by Debbie Young
Carol pointed to a photo of Linda and Rex together in their younger days. “I never knew she was a contortionist. Of course, Rex had told us about his previous career as a magician, but he’d kept it quiet about his other reasons for being famous.” She tapped her nose knowingly. “Spite of hand, you see. Doesn’t do any good to mess with nature.”
I bought a copy of the paper for myself, plus one to put in the tearoom, where I knew it would be in demand. I had a quick read of the main article on my walk from the shop, but didn’t want to make myself even later by reading the full reports inside.
Hector claimed first dibs on the paper before the school-run mums arrived.
“So the old bugger was interfering with his lovely assistants, eh?” He pored over the black and white photos of the young Rex performing a magic show in Bognor. “Blimey, I wouldn’t have recognised Linda Macarthur as our Linda Absolom. She was quite a beauty before she had the budget for botox.”
“It seems she was the one who blew the whistle on him and got him sacked, although no-one had the sense to press charges. I think it would be harder for him to escape unscathed from something like that today. Let’s just hope he doesn’t also have escapology among his party tricks.”
Hector read on. “At least he was cast out of the Magic Circle for bringing it into disrepute. You’d think they’d just make him vanish.”
He turned over to see the detailed biography of both parties that was printed on the next page, Linda’s in the form of a glowing obituary, Rex’s as the world’s worst CV. The report included a big graphic demonstrating when Linda’s and Rex’s lives had crossed at various times on the seaside theatre circuit, and later when Rex had moved to Wendlebury Barrow to take up the latest in a series of high school teaching posts, falling back on his first career as a drama teacher. All along, he’d fed his love of the spotlight by starring in or directing local amateur drama companies, each of which was listed by name.
“Do you reckon they were all as bad as the Wendlebury Players?” Hector wondered aloud, not without a certain pride.
“He must have got a shock when he pitched up to join as director and found Linda Macarthur waiting to audition,” I considered. “I suppose it’s a credit to their acting skills that they got through two whole productions without giving the game away.”
“But no surprise. Rex obviously had nothing to gain by airing his sordid past. And Linda was smart about it. She realised she could use his guilty secret to her advantage. I always wondered why he cast her in leading parts when she was such a dreadful actress. Now we know. It’s just a shame everyone assumed they were having an affair, not least her husband.”
“Maybe that’s what drove him into the arms of another woman?” I suggested.
Hector looked up at me over the top of the paper. “You old romantic, you!”
I went round to stand behind him to look at the pictures on the double-page spread. The large photo above the tribute to Linda showed her with her ex-husband in happier times.
“If he was her ex-husband, does that make him an ex-widower?” I queried, before going over to the tearoom to put out today’s cake delivery.
“I don’t know, but his ex-wife was certainly an ex-tortionist.”
I laughed. “So that’s what Carol meant this morning. Not a contortionist.”
Hector grinned. “Now that could have made for a whole different story.”
Seeing the parents and children heading up the High Street towards the school, I left Hector to it and went over to fill the kettle and the water reservoir of the coffee machine.
“I’d have had more sympathy for Linda if she hadn’t got greedy about it, and added financial blackmail to her list of charms.”
“Tempting, though, when she knew Rex’s girlfriend was loaded. Dido’s quite high up in some City finance firm, you know. Linda’s lavish lifestyle took a downturn when her husband moved out to be with his new woman. It wasn’t rocket science to seek withdrawals from the Bank of Rex in return for not spilling the beans to Dido.”
“Why didn’t Rex go to the police about her threats?”
Hector raised his eyebrows. “Do you really need to ask? That would have required a confession of his sordid past, so he’d have lost Dido one way or another – and his own subsidised lifestyle. His teacher’s salary must have been pin-money in their house. Dido owned the house long before they were an item. No, for someone like Rex, with an inflated sense of his own abilities, it was much easier to take the law into his own hands, especially when he remembered Linda’s potentially fatal bee allergy. When he spotted her prescription request for beta blockers in the shop, he must have done his research and found out, as it explains in the paper, that they can make future attacks more severe.”
“Carol thinks they’re called beetle blockers,” I remembered. “Bee blockers would have been more useful. Did I tell you, Billy heard Rex and Linda having a row in the pub because Linda wanted fake flowers on their float? Rex was refusing point blank, saying it was against the spirit of a horticultural show, but now it seems Rex had more sinister reasons. He made Carol use really strongly perfumed flowers too, the sort that Auntie May used to say attracted bees.”
“So it seems Rex had the makings of a perfect murder. If only he could introduce the bees without anyone seeing, her death would be attributed to natural causes. Turning a loaded bee on his victim would be easier to conceal than a loaded gun. She must have blacked out when the first sting entered her bloodstream. Subsequent stings would seal her fate in silence, in her personal Room 101 hell. Room 101, Sophie? I take it you’ve read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four?”
I sighed. “I know it’s from a book, not the television programme. I’m not a complete ignoramus.”
Predictably Hector got up from his seat to fetch a copy from the classics section and dropped it on the tearoom counter for me. He then folded back the paper to read out a funny sketch that the reporter had written of Rex using all his dramatic powers in court to portray the wronged victim. Rex had pinned the blame on a passing swarm of bees, possibly from a local hive kept by one Joshua Hampton.
