by JL Merrow
Phil stared at me for a long moment. “You want to do that?” he asked at last.
“Don’t you?” I countered, feeling a bit uncertain. As per bloody usual, neither his face nor his tone had given anything away as to how he actually felt about it. “I mean, we don’t have to. It was just a thought.”
Phil opened his mouth—and then the doorbell rang.
Bloody Vi Majors. She was twenty minutes late already. Couldn’t she have stretched it another ten? I sighed and went to let her in.
Vi was in purple today, to match her name. She had on a silky blouse thing that gaped a bit at the buttons, a matching Alice band, and a pair of dark-grey tailored trousers. The outfit didn’t seem quite her somehow, despite the trousers being the regulation size too small—maybe it was her idea of mourning gear?
“Find us okay?” I asked politely, gesturing her in.
She sort of shrugged and cast a glance behind her. “I hope the car’s going to be all right, parked round here.”
“Well, if you don’t wanna stay . . .” I was a bit narked at her suggestion this was a dodgy neighbourhood. She should see the estate Phil grew up on.
Vi shook herself. “God, no, don’t mind me. It’s just, well . . . What happened. Makes you a bit paranoid, doesn’t it?” She gave me a lopsided smile that made me like her a whole lot more. “Sorry.”
“No worries. Come on in.”
I led her through to the living room, where she gave Phil a suspicious look. He’d stood up to greet her, which Arthur must’ve been well chuffed about. Not. I was relieved to see my beloved’s trousers were still intact, which boded well for what was inside them. Hey, I’ve got my priorities.
“Oh. The fiancé,” Vi said flatly. “He’s not staying, is he?”
My hackles were getting a proper workout this evening—up and down more times than a porn star’s arse. Just to annoy Vi, I put an arm round Phil’s waist and gazed up at him adoringly, sort of like Julian after Gary’s just given him a doggy treat. “Oh, me and Phil don’t have any secrets.”
Vi looked like she was about to gag. “God, gay couples are the worst. Look, this has to be confidential, all right? I don’t want any of it getting back to Daddy.”
“Any of what?”
“Tell you what,” Phil butted in. “You two sit down. I’ll go make some drinks. Tea? Coffee? Something stronger?”
“Coffee, I suppose, since I’m driving,” Vi said regretfully. She watched him go with a look of approval. Well, he did look pretty damn hot in those jeans.
We sat down, her at one end of the sofa and me at the other. Arthur plodded up to give her a sniff, but she ignored him.
“Not a cat person?” I asked, pulling him onto my lap. He showed his gratitude by digging his claws into my legs, then settled down to be pampered.
“No.” She shrugged, suddenly seeming more human. “Don’t really know what to do with them. We always had dogs. Well, until Amelia barged in and pretended she was allergic, and we had to put Lady and Sebby into kennels. We could have them home again now,” she added, brightening as if it’d only just occurred to her. Then she coloured. “I suppose you think I’m heartless, but she really was an utter bloody bitch.”
I took it she was talking about her stepmum, not Lady. “Uh, well, grief’s a funny thing,” I said noncommittally. “So what was it you wanted to talk to me about?”
“I want to know what you were looking for,” she said, leaning forward. “Not at the fayre. In my bedroom. She told you I stole something, I bet she did. What was it?”
“Uh . . .” Thankfully Phil got back at that moment with the drinks, which gave me a moment to think.
See, I was pretty sure Dave Southgate wouldn’t look too kindly on me spreading the gossip about a certain diamond necklace. Then again, whoever was investigating the murder must have been asking about it, mustn’t they? First up, you’d show it to the next of kin—suitably cleaned up and all that. I hope. Do you recognise this necklace? That sort of thing.
It couldn’t be a coincidence Vi had turned up here desperate for a chin-wag the day after I spoke to Dave.
“Jewellery,” I said, looking at her carefully.
She coloured again. “It was that bloody necklace, wasn’t it?”
Phil coughed. “Which necklace?”
