The Slay of the Land (The Heathervale Mysteries Book 1)

by Matilda Swift

  The tree was a common sight in the area—there was both a Yew Tree Cottage and a Yew Tree Farm on the outskirts of the village—but right then, the close association between the gnarled evergreen and death made Arrina shudder.

  She pressed her back to the warm brick wall of the house. The day was sunny and dry. She could run across the fields straight to Julie and Phil’s farm, even without her boots on, then sneak back after dark to retrieve her lost shoes. She would probably injure herself on a few thistles and rocks and perhaps step in a cow pat or two, but being caught by Fiona seemed a far worse prospect right then.

  Arrina was just about to run for it when the doorbell rang.

  She stood as still as the stones at her back, too nervous to risk another glance into the kitchen.

  Shortly, she heard a door opening and a voice drifting around the corner of the house. Arrina recognised it instantly.

  ‘I’m so very sorry for your loss,’ came the unmistakable tone of Gillian DeViers. For once, Arrina was pleased to hear her over-polished vowels and striking volume.

  Fiona’s reply was too quiet to make out, but Arrina was sure the woman was there.

  ‘Now, you must let me apologise for not coming sooner,’ Gillian said. ‘As you’ve no doubt heard, the events of this week have touched me closely as well.’

  Arrina imagined Fiona maintaining a polite and welcoming smile throughout this. Arrina would not have managed the same in her place. In fact, she found herself glad right then to be hiding against a brick wall rather than sitting inside the house, as she’d intended. Had she been inside right then, she would have been forced to be nice to Gillian and to hear her inevitable comment on what an interesting outfit Arrina was wearing.

  Arrina’s relief at being outside the house only lasted a moment though. She soon realised that Fiona’s politeness would surely extend to an offer of tea, which could bring her back into the kitchen at any minute. Arrina only had a fleeting chance to retrieve her shoes and make her escape.

  She raced around to the back of the house, stamped her feet inside the muddy hiking boots, and fled through the screen of trees, trailing untied laces behind her as she went. Only once she had clambered up and over the wall at the far end of the meadow did she stop.

  In a heap by the roadside, she pressed a hand to her racing heart and caught her breath. Then, she slowly laced up her boots, checked that she still had the CCTV video tucked safely into her bag, and walked on towards Julie’s farm.

  For what seemed like the hundredth time that week, Arrina was in desperate need of a hug and some help from her wonderful best friend.

  16

  When Arrina checked the time on her phone, she was amazed to see that only thirty minutes had passed since she’d sat on the wall, waiting for the tractor to pass. It felt like hours had gone by as she crept through and around Fiona’s house.

  But it was not far beyond midday. The road was busy with people driving between the chocolate box villages of the Peak District for family walks and picturesque lunches, keen to wring out the last bit of enjoyment from the long summer holidays. Arrina stayed close to the drystone wall at the edge of the road as she walked. She kept an eye out for Rory in the fields downhill, not sure if she would duck down or stop and talk if she saw him. Not sure of anything at all right then.

  As she walked, the sun still beat down warmly, birds still chirruped sweetly, and sheep still bleated in the fields.

  And Arrina still had no signal on her phone. She looked down at her screen as she got closer to Julie’s farm, knowing that she was sure to pick up a bar or two of connection soon. Somehow, in spite of all the dead spots in the village, the area around Julie and Phil’s farm had a strong and steady signal.

  Arrina would reach the farm in about twenty minutes, but that felt like a long time to wait. The sound of Julie’s voice couldn’t come soon enough, or anyone’s voice, in fact, to push aside the echoing shock of Fiona shouting about Hugo’s will.

  Arrina watched her phone for the flickering bars of signal that would allow her to draw her friend’s comforting voice into her ear. But each time she saw one, it was just a flash of sunlight on her screen.

  Finally, a single bar of signal pulsed into thready life. Messages popped up, but Arrina swiped them away and pulled up Julie’s number.

  Just as she was about to hit dial, a loud beeping broke through Arrina’s focus.

  She leapt in shock, her reflexes sharpened to extremity by adrenaline. She pressed herself tightly up against the drystone wall by the road, cursing the day-trippers who whizzed carelessly around the roads.

