by Kate Adams
‘So he was frugal. I’m not sure how that helps us.’ Mark was driving me home and I was bringing him up to date on my conversation with Tom. ‘Unless this meant he had one enormous debt and he was taking on smaller ones in order to pay off the angriest of his creditors.’
‘He could have had a gambling problem, or maybe drugs,’ I suggested. I didn’t believe either of these ideas; I was just throwing things out there in the hope one of them might stick or trigger an idea.
Mark was clearly thinking along the same lines as me. ‘No, nobody has said anything that would indicate that.’ He drove slowly through the beautiful Charleton estate, keeping an eye out for any deer coming close to the side of the road. Charleton House was set in 40,000 acres of rolling countryside, the wooded hillsides home to red and fallow deer. There were trout ponds and miles of stunning walks, and in the distance, a church steeple peeped out from between the trees. It was an idyllic English setting that sent the tourists wild, inspired artists and brought a tear to my eye. Moving back here was proving to be the best decision I had ever made.
‘Are you looking forward to getting back to normal?’
I looked over at Mark, unsure what he meant. ‘Hmm?’
‘Now the fair is over, you’ll be busy again.’
‘Funnily enough, I am. I thought I’d welcome the break, but I enjoy it when we’re busy. I have a good team, like a well-oiled machine.’
‘So long as you keep greasing the cogs with coffee it will stay that way. Talking of greasing the cogs, do you fancy a drink?’ We were pulling into the village and could see the Black Swan up ahead, but I wasn’t really in the mood.
‘Not tonight, thanks all the same. I think I’m just going to relax, spend a bit of time with Pumpkin, maybe plan some menus.’
‘OK, well promise me you’ll do it with a gin and tonic in one hand and something unhealthy in the other.’
‘A gin and tonic isn’t unhealthy?’
‘Darling, put a slice of lime in it and it’s one of your five a day.’
We were both distracted by the sound of shouting as we neared the pub car park and our heads swivelled in the direction of two men who looked as if they were about to come to blows. Mark slowed down to a crawl, but the men were too focused on trying to hit one another to notice that they had an audience.
As we got nearer, I recognised them. ‘That’s Guy and Kyle. Can you hear what they’re saying?’
Mark wound down his window, but we still couldn’t make out what they were shouting at each other over the noise of the engine. Guy was clearly furious; his face was red and he was jumping about as if the tarmac under his feet was red hot. Kyle on the other hand was standing his ground. He looked just as angry, but more in control.
‘What was his alibi?’ Mark had read my thoughts. Right now, Guy looked angry enough to kill.
‘He was with Malcolm, having a breakfast meeting. Although to be fair, they both look angry enough to take a swipe at someone.’
As though he had heard me, Kyle threw his arms up in the air and shook his head. He started to walk towards the rear door of the pub, but Guy grabbed his shoulder and spun him around, his fist raised. I tensed my body, waiting for Guy’s fist to make impact, but something stopped him. Guy froze, and Kyle, who had seemed ready to take it, walked calmly inside. Guy stood with his head resting against the stone wall, looking as if he was trying to calm down. After a couple of minutes, he followed Kyle inside.
I’d been so engrossed that I hadn’t even noticed that the car had come to a stop. Mark and I looked at each other, wide-eyed.
‘Well, that’s enough drama for tonight. Are you sure you don’t want to go in for a drink, try and find out what was going on?’
I was tempted, but decided against it.
‘My guess is they’ll go to their rooms and stew for the rest of the night. We’re not going to find out anything tonight.’ I opened the car door and got out. ‘Drive safely, morning coffee in Library?’
‘Throw in some chocolate croissants and you have a date.’ And with his order placed, Mark drove off. I walked round the corner to my little house and, I was guessing, a grumpy and demanding cat.
Pumpkin was on the mat, waiting for me as I walked in. I was getting home later than she would have liked, or at least that was how I read the expression on her face as I followed her swaying tail into the kitchen and reached for a glass out of the cupboard. This was my first chance to really savour the Twenty Trees Gin that I had bought from the fair, so I was going to take Mark’s advice and pour myself a glass of gin and tonic.
