For the first time since she’d met him, Jack looked interested. ‘How come?’
‘Lord Templeton had no immediate heir. His brother died when they were young, his son was killed in the war and within a year his wife had faded away. But you must know that from your “acquaintance”. The solicitors searched but couldn’t find anyone who was related, except for a second cousin in Australia. A farmer living miles out in the bush.’
‘And he was the chap who inherited the house and the estate?’ When Flora nodded, Jack let out a puff of air. ‘That’s quite an inheritance. Do you think this is our farmer?’ He nudged the body with his toe.
‘Far too young. I believe the man who inherited was well into middle age, if not older. He wanted nothing to do with the Priory. I suppose you couldn’t blame him. It was thousands of miles away and the house was starting to fall to bits. Death duties over the years saw to that. I doubt there was much money in the bank to put it right either. Lord Templeton was a dear man but he wasn’t very astute financially.’
‘So the Australian sold it?’
‘I guess he was keen to have the money. He employed an English firm to find a buyer, the same firm who’d told him the house was falling to bits. They dug up Vernon Elliot, who was keen to open a hotel.’
‘Has it been a success?’
Flora put her head on one side to consider the question. ‘I don’t think anyone really knows. Mr Elliot seems to have a great many plans to put the hotel on the map. To be fair, he’s employed local people, and that’s gone down well in the village. Overall, though, his ideas haven’t been popular.’
‘Too modern for an old place. It happens.’
‘Too out of step with local feeling. This is a big village and we’re lucky to have a good many facilities. Shops and a post office, a pub, a doctor. But it’s still a rural community, and still recovering from years of hardship during the war. Incomers aren’t greatly welcome, especially if they turn out to be flashy.’
He grinned. ‘Your description, I take it?’
Flora grinned back. ‘Not mine, it’s the village’s word. But this man’ – they really should get back to the poor dead person lying on her bookshop floor – ‘even if Kevin Anderson knows the man who inherited the Priory, it’s still a strange place for him to choose to stay.’
‘It’s possible he was doing a tour of England and stopped off for a few nights in Abbeymead so he could tell the tale back home.’
‘I suppose…’ She gave a small sigh. ‘He won’t be doing much tale-telling now. How do you think he died? There doesn’t seem an obvious cause.’
‘It will be for the police pathologist to decide, though by the look of it…’ Jack bent down again, ‘he has a nasty cut on his forehead. That could be where he hit the bookshelf on his way down. As an amateur, I’d say it looks very much like a heart attack.’
‘But he’s a young man,’ she protested.
‘As I said, extraordinary. And extraordinary how he got in here in the first place. Is there another door to the shop?’
She shook her head. ‘There’s a yard at the rear of the building, but no door. The powers that be have never allowed us one. Ruining a historic building, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a complete bind. When I’ve rubbish for the dustbin, I have to carry it out of the front door and around the outside of the building. I wonder—’
Abruptly, she spun around, darting into the narrow passageway on her left, and almost running to its end. As soon as she turned the last corner, she saw it.
‘Look, look here!’ she called out.
A surprised Jack followed in her footsteps and was soon standing beside her, staring down at the pile of shattered glass. The window above sported a gaping hole, the chill of an October morning frosting the air.
‘That’s one question answered at least,’ he said.
A question that only created others. Flora wore a bewildered frown. ‘So he broke in. But why?’
‘To steal?’
‘Not money, for sure. The till is untouched. And books – would anyone break in to steal books?’
‘It’s been known, but it is pretty—’
‘Extraordinary, I know. And if this man is staying at the Priory Hotel, he could probably buy the Bodleian.’
‘You exaggerate, I think.’
‘Of course I’m exaggerating. My nerves are on end and now I have this mess to clear before I can let any customers in – and what do I do with the body?’ Flora’s fists tightened, fingernails biting into her palm.
‘I don’t think you’ll have too many customers today,’ Jack said gently. ‘Leave the mess until the police get here. They’ll want to see it in any case. Now, shall I telephone them or will you?’
