by Debbie Young
It was time for a hasty exit, before the conversation descended any lower.
The Wendlebury Writers were due to meet next evening at Hector’s House. Before leaving work at the end of the afternoon , I consulted Hector further about Rex.
“I’d hate to get it wrong in front of all the other writers,” I told him. “I think maybe I’ll go down and confront him about it now. Then I will make him come to the Writers’ meeting this evening and apologise to them all. That’ll teach him.”
Hector raised his eyebrows.
“You sure you know what you’re doing?”
“Yep, I shall strike while the iron’s hot. I’ll go in while I’m still feeling invincible.”
I wasn’t, but I thought if I said I was, I might.
“OK, if you must. Have you got your shop key with you, to get back in if I’ve gone by the time you come back for the meeting?”
I patted my pocket. “It’s in here with the evidence. Wish me luck.”
“Good luck,” he said solemnly as he powered down his computer.
Once I got outside the door, I felt my courage ebbing away, so I made myself march smartly up to Rex’s door and rap really hard with the knocker. I thought a noisy entrance might have the same effect as ancient warriors banging their shields with their swords to frighten the enemy.
To my surprise, Rex was all oily charm when he came to the door. Well, he was an actor.
“To what do I owe the pleasure?” I wondered whether he had company that he was trying to impress, or whether Dido was home during the week for once. I tried to peer around him to see who else was there, but couldn’t spot anyone.
Here’s where I’d been especially clever. From within my shoulder-bag, I produced one of the posies that I’d concealed there all day. Not so clever was that I’d forgotten that at its centre was a ball of green florists’ sponge, soaked in water, which had now drenched the inside of the bag.
“I brought you one of these as a peace offering,” I began, “provided that you can spare me a moment for a little chat.”
To be honest, I was glad to see the back of this one, because it had been Anne Boleyn’s. I was sure Rex wouldn’t have remembered which was which, and it gave me positive pleasure to pass this one off on to him.
Rex flashed me his most winning smile and stood back to allow me to cross the threshold. He probably thought I wanted to talk to him about the script.
“Why not have a drink while you’re here?” he suggested. “I was just about to have a little G and T myself.”
He raised the full crystal tumbler that was in his hand and beckoned me to follow him through to his kitchen. On the worktop lay a marble chopping board and knife with half a lemon cut side down. He took another tumbler from a cupboard and cut some wafer-thin lemon slices so easily that the knife must have been very sharp indeed. Feeling a little weak at the knees, I placed the damp floral ball on his draining board and sat down at his kitchen table. After drying my hands on my skirt, I dug into my pockets to reassure myself that the tell-tale sheet of paper was still there.
He set the nearly empty gin bottle on the counter with a thud. I suspected this was not his first drink of the day. He rummaged in the fridge for the tonic, plucked some ice cubes from the freezer, and topped the glass with a sliver of lemon before pressing it into my hand. Then he raised a toast, chinking his glass against mine with an intimate leer.
“So, have you come to talk to me about your ideas for your play script? We’ll need to start rehearsing in January, so sight of the script in October would be good, to allow for rewriting.”
I played him along for a little while. “Of course. Although I expect you’ll be focusing on your autumn show till it’s over in November.” He nodded. “Which I suppose will be extra hard now that you have to recruit another Anne Boleyn.”
He looked puzzled, as if he didn’t know which way I was going with this. Neither did I.
“Were you thinking of auditioning, then?” he queried. “I’m sure you’d be perfect for the part.”
This was a turn-up for the books. (Drat that Wendlebury Writers’ cliché box!) I’d spent the last four years resenting my boyfriend for not offering me a speaking part in one of his plays, and here was my arch enemy offering me one on a plate. I jumped at the chance.
