by Agatha Frost
“I wish I’d known all it would take was a murder to cheer her up,” Julia whispered to herself as she walked across the grand entrance towards the sitting room to question Conrad about what he was doing in Luke’s bedroom.
7
“Julia!” a voice hissed across the entrance hall, stopping her in her tracks before she reached the sitting room. “Would you be able to help an old man out?”
Through the gap in the door to the downstairs bathroom, Julia could see Casper sitting on the toilet. She almost turned away, not wanting another situation like when she had interrupted Theo. When she noticed that his trousers were pulled up and fastened, she felt safe to look.
“How can I help, Casper?” Julia asked, resting her plate of cookies on a side table next to the sitting room archway.
“I’ve been a bit of a fool,” he said, his shaky smile fluttering the moustache on his top lip. “I decided I was going to be stubborn and go to the bathroom alone while Heather was being interviewed. I wanted to keep my dignity and not ask for help, but, well – I’ve been sitting here for fifteen minutes, and I just can’t seem to get up. I’ve got so used to our high toilets with handles on either side, I’d forgotten how low the rest of the world did their business.”
Julia pulled back the door. Casper’s cane was on the floor next to the bath. She picked it up and rested it against the wall before pulling Casper up with both hands. He was even heavier than he looked, so it took three attempts for Julia to get the man steady on his feet. When he was finally vertical, he motioned for Julia to pass him his cane. As though he felt naked without it, an easy smile filled his face when it was back by his side for support.
“Let’s not talk about this, eh?” he asked with a wink, his cheeks blushing. “A one-legged old man doesn’t have much dignity to begin with, but I’d like to keep the last shred I have.”
“Consider it our secret,” Julia whispered. “Would you like a chocolate chip cookie?”
Casper’s face lit up, letting her know he would like one very much. They walked out of the small bathroom with Julia holding his arm to steady him. He smiled at her to let her know it was not necessary, so she let go to scoop up the plate.
“I’m a nervous baker,” she explained. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“If it’s what helps you cope,” he said as he circled his finger above the cookies before choosing one of the thicker ones. “We all have our vices. I suppose mine is food too, but not making it, eating it. Truth be told, I’m a terrible cook. I don’t know what I’d do without Heather.”
They drifted across to the foot of the stairs and sat down, the plate of cookies between them. Julia could tell Casper was in pain, even if he was trying to hide it behind a tight smile. She offered him another cookie, which he accepted gratefully.
“I’m not used to wearing this damn thing,” he said, slapping the fake leg, which produced an unnatural echo inside his trouser leg. “I’ve got used to hobbling around at home with a crutch. I’ve even got quite fast at it, but I wouldn’t feel right legless in front of people. That’s pride for you.”
“It must be difficult for you.”
“It happened a long time ago,” he said, hiking up the bottom of his trousers to flash Julia some of the prosthetic leg. “You’d think I’d be used to it by now, but I still wake up every morning with pain in the foot I haven’t had for thirty-five years. The Falklands War was quick, but it was brutal. I was lucky to walk away with just a missing leg compared to some of my pals. People are a lot more accepting of folk like me these days. I thank the Paralympics for that, but people never truly understand the pain. Forcing a stump down on a fake leg hurts, Julia. It hurts a lot, and I’m an old man. I should have been asleep an hour ago, but how can I sleep when my nephew has just died? I’m not going to lie and say we’ve been close recently because we haven’t, but he’s still flesh and blood.”
“I sensed there was some tension yesterday.”
“Was it that obvious?” he replied with a sad chuckle. “It all seems so silly now, but he wasn’t an easy man to love. We gave him some money a while ago, and he –”
Before he could finish his sentence, the door to the study opened. Heather shuffled out, her plump face low as she fiddled with a paper napkin. Barker smiled sadly down at her as she hobbled across the hall to her husband.
“Are you eating cookies, Casper Brown?” Heather cried, her voice lacking the warmth it had contained when Julia had first met her. “You know you shouldn’t have snacks after eight.”
“It’s the stress, Heather,” he insisted, forcing himself up using the bannister and his cane. “I was just telling Julia about how we gave Luke that money for –”
“Why are you telling her that?” she snapped, her beady eyes widening like saucers. “She doesn’t need to know the personal details of our life!”
“She’s family.”
“Family, or not, it’s nobody’s business,” Heather insisted, looping her arm through her husband’s. “No offence, Julia, but we don’t know you from Eve.”
Julia nodded her understanding, and watched as Heather and Casper walked slowly towards the sitting room. Julia scooped up the cookies, hanging back for a moment before following them. She stood in the archway of the sitting room, but Conrad and Bella were nowhere to be seen.
“Julia?” Barker’s voice travelled from the study doorway. “Are you busy?”
“Not anymore.”
Once in the dimly lit study, Julia placed the plate on the desk where the tape recorder had been set up. DS Christie immediately grabbed one, but Barker hung back.
“What have you got?” Julia asked.
“That’s classified,” DS Christie said quickly, crumbs flying out of his mouth. “Good biscuits. Where they from?”
“I made them,” Julia said. “Technically, it’s a cookie. It’s softer and bigger than a biscuit.”