Vi turned on him. “Oh, don’t be such a dick. If you and he really don’t have any secrets, which I seriously bloody well doubt, but anyway, then you know perfectly well which one. Pink diamond. Gold. Found on my stepmother’s body. Ringing any bells yet?”
That was interesting. On the body, not in it. Was that just her being imprecise, or were the police keeping shtum about that little detail in the hopes someone would incriminate themselves? “Maybe,” I answered, as she’d turned back to me.
Vi grabbed her phone out of the designer handbag, thumbed through some photos, and thrust it under my nose. “This one.”
It was round the neck of a lady of, well, I’d guess exactly Vi’s mum’s age, judging by the family resemblance and the shared taste for silky tops, although the first Mrs. Majors clearly didn’t agree that pastels were for pushovers. What surprised me the most was the way the necklace looked. Not exactly my area, bling isn’t, but I’d been expecting something, I dunno, more elaborate? This was just one big—but not that big—pink stone, cut into a heart shape and surrounded by little white diamonds—probably, although for all I knew they could have been glass—hung on a delicate gold chain. It looked like the sort of thing little girls went for, all shiny and sparkly. It didn’t look real, or valuable, or even that expensive.
Then again, if that stone in the middle was real, it ought to be worth a small country. Not surprising Amelia had wanted to get her hands on the thing. I pictured it hanging around her neck. Then I pictured it shoved down her delicate little throat and shuddered.
“Classy lady, your mum,” I said, handing the phone to Phil so he could have a proper butcher’s.
Vi looked a bit startled. “Yes. She was.”
She said it with a quiet sincerity that convinced me that yeah, she’d grieved for her real mum, all right. Course, it wasn’t necessarily because she was her real, as in birth, mum. Maybe if Amelia had married Alex a lot earlier and been the one to bring Vi up, she’d have grieved for her, blood relative or no?
Maybe I was just trying a bit too hard to see the parallels between Vi’s situation and mine.
“How long ago did you lose her?” Phil asked, handing back the phone.
“Three years now.” She stared down at her hands, which were turning the phone over and over in her lap. “Daddy met Amelia last summer. Everyone called it a whirlwind romance when they got engaged a month later and married on St. Valentine’s Day this year. I call it her making sure she got her claws into him as quickly as she could.”
“You think she married him for his money?” Phil’s tone didn’t judge.
“Isn’t it obvious? She was far too young for him. Even if she wasn’t a total bitch.”
“Age-gap relationships can be a success,” Phil suggested.
She shot him an incredulous look. “God, you’re naive. Men are just so bloody stupid when they get older.”
I coughed and leaned forward. “So why d’you s’pose she thought you’d taken that necklace?”
Vi reddened. “Well . . . it wasn’t the first thing to go missing.”
“You’d been, um, borrowing her jewellery for a while?” I asked, because it seemed a bit rude to just come out with So, you made a habit of nicking her stuff?
“Not exactly . . . Honestly? It started because I just wanted to piss her off. So I’d take one of a pair of earrings. Make her think she’d dropped the other one somewhere. Or one of those designer scarves she’s so fond of. I used to use them for dusters when I was poking around in the attic. And it was fun, watching her go mad trying to find where things had got to. You don’t know what it’s been like since she got her cheap talons into Dad. It’s been horrible, no fun at al
l. She’s such a c—” Vi stopped, her round face all screwed up. “Oh, bollocks, now I’m sounding like I did do it, aren’t I? But I didn’t. Anyway, it was all petty stuff. I’d never have taken something as valuable as the necklace. Although even if I had, it wouldn’t have been theft. It was Mummy’s necklace, and it should have been mine. But I’d never steal it.”
Phil coughed. “How valuable was the necklace?”
Vi shrugged. “Oh, I’m not sure. Daddy paid three hundred thousand pounds for it”—okay, so maybe not a small country, but definitely a small house in the country, as long as you didn’t mind a bit of a fixer-upper—“but that was years ago. It should be worth a lot more now. The diamond market’s gone up like crazy in the last few years, and this is a top-quality stone. Superb clarity.” Whatever that meant. “It was vintage, from the year Mummy was born, and Daddy had it reset for her. I thought it was so romantic when he bought it for her.” She bit her lip, showing the first signs of any softer emotions I’d ever seen from her.