“What? How dare he accuse Joshua! How could he possibly expect to pin a murder on that lovely old gentleman?” I cried, then blushed as I remembered that not long ago, I’d had him down as a ruthless poisoner of old ladies.
Hector carried on reading. “When the prosecution pressed him, he could not say why they had found Linda’s personal scent more appealing than the nearby marquee packed with exhibition standard flowers, cakes, fruit and vegetables.”
I laughed. “I wish I’d been a fly on the wall in that courtroom.”
“Not a bee?”
I shook my head. “I’ve gone right off bees. I should think Carol has too. Speaking of Carol, I’m glad they’ve done a special box story there about how her evidence helped convict him. That’ll make her feel better after being unwittingly duped into baiting his bee trap and stitching Linda into her costume to await her fate.”
“Well, I just hope everyone reads the full report. Then they’ll accept that no-one was to blame but Rex and Linda themselves.” Hector closed the paper, folding it in half, before chucking it onto the nearest tearoom table. “And I’ve no doubt they will. Our copy will be in shreds by the time the school mums have finished with it.”
Fortunately Hector was right. Even so, as Dinah had predicted, the next Show Committee meeting accepted a proposal from the Wendlebury Players to name a new trophy the Linda Absolom Cup for Best Honey in Show. Only Billy had the gall to say what everyone else was thinking: that this whole business should draw bumper crowds from miles around to next year’s Village Show. I was looking forward to it already.
33 Full Circle
Of course, we had to wait many months for the case to come to court and for justice to be done. Meanwhile, the village had returned to its normal routine after the excitement of Show Day. The start of the new school year brought the return of my pupils to the bookshop, and it fe
lt as if all the excitement of summer was over.
A postcard arrived from my parents who were holidaying in the Canary Islands, courtesy of Auntie May’s royalties. It turned out she’d left them to my dad as her next of kin.
Realising I’d missed out on a summer holiday this year, I decided to indulge in a bit of armchair travel instead. It was about time I read some of Auntie May’s books. One evening after work, I took down from the bedroom bookshelf her account of her travels in the Outer Hebrides. Characteristically, May didn’t visit in the region’s brief summer to bask in twenty-four hour daylight and jewel-coloured seas and skies. Instead, in midwinter, she rented a remote blackhouse, experiencing raw, wild weather and short, sodden days. Her scheduled week spilled over into a fortnight, thanks to seas too rough to permit ferry crossings. By the time she was able to leave, she had fallen in love with the place, returning to use it as a writing retreat when pressed by a stiff deadline.
Despite autumnal sunshine fading outside my open bedroom window, and heady wafts of night-scented stock drifting up through the warm evening air, her opening page immediately transported me to a Hebridean island in winter, overwriting the English summer garden scents with the choking fug of peat smoke. I turned the page, reaching with my other hand for the mug of cocoa on my nightstand, and out of the corner of my eye saw a slip of brown and white paper flutter from between the pages. Setting my cocoa down again to investigate, I found myself looking at a Bank of Scotland note with a face value of £100.
I did a double-take. There was something odd about this book. I realised for the first time that it looked distorted, with the pages thicker than the spine was designed to accommodate. It reminded me of a paperback that had been dropped in the bath, making the body of the book expand, crinkly paged, while the binding remained the same size.
On a whim, I held the book by the spine and gently shook it. Out fluttered a confetti of banknotes, most of them green, but some blue and the odd one pink. Gathering them together on top of the counterpane, I sorted them by colour then totted up the total: £1,245, including the £100 that I’d found after the first page.
At last I understood Auntie May’s message: “There’s money in books”. Tucked inside the first editions of each of her books on the special shelf by her bed was a secret stash of cash, concealed where only I’d be likely to find it once I’d moved into her cottage.
I counted twenty-seven books on the shelf. Getting up, I pulled down all of her first editions and set them gently on the bed. I picked each one up in turn and held it, spine uppermost, and pulled the covers back to open the pages. Each time, a pile of banknotes, in various currencies, fluttered out onto the patchwork quilt. I didn’t need to count them to be able to make an accurate guess that there were over ten thousand pounds.
Then another awful thought occurred to me. What if I hadn’t bothered to read the books but had shipped them wholesale to a charity shop, or put them on eBay? That would have served me right.
From the look in Joshua’s eye earlier that evening, I suspected that he knew of her plan. When I’d pressed him, he revealed she’d been using this system for years, slipping money in books to Carol, for example, as a surreptitious gift to help lighten her difficult load of nursing her dying mother. Fortunately, May must have stashed her cash away relatively recently, because the foreign money was all in Euros or dollars of various countries, and the sterling was the latest design.
For a moment, I wondered whether Auntie May hadn’t meant for me to write at all, just to find the money that she’d hidden in her books to reward me for continuing to read them after she’d gone. But no, she had spent the last fifteen years giving me notebooks and pens and encouragement. And there was her last message of all, written in the little green Moleskine book that still lay, as blank as she’d left it, on my nightstand: “Live a life worth writing down. Then write it down.”
