Dead in Devon

by Stephanie Austin

  I would give it to Mr Singh.

  I went down into the shop, switched on the dreadful fluorescent light and surveyed the scene of chaos: the walls partly painted, the shelves and heavy furniture shoved into the middle of the room and draped with old sheets. I threaded a route through the furniture to the door at the front of the shop, a door I had never seen open, and sorted through a handful of keys until I found the right one, an old iron key that fitted into the large keyhole. I tried it but, despite all my rattling about, it was too stiff to turn. The bolts wouldn’t move either. I’d have to return with a can of WD40. Another day.

  I was due at a client’s in a few minutes to tackle a load of ironing. Once a fortnight I worked my way through a basketful for an accountant who was very particular about his shirts.

  I switched off the light, tucked the chess set under my arm and prepared to go out the way I had come in. When I opened the door, I shrieked and almost dropped the box. Paul was standing right outside, his hand raised as if he was about to press the bell.

  ‘Juno!’ He laughed. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you!’

  We both laughed then, and after a moment’s hesitation, we hugged each other. Although we’d spoken on the phone, we hadn’t seen each other since before Nick’s murder, hadn’t touched. He knew all about my inheritance of course, after one long, long phone call. ‘I was driving by and I saw your van parked across the road. I noticed the light was on in the shop, so I thought I’d stop and say hello.’

  ‘I’m glad you did. It’s good to see you. Are you here for long?’

  ‘Just for a few days, whilst I’m sorting things out. I’ll be up and down quite a bit from now on.’

  ‘How’s your family?’ I asked.

  ‘Great. They’re all great.’

  ‘Good.’ He looked great himself.

  There was a slight pause while we both stood smiling and shuffling our feet.

  ‘How’s it going in there?’ Paul nodded in the direction of the shop.

  I sighed. ‘To be honest, I don’t know what I’m going to do with it all.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘That’s kind of you, but I’m sure you’ve got enough to do.’

  ‘I can find time to give you a hand.’

  ‘Look, Paul … I’ve got to go now,’ I said, checking my watch. ‘I’ve got a client in a little while.’

  ‘Still working, then?’

  I made a face. ‘I can’t afford to stop.’

  ‘What about this evening?’ he suggested. ‘We can grab a pint and a bite to eat and you can tell me all about it.’

  ‘That would be wonderful.’

  We agreed to meet at seven.

  After an hour in Paul’s company I began to feel whole lot better. I filled him in on the details he didn’t already know – mostly my adventures with Richard and Helena and all the tussles over the will.

  ‘But they didn’t contest it?’

  ‘Not in court, no,’ I admitted, ‘but Helena and her husband put up obstacles every step of the way − delayed things, refused to answer emails – all very petty, really. In the end the solicitors had to get heavy.’ I sighed. ‘I wish Nick hadn’t done it, named me in his will.’

  ‘Well, I don’t blame him. His kids never gave him the time of day, and he’d grown fond of you. He certainly wouldn’t have wanted you to agonise over it.’

  ‘I suppose not,’ I admitted reluctantly.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know if I can bear to live there …’

  ‘Creepy?’ he asked.

  ‘No, not that so much,’ I told him, ‘just sad. There are all his things … I’ll have to get rid of them. And there’s a lot of stock in the shop that I haven’t got a clue what to do with …’

  ‘Don’t look so worried.’ He put an arm around my shoulders, giving me a friendly hug. ‘It’ll all work out.’

  ‘I suppose. But at the moment, I find it unnerving, just going in there.’

  ‘Well, that’s understandable, especially with all Nick’s things still there.’

  ‘His children didn’t take any of it. There are his clothes …’

  ‘You need to clear the place out, make a fresh start. Look, I’m busy tomorrow morning, but I could be free in the afternoon. Why don’t I help you? We’ll go in and clear all his clothes. That’ll be a start.’ He picked up his beer glass and clinked it against mine. ‘You never know, we might find these rings.’

  ‘I wish we could,’ I told him devoutly. ‘At least then I could prove I hadn’t taken the bloody things.’

  He frowned thoughtfully into his pint, his dark brows drawing together in a manner I was trying hard not to find adorable. ‘You don’t think that Helena or her husband might have hired someone to look for these rings before? That maybe that’s why Nick was murdered?’

