Murder in Bloom - Libby Sarjeant Murder Mystery Series

by Lesley Cookman

‘Whatever,’ said Lewis. ‘Anyway, they went to have a look.’

  ‘We know that,’ said Libby, exasperated. ‘We were there.’

  ‘They found something.’

  ‘Oh, God, what?’

  ‘A boat was missing.’

  Relief whooshed through Libby and she sat down abruptly. ‘I thought you were going to say they’d found her body.’

  ‘That’s what I thought. Anyway, they reckon she must have collected her bags, shot down there and taken off.’

  ‘To where, though? Have they managed to trace her?’

  ‘Not as far as I know. I don’t understand any of it.’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ said Libby. ‘How do they know she took the boat?’

  ‘They found something of hers, I think. Something she dropped?’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Libby. ‘Not a cigarette end, I suppose? With a distinctive lipstick colour on the end?’

  ‘I don’t know, do I?’ Lewis sounded bewildered. ‘Anyway, she didn’t smoke.’

  Libby sighed. ‘It was a joke, Lewis,’ she said. ‘You know, like in detective stories.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘So you’ve got no idea what it was?’

  ‘I’ve told you, no. Look, I gotta go. Katie and me are going shopping this morning, and I might pop back up to London for a few days. Ad and Mog can carry on here. They know what to do – at least Mog does.’

  ‘Right,’ said Libby. ‘Will Katie go to London, too?’

  ‘Yeah. She can go back to her flat and come to me during the days.’

  ‘Have you got a flat in London, then?’

  ‘’Course I have! Only rented, see, I took it on when I first went on to Housey Housey, and I was going to buy something else when Creekmarsh came up.’

  ‘Right. Well, keep your mobile on so we can ring you if anything comes up.’

  ‘The police will let me know soon enough,’ said Lewis gloomily.

  ‘If anything else comes up, I meant,’ said Libby.

  ‘Ad’ll let me know about the garden. They’re going to plant up that little back bit next week so’s it looks pretty.’

  ‘Bit late in the year, isn’t it?’ said Libby.

  ‘How would I know?’ said Lewis. ‘Mog says they can do it, and they did it loads of times on Housey Housey, didn’t matter what time of year it was. And we’ve done it on my show, too.’

  ‘Right. I’ll talk to you soon, then, and see you when you come back,’ said Libby.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Lewis, sounded unconvinced. Libby was rather afraid he’d had enough of the Sarjeant and Castle investigating team.

  She reported all of this to Fran in another telephone call. ‘What do you think?’ she asked finally. ‘Is it a con? Has she really disappeared on a rowing boat?’

  ‘There was certainly the feeling that she’d been there, although I didn’t see anything you might call evidence. It’s a pity Lewis didn’t know what they found.’

  ‘Could you ask Ian?’

  Fran snorted. ‘Don’t be daft, Lib. Of course I can’t. Oh, and by the way, Guy invited him to the wedding. Seemed to think it was a good idea. And Jane and Terry are coming.’

  ‘Great,’ said Libby. ‘So it’s all organised, is it?’

  ‘Not the outfits. How about you and me going shopping tomorrow?’

  ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow! It’ll be horribly crowded.’

  ‘Don’t be a spoilsport,’ said Fran. ‘Go on. We could even go up to London.’

  Libby thought about it, tempted. ‘OK,’ she said eventually. ‘You’re on. I’ll get Ben to take me to Canterbury to catch the train.’

  ‘I’ll tell you which one I’m catching from Nethergate then,’ said Fran. ‘I’m really looking forward to it.’

  ‘She sounded really excited,’ Libby told Ben later. ‘I didn’t have the heart to tell her I hate shopping in London.’

  ‘Well, I think it’ll be good for you to get away from all the murder and mayhem,’ said Ben, pouring her a whisky.

  ‘I think it’s got away from us,’ said Libby with a sigh. ‘We’d decided it wasn’t any of our business before Lewis called us back in, but now I think he’s had enough of it and has gone back to London. Apart from Ad still working over there, it would appear that our connection to it all has stopped.’

  ‘We’ll have to find you something else to keep you interested,’ said Ben, coming to sit next to her on the sofa.

