Beatrice

by King, Rebecca

  “Why? Who are you?” The stranger demanded arrogantly as he studied Fred, whose job was evident from the uniform he wore.

  “Detective Inspector Bosville, Great Tipton Constabulary. This is my colleague, Detective Brown.”

  The man swallowed harshly and instinctively took a step back.

  “What’s your name?” Isaac demanded as he withdrew a little notebook and pencil from his pocket. The simple action was apparently enough to strike fear into the stranger’s heart, because his gaze began to flicker around them as though he was about to turn tail and run away.

  “Sigmund Hargraves,” he gasped. “My name is Sigmund Hargraves.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “What?”

  Isaac sighed, and stared hard at the man. “Where do you live?”

  Hargraves had the good grace to look uncomfortable while he clearly struggled to come up with a plausible address. He studied Isaac for a moment then shifted his gaze to Mark, who scowled darkly at him. Eventually, he seemed to realise that he was going nowhere until he told them what they wanted to know.

  “24 Southside, Great Tipton.”

  Isaac jotted the address down and shared a look with Mark. They both knew that Southside was the most deprived area in the county, where single rooms could be occupied by families of up to 12 to 15 people, and living standards were dire. Crime was rife, and there was nothing some of its residents wouldn’t do to earn a few extra pennies; including murder.

  “Who do you work for?” Isaac’s look dared the man to deny that he worked for anyone.

  Unfortunately, Hargraves was not the kind of man who would be cowed by a single look, and merely threw him a defiant look. The snide smile that curved his lips warned everyone that he was not going to co-operate without being pushed, or taken down to the station.

  “Unless you are going to arrest me purely because I want my parcel back, I don’t have to tell you anything,” Hargraves snapped.

  “Someone drove a carriage that looks very similar to yours down this lane yesterday and nearly ran this lady over. Not only that, but they returned and then nearly ran both the gentleman and the lady over. That is attempted murder around these parts,” Mark challenged.

  “It wasn’t me,” Hargraves snapped and glanced toward his carriage with a shrug. “Lots of people have carriages like mine. You cannot pin it on me.”

  “It’s a nice carriage,” Isaac mused as he studied the huge black monstrosity that was parked at the end of Beatrice’s driveway.

  “I bought it last year,” Hargraves reported proudly. “It’s top of the range.”

  “Must have cost a pretty penny,” Mark replied thoughtfully.

  Hargraves carefully ignored that and turned his attention to Beatrice. “If you do receive a package and it contains a plant, it is for me and I should be grateful for it back.” He turned around to walk away only to find Isaac blocking his path.

  “Before you go; what were you doing yesterday?” Although his voice was casual, there was a hint of steel hidden in the husky tones that made Hargraves glance around him warily.

  “Pardon?”

  “Yesterday man; what were you doing yesterday?”

  “I was visiting a friend in Tipton Hollow. Then I went home,” Hargraves replied crisply.

  “Which friend?”

  Silence settled over them for a moment. “He isn’t here anymore.”

  “Who?” Isaac demanded.

  “My friend, Barnaby Price.”

  “Where does he live now then?” Mark demanded. “This Barnaby Price?” He had no doubt that Hargraves was just making information up as he went along just to give them answers, but why?

  “Look, what is this? I haven’t done anything wrong so you have no business asking me all these questions.” He pointed one long finger at Beatrice. “She has a plant of mine and needs to give it back.”

  “I have nothing of yours,” Beatrice argued. “You keep calling by here because you refuse to accept my word.” She glanced at Mark. “When I didn’t answer the door, he even tried to open the back door.”

  “Why?” Mark demanded in a voice that was deadly.

  “I knew she was in,” Hargraves retorted, completely unconcerned that he had been attempting to break in.

  Hargraves opened his mouth to speak again only for Mark to intervene.