  ‘The thought has crossed my mind,’ I admitted, ‘but it doesn’t make sense, does it? I mean, if Nick had them all this time, or Helena thought he had, then why would she suddenly make a move to grab them? She’d already been waiting for years. As far as she knew, she was going to inherit everything when Nick died anyway, why not just wait a little longer?’

  Paul nodded reluctantly. ‘And there’s been no sign of our Russian friends, I take it?’

  ‘No,’ I told him gloomily. ‘Sometimes I think that we’ll never find out what happened.’ Suddenly I found I had to dash tears away. ‘What was the old fool up to?’ I asked angrily, groping in my pocket for a tissue. ‘What did he do to get himself killed?’

  Paul presented me with a handkerchief. ‘I don’t suppose we’ll ever know that either.’

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Next morning, after I had walked the Tribe and called in on Maisie, I went to Nick’s place and began a systematic search. I was looking for the rings and anything that might throw light on Nick’s murder. I started in the bedroom where I stripped the bed and turned the mattress, inspecting it for holes, tears, or any places where stuffing might have been removed to create a hiding place. Then I took out every sock, shirt and item of underwear from the chest of drawers, shook it out, folded it and replaced it. A small round tin, stuffed between layers of clothes, rattled in a promising manner, but only contained collar studs. I searched the pockets of all the coats and suits hanging in the wardrobe, probed the linings, felt down the length of all his ties and shook out every one of his shoes. I found nothing.

  The cabinet in the bathroom revealed nothing but a shaving brush, soap and denture fixative. I’d probably been watching too many movies, but I decided to take the lid off the cistern. It seemed to be a common hiding place for drugs, guns, and other potentially lethal things wrapped in plastic. The lid weighed a ton. It took me a minute or two of grunting, trying to heave the wretched thing aside enough for me to look underneath, and then the only object confronting me was the ballcock.

  Disgusted, I turned to the airing cupboard, removing every sheet, blanket, towel and pillowcase before shaking it and refolding it, as I had with the clothes.

  I was about to begin in the living room when the sickly rattle of the doorbell announced Paul’s arrival. I gave a silent cheer. I felt as if I’d been alone there for hours. It was a relief to see another human being.

  Together we got a lot done. We bagged up Nick’s clothes, curtains and bedding, loaded them into Paul’s van and drove them to Ashburton’s only charity shop. Paul tore up the carpet in the living room, and, along with the mattress, took it to his field to burn. I scrubbed the floorboards until my knuckles were raw and felt a lot better.

  Finally, we went down into the shop. After a struggle we managed to get the door of the shop open, and with the jangling of a little iron bell, let in fresh air for the first time in years.

  ‘There you are, open for business!’ Paul declared.

  ‘Well hardly.’ I looked around me at the shrouded furniture, the still unfinished walls. I had a long way to go before I reached that point.


  And progress was about to slow down again. Paul was returning to Nottingham next day. He’d shut up his unit in the bazaar and put his plot of land up for sale. He’d be back in a few weeks, he promised, to sort out his workshop. He would give me another hand then, if I still needed it.

  He gave me a little present before he left, wrapped in tissue paper. ‘Saw this in a market in Nottingham,’ he told me, ‘and I thought of you.’

  Inside the tissue paper I found a gleaming silver hatpin ending in a carved knob of black stone. ‘Whitby jet,’ he informed me.

  I thanked him with a hug, reminding myself I must try and find a netsuke for his collection some time. I was relieved he was going away, to be honest. It was altogether too comfortable having him around. No point in getting cosy. He wasn’t mine to keep.

  I went back to the shop later and let myself in. It still felt very strange to me, letting myself in with my own keys. I wondered if I’d ever be able to climb those stairs without thinking of Nick, of the morning I had found him dead.

  Walking across the bare boards of the living room, my footsteps sounded like thunder. When Paul and I had removed the carpet we had pushed all the furniture up to one end of the living room. It was still there, the dining chairs stacked on the table. I squeezed my way around them to the bureau, opened it and collected every scrap of paper from the pigeonholes and drawers, put them in a cardboard box I’d brought for the purpose and brought it home.

