Dead as a Scone

by Ron Benrey

  Nigel frowned. “The miscellaneous file box I found was all by itself on the bottom shelf,” he said, “with the label easily visible to anyone standing nearby. I suppose that’s why I decided to look inside.”

  Flick felt a tingle of insight that blossomed into a jolt of full-fledged understanding. “Elspeth Hawker spent months browsing through the archives. She found the journal before you did.”

  Flick stood up, unable to contain her excitement. “But she wasn’t sure how to interpret the commodore’s plea. Like me, she didn’t know if he really had stolen the antiquities. So she asked Jeremy Strain for his opinion, and she decided to reread Philip Oxley’s manuscript.”

  Flick flipped through the pages in the notebook. The additional information about the Brackenbury kin that Desmond Hawker had promised turned out to be three more pages of handwritten notes. Regrettably, the writing had become virtually illegible. Desmond had apparently used a different ink to write the additional pages—an ink that had faded over the years. Flick didn’t try to make sense of these addendums. There was equipment in the Conservation Laboratory that could help decipher the writing, if necessary.

  “I’m surprised,” she said, “that Elspeth Hawker didn’t encourage the museum to find Neville Brackenbury’s surviving heirs. It’s the sort of thing Elspeth might do.”

  Nigel, who had seemed to be lost in thought, raised his head. “Quite,” he said, “although it may have happened the other way round. Perhaps Neville Brackenbury’s heir found the museum first.”

  Flick experienced a new wave of giddiness. She sat back down on the sofa and stared at Nigel.

  No words were necessary. They both knew he was right.

  Sixteen

  “Now what?” Flick snapped her seat belt shut. “It’s eight thirty, I’m wide awake, and my mind is racing a thousand miles an hour.”

  “I feel the same way. I don’t want to go home, either.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about Desmond’s ancient sins. Somehow they are linked to the recent thefts that Elspeth discovered.”

  “Somehow…” Nigel echoed. He tugged on Flick’s seat belt. “I know what I want to do.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I want to figure out the hard-to-read pages in Desmond’s…what did you just call it? His copybook.”

  “Great idea. Let’s go to the museum. I’ll set up the equipment in the Conservation Laboratory and put on a teakettle and a coffeepot; you snag us some goodies from the tearoom.”

  “And we will work as a team to shut off the alarm system.”

  “Absolutely,” Flick said. “I have my trainers on and I’m ready to run.” She finished with a lilting giggle that sent a remarkable chill along Nigel’s spine. He put the car in gear, sorry that their journey from Rusthall to the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum would be over in less than five minutes. He enjoyed having Flick a few inches away in the cocoonlike privacy of his BMW.

  Someday soon you will have to tell her how you feel. Could there be a better time than now?

  “I know that I will enjoy watching you run,” he said softly.

  Good grief! What a blithering thing to say.

  Flick stared at him with a quizzical expression.

  Of course, she is staring, you dunce! You sounded like a smitten, tongue-tied teenager.

  He started the engine and gazed steadfastly at the road as he guided the BMW out of Rusthall. What on earth had prompted him to make such an inane comment? And what must Flick be thinking right now?

  He risked a sideways glance at her. What…she is smiling.

  He breathed in and out. Perhaps he had not done any lasting damage, after all.

  “Nigel,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m sure I’ll enjoy watching you run, too.”

  He began to laugh. Flick joined in.

  Nigel parked next to the side entrance. He unlocked the metal door, and they ran side-by-side down the hallway, laughing all the way to the kiosk. Nigel punched in the code to disarm the perimeter alarm; Flick used her index finger to turn off the motion detectors.

  “Does milady crave a particular sort of goodie this evening?” he asked, with a stiff upper lip he thought would do a movie butler proud.

  “I am easily satisfied with the best of everything,” she replied, in a credible Royal accent that raised his eyebrows. “Well done! I will see you in the Conservation Lab after I raid the pantry.”

