Murder in the Monastery (Libby Sarjeant Murder Mystery series)

by Cookman, Lesley

  Fran punched her lightly on the arm. ‘Come on, see what I’ve found. Or would you like an ice cream from Lizzie’s first?’

  Lizzie had a small booth selling indescribably beautiful ice cream just along from Guy’s gallery.

  ‘Oh, go on, then.’

  Returning to the sea wall with their cones, Libby said, ‘So what have you found out, then?’

  ‘Believe it or not, there’s the whole story on the estate website. I suppose it was concealed at the time and only got publicised with the advent of public openings and so on.’

  ‘So the church belongs to the castle estate?’

  ‘No, the estate of a stately home called Maidenhaye. It seems to be a sort of Chatsworth or Castle Howard set up – you know, villages still part owned by the estate, farm shop, all sorts of events going on.’

  Libby sucked the last dollop of ice cream out of the soggy end of the cornet. ‘Come on then, let’s go and have a look.’

  Maidenhaye was beautiful. The house, smaller than either of those to which Fran had compared it, still contained the sort of paintings and treasures associated with the British stately home, and within the estate boundaries there were villages, shops selling only produce from the estate, estate farms, woodyards and craft shops, not to mention several properties available for holiday lets.

  That, of course, was quite apart from the archaeological digs that seemed to be an ongoing process.

  ‘Here we are,’ said Fran. ‘Dissolution.’

  An early monastic house had been excavated, after the excavation of the supposedly 12th century monastery, the ruins of which had stood in the grounds for as long as anyone could remember. And with the excavation had come the examination of accompanying documents held in the family’s archives.

  And there was Eldreda.

  ‘No mention of Tredega, though,’ said Libby.

  ‘No, but it tells the story. How her relic was brought back to the monastery and the reliquary was designed to hold it. Miracles were supposed to happen if the faithful came and prayed to it. And then how this monk – what’s his name?’

  ‘Brother Thomas.’ Libby peered at the screen.

  ‘Yes, him. Fled from the monastery when he knew Henry’s thugs were on their way and gave it into the family’s safekeeping.’

  ‘It even explains what happens next,’ exclaimed Libby. ‘It’s not even a secret.’

  ‘Yes, the family lost everything – or nearly – and sold the relic after the South Sea Bubble burst. And there they lose sight of it.’

  ‘Right.’ Libby sat back. ‘So who are the family who lived at Maidenhaye? Does it say?’

  ‘The family are still there. It was entailed, and somehow they repaired their fortunes and hung on, even after the last war.’

  Libby scrolled back through the pages. ‘The Beaumonts. That sounds Norman-ish. Were they the family who brought back the reliquary?’

  ‘I should think the original Anglo-Saxon family married into a Norman family,’ said Fran. ‘So it probably is the original family.’

  ‘Who are still there. Should we ask them about it?’

  ‘We ought to ask Sister Catherine if she’s done that already,’ said Fran.

  ‘But she’s so difficult to get hold of.’ Libby gazed out of the window. ‘Let’s ask Patti.’

  ‘Go on, then, give her a ring. Then we can go and have lunch.’

  But Patti didn’t know.

  ‘I’m sure if she’d have known all that she’d have told me when we first spoke about it. But if they sold it after the South Sea Bubble – when was that? 1720s? – they wouldn’t know its whereabouts now, would they?’

  ‘They might know who they sold it to,’ said Libby. ‘Anyway, it’s all become a bit academic now. After all, the antiquities dealer has quite happily admitted he’s got the relic, and he’s told Ian who they’re handling it for. We’re just interested.’

  ‘As usual,’ said Patti, amusement palpable in her voice.

  ‘All right, nosy,’ agreed Libby, ‘but after all, you did set us on the trail.’

  ‘And gave your Ian a link to a cold case,’ said Patti. ‘Just watch out that the curse of the relic doesn’t come after you!’

  ‘I still think we have to get in touch with the Beaumonts,’ said Libby, as she and Fran walked down Harbour Street towards The Sloop Inn. ‘Peter needs to if he’s writing a play about St Eldreda. He might need to get their permission.’

  ‘That’s a point. You’d better tell him ASAP. Are we rehearsing tonight?’

