Nuala was upstairs in the living room wrestling with her long-sleeved T-shirt when she heard footsteps on the landing. With her top pulled half inside out over her head and her bra on show, all she could do was call out in a high-pitched voice, ‘Who’s that?’ and pray it wasn’t an after-hours gas man come to read the meter.

‘Me.’

Maddy. Well, that was good news. ‘Perfect timing,’ Nuala said happily. ‘I’m completely stuck. Can you give me a hand getting this off? Oh, and I can’t undo my bra either.’

‘How could you?’

Blindly, Nuala turned in the direction of Maddy’s voice. ‘What are you on about? I can’t, can I?

That’s why I’m asking you to do it for me.’

But the expected help didn’t materialise. Instead she heard Maddy say coldly, ‘You just couldn’t keep quiet, could you? I asked you not to tell anyone but you couldn’t resist it.’

Trapped within the confines of her T-shirt, Nuala’s face burned with indignation. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘I really thought I could trust you,’ Maddy retaliated furiously, ‘which just goes to show how stupid I am. You told Jake about Kerr and now, thanks to you, everything’s ruined.’

‘ I didn’t! I didn’t tell Jake! Oh, for God’s sake.’ With her good arm, Nuala managed at last to wrench the T-shirt back down over her head. Did he tell you I did?’

‘You and Juliet are the only ones who know. Juliet would never breathe a word.’

This was true; Juliet made sphinxes look garrulous. Appalled, Nuala recalled lying on the grass all but ignoring the cricket, far more interested in chatting away to Jake. Let’s face it, she’d had a fair few drinks this afternoon — oh God, had she somehow managed to give the game away without even realising it?

‘I-I’m sure I didn’t,’ Nuala faltered, but it was too late; Maddy had seen the worried look in her eyes.

‘You mean you didn’t do it on purpose, it just slipped out,’ she hissed. ‘Well, thanks a lot, I won’t forget this in a hurry. I won’t be telling you anything in future that I don’t want broadcast all over town.

In fact, I probably won’t be telling you anything at all.’

Kate was serving large gins to a tweedy weekend couple when Maddy stomped back out through the bar without so much as a glance in her direction. Ten minutes later, as she was fetching fresh supplies of peanuts from the storeroom, she heard a voice plaintively calling her name from halfway up the stairs.

‘What is it?’ Popping her head round the corner, Kate saw Nuala looking pale and subdued.

‘Um, sorry, is Dexter busy?’

‘He’s shouting at the washer-upper. Want me to fetch him for you?’

‘Oh crikey, no, it’s not urgent. I just, well, I can’t get out of my T-shirt.’

Plonking the cards of dry- and honey-roasted peanuts back down on the shelf, Kate checked over her shoulder that no one was waiting to be served.

‘Here, I’ll give you a hand.’ As she reached the top of the stairs, she saw that Nuala had been crying. ‘Hey, are you OK?’

‘Fine.’ Nuala nodded falteringly, then shook her head as she reached the sanctuary of the living room.

‘Sorry, it just seems so pathetic, not being able to take off your own clothes. All I want to do is go to bed

— oh bugger, and now I need another tissue ..

Grabbing the box of Kleenex on the coffee table, Kate freed one just in time for Nuala to catch the tears dripping from her reddened nose.

‘Come on, what’s really wrong?’

‘Oh God, this is going to sound so stupid,’ Nuala blurted out, ‘and I know you and Maddy don’t get on, but she’s my best friend. The thing is, she told me something in confidence the other day and now she’s mad with me because she thinks I told someone else.’

Kate felt sick. So that was why Maddy had come storming over here.

‘And ... did you?’

Standing patiently, like a child being undressed by its mother, Nuala waited for Kate to free first her good arm, then her head, before carefully unrolling the T-shirt down over her immobile shoulder. Finally she shook her head.

‘I can’t remember doing it. I wouldn’t hurt Maddy for the world, but there’s no other way it could have got out. It must have been me. I keep racking my brains,’ Nuala went on in desperation, ‘but I honestly can’t remember it. God, it’s like having that thingy disease, you know, that whatjacallit ...’

‘Alzheimer’ s.’

‘You see? You see?’ Nuala wailed. ‘That could be what’s wrong with me! Either that or I’m going completely mad.’ This was the moment to come out and say it, to set the record straight and put poor Nuala out of her abject misery.

This was the moment .. .

OK, one, two, three, here it comes, here it comes .. .

‘I’m sure you didn’t do it,’ said Kate, realising that these weren’t quite the words she’d had in mind. Deeply ashamed of her lack of moral fibre but not ashamed enough to blurt out the truth, she went on, ‘It’ll be OK. Now, d’you need a hand with this bra?’

