Best Murder in Show (Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries Book 1)

by Debbie Young

  How funny it would be if, after spending so long listening to Damian discouraging me from writing on the basis that it wasn’t a proper job, I penned a play that went on to become an internationally successful production. And Damian would have missed his chance to be my leading man and share the spoils. Wherever in Europe he ended up, I’d track him down via his drama company’s website and make sure he knew what he’d missed.

  So, on with the show, I told myself. But first, what to wear to a village drama club meeting? After another tussle with May’s wardrobe, I decided to be brave and go as myself. At least then I wouldn’t have to act. I hoped the Wendlebury Players members would be equally down to earth. I’d reserve judgement till I knew I could trust them.

  18 Stage Fright

  After fortifying myself with a small glass of wine from the fridge, I headed down to the Village Hall to join the Wendlebury Players’ meeting about their their autumn show, which was to be a historical drama. They seemed to have cast it already, so I was unlikely to get a part, but at least I could begin to make connections, building relationships in good time for the following production. Used to theatrical types, I thought I should be able to hold my own in a conversation with a bunch of provincial luvvies.

  I strolled up the High Street to the Hall, saying the customary hello to everyone I encountered on the way, whether or not I knew who they were. This friendly habit had felt intrusive when I was staying with Auntie May as a shy teenager, but now I took it in my stride. It made me feel as if I was welcome and belonged to the community, as did the floral scents wafting towards me from the front gardens through the heavy early evening air, catching in the back of my throat. Passing by a vast mock orange bush next door to the Hall, I felt as if I’d been pollinated.

  As I entered the Hall, I saw chairs arranged in a circle around the man I presumed to be Rex Hunter, the director. The occupants were all flicking through bound scripts, highlighter pens in hand, pouncing on their lines. They didn’t seem to have started rehearsing yet. That made it easier for me to introduce myself without feeling I was interrupting.

  Rex, the first to spot me, flashed me a smarmy smile. “Well, hello there,” he said, channelling Leslie Phillips. “What have we here?”

  Everyone else looked up from their scripts, as if this was a spot-test of their powers of observation.

  “Oh, I know her, Rex,” said a woman who looked vaguely familiar. “Some apprentice teacher type. You’re too late, darling, all the parts have been cast for this show.”

  For a moment I couldn’t place her, then her disdainful tone reminded me. It was Linda Absolom from the school office, the lady who thought herself too important for small change.

  “I wasn’t necessarily coming to audition for this show,” I explained. “But I had been wondering whether I might join your company. I have a lot to offer.”

  Shooting a look at Linda, which she met with a scowl, Rex stood up and held out his hand for me to shake. “New actors are always welcome here.”

  I stretched out my hand in return. His was uncomfortably warm and damp, and the minute I clasped it, he wrapped his other hand over the top, trapping mine and stroking it with the tips of his fingers. He gave me the creeps. I pulled my hand away as fast as I could without seeming rude. I’d met his kind before.

  Another man in the mainly female group got up to fetch me a chair, and everyone scraped their seats along to make space for me to join their circle. He put the chair between Linda and Rex and beckoned to me to sit down. Quick as a flash, Linda moved along one to sit next to Rex, so I sat beside her instead. I don’t think she realised how thankful I was.

  “So what exactly can you add?” Linda sounded disdainful, addressing me but fixing Rex with a glare. “I hear you’re the tea lady in the bookshop now.”

  I blushed, wondering how to answer that. Fortunately, everyone else ignored her. I got the impression they usually did.

  “Do I gather you have experience in the theatre?” Rex asked, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. I braced myself, not wanting to alienate him before I’d achieved what I’d come here for.

  “Yes, I’ve been involved with a touring company in Europe for a number of years. And I’m keen on scriptwriting too. I’d be happy to write something specifically for your company, if you’d like me to, once I’ve got to know you.”

  “Wonderful, darling.” Rex leaned across Linda to pat my knee. She drew back and gave his arm an admonishing slap, which I presumed she meant to look playful. “It is such a chore to find a script that matches our particular cast and talents. Always risky to compromise.”

  “And expensive,” put in a middle-aged woman who I presumed to be the group’s treasurer.

  Before he could probe further about my theatrical experience, I distracted him by going off at a tangent.

  “My other reason for coming is that I’ve joined the Show Committee. I’m here to tell you that they’re awfully keen for you to put in a float for the Show Carnival procession. We thought it might draw a bigger audience for your autumn show. Stanley can provide a trailer, and I’m sure we could find a four-by-four driver to tow it for you.”

  “Hmm, not a bad idea,” said the treasurer lady. “The fabric for Carol to make those lavish Tudor costumes will cost a fortune. We’ll need every performance to be a sell-out, and a Saturday matinee too, to boost the takings.”

  Murmurs of assent went around the group, with the odd proviso: “So long as I can get up the showground first thing on Show Day to put my dahlias into the judging tent”; “Provided we don’t have to wear our costumes all day – I’m in the mums’ tug-of-war in the afternoon”; “Please say you won’t make us wear stage make-up – it’ll melt in that heat if it’s the sunny weather we usually have on Show Day”. But what clinched it for Rex was talk of the trophy. He seemed the competitive type.

