Dressed smartly in her cream linen suit, newly made up and with a firm resolve not to be thwarted in her quest to find out where Alaric might be, or at the very least to learn about the location of the Hyblaean honey-makers, she stepped into the cool interior of the shop.
The young man from yesterday was nowhere to be seen. Instead, an elderly bearded and heavily sun-tanned man wearing a white gown smiled quizzically at her over the top of a pair of small half-moon glasses. Posie saw with a flash of surprise that the old man was wearing a thick gold crucifix over his gown.
‘Parli Inglese?’ asked Posie hopefully. Actually, she had no idea what she was going to do if the man didn’t speak any English…
The man nodded briefly and drew out a high stool for her to sit on, all the while gazing intently at her necklace. Posie introduced herself formally, passing across one of her smart little business cards.
‘How can I help you, signorina?’ asked the old man, reading her name on the card and raising his eyebrows. ‘Are you after a particular remedy? You know this is an apothecary? And an expensive one, too…it does not suit every person’s pocket.’
‘So I have heard,’ she retorted resentfully, climbing onto the seat and remembering Harry Redmayne’s comments about the cost of one spoonful of Hyblaean honey. Did she really look so shabby that this old man needed to warn her of the cost of his wares?
‘I’m not after a remedy. I am after some information. I travelled here especially from England. I was given your shop’s address by an Egyptologist at the British Museum. His name is Harry Redmayne, and he spoke about your shop to me and what it is you sell here. The honey… See here.’
She passed across the scribbled address of the shop which Harry Redmayne had written down on the back of his business card. She untied the bee coin deftly, turning it around before placing it in the man’s hands. She pointed:
‘There,’ she said resolutely. ‘Those words. I know what the second word means, or at least I can guess. But I need to know what “Serafina” is, or who she is. Can you help me?’
The old man frowned and clutched tightly at the coin in the palm of his hand, the other hand gripping at his crucifix. He looked up at her directly, his hand shaking slightly.
‘What is it that this Mr Redmayne wants to know exactly? Why has he sent you here as his messenger?’
‘No, no,’ Posie said impatiently. ‘He doesn’t want to know anything. I told him I was looking for something, for someone actually. He was trying to help me. And he told me to start here. At your shop.’
‘Just who are you looking for, signorina?’
Posie sighed. There was obviously no point in beating about this particular bush. She spoke Alaric’s full name aloud and watched the old man’s face: cool, composed, secretive. Giving nothing away.
However, at the very back of the shop there was a very small rustle of a gold-beaded curtain, and Posie caught a flash of dark olive eyes disappearing behind the moving glitter. She felt a stab of fear as she realised her whole exchange with the old man had probably been overheard. She continued, trying to sound unflustered:
‘Can you help me? Or point me in the right direction? I believe the man I am looking for is here on this island. Have you heard of Alaric at all?’
The old man shook his head, still staring hypnotically at the coin in his gnarled hand. Posie felt irritated. She was certain the old man was lying to her and at the same time she was reminded of the annoying Binkie Dodds who had failed her so spectacularly. She reached across and grabbed the coin back. She got down from the uncomfortable high stool and tied the necklace around her neck again. The old man stared at her, his eyes wide behind the glasses.
‘This coin which you seem so impressed by is the personal property of Alaric Boynton-Dale. It is my intention to return it to him. That is all. I want to see with my own eyes that he is alive and well. I think he has been in danger and is hiding from some very evil person. I will not harm him, or give his location away. I can give him my word of honour. If this Serafina is a person who is protecting him, you can tell her from me that I mean him no harm. Alaric might have other people to fear, but I am not one of them.’
Posie noticed that the man had pocketed both of the business cards she had given him, and so she searched inside her bag for a piece of paper and scribbled the address of the Locatelli guesthouse on the back of it. She noticed as she passed it over to the old man that it was in fact Alaric’s own typewritten sheet of the fairly worthless small coin collection he had inherited from his father, and which she had thrown in her bag whilst rootling around in the annexe at Boynton Hall.
