Too Cold For Snow

against the family, shall I? What about the time she paid a man to kill her cousin’s dog? It was hanged, Keith, and all because Higgy didn’t like the way it yapped.’
    ‘She belonged to a different generation. They had to be tough to survive. The war tempered them like steel.’
    ‘I appreciate that this is a day when we’re meant to forgive but she was beyond the pale. She was a spiteful, vindictive, miserly, hurtful woman, with a heart of ice.’
    ‘Come on, say what you think. Don’t hold back now.’
    Anne did laugh at that. She had gone an adjective too far.
    And that would have been that. Except for another adjective that would have stuck as appropriately to Higgie as a bluebottle to flypaper. Scheming.
    Had she attended the christening, Higgie would have attentively noted how sallow Christine looked and how ill-behaved Tracey’s twins were as they ricocheted their way around the aisles and how Tracey’s mother’s hair was such a shocking shade of bottle orange that she looked like a woman knitting at the base of the guillotine. She would have seen how Sian and Thomas’ marital drift had now taken them so far apart that they were out of each other’s hailing reach. Even as they held hands she’d have seen how it was just an automatic reflex, and they would barely have felt each other’s warmth.
    Higgie scorned so many of them, this pathetic dynasty which had bred too many brats and eaten too much fat. She despised the soulless, drab estates where they lived and their way of measuring success by the newness of their car registrations and the price tags of their designer spectacles. They didn’t want for anything, yet they craved more. They were soft and gutless as a family and she was ashamed to be of their ilk. That they were soft, yes, that was their greatest sin and the reason they would be punished. The men’s hands were feeble, unaccustomed to a single day’s real work. Hands like white Play-Doh, bloodless and marmoreal. And those palpy bottom lips, that were handed on as genetic collateral from one generation to the next that made them shower spittle at one another when they talked! Foul people!
    Higgy. This rebarbative woman had plotted how she would act from beyond the grave long before her body packed in. Long before the countdown sequence started, the organs shutting down in order of increasing importance, through kidneys to liver and on finally to the systolic and anastolic pulses of the heart, she was all the while planning her attack on the family. In Al Qaeda parlance it would be a spectacular.
    She’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s a few weeks after everyone else had come to the conclusion that she was suffering from it. The tell-tale stare, the awkward gait. When they heard it confirmed they greeted the news with as much compassionate warmth toward her as they could, which wasn’t enough to revive a frozen dormouse.
    After the diagnosis, Higgy knew exactly what to do. She arranged a meeting with Maindee, the devil’s own solicitor, and asked her two helpmates Maurice and Clitheroe to meet her at his office. One used to work in a tie shop but now ran a care home called the Hollies. Clitheroe was a farm worker whose leg had been crushed after being pinned down by a falling tractor when ploughing. The farmer had been too mean to wait until the wet earth had dried enough after some heavy rain to make it safe to work on the steeply raked camber of the Upper Field.
    As scumbag solicitors go, Maindee came from the bottom of the vat full of suppurating vileness where solicitors come to dine like flies. He was a man who robbed people of their inheritances, twisting a fine legal mind to bent purpose.
    She told Maindee she wanted to give Maurice and Clitheroe twenty thousand pounds each, along with a further twenty for expenses. He could take ten for his troubles and the remainder, after the sale of the house, was to go to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and for his share Maindee was entrusted to make sure that this was made as public within the family as possible. They all hated the Witnesses. Maindee smiled in that pantomime unctuous way of his, and said he would accede to all her wishes.
    Over the next few months Maurice and Clitheroe, who were getting a conventional wage from her in addition to the money promised in the will, contacted a lot of specialist suppliers and importers, and as their net was cast ever wider, they started to contact shadier and more duplicitous fellows who