The Marmalade Murders

by Elizabeth J Duncan

  “What is it, Florence?” she asked.

  “I just heard something that reminded me,” she said in a low voice. Everyone leaned forward to hear better.

  “What? What did you hear?” asked Mrs. Lloyd.

  “Somebody at a table behind us just said ‘pet.’ She said something like ‘The same thing happened to me, pet.’”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand what you’re getting at,” said Penny.

  “When I heard those words, I remembered. The woman who rang the Thursday night before the agricultural show and told me to bring my entries on the Saturday morning, she used the word pet.” Florence raised a hand to her forehead, as if the gesture would help her recall exactly what was said. “‘You can just bring them in the morning, pet.’ Those were her words. That’s what the caller said.”

  Penny’s eyes shifted to the left, past Florence. Seated at the table directly behind them were Elin Spears and her friends from the WG, Mari Jones and Delyth, whose surname Penny did not know. Mari and Delyth had sat across from her at Mrs. Lloyd’s table on Saturday night at the agricultural show banquet, but because of the size of the table, and the difficulty hearing and conversing against the background din, she had not had a chance to speak to them. Now she hoped she’d get a chance to speak with them during the course of the day.

  Mari, apparently sensing a pair of eyes upon her, looked up from the slice of cake she was attacking, and with a fork poised in her right hand, she asked with a smile, “All right? Enjoying yourself?”

  Penny returned the smile and nodded as Florence frowned and turned her head slightly. At that moment, Carwyn Lewis, the coach driver, passed by their table and stopped at the next one to speak to Elin. A moment later Elin got up, said something to her companions, and she and Carwyn left.

  “Bronwyn, who is that woman with Mari Jones?” Penny asked. Bronwyn didn’t have to look to know whom Penny meant. “Oh, that’ll be Delyth Powell. They look like sisters, but they’re not. They’ve been best friends, though, for a very long time. Both retired teachers. You don’t often see one without the other.” She checked her watch. “Our forty-five minutes are almost up. If Carwyn and Elin are going back to unlock the coach, I think I’ll go with them and see how Barbara’s doing. I hope a little sleep did her good and that she’s feeling better. I’m a bit worried about her, to be honest. She looked very peaky. I wonder if I should take her anything.”

  “Maybe a bottle of water,” suggested Florence. “Here, I’ll get one and go with you.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” agreed Bronwyn. “As much as I hate those plastic bottles, I guess we really don’t have a choice.”

  Seventeen

  Barbara had perked up a little by the time the last of the women, many laden with shopping bags filled with items they had bought at the garden centre, returned to the coach and climbed on board. Sitting up straight, both hands wrapped around the water bottle Bronwyn had brought her, Barbara, who had moved into the window seat, acknowledged her friends as they passed her and headed down the aisle to their seats.

  Once the coach was under way, it wasn’t long before the rugged terrain of North Wales flattened into the level fields of England. On the coach rolled, as countryside gave way to an urban, built-up environment, through Runcorn across the Mersey River on the Silver Jubilee Bridge, and then entered the industrial suburbs of Liverpool. They passed a sprawling car-manufacturing plant, the sun glinting off the roofs and windows of thousands of freshly minted vehicles parked in neat rows, signalling they were almost there, and finally they turned onto a long avenue flanked by old-growth trees, their lush green tops forming a leafy canopy, that brought them to their destination: Speke Hall.

  The coach slowed to a stop in the car park. Carwyn switched off the engine, then stood in the aisle, facing the passengers, to remind them that there was no formal tour or program, so they were free to explore the house and grounds as they wished, and to be back on the coach by three-thirty for the journey home. He wished them a pleasant day, then opened the door. He stepped nimbly down the stairs, retrieved the little wooden stool from the coach’s luggage compartment, and placed it at the bottom of the steps.

  As the women gathered up their belongings, ready to leave, Penny turned to Victoria. “Why don’t you go on ahead with Bronwyn,” she said. “I’d like to see if I can have a quiet word with Barbara about Florence’s marmalade. I haven’t given up on that, and I haven’t heard back from Joyce. I just want to see if Joyce had a chance to speak to her about it, now that the show and banquet are over.”

