A Slice of Disaster

by Jessica Lancaster

  She had a point. Bree was fond of Elijah’s morning visits where he’d purchase sugary baked goods for the library. He wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do so this morning, and it would help win favour over with asking for something like help.

  Ten minutes later, a horn beeped outside Bree’s mother’s house.

  “What’s that racket!” Helen shouted.

  “Bleeding loud!” Cleo chimed in.

  “It’s for me!” Bree called back to them. In a pair of jeans, a t-shirt, and a brown faux leather jacket, Bree was ready to find out more about the stolen jewels.

  In the car, Bree smiled at Sarah and thanked her for the help. In the backseat, there was a single metal sheet tray filled with baked goods.

  “Are you opening tomorrow?” she asked as they set off into the city.

  “I’ll have,” she said. “The only time it was closed for two days in a row was during the funeral.”

  “You know, I can run kitchen, if you want to serve customers, or—”

  The two women would take it in turns to bake and serve, while they had the two apprentice bakers beneath them trying to learn, it made the job a little slower at times, but once they had the knack of it, things sped up.

  “I might get my mum to go in,” Bree said. “Depends on what I find out today.”

  “You didn’t say,” Sarah said.

  “Elijah told me to come over, I could look through archived papers.”

  Sarah cooed with excitement. “Do you know what year?”

  “Late sixties.”

  She had some of an idea, and she recalled the men in the police station telling her the date, but it was all a fog in her head.

  They parked in a nearby car park while Bree continued to push the bounds of her memory, trying to pull anything from herself to figure out specifically the month and year it had happened.

  “We’re here,” Sarah said. “Do you know where we’re going?”

  Bree’s teeth gnawed together. “The centre?”

  She let out a slight chuckle. “Grab the tray, I’ll take us.”

  Bree pulled the metal tray from the back seat and followed after Sarah as she led them down an alley and into a small series of market stalls as they begun to wind down and close. They same types of market stalls which would be setting up in Cranwell tomorrow—but on a much smaller scale.

  The quiet library was busy with people walking around browsing the shelves, and another sub-section of people busy with their fingers tapping away at keys in the corner with computers.

  It had been many years since Bree had set foot in this place, even as a teenager, she wasn’t here often, perhaps once a fortnight after a school when her and her friends would use the computers to play games and use anonymous messaging forums.

  “Hello,” an older woman said, stopping Bree and Sarah from walking any further. “We do have a policy here.”

  “Elijah Porter,” Bree announced. “We’re looking for him.”

  The woman’s eyes gazes over the tray of clingfilmed goodies. “You’re from the bakery,” she let out with a squeal. “I’ll let him know you’re here.”

  She half-turned before Bree said, “take these.” And handed the tray off onto the woman.

  “I hope he can help,” Sarah said. “Have they asked to visit the bakery?”

  “The police?” her face turned with puzzle. “I thought they did yesterday.”

  Sarah shook her head. “After you were arrested, no other police officers came.”

  “Then who knows, there could be more jewels hidden under the floorboards.” A smirk crossed Bree’s lips. “And if that’s the case, I’m not telling anyone until I’m out of the country where I will sell them.” She laughed, turning it into a sigh.

  “Bree you’re here,” Elijah said, somewhat louder than the hushed speaking voice of everyone else in the library. “And thank you for bringing the pastries. You should’ve called.” He smiled.

  “I should’ve,” Bree hummed, giving a side-eye glance to Sarah. “But I don’t have your number.”

  He chuckled. “Come with me, we have an archive computer in a room at the back with the offices,” he said. “I asked a couple of the women here if they’d heard or remembered anything about the event, but most of them said it happened in their teens.”

  “I do have a date,” Bree added. “Well, a year. Sixty-nine, or sixty-eight.”