  Nigel found several day-old scones in the refrigerator, two probably older lemon curd tarts, a half-full jar of raspberry preserves, and a fresh bottle of clotted cream. He revived the scones in the microwave and filled two serving dishes with sufficient preserves and cream to feed a family of four.

  Who knows how long we’ll be working this evening.

  In fact, Nigel and Flick needed more than an hour to transcribe Desmond’s faded notes. They found that by illuminating the copybook with strong glancing light from the left side off the page—and carefully positioning a strong magnifying lens over the page—they were able to read a few words at a time. The story of Desmond Hawker’s search for the Brackenburys emerged in fits and starts.

  Dearest Basil,

  In 1885, I commissioned the Marlborough Detective Agency in London to investigate several thefts from our dockside warehouse. The operatives routinely looked into all persons who had left the employ of the company, including Neville Brackenbury.

  Thus it was that I learned for the first time that my old friend was dead, and worse, that he had taken his own life some two years earlier in 1883.

  For reasons I did not fully understand at the time, the news of Mr. Brackenbury’s suicide shocked me to the core. As good Christians are wont to say, the Holy Ghost worked in my heart to convict me of the wrong I had done.

  My appreciation of my sins grew slowly. More out of curiosity than anything else, I asked the Marlborough Agency to locate the rest of Mr. Brackenbury’s family. They had no success. Mr. Brackenbury’s widow and children had left London and seemingly vanished into the countryside. I tried again in 1887 and again in 1889. I commissioned wider investigations, in keeping with my growing faith and, I admit, my growing realization that I had misused the entire Brackenbury family.

  In 1891, the agency had a bittersweet success. An operative discovered that Lucinda Brackenbury and her son Graham died during the same influenza epidemic that took our beloved wife and mother, Pamela Nelson Hawker. It seems that Mrs. Brackenbury and her children had been living with a distant relative in Wales. The public records of their deaths finally revealed their whereabouts.

  Geoffrey Brackenbury was not taken ill during the epidemic. The agency made additional inquiries and found that soon after he buried his mother and brother, Master Geoffrey, age eighteen, immigrated to Nova Scotia, in Canada.

  I immediately made application to an agency of detectives in that distant province. Alas, they were unsuccessful in finding him, as my further attempts also have been. It is my unshakable conviction, however, that Geoffrey Brackenbury, the heir of Neville Brackenbury, is alive today.

  Nigel gave a soft whistle. “One must be impressed by Desmond’s resolve. He was not the sort of man to take no for an answer. He never believed that Neville Brackenbury had no survivors—even though he knew that Geoffrey might be the last of the clan.”

  He expected Flick to agree with him, perhaps to append a pithy observation about Desmond Hawker’s stubborn character. But she merely continued to stare at the copybook. He could see distress in her face, as if she found the very sight of the pages difficult to bear.

  She finally looked up at him. “You want industrial-strength resolve,” she said, “think of the depth of the hatred that Geoffrey Brackenbury—an eighteen-year-old kid—carried with him to Canada. He left England in 1890. The fire at Lion’s Peak was in 1925. He brooded and seethed for thirty-five years. I didn’t think that ill will could last that long.”

  “Alas, it can,” Nigel replied. “Hatred based on the loss of fam
ily honor often spans centuries. It is the stuff of famous literature and infamous vendettas.”

  “Family honor...” she repeated quietly. “I hadn’t considered that, but, of course, you are right. Family honor explains the low profit margin on the thefts at the museum. This thievery isn’t about money; it’s to restore what was taken from the family.” She turned pages in the copybook. “Desmond confessed to keeping objects that Brackenbury ‘valued far beyond their monetary value.’ The set of Tunbridge Ware tea caddies, purchased as an anniversary gift for Lucinda Brackenbury, must have held a preeminent place among the family’s treasures.”

  “Why do you suppose that the Canadian detectives did not find Geoffrey?”

  Flick shrugged. “Huge country. Zillions of places to hide.”