Nodding, Nuala turned her back. Kate unclipped the bra and helped Nuala into her dressing gown. Still racked with guilt — why couldn’t she say it, why? — she jumped as they both heard Dexter bellowing, ‘Hey, new girl, where are you?’

The next moment he appeared in the doorway.

‘What’s going on up here then?’ demanded Dexter. ‘Hot lesbian sex?’

‘Yes,’ said Kate. ‘Too bad it’s all over now. You missed it.’

‘Has it occurred to you that I’m trying to run a pub here? I’ve just called last orders and there are punters queuing three deep at the bar, so why don’t you get your ... self down there and start serving?’

He’d corrected himself, Kate realised; having been about to tell her to get her fat backside downstairs, he’d actually bothered to modify his language.

‘Fine,’ she told Dexter. ‘Keep your hair on.’ With a sweet smile she added, ‘What’s left of it.’

Chapter 24

‘I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,’ wailed Maddy the next morning. ‘I just want to kill myself, I can’t believe I said all those horrible things, of course you didn’t tell Jake about me and Kerr.’

‘I didn’t? Really? Oh, thank God for that!’ Clutching her chest with relief, Nuala sank sideways against the door frame. Last night she had slept terribly, racked by dreams of herself clambering onto the pub roof, calling the entire village to attention and announcing through a megaphone that Maddy was bonking Kerr McKinnon but that ... sshhh ... nobody must breathe a word because it was TOP

SECRET.

After that, being woken by the doorbell at seven thirty had come as a welcome reprieve.

‘What can I tell you?’ Maddy’s hair was looking distinctly bird’s-nesty, as if she hadn’t slept well either. ‘I’m so ashamed.’

Since she hadn’t been too ashamed last night, Nuala said, ‘What changed your mind?’

‘Jake, of course. He’d gone to bed by the time I got back. Deliberately, so I couldn’t interrogate him.

Then this morning I told him what I’d said to you and he went, "Oh, it wasn’t Nuala." Just like that, the bastard, as if I’d been trying to guess the mystery ingredient in a casserole. So I said, "Oh fuck," and of course that was the moment Sophie came into the kitchen and said, "That’s a very rude word, Mrs Masters says only stupid people say fuck." Which was, of course, the very reason I was saying it,’

Maddy concluded, ‘because I had been stupid.’ Looking anguished, she added, ‘I’m sorry. Really and truly. Will you still be my friend?’

‘Go on then.’ Nuala was just glad it was all over, dizzy with relief that she hadn’t let slip the secret to Jake when, in all honesty, she could so easily have done. ‘You’ll have to help me get dressed though – ow!’ she winced as Maddy threw her arms round her like an over-enthusiastic bridesmaid catching a bouquet.

‘Sorry, sorry!’

‘So who did tell Jake?’ Nuala was bursting to hear.

‘I don’t know! He won’t say! What am I going to do?’

‘ Finish with Kerr?’ Nuala ventured.

Maddy’s face crumpled. ‘I don’t think I can.’

‘OK, so you have to tell Marcella.’

With a shudder Maddy said, ‘I definitely can’t do that.’

‘Only one other thing for it, then. Find out who told Jake and hire a professional assassin.’

‘Excellent. Much the best way. And afterwards,’ Maddy said hopefully, ‘they could assassinate Jake.’

Monday night was darts night at the Fallen Angel. It was also discovery night for Maddy.

Every time she looked over at Kate working behind the bar, Kate hurriedly looked elsewhere. The real giveaway, however, was the expression on her face. With a jolt like accidentally sitting on an electric fence, Maddy knew that the person who had told Jake was Kate.

‘You’re wrong, it can’t be.’ Nuala, her eye by this time a dramatic explosion of magenta, inky-blue and yellow, was going for the sympathy vote tonight, perched on a high bar stool with her white denim skirt riding up to reveal tanned thighs. Revelling in the attention she’d been getting from the visiting team, her cheeks were pink and her eyes bright. Now, though, she shook her head. ‘Kate was with me last night, she knew why I was so upset. She would have said something if it had been her.’

Maddy doubted it. She still hadn’t the faintest idea how anyone, let alone Kate Taylor-Trent, could have found out about herself and Kerr, but somehow it had happened.

The bad news was that she had planned on speaking to the instigator privately to explain how vital it was that Marcella shouldn’t find out and generally appeal to their better nature. Well, what a waste of time that would be, seeing as Kate Taylor-Trent didn’t have one.