“Julia insisted,” Vesta said, lying through her teeth. I shot her a look.
“Well, now.” Lord Fotheringill’s way of beginning a new topic. “Rupert Lanchester. He certainly has ruffled a few feathers with this latest interview.” Linus chuckled, and Vesta joined in at the joke that was so old there were hardly any feathers left on it.
I smiled, but said nothing as my heart sank. Linus never seemed to notice my lack of enthusiasm when he mentioned my father, host of the popular BBC Two nature television show A Bird in the Hand. Linus was a huge fan of my dad’s, and although I’m not saying that Rupert was the reason Linus hired me to manage the estate’s tourist center, I’m not ruling out the possibility.
I suspected that Vesta suspected there was a story to be told, but I’d never offered more than a few sketchy details: I no longer worked as Rupert’s personal assistant or associate producer on the BBC show. I sought a new direction for my life, had settled on the tourist industry, and was delighted to be in Smeaton-under-Lyme. I breathed not a word about the recent upheaval in my personal life.
My mother had died unexpectedly late last summer. Dad and I at home in Cambridge, and Bianca down in Cornwall, sought ways to cope with the shock. My grief was deep, like a sharp pain cutting straight through me—and it didn’t help any of us that we’d had barely a word from my mum’s relatives. She was from California, but her family had cut all ties with her when she married my dad, and they continued to apply that ban to the rest of us after she was gone.
Gone—and not six months after she died, my dad remarried. Just the thought of his betrayal of Mum’s memory was like a punch to my middle, and even now, sitting at the table with Vesta and Linus, I struggled to breathe. But I would not let them see, because one slip would lead to another and I could not let my hysterical reaction to Dad’s marriage and my subsequent flight from Cambridge seep into my bright new life. Some things are best left to fester in the dark.
By the shrewd looks she gave me, I knew Vesta could tell that a sea of stories churned under the thin explanation I’d given her. She didn’t pry, but she would poke me with a stick occasionally, hoping to loosen up a few details.
“Did you see it, Julia?” Vesta asked, stick in hand at that moment. “On the news last night, they asked him what he thought about the plan for the wind farm going in somewhere in Norfolk.”
Near Weeting Heath, close to the Suffolk border.
“Rupert said it would wreak havoc on the birds,” Vesta said.
The meadow was an important breeding ground for stone curlews, and the wind farm could disrupt an entire population’s life cycle.
“Rupert said the company is a bunch of thugs,” Vesta added.
“Power to the People—that’s the name of the firm,” I said, “and they are most certainly thugs.” It slipped out before I could stop it—it was my intention to appear as disinterested in my old life as possible, but the subject made my blood heat up. “Rupert was pointing out that it’s a protected site,” I continued, “and yet the company is trying to push through approval for their project without taking into account the environmental impact.”
But with my defense of Rupert came a crash of emotions that disoriented me—a flush of pride in my dad for standing up to them, followed hot on its heels by the anger that never went away, followed by my eyes filling with tears. Get hold of yourself, Julia. If I didn’t, one of these days I would simply explode.
I shook my head and said, “I didn’t see the news.”
Vesta was relentless. “Later, they ran a repeat of one of his shows. It was from three years ago, but still such a delight. Rupert showed a group of schoolchildren how to build nest boxes for wrens, and he taught them a song about caterpillars. Do you remember that episode, Julia?”
Of course I remembered that episode—I’d scheduled it. Twenty-five second-graders from a poor school in Newham had gone out to Marshy End. Few of them could speak English, many had never been to the countryside, and all of them went wild. They ran riot over their teachers—breaking off stems of yellow flag iris and chasing one another round, jumping up and down on clumps of sedges near the pond. I certainly hadn’t been any help. It was a nightmare, until Rupert began a silly song that involved flapping his arms like a bird. One by one the children followed him, and soon they were acting out the life of a blackcap. They had ended their afternoon in quiet reverence, a congregation of seven-year-olds watching a pied wagtail bob its tail up and down before flying to the nest to feed its young. He was that good.
But the distance I put between myself and my old life could not be bridged. “No,” I said to Vesta and Linus, “I don’t remember that one. I was probably getting the tea.”
—
Vesta busied herself in the back so that I would need to see Lord Fotheringill out on my own. He stood near a rack of leaflets, fiddling with a copy of the Suffolk Walking Festival schedule. I had arranged a walk round the parkland at Hoggin Hall, and it had been accepted as one of the official outings—my first big score as TIC manager, and I was quite proud. Linus smiled and leaned toward me. I leaned away and shifted slightly, putting the counter between us.
“I believe we’ve a nesting pair of chiffchaffs along the shrub walk,” he whispered.