‘I will, though I can’t think Constable Tring will know what to do.’
‘He’ll get Kevin collected, at least. There’ll be a post-mortem and if the pathologist doesn’t like the results, you’ll have Brighton CID descend on you.’
‘Wonderful, that’s all I need.’
Rummaging through the big black diary Violet always insisted they kept, she found the number for the police house. Constable Tring took some time to answer and when he’d listened to everything Flora had to say, he wasn’t a happy man.
‘If he’s young, he shouldn’t be dead. And if he’s a guest at the Priory, he’s got money and money means trouble. I don’t like it. I’ll need to phone my superiors.’
‘Meanwhile…?’
‘You must shut the bookshop, Miss Steele. Yes, that’s what you must do. Shut the shop and call the undertaker. No, I best call them. Just be ready to let them in.’
When she replaced the receiver, it was to see Jack Carrington doing an odd kind of hop around the cash register.
‘I wonder,’ he began, ‘if I might pay and—’
‘The police will want to speak to you, too,’ she interrupted, seething with the injustice of it. He had found the body, yet he was planning to disappear. He’d get on with his life, while hers had been stopped dead. It was grossly unfair.
‘They know where they can find me,’ he said complacently. ‘Now, Miss Steele, if I could just settle up.’
Feeling mutinous, she took his money, then watched him walk through the door and in seconds disappear from view. She turned the key in the lock, as Constable Tring had instructed, changing the shop sign to Closed. It was then that Flora realised she’d locked herself in with a dead body. She hoped the undertakers wouldn’t be long…
It was a full five hours before she walked through her cottage gate. At the request of the police, the undertakers rather than an ambulance had taken Kevin Anderson’s body to the pathology lab where he would undergo a post-mortem to establish cause of death. Meanwhile, the shop had to remain closed, Constable Tring told her, and the inspector from Brighton would probably call tomorrow, although being a Sunday, that wasn’t certain. At least, Michael, the local odd-job man, had nailed sheets of wood across the broken window in order to secure the building. It was a comfort to know that she was unlikely to find another body when she returned on Monday.
But Flora was worried and that evening, as she sat by a fire she’d coaxed into being, she couldn’t help but fret. It wasn’t that cold for October, but she’d felt the need for warmth, and for the first time in months had fetched logs from the wood store. More than ever, she wished Violet was sitting beside her. Someone she knew and loved and with whom she could talk frankly about today’s events.
There was a lot to talk about. What had Kevin been doing in her shop? Why had he broken in, if indeed he’d been the one to smash the window? Had there perhaps been two of them, accomplices in theft, and a quarrel between them had ended in death for Kevin? But there was nothing missing from the till. She’d checked again after Jack Carrington left, so if the break-in had been about money, the thieves or thief had gone away empty-handed, but left behind something they shouldn’t have.
That was what bothered her most. Looking deep into the flames, listening to
the spit and hiss of apple wood, she felt safe. Not at the All’s Well, though. Not any longer. The bookshop had been a haven since she was so high, but now it felt violated and she worried that she might never feel comfortable there again.
If the police came up with a rational explanation for what had happened, it might be different, though what explanation there could be eluded her. Jack Carrington had offered none and he was a crime writer. A crime writer who had been next to useless, his interest waning swiftly. Once the demands of work reasserted themselves, he couldn’t wash his hands of the affair quickly enough. He was a popular novelist – Flora knew that from the orders she received – and he must, she supposed, have deadlines to meet. Even so, he could have been more supportive. A girl in distress, that kind of thing.
Except that she was no longer a girl. Twenty-five did not count as girlhood. She was a grown woman and unused to feeling this feeble. She and her aunt had managed everything between them, two independent spirits. Not for a moment had Violet allowed the loss of her fiancé in the First War to determine her life, though Flora knew it had left a deep scar. And, she decided, she must be similarly resolute. She was on her own in the world and whatever tomorrow brought, she must deal with it.
