Death in an English Garden: Book Six in the Murder on Location series

by Sara Rosett

  “Oh, that’s good because there is one showy car I’d love to discuss. A canary yellow one.”

  Doug nodded. “It’s been parked here off and on since the day before yesterday.”

  That was interesting. Stevie had been in Nether Woodsmoor since Wednesday, the day before the finial fell from Parkview’s roof and all this craziness started. I didn’t need to ask about yesterday. I had seen Stevie Lund myself at Tate House. “I don’t see it out there now. I wonder if it will be back later or if it’s gone for good…?”

  “I’m sure it will be back, unless the owner doesn’t care to collect some very expensive luggage and clothing. Tara says the suits are like the car—Italian.” He grinned. “Clothing isn’t covered under hotelier confidentiality rules.”

  “I see. Well, in that case, there’s another vehicle that I think is very interesting. It’s out there now.” I described the white car that I’d seen Gil Brayden get into after he was escorted off Parkview Hall’s grounds.

  Doug tilted his head. “That one’s been here longer. Sunday night, I think was the first night it was parked here overnight.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Sunday?” Then that meant Gil Brayden had been in Nether Woodsmoor as long as Arabella and her group had been. Of course, if he was stalking Arabella, trying to get photos of her in unguarded moments to sell to the gossip papers then it made sense that he’d arrive shortly after Arabella. But how had he known she was here? Had all the secrecy and decoy cars failed to throw Brayden off the scent?

  I had one of Tara’s flaky chicken and ham pies for lunch, hoping that I would see either Stevie Lund or Gil Brayden, but neither one made an appearance. I headed back to Cottage Lane where I let Slink out then gathered up my notebook and camera for the meeting in Upper Benning. I didn’t think I’d need to take any pictures, but it was better to be prepared in case Elise sent me off on an impromptu assignment.

  I didn’t bother shifting everything back to the tote bag, just put my work essentials in it and slipped the crossbody bag across my chest. I grabbed the keys to Alex’s car, locked up the cottage, and found Quimby blocking my front gate.

  “Oh, I didn’t see you there.” I hoped he put down my sudden quick breathing to jumpiness rather than the jolt of fear I felt on seeing him. I glanced up the lane looking for more police officials, but he was alone. Surely, if he had a search warrant, he’d have more people with him. Unless he’d come to pick up something small, like my tote bag or laptop. He wouldn’t need anyone with him for that, I thought and felt as if my insides had turned to ice.

  “I thought you’d be interested to know that the Emsley case will be transferred to Scotland Yard.”

  “Oh, really?” The frigid feeling inside me intensified.

  “It’s not surprising, of course. The case covers multiple jurisdictions and involves a celebrity,” he went on, but his voice was drowned out by the words Scotland Yard, which seemed to be echoing in my head.

  I tried to fight off the wave of worry that engulfed me and focused on what Quimby was saying. “…not sure what Scotland Yard will make of you. You’re a peculiar case.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “Normally when someone pops up in multiple murder investigations, it’s a cause for concern.” He paused, and I swallowed because my throat was suddenly dry. “But with you I think it’s something else. Perhaps an intensely curious nature combined with incredibly bad luck. Whatever it is, you’ve proved yourself valuable in the past. Several times, in fact. Yes, I heard about Bath. The point is, I understand that it’s happenstance, but Scotland Yard might not take that view. Looks peculiar—a civilian involved as frequently as you have been in crime cases. In light of that fact, I thought you might prefer to…share, let’s say…any information you might have regarding the case with me before it goes up the chain.”

  For a second, I wavered. I could tell him everything about the note and hand off my laptop. But would I be out of it then? Would he say thank you very much for this information and walk away? No, it would mean more questions. And it would tie me even closer to Arabella. Right now, the police viewed me as someone who’d met Arabella a week ago and happened to find her body. I didn’t want to be someone who, in their eyes, could have sent threats to her and researched how to kill her.

  I swallowed again. “I’m afraid I can’t help you. I don’t have anything to share.” I reached for the gate latch. “I have a work meeting and really must go.”

