‘Suicide,’ I snapped. ‘But in my opinion the police killed him.’ I felt my eyes fill with tears and blinked them away rapidly. I didn’t want to give way to tears in front of this man.
Daniel Thorncroft studied me gravely, his eyes sympathetic. In the light of the street lamp his thin features looked gaunt, accentuated by heavy shadows. ‘You know, Miss B, it’s none of my business,’ he began carefully, ‘but I think the person really responsible for Luke’s death is whoever committed these dreadful killings.’
I didn’t answer.
‘And you know,’ he went on, a slight huskiness in his voice, ‘it’s a tragic thing, but there are some people you just can’t save.’
I realised he wasn’t only talking about Luke, he was talking about his wife. I couldn’t think of anything to say. For a moment we just stared at each other. Then he smiled. ‘I’m not happy about you walking home alone, Miss Browne with an “e”,’ he said lightly, ‘may I walk with you?’
I gestured towards White Van parked on the opposite kerb. ‘I’m not walking,’ I told him. ‘This is mine, just here.’
‘Ah! Well, goodnight, then, Miss B,’ he said, and strode off down the lane, his bag of takeaway goodies hanging from one hand.
It was curry. I could smell it. It literally made my mouth water. I thought, as I unlocked the van and slid into the driver’s seat, that I could murder a curry right now.
I resisted the temptation to go to the Indian takeaway and settled for toast and Marmite when I got home. I was too lazy to cook and anyway, there wasn’t much in the fridge. You can’t do a lot with one onion, a pear and a tomato. I promised myself I would find time to shop for groceries next day. Actually, I had the tomato and the pear for dessert. I didn’t fancy the onion.
I lay on the sofa with Bill purring on my stomach, brooding over Daniel Thorncroft and wondering if it could have been him in the alley looking for a way to break in. It couldn’t, I decided. For one thing, the intruder hurried away heading for Sun Street, and there was no way he could have made it back to Shadow Lane in the time it took me to lock the shop. Actually, yes, he could, I realised, while I was busy checking the flat upstairs. But why would he? And somehow, I doubted if even Daniel Thorncroft would attempt breaking and entering hampered by a bag full of Indian takeaway.
The phone rang, disturbing my musings. It was Chloe Berkeley-Smythe, ship-to-shore.
‘Are you all right?’ I couldn’t imagine why she was phoning. She’d only been gone a few days.
‘Oh, I’m perfectly all right,’ she assured me, ‘but I’ve lost my thingy − you know, the thing I keep my photos on.’
‘Your tablet?’
‘That’s it! Well, it’s not amongst my luggage, which means it’s either been stolen or I’ve lost it, which makes me wonder if we ever packed it in the first place. I don’t suppose you can remember?’
‘No, I can’t,’ I admitted frankly. ‘You think it might still be in the cottage?’
‘Juno, my dear, would you mind having a look for me?’
‘I’ll take a look in the morning.’
‘Oh, you are an angel,’ she cooed. ‘It would set my mind at rest. I’d hate to lose all my photographs, so if you wouldn’t mind taking a peek? Don’t try and call me, dear. I’ll phone again.’
We wished each other goodnight and I put the phone down. But it was bugging me, not being able to remember whether I’d packed the tablet. I decided I wouldn’t wait until next day, I’d drive to Stapledon Lane and check it out right now. If it was in the cottage, I might bring it home for safekeeping. Chloe had been burgled before when she was away on a cruise and there was always the possibility it might happen again.
I found the tablet almost as soon as I’d got in through the front door and keyed in the code that switched off the burglar alarm. It was sitting on a table in the hall, still plugged in and fully charged. Everything else seemed to be in order. I was in and out in five minutes.
Of course I switched it on. Back in the flat, accompanied by Bill and a mug of tea, I nosed through hundreds of Chloe’s photos. She was really quite a good photographer. I found the photos she had shown me before, of the Ashburton river festival with the procession that included the water sprite and the monstrous figure of Cutty Dyer with Jessie Mole standing in the way.
