced us.

‘This is my friend Randal Hesketh – his family home is nearby, so I invited him along just for the ride. Randal, this is Kate.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ Kate said, all flirty smiles and big, pale blue eyes with fluttering eyelashes. I supposed she was pretty enough, but since she wasn’t in the least my type her flirting didn’t have any effect on me. This seemed to disconcert her.

‘Are you ready to introduce us to your friend?’ Charlie asked.

She made a moue that looked so cutesy she’d probably practised it in the mirror a million times. ‘As I’ve already said, she’s not a friend, it was just that Luke and I had to tolerate her after she and Jeremy got engaged. But I always felt there was something wrong about her – and my instincts are usually right.’

‘Then let’s get on and find out the truth,’ he said. ‘Do you remember your story, about how we got talking and you found out I was a journalist for Lively Lancashire magazine, though I’d walked into the gallery by chance?’

Kate nodded. ‘So I told you a bit about the artist and her day job as a packer in a warehouse, and then offered to introduce you. Got it,’ she said.

She gave me another of those flirty glances. ‘Are you coming, too, Randal?’

‘No, I’ll stay here; it’s none of my business,’ I said, feeling a distaste for the whole Judas situation. I may be in a similar line of work, going undercover to get film footage for the independent TV programme I work for, Hellish Holidays, but it’s more impersonal.

‘See you later,’ I added to Charlie.

I took a glass of water from a passing tray, since fizz wasn’t my thing, whatever it was labelled as, and surveyed the gallery. It was still crowded and buzzing, so the exhibition seemed to be a success. I noticed red ‘Sold’ stickers had been affixed to several picture frames too and, on impulse, bought one myself that had taken my fancy as we entered. It was of a helmeted woman in a chariot-like wheelchair, entombed in a Sleeping Beauty tangle of flowering briars. A figure was hacking his way in, but he looked more like the Grim Reaper than a handsome prince.

I’d just paid and arranged to have it delivered to my family home in the nearby hamlet of Godsend after the exhibition had ended, when Charlie came back looking pleased with himself.

‘Got what you wanted?’

He nodded. ‘She’s agreed to ask her boss if I can have a tour of Champers&Chocs and do a short interview, so I can include it in an article on local entrepreneurs. He won’t be able to resist the publicity, but I could see she wasn’t keen on the idea. Then the fiancé – that bloke she’s talking to now – showed up and monopolised the conversation, so I left it at that. Bit of a know-it-all tosser, I’d say, too fond of his own voice.’

The man was thin and not much taller than Tabitha, with an arty lock of marmalade-coloured hair falling over his eyes in a very doomed-poet kind of way. He seemed to be lecturing her about something.