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Heaven Preserve Us: A Home Crafting Mystery © 2011 Cricket McRae
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Dedication
In memory of Mark Challinor
Cast of Main Characters
Rex Graves—Scottish barrister and amateur sleuth
Helen d’Arcy—Rex’s fiancée, a school counselor in Derby
Reverend Alfred Snood—vicar of All Saints’ Church in Aston-on-Trent
Detectives Lucas and Dartford—of the Derbyshire Constabulary
PC Dimley—rookie constable
PC Perrin—young policeman, going places
On the Bride’s Side
Polly Newcombe—the less than lily-white bride
Victoria Newcombe—bride’s pretentious mother
Gwendolyn Jones—bride’s aunt on her father’s side
Amber Tate—maid of honor and Polly’s best friend
Meredith Matthews—bride’s friend from school who lives in London
Reggie Cox—Meredith’s sartorially flamboyant boyfriend
Bobby Carter—Newcombe family solicitor
Roger Litton—Polly’s former home economics teacher at Oakleaf Comprehensive
Diana Litton—history teacher married to Roger Litton
On the Groom’s Side
Timothy Thorpe—a well-intentioned groom with a weak chin
Mabel Thorpe—the groom’s fussy and overprotective mother
Dudley Thorpe—the groom’s womanizing twin and best man
Donna Thorpe—Dudley’s disenchanted wife
Tom Willington—the groom’s boss at the accounting firm
Jocelyn Willington—Tom Willington’s bossy wife
Clive Rutherford—Timmy’s former mathematics teacher and Helen’s ex-boyfriend
Jasmina Patel—Clive’s stunning date
Jeremy Walker—Timmy’s friend from accounting school
Elaine Price—Jeremy’s drippy girlfriend
Staff
Stella and Lydia Pembleton—the caterers
Rachel Pembleton—Lydia’s daughter, waitress
Harry Futuro—a.k.a. DJ Smoothie
“The Darling Buds of May”
Not a very auspicious day for a wedding, Rex thought as he looked out Helen’s bedroom window. A drizzly gray day beckoned feebly, and windy gusts rapped the branches of the willow tree against the panes of double glazing. Evidently, May in Derbyshire was no more predictable than May back home in Scotland, and Rex felt sorry for the bride and groom who would be setting out on a new life together this very day.
Wrapped in his flannel dressing gown, Helen entered the room with a tray and placed it between them on the bed before burrowing her feet under the covers. “You must have brought the cold weather down from Edinburgh,” she said. “I had to put the central heating back on.”
“It was fine weather in Scotland when I left yesterday afternoon. Helen, you should have let me make breakfast.”
“I felt like spoiling you. I tried to make your eggs the way you like them—soft-boiled, but not too runny. And the marmalade is homemade, courtesy of Roger Litton, the Home Ec teacher at my school.”
She proceeded to pour tea into two blue mugs. “I hope the rain will clear up for the wedding today.”
“And for our hiking trip.” A keen walker and nature-lover, Rex was looking forward to their excursion into the Peak District the following day.
“I do feel sorry for Polly and Timothy,” his fiancée remarked. “But I think it’s an indoor reception. Anyway, it may still turn out sunny.”
“You are the eternal optimist, Helen.” Rex took a more pragmatic view of British weather: be prepared and always take a brolly. He cracked the shell of his egg with the back of his spoon, sprinkled on some salt and pepper, and dipped a buttered strip of toast into the thick warm yolk.
“Perfect,” he complimented Helen on the consistency of the egg and, noticing she was not eating anything, asked, “Not hungry?”
“I have to fit into my suit,” she explained.
“Och, it’s not like you’re the bride. All eyes will be on Polly.”
“Including yours?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know. You’re just trying to be helpful.” She deposited a conciliatory peck on his cheek. “I can’t believe Polly is getting married,” she went on dreamily. “But Timmy ended up doing all right for himself, considering he was such a sickly child and missed a lot of school.”
“You said he was an accountant?”
“Yes, at quite a prestigious firm.” Helen shook her head in disbelief. “Seems like just yesterday Polly was in my office crying and carrying on. That girl had so many problems.”
“Were they childhood sweethearts?”
“Oh, no,” Helen said, refilling their mugs. “Timmy was bullied
mercilessly at school. Polly, on the other hand … well, let’s just say she was very popular with the boys. While Timmy was being picked on in the playground, she was kissing all and sundry behind the bicycle shed. After she dropped out, we heard she was going with an undesirable character from Aston. So when we got the invitation to the wedding, we at the school were all rather surprised—and touched. And her mother is ecstatic.”
“Have you met Mrs. Newcombe?”
“Yes, and she’s perfectly dreadful.”
