The Ladykiller by Martina Cole Page A

love, you must be frozen. I’ve got your dinner in the oven keeping warm.’
    Kate smiled to herself. Her mother still thought she was eighteen.
    ‘Where’s Lizzy?’
    ‘Oh, she’s in the bath, she’ll be down soon. I heard about the terrible goings on today. Scandalous, bloody scandalous! Was it the husband?’
    Kate followed her mother through the lounge and into the kitchen, where on a small breakfast bar her knife and fork were laid out. She sat on the stool gratefully and accepted a cup of steaming coffee.
    ‘It wasn’t the husband, Mum.’
    Evelyn O’Dowd wasn’t listening which did not disturb Kate. Her mother never listened to anyone or anything.
    ‘It’s usually the husband or some other relative . . .’
    Evelyn opened the oven and Kate felt her mouth water as the tantalising aroma of a good beef casserole wafted towards her.
    ‘Be careful of that plate now, it’s roasting.’
    ‘Thanks, Mum, this is just what I needed.’
    ‘I’ve made soda bread to go with it.’
    Evelyn O’Dowd was tiny and thin, like a little bird. She had black eyes that darted continually and never settled on anything. She wore black all the time which accentuated her thinness. She still looked after her forty-year-old daughter as if she was ten. Kate loved her.
    As she broke off a piece of bread her mother sat opposite her with a cup of coffee and the ever present cigarette. Taking a large draw on it, she blew smoke across the breakfast bar and smiled.
    ‘What a feather this one will be in your cap - when you finally solve it, of course. Which you will, I’m sure of that.’ It was said with absolute certainty.
    ‘Well, we’re doing the best we can, it’s early days yet, Mum.’
    Kate ate the food with an enthusiasm that pleased her mother no end.
    ‘If only your father could have lived to see you, he’d have died of happiness!’
    Kate grinned to herself. Her mother’s Irish sayings were not only unintelligible most of the time, they were often highly amusing - though Evelyn didn’t always think so.
    Declan O’Dowd had been a London docker and had made sure his two children received a good education. Kate’s elder brother now lived in Australia to where he had emigrated to twenty years before. He was a civil engineer and had a wife and five children whom Kate and her mother had never seen in the flesh. Kate had made her career in the police force. Declan O’Dowd had died a happy man shortly after she had passed out from Hendon.
    Kate’s mother had come to live with her shortly after Lizzy, her daughter, had been born. Danny Burrows, Kate’s husband, had left her when Lizzy was three months old. He showed up periodically over the years, turned everyone’s world upside down and then disappeared again. Kate was secretly dreading this Christmas because he was due on one of his flying visits. Lizzy adored her father, which made it hard for Kate to keep everything on an even keel.
    She heard her daughter patter into the room in her slippers.
    ‘Hello, Mum. I heard about the murder. Me and Gran watched it on the news.’
    ‘Hello, baby, come and give us a kiss.’
    Lizzy went to her mother and put her arms around her. At sixteen she was exquisite. Sometimes the beauty of her own daughter made Kate frightened. Lizzy had the O’Dowd darkness, like her mother and grandmother, but she also had porcelain white skin and startling violet eyes. She looked sixteen going on twenty-five. Unlike her mother she was full-chested, already a thirty-six B and still growing by the looks of her. She was as tall as her mother but far more graceful. One thing she had not inherited from Kate was brains. Though shrewd enough in her own way, she was no scholar, had no interest in anything academic. She worked now in the local Boots, filling shelves and waiting for the magical day they trained her for the tills. That was the height of her ambition and Kate accepted this.
    ‘How was your day then, love?’
    ‘Not bad, Mum, the usual.