by Fiona Grace
*
The next morning, Lacey was a different woman. She and Gina had spent the evening strategizing, and today her trusty neighbor would be taking over shop duty so that Lacey could play sleuth and clear her name.
Lacey sipped her coffee, feeling focused, determined, and filled with drive. Pen in hand, notebook open on the table, she went online to the local Wilfordshire news site. The murder of a local elderly aristocrat was obviously the main story, with numerous spin-off articles also devoted to it. She read each one with a meticulous eye for detail, combing for anything that may be a clue, and wrote each one neatly down in her pad in a bullet point list. As she scanned through, two things on her list leapt up at her:
- No forced entry
- No defensive wounds
So this was evidently done by someone Iris knew, Lacey thought, tapping her pen on the notepad. Probably even someone she trusted. That poor woman.
Lacey had seen enough cop shows in her thirty-nine years to know that the main suspect in most homicides was the person closest to the victim, and so she jotted down the names of the deceased woman’s family members—a younger half-sister whose Alzheimer’s had seen her committed to a care home for the last three years; a son, Benjamin, a successful businessman residing in South Africa with his wife and children; and a daughter, Clarissa, whom one paper scathingly referred to as “the spinster CEO of a bankrupt fashion brand.”
The papers also told Lacey that the estate, Penrose Manor, had once been owned by the aristocracy, and passed down the generations through the male heir line through the system of primogeniture. So, presumably, her son was set to inherit the estate. Perhaps he’d flown over to settle the will. Maybe he was at the house right now!
Lacey leapt up, her chair scraping against the kitchen tiles. “Come on, Chester, it’s time to solve this crime.”
Her trusty companion trotted beside her as she left Crag Cottage—cautious to deadbolt the door with the Rapunzel key, her paranoia spiking thanks to the threats of yesterday—and headed into the car.
On the one hand, Lacey knew how suspicious it would make her look to drive back to the scene of the crime, but the other part of her knew she was going to have to take risks if she stood any chance of clearing her name. And so that’s exactly what Lacey decided to do.
When she reached Penrose Estate, she saw the remains of the police cordon tied to the trunk of a tree, flapping in the breeze, the only evidence of the gruesome crime that had been committed within its walls.
With her heart slamming into her rib cage, Lacey went up to the door and knocked. Her hunch that someone would be home was correct; the door was opened by a man with a grief-stricken face. He looked to be around fifty. He’d certainly be around the right age to be Iris’s son.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” Lacey said. “I’m Lacey Bishop. I was—”
“I know who you are,” the man snapped back.
Lacey noted his accent—it was regional, not South African and not plummy like Iris’s, either. This wasn’t Iris Archer’s son at all, but someone else entirely. Someone unrelated.
“The police told me,” the man continued in his same abrupt, angry manner. “You were coming over here to value her antiques. If I hadn’t been out collecting her prescription you’d never have had a chance to hurt her!”
“I didn’t do anything to her,” Lacey refuted. “I didn’t take a single one of her antiques. They’re all there. I’d be a pretty bad burglar if I killed the homeowner without taking all their stuff, wouldn’t I?”
The man paused.
“Who are you?” Lacey asked. “You’re not her son.”
He shook his head. “Not by blood, no, though I’ve shown her more care than either of her awful children ever did. I’m Nigel, her valet. Was her valet, I should say. We were very close. I live here.” He began to weep. “Now I don’t know what’s going to happen! She left me the responsibility of settling the estate and I’ve no idea how to do anything like that!”
Lacey found that curious. Iris had children. A son, who should automatically inherit the estate. “Why aren’t her kids figuring all that out? Surely the estate should go to them in her will?”
Nigel paused and stared at Lacey. He went to close the door. “What am I doing talking to you?” he said, as if musing aloud. “You’re the police’s main suspect!”
“I told you, I did nothing to hurt her. And by the sounds of things you were the last person to see her alive. So you’ll be a suspect as well, even if the police haven’t told you as much.”
“I have an alibi,” he said haughtily. “Which is more than can be said for you. Now get off my porch. Go on, go away!”
He slammed the door in Lacey’s face.
She took a step back.
Nigel the valet was certainly suspicious. He ran errands for Iris—getting her prescriptions, for one—but it had been Iris herself who’d come to see Lacey in person. Perhaps she didn’t trust Nigel when it came to her antiques. Could he have killed Iris purposefully when he knew she had an appointment so that someone else other than him would find the body?
Whatever was going on, Lacey thought it was all very strange, and she was determined to get to the bottom of it. For her reputation. Her store. And for Iris.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Lacey got into her car and took out her cell phone. She found the little business card she’d been given by DCI Beth Lewis during her questioning and dialed the number. She wanted to know what was going on with the investigation—if Taryn was spreading malicious and unfounded rumors about her involvement, she had a right to know what the police were doing about it.
But as she listened to the ringing through the speaker, Lacey realized that she wasn’t going to get anywhere with them. The cops were suspicious of her too—the plainclothes officer outside her store yesterday was all the evidence she needed of that.
On the spur of the moment, Lacey decided that the only way she’d get any info out of the police would be if she pretended to be someone related to Iris Archer. She made a snap decision to pretend to be a daughter, and put on her best British accent.