  ‘There’s Steeple Farm,’ said Libby, ‘if Lewis is still going to take it on, or I suppose I could project manage myself if it came to it.’

  ‘There is,’ said Ben, ‘and there’s also your painting. You’ve been neglecting that a bit lately, haven’t you?’

  ‘I took some in to Guy only a week or so ago,’ said Libby, ‘but yes. I need to get going again with those. Pity it feels like churning out a production line.’

  ‘Just be grateful you can do it,’ said Ben. ‘It pays for all your little necessities.’

  Libby raised her glass. ‘Like this, you mean?’

  ‘And those,’ said Ben, retrieving the battered packet of cigarettes from the log basket.

  Libby sighed. ‘I will try and give them up,’ she said, ‘but I still feel resentful.’

  ‘Don’t do it for the government,’ said Ben, patting her hand. ‘Do it for me.’

  She laughed. ‘I’ll see,’ she said. ‘And now I’d better get some supper. Adam’s gone into Canterbury with Mog, so he won’t be here.’

  ‘House to ourselves, have we?’ Ben leant over and blew on her neck. ‘Ought to make the most of it, then, shouldn’t we?’

  So they did.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  FRAN AND LIBBY SPENT a tiring but ultimately successful day in London. Libby’s daughter Belinda met them for lunch, but Fran could not be persuaded to invite her own daughter Lucy.

  ‘She’d whine about bringing the children and then try and insist I went out to Tulse Hill to see them instead,’ she said. ‘I can do without that.’

  On Sunday the weather went back to being late spring-like and stayed like it for the next few days. Adam went back to work at Creekmarsh, Mog joined him for a few hours a day and Lewis and Katie apparently stayed in London. Adam reported that no police had been seen and everything seemed to have returned to normal. Ben and Libby had another look round Steeple Farm and decided that Lewis’s interest had been fleeting and born of the circumstances at the time. They would have to go it alone. Luckily, Mog had contacts with reliable local builders, one of whom was a qualified lime plasterer and had been employed by English Heritage on restoration work in the area. He was able to make a start on the odd bits of refurbishment that would be needed, but before that Libby and Ben had to decide what extremities of bad taste would have to be ripped out.

  Libby regularly pushed down the uncomfortable feeling that she was doing the wrong thing, and found herself going round her cottage talking to it. She kept reminding herself that she wasn’t selling it, and only moving into Steeple Farm as a sort of caretaker, but it didn’t make any difference.

  Ben, usually sensitive to her moods, had happily accepted what he saw as the new situation and spent the evenings talking renovations. He had also thrown himself into the role of Guy’s best man, and was helping move some of Guy’s belongings and furniture into Fran’s still sparsely furnished Coastguard Cottage.

  ‘Don’t you mind?’ asked Libby curiously. ‘You so wanted to be on your own at first.’

  ‘That was at first,’ said Fran. ‘And I had a lot to work through, didn’t I? All those memories and discoveries from the past.’

  ‘And Ian didn’t help, did he?’

  ‘It wasn’t Ian’s fault,’ sighed Fran. ‘It was me. It was the novelty of having a younger man fancying me. It confused me for a bit.’

  ‘And he is very attractive,’ said Libby slyly.

  ‘Yes, he is.’ There was a short silence. ‘But not as attractive as Guy,’ Fran said eventually, and Libby smiled.

  Th
e Skeleton in the Garden case, as the media referred to it, slipped to the inside pages of the newspapers and wasn’t mentioned at all on the television news. Neither was Tony West’s murder, although the press hadn’t been told of the link between the two cases. If they had been, thought Libby, it might still have been at least page two news.

  On Thursday, two weeks before Fran and Guy’s wedding and two weeks since Libby first met Lewis, Fran called Libby.

  ‘I know this sounds silly,’ she said, ‘but I had a dream last night.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. And I’m pretty sure it meant Cindy was in England before Sunday.’

  ‘Oh, Fran, that doesn’t seem very –’

  ‘I know what you’re going to say, Lib,’ interrupted Fran, ‘but it is based on something concrete.’

  ‘Her reaction when she found out he was dead, though. Lewis said she was hysterical.’