  “Right. I’ll wander around in the garden for a bit and see you in, what, twenty minutes at the entrance and we can explore the house together?”

  “Sounds good. I can’t wait to see that William Morris wallpaper.”

  Victoria leaned across the aisle to explain Penny’s plan to Bronwyn, and as the women filed off the bus, Penny slid into Bronwyn’s now-empty aisle seat. Penny introduced herself to Barbara Vickers, explaining their paths had crossed on the Friday night of the agricultural show when Penny and Victoria had checked in the entries to the home-crafts categories.

  “Oh, yes,” said Barbara, “I remember you. I’m sorry I wasn’t able to really speak to you properly. That was a busy time and we had a million things to do, but still, I should have introduced myself.” Or Joyce should have introduced us, thought Penny, but never mind that now.

  Penny explained the telephone call Florence had received, asking her to bring in her entries on the Saturday morning, that she had, in fact, entered them on time, and that her jar of marmalade was missing from the competition, and then asked if Barbara could shed any light on what might have happened.

  Barbara glanced past Penny. The aisle was now almost clear, with just Elin Spears, Dyleth Powell, and Mari Jones left to disembark.

  “Come along now, ladies,” Elin said to Penny and Barbara. “Carwyn needs to lock up the coach, and he can’t do that until everybody’s off.” She stood in the aisle, one hand on the headrest of the seat behind Penny and the other hand on the top of the corresponding seat across the aisle, until Barbara and Penny were off the bus.

  The group made their way out of the car park and walked toward Speke Hall, with Mari and Delyth in front and Penny and Barbara following. Elin had remained behind to speak to Carwyn, telling Mari and Delyth that she’d catch up with them.

  “Well, now that you mention it,” said Barbara, “I did notice something. Not on the Friday night or Saturday, but Sunday morning. It seemed odd,” she said. “So I checked, and it does have something to do with your friend’s missing marmalade.”

  Penny’s heart beat a little faster, with that same kind of excited anticipation you experience when you’ve been to three shops looking for an item and then finally, when you’ve just about given up hope, you spot it in the fourth shop, as if it were waiting just for you to find it. “What is it? What did you see?”

  They had reached the cluster of renovated home-farm buildings that housed the shop, restaurant, and reception. Penny and Barbara showed their entry cards to the attendant and accepted a map of the site.

  “Actually,” said Barbara, shifting her handbag from one shoulder to the other and glancing at Mari and Delyth, who were browsing a selection of pamphlets and books about the property, “I have to go the loo in the worst way. I’ve not been feeling all that well these past few days. You know how it is. So I’m afraid you’re just going to have to excuse me, while I…”

  Penny pointed to an overhead sign. “It’s through there. But before you go, could you just tell me what…”

  “Sorry,” said Barbara, her small dark eyes darting in the direction Penny had indicated and her body shifting slightly in that direction. “It’ll take too long to explain.” She turned to go, then offered over her shoulder, “Perhaps I’ll bump into you later or see you in the café at lunchtime.” With that, she darted away, leaving Penny frustrated and burning with curiosity. Damn, she thought. I was so close. What
was it that Barbara had seen? She considered following Barbara, but when she checked her watch, she realized it was time to meet Victoria. Torn, she hesitated, then returned to the main path that led to Speke Hall. A few minutes later, Victoria sauntered in from the garden with a small group of people.

  “I’ve just heard that there’s a tour about to start,” Victoria said. “I thought we could join it. You learn so much more from someone who really knows the place.”

  “All right. We can do that.”

  “How’d you get on with Barbara? Learn anything?” Victoria asked.

  Penny shook her head. “She wanted to tell me something, but she had to dash off to the loo. At least that’s what she said. Mari Jones and Delyth Powell were lurking nearby, and I thought maybe Barbara didn’t want to say anything in front of them. Barbara said she’d look for me in the café at lunchtime.”

  “Well, at least you didn’t try to follow her to the loo.”