Rex shot Helen a look, his spoon suspended midway to his mouth. “That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you speak an unkind word aboot anybody,” he said, his Scottish accent betrayed in the “aboot.”
“I know, it’s totally uncharitable of me, but you’ll find out for yourself. They live in a Victorian Folly—one of those whimsical places built by people with more money than sense. Anyway, the headmaster used to call M
rs. Newcombe in to his office most weeks to discuss Polly’s behaviour—her smoking on school grounds, the truancy, and so on, so I got to know her quite well. No dad in the picture, you see. He disappeared, quite mysteriously, while Polly was still very young.”
“An only child?”
“Yes, and only an aunt in the family.”
“It must be gratifying to know you had a positive influence on Polly’s life.” Rex checked his watch. “What time do we have to get going?”
“By ten.”
An hour later, they were getting ready to leave the house. Standing in front of the hallway mirror, Rex spruced up his ginger whiskers with a brush of his fingers. The silk tie Helen had surprised him with was the same cornflower blue as her tailored suit, and the exact shade of her eyes. He leaned toward the glass. Did the tie clash with his hair? No, of course not; Helen had perfect taste in all things.
“You look amazing,” he told her reflection behind him.
Her ears beneath the blond chignon revealed the swan earrings he had bought for her when they first met, that Christmas at Swanmere Manor, the location of his first private murder case.
“You don’t look half bad yourself.” She adjusted the pink silk carnation in the buttonhole of his charcoal gray jacket.
The boutonniere had been sent with the invitation. The card, a pink affair with scalloped edges and embossed in gold script, currently reposed against the clock on the living room mantelpiece. Rex had an inkling a leitmotif of pink would run through the day’s proceedings. He just hoped there would be a lavish banquet. He already felt peckish, in spite of the breakfast he had consumed. “How many people will be there?” he inquired.
“Polly said it would be a small reception for family and close friends, and a few teachers from the school, including Clive.”
“As in Clive, your old boyfriend?” Hmm … Rex didn’t quite know how he felt about Helen’s ex-beau attending the wedding. Emotions tended to run high at such occasions, especially when everybody had too much to drink. Still, it might be interesting to finally meet the mathematics teacher and see if he was as boring as Rex imagined him to be.
“Yes, Clive will be there,” Helen said lightly, “as will the Littons. Roger was Polly’s Home Ec teacher and sort of took her under his wing. Diana teaches history.”
Rex speculated anew about the tie. Undoubtedly, Helen was keen to present him in the best possible light to her friends—and to Clive, whose attendance she had flagrantly omitted to mention when she invited him to her protégée’s nuptials two months ago.
He watched as she checked the locks on the windows and the bolt on the back door. “I didn’t know you were so security conscious,” he remarked.
“I’m not, usually, but there’s been a spate of burglaries in the county. Not that I have a lot in the way of valuables, as you know. Mostly, it’s big places in outlying areas that have been targeted.”
Rex carried the gift for the bride and groom outside, a cut-glass fruit bowl that Helen had purchased. He couldn’t understand why a young couple would require a gargantuan fruit bowl, and privately considered a toaster a more practical present for two people setting up house for the first time together.
He held his black umbrella over Helen’s head as they started down the path to the driveway, at the same time attempting to keep droplets of rain off the gift’s white and silver wrapping. Juggling gift and brolly, he opened the driver’s door of her old blue Renault, which was marginally roomier than his Mini Cooper. Environmental concerns aside, he would not have opted for such a compact car had he anticipated frequent trips from Edinburgh to Derby. Next time he would take the train and save himself the leg-cramping 250 mile drive.
Installed in the passenger seat, gift perched on his knees, he pulled a map from the door pocket and located Aston-on-Trent on the outskirts of Derby, neighboring the canal village of Shardlow. Helen set the windshield wipers in motion and reversed into Barley Close, a cul-de-sac lined with 1930s semi-detached red brick homes, the sodden front lawns and early summer flowerbeds as forlorn as a lover stood up in the rain.
Definitely not an auspicious day for a wedding.
R.I.P.
The renault turned into a winding country lane edged with glistening hawthorn and, after half a mile, entered the village of Aston-on-Trent. Several homes appeared originally to have been farm houses, though many of more modern aspect had been added as the village grew into a commuter center, situated as it was just six miles southeast of Derby.
From Manor Farm Road, Helen exited onto The Green, where a half-timbered public house displayed the words “The Malt Shovel” in brass letters on its white wall. To make the point, a hanging sign depicted a man in a leather apron digging into a pile of malt. Rex made a mental note, fond as he was of pubs.
“This road loops around the back of the church,” Helen told Rex. “Hopefully we’ll find a parking space.”