Three
Flora was forced to keep the bookshop closed for the next three days while the police waited for the pathology report. A detective sergeant from Brighton had visited on Monday, inspected the damage, made various notes, and went away. Flora never learned what he thought, if he thought anything. It was a relief when Constable Tring rang with the news that she could once more open her doors.
‘So what’s the verdict?’ she asked him.
‘Verdict?’ The constable sounded fazed.
‘How did the man die?’
‘Ah, I see. The pathologist concluded it was death by natural causes,’ Tring replied primly. ‘A heart attack.’
‘How old was Mr Anderson?’ she asked.
There was a ruffling of papers while Constable Tring checked his notes. ‘It says here twenty-one, Miss Steele, though only just.’
‘He must have had some kind of health problem.’
‘Not as far as I know,’ the constable said cautiously. ‘The inspector actually telephoned Australia.’ He announced this in a solemn tone, pausing to let Flora absorb the immensity of calling a country so far distant, before he continued. ‘Mr Anderson’s doctor confirmed that he was a fit young man who took no medicine and had never sought medical help.’
‘You’re telling me that a man of twenty-one, who was otherwise fit and healthy, died of a heart attack?’
‘It can happen, Miss Steele, even to young people. A freak occurrence. I’ve read about it.’
‘And had the young people you read about just broken into a shop?’ There was silence at the other end of the line. ‘Isn’t anyone interested that I suffered a break-in?’ she demanded.
She could almost hear Constable Tring chewing his pencil. ‘Was anything taken?’ he said at last.
‘No, but—’
‘Well, then, least said, soonest mended, wouldn’t you say? Whatever this chap wanted in your shop, he didn’t succeed, and now he’s dead there are no leads for the police to follow. We must consider the poor man’s relatives, too. Suggesting he might be a burglar would cast a shadow and be very hurtful. Best to leave things as they are.’
‘And my broken window? Who will mend that?’ It was an irrelevance, Flora knew, but she was enraged that clearly the whole affair was to be swept beneath the carpet.
‘I’m sure the insurance will pay, Miss Steele.’
‘Damn the insurance,’ she said loudly, and slammed the phone down.
She stomped into the small kitchenette and put the kettle on to boil. By the time she was stirring a cup of tea, she had calmed down enough to think sensibly. It was stupid that this break-in bothered her so much. The constable was right. The man was now beyond reach – you couldn’t haul a dead body into court. And what real harm had been done, other than the shock of finding a defunct Kevin Anderson at the back of her shop?
But a week later, she had changed her mind. Trouble was in the offing. Harm had been done. It was what she’d sensed, brooding by the fire that first evening after finding the body. Now, her foreboding was turning out to be right. She glanced across at the photograph of Violet, her favourite photograph, taken the summer before her aunt fell ill. Wearing a faded pair of dungarees, a battered sunhat and a broad smile, Violet stood clutching a lettuce in one hand and a beetroot in the other. What would you do, Auntie? she wondered.
The problems had started the moment she’d re-opened after Constable Tring’s phone call. A number of villagers, who had never before put a foot inside the bookshop, had ‘popped in’ that afternoon – just to make sure you’re all right, Miss Steele. It was a voyeurism she should have expected and it went on for several days. But then, a sudden lull, and as more days passed, she could go for hours without serving a single customer. The shop was never hugely busy and there were times that were definitely more laggard than others, but the complete lack of custom was bewildering. For days, Flora was the only person in the bookshop.
The new sense of isolation was pervasive, spilling into her life beyond the shop. On her few forays along the high street – they were infrequent since Aunt Violet had grown every kind of fruit and vegetable in the long, narrow garden behind the cottage – Flora had felt people withdraw as she passed, seen looks of sympathy on their faces and heard the murmur of voices as she walked away. She had become a figure to view, a figure to discuss rather than talk to.