  “I warn you here and now, we will investigate your attempt to enter this house without invitation. It is breaking and entering. If your name and address turns out to be different from what you have told us, I will arrest you for giving us false information and hindering a police investigation. If you don’t provide us with your exact name and address, and I find out that you have been pestering these people again, we will find you and you will come down to the station to answer a few pertinent questions. If we have to come after you Hargraves, I promise you here and now that you will not leave until you have told us the truth.” He poked one long finger at the man’s chest. “If someone does not answer their door to you, and you let yourself in, you are breaking and entering. So be warned. Stay out of houses that don’t belong to you.”

  Before anyone could say anything else, Hargraves turned around and walked away.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  As soon as Hargraves had gone, Mark turned to Beatrice.

  “Now, I understand that you have made a rather grim discovery this morning?”

  Beatrice nodded. “It’s at the top of the garden,” she replied solemnly and accepted the elbow Ben held out to her.

  “You don’t have to see it again if you don’t want to,” Ben assured her.

  “I am alright. I have already seen it anyway.” Although her words were brave, the reluctance on her face told them all that it was the last thing she wanted to do. Sure enough, she got no further than the rockery before she just couldn’t bring herself to go any further.

  “I will wait here for you,” she sighed and threw them an apologetic look. “I am sorry, I just can’t –”

  Fred smiled sympathetically at her and walked past her.

  Mark sighed as he squatted down beside the corpse and studied the handle that protruded from the man’s chest.

  “What happened yesterday?” Isaac asked as he knelt on the other side of the body.

  Ben sighed. “I found Beatrice hobbling along the road after the carriage had nearly run her over. I brought her back here on my horse. I stayed to help her with her boot and to wait out the thunderstorm. I put my horse in the stable beside the house, and am positive that the body wasn’t here then. I can’t say I really noticed anything when I left a couple of hours later. It was dark, you see, and I just didn’t look.”

  He didn’t add that he had been too busy thinking about Beatrice to remember much of anything except the way the candlelight had reflected in the softness of her eyes, and the intimate atmosphere that had settled over them both during dinner.

  “What time did you leave?” Mark asked quietly.

  Beatrice sat on the rockery wall; close enough to hear them yet far enough so that she didn’t have to look at the body.

  Ben looked at Mark, then Isaac. “I left here about ten o’clock. Mrs Partridge went to her friend’s house after church, and stayed there until the rain eased enough for her to come home. She got back here about four o’clock and made dinner while Beatrice and I were busy in the study. After dinner, I left.”

  Mark looked at Beatrice. “Apart from the carriage, there was nothing else untoward happen that you noticed?”

  Beatrice and Ben shared a look but, before they could reply, Isaac spoke.

  “He doesn’t look familiar to you at all?” Isaac glanced at Beatrice expectantly.

  “I have never seen him before,” Beatrice replied.

  “Me neither,” Ben added.

  “I don’t think he is familiar with us,” Isaac muttered with a sigh and began to rifle through the dead man’s pockets in search of clues.

  Aside from a set of keys, and a few loose coins, there
was nothing in his pockets; no wallet and no identification of any kind. While Mark and Isaac studied the body, Fred began to walk backward and forward along the tree-line, studying the ground as he went.

  Ben felt a little useless and merely watched them for several long moments before he turned to Beatrice.

  “Fred, go and find the doctor, and send for reinforcements to take him to the mortuary,” Mark nodded to the body at his feet. “We will get him out of here soon, Beatrice.”

  “Has there been any sign of a struggle?” Ben asked with a frown.

  “Doesn’t look like it,” Isaac muttered as he studied the ground around the body.

  “There must have been,” Beatrice sighed and turned around before she could stop herself. She closed her eyes as soon as she saw the body and turned her gaze resolutely toward Mark. “I mean; he can’t have just been walking along and then just accepted being stabbed in the chest. If someone comes at you with a knife, you would struggle for your life, wouldn’t you?”

