Honey saw Doherty’s expression harden. It was a fair bet that he was about to lose his patience.
‘This is my fiancée you’re threatening.’ His voice was oddly cold. ‘And it’s Christmas.’
Humpty shook his head. His belly shook with it.
‘Sorry, sir, but the theatre weren’t too pleased about losing their horse. It’s a new one and the old one is full of holes caused by moths. That’s because it’s only used once a year, if then, so they tell me … Ouch!’
The policeman who so easily fitted the role of Humpty, leapt forward. Honey glimpsed the wand heading back from whence it had been. Her mother had used the metal star to jab the copper up the rear.
‘Nasty,’ said Honey, though secretly applauded.
Doherty waded in. ‘Gloria, you can’t go around doing things like that … Now apologise to the police officer. He was only doing his duty.’
The one that had been so fired up to arrest Honey’s mother was shaking his head sadly. ‘And she’s going to be your mother-in-law?’
Doherty took the police officer to one side so Gloria couldn’t hear him.
‘We all have our crosses to bear,’ said Doherty, in a pretty good parody of the long suffering son-in-law. The policeman immediately latched on to this.
‘You’ve got my sympathy, Steve, though in all truth, she couldn’t be worse than mine,’ he said, his voice suddenly mournful, his expression as hangdog as a kicked-out bloodhound. ‘She got widowed and then said she was lonely and my missus was concerned. The old bat’s moved in with us. That’s why I’m working all over Christmas. Anything but listen to her. She nagged her old man to death. Now she’s doing the same to me. I swear she is. I only wish she was young enough to get married again, but at her age?’
Gloria Cross was on the job. The fact that she’d been accused of theft was suddenly put on the back burner. She’d caught the whiff of a likely customer.
‘Your mother-in-law is widowed?’ she said, her eyes wide with interest. ‘Well there’s a thing. Now just you hang on here and take one of my cards …’
She took a card from a safe place next to her bosom and gave it to him. He read the card, his professional no-nonsense expression swiftly turning incredulous.
‘Snow on the Roof?’
‘It’s a dating service for the over-sixties,’ Gloria Cross explained. ‘You know the old saying, don’t you? Just because there’s snow on the roof …’
He nodded. ‘I know. There’s still a fire in the grate.’
‘Or in the old boiler,’ Doherty added. He was just about managing to suppress a grin. Honey kicked him.
The policeman with the mother-in-law problem looked thoughtful. ‘Do you think you could really fix the old bat up with a man?’
Gloria Cross nodded emphatically. ‘Just get her to register online. I take it you have a computer?’
‘I do. Well, my kid does, he uses it for his homework, but sod his homework, this is important.’ He tucked the card into a breast pocket. His mood seemed lighter. His back seemed to straighten and his expression was less pained.
His colleague looked resigned. ‘So we’re not arresting her. Never mind. Better luck tomorrow. We’ll nab a few drunk and disorderlies, no doubt.’
His partner looked askance. ‘Are you kidding? I need to get my life together. The sooner I go off duty and get her sorted, the better.’
The policeman who had looked resigned now seemed to come over all responsible. ‘May I remind you that there has been a theft …’
Fearing her mother might still end up in a cell, Honey protested. ‘Look, my mother is not a thief and neither am I.’
She threw Doherty a pleading look, but he had his back turned and appeared to be making a phone call.
‘I did not steal this horse,’ said Honey’s mother. ‘My daughter did not steal this horse. The truth is that two of her chefs got drunk and came back with it to the hotel. They couldn’t remember where they got it either.’
‘Is that so?’ Sensing closure on this case, the two policemen moved closer. ‘They were drunk?’
‘Mother …’ Honey attempted to quieten her. The last thing she wanted was for Smudger and his accomplice to be locked up over Christmas. There was a lot of cooking to be done.
Her mother pushed her away.
‘Of course they were drunk. ‘God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen’. You’ve probably sung the carol yourself. People get merry at Christmas.’