  Then the beeping came again—louder this time. Closer. Arrina looked up and saw a car bumper heading straight towards her. It was too late to get out of the way.

  She grabbed the wall and tried to haul herself over it. Her feet slipped. She couldn’t get a toehold. She threw herself flat against the stones and scrambled up. Her head dangled down over the far side, with her body threatening to tumble down after it.

  The car screeched behind her on the road. It stopped before it hit her. Arrina heard a car door open and slam shut before strong hands grabbed her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked the owner of the steady grip. Arrina recognised the voice instantly. It was Julie. Her strong baker’s hands soon had Arrina back on the right side of the wall and up on her feet again.

  ‘What am I doing?’ Arrina asked. ‘You almost ran me over!’ Arrina’s heart was racing fast enough to burst out of her chest again. When Julie pulled her in for a hug, she felt her friend’s heart pounding just as frantically.

  ‘I just tapped my horn to get your attention,’ Julie said as she pulled back from the hug. ‘And you almost leapt into Constance’s sheep dip.’

  The two women peered over the wall at the deep trough of dirty green water on the other side of it. The chemical smell made Arrina’s head swim. A dunking in that would have sent her straight to A & E.

  ‘My phone!’ Arrina said in a panic as she pictured it at the bottom of the murky bath.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Julie said, ‘I’m sure it’s here somewhere.’ She looked around for all of two seconds before turning to Arrina and pointing out, ‘It’s in your hand.’

  ‘Oh.’ Arrina looked down at it in surprise. Then she frantically grasped her bag to check that the video was still inside. It was.

  ‘Are you OK?’ Julie asked, her brow deeply furrowed with concern.

  Arrina managed a nod, which Julie’s dark, worried eyes did not seem to find convincing.

  ‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ Julie said. ‘And what were you even doing, walking here with your head buried in your phone? You always complain about the kids doing that on busy roads. You almost gave me a heart attack. Besides which—’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Arrina said, wrapping her friend up in a hug so tight she couldn’t talk. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  Julie responded with her own strong squeeze.

  Arrina felt tears spring to her eyes. Hugging Julie was exactly what she needed right then.

  ‘You know, I was heading over to see you,’ Julie said as the hug loosened. ‘I’ve not heard from you all morning, and I was starting to get worried.’

  A large white jeep slammed on its brakes with a beep as it reached the obstacle of Julie’s car in the middle of the road.

  ‘Sorry,’ Julie shouted with a wave as she bundled Arrina into her bright-yellow Mini. Then she drove off and continued talking as though there’d been no interruption. ‘I was imagining a grisly murder scene at your cottage. I thought I’d find you on the floor in the kitchen, done in by Professor Plum with the candlestick.’

  ‘I’ve been out all morning,’ Arrina said, not able to find the words to explain any more than that right then. Her stomach churned at Julie’s mention of murder. ‘I couldn’t get any signal. I was just walking over to see you.’

  ‘It’s a good thing I caught you, then. The whole farm stinks to high heaven with all the spilled milk. I sh
owered about twenty times this morning, but I swear I can still smell it in my hair.’

  Arrina could detect a faint hint of sourness in the car, but she shook her head and said, ‘I can’t smell anything.’

  ‘Liar,’ Julie said with a laugh. ‘The only faint ray of sunshine in all of this is that the smell of milk might finally persuade Tinsel to sit on my knee.’

  Julie’s car passed the back of Fiona’s tree-screened house then, and Arrina felt a shudder of worry about what she’d heard there. Then she focused back on Julie and realised why her friend was talking about Tinsel.

  ‘No,’ Arrina said. ‘We can’t go to my house. I don’t have a VCR.’

  ‘OK,’ Julie said slowly. ‘I’m going to guess this is some sort of Christmas-movie-based emergency.’

  ‘What?’ Arrina asked. ‘No. I need to watch the CCTV.’ She dug in her bag and pulled out the large black cassette tape. It had been banged around a bit on Arrina’s wall-leaping escapades, but it showed no sign of damage. ‘It’s the recording from the college of the night Hugo was killed. You still have a VCR at the farm, don’t you?’