  “Most people would,” Mark agreed with a sigh. He had to agree with her theory because the twigs on the trees were unbroken, and the ground was unmarked by boot prints.

  “Is there anything else we need to know?” Mark asked, and frowned when Beatrice and Ben looked cautiously at each other. Sensing there was something they didn’t want to mention outside, Mark gestured toward the house. “Shall we?”

  Beatrice nodded and didn’t bother to look back as she hurried across the lawn.

  “Stay with the body until Fred gets back,” Mark ordered Fred before he followed Ben.

  Once inside the sitting room, they explained about the plant and led Mark and Isaac to the study.

  “Good Lord,” Mark was too polite to mention the smell that came with it, but saw the wry look on Beatrice face and smiled. Beside him, Isaac coughed.

  “Do you think it is supposed to smell like that?”

  “If not, it’s a science experiment that’s gone horribly wrong for somebody,” she replied dryly.

  “Let’s go to the sitting room,” Ben suggested, and smiled when everyone sighed with relief and hurried out of the room.

  Mark put the packaging paper back onto the table and looked at them. “Right, well, until ownership can be established, given what is written on the packaging, I consider that the plant is yours Beatrice. You should not hand it over to anyone.”

  Ben took that moment to hand Mark the piece of paper he had prised out of the dead man’s hand. He put it beside the single line of writing on the packaging paper, and was unsurprised to find the writing was identical.

  “So the dead man is the person who delivered the plant,” Mark murmured thoughtfully.

  “Beatrice also saw him outside the window during the worst of the storm, when it was really black outside.”

  Isaac frowned. “He didn’t try to get in?”

  Beatrice shivered and drew her shawl tighter around her shoulders. “Nobody knocked on the door, so he didn’t want to get in. He was just looking through the window at us. One minute he was there, the next minute he had gone.”

  Mark nodded although couldn’t exactly recall how bad the weather had gotten outside yesterday. He hadn’t gone to church because he had been called to investigate a burglary in Great Tipton, and Harriett hadn’t gone because she had been feeling a little unwell. They had spent their free hours enjoying the delights of matrimony and, as a result, he had been too engrossed in his wife to care about what was going on outside. Still, he could vaguely recall that it had grown dark for a while, and had lain with his wife in his arms listening to the rain for quite some time. He carefully tucked those tender memories aside and turned his attention back to Beatrice and Ben’s afternoon which, by all accounts, had been completely different.

  “I can only assume that he may have been checking to see if you received the plant. If he went to the woods, he may either have been sheltering from the rain, or intended to make his way home once it had been delivered,” Mark reasoned. “I think that the plant is yours. The label certainly seems to suggest it. However, for now, you should keep it in the study with the curtains drawn so that anybody who looks into the house won’t see it. Also, keep Hargraves – if that is his name – out of the house.” He picked up the list of names they had found, and shook his head in disbelief. He thought that the village would be able to enjoy a period of peace and calm after the Psychic Circle debacle. Heavens, how wrong he had been.

  Beatrice tapped the sheet that contained the diagrams and Latin names. “I think that these are cultivation notes. We had planned to go to see the people on the list this morning to see if the plant we have is something my uncle had worked on.”

  “Does this look like his writing?”

  “I am not sure. My uncle used to write in spidery scrawl. It was highly unusual for him to write in block capitals like this. I have tried to compare the handwriting on these notes to his writing, but it is really difficult to tell for certain if they are one and the same.”

  Mark compared the writing, and knew what she meant. However, the more he studied them, the more he suspected that the notes had been written by a third person.

  “Where did you find them?” He placed both pieces of paper back onto the table with a sigh.

  “They were tucked away in this book on Rare and Tropical plants. We know from this that the plant we have is definitely an orchid, however we cannot find our particular variety. There is nothing even remotely similar to it in there.”

  “It is most probably rare,” Mark conceded thoughtfully.