“Really?” Then I pulled myself together, remembering what I’d come for. I was supposed to be calling the shots here. “But first, I need to talk to you about something that happened on Show Day. You see, I think you pulled a little trick there that no-one else but me has rumbled yet. But I need to nip it in the bud. Rex, I know what you did, and I can’t allow you to pull that same stunt again. It was far too upsetting for us all.”
The buzzing of a large bee interrupted my train of thought. It flew in through the open kitchen window and landed on the floral ball. Rex got up and slammed the window shut, with the bee still on the inside.
You’re not as bright as you think, I admonished him in my head. You should have chased the bee out first. Having the large furry bee buzzing around just a few feet away made me a little more anxious, but at least it wasn’t a spider.
The bee stopped buzzing as it set about gathering some pollen from within a large pink scabious at the centre of the floral ball. Almost immediately it set off again, this time attracted by the lemon in my drink, just as I was raising the glass to my lips. Thinking it was about to fly right inside my mouth, I let out a piercing scream and shot out of my seat, knocking my chair over in the process. It fell to the floor with a great clatter. I couldn’t take my eyes off the enormous beast.
“So, you’re another one not keen on bees.” I wondered if Rex was now trying to big himself up as the great defender of feeble women from fierce insects. I refused to let him have the upper hand.
“Bees, schmees,” I surprised myself by saying. “I’ve rumbled you, Rex, and I want you to promise never to do such a dreadful thing again.” I felt in my pocket for his list of pranks and waved it as proof. “I demand a public apology.”
It was Rex’s turn to look rattled. “An apology? To whom? And what good would that do?”
“I know why you did it, you know.” The bee started buzzing again, and I drew back as far as I could on to my seat.
“You bloody little bitch!” He seized the lemon knife, a look of sheer panic on his face. So much for his acting ability. But then he grabbed me by the shoulder and spun me round so that I had my back to him. With one arm he pinned me to his chest while with the other he held the knife against my throat. I lost my grip on the sheet of paper, which fluttered down to the floor unseen, and let out another piercing scream.
“For God’s sake, no!”
“Who have you told?”
I thought fast. “Hector. Only Hector. Though I’ll tell the Wendlebury Writers at the meeting tonight. And the WI!”
I had never felt so defiant, and in that moment I realised I would never let myself be bullied or bossed about by a man again, even if he had a knife in his hand.
“Oh, so they can write their pretty poems about it? Death of an actress? Ode to a bee?”
“Ode to a bee? What do you mean? I’m talking about all those awful pranks you played on us on our float, and the Suffragettes, just to give yourself a chance of winning the cup for your float. And you still didn’t win it anyway, so there!”
“And what makes you think you’ll be at the Wendlebury Writers meeting anyway? You’re not going anywhere with that blabbing mouth of yours.”
He set the point of the knife closer to my throat. I felt a pinprick piercing of my skin, just as I heard the back door being flung open. Thankfully, no-one ever keeps their doors locked when they’re at home in the village.
“Drop it, Rex,” a familiar voice said behind us. Suddenly I was free, and in a flash Hector had Rex in a headlock, doubled up on the kitchen table. “What were you going to do, saw her in half?”
Rex spluttered, inarticulate.
“So it was all done wit
h bees, was it?” Hector continued. “And you damn near got away with it, too. I’m still not sure how you persuaded the bees to sting Linda, but I’m pretty sure it was bees that triggered her fatal allergic reaction. What a terrible way to go, dying in front of everyone, concealed in plain sight, trapped inside that hideous costume. How long had you known she was allergic to bees, Rex? I suspect she’d tried to keep it secret since she lived here, but did you witness her suffering from bee stings in her younger days, when she was working for you? Did you know that with every attack, the reaction gets more severe? That the heart drugs she’d recently started taking increased the risk? Now I know why she kept ordering different books about bees, though never a beekeeper herself.”
Released from Rex’s grip, I recovered my breath. “That must be why she’d been pestering Carol to stock Joshua’s honey in the shop, to inoculate herself against the village bees. She probably didn’t dare go round to Joshua’s house to ask for it, in case she encountered bees from the hives in his garden. The poor woman must have been terrified.”