‘You can reach me here, if you think of anything. If you can help me…’ she said, trying to keep the bitterness and sense of failure out of her voice.
But she wasn’t holding out much hope.
****
Posie spent a while reading in her room. She enjoyed Ianthe’s light, almost comical style and she recognised several of the characters who were leaping out of the pages at her from The Tomb of the Honey Bee.
Here was Alaric, recognisable even though she had never met him before – dashing, brave, untameable – thinly disguised as a bee-loving character named Viscount Robert Rowse; here too was a character to all extents and purposes like Eve, Lady Boynton – rich, nasty, bejewelled – but with the key difference that she was madly in love with Viscount Robert Rowse, and would go to any lengths to ensnare him away from his lover… Posie put down the book. She found herself strangely frustrated: why on earth did the book have that odd title?
She yawned. She wasn’t really in the mood for reading. Still less did she want to read a fictional account of a murder mystery set in a version of Boynton Hall, the memory of which, even out here on the beautiful island of Sicily, gave her the creeps. She looked across at a small blue puppet of a knight which she had bought in a market on her way home, and thought how apt it was: she couldn’t shake off the feeling that some clever hand had been at work there, at Boynton Hall, puppeteering everything. She hoped Inspector Lovelace would be able to cut through it all.
Posie looked out of the window at the blue sky melding with the fantastic sparkling sea. Suddenly she felt like a prisoner trapped inside…just like the household at Boynton Hall, she supposed. They would be let out tomorrow, packed off in police cars to sit at the grim Coroner’s Court in Victoria, their every twitch and gesture observed by the detectives as they listened to the grisly details of Ianthe’s death at the Inquest. But Posie knew in her heart that the killer would be much too clever to give anything away in such an obvious fashion, and she couldn’t help but feel the Inspector was clutching at straws.
She determined to go out and send Lady Violet a telegram, updating her, although in truth she had no real news. She was frustrated at the way her pursuit of Alaric was going, and cross at herself for her lack of progress. She knew he was here now; she had seen that glint of guilt, of knowledge, in the old man’s eyes at the apothecary’s shop.
She decided too to spend some time in a little touristy market she had seen nearby, to buy some postcards and gifts. If she had failed in her mission to make this an investigation, she would at least make it look and feel a bit like a holiday.
****
Posie spent an enjoyable late morning wandering the streets near her guesthouse. She continued to look over her shoulder for anyone on her tail, but she had also taken the precaution of employing Enzo, the teenage son of the bellboy at the Locatelli to be her ‘guide’. While they didn’t share a common language, she had sketched out a diagram of a man dressed in the black Venetian costume with a white mask, and had managed to communicate enough to Enzo so that if and when he saw such a character appear, he was to tell Posie at once. If the boy thought her a little crazy, he didn’t say so, and he proved himself both eager and conscientious in response to the tip Posie had given him at the start of the walk.
After sending her telegram, Posie loitered in the local harbour market. She bought triple-mil
led soaps, and a jet-black beaded purse for Prudence. She also found a beautiful framed watercolour of the lagoon which would make a perfect wedding present for her friends Rufus Cardigeon and Dolly Price, whose wedding in September she had been looking forwards to with great excitement.
After a while, she instructed Enzo to carry her purchases back to the guesthouse. Posie felt convinced that she was safe alone, and she wandered aimlessly among the postcard-stands.
She was focusing on a choice between two almost identical postcards of the Cathedral when she became aware that someone was watching her. Moving surreptitiously along the stands, as if she hadn’t a care in the world, she picked up a few more postcards from the racks and then turned a quarter-circle, apparently fishing around in her purse for the correct change to give to the stall holder. From beneath her dark sunglasses but without moving her head at all she took a quick look at the stranger who was loitering on the other side of the pavement, observing her.
Posie almost gasped in shock as what she saw registered, and she dropped her postcards, her change, her carpet bag and her purse in one stupid, careless movement. Everyone turned to stare at her clumsiness and when she looked up from her crouching position on the ground, retrieving her belongings, the loitering person had disappeared. Were her eyes playing tricks on her?