  “We think that the notes we have relate to the cultivation of the rare variety that arrived yesterday,” Beatrice sighed.

  “I think you need to be very careful, Beatrice. Leave the investigation to us,” Mark said quietly. “It may be that this man had the plant and was killed over it. Someone may come and ask for it back.”

  Beatrice swallowed and felt a little sick. “Like Hargraves has.”

  “I am not suggesting for one second that he is the killer. However, for the time being, do not, under any circumstances, let any strangers, especially Hargraves, into this house. Keep the doors locked and don’t answer the door to anyone you don’t know. I would also strongly recommend that you don’t go out at night, and try not to walk the lanes.” He mentally winced at just how many orders he had given her. He had effectively placed her under house arrest and knew from the mulish look on her face that she wasn’t going to comply.

  “I refuse to be a prisoner in my own home,” she retorted flatly.

  Although the words sounded confident, a small voice reminded her about the incidents in the lane yesterday. She began feel a little sick at the prospect of just how dire her situation could have been. “While I agree not to answer the door to strangers, and will now keep it locked whenever I am at home, I do have a life to live. I cannot just stay at home and wait. I have to go about my daily life and, given where I live, it is impossible to go anywhere without using the lanes.”

  “Getting about isn’t a problem, Beatrice. I can take you in the carriage,” Ben assured her. “It is safer than you walking. Given how proud Hargraves is of his carriage, I doubt that he would be foolish enough to crash into us.”

  Beatrice felt the small hairs on the back of her neck stand on end.

  That being the case, she thought. Why did he risk damaging his carriage by attempting to run me over yesterday?

  She turned her attention back to Ben and she frowned when his eyes met and held hers meaningfully for several long moments. She had no doubt that he too was thinking about the journey they had planned to take today, however neither of them mentioned it in front of Mark and Isaac. She wondered if Ben was going to succumb to Mark’s dictates by forgetting about visiting the people on the list either. Somehow she doubted it.

  “Look, I have to go to London tomorrow to give evidence at this trial for the clairvoyants. I am going to be gone for the rest of the week, but will hand over some of the investigative wor
k to my colleagues to continue with while I am away. They need to check out Hargraves’ address, and work on identifying the deceased. He may be one of the men on the list, we don’t know yet. I just don’t want you getting involved in this any more than you already have, Beatrice. This is a dead body we have here, not a note of warning.”

  She nodded and reluctantly admitted that he was right. Still, the thought of having to sit around and do nothing while he toddled off to London to deal with the court case, didn’t sit well with her at all. Just thinking about all of that inertia made her want to fidget.

  It took an age before Mark had finished asking his questions, and issuing orders. Eventually, both he and Isaac appeared to be satisfied that they had enough to go on and quietly left.

  “What are we going to do now?” She asked Ben when Mark and Isaac had gone to speak to several constables who were scouring the garden for clues, and they were alone in the kitchen.

  “We need to think carefully about what we do from now on, Beatrice. This is no game. This is a real murder investigation,” he warned on a sigh as he moved to stand beside her.

  She tore her gaze away from the men outside and looked up at him. “I don’t know how to thank you for all of this,” she murmured quietly. “You have done so much for me, and haven’t uttered a word in protest.”

  “I really don’t mind,” he assured her.

  Her snort of disbelief was loud. “I have dragged you into a murder investigation.”

  Ben looked down into her eyes and was immediately ensnared by her feminine beauty. “I don’t want to be anywhere else, Beatrice,” he whispered and slid an arm around her waist to draw her against him.

  “I need to check on Maud,” Beatrice whispered, but made no attempt to move.

  “How are you coping with all of this, Beatrice?” Ben murmured, and tipped her head up until she looked at him. “A lot has happened in such a very space of time.”

  “I know,” she sighed, although wasn’t entirely sure if he was talking about the strange events surrounding the plant, or their relationship. “To think that only the day before yesterday I thought life was boring.”