  “Well, all the papers are on the computer, they’re scanned and stored. The computer is a bit old, and we can’t connect the archive to the public as there’s just too much,” Elijah explained as he walked me and Sarah down a path towards a door. “It’s nice to give people a touch of their history, but we’ve got to make sure people are supervised as there’s no copies.” His chuckle turned into a sigh.

  The door led into another hallway of offices, but they didn’t walk any further. He stopped and turned to his left, a glass door with the label ‘archive’ taped across.

  The room wasn’t just used for one single computer, it was the stock room, filled with printing papers and photocopying machines. Elijah nodded to the computer, an old computer Bree recalled from her childhood and teen years in school.

  “If I know how to use it,” she chuckled.

  Once she started, it was fairly simple. The papers had been organised into years and months, and they were in date order. Sarah and Bree looked over the headlines from the first of January 1968 and worked their way through.

  Elijah stood behind them offering moral support. “Luckily they were a weekday paper,” Elijah said. “If there’s anything on it, it’s in there.”

  Ten minutes of scrolling flew by.

  “These headlines are tame,” Sarah noted.

  Headlines such as, ‘Railway Delay Wreaks Havoc’ and ‘New Housing Development’. Although, for the year, they would’ve been what everyone gossiped over and found interesting. Now, if the railway is delayed, people will storm the internet with their aggravations, and nobody wants new housing developments to get too close to where they live.

  “Got it!” Bree exclaimed, almost jumping from her seat. “I got it.”

  “What does it say?”

  Bree read aloud. “Local jewellery heist,” she said. “Twenty-five thousand pounds worth of stolen jewels.”

  “Twenty-five grand,” Elijah scoffed. “That’s not a—” he paused. “Oh.”

  “Yeah, oh,” Sarah said, smacking Elijah’s arm. “How much is that worth now?”

  As Bree continued reading, she noticed something. “It happened in Cranwell,” she said. “Claims no witnesses, a single broken window.”

  “Add a zero and I’ll say that’s how much they’re worth now,” Sarah said.

  “Quarter of a million?” Elijah puffed his cheeks before slumping his arms over his chest. “I wonder why the thief didn’t sell them back then.”

  “Elijah,” Bree said, snapping a finger to cut him off. “Do you have any old street maps?”

  He nodded. “Yeah, why?”

  “This mentions a main road, and I want to know—”

  “It’s the same one,” Elijah said.

  “They just renamed it,” Sarah added.

  “To?” she quizzed back.

  “Landale Road,” they repeated.

  The very same road where Bree’s father had opened his bakery, but there was no such jeweller on the same road.

  “You don’t think—the bakery used to be the jewellers?” Bree posed.

  TEN

  It took Elijah less than ten minutes of talking to the local city council to find out if they had any records of businesses in Cranwell from that dreaded year of the heist. They didn’t, instead, they gave him a contact for the National Archive.

  Elijah approached Bree and Sarah as they stood around the librarians secretly eating the pastries and cakes that had been brought in.

  “What? What happened?” Bree asked with a mouthful of brownie.

  “Nothing,” he said. “They said these might help.�
�� He placed a slip of paper on the counter.

  Swallowing hard, a library stubbed her finger at the paper. “I have a friend who works there,” she said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Are you sure, Grace?” Elijah said.

  Bree’s eyes narrowed into a menacing gaze, fixed on Elijah. “Of course,” she said, attempting to swallow the remains of her food. “We’re looking for a jeweller, from Cranwell, the ones who were robbed. 1969.”

  “68,” Sarah corrected her.

  Taking in another sugary cake, Bree was attempting to settle her nerves from getting the best of her. She knew, getting a name would help her clear herself and her late father from any crime and the implications of handing stolen goods.

  Grace approached them again moments later.

  She pressed a folded piece of paper across the desk to her.

  “Who is it?” Bree asked.

  They were all wanting to know.

  Taking the note, Bree took a peek. “Mr Edmund and Mrs Fiona Prince.”

  “Prince?” Sarah said.

