She watched snowball fights, tree-decorating contests, and people winning battles against the elements to get home to their families. None of it quite settled her racing mind, but she eventually curled up and fell asleep to the strains of Judy Garland singing Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
Arrina didn’t rouse once all night, but in the morning, she awoke on the sofa, feeling itchy eyed and agitated, as if she hadn’t slept a wink.
She had fixed the immediate issue of where to hold the college’s classes the following week. She’d got a well-organised to-do list that she could work through for the next few days. She’d done all that she could do. She’d even tried her best with an evening of wallowing with Christmas movies. And yet her stomach still churned. She felt the same looming sense of dread that she’d had yesterday upon waking.
She rolled over in her nest of cushions as she thought about it. Tinsel lifted his head to glare at her from his spot on the blanket. He was not an early riser, and he gave Arrina a squinting stare to remind her of this. Arrina ignored him. Her taut nerves told her that she had bigger things to worry about than a mildly irritated cat.
The college wasn’t going to be reopened—not next week nor anytime soon—that’s what the feeling in the pit of her stomach was telling her. She’d sorted out replacement classrooms for the first week of term, which had been hard enough to manage, and Arrina knew she couldn’t stretch her makeshift solution beyond that by even a single day.
In the woods, yesterday, Tony hadn’t seemed confident about the case. And when he’d received that phone call, it had not sounded anything like a breakthrough. Arrina thought about what he’d said:
Are they sure about that? Have they looked at everything?
She didn’t know what those questions could mean. But Tony had sounded worried, which suggested he wasn’t close to a solution. Which meant the college was staying shut indefinitely.
Arrina couldn’t let that happen.
But what could she do about it? She couldn’t exactly solve the case herself. The closest she’d come to being a detective was going out with one, and even that hadn’t ended well. How could she solve a crime that the police themselves were struggling with?
Tinsel gave a sharp meow.
‘What do you think?’ Arrina asked the cat as she sat up on the sofa. ‘Do you have any theories about what happened to Hugo?’
Tinsel stretched out one long, elegant leg and licked it. The bobbing of his head looked like a nod.
‘Anything you’d care to share with me?’ Arrina asked. Tinsel shut his pale-blue eyes and laid his head back down among the blankets.
He wasn’t as good in this situation as Julie would be. Not by a long way. Arrina grabbed her phone from the coffee table in order to call her best friend. It was seven am, and Julie would already be down at Do-Re-Mi preparing the biscuits and cakes for the day ahead. She would know just what to suggest Arrina do to get the college open again.
Julie answered quickly. ‘Hi!’ she shouted. The word was hard to hear over the loud mooing of cows. ‘Thanks for all your help yesterday.’
In the background, someone was yelling about udders and valves. It sounded like Julie’s husband, Phil.
‘Are you OK?’ Arrina asked. Julie should have been up to her elbows in dough by this time of the morning. So why did it sound like she was in the cow shed of her husband’s family farm?
‘Just a mishap with the milking machine,’ Julie shouted. A particularly irate-sounding cow bellowed nearby. ‘I’m sure we’ll sort it soon, then I’ll head down to the café. You should be able to get back to your desk in the window by midmorning.’
‘Don’t worry about me,’ Arrina said. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ Arrina wasn’t at all sure what that might be. Perhaps jumping into blue overalls and holding tools would be useful enough.
‘No,’ Julie said. ‘We’ve got a tidal wave of spilled milk here. Anyone who comes close will be smelling of it for weeks. You’re best keeping clear.’
‘That sounds awful,’ Arrina said. She remembered what Julie had said two days earlier about the price of milk already threatening the future of the herd. Spilled milk and broken machinery were the last things Julie and Phil needed.
‘Oh, before I forget,’ Julie said, ‘a young woman came into the café yesterday looking for you. Tiny thing who showed up just as I was closing. I must admit, I felt mighty offended that you have other Chinese friends. Mighty offended indeed. And I’m also starting to question our friendship. Am I just part of your Chinese woman collection, or perhaps—’
‘Was her name Maggie Lee?’ Arrina asked loudly before Julie’s joking rant got away from her.
‘Maggie Lee, that was it. Her name even sounds like mine. Julie Wen. Maggie Lee.’
‘They sound nothing alike,’ Arrina said.
‘That’s exactly what you would say. Just be honest here. Are you replacing me with a younger model?’
Arrina laughed. ‘Maggie’s our new chemistry teacher. But she’s been living in the village all summer, so surely—’
‘All summer! I can’t not have noticed the only Chinese person here outside my family. Have you been hiding her from me? Sneaking around behind my back?’
‘Did she leave me a message?’
‘No. She just asked if you were still there. When I said no, she dashed straight off. She’s a little rude, if you ask me. Certainly not an upgrade in the best friend department. Though if you want to make a terrible mistake, you just go right ahead.’
Phil started yelling in the background again, saying something about sprockets and flow rates that Julie responded to with, ‘I’ll be right there.’
‘Let me know if there’s anything I can do,’ Arrina said. ‘I’ll hold off any decisions on the best friend front till you’ve got the milk situation sorted.’