  Julie slowed down as she reached the turning towards Arrina’s house. She stopped the car in the middle of the road. Then she swivelled around in her seat and looked carefully at Arrina and the tape she held.

  The white jeep behind them beeped once more. Julie ignored it.

  ‘The CCTV from the college,’ Julie repeated slowly.

  ‘Yes,’ Arrina said. ‘You remember I told you that the cameras were smashed the night before the murder? Well, there should be something on here that shows who did it.’

  Arrina did not mention her fear that the video would reveal Fiona was there that night. It seemed impossible to imagine the elegant older lady throwing rocks at a camera, let alone murdering her husband.

  Julie said nothing for a moment, not seeming to hear the repeated beeps from the car stuck behind them. ‘Did the police make a copy of it for you?’ she finally asked.

  Arrina looked at the video in her hand. ‘Not exactly.’

  Julie’s eyes widened, and Arrina suddenly realised what she was asking of her friend. The tape was evidence from a murder case. That sounded like something that could get them both arrested if they were caught with it.

  In fact, she wasn’t even sure if the tape was a copy at all. Perhaps Wilfred had taken the original and the police would be searching for it. She suddenly shared the worry in Julie’s eyes.

  The jeep behind them revved its engine loudly and blasted its horn for several seconds. Julie turned in her seat and faced forwards again. Then she slowly moved off, not in the direction of Arrina’s house and not back towards her own but straight on, towards the centre of the village.

  ‘I have a VCR at the café,’ Julie said quietly. ‘But before we watch anything, you and I need to sit down with a stiff drink and a slice of cake. I think I might need a bit more information before I become the Thelma to your Louise.’

  17

  Julie pulled her car down the tight alleyway beside the café. The high-walled ginnel was too narrow for any vehicle larger than her tin can Mini, which was exactly why she drove it. At the far end of the alleyway, there was a jackknife turn into a courtyard at the back. Arrina held her breath as Julie steered into it.

  Usually, Julie parked on the High Street, her bright-yellow car acting as a vibrant beacon to passers-by that Do-Re-Mi was open for business. She only hid her car at the back when she needed to work in the kitchen undisturbed.

  She wouldn’t be working that day though. The milk spill at the farm had left the café closed all morning, and now Julie was opening the building up for herself and Arrina alone.

  The two women walked in through the back door and grabbed chairs from the main café.

  Arrina glanced over at the desk in the window that she had worked at. It didn’t seem possible that she was there just yesterday. Everything had felt so very fixable then. She’d had a list of classes for the following week that needed moving out of the college, and she’d worked her way down it, ticking things off until each task was complete.

  Had she really thought it would be that easy to solve Hugo’s murder as well? Now it seemed that she’d gathered more questions than answers. And the only concrete piece of evidence she had was a stolen video tape that she was nervous about watching.

  The two women sat down beside one of the stainless-steel workbenches in the kitchen. They had a stool propped between them, onto which Julie set a bottle of spiced rum and two pink-tinted glasses. Then she put down delicate flowered plates with sticky slices of cake on each—one carrot and one chocolate. A minute ago, Arrina would have said she wasn’t hungry, but the smell of the cakes in front of her set her stomach rumbling.

  ‘I’m sorry for putting you in this position,’ Arrina said softly.

  Julie held up one hand while she poured out generous glugs of rum with the other. ‘Sustenance first,’ she said. ‘Once the shock of almost running you over is dampened by sugar and a strong drink, we can talk properly.’ She took a long swig from her glass before pointing at the cakes. ‘Pick one.’

  Arrina couldn’t choose, so she cut the thick slices in half and split them between the two plates. She filled her mouth with an enormous bite of the chocolate cake. It was rich, dark, and covered with a thick ganache that flooded all her senses at once. She felt the weight of her problems lighten a fraction.

  She looked around the room while she ate in greedy silence. Her eyes travelled over the wall of photographs above the worksurface nearby. They were pictures of the workers at Do-Re-Mi throughout the decades. A span of over forty years was hung on that wall—with each image showing staff members beaming over something delicious they’d made.