  “Like Prince’s Price?” she mumbled back. Bree folded the paper and shook her head. “It can’t be the same family—but—”

  “You took the jewels into them,” Sarah said.

  “They’re setting you up,” Elijah added.

  “Oh,” Grace gasped. “I’ll step away from this one.”

  Before Grace could leave, Elijah waved a hand to get her attention. “Could you grab the Yellow Pages,” he said. “Let’s see if they’re listed.”

  Bree recalled vaguely how old the owners of Prince’s Price were, and they certainly weren’t old enough to have been running a jewellery shop fifty-one years ago—or even alive, if her memory served her correctly.

  With a new tool at hand, the Yellow Pages was a force to be reckoned with. If your landline home phone wasn’t private, you were listed in the directory.

  “Nobody has a landline anymore,” Bree said.

  Elijah raised his brows, glancing to Bree. “You’ll be looking for someone in their eighties, right? They’ll have one.”

  Bree left him to it, knowing he was right. She turned to Sarah, ready to stuff her mouth with another bite of cake.

  “Do you think they were setting you up?” Sarah asked.

  “I handed them over,” she replied. “For all I know, they could’ve said anything.”

  “And for what it’s worth, I don’t think you can say finders’ keepers,” she added. “I mean, I would’ve loved the raise.” She smiled. “But it’s not worth fighting it. I wonder how long it had been under the fridge for?”

  “The fridge. The backroom,” she mumbled as notes formed in her mind. “It was used for storage, to keep items safe.”

  “Mrs F Prince, Cranwell” Elijah said. “I have her number. There isn’t one of Mr E, which makes me think he’s possibly passed on.”

  “I’ll take the number,” Bree said. “Sarah, we’re gonna need to get to that shop before they close or whatever. I should’ve gone there first thing.”

  Sarah nodded. “Ready when you are.”

  “And you’re going to leave me here?”

  Grace scoffed. “You’re at work,” she said. “Leave the women to it.”

  He finished jotting the number down before passing it over. “Good luck.”

  Bree didn’t need luck, she needed proof.

  Back in the car, Bree took a moment of deep breathes. “I think we should go see the mother,” she said. “If there’s proof, it’s not going to be kept in the shop.”

  “Call her and see where she lives,” she said.

  “And tell her about the robbery?”

  “No, no, no,” she chuckled. “Make it up. You’re delivering some mail and it doesn’t have a full address only a telephone number.”

  Bree fished her phone from her pocket. “You’ve done that before, haven’t you?”

  She hummed, the corners of her lips turning. “Before Michael, and way before Christopher was born, probably just after you left for London, I had a phase where I was madly in love, but it was short lived, and I think in the end, I was a little stalker-ish.”

  “How could you keep that from me?”

  They laughed.

  As Bree called the telephone number, she waited for a moment before a click, and the house phone was picked up.

  To Bree’s surprise, as she spoke with Fiona, going from the impromptu scenario Sarah had provided, Fiona was happy enough to give her entire address.

  A smile waved across her face. “Got it,” she said.

  “Where?” Sarah asked.

  “Putter’s Lane,” she said.

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “With the rich people.”

  “Is it?”

  “After all of this, I’m going to re-educate you on all things Cranwell.”

  Putter’s Lane was inside Cranwell, and down a narrow country road. There were several homes each with large gardens and with plenty of room between houses to never have any noise complaints.

  “Which number?” Sarah asked as she rolled the car into a slow drive.

  “Eight.”

  Reaching 8 Putter’s Lane, they noticed the door open wide and a Range Rover in the drive with the boot exposed.

  Sarah drove into the drive and parked behind it.

  As they hopped out of the car and carefully approached the front door, a man appeared, he scowled at them. To Bree’s surprise, although short-lived, she saw the jeweller, Finnegan.

  “Mother, come on, we’re going!” he shouted, grabbing at the handle of a suitcase.

  Bree and Sarah raced to the door, blocking him from leaving.