‘Not us, madam. We’re policemen. We have a job to do.’
During the last events of this debacle, Doherty had been on the phone to the people at the Theatre Royal and explained the situation.
‘We’re all out of here,’ he said. ‘Just take the horse back and they won’t press charges. They’ve got a pantomime to perform.’ There was no mistaking his tone. He’d given an order. The two officers headed for their car.
‘And we,’ he said, turning to Honey, ‘have a murder to solve.
Chapter Thirty
Honey was tossing and turning in her bed, pummelling imaginary lumps in her pillow. She twisted until she was wrapped tightly in her duvet, feet sticking out one end.
She sighed, closed her eyes, opened them again, and made an effort to disentangle herself from the chrysalis covering of feather filled down. The duvet wasn’t letting go that easily. She ended up on the floor, spewed out like jam from a huge marshmallow.
No matter how hard she tried, the fact that Doherty was asleep in another bed on the other side of the yard denied her the sleep she craved. And she had to have sleep! There was so much to do.
Quietly, so as not to disturb Lindsey in the adjoining bedroom, she reached out for the bedside light. In the dead of night, the sound of the switch turning on sounded like an explosion to her ears.
She listened for any sign of movement. There was none. The night was complete; dark and silent, yet somehow tingling with apprehension.
A thought came bouncing into her mind; she could sneak across the yard and into the hotel. By morning she could be back in her own bed and Lindsey would be none the wiser.
Why are you doing this?
The mature voice of reason spoke loud and clear. Up until now, Lindsey had been adult about her mother and her policeman friend. The only thing that had changed was a stranger blabbing about them marrying and the arrival of Professor Jake Truebody.
She pushed the urge to fill the empty half of Doherty’s bed into the back of her mind.
Occupy yourself.
Yes. That was the thing to do. The murder of Clarence Scrimshaw was posing quite a puzzle. She stirred the facts around in her mind like the ingredients of an Irish stew.
Write it down.
Yes! That was the right thing to do. Write it down.
Stealthily opening the top drawer in her bedside cabinet revealed a notepad and pen which had ostensibly been placed there to record her dreams. The process had been recommended by Mary Jane as a way of purging the bad spirits of the past that occasionally came to haunt her.
As a matter of fact, Honey found her dreams mostly filled with general day-to-day things, such as guests who didn’t pay their bills, though sometimes they were far more imaginative. A Roman legion marching through the dining room featured on one occasion. Her dead husband Carl turning up either in spirit or physical form was the stuff her nightmares were made of – hence her unease with regard to Jake Truebody. Too many emotions were being stirred up by his presence.
Naked except for a dab of Chanel behind each ear, she piled three pillows behind her and sat up. Pen and notepad in hand, she was ready for action.
Now what?
Right. List everything she knew about the death of Clarence Scrimshaw. Now, what strikes me most about this man? Honey asked herself.
That name for a start; straight out of Charles Dickens. Scrimshaw. She’d never met anyone with that name. Not one guest had ever checked in with that name. It was archaic and far from common. With the end of the pen resting on her lips,
she pondered why that was, and decided that perhaps people with that name had wanted something more jaunty and modern and changed it by deed poll.
But all that was beside the point. The blank sheet in front of her awaited words of enlightenment with regard to Clarence Scrimshaw’s murder, and words had to be written. The blank page ordered it be so.
First she made headings, noting how, when, and where he’d died. After that there came the questions and clues. Number one, why the overkill? Any one of the three methods used was enough to kill him. Someone had to want somebody dead real bad to do it three times. Perhaps it was some kind of joke designed for the police; spot the method that hadn’t been used. Poison?
Scrutinising what she’d written did little to help. The methods were there in black and white, yet a ‘Eureka!’ moment refused to materialise .
She turned her attention to motive. Not so easy. So who had a motive? His employees regarded him as too mean to live. Could one of them – all of them? – have decided to put him out of his misery?