Jessie featured in quite a few of Chloe’s photographs. I picked her out in the crowd watching the procession go by on the day of the Ale-Tasting and Bread-Weighing Ceremony in July. It’s an Ashburton tradition that goes back to the Middle Ages. Everyone in the procession dresses in a rough approximation of medieval costume, usually accompanied by strolling musicians playing a rough approximation of medieval music. Chloe had taken a picture of Jessie with the Portreeve, Ashburton’s equivalent of a mayor, just the two of them standing together, smiling for the camera.
Bored with the local stuff, I skimmed with my finger, sending the photos whizzing across the screen until I came to her cruise boat pictures. There were hundreds of photos taken on these floating palaces: in port, at sea, with people on deck looking sunburned and sporty in shorts and deck shoes, in the state dining room with buffet tables groaning under dishes of pineapple and lobster and ice sculptures shaped like swans, or at the captain’s table with men in dinner jackets and women in long dresses. I began to yawn, and then came across some pictures of Digby Jerkin and Amanda Waft.
Digby and Amanda, who had come to settle in Ashburton after seeing Chloe’s charming pictures of the town and surrounding countryside. Digby and Amanda, who had seen the same photographs I had just been looking at: photographs of the town, of the processions, of the carnival, of Jessie Mole.
Way past bedtime I found what I was looking for. I’d been trawling the Internet, researching the careers of Digby Jerkin and Amanda Waft. Most of the information came in the form of reviews of the various shows they had been in, dating back fifty years, and stories about the television series they had starred in. But then I came across a twenty-year-old article from a Bath newspaper. The headline read Popular Television Actress Arrested in Bath Store. Digby and Amanda had been appearing in a farce at the Theatre Royal at the time and the article reported that Amanda had been apprehended by a store detective for shoplifting. He was quoted as saying that he had Ms Waft under observation for twenty minutes and had followed her out of the shop. When stopped, she was found to be carrying several items of clothing in her bag, which she had not paid for, and the police had been called. It went on to say that Ms Waft denied shoplifting and put the incident down to forgetfulness and stress. The store did not press charges as the items were returned but Ms Waft was banned from the store in future.
I sat back in my chair and sighed. Poor Amanda! How humiliating for her. It was shortly after this incident, I worked out, that she and Digby had started entertaining on the cruise ships. Perhaps they were trying to get away from the negative publicity, trying to put the embarrassing incident in Bath behind them. I wondered if this little scandal had ended their television careers.
And was it enough? I asked myself. I’d been searching for some connection with Jessie, something in the couple’s past that might have led her to blackmail them, to start sending them her poisonous letters, something so incriminating that on recognising Jessie from Chloe’s photos, they would actually come to Ashburton so they could get rid of her. The shoplifting incident was certainly the kind of thing she would latch on to – something she would love to have tormented Amanda with − supposing she’d ever found out about it, which she could have done from the local paper if she had been living in Bath at the time. But was Bath the place Jessie had spent those missing years?
As a theory it was all a bit thin, frankly. I admitted as much to Bill as he wandered across the keyboard. I closed the laptop, he sat on the lid and I fondled his ears as I brooded. If someone had been blackmailing me, and years later I found out where that person was living, I’d probably want to run as far away from them as possible, not go and live in the same plac
e. And could I really see either Amanda or Digby as a murderer? Perhaps Digby might kill in order to protect his beloved Amanda. But could he hold Jessie’s head under the water until she drowned and afterwards cut her throat? I shuddered at the thought but decided it was not a convincing image. No, it was impossible. And neither he or Amanda could have had anything to do with the murder of Verbena because I was with them when it happened. All I had done was nose around in their past and dig up an unfortunate incident from long ago that was best forgotten. I felt like some snooping paparazzi, like Sandy Thomas from the Dartmoor Gazette. I felt mean.