‘That’s awfully generous of you,’ Julie said. ‘Did you want anything, by the way?’
A bellow from Julie’s end made Arrina pull the phone from her ear. It had sounded like a cow, but it might also have been Phil, who was always rather vocal when fixing machinery.
‘Nothing that can’t wait,’ Arrina said.
Then the call ended, and Arrina was back in the surprising quiet of her living room.
She wished she could do more for Julie and Phil, but right then, she had several more pressing issues.
Call Maggie Lee was already on Arrina’s to-do list. She’d been putting off doing it because she didn’t want to hear that the young teacher was leaving in response to the recent terrible event in the college. It seemed that Maggie was eager to find her, but she would just have to wait.
Arrina looked back over at Tinsel, who had one blue eye opened to a slit and was watching her carefully.
‘Staring at me like that isn’t as helpful as you think,’ she said to the cat. Then she slid off the sofa and headed for the one place he wouldn’t follow—the shower.
The house’s old metal pipes juddered and clanked as Arrina turned the taps. She waited a long time for the hot water to kick in and finally gave up.
A blast of cold would do her good anyway on this warm August morning. She needed her mind to be more awake than it had ever been.
Arrina had made a decision about what to do next. She was going to get the college open in the next few days. And to do that, she needed to solve Hugo’s murder.
It wouldn’t be easy. She would need to work single-handed and figure out a case that had stumped the police. She was starting from nowhere and didn’t have a single clue so far.
The cold droplets hit her head, and Arrina racked her brain for a place to begin.
12
As Arrina stood under the flow of chilly water, she realised that she actually did know a few things about the case already.
The medical examiner had put Hugo’s death between three and seven am.
Yet Julie had seen him speeding away from the college at seven that very morning. So how could he have died before
then?
And Hugo was just about to start work at the college, so Arrina thought it couldn’t be a coincidence that he’d been killed there.
The college was the one factor in the case that she knew more about than the police—she knew it better than anybody, in fact. If she was going to be useful to the investigation, it would be by figuring out something that the police had missed at the college.
But Tony had made it clear that Arrina wasn’t allowed to return there. He’d even taken away her keys.
As Arrina worked shampoo through her overgrown pixie cut, she thought about the spare set of keys she kept in her bedside table. She could let herself in and sneak around without being noticed.
But if she got caught breaking into an active crime scene, she would almost certainly be arrested. That would make her suspension seem like a happy memory.
It was probably best to keep her spare keys as a last resort.
Anyway, she didn’t really need to go there. She knew the building like the back of her hand, so if anything had been out of place on Tuesday, she would have noticed. All she had to do was focus.
Arrina rinsed the soap suds from her hair as she retraced her steps from that day. She ran through all the details of that morning in as much detail as possible, even recalling the condescending pompousness of her conversation with Gillian DeViers. She went over it all until there was only one final thing that she hadn’t thought about.
Arrina slowly worked cinnamon-orange conditioner through her hair while she forced herself to think back to the scene of the crime. It was an unpleasant memory, but she was sure that there must have been something important about what she’d seen—something which could help her work out where to start. She kept her eyes squeezed shut while she tried to picture the scene.
But her mind refused to settle on the grisly image. It was too painful. Flashes of blood and the glint of a knife blade passed across the darkness behind her eyelids but no other details. All that came to her when she thought of it was the stomach-clenching horror of the discovery.
She rinsed her hair once more, running her fingers slowly through her wet, silky locks and trying to rid her body of its mix of shock and sorrow. She could not think about the scene of Hugo’s death any longer.
Arrina could think of only one other civilian who’d seen what had happened that morning—Gillian DeViers—and Arrina was certainly not going to ask her for help. She would have to look elsewhere for clues.
Arrina was shivering by this point. She turned off the cold water and wrapped herself up in a towel. Then she wandered into the kitchen for a cup of tea. A good brew always helped her think. Arrina reached up to the second shelf of her tea cupboard for a light, energising Ceylon Orange Pekoe.
She nibbled on one of Julie’s Christmas biscuits while she mulled things over.
There was one other person who’d been in the college on Tuesday, Arrina realised. And she hadn’t heard from him since. It was the college security guard, Sampson Morgan.
Arrina had been hesitant to hire Sampson when the Board of Governors had first suggested it. Arrina had only recently moved to the village then, but she’d already heard tales of the Morgans, who were a sprawling clan living out in the woodland at the edge of the village. They’d inhabited it for hundreds of years, although they had no deed to the acreage. In fact, the land really belonged to the Yates family, but everyone in the village understood that it was Morgan land in every way that counted.
Grandma Morgan was a mythical figure in Heathervale—her name was used to scare local children when they misbehaved. Eat your vegetables, or Grandma Morgan will come and get you! Other Morgans sprang up regularly in tales of misadventure and crooked deals. Constance Morgan was said to be an expert at poaching pheasants from local forests using brandied-raisin bait. Barnaby Morgan had his own corner in the Horse and Hound from which he sold all manner of things that had fallen off lorries, including sacks of potatoes and fluffy Santa slippers.
