Page 90 of The Sugar and Spice Bookshop Bakery

And then faint.

She isn’t sure if she’s going to vomit or keel over first. She takes a deep breath and grips the back of a chair.

‘What the hell…?’ Maddie holds up the object so that the group can see. The nausea rises in Louise’s throat.

It’s a stuffed toy dog, with splashes of red paint that look like blood, and a kitchen knife embedded in its stomach.

Someone is upping their game. The A board and the flower pots – well, they could have been accidental, but coupled with the pool of fake blood on the doorstep and now this, there’s an angry reader out there who really has it in for her.

‘How dreadful,’ says Richard. ‘Who on earth would leave that on someone’s doorstep?’

‘It’s spooky,’ says Elizabeth. ‘Absolutely chilling.’

‘It’s gross,’ says Maddie.

Nobody else speaks.

‘It must be some horrible mistake,’ Jack says. ‘A kid playing a joke on one of their friends. They’ve just got the wrong house.’

‘I doubt it,’ says Hazel. ‘This is the bakery, not a house.’

‘But what other explanation is there?’ says Elizabeth. ‘Unless… none of us here has ever harmed an animal, have they? No one’s run over a dog or anything like that?’

They all shake their heads.

Louise swallows hard.

‘I did,’ she says. ‘I killed a dog.’

Thirty

‘You killed a dog?’ Richard says, a look of distaste on his face.

Every eye in the room is on Louise. She’ll have to explain.

‘This was meant for you?’ Jack stands up and takes the grotesque toy off Maddie. He looks around the room like the detective in an Agatha Christie, about to go for the big reveal. ‘Did you stab a dog, Luisa?’

Louise nods. ‘Yeah. Hence the knife.’ She gestures at the toy in his hands.

‘Louise, how could you?’ Her mother looks shocked.

‘You’ve never struck me as the kind of person who’d stab a dog.’ Jack is clearly dumbfounded. ‘I mean, why would you do that?’

‘Was it in self-defence?’ Maddie says.

Louise frowns. ‘Not a real dog. Blimey, what d’you take me for?’

‘Thank heavens for that,’ Richard says.

‘Such a relief,’ Hazel adds.

‘Thor was a character in a series of books,’ Louise says. ‘Hugely successful books, as it happens. He was a police dog.’

‘Sheila’s books,’ Elizabeth says. ‘Of course.’

Suddenly the whole story spills out, the story she’s been bottling up for months now.

‘You all know Sheila Penhaligon, right?’