When I could find the time, I decided, I would pop around to their cottage and say hello. After all, they didn’t know many people in Ashburton. I’d find out how the house-hunting was going, and maybe I could discover a bit more about what had made them decide to come and live here. Because the idea that they had come on the strength of Chloe’s photographs was something that still bothered me, just a bit.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I didn’t get an opportunity to do this for several days. I got stuck in the shop. We were still short-handed with Pat not coming in, Sophie was offered waitressing shifts at a hotel that she couldn’t afford to turn down – not if she was going to stay friends with her mum − and Elizabeth wasn’t able to help out because she was struck down by an appalling stomach bug that it seemed Olly had brought home from school. I didn’t get around to see Maisie until the following Monday.
‘They sent a new one from the agency this morning,’ she told me ominously as soon as I walked in her cottage door.
‘Oh?’ I asked, hauling Jacko off by his collar as he tried to hump my leg. Unabashed he trotted off into the kitchen and I heard him loudly gulping water from his bowl. ‘What’s happened to Maria?’ She was the carer usually sent by the agency to help Maisie get bathed and dressed in the mornings, a service paid for by Our Janet up north.
Maisie sniffed in disgust. ‘God knows!’
‘Well, was she OK, this carer?’ I asked, suspecting I already knew the answer.
‘She was all right,’ she conceded grudgingly. ‘She was only a young thing. But she had that skinny hair, d’you know what I mean? A lot of the young girls have got it.’
‘They straighten it with tongs.’ I laughed. They’d have a job on straightening mine.
‘I said to her,’ Maisie went on, ‘“What d’you want to do that for? When I was a girl, no one wanted hair straight as pump-water.”’
‘Things have changed a bit since then, Maisie.’
She rolled her eyes. ‘I said to her, “What d’you want to paint them big black eyebrows on for? They look ridiculous!”’
‘It’s the fashion.’
‘You don’t do it.’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘Well, there you are then!’ she responded, as if this settled the matter. ‘It’s not natural, is it?’ she asked, shaking her apricot perm, ‘I told her, “No one with hair as yellow as yours is going to have great blocky black eyebrows like that.”’
‘Um … you actually said that to her?’ I asked, trying to sound casual.
‘Course! They looked like caterpillars. And another thing,’ she went on, ‘she told me she’d bought this puppy. Doodle, she calls it. I said, “Why d’you call it Doodle?” She said it was a Labradoodle. I said, “What the hell is that?” It’s a cross between a Labrador and a poodle, she tells me. She paid three hundred and fifty pounds for it. “Getaway!” I said. “Years ago, we’d have called that a mongrel and you couldn’t have given it away.”’
‘Mm. What was her name, this carer?’
She tutted. ‘Ashleigh.’
‘Well, I wouldn’t worry about it, Maisie, I don’t expect Ashleigh will be back.’
She scowled suspiciously. ‘Why not?’
‘Well, let’s just hope Maria’s back tomorrow, eh? Now, what can I do for you?’
We put together a shopping list and I went forth, minus the rumbustious Jacko. I had a lot of shopping to get and could manage him better without shopping bags in both hands. I’d take him out later.
It was as well I decided not to take him, as on my way into town I bumped into Daniel Thorncroft with Lottie. Jacko is an aggressive little bully with other dogs and he’d have tried to show Lottie who was boss, straight off. I wouldn’t have wanted him pitching into her. She greeted me with her usual rapturous enthusiasm, but Mr Thorncroft seemed not to notice me. He seemed abstracted, miles away. He almost fell over me.
‘Ah! I’m glad I’ve seen you,’ he began without preamble, once he’d actually focussed on who I was. ‘The other evening, when I nearly frightened you to death in your shop, it was a Wednesday, wasn’t it?’
‘Hello,’ I said pointedly, stooping to pet Lottie. ‘Yes, it was Wednesday.’
‘You’re sure?’ he asked, his grey eyes narrowed.
‘Yes, I remember the bells.’
He frowned. ‘Bells?’
‘Bell-ringing practice,’ I explained, ‘in St Andrew’s. It’s always on a Wednesday evening.’
‘Ah!’ He nodded to himself. ‘I thought it was … Wednesday, I mean.’
And with that he went striding off. I gaped after him. Was that it? I asked myself.