  He stepped back. “I don’t believe you, you know—that you’re going on about your normal life and have no interest in Ms. Emsley’s death, but if that’s the way you want to play it…”

  He watched me walk up the lane to Alex’s car, which was parked in front of his cottage. I managed to get it started and shift into gear, despite my unsteady legs. I spun the wheel and executed a U-turn under his gaze then watched him in the rearview mirror as I drove away. He remained planted in front of my cottage, his steady gaze following the car until I turned the corner.

  “Kate, your thoughts?”

  “Well, I’m not sure…,” I said, playing for time. My thoughts had not been on the meeting. As Elise’s voice droned on, covering various last minute options we could put into play to cover the gap in the episode, I’d been thinking about Stevie Lund. Even though the cameras at Tate House had shown he only went to the front door and back to the gate, could he still be responsible for the wires that had shocked Arabella? But then I had to wonder if a murderer would drive a bright yellow sports car to the scene of the crime and leave it in sight of the road. Would anyone be that stupid? Could it possibly be a feint? Could Stevie Lund be that clever?

  From my few interactions with him, I thought he wasn’t the type of person who liked to confuse or secretly laugh at people. He seemed the sort who liked confrontation. He’d relish seeing fear in an adversary’s eyes.

  And Brayden…I’d searched out what I could find of his photos while waiting for the meeting to begin. He only had a few recent photos of Arabella posted in the gossip news. And it wasn’t like Arabella hadn’t been available to be photographed during the first part of the week. Her daily walks to the village would have been a prime opportunity to photograph her. Where had Brayden been then? He had to have known she was in town—the whole village knew.

  “You must have an opinion on whether or not a segment on Jane Austen-inspired video games would be a good idea or not,” Elise said from the head of the conference table. Arabella’s death had barely made a ripple in the meeting. It had been discussed—shocking and terrible—but Elise clearly viewed it as something that had happened on the periphery of our work. She believed that, except for the bad luck of me being the one to find Arabella’s body, none of our crew had been involved or were suspects—and I wasn’t about to let her know that it looked like someone was trying to push me into that role. Unlike other times when a death had happened around our filming and it had taken center stage, this time the only discussion about Arabella concerned how her death affected our schedule.

  I cleared my throat and tried to drag my thoughts back to the snippets of the discussion I’d caught. “It’s intriguing that Austen’s influence has extended to things as modern as video games.” I nodded at Felix Carrick, our cinematographer, who had a wicked glint in his eye. “But I don’t think the topic would appeal strongly to our typical viewers, women from thirty to forty-nine,” I added.

  Felix said, “That’s true, most likely.” He waved his hand, indicating the floor was open for the next idea.

  Working with Elise did have its drawbacks, but in the area of idea generation and brainstorming, she had become quite democratic lately. Or perhaps she was more desperate for new ideas, my cynical side whispered. Whatever the case, she did ask for and listen to input from the entire crew. Felix leaned back in his chair, looking content. A bit of a troublemaker, he enjoyed riling Elise. I bet he threw out the video game idea just to see what reaction he could get from her. I hadn’t seen much of him lately
. Any day off he had, he was off meeting his new girlfriend. The relationship had softened his personality somewhat, but hadn’t completely erased his subversive streak.

  The silence stretched, and then Elise shot a disapproving glance at Ren. “You’ve been almost as quiet as Kate.” He had only spoken a few words so far during the meeting.

  “I’m perfectly happy to listen to everyone’s ideas and will chime in when I have something to say,” he said mildly.

  Elise turned back to me, eyebrows raised. “We haven’t heard an original idea from you.”

  I pushed all thoughts of Arabella and Tate House out of my mind. “I like Melissa’s idea of looking into the modern resurgence in the popularity of Regency paper dolls.” Melissa and Paul had arrived a few minutes late, hand-in-hand which drew an evil-eyed look from Elise, but neither of them seemed to notice, and both had been tossing out suggestions during the meeting.

  Elise said, “Yes, but that centers on fashion, and we’ve done several segments on that. We need something new. Something we haven’t touched on yet.”