  “Oh, believe me, it flashed through my mind, but I thought it best to give the poor woman some privacy, and anyway, it was time to meet up with you.”

  “Let’s just put all that aside for the moment and enjoy this beautiful building,” said Victoria. “Look at that!” She pointed to the half-timbered façade with its distinctive black-and-white geometric pattern. “It’s stunning.”

  “You’re right,” said a stout man in a windproof jacket, who introduced himself as an outdoor tour guide. “It is beautiful. That’s the typical wattle-and-daub construction of a Tudor house.”

  Other visitors joined the group, and the guide continued. “Speke Hall is one of the most important surviving timber-framed buildings in Britain. It was built in stages, and reached its present form in 1598. And it’s been sold only once in its five-hundred-year history, and that was back in 1795, to a wealthy merchant who had made a fortune in the West Indies.”

  The guide provided more interesting details on the building, from its Tudor origins through an extensive Victorian makeover and refurbishment. He reminded them that when the house was built, England was in the turbulent aftermath of Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church, and because the house had been built by the Catholic Norris family, it included a priest hole, where Catholic priests could be hidden from persecution.

  He led the group through a small door and into an open courtyard. Another door, flanked by two magnificent yew trees, lay ahead of them. “That door,” explained the guide, “is the original entrance to the house. And just to the right of it, if you look up”—and all eyes were dutifully raised—“you’ll see a hole. This is called an ‘eavesdrop.’ This is where servants could listen to the conversations of the people waiting outside before admitting them to the house. Particularly useful if the people asking for admission were soldiers. Give you a bit of time to hide the priest. So be sure to look for the priest hole on the first floor, in the Green Bedroom.”

  “What’s a priest hole?” asked a boy. Penny judged him to be about ten years old.

  “Well, this house was built by a great Catholic family,” explained the guide, “and in the sixteenth century, when King Henry the Eighth separated from the Catholic Church, Catholics weren’t allowed to practise their religion. Everybody was supposed to follow the new religion that we know now as the Church of England, with Henry as its head. But some people liked the old religion and wanted to stay with it. And then, during the reign of his daughter, Queen Elizabeth the First, it was a very dangerous time, so big old houses like this became safe havens for Catholic priests, and when the queen’s soldiers came riding up the drive, looking for the priest, the family would hide him in the priest hole, for as long as it took. So the priest hole is a secret hiding place. And as far as we know, this house has only one. Some properties have as many as fifteen!”

  “Wow!” exclaimed the boy. He seemed satisfied with the explanation, and the guide wrapped up his presentation.

  “A docent will be stationed in most of the main rooms of the house, and he or she will be happy to explain everything to you in as much detail as you like.” He gave a little farewell nod. “Well, this is where I leave you. I hope you’ll take your time and enjoy your tour of the property.”

  “What’s a docent?” the boy asked as the crowd moved forward, leaving the guide to explain.

  Penny and Victoria crossed the threshold and stepped back five hundred years in time, into the home of a once-great family. Pleasant domestic smells—old papers and textiles, candle smoke, polished wood, scrubbed floors—that had accumulated across centuries greeted them.

  They wandered off down the corridor, exploring from room to room. They admired the carved sixteenth-century panelling of the Great Hall, examined the ornate plaster ceiling of the Great Parlour, and lingered in the library, where Penny was thrilled to see the original green William Morris wallpaper from the Victorian renovation.

  After working their way through the treasures on the ground floor, they climbed the stairs, carpeted with a well-worn burgundy runner, to the first floor, where an elderly man wearing the blue jacket of a volunteer guide rose from a modern folding chair to greet them.

  “Please explore at your leisure,” he said, adding, “You’ll find all the main bedrooms open, but some painting’s been scheduled for a couple of the side rooms, and they’ve been blocked off. I suggest you start here,” he added, gesturing to the nearest open door, “at the Blue Bedroom, and you can work your way down to the end of the corridor and around the corner and you’ll finish up at the bathroom. You’ll find placards in all the rooms explaining the furnishings and the many interesting features. Take your time.”