How ironic that the intervention of a randomly visiting bee had been the catalyst for my rescue. If I hadn’t screamed when it came near me, maybe Hector would never have come running. Maybe the bee was the ghost of Linda Absolom coming back to get her revenge. Maybe she hadn’t disliked me as much as I’d thought.
If the bee was Linda, she was very forgiving, because instead of stinging Rex, it flew straight out of the back door the minute it was opened again by Rex’s next-door-neighbour , letting himself in to see what all the noise was about. His intervention was clearly out of curiosity rather than concern for Rex’s well-being.
“What’s this old bugger been up to now?” he asked brightly, crossing over to help Hector keep Rex pinned to the table. “Sophie, I think you’d better run out and give our Bobby a shout.”
“Wouldn’t it be better to dial 999?”
“No, Bob lives the other side from me. He’s in the back garden watering his dahlias. Tell him to get himself down here quick, and he can take charge.”
Ten minutes later, I was on the outside of a glass of brandy in the pub, with Hector’s arm protectively about me. I’d gone right off gin.
“Had a change of heart, girlie?” called Billy from his habitual bar stool. “Not meeting your writing chums at Hector’s House after all? It must be bad if not even Hector wants to be there.”
I was shaking too much to reply.
“How did you magically appear in Rex’s kitchen?” I asked Hector, gripping his arm as if to reassure myself that he was real. “I thought he was the conjuror, not you.”
“Easy. I was just setting the burglar alarm at the shop when I heard you scream. I’d have known it anywhere. Don’t forget, I heard you being mugged by that spider in the stockroom yesterday. I thought perhaps it had followed you to Rex’s.”
I squeezed his arm tighter in gratitude.
“So it was a bee sting all along. Who’d have thought it?” Hector continued. “Poor Linda, not a very dignified way to go. But I’m wondering why she didn’t carry an EpiPen, if she had a bad allergy to bee stings?”
Someone had called the doctor from across the road to come and see that I was all right. I hadn’t yet registered with him as his patient, but he didn’t mind being called on in a crisis. It gave him a fast track into local gossip.
“Couldn’t happen,” he said, “unless there was either a huge swarm or reduced immunity.”
“Heart medicine?” suggested Hector. “Apparently she had tablets prescribed for her heart.”
The doctor looked grim. “Beta blockers. It’s a possibility. The patient could pass out at the first impact, but the application of an EpiPen followed by emergency treatment could have saved her. On the other hand, if it happened when she was on her own, and she was stung repeatedly before anyone could discover her, it could be too late. Surely she was in public view on a float on Show Day?”
“Yes, but enveloped inside a costume that concealed her face and body. Her reaction would have been invisible. If she had been able to cry out for help before she lost consciousness, the noise of the band and the crowds would have drowned her out. Of course, we would have noticed if she’d keeled over, but she was wired to the safety rail round the trailer to stop her falling off it where she knelt before the chopping block. Awaiting her execution. Oh my goodness.”
Hector shuddered and lapsed into silence.
The doctor took over. “I suspect she would have died before you’d even reached the showground. But best leave it to the experts now. The post-mortem will reveal all, I’m sure. But what’s puzzling me now is how did the bees get inside the dress? There’s still no real evidence to suggest anything other than natural causes, apart from Rex having a bit of brainstorm and threatening young Sophie here.”
“And why those stupid pranks?” I queried.
“Distraction techniques, I reckon. Diverting attention away from the Players’ float will have given him longer to introduce the bees to Linda’s costume without anyone noticing. He knew from the numbers given out the night before the Show which groups’ floats would be either side of his. That’s how he was able to target your writer friends so precisely. But why go to all that trouble? That’s what I’d like to know now.”
“The truth will out,” called Billy. “There’s no smoke without fire.”