Sitting down at the kitchen table, I let Pumpkin jump up onto my lap. I couldn’t remember the last time she had been weighed, but I would have sworn she was the same weight as a small child, with the attitude of a haughty teenager under the illusion that the world revolves around them. In Pumpkin’s case, it’s not an illusion; the world really does revolve around her.
She rubbed her face against my chin, purring, then against the side of my glass. I only narrowly avoided losing its contents. After sticking her claws into my shirt and probably making a number of holes, she considered her duty complete and jumped off my knee to collapse in a heap by my feet. Her large tabby mass spread across the floor until she was the size of the small dog that she seemed to believe she was.
I sat back and put my feet on the chair next to me. Swirling the ice around my glass, I breathed in and liked what I discovered. The drink’s grassy notes made me think of fresh country air, hibiscus and lemongrass, maybe a touch of pine. My love of gin wasn’t something that I allowed to cross over into work too much; this was for pleasure only, when the working day was over and I could fully relax. Only tonight my mind wouldn’t stop whirring. The conversations I’d been having about Ben were buzzing around my brain and showed no signs of quietening down, even under the influence of alcohol.
Taking centre stage right now was the image of Kyle and Guy fighting outside the pub. I couldn’t be sure that it was related to Ben’s murder; maybe they were under a lot of stress and emotions were simply running high after the death of their colleague. That wasn’t hard to imagine. Maybe they had found Ben stealing their profits, killed him in a moment of anger, and then made it look like a robbery to hide their tracks, only now they were worried they were going to get caught and were taking it out on each other. The problem with that idea was that they both had rock-solid alibis. Perhaps the murder was the result of a robbery and the guy who had been selling the coffee down the pub was going to find himself serving a life sentence once Joe got hold of him. That I did find hard to believe. You’d have to be pretty stupid to kill someone and then start selling the evidence at a pub under five miles away.
My next thought was of Elliot Forrester, the gardener Mark and I had seen having a go at Ben, having almost barrelled me to the ground. He wasn’t afraid of being seen shouting at Ben and had no problem expressing whatever was annoying him, so it didn’t seem like there would be unreleased rage simmering inside him, ready to bubble over into violence. At least, not the murderous kind.
But I could look at that another way. A man not afraid of showing his temper in public, not caring what others thought, might just be able to get angry enough to kill someone. After all, he didn’t seem to have a self-control button.
Tom Bidwell didn’t appear to be carrying any residual anger; instead, he remembered Ben fondly. As far as he was concerned, no one else was baying for Ben’s blood over a couple of hundred quid here or there, either. Ben was coming across as an unremarkable man who, with the exception of Elliot, few people felt any ill will towards. None of it seemed to fit easily. It was like a jigsaw puzzle that looked, from a distance, as if all the pieces would slot together, but once you tried to match them, they were misshapen and wouldn’t flatten into place.
I looked at my glass. It was empty. That wasn’t going to help things. I needed another drink.
With a second drink in my hand, I moved next door to the sitting room and sat o
n the sofa, opening my laptop on my knee. Pumpkin made a half-hearted attempt to sit on the keypad, but realised for herself it was unworkable before I had to shoo her off. She settled instead for curling up in a ball by my side. Something had been bugging me, and I didn’t know if it was connected to anything. It was just there in my mind and I wanted to do something about it.
I’d been wondering about the art theft at Berwick, and then at Charleton House. Joe had said they were very different crimes carried out in different circumstances, but I wanted to check them out anyway. It wasn’t because I thought they were connected to Ben, but I felt so bad for the Duke. It was hard to spend any time with him and not realise just how important art was in his life, especially a piece that had meant a lot to his mother. I wondered if I could help, plus my brain would not settle. I was beginning to wish I was into meditation or distracting myself with muscle-aching exercise, but neither of those things were up my alley, so I just had to run with it and see what I could find.