It didn’t gel. Surely a discontented employee would have committed a murder in anger, done it swiftly there and then, possibly grabbing something heavy to do it with. Honey recalled having seen two brass-stemmed table lamps at the scene of the crime. Anyone killing in the instant heat of anger would have grabbed one of those, given old Clarence a mighty bash over the head, then come to their senses and rode out of Dodge – or Bath in this case – as fast as their legs or a tuned-up engine could carry them.
A disgruntled author was another possibility. From what she’d heard, publishing houses initially treated their authors like foreign wives bought over the internet: willing to work and regularly screwed. After a while, though the willingness to work was still there, the willingness to be screwed was not. Patricia Pontefract was a case in point. In Honey’s opinion, Patricia seemed believable when she said she wasn’t the killer. Her brusqueness could be interpreted as evidence of her honesty, but that didn’t mean to say that she always told the truth. After all, Patricia made her living from fiction.
Scrimshaw had probably made a few enemies over the years. Doherty’s crew had done some pretty swift and sure research into the old guy’s life. Overall it seemed that Clarence Scrimshaw’s closest acquaintances were his accountant and his lawyer. Both of them were to receive a visit from Doherty shortly after Boxing Day and possibly at their homes. Neither profession was likely to be haunting their offices until around January the fifth.
When it came to employees, there was Samantha Brown. She was pretty, a little bit empty upstairs, and, according to investigation, was a single parent. Apparently Sam’s mother looked after her son for two days of the week, with the remaining three days covered by a day nursery called Total Teeny Tots. Day nurseries of any description didn’t come cheap, so Sam couldn’t be earning enough to pay for it. Now who, Honey wondered, was paying for that? The father? And who was the father? Perhaps old man Scrimshaw had had more than just a soft spot for Samantha. It was something to look into. OK, the boss of Mallory and Scrimshaw was a bit long in the tooth but, as her mother had told her, the market was out there. Snow on the roof, but a fire in the grate; wasn’t that what she’d said?
She made a note that it wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility. David Longborough had hinted at Sam having been close to the old man. It could have been innocent, or it could have been incredibly serious. Office flings between employee and boss could start very innocently. Sam probably used to take Scrimshaw his tea mid-morning and perhaps he’d hinted at something extra, something a bit more satisfying than a digestive biscuit. If Scrimshaw had taken a shine to her, then perhaps he may have imparted secrets to her that nobody else knew anything about.
The list only made it to half way down the page. Honey frowned. She favoured seeing more suspects on her list. The fact was that none of them actually leapt from the page with a label attached saying take a closer look at me.
She stopped writing. There were no answers, only questions; no clues, only conjecture. And no Doherty, she thought, studying a solitary rum truffle sitting on her bedside table. The truffle would have to do.
She awoke to the sound of something buzzing not far from her ear. At first she sat bolt upright thinking it was the fire alarm. The blue light on her phone was flashing blue. Its clock face said it was three in the morning.
She spouted a few swear words in the phone’s direction before picking it up.
‘Who the hell is ringing my phone at this deathly hour?’
‘A guy with half a bed to spare. I’m lonely.’
‘Shhh. Keep your voice down!’
‘I am keeping my voice down.’
Honey frowned, one ear trained in the direction of Lindsey’s bedroom. There was no point in waking her up.
She threw back the duvet and reached for her dressing gown. ‘I’m coming.’
She fumbled in the dark for her slippers. Unfortunately they seemed to have gone wandering by themselves. The only footwear her fingers connected with were a pair of knee-high boots that she’d worn when out shopping. She pulled them on.
Pausing outside Lindsey’s room, she listened for any of movement but heard nothing. Lindsey had to be sound asleep.
Wrapping the towelling robe more tightly around herself, Honey crept to the front door, crossed the yard to back door of the hotel, went along the corridor that led to Reception, and up the stairs to the first floor.
