Cupcakes and Casualties (Peridale Cafe Cozy Mystery Book 11)

by Agatha Frost

  "Your friends will probably be wondering where you are," Julia said, looking around the pub for the builders. "Oh, they've gone."

  "They're not my friends," Alfie said without a hint of sadness. "They're probably outside smoking and cat-calling every poor woman who walks past. It's not my scene."

  "What is your 'scene'?"

  "Conversation," Alfie said as though it should have been obvious. "With a real human being about real things."

  At that moment, Alfie's eyes danced down to Julia's chest. She realised that the bust-line of her dress had slipped down to reveal the top of her bra, so she quickly pulled it up. Her comfort in Alfie's presence switched to something entirely different, causing her cheeks to burn brightly. She looked up at him, embarrassed, but he looked as horrified as she did.

  "I wasn't looking at -"

  "I'm engaged," Julia said quickly, holding up the ring. "I'm flattered, but -"

  "Honestly, I wasn't looking at that," Alfie said, his eyes darting down there again as he leaned in. "Your locket. What does the engraving say? I thought I -"

  Julia looked down at Jessie's locket, and then up at Alfie. It sounded like the oldest trick in the book to get away with glancing at a woman's chest, but the sincere look on Alfie's face made her believe him. She rested her hand on the locket, the silver cool to the touch.

  "It's from my foster daughter," Julia explained. "She gave it to me to mark our one-year anniversary of being together."

  "The engraving," he repeated. "What does it say? What names are engraved on the front? I thought I saw something."

  "My name," Julia said, looking down at the locket. "And my foster daughter's name. Jessie. Well, her full name is Jessika, but we all call her Jessie."

  Alfie stared blankly at the locket for the longest time, beads of sweat gathering on his brow. When his eyes flicked up to hers, she saw something harrowing behind the glassy surface.

  "Jessika spelt with a 'K'?" he asked. "That's so - unusual."

  "She's an unusual girl," Julia said, as she clipped the locket open to show him the pictures. "She's seventeen, but I'm telling you she's more mature than me when she wants to be. Other times, she's as immature as my nieces, but isn't that what being seventeen is all about?"

  "Was she born in the year 2000?" Alfie asked, his eyes staring at the picture of Jessie. "May 25th, 2000?"

  "How did you know?" Julia asked, snapping the locket shut, the feeling of familiarity being replaced by suspicion. "Why do you know that?"

  Alfie reached into his pocket, his hands shaking more than Mikey's hand holding the glass of wine. He pulled out a tattered leather wallet before flipping it open and pulling out a white square. He looked down at it, his eyes full of the same confusion Julia felt. He passed it to her, revealing it to be a dog-eared Polaroid. The picture showed a newly born baby with a head of dark hair, the caption 'Baby Jessika' scribbled in faded black pen underneath. Julia turned the picture over in her hands, the date of Jessie's birth scrawled on the back in the same handwriting.

  "I had a sister called Jessika," Alfie said, his voice sounding strangely unlike his own. "Jessika with a 'K'. I haven't seen her since our parents died seventeen years ago."

  Julia stared down at the picture, her heart writhing in her chest. She looked up at Alfie, and then at the baby; she saw Jessie in both.

  The walls began to close in around her, and her throat sealed at the top. She tried to speak, to scream, to make any noise, but nothing came forward. Her phone vibrated and rang loudly in her handbag, making her jump and drop the picture onto the table. Instead of pressing Alfie, she scrambled for her phone. When she saw Jessie's name and picture on the display, she suddenly found her words.

  "Hello?" Julia called into the phone, her voice shaky.

  "Where are you?" Jessie cried. "I thought you were taking me on a driving lesson at twelve? It's twenty past. I'm bored."

  Julia stared at Alfie, who was staring at the phone; he knew who she was talking to.

  "I'm on my way home," Julia said quickly before hanging up and throwing her phone back into her bag. "I need to go."