  ‘Yet she didn’t say anything about going to see him when she arrived at Creekmarsh, did she? Wouldn’t you have thought she would have asked if she could at least call him after Lewis told her the whole story?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Libby slowly. ‘And she didn’t, did she? You would have thought she would want to know where the money was, as it was due to be hers eventually. And the other thing was, she actually told Lewis all about knowing Tony, and him covering up the murder.’

  ‘Why didn’t Lewis mention it to her then?’

  ‘I think he thought he had, or that she already knew.’

  ‘Her behaviour doesn’t ring true. I’m going to try and find out a bit more.’

  ‘Fran! We’re out of it,’ said Libby. ‘Why do you want to do this?’

  ‘Because I can’t get it out of my mind. I’m going to see if I can track down any historical references to Creekmarsh.’

  ‘What good will that do?’ asked Libby, bewildered.

  ‘Hiding places,’ said Fran crisply. ‘I’ll let you know if I find anything.’

  ‘I’m going to look too,’ said Libby, and switching off the phone went straight to the computer.

  At first, it looked as though there was little on the Internet about Creekmarsh, but by dint of following seemingly insignificant clues, she eventually chanced on a local website about villages in the area with a whole page about the village, the church and the house.

  Creekmarsh Place had been built towards the end of the sixteenth century, and most of the history concerned the families through whose hands it had passed. Part of the house had been destroyed by fire in the eighteenth century and there were rumours of passages running between the church, the house and the inn, although none of these had been found, and both the church and the inn had been rebuilt during the nineteenth century, so it was unlikely that, if they ever had existed, they continued to do so now.

  After an hour of following up promising-looking clues and cross-referencing with historical documents, Libby was ready to give up, when something caught her eye. There was a tunnel at Creekmarsh. Leading to an ice-house. Her heart gave a great thump in her chest just as the phone began to ring.

  ‘Lib?’ Fran’s voice sounded muffled.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Just outside the library,’ said Fran. ‘Trying to keep my voice down. I’ve found something.’

  ‘So have I.’

  ‘Oh?’ Now Fran sounded put out.

  ‘On the computer. What did you find?’

  ‘There’s an ice-house.’

  ‘Joined to Creekmarsh by a tunnel.’

  ‘Oh, bugger,’ said Fran, who never swore. ‘I never should have taught you how to use a computer.’

  Libby laughed. ‘I’m so pleased you did,’ she said, ‘although I do waste time on it. Anyway, did you find anything else?’

  ‘Yes. Did you?’

  ‘No, that was it, except bits and pieces about the history.’

  ‘Well, in the library they’ve actually got archives of all sorts of things, how much people were paid, what was ordered for the kitchen, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘There’s mention of a “strong room”. Where do you think that was?’

  ‘I don’t know. What date was this?’

  ‘Mid eighteen hundreds. About 1848, I think.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Libby. ‘That was when the church was rebuilt.’

  ‘Has that got anything to do with it?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m thinking.’

  ‘Be careful,’ said Fran.

  ‘Can you take any notes about that strong room? Or copy the pages? And would there be anything about the pub?’

  ‘The pub?’

  ‘The Fox, opposite the turning towards the house. On the history site I found, it said it used to be connected to the church and the house before it was rebuilt.’

  ‘I’ll go and try. You carry on playing with the Internet. I’ll call you when I’ve finished.’

  Libby laughed. ‘What are we like?’ she said. ‘We’re not supposed to be doing this.’

  ‘I know.’ Fran sighed. ‘I just can’t seem to help it.’

  Libby returned to the computer and searched for The Fox. Luckily, it had its own website, with a good sprinkling of interior photographs and a history page, which actually mentioned the “secret passage”. The writer had indulged his or her love of romance by embroidering the story with tales of reckless smugglers, which wasn’t altogether unlikely, thought Libby, given that Creekmarsh had such excellent masked access from the river via the inlet. Which brought her back to Cindy and the reason Fran had embarked on this search.

  However, The Fox claimed to have no knowledge of the continued existence of the passage, and although there was a very limited website for the little church, it made no reference to anything secret: passage, tunnel or otherwise.

  Fran phoned a little late and said she’d been allowed to make copies of relevant pages, but there was nothing else in the library except a small poster advertising The Fox.