  ‘Yes. And I’ll leave a message for Ian. I find it odd to say the least that the Arts and Antiquities people haven’t got this far in their researches.’

  Peter went into a very uncharacteristic panic when Libby told him the news and rang off saying he was going to call the Maidenhaye estate immediately. To the message she left for Ian, she received no reply.

  When she arrived at the theatre that evening, Peter was in the bar with his laptop and several sheets of paper, frowning furiously.

  ‘Good job you told me about the Beaumonts,’ he said, looking up. ‘They’re very happy for me to go ahead, but they knew nothing about the reappearance of the relic. They’ve given me access to the few documents they hold when ever I want to go down, which means I’d better go this weekend. Want to come?’

  ‘Well, yes, but – Ben …’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Lib. You’re not tied at the hip. Fran could come too, if she liked.’

  ‘If I liked what?’ Fran came up behind Libby, who explained.

  ‘No, I’ll leave it to you two, I have to help in the shop in Saturdays, and Guy’s being very forbearing about all this rehearsing I’m doing.’

  Ben appeared carrying a ladder.

  ‘You don’t mind if Libby goes down to Herefordshire with me on Saturday, do you, cousin dear?’ Peter called across the lobby.

  Ben raised his eyebrows in surprise. ‘No, why?’

  ‘We’ve found out more about the relic,’ said Libby. ‘Well, Fran did, actually.’

  ‘So who did you speak to at Maidenhaye?’ asked Fran.

  ‘Eventually the household manager, who put me on hold while she spoke to someone else. The Beaumonts are in residence, apparently, and she managed to convey the fact that they are very interested. Wonder why?’

  ‘Who wouldn’t be? Something from your family’s past turning up as part of a puzzle. If you count poor Bernard Evans as a puzzle, that is.’ Libby looked over Peter’s shoulder at the pieces of paper. ‘Script changes?’

  ‘There will have to be, now. These are preliminary notes. Meanwhile, we can go over the stuff that won’t be affected.’ He stood up. ‘Is everybody here?’

  ‘Nearly everybody,’ said Ben. ‘Except Dominic.’

  ‘I don’t know how he kept a job in television,’ muttered Peter. ‘I’ve never known anyone so unprofessional.’

  The errant Dominic turned up halfway through Peter’s explanation of the prospective script changes and annoyed everybody by asking for the whole story to be repeated. Peter refused and chivvied everyone into position for the start of the scenes he proposed to rehearse.

  ‘I do think he might have explained properly,’ Dominic said in an aside to Fran. ‘It might have an effect on my character.’

  Fran gave him a disgusted look. ‘You’re playing a thoroughly disreputable priest. Nothing much is going to change that.’

  Dominic looked thoughtful. ‘No. Much more fun playing baddies.’

  Fran rolled her eyes and edged away.

  When Libby and Ben got home, Libby found the Maidenhaye website and showed it to Ben.

  ‘It looks beautiful,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we should book into one of their hotels and make a weekend of it.’

  ‘That’s an idea,’ said Libby. ‘That looks nice.’

  The Maidenhaye Arms, predictably, stood on the edge of a village called Haye, just a stone’s throw from the main house and the archaeological site. Ben called Peter’s mobile, apologi
sing for the lateness of the call, and made his suggestion.

  ‘Looks good,’ said Peter, after calling up the site on his own computer. ‘Do you think it’s too late to ring now?’

  ‘We’ll email. A double and a single? Hal won’t be able to come will he?’

  ‘No, pity. If we get in, don’t forget to tell Hetty we won’t be around for Sunday lunch.’

  Friday morning, and an email accepting the booking was in Libby’s inbox.

  ‘Now you need to tell the Beaumonts we’re coming,’ said Libby, when she called Peter to tell him. ‘And hope they don’t mind hangers-on.’

  She had barely switched off the phone when a sharp knock on the door indicated someone in a bad mood.

  ‘Hello, Ian,’ she said.

  ‘What’s all this about the Beaumonts and Maidenhaye?’ he demanded, sweeping past her in to the sitting room.

  ‘I told you in the message. Peter, Ben and I are going down there, tomorrow.’

  ‘And you didn’t think to ask me first?’

