Read Shadows in the Cotswolds for Free Online Page B

Stoke tonight. I just had to fetch this …’ she held up the little torpedo-shaped data storage device ‘… it’s got some files on it I’ll need tomorrow.’
    ‘They’re clever little things, aren’t they?’ said Thea vaguely. Despite being in possession of a BlackBerry and a laptop, she felt herself lagging considerably in the frantic developments in digital technology.
    As she had half expected, Melissa gave a scoffing laugh, a single high bray that sounded more like a donkey than a person. ‘They’re pretty antiquated now, actually. It’s going to be much easier to just upload everything to Cloud and access it from absolutely anywhere. Nothing can get lost that way, and no need for all these physical gadgets.’
    ‘Right,’ said Thea, even more vaguely than before.
    ‘Bye, then,’ breezed the visitor, with scarcely a backward look. Thea watched the jaunty walk,the carefree bounce of someone who trod lightly across the world. By rights, she should approve of such a lifestyle: carrying no baggage, confident that possessions were unnecessary for a fully productive existence. Instead, she felt defensive about her own choices. Somehow she had come second in an unspoken competition; had been in the wrong from the first moments. She had not much liked young Melissa, who had ‘someone waiting for her at the pub’ and was therefore also ahead in the unavoidable race to find and keep a man, which every woman was expected to enter. Thea had no illusions about her own position where this subject was concerned. She wanted to be half of a couple. She had liked being married to Carl, and would never forgive the cruel fate that had disrupted her assumptions so completely. She wished quite painfully that there was someone waiting for
her
at the pub as well.
    It really was close to twilight now. She was confined to the house for the coming night, whether she liked it or not. The usual strategies for passing an evening would be brought into play, after she had cooked the sausages from the Winchcombe butcher and the small quantity of potatoes she had found in Oliver’s vegetable rack. She had located the television, which would pass the hours if all else failed. She could play games on her laptop or listen to the radio. She could read a book or search for websites of local attractions. It was the same set ofoptions that probably millions of single women across the land were considering, as the daylight faded. Or if not millions, then a lot. Those who had not managed to get together with another person for a trip to the pub or the cinema or a nightclub on a busy street. Those whose husbands had died or departed or disappeared into a garden shed or back bedroom. And those who had never possessed a husband in the first place. A silent community of solitary women, all wishing passionately that there was something more engaging on the TV than the nine hundredth episode of
Casualty
.
    She got through it readily enough. At ten, she took the dog out of the back door for a final pee, noting that the moon was very nearly full. Something about September moons stirred in her memory – this one was orange-tinted, and not especially friendly. It rose above Oliver’s trees like a reminder that the world was full of small and irrelevant concerns. Hepzie threw a bizarre long-legged shadow over the patio as she sniffed idly at something on the flagstones. Everything was unnaturally quiet: no traffic or music or human voices could be heard. She might be fifty miles from the next habitation, instead of fifty yards. There was a house to the north-west, no further away than that, and a whole double row of them not far beyond. Winchcombe itself was within shouting distance. But in this polite little place, nobody shouted very much, even on a Saturday night. 
    At ten-thirty she went upstairs, with the dog at her heels, and arranged a comfortable night for the two of them. She closed the curtains and turned off all the lights. Outside an owl