  ‘Shall we go and have a look?’ asked Libby. ‘We could go to The Fox for lunch.’

  ‘OK, I’ll meet you there in – what? Half an hour?’

  ‘You’re keen,’ said Libby, and switching off, went upstairs to put on something respectable before calling Ben to ask once more for the loan of the Land Rover.

  The Fox, on the bend of the road opposite the lane to Creekmarsh and the church, was a two-storey, cream-washed building under a red-tiled roof, with two single-storey additions, one at each end. Window boxes planted with pelargoniums and petunias hung under the windows and a chalkboard apparently held aloft by a beaming chef announced daily specials. Libby parked the Land Rover next to Fran’s little car in the car park behind the pub, and found Fran in the garden.

  ‘Have you ordered?’

  ‘No,’ said Fran, squinting up into the sun. ‘I thought I’d wait for you.’ She stood up and led the way inside.

  There hadn’t been too much tarting up, thought Libby; no glittering horse brasses or tables with beaten brass tops, and at the end of the bar were copies of several daily papers. They ordered two mineral waters and two ham salads and Libby smiled confidingly at the woman behind the counter.

  ‘We hear there’s a secret passage here?’ she said.

  The woman shook her head and laughed. ‘Oh, that’s just on the website and in the brochure,’ she said. ‘My Frank got a bit overexcited about that.’

  ‘Oh?’ Libby hitched herself onto a bar stool. ‘He didn’t make it up?’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the woman. ‘There was a tunnel, apparently, went to the church and then on to the big house, but it was blocked off when this place was rebuilt.’

  ‘What a pity,’ said Libby. ‘When was that? It looks old.’

  ‘Same time as the church, we think. 1849, ’50. Something like that.’

  ‘Smugglers?’ asked Fran.

  ‘Yeah, definitely. ’Course, by that time there weren’t many left, it was all through those old wars it went on.’

  �
�Brandy for the Parson,’ said Libby.

  ‘Baccy for the Clerk,’ added Fran.

  ‘Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,’ they chanted together. The landlady stared at them in surprise.

  ‘Rudyard Kipling’s ‘Smuggler’s Song’,’ said Libby. ‘I bet your Frank’s heard of it. Very famous. Otherwise known as Watch The Wall My Darling, While The Gentlemen Go By.’

  ‘Right.’ The landlady looked doubtful. ‘I’ll ask him.’

  ‘So he doesn’t know where the tunnel might have come out?’ asked Fran.

  ‘In the cellars, I suppose. Makes sense, doesn’t it?’

  Libby and Fran looked at each other.

  ‘Cellars?’ said Libby.

  ‘Are they still there?’ said Fran.

  ‘Well, of course they are!’ The landlady laughed. ‘All pubs have cellars. Don’t suppose they’re the same as they were a coupla hundred years ago, though.’

  ‘No,’ said Libby, disappointed.

  ‘Why are you so interested?’ The landlady turned and leant through a hatch, bringing back two plates of ham salad with a brief thanks to a disembodied voice from beyond.

  ‘We read about it on the Internet,’ said Fran, shooting Libby a warning glance.

  ‘You’re not tourists?’ The woman frowned.

  ‘No, I’m from Steeple Martin and Fran lives in Nethergate,’ said Libby, unwrapping her knife and fork.

  The landlady’s brow cleared. ‘Hang on,’ she said, ‘I know you! You’re the lady who does the murders!’

  Libby made a face and Fran blushed.

  ‘You’re the psychic lady, aren’t you?’ The landlady now looked delighted. ‘Is this passage something to do with – ooh!’ She put her hand over her mouth and her eyes widened. In the corner a group of locals looked over their shoulders with interest. ‘That skeleton they found?’ she continued in a whisper.

  Fran sighed. ‘No, I’m afraid it isn’t,’ she said. The landlady looked disappointed. ‘It is for the owner of Creekmarsh, though,’ Fran continued, lowering her voice. ‘He thought he might be able to trace the passage.’

  ‘Fantastic!’ The landlady’s eyes were shining. ‘I’ll tell Frank the minute he gets back.’

  ‘Is he away?’ asked Libby, wondering what Fran was up to.