  It comforted Arrina to see this—the way that time passed, no matter what awful things might happen, and that people would always make cakes.

  She sipped her rum slowly while she looked at the people in the pictures. In many of the older photos, a changing roster of dewy-faced girls were squeezed in between Julie’s happy parents. Then once Julie herself got old enough to help, she replaced the young assistants and eventually even her aging parents as well.

  Arrina recognised many of the teenage helpers in the pictures as women who were now her own age or older. Once, they’d been girls with thick eyeliner and brightly dyed hair, and now they were women with crow’s feet and sensible bobs. There was only one face from the early years that Arrina couldn’t place.

  Julie followed Arrina’s gaze up to the photo in the top-left corner of the room.

  ‘That’s Aunty Lou,’ Julie said. Arrina had never heard Julie mention an Aunty Lou before. The young woman in the photo was much taller than either of Julie’s parents, and though they all shared the same dark hair and eyes, her face was longer and thinner than theirs. Aunty Lou looked elegant in a way that suggested she was more at home in a palace than a café in Heathervale.

  ‘She’s not my real aunt,’ Julie continued. ‘Her name’s Louise Cheng, though my parents said she often joked about changing her surname to Wen. She worked in their restaurant in Chinatown then moved with them to open this place. She was only a teenager, but she had a real knack for baking, apparently.’

  Julie leaned her head against the worksurface beside her. She looked as tired as Arrina felt.

  ‘I’m sorry about giving you a fright back on the road,’ Arrina said. ‘You must be exhausted after dealing with the milk-machine problem.’

  Julie nodded but didn’t seem to be listening.

  ‘I think I have a picture somewhere,’ Julie said. Then she got up from her seat and rummaged through the small, rarely used drawers beneath the sink. She lifted out tiny, rusted cookie cutters and lace-trimmed napkins from one. Then moved to another drawer, which contained nothing but knitting needles.

  Finally, she seemed to find the drawer she was looking for. It held yellowed newspaper clippings, promotional leaflets, and unframed photographs. Julie pulled out the who
le messy stack and dumped it on the counter beside her seat.

  ‘It’s in here somewhere,’ Julie said as she leafed through the pieces of paper. Then she pulled out a single photograph and presented it to Arrina. ‘I’d forgotten I had this. Talking of Aunty Lou reminded me.’

  The picture showed Louise Cheng sitting at a table in the front window of the café and looking just as regal and beautiful as she did in the photo on the wall. But that was not what caught Arrina’s eye. Sitting next to the glamorous woman was a young but unmistakable Hugo Hayes.

  He was clad in a fringed suede jacket and had a shaggy mane of hair, looking just as seventies as it was possible to be. He must have been seventeen or eighteen, the same age as Arrina’s students. He even had the same wide, world-conquering grin that young people had when they sat with someone they loved. Hugo had his arm around Louise in the picture, and the glow of their happiness radiated right off the page.

  ‘Is this really him?’ Arrina asked, though it could be nobody else.

  Julie nodded. ‘That picture’s from before I was born. My parents told me once that Hugo used to come in here all the time. Then Aunty Lou broke his heart, and he never stepped foot in the café again.’

  Arrina thought of her students’ responses to break-ups—all-black outfits, public shouting matches, and tears in the canteen were common enough sights. To never return to a place though—especially when it was one of a handful of eateries in a very small village—seemed extreme. Hugo’s heart must have been shattered by the break-up.

  ‘Do you think your aunt’s heard about...’ Arrina asked.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Julie came back to sit in her seat and took a sip of her rum. ‘Her family was far more traditional than mine. When they found out about her and Hugo, they threatened to send her to relatives in China. She said she would never speak to them again if they did.’ Julie smiled at this, as she did at all acts of great stubbornness. ‘In the end, she moved back in with her parents in Manchester and worked for them. We used to visit at Chinese New Year, and she always gave the best red packets—real money and chocolate coins. But the visits stopped when I was a teenager.’ She took another slow sip then refilled both glasses. ‘It must be more than twenty years since I last saw her.’