That flash of a glance had left her with the impression of a tall willowy woman, all long limbs, her face obscured by an enormous sun-hat. But there had been no mistaking the red, red coils of hair which had been escaping in wild, curling tendrils from beneath the hat.
Could it be Cosima Catchpole, here on the island with her? It was certainly possible; she wasn’t officially one of the suspects in Ianthe Flowers’ death, and she was not being observed back at Stowe-on-the-Middle-Wold by the police surveillance team.
Had Cosima Catchpole known more about Hyblaean honey and where it came from than she had been letting on? Had she, under her cool and somewhat aloof exterior, still been harbouring feelings of love for Alaric, despite her insistence to the contrary? Had she been lying when she had said their love affair was all over?
Or was she here for more sinister reasons? Had it been Cosima dressed in the carnival outfit, following her and whispering her name at the cave? Posie remembered suddenly the conversation she had had with Major Marchpane about his wife: he had told her that Cosima loved to dress up and act.
So was she here on the island as friend, or foe?
****
Twelve
Having trailed unsuccessfully through the market in pursuit of the woman who might have been Cosima Catchpole, Posie gave up at last, admitted defeat and retreated to a shady café in the precincts of her guesthouse.
Try as she might Posie couldn’t see Cosima’s motive for any of the dangerous events which had led to Alaric’s disappearance, or to the murder of Ianthe Flowers. So what was she doing here on the island? Posie took a long unsatisfying slug of her strong coffee and scowled: none of this made any sense at all. She stuffed another soft pastry cake into her mouth, a Sicilian cream-filled fancy known as a cannoli, which she was developing quite a taste for.
Her thoughts were broken into by a bland, calm, non-descript Englishman’s voice cutting through the busy sounds of the café:
‘Excuse me, do you mind if I join you at your table?’
She had quite forgotten where she was, and without looking up she found herself nodding and making space at the wrought iron table, much as she would have done back home on a café terrace in Covent Garden.
‘But of course…please do.’
When she looked up she got her second shock of the day: so much so that she dropped most of her hot coffee down the front of her lovely cream silk blouse.
‘BINKIE?’ she almost shouted, although the words seemed to get stuck in her throat somewhere. And it was indeed Binkie Dodds, dressed in tweeds as if for an English winter, unfetchingly red and sweaty in the face and peering at her through his bottle-bottom thick glasses.
‘What-ho, old chum!’ he smiled cheerfully, slapping a guidebook to the island down on the table.
‘Don’t suppose you can get a nice cup of English tea in this place, can you? It’s always ruddy coffee on the continent, isn’t it? I’ll have one of those cakes, if you don’t mind, too. You look like you’ve packed on a few pounds in recent years; you won’t mind skipping on just one, will you?’
He swiped the last remaining cannoli, and scoffed it in one. Posie fumed, especially at the remark about her weight, which probably had a grain of truth to it, but was not at all what she wanted to hear. Binkie waved at a passing waiter and ordered coffee.
‘Bit ruddy hot here, what?’
His manner was friendly and almost carefree, totally unlike when she had last met him in his horrible brown office. Posie stared at him in utter disbelief. This was all she needed to complicate matters! She couldn’t help but notice that Binkie kept his beady eyes fixed on her necklace.
‘Bet you’re surprised to see me here, eh?’
‘I would say “surprised” is an understatement,’ she said slowly. She gave him one of her looks.
‘How did you know I was here, in Ortigia of all places? And more specifically, Binkie, what is it you want from me?’
He was drumming his fingers on the snowy cloth of the table. He took his coffee and swigged at it, wincing at its strength.
‘I was due some leave…thought I’d come out here for a holiday, check out some of the archaeology. The Ear of Dionysius alone is meant to be worth the trip.’ He didn’t meet her gaze but stared out at the harbour. He was lying.
‘The TRUTH, Binkie.’
He sighed, flicking the pages of the guidebook absently.
‘That obvious, is it?’
‘I’m not a detective for nothing,’ Posie said sourly.