The air hung heavy with the unspoken invitation for a bit of one-on-one birding with his Lordship, but I swept the notion away brightly. “You’ll have to keep an eye on them for us—won’t he, Vesta?” I called over my shoulder. “And let us know how they get on.”
“Yes, yes, of course, I’ll do that.” He left looking a bit crestfallen that I hadn’t taken the bait. I felt only a tiny twinge of guilt—as grateful as I was to him for hiring me, I didn’t think I should have to repay him with my life.
—
I got our sandwiches at lunch—apparently Vesta didn’t want to overplay her hand with Akash, showing up twice in one day. When I returned to the TIC, she was seated at the computer in the back half of our small space, with a fist of triumph in the air. “There you are now, old girl,” she said, “I knew you’d come through for me.”
She wasn’t cheering for her roast chicken sandwich, but rather at a photo online of Princess Anne.
“You see what she’s wearing there?” Vesta asked, eyes shining as she pointed at the computer screen, which showed her Royal Highness shaking hands with someone at a charity do the day before. “That buttercup-yellow Chanel suit. She’s worn it every spring for the past ten years, and so I put a few bob down on her to wear it this season, too. She’s a great one for recycling—I knew she wouldn’t let me down.”
Vesta, I learned early on, liked to place the occasional bet. “Did you win much?”
She swiveled in the chair and scooted over to our table. “Twenty pounds,” she said, shrugging. “It’s just a bit of fun, only the odd wager.”
Odd is right. “Taking a flutter” it’s called—placing these small, quirky bets. I’ve never seen the attraction of it, although it’s practically a national pastime. Bookmakers will take on the silliest wagers—at their own discretion—and I’m sure a fair amount of betting goes on between private citizens.
When my sister, Bianca, was eleven, she went through a phase of betting on just about anything with our best friend, Stephen, ten at the time. I was nine and felt far older than the two of them—although it may be because I felt a bit left out. Bianca and Stephen would smirk and snigger as they placed ten-pence bets with each other over whether the next song on the radio would be U2. I don’t think I even knew who Bono was at that age. And I think they liked wagering not because of the money, but because “taking a flutter” sounded slightly naughty to them. Still, to this day Bianca will bet on the most absurd things—like the year she bet me five pounds that someone would wear a real wedding cake as a hat at Ascot. Wouldn’t you know the one time I take her up on a wager, I lose.
—
Vesta departed after lunch. She worked for me half-time and always acted as if she had someplace she needed
to rush off to. Toward the end of the afternoon, I made myself a cup of tea and sought inspiration for a new visitors leaflet that would explain the history of the estate. “The Fotheringills,” I typed, “have a long association with Suffolk, and in fact, Hoggin Hall has been the family seat since the Jurassic period.” Delete. All right, perhaps it only seemed that long after a morning spent listening to Linus’s tales of his waggish ancestors and their shenanigans.
—
I stood at the door, locking up at the end of the day, and in the window’s reflection I caught a glimpse of something—a sight across the road that froze my blood. There, just beside the red post box at the corner—was it someone in a wide-brimmed field hat? I whipped round, but saw no one. Stop imagining things. I’d left my old life behind, and only Bianca knew where I lived.
—
Pipit Cottage sat in the middle of a row of former sixteenth-century flax workers’ lodgings. “It suits you,” Linus had said, almost shyly, when he showed me my lodgings, “with your flaxen hair”—my first clue that he might wish to think of me as more than an employee. The cottage was small, but I had distilled my life into its essence and needed little. I had a cozy sitting room with fireplace, a kitchen with all the essentials, a bedroom up a steep set of stairs, and a back garden that had been trimmed, mowed, fertilized, and sprayed to within a centimeter of its life before I moved in. Now in spring, I was allowing it to grow into what I wanted—disreputable, wild, full of birdsong.
I let myself in as the road traffic began to thicken, flipped the switch on the kettle, and pulled off my heels to better climb the steep stairs. I stripped off my uniform and stretched, folded the thin wool cardigan, hung up the pencil skirt, and tossed the white blouse in a corner. We were nothing if not official, Vesta and I, in our navy-blue outfits. I pulled on denim trousers, a T-shirt, and a thick, woolly cardigan that reached almost to my knees. It had been my mum’s and everyone said the color, a warm chestnut, set off her golden-brown hair perfectly.
The door knocker clattered, and I considered the short list of possible callers. Rosy from The Hair Strand telling me it’s time for a trim? It wouldn’t be Vesta—she knew where I lived, but we never called on each other. Linus—oh, let’s hope he hasn’t got so far that he’d drop by with a bottle of wine.
But it was none of them. Instead, Rupert Lanchester stood on my doorstep.
Every great mystery needs an Alibi
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Best-Laid Plants Page 29