  After a few beats of silence, I said, “We haven’t done anything on money.” We’d explored the literary side of Austen’s work from the plots themselves to the actual writing of her books. We’d also delved into the modern film adaptations, Austen’s family life, her time in the city of Bath, courtship, marriage, fashion, etiquette, and military history—several of Austen’s brothers were military men as were some of her characters—but we hadn’t touched on the theme of money.

  Elise said, “Go on.” Coming from her, that was lavish encouragement.

  “Not necessarily the bills and coins used in her day, although that could be mentioned, but we could focus on the value of money. What was enough to live on in the Regency? Why were the Dashwood women poor with only—what was it?—something like five hundred pounds a year? And why did everyone always seem to know how much money everyone else had to live on? And why was it always mentioned as a certain amount per year?”

  I leaned my elbows on the table as I warmed to the idea. “Money is a theme in all Austen’s books—not enough of it, like in Pride and Prejudice and Sense and Sensibility—or the opposite, which is one of the themes of Emma. What happens when you have an excess of it and a meddling personality to boot? We could even touch on the changing attitudes toward wealth and money in her fiction. Darcy inherits his wealth, but by the time Austen wrote Persuasion, Captain Wentworth has earned his fortune and is a self-made man.”

  Paul, sitting beside Melissa, pulled his pencil from behind his ear and tapped the table. “We could bring back that author, the one we interviewed for the second episode about food in the Regency, who kept veering off to talk about other things. Didn’t she have several books? One of them had something about commerce or money, I think.” He dropped the pencil and picked up his computer tablet. “Yes, here it is. It’s called A Regency Primer: Daily Life by Deborah Clayton. Table of contents…household, food and drink, transportation, education, work…and yes, money—a whole chapter on it. Looks like exactly what we want.” After another flurry of typing, he’d brought up her contact information. “She works out of York. If she’s free during the next few days…”

  Elise drummed her fingers on the table. “I remember her. She was personable and entertaining. We do have Monday as a contingency day at Parkview. If she were able to come here on short notice, it might work out. Where could we film it?” Elise looked to me.

  I ran through my mental list of options. “We haven’t used the Tapestry Gallery. Good light in there, the colors are rich and textured, and there are a couple of big globes we could arrange in the background. That would look nice.”

  We all turned our attention to Ren. “Excellent idea. Let’s see if we can make it happen.”

  Elise handed out assignments, and the meeting broke up. I didn’t linger. After I’d jotted down my assigned tasks, which were to coordinate with Beatrice about possibly using the Tapestry Gallery and to check with Torrie about the exact date that Tate House would be vacant, I said a general goodbye and left. There was still plenty of daylight left, and I wanted to get back to Nether Woodsmoor. Slink would be ready for her run, and I wanted to make sure all was well at the cottage. I hadn’t liked leaving Quimby standing outside my gate, but at least Slink was inside. I hoped Quimby wouldn’t execute a search warrant with her inside.

  I navigated back to Nether Woodsmoor through the quiet countryside lanes. As I approached the village, I decided to talk to Torrie first and get that off my list. When I spoke to her earlier today, I should have nailed down an exact time she and the Hibberts would leave Nether Woodsmoor, but I’d been shaken up from finding the cut-and-paste note. Coordinating move-out details had completely slipped my mind. I’d need to do a walk-through of Tate House after Torrie left—if the police would let me. Since they’d let Torrie and the security guards remain, I didn’t see why I shouldn’t be able to check the premises before I handed the keys over to Claire.

  I turned the car toward the road that climbed through the trees to Tate House. I rounded the curve at the top and saw the gate was open. I cruised through and rolled to a stop beside one of the hulking SUVs with the dark tinted windows. It was parked at an angle, nose toward the house, and one of the Hibberts was opening the back passenger door.

  As I levered myself out of the MG, I saw the silver hoop in his ear and said, ‘Hi, Chester.”

  The engine of the SUV was running. The low mumble must have drowned out my car’s approach because he jumped and looked around quickly.