  “Perhaps. But I will wager that Geoffrey had sailed back across the pond, probably with a brand-new identity. Edwardian England was a much more likely place than the bucolic Dominion of Canada to brood ill will and breed a new generation of Hawker haters. He—they—would have seen the Hawker family living a pampered life that should have also belonged to the Brackenburys. And so—”

  “The fire at Lion’s Peak,” she joined in.

  “Intended to eliminate the Hawkers and their ill-gotten gains in a single stroke.”

  “Who do you think died in the blaze?” Flick asked.

  “Geoffrey, if I had to guess. That must be why the attacks stopped after the fire.” He picked up his coffee mug and discovered it was empty. “Only to be resumed eighty years later when a more recently hatched member of the Brackenbury family—say Neville’s great-grandson—decided to start nicking Tunbridge Ware from us.”

  Flick’s face darkened. “What about Elspeth’s murder? Was that triggered by family honor, too?”

  “I shouldn’t think so. According to Elspeth’s notes, the theft of the tea caddies spanned nine months. If one of the thief ’s objectives was to kill Elspeth Hawker, why delay so long? And while one is at it, why not also call down vengeance on Alfred Hawker and his penurious sister, Harriet?”

  Flick lifted her gaze to meet Nigel’s eyes. “You know, of all the Hawkers, it was Elspeth who suffered most for her grandfather’s sins—first as a child caught in the fire at Lion’s Peak, then later as a murder victim.”

  “Elspeth seems to have been the only good-hearted Hawker in the bunch.”

  “So good-hearted that she initially refused to believe the vendetta theory advanced by Philip Oxley.” Flick picked up the copybook. “Only when she read Desmond’s confession did she come to understand that a Brackenbury heir was responsible for the recent thefts. And why.”

  “What adds an element of Greek tragedy to the story is that Desmond wanted to give the clobber back—to pay double, in fact.”

  “But Geoffrey Brackenbury never knew that,” Flick said.

  “True. But even if he had known, he probably would have doubted that Desmond turned over a new leaf.” Nigel smiled at Flick. “Look how hard it is for you to accept the truth of his conversion.”

  A sheepish expression crossed her face as she looked down at the old copybook in her hands. “I have to admit that this is not a public exhibition of piety, like building a church. The Desmond Hawker revealed on these pages seems genuinely changed.” She paused to choose her words carefully. “I may have to revise my…opinion. It certainly seems as if Desmond heart was renewed.” She sighed. “That’s another element of this tragedy. Desmond wanted to make amends but was never able to, no matter how much he tried. Despite the many good things he accomplished late in his life, he couldn’t find a way to do that.”

  Nigel walked to the coffee pot to refill his mug. Much like the Tea Tasting Room, the Conservation Laboratory had built-in waist-high cabinets with slate countertops flanking the windows. There were also five laboratory workstations arrayed along a line that bisected the narrow room. Flick had chosen the third workstation, close to the middle of the room, to examine the copybook. This, she explained, was to avoid disturbing Lapsang and Souchong, who had commandeered the first and fifth workstations as their own. There was one cat—Nigel still couldn’t tell them apart—curled comfortably on the bottom shelf of each workstation. He might have completely forgotten their presence except for the faint aroma of slightly used cat litter that wafted throughout the laboratory.

  Flick had set up the drip coffeemaker alongside the sink in the corner of the laboratory that overlooked Eridge Road. Nigel poured, watched a large lorry roll toward Tunbridge Wells, and wondered what posterity would make of his checkered career. On occasion, he, too, had let his ambition run loose “at all costs.” But he had not played the big-business game as well—or should the word be badly—as had Desmond Hawker.

  Had he lied? At times. Had he deceived? Everyone at his old company did. Had he used confidential business information to get ahead of a business rival? Once or twice. Had he caused grievous harm to anyone? He didn’t think so, but then neither had Desmond Hawker until many years later.

  If there was a difference between Nigel Owen and Desmond Hawker, it was simply one of degree. Nigel had not coveted success enough to develop a true killer instinct. Probably that was why his company had declared him redundant while other higher-flying blokes in the organization were still at their jobs.