“Do we have time for a pint if the pub’s open?”
Helen glanced, frowning, at the dashboard clock. “The wedding service starts at ten-thirty. If I can find a spot near the church, I won’t have to walk far in these shoes.”
Ahead of them, the square Norman tower of All Saints’ rose above the treetops beyond the tip of the village green.
“I could drop you off and park the car,” Rex suggested. And then get a quick pint, he forbore from adding aloud.
“I’d prefer we arrive together. In any case, most pubs in England don’t open until eleven.”
Rex conceded defeat. It was Helen’s day, after all. “I hope they have beer at the reception,” he contented himself by saying as he gazed longingly over his shoulder at the pub.
Helen had started to reply when she exclaimed in triumph, “Oh, look, someone’s just leaving,” and edged the Renault in between two other cars on the street. “We’ll leave the gift here. Newcombe Court is a few miles from the village, so we’ll be driving over to the reception.”
“Right-oh.” Rex wondered how long the church service would last, not having attended a wedding in decades. Had that been his own wedding? No, there had been the marriage in Edinburgh of the son of a legal colleague some years ago, a full-blown traditional affair—bagpipes, kilts, swords, and all.
He levered himself out of the car and, opening the door for Helen, shielded her under his brolly as they approached the church. The churchyard wall was linked by an oak lychgate— “lic” meaning corpse in old English, as Rex had once informed himself; the covered gate serving in olden days to shelter the coffin and pallbearers while they waited for the priest to perform the burial service. Beneath the rafters of the pitched tile roof huddled a group of gussied-up couples equipped with an assortment of umbrellas, temporarily furled.
Now that he had an unobstructed view of All Saints’, Rex recognized it as a beautifully preserved example of a Midlands parish church, begun in Saxon times, with the tower, buttresses, battlements, and four Victorian pinnacles added down the ages, and incorporating the straight lines of the Perpendicular period in between. Layered with history, the brown-gray edifice gave an overall appearance of something out of a Gothic melodrama as it brooded against the gloomy late morning sky.
The clock face beneath the Norman window in the north wall of the tower pointed to one minute before the half hour. A moment later, a six-bell peal rang out, scattering a flock of thirteen ravens from the battlements. The last of the guests hurried down the churchyard path amid ancient headstones embedded in the wet grass and streamed through the pointed arched doorway of the porch.
As Rex and Helen entered the short nave, a po-faced young woman in a frilly pink dress handed them a sheet edged in gold. She ushered them toward the pews to the left of the central aisle, which had already filled up with the bride-to-be’s family and friends.
Rex looked around for someone who might fit his mental picture of Clive, the mathematics teacher, but most of the thirty or so guests had their backs to him, having arrived earlier. The traffic out of Der
by that Saturday morning had been surprisingly heavy and slowed down by rain.
Helen waved to a woman in a lilac outfit and large straw hat seated four rows ahead beside a bald man in a brown jacket. “That’s Diana Litton and her husband,” she told Rex.
Mrs. Litton, who wore translucent pink-framed glasses and a flirty shade of lipstick, waved back with enthusiasm. Rex thought she looked like she might be good company.
“There’s loads of history in this church,” Helen proceeded to inform him. “Diana brought a class here on a field trip, and I tagged along as a helper.” She pointed to the front of the side aisle, separated from the eight rows of blue-padded pews by an arcade of stone arches set atop heavy, round pillars. “Over by the organ is an alabaster tomb from the fifteenth century bearing the effigy of a local landowner in a round cap and gown with his wife lying beside him, each with a dog at their feet.”
The crouching dogs’ extremities had partially crumbled away. Carved in bas-relief on the chest tomb below, a series of angels held shields engraved with coats of arms.
“The couple is united in death,” Helen whispered. “Romantic, don’t you think?”
“Only if they weren’t going at it hammer and tongs in married life,” Rex whispered back. “Perhaps she never let him go down to the ale house.”
Helen feigned an exasperated sigh, but further discussion was forestalled by the opening chords to Wagner’s “Wedding March” booming sonorously from a robust set of organ pipes. The muted conversations ceased. Heads turned toward the back of the church as a hugely pregnant bride sailed down the oxblood red carpet on the arm of a stout man, hair resembling white plumage backcombed over his head.
“That’s Bobby Carter, a family friend, standing in for Polly’s dad,” Helen murmured in Rex’s ear.
Rex was more transfixed by Polly, whose frothy white dress flaunted a generous bosom while doing little to conceal her advanced condition. The old playground chant, “Here comes the bride, forty inches wide!” flowed unbidden to his mind as the organ music played valiantly on from the side aisle.
Murder of the Bride Page 1