‘No, just Jessie Mole. If she follows me in here, I’ll kill her.’
Sophie laid her paintbrush down. ‘I don’t think she’ll dare.’
Jessie is a particular nuisance in shops. She tries to lock shopkeepers in a stranglehold of gossip, oblivious of the customers they might be trying to serve. As Ashburton is a small place and the number of shops is limited, it hasn’t taken her long to exhaust the patience of the entire shopkeeping community.
‘She came in here the other day,’ Sophie said, ‘hanging around, looking over my shoulder when I was trying to paint—’
‘When was this?’ I asked.
She shrugged. ‘One day last week,’ she responded vaguely. ‘You weren’t here. Anyway, I was longing for her to leave when Pat came in and got rid of her. She just ordered her out, said she wasn’t prepared to put up with her nonsense.’
‘Good for Pat.’
‘I don’t think she means any harm − Jessie, I mean,’ Sophie added, picking up her brush and surveying the painting in progress.
‘Maybe not,’ I conceded, ‘but she puts customers off.’ I’d seen many people execute a last-minute swerve and change course when they’d spotted Jessie through a shop window.
‘She is creepy,’ Sophie admitted.
I sat down heavily on a stool and sighed. ‘I wish I’d never mentioned that effing dummy to the police.’
‘You did the right thing,’ she said, gazing at me solemnly. She laid down her paintbrush for a second time. ‘Tea?’ she volunteered sympathetically. ‘Coffee?’
I glanced at my watch. ‘I’ll make it. I just popped in to check all was well. I’m going up to Mrs Berkeley-Smythe’s place to switch on her heating, and then I’m off up to the Brownlows’ house. They’ve got visitors coming to stay and their spare bedroom needs a good going-over. But I’ve got time for coffee.’
I climbed the stairs to the kitchen above, in what used to be Old Nick’s flat, and flipped the switch on the kettle. I got an unflattering view of my reflection in its shiny surface and detoured to the bathroom to see if things were as bad as they looked. Raking my fingers through a tangled mass of red curls did not make the frowning apparition in the mirror look any tidier. I had taken five dogs for a walk on the moor that morning, I reminded myself, and more or less sprinted to get away from Jessie Mole, so no wonder I looked a mess. Not that I would look much different if I hadn’t.
On my way back to the kitchen I paused on the landing. There was a tiny framed photograph on the wall, a picture that probably no one but me ever stopped to look at. Old Nick stared at me from twinkling eyes. Old Nick, for whom I had worked just a few months and who had rewarded me on his death by leaving me the building in which I now stood.
‘Bastard,’ I whispered softly, and swore I heard him chuckle.
On my way back from the Brownlows’ house, I called in at the information centre behind the town hall. I wanted to send a card to an old college friend. I prefer cards with original photos of Dartmoor and knew there was a rack full of them there, together with local maps and books. I found postcards identical to the one attached to the dummy: From Devon With Love written in red and a picture of thatched cottages. There was a range of cards with the same wording but different pictures: Widecombe Fair, Dartmoor ponies, or a cream tea laid out on a lacy tablecloth − all a bit naff, if you ask me. I selected a card with a picture of a twisted thorn tree standing alone in the bleak landscape of the moor, almost bent double by a cruel wind, dark clouds piling up for a storm in the sky behind it − much more my sort of thing.
I walked the dogs by the river next morning, through misty woods. The winter trees were leafless, their branches bare, the forest floor like old owl feathers speckled with greys and browns as autumn leaves decayed. Yet there was the green on the ivy-tangled trunks and every branch wore a velvet coat of emerald moss. The sun broke through the mist for a moment and the water in the river flashed silver, pouring like a layer of glass between stepping stones. The Tribe – the five dogs that I walked on weekday mornings − splashed happily in the shallows, snapping at the shadows of little fish, all except for Sally the ancient black Labrador who never left my side, happy to watch the younger dogs, her tail slowly wagging, and barking occasionally.
I couldn’t look at the water without remembering that damned dummy. Such an odd, strange thing. Just thinking about it filled me with a sense of unease, like this quiet, still January waiting for winter to come. I felt as if I was holding my breath, waiting for an axe to fall.