  "Was that her?" Alfie cried, suddenly standing up. "Was that Jessie? I've seen her all over the village, and I knew - I knew who she was, but it felt too far-fetched to be true."

  Julia stood up and slung her bag over her shoulder. She stared at Alfie as he looked at her, expectant and full of questions.

  "I need to go," she repeated.

  Before Alfie could say another word, Julia ran to her car, not daring to breathe until she was speeding towards her cottage.

  10

  Early the next morning, Julia found herself shivering outside a motorway service station before the sun had even risen. Cupping her hands to her face to warm them with her breath, she watched every car pass by, her anxiety growing with each passing vehicle.

  When Kim Drinkwater's bright yellow Fiat Cinquecento careened into the car park, almost hitting four cars in the process, Julia did not know if she was happy or not to see Jessie's social worker.

  After parking wonkily in the middle of two empty spaces, Kim tumbled out of her car, dropping a thick file of paperwork in the process. She gathered it up and stuffed it into an orange knitted bag, which matched her bright orange maxi dress and similarly-hued frosted eyeshadow.

  Despite the nature of their meeting, Kim approached Julia with a beaming grin as her orange Crocs slapped against the damp tarmac.

  "Can't say I've been awake this early in a while," Kim announced jovially as she looped through Julia's arm and pulled her into the service station. "Let's get warmed up. This cold weather gives me the willies."

  The service station was filled with long-distance lorry drivers who looked like they had been driving for most of the night. Heads turned as Kim flounced towards the coffee shop, her rubber shoes slapping the tiles with each clumsy step.

  "I'm dying for some caffeine," Kim proclaimed when they reached the counter of the small coffee shop. "And something sweet. Muffins! What flavour do I get?"

  Julia could not bring herself to create small talk. She had one thing on her mind, and one thing only: Alfie. She had spent the previous night unable to look Jessie in the eye, the possibilities and scenarios burning around in her mind. Even though she had retired to bed early, she had stayed up most of the night staring at the ceiling trying to piece together the truth. One of her final thoughts before she finally drifted off was that Alfie could be a stalker who had found out all of this information and concocted the whole story to get money from Julia.

  As she watched Kim pluck each of the flavoured muffins from the display to sniff them, Julia peered down into Jessie's thick file, knowing the answers she craved were held between those pages.

  After Kim ordered a large Frappuccino with two extra shots of coffee, three extra pumps of syrup, and artificial sweetener, they took the table on the edge of the coffee shop, which opened up into the food court-style dining of the service station.

  "I always loved these places as a little girl," Kim said as she ripped the heads off four packets of sugar. "Shhh! Don't tell the slimming club. I put on weight again last week, but what they don't know won't hurt them."

  Julia looked at the three muffins Kim had chosen, her stomach turning. Not because she was thinking about her weight, but because she was too nervous to even think about eating. She looked once again at the file, one simple answer able to turn her entire life upside down in a matter of moments.

  "You know why I asked to meet you," Julia whispered, looking around the service station, even though she had purposefully picked the location for its distance from the village. "Do you remember what I asked you over the phone?"

  "Ah, yes," Kim said, uninterested in what Julia had to say and more interested in unpeeling the first of her three muffins. "The man claiming to be Jessika's brother."

  Kim bit into the muffin, her eyelids fluttering as though it was the first bite of something sweet she had taken in years. She chewed the mouth
ful before plucking the large, tattered file from her bag. Julia had seen it before, but she had never looked inside, even though Kim had told her on numerous occasions that she had permission to do so if she wanted. She had preferred Jessie's past to come from her lips and not the perspective of social workers, but now that something so big was up in the air, she needed to see the facts in writing.

  "Is it true?" Julia pushed. "Does Jessie have a brother?"

  Kim dropped the heavy file onto the table. Before opening it, she took another bite of the muffin. Smearing chocolate on the front page, she opened it up and stamped her finger down on the top page.