‘I’m here because I heard you talking to my colleague Harry Redmayne on Friday. I loitered outside my office for a while and heard him telling you to come to Ortigia. I panicked.’
Posie bit her lip on the anger she felt mounting up inside her.
‘Why would you panic?’
‘I thought you were coming out here to give the coin back to them. But I see I’m just in time, it’s still in your possession. Although you really shouldn’t be wearing it like that, you fat-head. It’s a world-class museum piece! It should be in a cabinet, not around your ruddy neck!’
Posie stared at Binkie in horror. He had never been her, or her brother Richard’s favourite person in the world, but now she was convinced that there was something mentally unhinged about him.
The echo of a sentence uttered by Harry Redmayne suddenly came back to her: ‘He gets awfully excited about coins, he could even kill for one!’ She gasped aloud. Could this whole wretched pursuit on the island, the man dressed in the Venetian costume and the whispering at the Archaeology Park have simply been Binkie Dodds trying to intimidate her, desperate for the coin back?
But then reality kicked in: somehow she couldn’t imagine Binkie being creative or ingenious enough to dress up in such an elaborate outfit, or to trail her around in the sweltering heat. He also looked as if he didn’t have the puff, or the willpower.
Binkie stretched out his hand in Posie’s direction, palm upturned. ‘I need you to hand that coin over to me. Now, please.’
Posie laughed incredulously at him. ‘It’s not mine to give you, Binkie,’ she said curtly, gathering up her bag and the postcards. ‘You know that.’
And then something he had said replayed again in her mind:
‘Just who exactly did you think I would be giving this back to anyway?’
‘Why, the monks of course!’ Binkie retorted as if she were stupid. One look at her confused face made him realise she didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.
‘At the Monastery of Serafina,’ he sighed wearily. ‘That was where the coin came from in the first place; it was found by an English explorer who infiltrated the Monastery in the 1600s. He took it for hi
s own collection and then donated it to the British Museum later, where it stayed nicely until your pal Alaric got his hands on it. The monks of Serafina would probably give their eye-teeth to have it returned to them. It’s an ancient coin, priceless. Their Monastery is cut off in the mountains and in a secret location, but I thought you might have sussed it out by now and got there before I’d found you! Anyhow, don’t feel bad: the monks don’t need it; they’re known to be rich beyond belief. And who will ever see it stuck up there? Not like at the British Museum where thousands can visit it every year…’
Posie stared at Binkie, her mouth open. Serafina: not a person after all, and not a Goddess, but a Monastery!
Binkie drivelled on. But Posie wasn’t in the least bit interested in his potted history lesson. Instead, she was putting pieces of the jigsaw together: a secluded Monastery, a perfect place to hide if you were in danger; a secret Monastery, high up in the Hyblaean mountains where in all probability the legendary honey was made; a flash of a gold crucifix swinging against the white robes of the old man at the Il Gioiello Ambra shop; the sumptuous interior of the shop, and the way the old man had stared at the bee coin in a kind of haggard disbelief.
It all fitted nicely! The Il Gioiello Ambra shop must be run by the monks, selling their select wares from the Monastery!
‘Do me a favour, Binkie. Do you happen to know if they make honey up there at this Monastery?’
Binkie scowled. ‘Honey? I haven’t a clue. Now, that coin. Are you going to give it to me, or what?’
‘No,’ said Posie firmly, rising from her chair. ‘Over my dead body. And if you keep hassling me like this I’m going to call the police. Now, go away and leave me be.’
****
Back at the Locatelli, Posie stopped at the Welcome Desk to ask if there were any messages or telegrams for her. She stood in a queue of fellow guests with an ill grace; she was tired and fidgety, longing for a bath and to change out of her coffee-stained blouse. She was also planning on having another stab at reading Ianthe’s book, and then she planned to focus all her energies on trying to locate the Serafina Monastery, using Inspector Lovelace’s contacts in the Sicilian police force if she had to.
The Tomb of the Honey Bee: A Posie Parker Mystery (The Posie Parker Mystery Series Book 2) Page 13