  He would have a tough decision to make five months from now when his acting directorship came to an end. Did he really want another job in a building full of Desmond Hawker wannabes? There were decidedly pleasant aspects of his tenure at the museum, starting with the lack of a need to guard his back continuously. Oh, the trustees could be pains in the posterior, but Flick Adams was not after his job. His success did not imply her failure.

  Another charming facet was the human scale of the museum. He could get his arms around the entire enterprise and take real pride when his management skills kept things running efficiently. And one might even argue that directing a museum promoted, in a modest way, the “betterment of humanity.”

  He sipped his coffee slowly. What if he didn’t move back to London? What if he managed to find a full-time job along the lines of the one he had now? It certainly was worth pondering in the weeks ahead.

  “Nigel.”

  “Yes,” he replied hazily.

  “Nigel!”

  “Sorry!” He spun around to talk to Flick.

  “It’s my turn to be a genius,” she said. “I’ve been thinking about our conclusion that our ‘exceedingly clever thief’ is a fourth-generation relative of Neville Brackenbury. Doesn’t that change our list of suspects?”

  Nigel had difficulty swallowing the coffee in his mouth. “Blimey! When did I become such a dunderhead? Of course, it changes the blooming list. Archibald Meicklejohn is the blue blood among our trustees. He has a pedigree that goes back six hundred years. I have seen portraits of his ancestors; he looks just like them. There isn’t a chance in the world that he is kin to Neville Brackenbury. The same is true of Conan Davies, although his blood is plaid. Conan is indisputably Scottish through and through.” He added, “Who is left on the list?”

  “Marjorie Halifax, Dorothy McAndrews, Matthew Eaton, and Iona Saxby.”

  “A politician, an antiques expert, a landscape gardener, and an attorney.” He waved his hand disparagingly. “I find it hard to picture any of that lot skulking into your office and sprinkling a lethal dose of oleander in your Assam tea. Even more difficult to accept is the notion that one of those duffers possesses the required electronic skills to defeat our security system.”

  Flick grimaced. “I keep remembering the alarm, then forgetting it again. We won’t move forward until we can work out how the thief dealt with the motion detectors.” She suddenly seemed energized with determination. “What time is it?”

  “Twenty-two hundred hours. Ten o’clock.”

  “Five p.m. in Pennsylvania. I’ve been meaning to bounce the alarm question off my uncle Ted. He’s probably still in his office.” She reached for the telephone on the top of the workst
ation, switched on the speaker, and dialed.

  A gruff voice came forth: “Homicide. Detective Adams.”

  “Hi, Uncle Ted, it’s Flick.”

  “Speak of the devil. I yakked with your mother less than an hour ago. Half of our discussion was about you.”

  “I’m sure it was,” she said quickly. “Anyway, we have an interesting…issue at the museum. We have experienced an after-hours theft or two, but we have a top-of-the-line security system.”

  “And you are confused as to how the perpetrator could get past your foolproof burglar alarm.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Simple. There’s no such animal as a foolproof security system.” He chuckled. “You’ve described a variation on the classic ‘locked room’ mystery. There’s no way in or out of the room, except the thief managed to find one.” Another chuckle. “There’s always a way in and out.” His voice became serious. “I assume you have the usual perimeter sensors and motion detectors?”

  “We do.”

  “Then there are three likely explanations. One—it’s an inside job. Namely, one of your own staffers is the perp. Two—you have a security breach. The perp learned how to disable the system. Three—the most likely answer. Your perp goes to work when the alarm is switched off.”

  “One or two may be possible, but not three. Our alarm is on whenever the museum is closed to the public.”

  “No, it isn’t!” Ted said confidently. “If that were true, your cleaning people couldn’t do their jobs. Think about it—security systems get turned off a lot.”

  “I will think about it. Thanks.”

  “By the way…expect a call from your mother. She is disturbed that you seem to have no love life these days…” Flick yanked the receiver out of the cradle, which automatically turned off the speaker.

  Nigel watched Flick blush. The wave of color sweeping along her cheeks seemed an extraordinary sight. He couldn’t resist smiling at her momentary embarrassment.