Poinsettias and the Perfect Crime

by Ruby Loren

  “Even though the evidence in front of you suggests the exact opposite?”

  He grinned. “Okay, so she’s more of a fox, if you know what I’m saying.”

  “And her money has nothing at all to do with it?”

  Harrison looked genuinely surprised. “Her money? She hasn’t paid for anything since we’ve been together. I never really thought about it.”

  I raised my eyebrows. Were there really men like Harrison still in existence, who wouldn’t let their women pay for anything, or had Cordelia really done a number on her boyfriend? “But you know her family is wealthy, right? Did she mention anything about that when you were chatting about the diamond?”

  Harrison frowned.

  I was being a little heavy handed, but his ‘I never really thought about it’ seemed like a stretch.

  “Look, I’m the CEO of a London tech company. Money isn’t exactly an issue. I don’t actually think about it much at all. It’s just something to use. All I really know is that Cordelia’s family has a military background. One navy commander great-grandad in the family and apparently you’re set. You know what they say… one man’s war is another man’s treasure chest.”

  I tried to fight down the stabs of jealousy. Was this really how the other half lived, without a care in the world when it came to cash? I’d been lucky to get the house and land I had, and I was even luckier to own it without a hefty mortgage to pay off. My business was doing well, but certainly not well enough that I didn’t need to be very careful with what I spent, and I didn’t see that changing any time soon.

  Harrison flashed his white teeth at me. “Maybe you need to date a guy like me. It sounds like you’ve been wasting your time with losers.”

  “I haven’t been wasting my time with anyone,” I said, and then realised how that made me look. It was the unfortunate truth. I hadn’t had a proper boyfriend since George.

  Or even an improper boyfriend.

  He shrugged and nonchalantly ran a hand through his waxed and teased hair. “If you change your mind, I could maybe introduce you to someone. Any friend of Cordelia’s…” he stopped talking and smiled again when he realised what he’d just said. “I just mean I think you could find a good guy. Maybe you’re closer to one than you realise.”

  I suddenly focused on his hazel eyes and discovered they were looking at me, taking in every inch. My limbs seemed to freeze up, and for a second, I felt like I was having an out of body experience. Then I snapped out of it. “I like to do things my way.”

  Harrison nodded, still looking at me in that way. “I can respect that. You run a business. That’s impressive.”

  I nearly sighed at him. He was using flattery, but whatever it was he was interested in, he wasn’t going to get it.

  “I could give you some business tips, you know. I know what it takes to move a company from being mediocre into a success. The key is to be able to focus on what you’re selling without the emotional attachment. I’m not saying that you’re emotional…”

  I found I was looking past Harrison rather than at him as he launched into what sounded an awful lot to me like corporate claptrap. I’d worked for a large company who’d shared his principles in London. I recognised the signs. The man at the top of the company did have some influence over the company’s success, but when businesses got really big, they tended to trade off the idea of the company, rather than the product, service, or what have you, which was handled by their many, many underlings. They were the cogs that kept the company moving forwards whilst the board members at the top sat around and discussed how successful they were, trading marketing secrets that they had no real clue about. It was different when it was just you, a field full of flowers, and a bunch of bills that couldn’t be written off in the ‘loss’ section of the annual tax return.

  My eyes focused on the window someway behind Harrison. It was fogged up, probably because of us standing around and talking. Or maybe it was extra moisture in the air caused by the respiration of all the police workers who’d probably been in and out all night.

  “I’d love to talk about all of this with you soon. Why don’t you give me a call?” I said, handing him a business card I always had on my person and smiling in what I hoped was a grateful manner. Anything to get him to go away.

  He looked surprised, but quickly recovered, following it up with another handsome smile.

  Normal smile. Not a handsome smile, I corrected.

  “Brilliant. I’ll call you soon. I should, ah, probably go and find Cordelia.”

  “You probably should,” I said, my attention elsewhere. It only returned to Harrison when he got within two inches of my face.

  “Be seeing you,” he said, making me feel all kinds of odd feelings. The biggest of which was strangely ‘Ewww’. It had to be my repressed teenage self coming out, but I was definitely not buying whatever it was that this man was selling.

  “Bye,” I said, knowing my facial expressions were probably making my feelings known. I’d never been a good actress.

  Harrison must have found it amusing, as he was still wearing that salesman’s grin when he walked away with a spring in his step.

  I’d believed that men got a lot simpler to understand when you grew older and knew that their motivations were often (at least, at first) a lot more carnal than a typical female’s. However, these past couple of days had thrown me enough curve balls that I wasn’t sure I knew what men wanted at all any more. Or why I had a few of them showing a decidedly odd level of interest in me. Christmas fever? I wondered, knowing that women were often accused of wanting to have a boyfriend to cozy up with for Christmas and then ditch him in the New Year… preferably after Valentine’s Day. I’d always thought it was as shallow as you could get, but perhaps the men were getting in on it, too.

  Except this one was already taken.

  I watched him walk away down the corridor and wondered what Harrison’s game was, whether or not it was all in my head, and what Cordelia had to do with it all.