  Libby was outraged. ‘I bloody did! We didn’t decide to go down there until last night after Peter had spoken to them. By which time you’d had my message since lunchtime. Besides, I don’t have to ask your permission to do everything in my life.’

  ‘All right, calm down, I’m sorry.’ Ian pushed his hand through his hair.

  ‘And you did say there was no harm in us digging,’ said Libby, slightly mollified.

  ‘Yes, I did. I’ve said I’m sorry.’

  ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ asked Libby. ‘Come into the kitchen and you can tell me all about whatever it is that’s brought this on.’

  ‘Mark – you remember? – got on to Marshall the collector’s solicitor, who is handling the sale. He was able to state chapter and verse and make the solicitor realise that the reliquary had been stolen from Bernard Evans. He genuinely didn’t know, and showed Mark all the relevant documentation for its provenance. The trouble is, the documents were genuine. They just dated from a century before.’

  ‘No!’ Libby paused in the act of pouring water on to tealeaves. ‘So they were stolen, too?’

  ‘Unfortunately we can’t find that out. At the moment we’re trying trace the person who provided them and sold the reliquary. All we have is photocopies of the documents, which Mark has verified.’

  ‘It gets more and more complicated, doesn’t it?’ Libby fetched milk from the fridge. ‘So why were you cross that we’d been in touch with Maidenhaye?’

  ‘Because the documents appear to come from the Beaumonts.’

  Chapter Six

  ‘So what exactly was he cross about?’ asked Peter, as Ben manoeuvred the four by four out of the Manor drive the following morning.

  ‘He felt he should have approached the Beaumonts first – or Arts and Antiquities should.’ Libby put her feet up in the back seat and prepared for a relaxed journey.

  ‘I can see why he felt that. How did you talk him round?’

  ‘By pointing out that anyone could have found out as much as we had about old Eldreda without knowing anything about Bernard Evans’s murder. We were simply nosy researchers. He eventually conceded we might be able to find out more than he could. The Beaumonts don’t, after all, know what we’re looking for.’

  ‘What you’re looking for, you mean,’ said Peter, sending her a disapproving look over his shoulder.

  ‘So are you, really, whatever you say.’ She peered through the gap between Peter and Ben. ‘How long did you say this would take?’

  ‘About four and a half hours, according to the route planner.’ Ben eyed his satnav with disfavour. ‘And if this doesn’t take us up a farm track by mistake.’

  ‘I shall follow the map on this,’ said Peter, waving his smart new tablet. ‘And give you updates on the news if you should want it.’

  ‘No thanks,’ said Libby. ‘I have thought about a smartphone, though. It would be quite good for the old social networking.’

  ‘I can’t believe,’ said Ben, looking over his shoulder as he pulled on to the main Canterbury road, ‘that only a few years ago I had to help you buy your first computer. And now listen to you talking about social networking.’

  ‘A lot’s happened in the last few years,’ said Libby. ‘And Fran and I couldn’t possibly have carried out our investigations without the internet.’

  Peter and Ben exchanged amused grins.

  ‘Anyway, to get back to the subject, are we allowed to tell the Beaumonts about the documents that were found?’ Peter asked.

  ‘Yes, I think so. After all, unless they somehow got the relic back, they’ll be as much in the dark as we are, and they ought to know that someone has misappropriated some of their documents.’

  ‘They probably don’t know of their existence if they haven’t noticed they’re missing,’ said Ben. ‘Oh, great. Here’s the first traffic jam.’

  Including a brief stop at a motorway service station, the journey actually took five hours; they pulled up in the Maidenhaye estate car park at half past three.

  Libby uncurled stiff limbs from the back of the four by four and stretched. Ben was already looking in the windows of the estate shop, sited handily in what appeared to be an old barn right next to the car park.

  ‘Look at that beef,’ he said. ‘And that bread.’ He turned to Peter and Libby. ‘Do you think we should have an estate shop?’

  ‘We wouldn’t want to take away the livings of Joe and Nella at Cattlegreen,’ said Libby, ‘or Bob at the butchers. And they have organic stuff. The only thing the village hasn’t got is a baker, and I can’t see us doing that.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Ben turned back to the shop. ‘Lovely range of home-made jams and pickles they’ve got, and look at their cheese counter.’