  “I need to speak with your mother,” Bree said.

  “Ohhh,” a voice cooed from indoors. “I told you someone was coming with mail,” she called back.

  Finnegan was easily passed as Bree walked inside.

  “Mrs Prince,” she called out.

  “I’m in here.”

  Following the voice, Bree found a short woman in a cream cardigan sitting at a dining table as she swilled a spoon in her teacup.

  “Hello,” Bree said, glancing behind to see if Sarah had followed. She hadn’t, Sarah stayed by the door, initiating her own line of questions.

  “Take a seat,” Mrs Prince said. “You have something for me.”

  Bree exhaled; her fingers gripped on the back of a chair. She couldn’t sit, she needed to be standing for what she was about to ask—or accuse on old lady of doing, even if she hadn’t been old when she did it.

  “Or, what is it?” she asked, tapping a hand on the table.

  Fiona Prince was eighty-six years old, she’d seen and heard most things, she’d been around most people, and she knew when someone needed to get something off their chest.

  “My family, my father, someone thinks we stole jewellery from a shop you once owned,” she said.

  Her shaky hand picked at her teacup, she took a sip, glancing away from Bree.

  “He’s still got some!” Sarah shouted.

  Sound startled Mrs Prince to shake the little tea left in the cup onto the tablecloth.

  “What do you mean?” Bree asked, turning to see Sarah.

  An out of breath Finnegan joined them. “It—was—to—to—”

  “He said, once the first gem flagged, he decided to keep some of them, and assume you would be put in prison,” Sarah said.

  Mrs Prince placed a hand on her chest. “I knew—I knew—it was a matter of time.”

  ELEVEN

  As they all sat around the dining table, Mrs Prince shed a tear. Finnegan mumbled to himself, telling his mother not to say anything to them.

  “We were going bankrupt,” she started. “Had no money coming in, nobody was buying expensive the expensive jewels we’d invested money in from Edmund’s family, they’ve all been jewellers, even now.” She took her son’s hand in hers. “So, one night, we said we’d been robbed.”

  “Mother, you don’t have to,” he tried again. “We can
leave now, Dolores has agreed to stay behind and sell the shop, then she’ll come with us.”

  “That was your plan?” Bree asked, her face creased.

  “It is.”

  “Enough,” Mrs Prince said. “We claimed insurance. A good policy. We could’ve sold as soon as it happened, but we were paranoid.”

  “And?”

  “We eventually sold it to a baker.”

  “And then my dad bought it from him,” Bree added. “So, you kept the jewels in a box beneath the floor, and nobody searched for it?”

  She shrugged. “It was fifty years ago,” she said. “Nobody suspected foul play.” Mrs Prince continued to look at her fingers and the small tea stain she’d made on the tablecloth. Her unblinking eyes never once met another eye from across the table.

  Bree sighed. “You know, I have to tell the police,” she said.

  “You will not!” Finnegan shouted, jumping from his chair as if he’d regained his spritely youth. “My mother is not going to prison!”

  Bree didn’t want that either, from one night in a holding cell and being questioned constantly, she didn’t want that for anyone. But they weren’t innocent, both of them had now confessed to committing crimes.

  “What about you?” Sarah asked across to Finnegan.

  “I’m not either.”

  “Sit down, Finn,” his mother commanded, an odd situation to see as he followed her instruction.

  “You said you kept some of the stolen jewels,” Bree added. “Did you know they were from your family’s insurance fraud?”

  He shook his head. “No, definitely not. I mean, I didn’t immediately know, but my father had once mentioned what happened, and I thought it was nothing more than senile thoughts.”

  Mrs Prince slapped her son’s hand. “He wasn’t senile.”

  “And technically, it’s not stealing if they belong to your family,” he said.

  “A confession?” a deeper voice spoke, entering the kitchen. “I’m detective Mark June with the Landale police, currently investigating a fifty-year old cold case, and what I just heard sounded like a confession.”