  I spent the evening going through it, my feet up on the coffee table, Bill sleeping on my lap. Most of it was correspondence, and most of that told the story of a long and increasingly acrimonious dispute between Nick and the Inland Revenue. He had settled before they took him to court, but only just. I kept the document showing his proof of payment and threw the rest in the bin. It was junk. I doubt if the taxman had murdered Nick, however much he might have felt like it.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  The phone rang as I was getting breakfast.

  ‘Good news, Miss Browne.’ It was the inspector’s voice. ‘We think we’ve found one of your Russians.’

  I put down the bowl of breakfast cereal I’d been about to tuck into. ‘Where?’

  ‘In London. His name is Ilya Pietrov, Ukrainian by birth and known to the EU police, but judging from your description of him, I think you probably know him as Igor. Unfortunately, he’s dead. I’ll be sending an officer down to you with a photograph to see if you can identify him. I’m afraid it’s not pretty to look at.’

  ‘What happened?’ I asked. Bill came to sit on my lap as if he wanted to know too.

  ‘He was picked up on CCTV, a few days ago, getting out of a taxi opposite St Thomas Hospital. As he was crossing the road towards Accident and Emergency, he was mown down by a hit-and-run driver in a dark-coloured BMW, which was later found abandoned.’

  ‘Was he killed outright?’ I asked.

  ‘More or less. But he wasn’t well to begin with. He was suffering from sepsis, probably a result of dog bites for which he had never received proper medical attention. Anyway, the good news is, forensics have matched his prints to some found in the house of Mr Albert Evans, definitely placing him at the scene on the day of the murder.’

  ‘But nothing that links him to Nick?’ I asked.

  ‘Not so far. I’m sorry.’

  I thanked the inspector for telling me, promised to look at the photograph, and put the phone down. I dialled Paul’s number straight away, to tell him the news, but there was no reply from his mobile, so I left a message. I was reluctant to try his landline in case Carrie picked up the phone. I didn’t want to make any more waves in that department.

  Later that morning I went round to Ricky and Morris. I’d agreed to help with an urgent order for costumes for Twelfth Night, but was delayed by the arrival of two female police officers – the same two who’d interviewed me about Verbena’s jewellery – with the photograph.

  ‘And was it him?’ Ricky’s voice floated from behind a clothes rail jammed tight with costumes, his precise whereabouts undetectable save for the occasional rustle as he searched for the one he wanted. ‘Was it Igor?’

  ‘It certainly was. It was a head and shoulders shot taken in the mortuary. He looked horrible. Mind you,’ I conceded, brushing at the velvet collar of a cloak with a stiff brush, trying to remove traces of old stage make-up, ‘he didn’t look too pretty when he was alive.’

  ‘He must have been suffering.’ Morris spoke with a pin pressed between his lips as he worked on a repair. ‘I mean,’ he added, removing the pin, ‘to have reached a point where he was prepared to risk getting caught in order to seek medical treatment.’

  ‘A risk Vlad wasn’t prepared to let him take,’ I added. ‘He killed him to shut him up.’

  Morris tutted, over the tear in the costumes rather than Igor’s demise. ‘At least now the police know who murdered Bert Evans.’

  ‘Apparently,’ I went on, ‘the police pathologist thinks that microbes in the water in the fish pool may have been the real cause of Igor’s sepsis.’

  Ricky’s head appeared, parting the costumes on the rail. ‘What comes around, goes around,’ he grinned.

  ‘Don’t be callous,’ Morris protested mildly.

  ‘Oh, Maurice, try not to be such an old woman! He got what he deserved.’

  He turned to look at me. ‘And you can stop having nightmares about him.’

  I smiled but didn’t say anything. I wish I could have felt reassured but somehow the thought that Vlad was on his own, operating out there somewhere as a lone wolf, was scarier than the thought of him and Igor together.

  There’s a sign on the door of the Ashburton Art and Antiques Bazaar, which clearly states that dogs are welcome in the cafe. I suppose taking the entire Tribe in all at once is stretching a point, but they were very well behaved. EB, the miniature Schnauzer, sat upright on my lap, being a very good boy. Schnitzel disappeared under the cafe table, nosing for scraps, Sally, the elderly Labrador, flopped down on the floor, glad of a rest after our walk, and Nookie and Boog sat quietly by my chair, Boog leaning the warm weight of her body against my thigh.