When the Board of Governors recommended Sampson Morgan as head of the security team at the college, Arrina thought they were kidding. But they assured her that he was the very best person for the job—he knew everyone and everything that happened around Heathervale. Nothing would escape his notice, and nobody was brave enough to cross him.
Arrina had warmed to the Morgans by the time Sampson arrived for his first day of work, but when he didn’t say a word of greeting, she felt sure she’d made a mistake. In fact, Sampson hadn’t spoken to her at all for the first week. But then he showed up at her office door with a confiscated bag of firecrackers that Arrina hadn’t heard a hint of gossip about, and she realised the benefit of having him around.
Even though Arrina often went days without hearing from Sampson, he always came straight to her with any issues, and he noticed minute details of the comings and goings around the college that anyone else would miss.
There were other guards on site during term time, but it was Sampson who Arrina sought out for the big things. And he was the one who stayed on over the school holidays to keep a watchful eye on the place. He even let his gruff exterior down a little during the holidays, and he and Arrina sometimes sat together over glasses of his strong homemade cider at the end of the day.
If anyone knew what had happened in the college that week, it would be Sampson. Arrina drained the last of her tea and finished her biscuit. Sampson didn’t have a landline, let alone a mobile phone, so if she wanted to speak to him, she would have to go over to his cottage.
She got dressed in a pair of scruffy jeans and an old checked shirt—it was a long and difficult walk to the Morgan woods, and Arrina had learned on previous visits that it was better to be dressed for the journey than to care about the impression she might make on arrival.
The fields through which Arrina walked were towering with spears of green wheat. In a matter of days or weeks, the crops would be cut down. In their place, stubbled black soil would reveal the lively passage of foxes, badgers, hares, and mice. Then later, plump quilts of snow would lay themselves down for a long winter sleep, creating a world of silence and calm that would last until the thaws of spring.
Arrina breathed deeply as she walked along the footpath, picking an occasional blackberry from the bushes she passed and savouring their late-summer sweetness. It was almost unimaginable that Hugo would never again eat sun-warmed fruit from a local field. It would be a long time before even his family would be up for such a casual enjoyment of the countryside around them.
Hugo had a wife and a brother but no other family members in the village. Arrina had assumed that he was related to the Hayes sisters in Bakewell, who ran a shop selling the jam-and-almond tarts to which the village gave its name. Arrina had asked Hugo about it a few weeks earlier, and he’d said they were very distant cousins, though they were the closest thing he had to family beyond Fiona and Rory.
He’d sounded sad at that, and Arrina wondered if he’d ever wanted children. She didn’t ask though. She knew herself—as a woman in her late thirties—how intrusive it could feel to be questioned about a lack of offspring.
When Arrina reached the edge of Morgan land, she set aside her thoughts of Hugo for the moment. She was walking along a path that had a wide, well-tended field on one side and the dense Morgan woods on the other. The woodland here was not enormous, but it was confusing, and Arrina knew that the turning that led to Sampson’s house was easy to miss. She slowed down and watched the ground for a sign of the track she needed to take.
The trees were old and cast a dark shadow through which her sun-soaked eyes struggled to see. Twice, she thought she’d found the right path, but it petered out quickly, and Arrina had to return once again to the main footpath, which ran between the woods and the brightly lit field.
On her third try, she recognised a clearing off to her left. It had a fallen tree across it, which was soft and green with moss. From there, all she had to do was follow the path for a few minutes, and she would reach Sampson’s house. S
he set off slowly, waiting for her eyes to adjust to the gloom of the forest.
‘How do?’ came a deep voice from behind her. Arrina leapt off the path in fright.
13
Arrina whipped around to see who was behind her. She crouched, knees bent, ready to run and fight and scream.
When she saw who was there, she breathed a sigh of relief.
It was Wallace Morgan, Sampson’s favourite nephew. She knew for sure that Wallace was not a murderer—every story Sampson told of the strapping young farm hand was of his affection for animals and his devotion to his sprawling family.
‘Is there a sign on my back?’ Arrina asked.
Wallace cocked his head to one side in confusion.
‘Every time I walk into the woods,’ she continued, ‘it seems like someone leaps out at me. Maybe there’s been an announcement on the radio about it, or there was a notice put up in the Horse and Hound?’
‘Come again?’ Wallace asked, his face still showing no sign of comprehension. ‘I ent seen no notice, no.’ The man was sweet—he raised orphaned rabbits and had once carried his injured sister three miles to the hospital—but he wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. He definitely wasn’t up to decoding an adrenaline-fueled rant about people jumping out at Arrina in the woods, so she stepped out of the undergrowth and smiled at him politely.
She and Wallace walked together along the path, and Arrina forced her panting breaths to slow down. There was nothing to be scared of here on Morgan land. Well, perhaps Grandma Morgan, but Arrina didn’t think the woman was anything more than legend.
Arrina’s eyes adjusted as she and Wallace walked through the woods. It wasn’t as dark beneath the dense canopy of trees as it had seemed at first. Rays of sunlight made their way to the ground in places, and where they did, bushes of pink dog rose bloomed and sweet-smelling honeysuckle tangled tightly around its thorny branches.
The Slay of the Land (The Heathervale Mysteries Book 1) Page 8