Flint passed her a tenner. Ana noticed that he deliberately brushed the side of her hand with his fingertips as he handed it over and she noticed that Lou almost visibly jumped, like she’d just had an electric shock.
‘D’you know anything about it? The cottage.’
She shrugged and slammed the cash register shut. ‘Like what?’
‘Like who lived there?’
Lou rested her elbows on the top of the bar and put her face in her hands, looking up at Flint with wide eyes, her sun-burned breasts quivering urgently. She grinned up at him. ‘Are you coppers?’ she asked.
‘Nah,’ grinned Flint, taking a big macho slurp of his lager and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes glued to Louise the whole time. ‘Look. Lou.’ He leaned down towards her so that their noses were almost touching. Ana noticed that Louise stopped breathing. ‘Are you any good at keeping secrets?’
She nodded, her eyes widening by the second.
‘Look. Our friend. Well – she died last month.’
‘Oh God – I’m really sorry.’ Lou clutched her heart with her hand.
‘Yeah. Thanks. And the thing is that since she died, we found out some really weird things about her.’
‘Oh yeah?’ If Lou’s eyes had opened any wider, her eyelids would have slipped irretrievably behind her eyeballs.
‘And one of them was that she owned that cottage. The pink one.’
‘Oh right. You mean the woman with the black hair and the motorbike?’
‘Yeah. That’s the one. Did you know her?’
‘No. She wasn’t around all that often. Only at the weekends, I think. Mrs Wills – that was her name.’
‘That’s my mum’s name,’ Ana whispered in Lol’s ear.
‘And who did she used to stay with?’
‘What d’you mean?’
‘I mean – when she was there, in the cottage. Do you know who stayed with her?’
Lou shrugged. ‘I never saw anyone. There was an ambulance there sometimes, though.’
‘An ambulance?’
‘Yeah. You know. One of those like they take old people about in. Not like an emergency ambulance or anything.’
‘Like they might take disabled people about in, you mean?’
‘Yeah. That’s right.’
‘But you never saw anyone getting in or out of it?’
‘No – I mean, I saw it arriving and that, and the ambulance people helping someone out, but it was all on the wrong side, facing away from me, so I never saw anyone getting in or out. I just kind of thought it was an elderly relative or something.’
Flint nodded and looked very serious. ‘And did you ever speak to Mrs Wills? Did she ever come in here?’
‘Nah. Not in here. But I used to see her sometimes, on her motorbike – just passing through. Or at the Spar, a couple of times. Not to talk to or anything, though. She was very pretty. How did she – if you don’t mind me asking – how did she die, exactly?’
‘Well – we don’t know – exactly. That’s what we’re trying to find out.’
‘She didn’t – well, she didn’t die in the cottage, did she?’
