THE APOTHECARY’S DAUGHTER an absolutely gripping crime thriller that will take your breath away

by Jane Adams

  He emptied the sink and dried his hands. ‘I really do have to go now,’ he said, ‘but I’ve enjoyed this. Maybe we can return the compliment?’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Me and my wife, Maggie. I’ll give you a ring, OK?’

  Ray nodded. ‘That would be nice. Thank you.’

  ‘No problems. But you’ll have to put up with the dog and the kids climbing all over you. I’m afraid they’re all three convinced that any visitor to our house wants to play.’

  Ray laughed a little uneasily and touched the scarring on his face again. He wasn’t used to children.

  ‘The kids’ll want to know how you did it and the dog will probably try to lick you anyway.’ He extended his hand and clasped Ray’s briefly, the broad grin back on his face. ‘Now,’ he said, pulling at the tangle of curls falling forward into his eyes, ‘the boss — Maggie to you — tells me I can’t come home until I’ve had some of this cut off and it’s my turn to help out at the local Gingerbread group.’

  He made his exit soon after that, leaving Ray thoughtful and a little lonely.

  He wandered back into the living room, turned on the television and flicked restlessly through the blend of afternoon soaps and quiz shows, and sat down to watch, though with most of his mind elsewhere, plucking gently at the threads of Kitty’s story. He felt a sympathy with her for their commonness of injury, if nothing else. He recognized as his own, the pain she must have felt, knowing that his own hurts, well treated and healing, still caused him discomfort to say nothing of the emotional strain it had placed upon his life. He’d been lucky, his hands still retained most of the normal range of motion. He just had to be a little more concentrated on tasks requiring dexterity. What was harder to overcome was the variety of reactions that his injuries invoked.

  Ray stared harder at the television, suddenly annoyed with himself for becoming so involved in something that could no longer matter.

  It had mattered to Mathilda. He sensed also that Kitty had come to matter to John Rivers. In the end boredom and curiosity won. He gave up on the television, got up almost hurriedly and went over to the desk. John had talked about photocopies. If Mathilda had kept them — and what didn’t she keep? — then the most likely place would be the desk.

  He opened the door to the other cupboard, the one housing the more official correspondence, and began to rummage through the assorted, carefully ordered papers, not, this time, for clues to his aunt’s life, but for that of a woman who’d been dead three hundred years before Ray had even been born.

  Chapter Seven

  It had rained in the night but the sun had risen fierce and early. Ray stood barefoot on the garden path, bathed in the sea of fragrance that rose from wet earth and rain-drenched plants.

  He had been up late again the night before, reading what he could find of the photocopies John had made. It had been a frustrating task. John had not really known what to look for and had copied only parts of documents, fragments that must have looked relevant to Mathilda’s search. Reckoning up the cost of photocopying, Ray could understand why he had been so selective. To say nothing of the time he must have spent even to get as far as he had.

  Even so, Ray had found himself irritated by the half story that these patchwork records told. He wanted to see the real thing. To know the rest. He went back inside the house and made his morning tea.

  John had copied pages from the Reverend Jordan’s diaries and bits and pieces from the parish records, mainly relating to the trial. The journals were couched in the most cautious of terms as though Matthew Jordan had been afraid to commit too much to paper. The omissions showed, even to the stranger that Ray was. His instincts told him a great deal about Matthew Jordan and Ray was deeply saddened by what he thought he saw.

  Matthew Jordan had seen Kitty not just as friend and housekeeper. He had loved his young cousin with far more than familial emotion and the thought of her death was tearing him apart.

  Searching for more, Ray drove into Edgemere.

  The young woman at the records office was friendly and sympathetic, but she was less than helpful.

  ‘I’m just a student,’ she said. ‘This is my holiday job and I only do mornings.’

  She had gone off to consult with someone in another room and came back smiling. ‘You want to see Miss Gordon,’ she told him. ‘She’s not in today and it’s half day closing anyway, but Miss Gordon knows the catalogue back to front and inside out, she’ll be able to sort you out in no time.’