  I remembered the gun that had made a brief appearance when Stevie Lund climbed the wall, and I halted, with the open car door between him and me.

  Chapter 22

  IT WAS A SMALL CAR with small doors, totally inadequate as a shield. But Chester didn’t pull out a gun, only nodded a greeting, then opened the passenger door and chucked in a duffle bag. He shrugged his shoulder and his backpack dropped from his shoulder to his hand. He tossed it in as well then slammed the door.

  He wasn’t wearing his usual outfit of a dark suit and white shirt. Instead, he had on a navy T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes. “Off duty?” I closed my car door.

  “Yeah,” he said sarcastically. “You could say that.” His gaze skipped around the grounds then over his shoulder. It wasn’t the confident surveying sweep I’d seen Sylvester use when he scanned the pedestrian walkway. Chester’s glance was nervous and darting.

  He climbed into the SUV and closed the door. I hurried across to him and knocked on the window. When he rolled it down halfway, I said, “You’re leaving, aren’t you?” The casual clothes, the bags, and the furtive glance around…had Torrie let him go?

  He nodded. “And you’d be smart to make yourself scarce, too.” He fastened the seatbelt with a click. “They’re looking for someone to pin it on, and you’re an easy target. I’m one too—that’s why I’m out of here.”

  “Wait. Are you talking about the police?”

  He jerked his chin in the direction of Tate House. “No, Torrie and Sylvester.”

  He shifted into reverse. I gripped the edge of the car window. “Slow down. What are they trying to pin on me? Arabella’s murder?” I had an uneasy feeling I knew what he was going to say, but I wanted to make sure of what he was hinting at.

  He removed one hand from the wheel and ran it over his shaved head. “They’re scared. Their plan is smashed to pieces, and they’re afraid they’ll be blamed for the murder, so they’re making sure someone else looks good for it—not them. Get it?”

  “No, I’m afraid I don’t. Look, I know you’re not a chatty kind of person, but I need more details to understand. If they didn’t murder Arabella, then what are they worried about? And how do you know all this?”

  He sighed and looked longingly into the rearview mirror then put the SUV back in park. “I heard them talking. They thought I was out of the house this morning. I’d gone out to tell Ms. Emsley’s sister that I couldn’t let her in. />
  “Violet?” I asked. “I thought she’d left Nether Woodsmoor.”

  “No, she was here a few hours ago. Wouldn’t go away either, until someone came out to talk to her.”

  “What did she want?” Violet had seemed so anxious to leave the village earlier. Why was she hanging around Tate House?

  “She wanted to look around the house and garden, but I couldn’t let her in. Police orders, I told her, which wasn’t exactly accurate, but Torrie didn’t want to let her in. Once Ms. Emsley’s sister left, I came back into the kitchen quietly, not that I meant to sneak in or anything. I just happened not to make much noise. But they probably wouldn’t have heard me even if I was noisy because they were in the sitting room arguing.”

  I nodded, remembering how the voices of Arabella and Torrie had carried into the kitchen. “What were they arguing about?” Getting Chester to talk was harder than trying to get Elise to give me a day off.

  “The notes,” he said in a tone that indicated it should explain everything. He reached for the gearshift.

  “The threatening notes…you mean Torrie and Sylvester sent them?”

  He shrugged. “It was Ms. Emsley and Torrie in it together, sending the notes before we showed up. Sylvester caught on to what they were doing, and then he wanted in on it. He’s wily and likes to be part of anything like that.”

  “Did Sylvester and Torrie know each other before you went to work for Arabella?” I asked. Torrie hadn’t been able to tell the cousins apart the day they arrived—or she’d pretended not to know them.

  “Nah, but they hit it off right away.”

  “Torrie did say something about publicity and the threatening notes…that Arabella wanted to play up the story in hopes it would help her get a part in that psychological thriller, The Darkness, that’s casting right now.” Had Arabella engineered the whole thing—the threatening notes and the press coverage as well? If that was true, then Stevie Lund was a convenient scapegoat to blame the notes on, and it would explain why Gil Brayden arrived in Nether Woodsmoor the same day as Arabella.