  Linda was quick to lay down some ground rules.

  “You can’t possibly be on our float, Sophie. I think it should be the leading players only: Rex and his six wives.”

  “Rex has six wives?” I gasped, before I could stop myself. He seemed the type to play the field, but this was ridiculous.

  She fixed me with a sneer. “Rex plays Henry VIII. I play Anne Boleyn.”

  I bet there was no shortage of volunteers to play the executioner.

  “And Ian,” said one of the other queens. “We’ve got to have Ian, even though his is a non-speaking part.”

  All the other ladies agreed, but I could see Rex wasn’t keen to share the limelight with another man. I pretended not to be offended.

  “Oh, that’s fine. I’ve already agreed to be on the Wendlebury Writers’ float.”

  There, I thought, that’ll compound my credibility as dramatist of their next play. Still, I couldn’t complain. It had been easier than I’d expected to achieve both my objectives.

  In spite of my misgivings about the odious Rex, I willingly accepted his invitation to stay to hear their read-through of the script. I thought it would help me get to know the actors’ strengths and weaknesses, and give me ideas for the characters I could write for them in my play. By their tea break half way through the evening, I’d relaxed so much that I even let Linda push me into the kitchen to serve the tea.

  “That’s what Sophie does for a living, you know,” she reminded everyone loudly. I resisted the temptation to spit in hers before I served it. I suspected I wouldn’t be the first to have done so.

  The treasurer lady, Mary, came in to help me wash the cups up after the break. Cast as Catherine of Aragon, she didn’t appear in the second half of the play.

  “Don’t you mind Linda’s remarks, she’s just a bit possessive of Rex. They go back a long way. She knew him before he moved to the village, and before she was married. Not that she’s married any more – not divorced yet, but it’s in the pipeline. Her husband’s run off with someone from work.” She leaned a bit closer to me confidentially, and giggled. I anticipated a juicy revelation. “Apparently she
used to be his lovely assistant when he was a professional conjuror. Can you imagine it?”

  I smiled as I pictured the expensively-dressed Linda in a sparkly nylon leotard and ostrich feathers. It made her seem less scary.

  “Not that they can be open about their affair, given that Rex already has a partner. He lives with a woman called Dido – or, by all accounts, lives off her. She’s got some terrifically highly paid job in the City while he’s just a part-time drama teacher at the local secondary school. She owns their house. Between you and me, if I were Dido, I’d chuck him out on his ear for carrying on.”

  I walked home with a light and cheery tread, despite having been lumbered with a bag of used teabags to put on my compost heap at Rex’s insistence. People were very conscientious about recycling in the village. I didn’t like to tell him that I had yet to go near Auntie May’s compost heap, expecting it to be repulsive, chucking all my waste in the wheelie bin. Hoping no-one saw me, I walked down the road carrying the bag as gingerly as if it was dog poo, but without the dog to justify it.

  On going down to the bottom of the garden, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that compost heaps give off no smell at all. Well, who knew? I determined to make more use of mine in future. Joshua would be able to tell me what to do with the compost.

  Afterwards, as I settled down on the sofa with pen and notebook in hand, I realised I had no idea as to what kind of play I should write for the Wendlebury Players. I ran through types that might suit their personalities. A bedroom farce? No, too close for comfort for Linda and Rex. A romantic comedy? Rex would certainly enjoy being the male lead. I decided to make Mary Rex’s character’s love interest to spite Linda, but then thought Mary wouldn’t thank me for it.

  I gathered I wasn’t the only one made to feel uncomfortable in his presence, but I wasn’t sure why. There was something unsettling about his exaggerated courtesy and charm. It spoke volumes about my relationship with Damian that a man being attentive and tactile would put me on my guard.

  Damian again. He kept coming back to haunt me like Hamlet’s ghost. Perhaps I should write a play about exorcism.

  Feeling no further forward by bedtime, I determined to check the how-to section in Hector’s House next day for books on playwriting, preferably while Hector wasn’t looking.

  19 Drumroll

  Plenty of others were also consulting Hector’s House, to help them prepare their Show entries. As Hector had predicted, sales of both gardening books and craft books crept up and up as Show Day got closer. Some of the books ordered filled me with surprise and intrigue – instruction manuals for crafts I’d never heard of and obscure specialist manuals devoted to a single vegetable or flower variety.

  Not all of these sales led to show wins, or, Hector told me, even to show entries. Too often people’s ambition outstripped the time they had to prepare their entries and they gave up as soon as they realised how much effort it really took to grow a prize marrow or bake an award-winning cake. Linda Absolom was one such, Hector said, having bought six different books about honey production the previous year, although she still hadn’t got round to installing beehives in her garden.

  I also noticed villagers becoming ever more secretive about the activities in their gardens.