I spent the next hour searching for art thefts from historic houses, focusing on Derbyshire, but taking into account anything in the neighbouring counties. There had been five in Derbyshire over the last six months, and three in neighbouring areas, the bulk of them carried out since April. Then I looked further back in time and found that over the preceding twelve months, there had been eight reported thefts in the area, starting in March and ending in September. That timeline made sense as many historic houses closed over the winter and couldn’t be accessed by the public.
I looked at the houses. Some were run by charities, some were privately owned, but all were open to the public at some point during the year. Two of the thefts had been of paintings small enough to be hidden in a bag, the rest were either silverware or ceramics of one kind or another. I couldn’t see any pattern of locations or kinds of houses. I even started reading about the history of the houses – maybe there was a connection from centuries ago, but I wasn’t finding anything. Adding to this the fact that I was getting my information mainly from press reports, so it could have been that not all the relevant information had been made public, I started to feel like I was wasting my time.
If there were any links, then Joe stood a better chance of finding them than I did. Joe had already given Mark and me far more information than he ever should, and part of me felt guilty that he could get in a lot of trouble if he was found out. Not guilty enough, however, to stop me sending him a text message and promising him fresh chocolate croissants and as much free coffee as he could drink if he came round tomorrow morning before we opened to the public. I was really hoping that under the influence of my baking, he’d forget all pretence of professionalism and bring me up to speed on what he’d found out so far.
Chapter 9
‘You’re kidding, right?’ Joe looked over at Mark hopefully. ‘She is kidding?’
I placed a tray of muffins in front of them, the result of my early arrival at work and a quick baking session before any of my staff arrived. I’d promised Joe and Mark some freshly baked chocolate croissants, which were coming, but first I wanted them to try my latest experiment.
‘Chocolate and beetroot muffins?’ Mark looked as nonplussed as Joe. ‘What would Ruth say? I will tell her.’ His threat of revealing my experimentation to our pastry chef wouldn’t come to anything. After all, it had been Ruth who’d encouraged me to have fun and try new things when baking.
I decided to ignore Mark’s comments. ‘The chocolate is produced by a local artisanal chocolatier and the beetroots are from the Duchess’s own vegetable garden.’ I’d been inspired by the Food Festival and the idea had come to me last night as my online research became a journey down an internet black hole of food ideas. I was pretty impressed with myself; Joe and Mark less so, it seemed, but I put that down to surprise and not having heard of the combination before.
They both reached for a muffin and examined them more closely, then looked at each other like soldiers about to go over the top. I swear they were a heartbeat from a manly pat on the shoulder and a good luck wish. Each took a bite and chewed slowly while looking at me, back at each other, at the muffins, and then back at me again.
Mark swallowed.
‘So?’ I asked him. I loved the idea of the muffins, and thought that with the backstory of the ingredients, they’d make a great addition to the menus in the Stables and Library Cafés. Mark took a mouthful of coffee, looking as if he was thinking – hard.
‘Well, you know how much I love chocolate, and I’m up for trying pretty much anything. The chocolate, yep, great. Those chunks are fabulous, you can tell it’s good quality.’ He paused and looked over at Joe. ‘And I think this is a great example of a project that combines the work of the kitchens and the gardens, largely because it tastes like I’ve just eaten a mouthful of Charleton’s finest artisanal soil.’
Joe sniggered as Mark took another mouthful of coffee and swilled his mouth out with it.
‘Sophie, I’ve become very fond of you, and I love being one of your chief tasters, but please don’t pursue this or I might have to resign from my position.’
‘They’re not that bad, surely?’ I reached for a muffin and took an enormous bite. After a couple of chews, I saw his point. I felt like I’d just licked one of the gardeners’ spades. ‘Oh God, alright, point taken. I can’t argue. Can’t blame me for trying, though.’
It was Joe’s turn to speak up. ‘No, you’re right, we can’t. But we can blame you for trying them out on us. I thought you liked us.’