  ‘All right, all right,’ said Peter, ‘we’ll go in and buy everything when we leave. I shall take cheese back for Harry. Now where do we have to go?’

  They discovered the entrance to the main house and explained that they were there to see the Beaumonts and didn’t want to buy the (expensive) tickets to see the house. The woman behind the desk looked dubious but lifted her telephone and pressed a button.

  ‘Mr Beaumont will be down in a moment,’ she said addressing a spot just behind Peter’s left shoulder.

  Libby looked round for a seat, but in the large hall the only seats were behind the desk. She wandered over to a huge portrait of a typically bland-faced gentleman in eighteenth-century clothes. ‘I wonder if it was this one who lost the family fortunes?’

  ‘It certainly was,’ said an amused voice. Libby spun round to see that a tall man in slightly disreputable clothes had joined Peter and Ben.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Libby, going forward and holding out a hand. ‘I’m Libby Sarjeant and I always say the wrong thing.’

  ‘And I’m Alastair Beaumont.’ The man took her hand with a friendly smile. ‘Do come upstairs and meet my wife. We’re dying to hear your story.’

  Libby, Ben and Peter followed his rather stooped figure down a corridor and through a door marked private, where they climbed a well polished staircase to another door marked private.

  ‘Sorry about this, but if we didn’t keep a tiny bit of the house to ourselves, we’d go mad.’ Alastair Beaumont opened the door and ushered them into a room with huge windows overlooking the park, with a view in the distance of what looked like ruins.

  ‘Jennifer,’ he said, ‘here are our guests.’

  A short woman with greying brown hair and a bright pink cardigan came forward with an equally bright smile.

  ‘So good to meet you all,’ she said. ‘And we’re dying to hear all about the relic. I boiled the kettle while Alastair was downstairs fetching you, so we can all have tea.’

  When they were all settled in armchairs surrounding the empty fireplace with cups of tea, Libby began the story as it had gradually unfolded to them.

  ‘It’s intriguing,’ said Alastair when she had finished, assisted by Peter, who told of his visit to the Ab
bey and the forthcoming play. ‘We knew nothing about the documents. How did your policeman know they were genuine?’

  ‘Actually, I don’t know,’ said Libby. ‘I mean, they were authenticated by someone in the Arts and Antiquities department as being original old paper and ink – apparently they can practically tell what year the ink is from – and they have the Beaumont crest on them. Further than that, I don’t know. But I expect Chief Inspector Connell will be in touch to ask you to verify them.’

  ‘And these documents are where, now? Or rather, where were they found?’ asked Jennifer Beaumont.

  ‘They were provided by the solicitor handling the estate of a Mr Marshall, the collector who died,’ said Peter. ‘We think he bought it in all honesty. The documents would certainly make it appear legitimate.’

  ‘So we don’t know who sold it to him?’ Alastair Beaumont frowned at his tea cup. ‘And you say someone was murdered, too?’

  ‘Yes, a Bernard Evans back in the seventies, but we don’t know where it came from then. He had inherited it, we think.’

  ‘I wonder if he’s a distant connection of ours?’ said Jennifer Beaumont. ‘We have Evanses in the family, don’t we dear?’

  Alastair laughed. ‘I should think everyone in England has Evanses somewhere in their families, Jenny.’

  ‘All right, I know I’m a bit dim.’ Jennifer smiled comfortably, not at all put out.

  ‘Well, when we’ve finished our tea we’ll go down to the muniment room and you can see what I’ve dug out so far since your phone call,’ said Alastair.

  A white-painted arched door led into the muniment room, which was not, as Libby had thought, a dim and dusty dungeon, but a light room with tall windows, shelves on the walls, also white-painted, and a polished round table in the middle. Library steps stood against one set of shelves which held what appeared to be modern brown storage boxes, while against one wall stood a beautiful apothecary’s chest and an ancient telescope. More boxes could be seen through a cupboard door which stood open.

  ‘As you can see,’ said Alastair, ‘we’re trying to catalogue everything and make everything more accessible, especially since we’ve had the archaeologists around. And we already had these out after the discovery of the earlier monastic house.’