It was rumour to blame. It most often was in village communities. Rumours that there was something wrong with the All’s Well’s building. Something deadly. How could a fit young man die without explanation? Abbeymead clearly didn’t believe in freak occurrences. Stories were exhumed from the past. There was the widow who had lived in the building as a private home. She’d sworn that the place was haunted. She had actually seen the ghost. Not only seen, but been terrorised by this violent apparition, she and her cat made sick and the water in her taps turned bitter. The older residents recalled how one of the soldiers, billeted in the building during the First War, had collapsed and died, seemingly without cause. It was whispered, though never proved, that a poison had seeped from the walls.
In the last day or so, Alice had overheard Dilys, the postmistress, regaling her customers with the way she’d always sensed something odd in the bookshop, a smell she could never put a name to. It had to be the poison, the one that had slaughtered the soldier and made the old woman sick. It might have been in abeyance for years but now it was killing again. Flora could have screamed, but was powerless to stop the gossip as one rumour supplanted another, all of them pointing squarely to the dangers residing in the All’s Well building.
And something just as damaging, if that were possible, had reared its head on Saturday. A party of sensation-seekers had arrived from out of the village. The news, confirmed by the police, that the dead man was the nephew of the very Australian who’d inherited from Lord Templeton, and that he was young and fit and should never have died, had caught the public imagination. People always enjoyed seeing the wealthy brought low: They might have had a lucky inheritance, they said, but money was no security. Even the rich could die early. An enterprising bus driver from Steyning had tapped into this universal sentiment and hired a coach to offer a guided tour of Abbeymead, with particular focus on the bookshop where this dastardly event had occurred. If this inaugural trip was a success, Flora learned, he intended to make it a regular Saturday feature. The village was not amused.
A coachload of the day trippers had pounded their way into the All’s Well, aimlessly wandering its winding passageways, gawping at nothing in particular, bombarding Flora with a pelter of questions – and buying nothing. Where was the body found? How had the man got into the shop? Had she locked him in overnight by mistake and he’d died of starvation? The more outrageous the comments, the
tighter Flora’s lips became.
The trippers’ descent on the All’s Well was not the worst of it. The village was up in arms over the coach trip, infuriated by the prospect of being overwhelmed every Saturday by visitors who bought nothing but prevented everyone else from going about their lawful business. Somehow this onslaught had become Flora’s fault, and her pleas that she had been similarly inconvenienced fell on deaf ears.
Sales had fallen dramatically and the cellar was now almost empty of books, with few orders in the ledger to replace them. With trade so bad, she was forced to pillage her savings. It broke her heart to do so – not for the money itself, but for what it represented. The loss of a dream. Since she’d returned to Abbeymead to help her aunt run the shop, she had been saving hard. Through all the months and years of caring for Violet, she’d continued, saving for the time when she hoped her aunt would have recovered sufficiently for Flora to take a year out and set off on her travels.
Paris would be her first stop. She would find a small hotel in the Marais, enjoy coffee beneath the linden trees before she plundered the second-hand bookstalls along the Seine. A few months in France and then on to Italy. She knew she would love Italy – not just the cities, Rome, Florence, Venice, though they would be wonderful – but the countryside, too. Tuscany, Umbria, Le Marche. She had read about them all. Careful planning, she had reckoned, would allow her to pay for an assistant, a woman that both she and her aunt trusted, who would help in the shop and keep a careful eye on Violet. It had been a dream that after her aunt’s death had faded. Now, forced to use her savings simply to keep the shop going, it had disappeared altogether.
If she could only see an end to it, but she couldn’t. Anderson’s death remained a dangerous mystery, at least as far as the village was concerned and, apart from some desultory questioning at the hotel, the police had shown little interest. Now, it seemed, they had walked away from the case entirely. Reggie Anderson, the young man’s uncle and Lord Templeton’s heir, had been contacted to arrange for the body to be shipped back to Australia. Reggie, apparently, was unhappy at being asked to pay for the repatriation of his dead nephew.
The Bookshop Murder: An absolutely gripping cozy mystery (A Flora Steele Mystery Book 1) Page 2