  Somewhat put out, Ray had to settle for an appointment for ten o’clock the following morning. He left a list of the sort of documents he wanted to see, the Reverend Jordan’s diaries, any court records that might be held, then went back into the sunlit street and wondered what to do next.

  He’d noticed a cafe earlier and went to get himself a cup of tea. He sat in the window with tea and toasted teacakes, watching the world go by. Edgemere was an attractive little town. The main street was very wide, leaving room for the market still held there twice a week, and the new bypass had taken the bulk of through traffic away to the south. A butter cross stood opposite the cafe and a flower seller had set up in its shade. Half-timbered buildings formed a backdrop. The lower floors of some had been converted to shopfronts and Ray wondered if any dated back to Kitty’s time. Her father’s house had been like this, he recalled. Half-timbered and with the shop below. But it had burned down long before.

  The tourist information centre told him about the battle that had taken place not three miles from Edgemere. It had been a decisive one for the Royalists, early on in the Civil War but was not well known even locally having been overshadowed by the similarly named Edgehill only a month or so after. From there the King had barely escaped with his life. Ray pocketed the free leaflets on offer — maps of the old town and the battlefield and guides to local museums and places of interest. On impulse he asked if they had anything more detailed and bought a guidebook full of colour pictures and what looked like not a lot of text. He asked, but no one had even heard of Kitty Hallam.

  Chapter Eight

  The following morning, Ray was awake with the birds. He had fallen asleep reading the pamphlets he had collected the day before. In the night they had slipped from the bed and lay scattered on the floor.

  He lay watching the sun rise above the church and filter through the green leaves of the apple tree, thinking about Kitty. Had this been her room? What had it been like? Mathilda had furnished it simply, whitewashed walls complementing the exposed beams running across the ceiling. A brass bed and worn rugs on a bleached wood floor. Would it have been so different in Kitty’s time?

  Ray turned on his side, the better to watch the slowness of the sunrise, shafts of light striping the blue quilt and turning white walls to primrose. Had she lain here, so long ago and watched the sun rising over the church tower and the tall trees of Southby wood?

  Ray laughed at himself. He was beginning to obsess. What was it about Kitty Hallam that had drawn him so powerfully? It was more, he felt, than the mere coincidence of injury and some oddly placed regard for his aunt’s interest.

  Ray rolled onto his back, the sun now above the level of the apple tree and the light too bright for his eyes. He found himself thinking about his life and what he had done with it so far. A career copper with the almost obligatory broken marriage to a woman he’d known at college and whose face he could barely recall. He still owned the marital home, the man his wife had left him for too rich for her to bother depriving Ray of his half share, though now, even that was up for sale. He had his hi-fi equipment and collection of CDs and direct cut vinyl, safely — he hoped — in store and a Volvo estate that he kept planning to replace with something more dynamic, but he had never been a great one for possessions.

  And there were a few, a very few people, that he called friends. He could number these on the fingers of one hand as distinct from the ‘people he knew’ that must run into hundreds.

  Not, Ray thought morosely, one h
ell of a lot to show for forty-five years.

  Irritated by this threatened dive into self-pity, Ray hauled himself out of bed and started to run his bath. Breakfast was early and he left the cottage far too soon for a ten o’clock appointment. It was only eight thirty-five when he crested the hill outside the village and looked back across the valley. Ray pulled the car onto the verge and stood, leaning against it, examining the patchwork of fields and scattered houses. Loose spokes radiating from the centre of the village itself, circling the hub of the churchyard. A small development of ‘executive homes’ had sprung up in what had been an orchard about a quarter-mile from the village proper, and the village hall now stood where the rectory would have been. Other than that, Ray thought, Kitty would have known the place.

  A narrow path crossed the fields from the road where he had parked the car and led to a stile and a plank bridge before turning towards the church. The path had been there when Ray was a child and on occasions they had walked it, Mathilda and his mother up ahead, his father, generally lost in thought, following on behind and Ray, with a big stick to beat the nettles back, bringing up the rear.