  Unusual for its period, the bedroom floor featured a long, dark-panelled corridor with rooms branching off it, rather than the Tudor style of interconnecting rooms. Leaded windows set into the corridor wall opposite the bedroom doors let in diffused light through their diamond-shaped panes, casting weak patterns onto the carpet. Under the windows stood several heavy chests, which appeared to be made of the same dark wood as the panelling—so dark, it was almost black.

  The blue woollen damask hangings around the half-tester Victorian bed gave the first room Penny and Victoria entered its name. Two large eighteenth-century tapestries graced the walls, one hung above an ornately carved chest of drawers. The soft, muted light from the window provided just enough atmospheric late-morning illumination to see by.

  “That’ll be to protect the fabrics,” Penny said. “They don’t want sunlight on them, especially the tapestries, and besides, it gives you a better idea of what the room would have looked and felt like hundreds of years ago, when there was no electric light. It must have been very peaceful to wake up here.” She peered out the window at the garden below, and after one last glance around the room, they stepped back into the corridor.

  Except for the guide at the top of the stairs, the corridor was empty. “I wonder where everyone is,” said Victoria. “We saw a few people downstairs, but not as many as I would have thought.”

  “It’s a big house and it’s a beautiful day. I expect lots of people are enjoying the garden and the rest will be scattered about.”

  “Or they may have gone to the café,” said Victoria. “It’s almost lunchtime and I’m getting hungry. I had an early breakfast. How about we check out this floor, then find the café? We can see the rest of the house after lunch. As nice as the posh rooms are in places like this, I always find the kitchens and servants’ quarters more interesting.”

  They spent a few minutes admiring the furnishings in the next bedroom, the largest and grandest, and then moved on, pausing to check their floor plan in front of a small set of three cordoned-off stairs that led up to a short corridor. A couple of pale grey canvas drop cloths were piled loosely at the foot of an open stepladder in the middle of this hallway. Several WET PAINT signs sat on the ladder’s lowest rung, and a roller brush on a long handle resting in a paint tray and three unopened paint cans were lined up against the wall.

  “Looks like someb
ody’s getting ready to go to work,” mused Penny. “I wonder if that’s where Andrea is working. She mentioned she was going to be painting at Speke Hall, but I don’t know if she’s here today.”

  “If she is, we might bump into her,” said Victoria.

  They moved on until they reached the end of the main corridor, then turned to their right.

  “Oh!” said Victoria. The door to the Green Bedroom was closed, a faded red velvet rope affixed to two brass stanchions stretched in front of it. A printed sign taped to the door read WET PAINT. “It’s odd the guide didn’t mention this. He said all the main bedrooms were open. You’d think he’d know that one of the bedrooms is closed.”

  “And not just any bedroom, either,” said Penny, “but the one most people, including me, want to see, because that’s the bedroom with the priest hole that the outdoor guide mentioned. I’ve always wanted to see a priest hole.” She checked her map, peered into the next room, and the one after that. “Yes,” she said, gesturing at the closed door. “This is the Green Bedroom all right. Oh, this is so annoying.”

  She pressed the door lever, opened the door a few inches, glanced in, then closed it. “The room looks normal, although it’s pretty dark and I couldn’t see much, but there’s no smell of paint.”

  “Maybe they blocked off the room because they’re going to get it ready to paint,” Victoria said.

  “Maybe,” said Penny. At the sound of voices drifting down the corridor from the direction of the stairs, she told Victoria, “Wait here. I’m going to ask the guide about this.”

  She returned a few minutes later with the guide, who rubbed his hands together nervously. “I knew there was some cleaning, hoovering, window washing, and the like going on, and the painting in the hallway that’s cordoned off, but I wasn’t told about painting in any of the bedrooms,” he said. “Certainly not the Green Bedroom. And all this”—he indicated the red rope and WET PAINT sign—“wasn’t here earlier this morning when I started my shift. I’d better find out what’s happening.” He pulled a portable two-way radio out of his pocket, spoke into it, then shook his head. “No, they don’t know anything about any painting. Someone’s coming up to sort it.”