Every experienced hotelier was totally aware that honeymooners required a four-poster bed, a bottle of bubbly, and total privacy. The last requirement was the most essential, thus the honeymoon suite at the Green River Hotel was situated on the second floor, around the corner at the far end of the landing, where on clear nights moonlight threw a pool of silver through a dramatically arched window. The window overlooked the fire escape to the rear of the hotel, the coach house roof, and the back of the buildings in the next street.
Honey paused, one booted foot placed neatly in front of the other. Something was wrong. The landing lights should have been on. Even at this hour their muted glow should have lit the landing in case of mishap.
But the lights weren’t on. There was only moonlight streaming through that arched window. A chilling thought occurred to her. Arched windows like that figured prominently in movies. Movies about haunted houses in places like Amityville.
But this is Bath! Things like that don’t happen here.
Keeping a keen look out for axe-wielding maniacs, she crept along the landing. Nothing to be scared of, she told herself. Of course not. She knew this old building well, and as far as she was aware it didn’t harbour the ghosts of any axe murderers. There was only Sir Cedric, who might or might not be a figment of Mary Jane’s imagination.
Gathering the warmth of her thick towelling dressing-gown more closely around her, she prowled along like a cat burglar in search of loot.
Straighten up! March forward! What are you so scared of?
She was just about to obey this urge to be courageous, when a shadow cut into the pool of silver moonlight. In an instant Honey was in a half-crouch behind a carved oak linen cupboard that she’d had the foresight to install in a handy place – handy for hiding behind when shadows loomed up in front of you.
One side of her brain was suggesting Doherty was waiting for her outside his room. The other side of her brain, the more cautious side that looked left and right before crossing the road, and meant that never walked under ladders or brought hawthorn blossom into the house, told her to hang back.
The possibility that she may have disturbed Lindsey entered her head, but if Lindsey was following her, she would have declared her presence with an accusatory statement, like ‘And where do you think you’re going at this time of night, as if I didn’t know?’
Unless Lindsey had her own agenda for prowling around.
Her throat constricted as the worst case scenario hit her; Lindsey and Jake Truebody; was it possible?
The last thing she wanted wa
s her daughter thinking she was spying on her. On the other hand, she would really like to know if a little hanky-panky was going on here; quite a lot of hanky-panky if her daughter was intending to creep into his room.
Now what? Should she jump out and confront whoever it was?
Ascertaining the size and shape of the shadow wasn’t easy. Shadows by nature can get distorted depending on the light shining behind them; a squat dwarf becoming a string bean.
Pulling together all the logic she could muster, she did her damnedest to work out whether the shadow had resembled anyone she knew.
Can I hear breathing, or can’t I?
She couldn’t. She couldn’t see or hear anyone, yet she was convinced that somebody was there.
Suddenly she heard footsteps softly falling on the carpet. Someone was standing in the dark, waiting, perhaps listening because he’d heard her.
She held her breath.
If it wasn’t Lindsey and it wasn’t Doherty or a sleepwalking guest, then it had to be a male intruder. Her reasoning for it being a male intruder rather than female was that, on the whole, women weren’t attracted to a career in burglary. There was too much climbing around, and wearing stockings over your head caused ladders and played havoc with a good hairstyle.
Whoever it was had decided to move. Unfortunately, they’d chosen to move in her direction.
Pressing herself tightly against the wall and behind the linen press, she crouched lower, hoping for instant invisibility and worrying her chocolate-thickened thighs might give her away. Where was a policeman when you needed one? Hanging around in his room.
So phone him!
She checked for her phone. Her fingers detected a distinct bulge in her pocket. She felt for the keypad, desperately trying to recall the location of the shortcut key. She couldn’t find it.
The shadow passed close by. Whoever it was would soon see her. She had no choice. Once he was at some distance she would run to the honeymoon suite and get Doherty to deal with it.
As with the best laid plans of mice and men and people with mobile phones, things went astray. Hers began to ring.
The Ghost of Christmas Past: A Honey Driver Murder Mystery (Honey Driver Mysteries Book 8) Page 19