I laughed at them. ‘Oh shut up, the pair of you. I’ll go and get the croissants.’
I let them eat a croissant each in silence, the looks on their faces oddly serene.
‘Better?’ I raised an eyebrow at them, daring them to make a cheeky comeback, but all I got were synchronised ‘mmmms’ and a ‘God, yes’ from Mark. Deciding that I had Joe in a moment of chocolate-induced weakness, I enquired after the murder investigation and how it was going.
‘Slowly,’ he answered. ‘We just can’t get hold of anything concrete. Friends, family, they all say the same thing about him: a nice guy who couldn’t get any real purchase on life. I’ve spoken to a bunch of people he owed money to, but none of them seem particularly angry. They’re just really sorry he’s been killed. I guess that’s the thing about small town life: he’s one of theirs and they care about that more than a couple of hundred quid. It’s a reminder of why I like it round here. There’s so much awful stuff going on in the world, but they seem to have their priorities straight.’
His comment about money reminded me of my conversation with Tom. ‘From what I’ve heard, there wasn’t much evidence of him spending the money he borrowed, or earned for that matter. Any idea what was going on? Was he gambling?’
‘Who have you been talking to?’ Joe looked both curious and slightly annoyed. As he’d finished his croissant, it seemed the window on his moment of weakness had closed. ‘You shouldn’t be getting involved, Sophie. I’ve already told you far too much. You need to leave this to the police.’
‘It was just a couple of locals who were working at the festival. We got chatting about Ben. It’s a hard subject to avoid when he was killed right here and many of them knew him.’
That seemed to placate him, but he did pause for a moment before replying.
‘We haven’t found evidence of gambling. He seemed to travel quite a bit with the job, but mainly around Derbyshire. Sometimes further north in England – presumably the company covered his expenses for that.’
‘What about the lad Tina saw selling coffee in The Old Oak?’ Mark asked. I hadn’t realised that he’d been paying attention; I’d assumed he was still in a croissant-shaped world of his own.
Joe smiled, his lecture forgotten. ‘Local lad was romancing his girlfriend in the back of his car in a layby north of here. They got out to have a smoke and he found the coffee abandoned in the grass.’
Mark snorted. ‘And they say romance is dead. Presumably the sweet Julie
t can confirm her Romeo’s story?’
‘She certainly can. We also found a couple of bags they’d missed when we visited the site. Problem is, we can’t know if the lad selling them knew they were stolen goods, so it will be difficult to prove any kind of offence. Either way, it doesn’t help our investigation at all.’
Talk of Romeo and Juliet got me thinking. ‘Did Ben have a girlfriend, or boyfriend? Maybe this is the work of an aggrieved partner.’
‘You still fancy the crime of passion route? No, not that we can find. He lived a pretty quiet life with his mum when he wasn’t on the road. He has a brother down in London he phoned occasionally, a few friends he’d go to the pub with. We did find a picture of a kid in his wallet, but his mum didn’t recognise her and thinks she might belong to a friend of his. She said he was always good with youngsters and got quite attached to his friends’ children – a sort of honorary uncle.’
‘He sounds a bit too good to be true,’ Mark commented. ‘He has to have had a murky side hidden away for someone to have killed him.’
I wasn’t sure I agreed. I’d heard enough stories from Mark over the last year to know that history was littered with innocent victims.
‘Think about all the research you’ve done. There must be countless people who have been wrongly accused of things, or became the target of treacherous kings and noblemen just because they were in the way of their dastardly ambitions.’
‘Fair enough.’ In the silence that followed, Mark stared into his mug, and then looked up, his puppy dog eyes sending a clear message. I reached out for his mug.
‘You really need to work on your subtlety. Joe, more coffee?’
‘No thanks, I should be going. I need to head back to Berwick Hall – a member of staff I need to interview about the theft has just returned from holiday. I’m hoping I can get something from him that is tantamount to a lead; that’s another case that’s grinding along far too slowly.’