After a long circular walk, I deposited the canines in their respective homes and popped back to the flat to change my muddy boots. Then I drove up to Stapledon Lane to await the arrival of Mrs Chloe Berkeley-Smythe. As it turned out, she got there before me.
Stapledon Lane is where the police station and old courthouse used to stand. Now, these buildings are desirable residences. No less desirable is the handsome stone cottage belonging to Mrs Berkeley-Smythe, situated at the turn of the lane, commanding a fine view of the town below and the hills above. But its narrow front door and the two steep steps leading up to it make it less than ideal for anyone attempting to lug large suitcases into its cramped hall. A limousine from Southampton and its driver come as part of Mrs B-S’s cruising package and as I arrived the poor man was trying to drag a suitcase the size of a sofa up the steps without getting it wedged in the front door. There’s an art to it, as I know.
Mrs B-S was standing by the car, her refined foghorn voice blasting down the lane.
‘I’m so sorry, I can’t possibly help you, I’ve got a bad back. I’m so sorry.’
I called out to her and waved.
‘Juno, my dear!’ she cried as I approached, and enveloped me in an embrace that smelt of hairspray, face powder and high-powered perfume. ‘I can’t wait to get inside. I’m exhausted, utterly exhausted.’ I agreed that being driven from Southampton in the back of a limousine must be an exhausting experience. ‘Could you help poor Charles here?’ she asked. ‘Would you mind?’
Charles and I had met before. He was Chloe’s favourite driver and she always requested him, the poor sod. Between the two of us we managed to squeeze four large suitcases and three vanity cases into the cottage, allowing Chloe to flutter through into the living room, declaring, ‘I must lie down. I really must lie down.’
I paid Charles a handsome tip from her weighty leather purse and allowed the poor man to escape. He probably needed a lie down himself after driving her all the way to Ashburton, although he assured me, with a broad wink, that Chloe usually slept all the way after the first few miles. No wonder she was so exhausted. I noticed that she had managed to totter as far as the sherry before sinking into the cushions of the sofa. She lay there now, still wearing her coat, eyes closed, one heavily ringed hand hanging over the edge as if she were lying in a punt and trailing her fingers in the water.
‘Good trip?’ I asked.
‘Wonderful!’ she sighed. ‘But whenever I come back here and look around my darling little cottage, I wonder why I leave.’
I smiled. ‘You say that every time. You usually last about three days before you’re planning your next trip … or have you got something planned already?’
‘Nothing … well, only Cyprus … but that’s weeks away.’ She opened her eyes. ‘Come with me!’ she begged.
‘No, thanks.’
‘I’d pay.’
‘You’d have to, and it’s very kind of you to keep offering, but I can’t − really.’
‘Well, I’m going to have to stop cruising soon,’ she moaned. ‘I shall run out of money.’
‘You say that every time too.’
‘Do I?’ She surveyed me from beneath heavy eyelids shaded a delicate mauve. ‘Why aren’t you married? Or living in glorious sin with some sexy man somewhere? It’s such a waste … You’re not gay, are you, dear? You’ve never struck me that way.’
‘No, I’m not gay,’ I assured her. ‘Now, I’ve done your shopping. There’s milk,
cream, prawns and pâté in the fridge, and your favourite coffee ice cream in the freezer.’
‘You are wonderful,’ she sighed.
I pointed out three piles of post on her coffee table. ‘Hospital appointments in the first pile … you need to look at those … bills in the middle pile … and in this one’ – I pointed to the largest pile, more of a stack, really – ‘is the brochures you’ve ordered.’ There were also several parcels under the table, items ordered by Mrs B-S before she went afloat and taken in during her absence by her long-suffering neighbour.
Chloe barely glanced at them. ‘I shall need to go to the bank.’
‘That’s fine. It’s a bank day tomorrow.’ Ashburton no longer has a bank of its own, but two of the high street banks provide a mobile service, each visiting once a week, their immense wagons taking up three spaces in the town hall car park. ‘I’ll take you there in the morning,’ I promised. ‘Now I’ll make a start on the unpacking.’