If he’d been at the Wendlebury Writers’ meeting, that would have cost him 20p.
31 Beware of the Wardrobe
As it turned out, Billy was right. A couple of days later, when Carol finally got round to hanging all the Tudor costumes up in the drama wardrobe at the back of the Village Hall, a small plastic snack box dropped out of Henry VIII’s codpiece. Through its clear lid, she could see little dark shapes and assumed it was a sustaining handful of nuts and raisins, to keep Rex’s energy levels up on Show Day. She flipped the lid off, planning to eat a raisin or two, when she realised these weren’t dried fruit, but the dead bodies of plump, fuzzy bees.
She immediately ran from the Hall to Bobby’s house with the box of bees in her hand and pounded on the door, crying, “Officer, arrest these bees!”
Bob took it in good heart. “No, they can’t be the culprits,” he told her, resealing the box and placing it inside a plastic bag for fingerprinting later. “They will have been inside the dress. I would say these were the culprits’ understudies – reinforcements in case the first batch didn’t do the trick. But let’s take a look at Linda’s dress.”
He followed Carol over to the Hall. Together they gathered up the thick velvet folds of Anne Boleyn’s costume and shook it out onto the parquet flooring. Sure enough, a dozen or more bees dropped out. With a pair of tweezers borrowed from the Village Hall first aid box, Bob added them to the plastic bag. He also took away the dress “for questioning”, as Carol confided in me the next day.
“But how could Rex have forced quantities of bees into Linda’s dress?” I asked Hector in the bookshop later.
“Don’t forget he was a conjuror by trade,” said Hector. “Sleight of hand may not have been easy with a fistful of bees, but I’m sure, drawing on his old conjuring skills, he could have done it, especially when the folk on the floats were otherwise preoccupied – the Wendlebury Players with striking poses, the Suffragettes chained into place facing the other way, and you Wendlebury Writers getting aeriated by the stupid notes he’d secreted on to your persons. If I were not such a subtle type, I might even say you all had a bee in your collective bonnet about them.”
“Next Show Day, I think I’ll stay at home quietly with a good book,” I told him.
It wasn’t till I got home and was sitting on my back garden bench, watching the remaining five posies blowing gently in the breeze under the apple tree, that I remembered I had another question as yet unanswered. Joshua was hoeing beneath his runner beans, whistling quietly. I got up and walked down to lean over the wall.
“Joshua,” I called. “Can I ask you something?”
“So we think it’s pretty clear now that poor Linda died from a fatal reaction to multiple bee stings, to which she was particularly sensitive due to the heart medication that she was on.”
“Ah, that would explain why she was so keen to have some of my honey. How sad that she was too frightened to come to my door to ask for some. If only I’d known, I’d gladly have given her a jar with my compliments.”
I frowned. “That’s tragic. But what we still don’t know is why would Rex set her up for such an awful thing?”
He leaned on his hoe thoughtfully. “Any number of reasons may come out in court. Or if the Lord prefers, perhaps we’ll never know.”
32 Unmasked
The evidence did indeed come out at the trial, many months later. The local paper, the Weekly Slate, devoted a full page to reporting from the court, week by week, with a front page splash and double page spread inside when the guilty verdict was finally announced.
The day that paper came out, Carol beckoned me into the shop on my way to work. Although we’d both been called in as witnesses, and the village grapevine, fuelled by social media, had circulated facts and fiction about the trial as it took place, we’d been looking forward to seeing the eventual report in the newspaper to draw a line under the whole unpleasant business.
As the bell jangled me into the shop, Carol was spreading out several copies of the paper on the counter, to show off the five pages of articles at a glance. I leaned over to have a good look.
“I’m glad Mr Absolom got their children away from the village before this came out. It wouldn’t have done any of them any good to read about what Rex claimed were the mitigating circumstances. I wonder how her poor husband must have felt when he realised Linda hadn’t been having an affair with Rex after all. What a tragic waste.”