  It was an old track then, old perhaps even in Kitty’s time.

  Ray stood quite still, gazing down into the valley, feeling the early morning sun already tightening his skin, impatient to be getting on with the day, but holding back, waiting for something. Then as Ray watched, a flock of birds rose from the thicket of crack willows standing beside the river, as though a hidden someone had disturbed them passing by.

  Part II

  Chapter Nine

  June 1642

  Kitty got awkwardly to her feet and pulled herself back onto the bank holding the roots of the large crack willow for support. She hurried back towards the village carrying the watercress she had been gathering.

  Tomorrow, the Reverend Jordan would leave for his niece’s home and Kitty’s duties to him would be over. This afternoon, Matthew Jordan’s niece and her husband would arrive and the evening meal, Kitty was determined, would be a celebration among friends, not a precursor to the sad goodbye that would follow.

  The kitchen door stood wide open. It was already warm outside but the heat from the cooking fire made a furnace of the room. A covered bucket, water fresh drawn from the well, stood by the kitchen door, a wooden dipper hanging from its handle. Kitty drank from the sun-warmed water, its taste honeyed with sunlight, then she kicked off her shoes and cooled her feet on the flagstone floor.

  ‘Mistress Hallam, mistress. Master Jordan has been calling for you this last quarter-hour.’

  Kitty smiled. ‘One moment, Ellen, and I will be there.’

  She dropped the basket of watercress on the board next to the stone trough used for washing vegetables. Later it would be chopped with parsley and green onions to stuff a chine of beef that would be salt-crusted and slow-cooked in a Dutch oven close to the hearth. The larger joints of meat already hung on the spit, slow turned by the ‘jack’, the dripping of their juices into the basting tray hissing a soft accompaniment to the clatter of pots and the crack of the wood on the open fire.

  Ellen, five years old but already useful, stood on a stool to help her mother with the bread. Three loaves had already been set to prove on the scrubbed table. And Mim, who had been in the household since Ellen’s mother had been a mere babe, sat close to the open door, a rough cloth cast across her lap as she plucked the last of the birds that would be stuffed with chopped fruit and sweet herbs to be eaten cold on the journey of the following day.

  Another day, Kitty thought with a sharp stab of sadness, and this place would change for ever. The household broken into so many parts as the servants left to work elsewhere and Kitty herself moved to her new home in the village.

  ‘I’ll go and see what Master Jordan wants,’ she said, ‘then I will be back to help.’

  ‘There’s sugar needs to be broken and searced,’ Mim told her, ‘and the Jumbals to be made. If you would do that, Mistress Hallam, since you have a lighter hand.’

  Kitty smiled and nodded, then went through to the hall that divided the kitchen from the remainder of the house. She paused a moment to glance in the small mirror hanging by the door, tucking a loose hair under her cap. She had grown so used to the sight of herself that she no longer hid from the looking glass as she had in the early days, when the scars on her face were peeled and raw and she had hated every casual glimpse. These days, Kitty had learned to be valued for other things and to see virtues in herself beyond the story a few scars could tell.

  Matthew Jordan was calling to her from his study.

  ‘Ah, Katherine, there you are.’ He paused, looked wearily around the little room he used as his study, now all but packed away and ready for his departure. ‘Oh, but I’ll miss this place. It looks so bare with my books gone from the shelves and everything so unnaturally . . .’

  ‘Tidied?’ Kitty laughed. ‘I’ll miss this too but it is for the best, we both know that.’

  She crossed the room and opened the desk drawer, taking Matthew’s reading glasses from beneath a stack of papers.

  ‘Oh, there they are. Kitty, sometimes I think you read my mind.’

  ‘No, I just know you well. Seven years of playing lost and found with your spectacles has me well trained.’

  ‘I will miss you, Katherine. I’ll have someone else to train over again. But, you will visit with us.’

  ‘I will, I promise you. And now, Master Jordan, I must be on with the day. There is food to prepare and sugar cakes to make.’

  ‘Sugar cakes, Jumbals. Excellent.’ Matthew Jordan smiled like a satisfied child.