‘Bye!’ I called out. But I got no reply. He’d already disappeared back into whatever parallel universe he’d been living in when I encountered him. He was odd. He’d make a good Doctor Who.
I did Maisie’s shopping, walked Jacko, and then walked down to the other end of town to Station Cottages, to collect a prescription for Tom Carter. As I came out of the pharmacy someone hailed me in a jolly fashion from outside Taylor’s tea room. It was Digby Jerkin. I crossed over the road to him. I hadn’t seen him since the night of the ball and he thanked me for my help with Amanda. It was nothing, I assured him, feeling horribly guilty about the snooping into their lives I’d recently done. Of course, we both shook our heads over what had happened to Verbena.
‘Ghastly business altogether,’ he said. ‘Are the police any nearer to finding her killer, do you think?’
I had to admit I didn’t know. ‘Is Amanda well?’ I ventured.
‘Yes, yes! She’s just taking a little nap … She always does, after lunch,’ he explained, seeing my querying look. ‘I usually go for a walk so that I don’t disturb her. I was just looking at that building over there,’ he said, pointing across the road to a shop. It was an old building, its frontage hung with grey tiles. ‘It’s rather interesting. Some of the tiles are shaped like hearts and spades, and diamonds … and look, yes, there’s clubs!’
‘It used to be the gaming house,’ I explained.
He laughed in surprise. ‘Gaming house?’
‘Ashburton had quite a reputation for bad behaviour back in the day,’ I told him. ‘People who couldn’t pay their gambling debts would sell off odd bits of land. That’s why so many properties here have weirdly shaped gardens.’
‘Good Lord!’ Digby exclaimed. ‘That explains it! The garden of the cottage we’re renting looks as if it’s had a great bite taken out of it. It’s almost chopped in two by a wall.’
I nodded. ‘I expect that’s it.’ The gaming house was long gone, but the way people in Ashburton paid their gambling debts in the past led to disputes over boundaries and access to property even now.
Digby and I nattered on for a little longer. ‘I bumped into Meredith before I saw you. Are you coming to the opening of the exhibition at her gallery?’ he asked me.
‘I haven’t been invited.’
He raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘Really? Meredith and that boyfriend of hers popped around with an invitation the other day.’
‘They only invite the rich and famous.’
He laughed. ‘Well, never mind, my dear, I expect it’ll be a bore.’
I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him. He was so resolutely cheerful, so adoring of his Amanda, and yet I was sure he had a lot to put up with. Living with her couldn’t be easy, and it was possible
that her actions long ago had cost them their careers. I told him I thought I might pop into the cottage one day and see them both. He seemed delighted. ‘Come today,’ he insisted. ‘This afternoon, come to tea.’
I promised I would, when I had finished my various jobs. Elizabeth was manning the shop that afternoon and once I’d done all I had to do for Tom Carter I should have an hour before I needed to go around and help her close up.
I didn’t get my tea as it turned out, or get to the shop. When I arrived at Digby and Amanda’s rented cottage there was an ambulance parked outside, blue lights flashing. I hurried through the open doorway, calling out as I entered the hall. I was confronted by a white and shaken Digby slumped in a chair in the living room while a team of paramedics worked on Amanda who lay prostrate on a chaise longue.
‘Digby, whatever’s happened?’
He could barely speak. I dropped to my knees by the side of his chair and took his hand.
‘Someone tried to kill Amanda,’ he managed in a trembling voice.
‘Kill her?’ I glanced across at the figure lying on the chaise longue, an oxygen mask over her pale face, her half-closed eyelids fluttering.
‘If I hadn’t come back when I did …’ Digby shook his head, thrusting his hands through his thick hair.
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Someone must have got in through the back door. I came back here not long after I had left you, and I heard this fearful crash, you see. That’s what alerted me. Whoever it was heard me come in and slammed out through the back door. And my poor darling was lying here …’ His voice began to shake and he pressed his fist to his mouth, biting down on his knuckle ‘… fighting for breath …’
I glanced again towards her. The paramedics had fixed her up to some kind of heart monitor.
From Devon With Death Page 21