  We were lucky to be having a classic English summer, with glorious sunshine late into the evening and barely a breeze to cool you down, although the seasoned Show exhibitor would apparently have welcomed rain to spare them the daily task of watering fruit, vegetable and flowers by hand to avoid scorching or shrivelling. I had not appreciated until now how closely bound the growing of produce was with the vagaries of the English weather. A summer with a hosepipe ban was the second worst fear after a wet Show Day. It struck me that England wasn’t the ideal country in which to stage traditional English village shows.

  While I did not expect to enter any of the flowers or fruit from Auntie May’s garden into the Show, I demonstrated kindred spirit by ostentatiously watering my flower beds, especially the more visible ones in the front garden, whenever I remembered. I wanted my new neighbours to realise I wasn’t the townie ignoramus they took me for.

  Hector, whom I’d have thought would be pleased with the run on self-help books, alongside the flurry of bulk orders from schools as they prepared for the next academic year, became increasingly agitated. He spent more and more time at his computer, typing like a man possessed. At first, I thought this was to process all the orders, but then he started delegating those to me. He also showed me how to replenish the shelves as new deliveries arrived and how to remove the non-movers and return them to the publishers for credit. This heartless cull made me all the more anxious about my own prospects as an author. I hoped when my turn came, stockists would be more merciful.

  In the meantime, I kept trying to find out exactly what Hector was typing. I assumed he was in some kind of financial trouble and consequently engaged in extensive correspondence with his creditors. Now that Auntie May was no longer around to underwrite his debts, and his parents were living on a pension in a seaside bungalow, his business was terribly exposed. I could think of no other small village that sustained its own bookshop. Even city centre bookstores, with their huge customer base, were closing down at an alarming rate. How on earth could Hector’s House survive with its daily trickle of shoppers? I was torn between offering my resignation to ease his financial burden and dreading parting company from him, even though I knew he was unattainable to me, romantically speaking.

  To assuage my conscience, and in hope of averting Hector’s impending financial crisis, I tried to find other ways to increase the shop’s sales. I worked late one night to surprise him with a spectacular window display on the theme of the Village Show, secretly borrowing toy trucks, tractors, Playmobil and Sylvanian characters from my pupils to create a little carnival procession running the width of the window. He was certainly surprised next morning, and at least the schoolchildren, winding home in the last few days of the school term, stopped to press their sticky noses against the glass each night, squabbling about which diminutive float should win first prize.

  One afternoon, when Hector had gone to deliver books to a secondary school a few miles away, I took it into my head to interrogate his PC for clues about the precise nature of his problems. I called up the list of recent documents to see if there were any obvious suspects. The one he’d been updating before he went out was called “A Lover’s Revenge”. With my heart pounding, I clicked on the file to delve inside, but it was password protected.

  I gasped and sat back on the stool. I didn’t know Hector had a lover and wondered who he might be. There weren’t any obvious candidates in the village at least – as Hector himself kept pointing out, there were no eligible single men close to my, or his, age, so perhaps he was involved with a much older man. I certainly hadn’t spotted anyone in the shop whom Hector looked at in that particular way. He was affable, yet distant with almost everyone. Either he was being careful to cover his tracks, or his lover lived further afield.

  I wondered whether it was one of the distant customers that he delivered to on his mysterious treks out when I was left to mind the shop. Of course, there was no reason it had to be anyone to do with the business at all. But why did he need to be so secretive?

  I had a bad feeling about it.

  Seeing him park his Land Rover on the street outside the shop, I hurriedly closed down Word, and determined to keep a special eye on his behaviour towards all his customers in future.

  20 Carnival Time

  For the next few weeks, there was plenty to distract me from identifying Hector’s secret lover.

  Preparing for Show Day seemed to have become everyone’s priority. The next meeting of the Wendlebury Writers focused entirely on decorating our float. We talked about what we would wear and what props we would need. We each had to choose a book written by our proposed literary hero, preferably an edition that had their name in large print on the cover, visible from a distance, s
o that we could sit reading it on the float, to help people realise who we were meant to be. Finding the right period chairs for each author was more of a challenge. And we needed to decorate the float’s backdrop to stand out in the judging.

  This meeting was taking place in Hector’s House, so I was able to persuade them to invest in twenty sheets of wrapping paper printed with the spines of old books. If we pasted all these on to the backboard of the float, it would look like we were in an old-fashioned library.

  “Better coat it with plenty of yacht varnish,” said Dinah. “Just in case the heavens open upon us.”

  In addition, we met every few days in one of Stanley’s barns, where our trailer lay waiting for us. We pasted up our library-effect wallpaper on a backboard, carpeted the floor with old rugs, and hung bunting made out of the pages of old books. Unwilling to cut up perfectly good books, I’d approached a local charity shop and discovered that in their backroom they had more donated copies of Fifty Shades of Grey than they could ever hope to sell, so they gave them to us for free. It was a good thing the bunting was high up along the top of the trailer, so that no-one in the crowd would be able to read it.

  When the float was complete, we had an entertaining meeting back at Hector’s House reading the opening chapters aloud from each of the books we’d chosen for our characters, followed by a show of hands to vote for the best, like a lazy person’s balloon debate. I read from Auntie May’s ancient hardback of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, pleased to think that a little piece of May was still taking part in the Show.