The Shooting in the Shop

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In a sense, the murder let Carole Seddon off the hook. All the social niceties she had been worrying about throughout December seemed much less important after someone had been killed.

For many years Carole had tried to ignore Christmas. As a child, she had observed it with the tense middle-class rigour that her parents had brought to everything they did. In the early years of her marriage to David the festival had been slightly less fraught and when their son Stephen was small they had gone through the required rituals with an attitude which at times approached the relaxed.

But Carole’s painful divorce from David had put an end to the idea of Christmas as a season of goodwill. The adolescent Stephen had reacted – as he did to most pressures – by burying himself in work, and as soon as his age made it decent for him to do so, had contrived to spend Christmas away from both of his parents.

But Stephen’s life had changed. He was now married to Gaby. They had an adorable daughter Lily. And for some months Stephen had been talking in terms of ‘a proper family Christmas’. It was a prospect that filled Carole Seddon with a sense of deep foreboding.

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