‘Oh, it’s too exhausting!’ she complained. ‘Sit and have a sherry.’
‘I’ll have one later.’
‘Well, you wouldn’t pour me another, would you?’ She looked around vaguely as if she couldn’t remember where the bottle was. ‘And pass me the remote. Oh, you are an angel!’
As I left the room, the television blared into life and I heard her flicking through the channels until she found the one she wanted: the shopping channel. ‘There’s a present for you in one of the cases,’ she called out. ‘I can’t remember which one, but you’ll find it.’
‘It would help if I knew what I was looking for,’ I called back.
Chloe laughed. ‘I can’t remember that, either. What on earth did I get you? Oh, I expect you’ll know it when you see it.’
Her cases were beautifully packed, each garment carefully folded, not by Chloe but by some member of cabin staff, the most delicate items wrapped in tissue paper. I began unpacking, sorting and selecting clothes for the washing machine and the dry-cleaners, and hanging up those that could be returned to the wardrobes. This was a process that would take the rest of the day and most of the next as well. All this unpacking had to be done in the hallway as the cases were too heavy to lug upstairs. Once unpacked, and I managed to empty two that day, they could be stored in a spare bedroom, a room devoted entirely to shoe racks and sets of matching luggage. During the unpacking I came across a silk pashmina in mint green, which I decided wasn’t Mrs B-S’s shade at all.
Hoping that this might be mine I went into the living room to check. But Chloe was snoring gently in front of the shopping channel, a clutch of partly opened envelopes scattered on her ample bosom and spilling onto the floor. I decided not to disturb her.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘I am doing a wonderful job of spending the children’s inheritance,’ she announced to the world in general next morning as she descended the steps from the mobile bank where she had spent the last half hour. ‘It serves them right. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve such beastly children … well, yes, I do,’ she added, laughing, ‘I’ve always done precisely as I chose. I don’t see why one should put one’s children first, do you? I always brought them up exactly as I did the dogs. But I shall have to slow down soon, start downgrading to a cheaper cabin …’
‘Where do want to go next?’ I slipped in as Chloe drew breath.
‘Well, I thought the Adriatic … the Croatian Islands … Oh, you mean now?’
I laughed. ‘Yes, I mean, where do you want to go now?’
‘Well, you know, I’m absolutely exhausted. I shall die soon if I don’t have a coffee. But I thought first we might visit that nice little boutique around the corner. You know, you must stop me spending money. And there’s that pretty little place that sells the handmade soaps and bath things, so convenient, it being next door.’
I was only half listening to her. We were standing on the bridge outside the town hall: King’s Bridge, the very bridge where, according to legend, Cutty Dyer was most likely to be found lurking. By leaning over the wall, I could watch the river rushing out from under the civic building, a brief glimpse before it disappeared beneath the bridge we were standing on. I couldn’t help wondering about that damned dummy being swept along.
An hour later, I managed to steer Chloe and several large carrier bags through the door of the Old Library Cafe.
‘I wish you’d let me buy you those lovely silk culottes,’ she was announcing as I forced her through the door, her foghorn voice drawing the attention of everyone in the place. It was packed, there were no free tables.
‘It doesn’t look as if there’s anywhere to sit,’ I murmured.
‘No, here’s a place!’ she cried. There was a man sitting alone at a table for four, making use of the free Wi-Fi, tapping away at a laptop, the table spread with papers. ‘He really can’t expect to occupy a table for four,’ she whispered loudly, sliding behind the table and effectively trapping him in his seat as she placed all her shopping on top of his paperwork and sat down heavily on the bench next to him. He glowered at her from behind heavily framed spectacles and then flicked an irritated glance at me as I took the seat opposite.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, picking the offending shopping bags off the table and sliding them onto the floor beneath.
He stopped working and for a moment closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose and suppressing a sigh, like a man at the end of his tether. I got the feeling that he’d been tapping away for hours and that the cafe had gradually filled up around him. Then he snapped the laptop shut and began gathering up his notes from the table. Chloe deliberately ignored him and carried on talking to me. ‘Do let me give you one of these bath bombs I’ve just bought,’ she prattled on gaily, rummaging in one of the bags and producing a scented ball wrapped in a net bag. ‘You just pop it in the bathwater and it whizzes about all over the place. Such fun!’