The call connected.
“Hello,” Lacey said, pronouncing the word as if it were spelt with three o’s. “I’m calling to speak to Superintendent Turner regarding Iris Archer from Penrose Estate.”
“Who’s calling?”
“This is her daughter.” Lacey paused, wracking her mind for the name of the daughter that she’d read in her research. “Clarissa,” she blurted the second she recalled it. But her surname escaped her.
Luckily, the receptionist didn’t seem to need a full name.
“Transferring,” she said.
There was a pause. Lacey could feel her heart thrumming while she waited to be connected to Superintendent Turner. She may have fooled the receptionist, but it would be a different matter entirely fooling a police detective. They were trained to smell BS, after all, even if it was coming through a telephone handset.
“Superintendent Turner,” the familiar gruff voice came on the other end, giving Lacey an immediate mental image of the man who’d been so rude to her that dreadful morning a few days ago.
“Hello, it’s Clarissa, Iris Archer’s daughter. I wanted an update on my mother’s case.”
There was a long pause.
“And you’re Clarissa Archer?” Superintendent Turner said finally.
Archer, Lacey thought, recalling how the papers had described her as unmarried.
“That’s right,” she said aloud.
There was an agonizingly long pause. Superintendent Turner seemed very fond of them, Lacey thought.
“Really?” he said finally, in a slow, drawn-out manner.
Uh-oh. He was on to her.
“Yes,” she tried, in her poor attempt at a well-to-do British accent.
In the seat beside her, Chester gave her a look of derision. Even he wasn’t falling for it.
“Let’s stop playing games,” Superintenden
t Turner said in her ear. “I think you’re Lacey Bishop, putting on a fake English accent. A very bad fake English accent, I might add.”
Damn. She’d been caught.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” she said, grimacing, her voice about ten octaves higher now than when she’d started. “This is Clarissa Archer. Iris Archer’s daughter.”
“No it’s not,” Superintendent Turner barked. He’d clearly reached the end of his rope and had snapped. “I know it’s not because Clarissa Archer is sitting at the station as we speak!”
Lacey gasped. Clarissa was there? If she could speak to her, perhaps she’d be able to get some useful information on the case.
“I mean…” the Superintendent began to say, clearly in an attempt to backpedal from the confidential information he’d just blurted in a moment of frustration.
But there was no backing out of this one. What had been said had been said.
Lacey hung up and punched the air.
“Come on, Chester, let’s go speak to daughter dearest.”
She turned the ignition of her car and drove away at speed.
*
Lacey parked around the corner of the station. Her champagne-colored rust bucket of a car was hardly inconspicuous, so it was better for her to keep it out of sight.
“Chester, you can come with me,” she told the dog. “But you must be completely quiet, okay?”
Chester raised his head and regarded her with his intelligent eyes. It really looked as if he understood the instruction, and since he didn’t whine like he normally did when she spoke to him, Lacey decided that must mean he’d understood every word she’d said.
They walked around the corner together. It was an overcast day, dark enough to activate the automatic streetlights. Each time Lacey passed beneath one, it felt like a spotlight being shone on her.
The police station was sleek looking, with bright yellow light streaming from its large glass front onto the paving slab steps leading up to it. Lacey and Chester shuffled into the hedges to obscure themselves from sight and watched silently, with bated breath.
Before long, the glass door was pushed open and a woman exited the police station, trotting down the steps with a handkerchief up to her eyes. She was dressed quite glamorously, and Lacey recalled that she’d once run—then run into the ground—her own fashion brand.
“That must be her,” Lacey whispered down to Chester. “Clarissa. Come on, let’s go and see what she’s up to.”
Chester gave her a silent look of understanding and followed Lacey as Lacey, in turn, followed the woman.
The three moved along the street, Lacey and Chester staying close to the protection of the straggly hedgerows, the daughter rummaging in her purse for something. Just then, Lacey heard the tinkle of keys and deduced that the woman must be heading for the single car parked against the sidewalk.
“Quick,” Lacey said to Chester. “We’d better talk to her before she drives away.”
Lacey was more than acutely aware of the fact that approaching a lone woman on an empty street was far from polite, but with her reputation on the line, she had no choice but to do it. She hoped Clarissa Archer didn’t carry pepper spray.
“Excuse me,” Lacey said, hoping that an overly formal greeting would ease any terror her sudden appearance might spark in the woman.
Clarissa swirled, startled. “What? Who are you? What do you want?”
She didn’t seem to be reaching for pepper spray, and so Lacey relaxed and took another step forward. Clarissa had her mother’s eyes—dark brown, sparking with astuteness—but unlike the kindness Lacey had seen in Iris Archer’s eyes, her daughter’s were filled with suspicion.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you,” Lacey began. “My name is Lacey Bishop. I’m an antiques dealer and I had a meeting with your mother—”
“The day she died,” Clarissa interrupted. With a cold tone, she added, “I know who you are. What do you want?”
“I wanted to ask you about Nigel,” Lacey said. “Your mom’s valet. Did you know him well?”