“You must have been upset when he gave it to your stepmother,” Phil rumbled, his tone neutral.
Vi looked up sharply, her eyes flashing. “I could have bloody ki— Shit.” She hung her head for a moment.
“You could have killed him for it?” Phil suggested, which wasn’t what I’d been thinking at all.
Vi shook her head with a touch of impatience. “Not Daddy. I don’t blame Daddy at all. Amelia had this way of getting people to do whatever she wanted. Well, men,” she added, with a look of disgust for the whole cock-led lot of us.
Yeah. Given the way Mrs. F-M. had had my sister by the short and curlies—and bloody hell, that was not an image I wanted to have in my mind—I reckoned it wasn’t quite as simple as Vi had made it sound. After all, she’d managed to get me to make a right tit of myself in front of hundreds of people, and blonde hair aside, she really hadn’t been my type.
“But I didn’t kill her for it, either,” Vi went on, her tone steely. “It’s just a figure of speech and you know it. Who are you, anyway, Tom’s fiancé? Police? You sound like it.”
Not a bad call. Well done, that girl.
“Private investigator,” he told her steadily.
Her eyes widened. “Who are you working for?”
“No one, right now.”
I happened to know that wasn’t strictly true—Phil’s business was ticking along nicely, ta very much—but he was probably right to assume she wouldn’t give a toss about any unrelated cases.
“Are you any good?” Her chest rose and fell, and she went on without waiting for an answer. “I want to hire you.”
“To find out who killed your stepmum?”
Vi coloured. “No. I want you to find Mummy’s necklace.”
Phil and I exchanged glances. “I thought you knew it’d been found, uh, with your stepmum?” I asked cautiously. I mean, she’d literally just mentioned it.
She shook her head impatiently. “Not that one. The real one. The one Amelia had when she died was fake.”
“Well, that puts a bit of a different complexion on things, doesn’t it?” I said to Phil after Vi had left.
He nodded, petting Merlin thoughtfully. “Widens the field a bit.”
“You reckon? I mean, it’s got to look better for Vi and her dad, hasn’t it? Not that, you know, I had them down for killing her, but well, it made it look personal, didn’t it? And they were the only ones who could leave a necklace that valuable, uh, where they left it and know they’d get it back in the end.”
“Maybe, but just how pleased do you reckon Vi would have been to find out her stepmum had sold Mummy’s necklace and replaced it with a fake? Or Mr. Majors, for that matter?”
“Uh, yeah. Guess so. So you reckon that’s what happened? Amelia sold the real bling?”
“Did I say that? Vi seemed pretty well informed about the value of diamonds, didn’t she? It could have happened that way, though. I think we might want to start by having a look into Amelia’s finances.”
“‘We’?”
Phil smirked. “Meaning me. But if you want to help, you could start by pumping Greg for information on her relationship with his boss.”
“Hope you mean the bishop. I reckon her relationship with the bloke upstairs is something only she knows about now.” I frowned. “Hang about, though. Is that even relevant? To the necklace, I mean. Which, in case you’ve forgotten, is what Vi’s paying you to find out about. Not, you know, the murder of her stepmum, which she couldn’t give a toss about.”
He stared me out. “Maybe Amelia sold the necklace and gave the money to the church?”
“Yeah, ’cos she seems just the self-sacrificing sort who’d do that. Have done that,” I corrected myself.
“There’s more motives than altruism.” He huffed. “Maybe she wanted to butter him up for something. Maybe he was blackmailing her.”
“Maybe you’re just making up excuses for trying to find out who killed her, instead of just playing hunt-the-necklace?”
Phil took a deep breath and let it out slowly. His lips were still quirked in an almost-smile when he answered. “Maybe I don’t appreciate people dumping dead bodies on my bloke.”