The man, meanwhile, had stood up − he was very tall − and was trying to extricate himself from the corner by squeezing his body between the table and the wall. He dropped half his papers and I scrabbled to help him pick them up. I felt torn, sorry for a poor man minding his own business and being swept up by Hurricane Chloe, and cross at his unsmiling irritation. After all, he couldn’t expect to hog the entire table when there was nowhere else for us to sit. He snatched a piece of paper I was offering him. ‘Thank you,’ he muttered savagely, and stomped out.
‘Well, what a horribly rude man!’ Chloe exclaimed. I’m sure he heard. She has a very poor grasp of when a person is out of earshot and unwittingly offends people all the time. I still cringe at the memory of ‘What a very plain baby!’
‘Oh look, look!’ she cried, pointing at the floor under the table. ‘There’s another of his bits of paper! You’d better run after him, Juno, and give it back to him.’
‘Mine’s a cappuccino,’ I told her as I scraped my chair back from the table and hurried after him. I could see him across the road, already at his car, the tailgate up, putting his things away. ‘Excuse me,’ I yelled at his back. ‘Hello? You dropped this.’
He turned around, scowling. He had taken off the heavily framed specs and I realised he was younger than I thought. He had a lean, hawk-like face beneath untidy dark hair. He wasn’t bad-looking in a sort of angry bird-of-prey way.
I held out the piece of paper. ‘You dropped this.’
He took it from me and glanced at it. ‘I would have been lost without this,’ he admitted and for a moment he smiled. ‘Thank you.’ He looked at me and put his head on one side, considering. ‘I’ve seen you before somewhere, haven’t I?’
Dratted bloody Gazette. ‘I don’t think so. Anyway,’ I added as I turned away, ‘my coffee’s getting cold.’
‘I could buy you another.’
I stopped, turned back to him. ‘No, thanks, I’m with a client.’
He raised a dark eyebrow. ‘Client?’ he repeated. ‘I thought she was your mother.’
‘My mother?’
He smiled
. ‘Well, what kind of client offers to buy you silk culottes?’
‘Smartass,’ I muttered as I strode back down the car park towards the cafe door.
Mrs Berkeley-Smythe insisted on lunch after she had perused the cafe menu and so it was afternoon by the time we got back to Stapledon Lane. I returned to unpacking her luggage while she sorted through her morning’s shopping, trying to remember what she’d bought and, in some cases, why. Suddenly she called out to me from the living room in a tone urgent enough to bring me in from the hall.
‘Where did this come from?’ She held up a torn envelope, thickly stuffed with papers.
‘Who on earth is Daniel Thorncroft?’ she asked, reading the name scrawled in black letters on the front.
‘Where did you find it?’
‘In one of my shopping bags,’ she responded. ‘It must belong to that objectionable man in the cafe this morning. It must have slid in there when he dropped his papers.’ Before I could stop her, she had picked out a letter and unfolded it.
‘That might be private …’ I began, but it was too late.
‘Dear Mr Thorncroft,’ she read aloud, ‘first may I express my condolences on the death of your aunt, Mrs Selena Harrington. Mrs Harrington was a valued client of Langley Brown … oh, it’s from his solicitor.’ Interest lost, she folded the letter and began trying to stuff it back in the envelope. ‘You’ll have to take it back to him.’
‘Is there an address?’
She glanced at the envelope. ‘Moorview Farm.’
‘Well, I haven’t a clue where that is. I’ll take it back to the cafe and leave it there. He’ll probably realise that’s where he lost it and go back for it.’
But by the time I got back to the cafe it had closed for the afternoon. I didn’t feel I could just shove the envelope under the door without explanation, and anyway, it was too thick.
Grumbling, I got back into White Van and flung the envelope on the seat beside me. Then, curious, I picked it up to see what else might be inside. I shook out the contents and groaned. Amongst other papers was a thick wad of fifty-pound notes held in a rubber band. I counted. It was a lot of money.
From Devon With Death Page 3