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“Mind you, it’s that Agatha Browning you want to watch out for,” added Sylv, taking Billie’s five pound note and making change. “She’s a dark horse, that one. Sharp as a stick and twice as pointy.”
“Her mum works at the bookshop, doesn’t she?” Billie asked.
“Just over the street there, The Queens of Crime,” said Sylv, handing over some coins. “And her dad’s Max Browning, the policeman.” She smiled. “It’s nice to see you back, Billie Brooke. Even if you are being mysterious about why you’re here.”
Billie took her biscuits. “There’s no mystery about why I’m here,” she said, hurrying toward the door. “I’m just back, that’s all.”
She left without waiting to see what Sylv was going to say next. She should never have got involved with the conversation, Sylv was the biggest gossip in town.
She hugged the biscuits to herself as she walked faster toward home. She wanted to get away from the prying eyes of Whitebridge. But she also, privately, sort of wanted to see Jules Hawthorne too, she realized.
Chapter Eleven
Jules looked down at the keyboard, which was uncharacteristically dotted with colored stickers. “I’m not one of your five year olds,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Billie.
“That this whole ‘paint by numbers thing’ is sort of demeaning,” said Jules, scowling up at her. “I’m not a little kid.”
“Listen, do you want to learn to play this song or not?”
“Yeah, but…”
“But nothing. There’s a method to the madness if you’d sit still long enough to figure it out.”
Jules stared down at the colored stickers then looked back up at Billie. “Go on then, explain it.”
Billie sighed. “Look at the keyboard. It’s a repeated pattern, just look. Two black notes here, then three, then two again, then three.”
“Alright,” Jules nodded.
“The idea is, rather than teach you how to play the piano, which will take ages, what we’re going to do is teach you to recognize the patterns that you need to know to play this one song.”
“Right.”
“It’s going to be a bit rough and ready at first, but we’ll get there. I’ve printed out pictures as well, and you can take those home and memorize them, in lieu of playing them on the keyboard, since you don’t have a piano at home.”
“Right,” Jules said again, somewhat doubtfully.
“Okay, there’s two things you need to know for a start. First, the order we’re going to use is always going to be red, yellow, green. Play all the red notes together, all the yellow ones, then all the green ones. Once we’ve learned this section, then we can move on to the next. Second, the pedal there on the right will make things sound a little louder and will help blur the connections between notes since your fingering will be awful to start off with.”
“My what will be awful?” Jules said, offended and sitting up straighter.
“Your finger—Ah, yes, I see. Very funny. This will go faster if you concentrate.”
Jules looked down at the keyboard again. Out of the corner of her eye she could see the plate of chocolate digestives sitting on the coffee table and wished she’d taken one. A good choice, though unexpected. She’d have had Billie Brooke pegged as a chocolate Hob Nob person at the very least, if not a posh Bourbon biscuit connoisseur.
“You’re lucky that the main thrust of the song is all chords in the accompaniment. Things will get trickier toward the chorus, but we’ll deal with that when we get there.”
Jules bit her lip and snickered at the word thrust, but Billie ignored her. Which was just as well because the t-shirt she was wearing showed a tad too much cleavage and Jules had been trying not to look at it for the entire time she’d been inside.
Not that she was interested, but she was human.
And, to be perfectly fair, Billie was an attractive woman. A pain in the arse and with no sense of humor, but she was good looking.
“Go on then,” Billie said. “Play all the red notes together, just put your fingers on the keys with the red stickers and push them all down at the same time.”
Jules, who was not at all sure that this was going to work, pressed all the red keys down and found that actually, the sound was quite pleasant.