“Oi, I’m all right. Haven’t even had nightmares about this one.” That was technically true, so I didn’t feel the need to cross my fingers behind my back or any of that bollocks.
The girl in the nightmare hadn’t been Amelia; she’d been the little girl I found when I was a nipper. Still strangled, mind.
“Anyhow . . . I can’t see us solving one crime without the other. The way that necklace—the fake one—was left on her body, that’s got to mean something. Murderers don’t do something like that unless the victim’s seriously pissed them off.”
“Well, not unless they’re a complete nutter,” I agreed. “You think it was personal, then?”
“Maybe. Or maybe she was trying to use it to pay someone off, which is why the financial question. I can imagine some people getting pretty nasty if they’ve been promised a rock worth several hundred grand and fobbed off with a handful of paste.”
“What, like the bishop, you mean? No, seriously, I can’t see what he’s got to do with all this.”
Phil shrugged. “It’s just a gut feeling. Come on, it’s not going to kill you to ask a few questions. See if you can find out anything about the other people Vi mentioned while you’re at it.”
“What, Sir Prancelot and Uncle Artex?”
“Lance and Uncle Arlo would be two of ’em, yeah.” Phil stuck up the requisite number of fingers at me as a visual aid. “Talk to Cherry too. She might know something.”
I grinned. “Got it. Now, are we gonna talk about that lot all night? ’Cos I’ve got a few alternative ideas for what we could be doing instead.”
I rang Sis up at work next day. “Wanna meet for lunch?”
“Mm, can’t. I’ve got a meeting. I know, why don’t I come round to your house after I finish tonight?”
“Let me guess—Greg’s busy tonight, and you fancy having someone else cook you dinner?”
“Oh, well, if you’re offering. That’s very kind of you, Tom. Fish would be nice. Although not shellfish because of my—”
“Allergies, yeah, I got it. And you’ll have what you’re given and like it.” I was already planning a trip to the fish counter at the local supermarket. There was a recipe I’d been meaning to try for trout done Thai-style I reckoned would be right up Cherry’s street.
“Fine. I probably won’t leave the office until six, is that all right?”
“Yeah, no problem. Just let yourself in if I’m out when you get there, I’ll only be down the local shops.” After a bit of a dodgy experience a few months ago, I’d asked Sharon at number twelve to hand me back my spare key, which had given the old tact muscles a real workout. We were still speaking, so I hadn’t done too badly, and I’d given the key to Cherry. Hopefully I could trust her not to let any murder suspects in to lie in wait for me while I was out.
> Now, you might be wondering why, seeing as I wanted to talk to both Cherry and Greg, I didn’t just arrange to see ’em both at the same time. The answer is that Sis, when she’s just with me, and Cherry, when she’s on her best behaviour for the uprightly reverend husband-to-be, are two very different animals.
I mean, I’m sure she’ll let her hair down once they’re married. It wasn’t anything that made me worry for the relationship, which I reckoned was pretty solid. Just, I could see her not wanting him to hear her speaking ill of the dead. And I had a feeling getting anything useful out of Cherry was going to involve quite a lot of speaking ill of dear old Amelia.
As it happened, a job went quicker than expected, and I was already back from the shops and in the kitchen when Cherry got in.
“Do I smell food? I’m starving,” she greeted me with, padding into the kitchen in stockinged feet. I guessed she’d been wearing heels for the lunchtime meeting.
“Yeah, won’t be long now. You want to put the rice on while you’re here?”
Cherry backpedalled so fast I half expected to see skid marks on the kitchen tiles. “Oh, I don’t want to get in your way. I just came in to give you this.” She plonked a bottle of red on the kitchen counter. “I know we’re having fish, but I thought we could drink it after the meal.”
“Sis, I’m touched you think I give a monkey’s what colour wine I drink with what. But yeah, after the meal is fine. I’ll put it in the fridge, yeah?” I added just to wind her up.
Cherry glared. I grinned and bunged the rice on to cook myself.
The Thai trout went down a treat. Mildly spiced and delicately flavoured, it would, actually, have been a crime to drink red wine with it.