Katy Carter Keeps a Secret by Ruth Saberton Page A

even paler than usual and there are dark smudges beneath her eyes. She works far too hard at the uni. This doesn’t usually stop her having a drink though. Holly and Guy are such regular fixtures in the pub they ought to have shares in the local brewery.
    “Don’t look at me like I’ve grown two heads, Katy!” Holly snaps. “I don’t have to have a drink to have a good time, you know.”
    “I know that,” I say, feeling hurt.
    “Well, I do need a drink. Good times, bad times or indifferent,” Maddy declares. “And since I’m on a rare night out, I’m going to have another.”
    I open my mouth to remind her about the Lenten ban, then shut it quickly. Mads didn’t listen to me when I protested earlier, so nothing much will have changed. If Frankie drops her in it with the Rev, then it’s her bad luck.
    We all perch at the bar and Frankie has a lovely time ordering drinks and being over-the-top camp just to wind up Derrick the landlord and some of the more conservative locals. Much as they dine out on having a rock musician and his film-star husband as part-time residents, this is Tregowan and attitudes can still be quite traditional – something I know only too well.
    “So what are you going to do about rewiring the cottage, not to mention getting the roof fixed?” Holly asks me when we’ve all settled down to the serious business of eating and drinking, once our plates of chips are in front of us too.
    “Are you trying to drive me to alcohol?” I groan.
    “I didn’t know electricians could charge that much. I might retrain,” says Maddy thoughtfully. “Then I could run an all-female team of electricians. We could have pink dungarees and vans and tools! It would be brilliant.”
    “You could call your firm Pussy Power,” suggests Frankie, and Maddy laughs so hard at this that she snorts her drink all over the bar.
    “I don’t know what you’re laughing about. It was your lava lamp that caused all my problems,” I point out after she’s recovered sufficiently to breathe. “Or the electrician’s bill, at least. I ought to be making you pay for it!”
    “I never talked you into taking it or said it was working. I seem to remember you were the one who wanted the bloody thing,” Maddy reminds me, mopping up her drink with a bar towel. “Did I tell you to plug it in without testing it? Did I?”
    “No,” I mutter sulkily.
    “I’d offer to get it all fixed, sweetie, but Ollie will only say no,” says Frankie. “That boy is too proud for his own good.”
    He’s right. Ollie will say no. He’s scarily independent and never wants handouts or help of any kind. When my godmother died and left us enough money to put a big deposit on our cottage I had a hard time persuading him to accept it, and that was when we were first together and persuading him was fairly easy! I don’t stand a chance these days.
    Especially since he’s still laughing about my WAG-over. He’ll probably never take me seriously again after that.
    “You could always look for the loot,” chips in Derrick the landlord, who’s polishing glasses behind the bar and listening in to our conversation. “That would pay for you to get the place rewired. Probably take care of the leaky roof and the mortgage too.”
    My ears prick up. At the moment rewiring , roof and mortgage are words that wake me up in the night. Along with overdraft and Carolyn and secret writing job , obviously. It’s amazing I get any sleep at all.
    “What loot?”
    “The loot that’s buried in your cottage,” Derrick says patiently. “Old Cecily Greville’s life savings.”
    He’s got my attention now. When Ollie and I bought our cottage it was in a really bad way – even worse than it is now, which I know you’ll find hard to believe. It had belonged to an old lady who’d lived there for donkey’s years; in fact, nobody in Tregowan could agree on just how long she had lived there. Bob the Post reckoned at least forty years because he remembered