  I walked over to the fogged up window and looked out, realising I could just about see through the glass. The view outside was lovely. You could see the rolling hills that surrounded Merryfield and the village, nestled at the bottom of the hill the manor house stood on. I brought my gaze closer to the house and observed the wooded grounds and lawns… and the man running across them away from the house.

  I squinted through the window and reached out to clear the mist. My hand froze just before touching the glass. I realised that my breathing on it had increased the condensation… and revealed something that looked like writing. With a sound of annoyance, I stood on tiptoe and tried to see, but all I could observe was the dark blonde hair of the fleeing figure. It was only the stocky stature of the person that had made me instantaneously conclude that it was a man. Who are they, and why are they running away? I wondered, but they were gone and I knew I couldn’t catch them, even if I tried.

  “Fergus!” I shouted, as a sudden worrying thought occurred to me. What if he’d interrupted the running man whilst breaking and entering Merryfield Manor? What if right now Fergus was lying in the kitchen in the same state as Bill Wrexton?

  “What is it?” the reply came from close by. “I was looking for you. Hey, what’s wrong?” he added when he saw my expression.

  “I just saw something and thought… never mind,” I said, taking a step back from the window and looking at the writing I’d noticed on the glass. It looked like someone had done it with a stick, as it wasn’t soft enough at the edges to be a finger.

  Fergus frowned at it with me. “It looks like the number twelve and then twenty-eight and then… a right-angle? Pointing to the right? And another pointing up?”

  “I think that’s it,” I concurred. The reason it took any working out at all was because the whole thing had been written in reverse. “It’s as if someone intended it to be read from the outside.”

  “It would be difficult to read from a distance. Unless you had really high-powere
d binoculars and knew what to look for.” Fergus rubbed his clean-shaven chin, thoughtfully.

  “I saw someone running away just now. They disappeared into the trees at the back of the garden, but they certainly didn’t look like they belonged here.”

  Fergus raised his eyebrows. “A trespasser! I thought I’d run all of those off this land.”

  “More like you paid them to be here and then disappear when you wanted to impress the Wrextons.”

  “That is libellous.”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “How about we get back to focusing on the case. What do we have so far? A crushed flower, some mysterious writing on the window, presumably written by someone who didn’t want to leave their fingerprints, and a man running away from the house. I think we’ll have this wrapped up by Christmas,” I said - and not without sarcasm.

  “I bet we’re doing better than the police,” Fergus countered.

  “That’s not saying much.”

  “Did you notice anything significant about the trespasser? Anything that might help you to recognise him if you saw him again?”

  “He had dirty blonde hair, and I think he looked sort of stocky. Like he might go to the gym, or have big shoulders.”

  “Know anyone around here who fits that description?” Fergus asked.

  I gulped. I’d been afraid he’d ask that. “I can think of a few people,” I said, as vaguely as I could.

  I could actually think of two men who fitted the description of the man I’d seen running away. The first was my sister’s boyfriend, and the second was my ex-boyfriend and new stalker, George.

  If it was either of them I’d seen running across the lawn… well, I wasn’t sure which one was worse.

  11

  Fun for all the Family

  Fergus relinquished his grip on my day once we left Merryfield Manor. He’d said something vague about researching the past some more and had wandered off, apparently forgetting that he’d left his car, and his dog, round my house. I’d let him go, not wanting the precious little time left before Christmas to slip away. It was Christmas Eve. I hadn’t thought about it until now, but that was what today was. Tonight, there was our first family get-together - a small party which usually included board games - and then tomorrow it would be the big day itself. It was surely a sign of my advancing years, but it had really snuck up on me this year.

  “I should have asked Fergus if he could come to Christmas Eve, too,” I muttered as I pulled my car into a spot by the Merryfield village church. I hadn’t expected him to be interested in Christmas, but if he wanted to come to lunch, he may as well endure the day before with me, as well. Heaven knows I could use some of Fergus’ off the wall chatter to take away the tensions that were only going to get worse. My mother would have undoubtedly heard of my and Charlotte’s involvement in the murder of Bill Wrexton, and we would be in for it.

  I got out of the car and walked in towards the small village grocery shop. Was I really hoping that a pot of her favourite olives would be enough to appease my mother? I knew it was futile, but I was going to give it a shot anyway. Whilst I was in the shop, I would pick up some chocolates for my dad and his partner, Annabelle. Usually, he received most of the Christmas-time disapproval from my mother, but this year he was probably going to catch a break.

  I was still thinking these gloomy thoughts when it filtered through to my consciousness that someone was calling my name. I blinked, looked round, and saw Deirdre waving to me from across the road. I waved back, pleased to see that she hadn’t yet been arrested for murder.

  She hurried across the street. “Merry Christmas, Diana! It’s been an exciting one so far this year, hasn’t it?” Deirdre said, looking as jolly as ever.

  “Merry Christmas. I heard that the police were trying to pin this murder and theft on the Merryfield Murder Mystery Fans. Are you all right?” I asked her.