“Aren’t they the same thing?” DS Christie replied, narrowing his eyes on Julia.
“Sort of,” Julia said with a shrug. “It’s not important right now. What do you have?”
“It’s still classified.”
“Leave off, John,” Barker said, rubbing between his eyes. “She wouldn’t be asking unless she knew something useful too.”
DS Christie collapsed into the chair and picked up another cookie. He pulled off his already loose tie and tossed it across the bookcase-lined room.
“Was Luke gay?” Julia asked in a low voice.
“I don’t know,” Barker replied. “I haven’t seen him for three years.”
“Since Bethany’s funeral?” Julia asked.
“How do you know about Bethany?” he asked sharply. “I never told you about her.”
“No, but her name has come up a dozen times in the past two days,” she said, turning her back on DS Christie to lean against the thick mahogany desk. “She seems to be an important part of your family history, but we’ll come back to that. I think Conrad and Luke were having an affair.”
“What?” DS Christie scoffed, choking on a cookie. “Conrad has a girlfriend.”
“So?”
“Well, he’s not – ya’know. Like that.”
“Gay?” Julia snapped, craning her neck to face the DS. “You can say it, you know. It’s not catching.” She turned back to Barker and folded her arms. “I have it from a very reliable source that Conrad was seen going into Luke’s room at five, and leaving twenty-five minutes later in a ‘state of undress’. Unless they were playing strip poker, I think that speaks for itself.”
Barker picked up a notepad from the table, where he had cobbled together a crude timeline.
“Seems to check out,” he said over her shoulder to DS Christie. “According to your father, Theo, Luke, Bella, Conrad, Casper, and Heather were all in the sitting room around four in the evening. Luke complained about a headache around quarter to five and said he was going up for a nap before the party. Conrad and Bella went for a walk around the grounds five minutes la
ter, but Bella returned around five past the hour saying that Conrad was taking a work call.”
“And he was really in bed with his girlfriend’s cousin?” DS Christie asked, a little less sceptically this time. “Your family is messed up, even by my standards, and two of my cousins married each other!”
Julia found herself on the same page as the DS. Ever since meeting Ethan, Dawn and Luke at the train station, she had felt her perception of the Brown family shattering piece by piece.
“Brian said everyone left the sitting room by half past five, and forensics is estimating the time of death as being between half past five and six, meaning he was likely killed immediately before Katie discovered him.”
“Not officially, though,” DS Christie jumped in. “We won’t know for sure until the autopsy, but that will take days.”
“So, it could still be any of them?” Julia asked, frustrated that they had not narrowed down the list of suspects. “We’re getting nowhere.”
“Go and find Theo,” Barker said to DS Christie after checking his list. “I need a break. Let’s go for a walk, Julia.”
Julia did not argue. She followed Barker out of the study, taking her cookies with her, much to DS Christie’s displeasure. She walked quickly into the kitchen and placed them on the counter, not surprised in the least to see that Jessie had wandered off.
“I need some air,” Barker said. “This place is suffocating me.”
“I thought we couldn’t go outside?”
“We’re not suspects,” he reminded her. “We’re probably the only two people in this manor with concrete alibis, aside from John, your father, and Katie.”
“And Jessie,” Julia said. “She’s wandering around in there somewhere. Don’t ask.”
To her surprise, Barker did not ask. They walked through the front doors, nodding to the officer on duty. The night was cold, probably only a couple of degrees above freezing. Even though the bitter chill nipped at Julia’s exposed skin, she was glad of the fresh air. Barker pulled off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders.
“I should have told you everything before it got to this,” Barker said, looping his arm through hers as they walked past her Ford Anglia where Dot was fast asleep behind the wheel, a blanket bundled around her head. “It’s not that I lied to you, it’s just been a complicated mess for a while now. I didn’t even know how to explain it.”
“Since Bethany’s death?”
“Before that,” Barker said with a heavy sigh as they walked around the side of the house. “Since Mum died five years ago. She was the glue holding us together. We’d gather at her house, and it kept us close. Birthdays, Mother’s Day, Christmases, Easter. No matter what we were doing, we’d always be there, for her mainly, but we also enjoyed using it as a way to catch up. Now, it’s a Christmas card and birthday phone calls, if I’m lucky. I didn’t even notice that this was the first year none of them called me, but now I know why.”
“And Bethany?”
“Bethany was my niece,” Barker explained as they walked through the bubble of light streaming out of the kitchen. “Theo’s eldest daughter. Bella’s older sister. She would have been twenty-one last month. She was only eighteen when she died. It was no age for her to go.”
“How did it happen?”
“She was drunk behind the wheel.” He paused to inhale deeply. “We all gathered for her eighteenth birthday three years ago. It was the first time we had properly all been together since Mum’s funeral. We all had a great time. We always got on as well as brothers did.
“At the end of the night, Bethany decided she was going to drive home. None of us knew. We didn’t even know she’d been drinking. She just slipped away from the party and got into her car. Ethan got in too. They were staying at the same hotel. He was drunk. Too drunk to notice that she was also drunk, or so we all suspect. We don’t blame him, well, all of us except for Theo. He said outright at the funeral that he blamed Ethan for his daughter’s death and vowed never to speak to him again. That’s why I’m so surprised you got them to agree to come here.”