I gathered up the money, stashed it all into one of her Moroccan leather purses, and put it under my pillow for safekeeping. I realised I should count it properly and get it to the bank for safekeeping, and then I should tell my dad, who was sorting out the legal stuff to do with her will and probate. But that could wait. I knew exactly what I needed to do next.
I picked up her pen, opened the green Moleskine notebook, and began to write. I was on my way.
Epilogue: Homeric Justice
I couldn’t wait to get to work next day to tell Hector about my good fortune.
“So you see, I don’t need this job anymore, and you don’t have to pay me, and your shop will stay in business.”
Hector looked both bewildered and a little sad. “Pardon?”
“I know you only took me on because you felt indebted to my aunt, rather than because you needed me or could afford an extra member of staff. Now you’re off the hook. I’ll be able to buy a car and drive outside of the village to get a job. Once I’ve learned to drive, anyway.”
Hector minimised whatever he was typing on his computer and sat back on the stool, arms folded across his chest.
“First of all, I do need an extra pair of hands in the shop, and if I hadn’t appointed you, it would have been one of the many other applicants that you detected in the recycling box, if you cast your mind back.
“Secondly, I can afford your wages, thank you very much. Thanks to my fine business acumen and skilful diversification, my shop is profitable.”
“I’m sorry, Hector, I find it hard to believe that my presence in the shop has brought in so much more business that you can justify my wages, even with the sponsorship you get from Literally Gifted and the income from my teaching books.”
“No, you silly girl, what you’ve done is given me back my time, which I’ve been using very fruitfully on the computer, in case you haven’t noticed.”
“But how has that helped? I mean, what can you have been doing on it to make so much money? Playing the stock market? Oh no, don’t tell me you’re a gambling addict!”
How could I have been so stupid not to have noticed? No wonder he often looked so emotional when plugging away at the computer, and could be irritable if interrupted by a customer or a phone call.
He sat quietly for a moment, and I fiddled nervously with the pink string bracelet that Jemima had given me at our last lesson. Then he pointed over to the fiction display in the window.
“Please bring me a book by the author who is our top fiction seller,” he instructed me.
That was easy. I plucked Hermione Minty’s latest blockbuster, Touched by Love, out of the window and set it down on the counter in front of him.
“Now tell me her name.”
“Hermione Minty.”
“Anything strike you as familiar about Hermione Minty?”
I stared at the book for a clue, turned it over to scan the blurb on the back, then opened the cover to read the sparse author bio within.
“Hermione Minty enjoys a private life in a charming English village, where she has many strings to her bow.”
I clicked at once.
“She’s a violinist? She lives here in the village?”
“Look at the initials.”
As I examined the book again, he deftly set a poignant violin solo playing on the shop’s sound system. When I looked up, I clocked his enormous, self-satisfied grin, like someone who’s just won a lengthy game of charades.
“You mean, you’re Hermione Minty?”
“Yes. Would you like my autograph? Mind you, I can charge an extra fiver for signed copies of my books on eBay. That pays the shop’s electricity bill, for starters.”
“You’ve had me fooled. Ever thought you should take over from Rex at the Wendlebury Players? You’re certainly the better actor. You could win prizes for it.”
Hector nodded appreciatively, then reached into his bag to produce a large Manilla envelope, addressed to me care of the shop, and a small piece of thin red cardboard.
“By the way, speaking of prizes, you’ve won something. Two things, in fact.”
“Me? How? I haven’t entered any competitions lately.”
“Oh, but you have. Firstly, you don’t seem to have noticed that your entry in the new nature writing competition class at the Village Show won first prize: the princely sum of £2.50 and a certificate the size of a postcard. I’m sure you won’t let it change your life.”
“How lovely! I’m an award-winning writer at last!” I hugged the certificate proudly to my chest and wondered where I’d hang it once it was framed. Then a dreadful thought occurred to me. “Mine wasn’t the only entry, was it?”
I’d noticed several fruit and vegetable classes in the Show had fewer than three submissions, though first, second and third prizes were set aside for each one. In some cases, a solitary entry had been awarded third prize, indicating that it wasn’t worthy of first or second, even without competition.
Hector reassured me. “There were at least a dozen, and I read them all. Most of the others were straight descriptions, smacking of school essays – two hundred and fifty words on a squirrel, or whatever. But yours had heart. Nature was only a jumping-off point for a deeper and more far-reaching piece about the human condition.
“Really?” I said lightly. “And there was me thinking I’d just written about Auntie May’s garden.”
He looked at me reproachfully. “No, it was lovely, demonstrating the inextricable relationship between the garden, your aunt and you. It was very touching, very individual – and very you.”
His kind words and his warm gaze upon me now were worth so much more than £2.50.
“I still can’t believe I won a prize for my writing! I can’t wait to tell Damian.”
Hector raised his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me you two are getting back together? I would have thought you’d had enough of actors.”
I laughed. “God, no! I just want to prove to him that at least someone thinks my writing is worthwhile. He was always so dismissive of it. It was very hurtful.”