  "I'm afraid it's not as simple as that," Kim said with a sigh, one eye still on the muffin. "As you can see, Jessie's file started a little after her first birthday in 2001. I'd never noticed until you called me yesterday. I've been her social worker since she was six, but I never went that far back."

  "Where's the rest?" Julia urged.

  "Destroyed," Kim said with another sigh. "I asked some of the girls at work, and Pauline remembered a fire destroying a good chunk of our records just after the millennium. Jessie's files must have been in there, and this is when they were restarted."

  "Didn't you have copies?" Julia asked. "Computer back-ups?"

  "We'd only just come out of the nineties," Kim chuckled through a mouthful. "We barely had working pens, never mind a central computer database."

  "And there's nothing about a brother in there?" Julia asked, wanting to rip the file from Kim to comb over every page. "No mention of an 'Alfie'?"

  "Not that I've found," Kim said with a shrug. "Although I only skimmed. My dad made a lovely curry last night, and I couldn't resist. I'm back living with him since I broke up with my last man. How's your Barker doing?"

  "He's good," Julia snapped. "Is there any way of finding out if this is true?"

  "There was Janie," Kim said, tapping her finger against her chin, which was now covered in gooey gloss thanks to her muffin. "She was Jessika's social worker before me. She'd probably know."

  "Are you still in contact?" Julia urged, edging forward in her plastic chair. "Where is she?"

  "Dead," Kim replied flatly. "Terrible incident with a curling iron and a bathtub, but the less said about that, the better. She was Jessika's social worker from birth, and then I took over."

  "And there's no one else who you work with who remembers?" Julia asked, almost begging. "No one at all?"

  "I did put the word around, but most people only know Jessika for her troubled ways," Kim explained as she flicked through the file. "Jumping from foster home to foster home, never settling for more than a couple of weeks. Setting fires, stealing things, fighting with the other children. She could never behave."

  Julia's mind blurred. She had come here expecting to find out the definitive truth either way, but with Kim not having an answer, she could not focus her thoughts.

  "Please tell me this," Julia said, trying to steady her voice as she stared into Kim's eyes. "Is it possible this man, Alfie, could really be Jessie's brother?"

  Kim bit into her muffin once again as she pondered the question. After swallowing, she went to take another bite, but Julia rested her hand on Kim's arm to stop her.

  "It's possible," Kim said finally. "Jessika's parents died in a terrible car accident from what I know. When babies go into care, their names are usually changed, but because she hadn't been taken away from her parents, they probably didn't see the point. If she'd had a brother, they would have been separated. You said this man was in his late twenties? All the more reason to split him up from a baby. Nobody ever wants to take siblings as a duo, especially when there's such an age gap. I did a search for an 'Alfie Rice' in the database, but he could have changed his name along the way. Does he look like Jessika?"

  "I'm sorry?"

  "Does the man look like her?" Kim repeated as she reached out for her second muffin. "I usually find that's a good way to tell."

  "He does," Julia replied bluntly. "A lot. I'm going to go."

  "You won't mind if I stay here, will you?" Kim asked, her eyes firmly on her sweet treats. "I've only just got warm, and these are too good to pass up."

  Julia did not bother to reply. She hurried towards her car and jumped inside. After turning on the engine, she switched on the heaters and waited with her fingers clenched tightly around the cold steering wheel.

  As she stared at the sun struggling to break through the murky sky, she thought about how a part of her did not want to return to Peridale. A large van passed by inches from her car. When she spotted a newspaper logo on the side, an idea sprung to mind. It was so obvious, and yet she could not believe she had not thought of it before.

  She scrambled in her bag, pulled out her phone, and opened up the web browser. After almost a minute of loading, the search engine appeared on the screen. After a deep breath, she typed 'Jessika Rice Car Accident'. Thousands of results instantly sprung up, but the first one, a link to a newspaper article from the year 2000, caught her attention. The link took her to the Blackpool Gazette website. The headline made her stomach turn:

  'Tragic Motorway Smash Leaves Children Orphaned.'