“Theo was the difficult one,” Julia said. “He told me he only came because Conrad wanted to come and take pictures. I wonder if Conrad really wanted to come because he knew Luke would be here? On the morning I picked Luke up from the train station with his mum and dad, he asked me specifically if Bella would be bringing Conrad. It all makes sense now.”
“When you asked if I thought Luke was gay, I didn’t want to answer in front of John in case he repeated something back to Ethan and Dawn. The last thing they need now is to find out something like this when he has only been dead a couple of hours. I babysat him when he was about fourteen. He was different back then. This was before his job took over. I let him go on my computer, and I found some stuff after. I don’t think he knew how to clear the history. He was only typing in questions. I remember one of them was ‘will people still like me if I am gay?’ I never brought it up.”
“What did he do for a job?”
“He developed apps,” Barker said. “Ran a big shot company in London. They made games and things like that for phones.”
“So, it was apps, not apples,” Julia said, almost to herself. “That makes more sense.”
“Apples?” Barker asked, forcing a laugh. “What are you talking about?”
“Katie overheard Heather and Luke arguing on the landing last night about money and apps.”
“Oh,” Barker said, suddenly standing still. “She didn’t mention that in her statement.”
“Casper was about to tell me about some money they had given to Luke, but Heather shut him down and basically said she didn’t trust me.”
“Well, she must not trust me either,” Barker said quietly. “She’s known me since I was born. Mum had Casper when she was sixteen, and she had me when she was forty-five. She was an old mother in those days, but she never cared. I’ve always been closest with Casper, even though Theo and Ethan are only three years older than me.”
“Ethan said you all had different fathers.”
“We do,” Barker said with a nod. “Except Ethan and Theo, of course. Casper’s dad died when he was a child, and the twins’ dad left while she was pregnant with them. I never knew mine. Mum never wanted to speak about it, so I didn’t ask. I loved her too much to upset her, and she loved us. That’s why we all have her maiden name, Brown, rather than our fathers’ names. She wanted us all to belong, and it worked until she died, but look at us now. I’m questioning them about a murder, and I know someone in my family did it, and now I know that at least two of them are lying to me about money.”
“It might not be connected,” Julia suggested.
“That’s not the point,” Barker said. “A hallway argument is the sort of thing you bring up in an interview unless you have something to hide.”
Julia could not object; the logic seemed spot on. She was good at talking to people on a human level, but she knew nothing about official interviewing techniques. She took people at face value most of the time, using a combination of her wits and her own logic patterns, which more often than not led her to the solution.
“I still need to talk to Ethan and Dawn,” Barker said when they reached the front of the house again. “I wanted to give them some space to come to terms with it, but they might know something.”
They walked back inside, the entrance hall wrapping around her frozen skin like a warm blanket. She shrugged off the jacket and handed it back to Barker, who accepted it before heading back to the study. Julia turned to the kitchen to grab her cookies, but what she saw was an empty plate and Jessie with chocolate around her mouth.
8
Julia bolted up in an armchair, a heavy blanket over her, and the warmth of the roaring fire prickling her cheek. She turned to Jessie who was sitting cross-legged on the couch staring at her.
“I fell asleep?” Julia croaked, not remembering crawling under a blanket. “How long have I been out?”
“It’s almost m
idnight,” Jessie said, pulling back her hood a little before stuffing her hands into her hoody pocket. “I put the blanket over you. Barker lit the fire.”
“Midnight?” Julia cried, jumping up. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
“Because you must have needed it, cake lady,” Jessie said. “Don’t worry. I’ve been sitting here keeping watch. Your neck was safe.”
Julia lifted her hand up to her neck, not believing she had fallen asleep on the job. She thought back to walking into the sitting room with Jessie, disappointed to find it empty. She had sat down for a moment, and the last thing she remembered was chatting to Jessie about her baking course at college.
“Has anything happened?” Julia asked, cracking her stiff neck.
“Nope,” Jessie said with a shrug as she let out a yawn. “Barker is interviewing Ethan. I think he’s the last one. Haven’t seen anyone since we came in here.”
“Why don’t you go home and get some sleep?”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“I’ll be fine,” Julia insisted. “I’m a big girl.”
“So am I,” Jessie said, jumping up and forcing down another yawn. “I’m not leaving you when there’s a strangler on the loose.”
“I’ll be fine,” Julia repeated.
“You’re poking your nose into other people’s business and asking a lot of questions,” Jessie said with a roll of her eyes. “If I were a murderer, I’d be cracking my knuckles ready to choke the life out of you.”
Julia’s hand drifted up to her neck again. As usual, she had not considered that she was jumping into harm’s way by investigating another murder case.
“I think we’re safe,” Julia said. “I think the murder was spontaneous.”
“Spontaneous?”
“It means they didn’t –”
“I know what it means, Julia,” Jessie snapped, cutting her off as she looked down her nose at her. “I’m not an idiot.”