  Across the table sat Sophie Child, staring at EB. ‘I don’t do that kind of thing,’ she told me, pulling a face. ‘Pet portraits,’ she added disdainfully, ‘not my thing at all.’ She pointed at the easel on her unit, a delicate watercolour in progress. ‘That’s my sort of thing.’

  I had to admit that her sort of thing was exquisite: a painting of a rusty garden gate, its slim iron rails entwined by bindweed, the stone pillar to which it was attached encrusted with lichen and half smothered by ivy. Dead leaves had swept in under the gate and scattered across the broken paving of a pathway, leading through an overgrown garden, an ocean of weeds and wildflowers, an abandoned cottage just visible in the distance.

  ‘I don’t do pet portraits,’ she repeated, batting her long lashes and sliding her glasses back up her titchy nose.

  ‘But EB’s mum would like his portrait painted and so I thought of you.’ This wasn’t quite true. EB’s mum had decided to take him to a professional photographer; it had taken some persuasion on my part to convince her that a painting would be better.

  ‘Lots of other artists do pet portraits,’ Sophie told me, shrugging her thin shoulders. ‘Why don’t you ask one of them?’

  ‘Yes, lots of other artists paint pets,’ I agreed, annoyed that my efforts on her behalf were being met with such ingratitude, ‘and because they do, they can afford to buy food and pay rent.’ I nodded in the direction of the painting on her easel.

  ‘When was the last time you sold something like that?’

  Sophie didn’t answer. ‘Why’s he called Ebee?’ she asked.

  ‘EB,’ I corrected. ‘It’s short for his name.’

  ‘Which is what?’

  ‘It’s a secret. You have to guess.’ I have strict instructions from EB’s mum to play this game whenever anyone asks.

  EB, sensing he was the subject of our conversation, sat
up very straight, his fluffy forelegs thrust out in front of him, his bushy eyebrows twitching anxiously.

  ‘Edward Bear?’ Sophie suggested vaguely.

  ‘Wrong. Look, he’s gorgeous, how can you not want to paint him?’

  ‘Edward Bone?’

  ‘It isn’t Edward anything. Stop changing the subject.’

  ‘What’s this one called?’ she asked, pointing.

  Champion Boxer, Bollywood Boogaloo Boogie Nights of Bognor – known to all who love her as Boog – was excited at being pointed at, as this usually meant she was about to receive a rosette. She snuffled, and licked herself on the nose.

  ‘She’s sweet!’ Sophie exclaimed, clicking her fingers. Boog bounded to her feet. With no tail to wag, her whole rear end went into a ridiculous calypso of welcome. Nookie, who up until this point had been sitting aloof, staring into the distance as if gazing at snowy arctic wastes, also stood. Leads began to tangle, and the cafe table, to whose leg most of them were hitched, was dragged two feet across the floor before I got control of it. I could see the cafe owner looking at me askance. It was time for the Tribe and me to depart.

  ‘Look Sophie, if you make a good job of EB then other dog owners will want their portraits painted too. Boog’s a champion. Her mum is a breeder, she knows loads of others and they’re all besotted with their animals. You can’t afford to turn it down.’

  ‘Well, I suppose …’ Sophie began reluctantly. I thrust a piece of paper at her, with EB’s phone number written on it. ‘At least give it some thought.’

  ‘I will,’ she promised, as if she were doing me a favour. ‘Oh … and … thanks,’ she ended weakly.

  By then I’d gathered up the various leads and my escalating temper and was hauling my charges off in the direction of the door.

  I left the bazaar and turned down Sun Street, ready to take the various members of the Tribe to their respective homes. As I walked them along, trying to keep them up together, the long, low shape of Verbena Clarke’s Porsche swept by me. I watched it drive to the end of the street and turn left. The last time I had seen her was in the alley that linked Sun Street with Shadow Lane. Understanding hit me like a brick. What an idiot I was, not to have realised at the time. Verbena hadn’t simply been trying to avoid me. She didn’t want anyone who knew her to see her in that alley, because she’d been coming from Nick’s.