  ‘And the sugar won’t pound and sieve itself any more than the salt will come off the butter without washing and I promised Mim I would be back to help.’

  Matthew Jordan smiled gently at his cousin. ‘I will miss you, Katherine, I mean that, you know.’

  ‘I know. But tonight we should celebrate. Thomas and Margaret will bring news of how things pass with the King and Master Eton will be here to argue with you. Let the rest go until we have to think of it.’

  The old man nodded. ‘You are right, of course. And you might well find, Katherine, that the new incumbent and his wife value your presence as I have done. You might not even notice I am gone.’

  Kitty laughed at the obvious fishing. ‘I will notice your absence,’ she said. ‘No matter how great a friend Master Randall and his wife become you will never be replaced.’

  Chapter Ten

  Ray arrived fifteen minutes early for his appointment with Sarah Gordon and she kept him waiting the full time. He got instinctively to his feet as she strode into the lobby. Miss Gordon, he realized immediately, was not someone you would want to greet sitting down. She had an air of authority about her — and something more formidable. Here was a woman unused to having her time abused.

  She assessed Ray at a single glance and offered her hand. ‘Sarah Gordon,’ she said. ‘I’ve ordered the documents you asked for, they’re being brought up for you. Come on through.’

  Ray followed her behind the barrier of the front desk and into the cool of the library beyond. Sarah Gordon was a tall woman, almost matching Ray for height, and she carried it well, with a military precision. Her thick red hair was pinned tightly into a businesslike chignon and she wore heavy framed glasses that exaggerated the size of her grey-green eyes.

  Nice bones, Ray thought to himself, and a good shape to go with them. He was still smiling at the thought when Sarah Gordon turned to him.

  ‘The documents you wanted,’ she said, indicating books and papers stacked neatly on a long table. ‘There are a few that can be copied, others have to be scanned into the computer and you can have printouts. There’s a charge, of course. Photocopying damages them. Handling does them very little good either, so we ask you to keep it to a minimum. Others are too fragile to copy or scan so you’ll have to make your own notes.’ She looked suspiciously at Ray. ‘You’ve brought a notebook, I take it?’

/>   ‘Oh yes.’ He patted his pocket. ‘A pencil too.’

  ‘Right, well, I’ll leave you to it.’ She took a few steps away from the table, then turned and indicated a smaller desk at the other end of the room. ‘I will be over there should you need anything.’

  She gave Ray a long last suspicious look and walked away. Ray sat down, laughing to himself. Obviously, he didn’t look like someone able to handle historic documents or capable of doing research. He surveyed the books and documents laid out on the table in front of him with a feeling of great satisfaction and not a little awe. These things had survived more than three hundred years and had probably hardly been looked at in all that time. He reached out for what he took to be one of the Reverend Jordan’s notebooks, one of a dozen, leather bound, yellowed pages foxed with age. The pages crackled as he laid the book open on the table, their faces covered with a tiny spidery hand, set in impossibly close lines as though someone had been eager to save space. The ink had been protected from the light in the closed books and was remarkably unfaded considering the age. Ray bent over the first page and began to read, frowning in his effort to make out the words, conscious that he really was gazing directly into the past.

  * * *

  It was lunchtime before Sarah Gordon’s curiosity finally got the better of her and she came over to see what Ray was doing. He sat, pen poised over notepad, squinting hard at a paragraph of Matthew Jordan’s close scripted entry.

  ‘Problems?’ Sarah asked him.

  Ray sighed. ‘I used to have a sergeant who specialized in deciphering the impossible. Failing that, there was always some young probationer looking to earn a few brownie points.’

  Sarah raised an eyebrow at him, then grabbed a chair and tucked in close by, peering in turn at the paragraph Ray pointed to.

  ‘Sergeant?’ she asked. ‘A military man then?’

  Ray laughed uneasily. ‘Police,’ he said. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Ray Flowers at your service,’ he told her. ‘Twenty years in Her Majesty’s service, for all the good it’s doing me.’