  Julia closed her eyes before she continued reading. She felt as though she was reading something she should not have been. If Jessie did not know about having other siblings, she had not read the article either. If she had not needed to see the truth, she would have clicked right off the report, but for Jessie's sake, she needed the answers, so she continued reading:

  'On Sunday, August 18th, a tragic car accident on the M55 resulted in the deaths of six people, one of those being Patrick Kennedy, who the police believe to have caused the fatal pile-up. Kennedy, a forty-six-year-old long-distance lorry driver and a resident of Dublin, Ireland, crashed his lorry through the central barrier and straight into oncoming traffic. Eyewitnesses claim to have seen Kennedy asleep at the wheel moments before the crash.

  Among the victims were parents Olivia and Brett Rice, both thirty years old and residents of Blackpool who were travelling back from Skegness after a family holiday. Their two children, Alfred and Jessika, aged ten-years-old and three-months respectively, were both in the back seats, but they luckily survived the impact.'

  Julia stopped reading when the article diverted into the other victims of the accident. She locked her phone, unable to look at her screen anymore. Alfie was telling the truth, and that was all that mattered.

  Against all the odds, he had turned up in Peridale for a building job and unknowingly found a sister he had been separated from for seventeen years. The thought of such a reunion made Julia want to jump for joy and sing from the rooftops, but a selfish voice in the back of her mind wanted to keep Jessie for herself, to preserve what they had in amber forever.

  "Stop it, Julia," she whispered to herself as she pushed down the handbrake. "This isn't about you."

  Julia drove slowly back to Peridale, her hands and feet working on autopilot while the details of the article raced through her mind. Jessie had never shared anything about her parents because she claimed not to know anything other than how they died, but now that Julia knew their names, her history suddenly felt a lot more real.

  Somehow along the way, she came up with a plan: first, she would find Alfie to question him further about what he knew, and then she would find Jessie to tell her the truth. She had no idea how either situation would unfold but keeping the information to herself was only going to complicate things further.

  The sun had risen, and the day had begun by the time Julia arrived in Peridale. A quick glance at her watch let her know she had just enough time to sneak back home, bake something to sell at the café, and open up for the day. When she spotted the police cars and crime scene tape strung across the opening of Mulberry Lane, Julia knew it would not be that simple. When she spotted Barker talking to DS Christie on the other side of the tape, her heart sank.

  After parking wonkily on the kerb, Julia jumped out of her car and ran towards the ta
pe. Ignoring the uniformed officers' protests, Julia ducked underneath and ran to Barker.

  "What's happened?" she cried, looking around the street as police combed the area.

  "I wondered how long it would be until you turned up," DS Christie replied with a roll of his eyes. "Who let her through? This is a crime scene, people. Authorised personnel only."

  Before Julia could ask more questions, she noticed that the window in the door of Pretty Petals had been smashed. As the pieces slotted together, she realised the police activity concentrated around the flower shop.

  "Suspected burglary gone wrong," DS Christie explained when he noticed Julia's eyes homing in on the shop. "Did you know her?"

  Julia looked up at Barker, and then at the shop again. Two men carried out a stretcher with a red blanket covering a body.

  "Harriet?" The name escaped Julia's lips before she had a second to think. "Harriet Barnes is dead?"

  "Stabbed in the neck with her own gardening scissors," DS Christie announced coldly as he hooked his thumbs through the belt-straps of his trousers. "Poor thing must have been working late last night when someone smashed the window to rob the place. I bet they didn't even know she was there, so they panicked and stabbed her."

  The two men carried Harriet into the back of an ambulance before slamming the doors shut.

  "She has a cat," Julia found herself saying. "At her cottage. It'll need taking care of."

  DS Christie scribbled down the detail on his notepad before turning to the shop.

  "The flowers, Barker," Julia whispered, nudging him in the side when DS Christie walked towards the shop as he snapped on latex gloves. "This is connected. You know it."

  "I tried telling him," Barker whispered back. "But he won't listen. What did she say to you when you talked to her?"