  She bobbed her head without losing her smile. “Oh yes, we are all just fine. That was the excitement I was talking about. Did you know, for years, Walter Miller has refused our requests to be shown the inside of the police station and the insides of the holding cells? He always claimed it was twisted and in poor taste.” She flicked a hand to show exactly what she thought of Walter Miller’s view. “He didn’t have much of a choice this time. We all got to see the inside of the holding cells from the inside when he claimed we were being rowdy and shut us in there. Then, we each had a real-life interrogation experience. It was just like being the criminal in a novel. We did have a Christmas lunch planned today, but all of us agreed, our morning spent at the police station was so good we didn’t even mind it running over and making us miss our lunch booking!”

  “I’m… pleased to hear it?” I said, searching for the appropriate response. “Have they cleared everything up now with the club and the disagreement between you and the late Mr Wrexton?”

  “Disagreement? It was positively a vendetta when he decided not to send out those invitations! We were going to show him last night by…” She cleared her throat, getting carried away. “Not by killing him, dear, but we were going to do something quite naughty.”

  The police must have had a field day with this group of eccentric older ladies. “What were you planning to do?”

  “You know we were all dressed as waiters, when it was time for the toast given after the speech, we were going to set off the little flash bangs we’d placed under all of the refreshment tables and shout ‘Get down!’, or something along those lines. It was going to be a hoot! Bill Wrexton would never have dared not invite us again. We never got a chance to set them off, what with everything that happened.”

  The Merryfield Murder Mystery Fans had been planning to set off bombs at the ball. It was so nutty that I actually believed it. “The police found your devices?”

  “Yes, they claimed we should be registered as a terrorist group, or something like that. Wouldn’t that be exciting, dear? I bet it would bring more people into our club. We’re not all fuddy-duddies, reading and chatting about the books we’ve read over our knitting, you know. We have our fair share of excitement.”

  I privately thought that the club had been up to enough excitement over the past day and a bit to last any book club for a decade. I hoped that there was more reading, and less bomb making, in their future. “What exactly was Bill Wrexton’s problem with the club, anyway? You said it was because of the family secret?”

  “Oh, that old chestnut. Bill thought that nobody in Merryfield knew about the diamond they kept locked up inside that house, but I was friends with his mother, Fay. When he got the thing, she told me all about it.”

  “When he got the thing?” I remembered Gillian saying that the ownership of the diamond was complicated.

  “Decades ago. It was before he and Gillian produced that dreadful daughter of theirs. They were married. Perhaps it was a wedding gift? It was the first I heard of it. I don’t know where it came from. We were reading a book which had some fanciful ideas about diamonds and their properties when I remembered the Wrexton diamond. It was years ago mind, when dear Fay Northwood was still with us, but I recalled her saying something about their diamond was bad news…” She grinned at me. “It sounded like a mystery!”

  “You went and asked Bill about the diamond?”

  “We did. He didn’t want to talk about it. He seemed shocked and outraged that anyone even knew of its existence.” She waved a hand. “As if it was a big deal. Everyone in Merryfield knew about it by then.”

  That was no big surprise. The Merryfield Murder Mystery Fans book club was home to some of the biggest gossips in the village. I could say sayonara to my theory that only a select few had known about the existence of the diamond. Anyone in the surrounding 100 miles around Merryfield had probably caught wind of it by now.

  Deirdre was looking at me like she’d just asked a question and was waiting for an answer.

  “Sorry?” I said, realising I’d drifted off into my own musings.

  “I was saying, do yo
u think they stole the diamond? There was an open safe, wasn’t there? Walter wouldn’t tell us what had been in it. He said we already knew and wanted us to fill in the blanks.”

  I privately thought it was not unlikely that, even though half of Merryfield knew about the diamond, Walter Miller probably remained ignorant of its existence. Gillian had tried to steer him away from it last night. But someone should tell him.

  Probably.

  But certainly not me.

  “They did steal it,” I confirmed for my old allotment friend. Most of Merryfield would be speculating that it was the case anyway. I was hardly letting the cat out of the bag.

  “I thought so. That’s a terrible blow for the family. As is Bill’s death, of course,” she hastily added.

  “Did you find out anything about the diamond?”

  “No, nothing beyond what I remembered Fay saying about it being bad news. Unless you can get questions answered about where it came from, and what kind of diamond it is, there’s not much you can do! We were blocked from doing any of that.”

  “That’s all the family secret was? Just the diamond?”

  “Well, I’m sure they have other secrets. Every family has their problems that they keep concealed from public view, don’t they?” She shot me a knowing look. I looked away. My family’s problems were hardly kept concealed. “It could be that the Wrextons were hiding more than just their diamond.”

  “It could be,” I concurred, thinking that there was a lot of evidence to suggest it was the case. A word scrawled on a jotter, writing on fogged up glass, and a man running away from the manor.

  This wasn’t your average robbery gone wrong.

  * * *

  After taking Diggory and Barkimedes out for a walk, I got ready to spend an evening around my father’s house. It was a little way out of Merryfield, and theoretically beyond the reaches of my mother’s towering disapproval, but it was our tradition to split our time between family houses. By the third outfit change, I’d concluded that no matter how conservatively I dressed, I owned nothing that would give me the ability to fade completely into the background. Even the army were still working on that.