Clarissa shook her head. “No. But Mother adored him. She never stopped talking about him.” She dabbed at her eyes with the kerchief. “Why are you asking me that?”
“He told me that he’s the one settling the estate,” Lacey explained. “That your mother left it to him in her will. But I thought there were all kinds of laws around estates, about them staying within the family and passing down the firstborn male’s line.”
Clarissa sighed loudly, as if she thought Lacey was a moron. “Like most English estates, Penrose Manor had that law written out about a hundred years ago. My mother inherited it from her father, after all, and she’s not the firstborn male, is she?”
Her condescending manner made Lacey bristle. It reminded her of the way Saskia would speak down to her. Lacey drew on all her years of experience of handling Saskia to remain cordial in the face of this rude woman. The important thing was to keep Clarissa speaking, even if the woman couldn’t help herself from schooling an ignorant yank.
“So yes, before my mother the estate passed down the male bloodline, but it’s changed now and she has the liberty to leave it to whomever she wanted.” She punctuated her words with gesticulations, several rings adorning her fingers, and bangles around both wrists. “She could’ve left it all to her cat, Albert, if she’d taken the fancy.”
Lacey let what she’d heard sink in. “So, if there hadn’t been a change in the law, your mother wouldn’t have inherited the estate in the first place?”
“My goodness, there is a brain in there!” Clarissa said snootily. “My mother was the oldest of two girls. Her sister had a son first, so if the old laws were in place, it would have been he who inherited the manner.”
“And that son would be your cousin?” Lacey clarified. “The son of your aunt, who has Alzheimer’s?”
The woman’s brown eyes narrowed, becoming even colder. “You seem to know a lot about my family.”
“Only what’s been printed in the papers.”
Clarissa scoffed. “Yes, and we all know we can trust what we read in the papers!”
Her sarcasm was obvious to Lacey. Being referred to as “the spinster CEO of a failed fashion brand” had obviously gotten under her skin.
Clarissa folded her arms, her metal bracelets jangling. “Why are you so interested in what the papers have to say about my family anyway?”
Lacey didn’t think it was a good idea to reveal that she was a suspect. “Your mother knew my father. I haven’t seen him since I was seven. I thought she might be able to help me answer some questions about him.”
Clarissa arched a single eyebrow, clearly unmoved by Lacey’s plight. “Well, I’m afraid there’s nothing to be done about that now. Once Mother’s buried, I’m going back to London to put this rotten business out of my mind. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
She unlocked her car, slid into the driver’s seat, and slammed the door shut in Lacey’s face.
Lacey hopped back onto the sidewalk as the car kicked into life and Clarissa sped away into the gloom, her brake lights quickly becoming two floating red dots as the car was swallowed by the mist rolling in from the ocean.
Lacey shivered beneath the darkening clouds. Clarissa’s irritation was evident. But it felt to Lacey like its cause was much, much more than just the incessant questioning of a meddling stranger. There was definitely a strange family dynamic going on in the Archer family, one that Lacey suspected had something to do with the history of Penrose Estate, who had inherited it, when, and from whom. Clarissa Archer seemed bitter about something, and Lacey was going to find out what.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The fog had thickened considerably as Lacey drove toward Crag Cottage. Her headlights barely illuminated the rocks and shrubbery that lined the narrow cliff-side road.
I guess this is a typical British springtime, Lacey thought with a smirk.
As she turned into her driveway, pebbles
crunching beneath her tires, the beams caught something in them—a silhouette of a shape that was distinctly human.
Lacey’s heart began to race. Was there a shadowy figure lurking on her front lawn?
She squinted through the windshield. But the mist was too dense for her gaze to penetrate.
She looked over at Chester in the passenger seat. He whined. Her guard dog and protector was as sharp as a tack. If he wasn’t barking, then surely everything was safe. That flash of a figure must’ve been a figment of her anxious imagination, a ghoul born out of stress.
She got out of the car.
“Aha!” a voice exclaimed.
Startled, Lacey swirled on the spot. A person was emerging through the mist like an apparition. Her legs began to shake.
That was, until Lacey saw their features. Sharp jawline. Handsome eyes.
“Tom?” Lacey exclaimed, the terror leaving her body in one sudden whoosh. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at your store?”
“Paul took over my shift so I could knock off earlier and make something special for our dinner,” Tom said conversationally, clearly oblivious to how much he’d startled Lacey. “I went into your store to see if you ate fish and met Gina, who told me you’d taken the day off. So I figured if you were home, I may as well come right over”—he held up his trusty basket—“and do the cooking here.”
The plan they’d formulated yesterday morning suddenly slammed back into Lacey’s mind. She’d been so wrapped up in her detective work, she’d forgotten all about their date. Or not-date. Whatever it was.
Feeling terrible for having forgotten about him, Lacey quickly fumbled in her purse for the Rapunzel key.
“Have you been waiting long?” she asked, as her fingers anxiously combed through her overstuffed purse.
“Not really,” Tom said with a breezy shrug. “Only half an hour. Give or take five minutes. Well, give ten minutes.”
“You were waiting forty minutes?” Lacey exclaimed, her still empty hand withdrawing from the purse as her gaze automatically went up to the gray clouds.