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

by Matilda Swift

  ‘My mum never wanted to talk about the past,’ Maggie continued. ‘When she was dying last year though, she finally opened up and told me about Hugo. I came here to meet him, and it was great but... complicated. We decided to keep it in the family until...’ She hunched her shoulders in a nervy shrug. ‘Well, until we figured things out.’

  ‘That must have been a hard secret to hold onto for all those years,’ Arrina said. She’d been talking about Maggie’s mother, but now she wondered how Hugo had kept the secret as well. In a village like Heathervale, even a relative newcomer like Arrina would have heard the gossip about a love child if it had been public knowledge.

  ‘My mum was a very private person,’ Maggie said. ‘She was quite traditional like that. But once she started talking about her past, she couldn’t stop. In her last few months, she told me all about her life here in Heathervale, and she made the place sound so magical that—’

  ‘Your mother lived here?’ Arrina asked. That made no sense. Julie Wen came from the only Chinese family in the village, in fact, the only Chinese family for miles around. But Maggie’s mother couldn’t be Mrs Wen. Though Julie’s mother was struggling with her health, she was still very much alive. Besides which, the woman couldn’t even keep a scone recipe secret, let alone a second family.

  ‘She used to,’ Maggie said. ‘A long time ago.’

  Then Arrina realised who Maggie’s mother was. ‘Your mum is Aunty Lou.’

  ‘Aunty Lou?’ Maggie wriggled in her seat with excitement. ‘Did you know her?’ She curled her legs under herself and got comfortable, as though expecting a story.

  ‘No,’ Arrina said, and the young woman’s face fell. ‘I’m sorry. I’ve only been here five years, and I know she left a long time before that. But I have a friend who knew her.’

  ‘I’d love to talk to your friend,’ Maggie said. ‘Really love to. I want to know more about my mum’s life back then.’

  ‘You’ve already met her. She’s Julie Wen—she’s the person you spoke to in Do-Re-Mi on Wednesday.’

  ‘That’s Julie? I’ve seen a picture of her from when she was a kid. She was in my grandparents’ house, covered in flour from helping with the baking. My mum laughed whenever she talked about Julie.’ Maggie smiled to herself. ‘It was nice to see Mum happy in those last few months.’

  ‘Julie’s lovely,’ Arrina said. ‘You’ll really like her.’

  ‘Ever since coming to live here, I’ve wanted to go and see her in Do-Re-Mi, and her parents as well. My mum talked a lot about the café and how much she loved the place and the family who ran it. Every time I got close to going in though, I felt too emotional. I didn’t want to meet them like that.’ That explained Maggie’s hesitation outside the café on Wednesday, and why she’d disappeared when Arrina had waved her inside.

  ‘The cupcake!’ Arrina said. ‘The cupcake is your mother.’

  Maggie looked at Arrina like she’d gone crazy. Then she smiled—her grin was wide, charming, and unmistakably Hugo’s. ‘On the charm bracelet! Yes, the cupcake represents my mum.’

  ‘And the mysterious oblong is... you?’

  Maggie fingered the third charm. ‘It’s meant to be a test tube. You know—because I’m a chemistry teacher.’ She smiled fondly at the bracelet. ‘When I first met Hugo, I wasn’t sure what to make of him. He seemed like a giant, and he was so loud and brash compared to the family I grew up with. But then he gave me this, and I realised how thoughtful he was.’

  ‘I didn’t know him for long,’ Arrina said, ‘but he really was a wonderful man. Did you know he was going to start teaching at the college next term?’

  Maggie nodded. ‘He was so excited to become a teacher. He kept asking me for tips about how to explain things to kids. He bought tons of teaching books. He would have been great at it.’

  ‘He had a real way with people,’ Arrina said. She thought of Hugo checking that Olly was OK after the tractor accident.

  Then she flashed on an image of Hugo and Olly in the car park on the morning of the murder—they’d looked calm and happy to see each other, but both of them were there for no reason that Arrina could fathom.

  ‘I’m really very sorry for your loss,’ Arrina said. ‘I should have said that before. Hugo was a great person. I’m sure he was an excellent father, even in the brief time you had together.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m glad I had the chance to get to know him. I only wish we’d had a bit more time.’

  Arrina shifted in her seat. Maggie was so very young, and she had suffered so much sadness in her life already. Arrina didn’t want to cause her more pain. But she needed to get to the bottom of what had happened to Hugo. That was the only way she was going to help Olly.

  ‘Was it difficult?’ Arrina asked. ‘Getting to know him, I mean. It must have been a strain on his relationship with Fiona to have the past stirred up like that.’

  Arrina did a quick mental calculation. Maggie was twenty-four years old. The wedding photo she’d seen of Hugo and Fiona looked to be from ten or fifteen years ago—twenty years ago at most. There was no evidence of an affair, then. But Julie had said that Aunty Lou left the village over forty years ago. So how did Hugo and Aunty Lou have a twenty-four-year-old child together?

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ Maggie said softly. ‘After missing out on seeing me grow up, Hugo really wanted to make up for losing all those years. We spent a lot of time together just the two of us. And Fiona was trying her best to be understanding. I could tell she found it difficult to see him with me though, after she’d wanted children herself and met Hugo too late to have any. When he told her that he was leaving his company and switching to work at the college with me, that really... well, she found it hard to deal with.’

  Arrina felt a twinge of guilt at the college’s involvement in this, but she pushed it aside. That wasn’t important right then. Finding the evidence to help Olly was what mattered. And she was certain now that she was on the right track. Fiona had plenty of motive to murder Hugo—a secret love child, a growing distance in her marriage, and the abandonment of the company that had kept her in such a comfortable existence.

  ‘She got quite angry when he told her about becoming a teacher,’ Maggie said in a small voice. ‘They had a huge fight, and she told him to go and stay at the farm with Rory.’ Arrina felt bad for the flicker of excitement she felt at this. But it seemed like she finally had enough evidence to take to the police.

  ‘Was that when you lost your bracelet?’ Arrina asked. She pictured shouting, shoving, and violent threats. The police would be certain to arrest Fiona if Arrina told them that.

  Maggie looked down at the silver chain.

  ‘No.’ She shook her wrist and made the charms tinkle lightly. ‘On Monday, Fiona called me at my house. She said she’d been thinking about our situation and realised that life was too short not to appreciate the blessings in it, even if they didn’t always come in the form you expected.’

  Fiona’s sudden change of heart seemed suspicious. And Monday was the day before Hugo’s murder. That couldn’t be a coincidence.

  ‘She asked me to come around to her house,’ Maggie continued. ‘And we had afternoon tea together and talked through everything. She said she’d been feeling a lot of resentment because of how much she’d always wanted children herself. And then...’ Maggie sniffed, and a tear fell onto her cheek. ‘Then she said she hoped one day I’d think of her as a second mother, even though she knew she couldn’t replace the real thing.’

  The young woman’s fondness for Fiona seemed real. Arrina’s heart tensed at the hope in Maggie’s voice. Something didn’t feel right. Could Fiona have set Maggie up for Hugo’s murder? That would explain why Hugo had been killed at the college where Maggie was employed. And Fiona’s cosy afternoon tea would have been a perfect opportunity to get Maggie’s fingerprints on a knife or ‘accidentally’ pull a hair to plant at the scene.

  ‘So, how did you lose your bracelet?’ Arrina asked slowly, wishing she didn’t ha
ve to continue and risk shattering the grieving woman’s ideas about Fiona. Maggie would be losing her third parent figure in under a year if Arrina’s suspicions proved to be correct.

  ‘After we finished the sandwiches and scones, she insisted on doing the washing up while I had a look around. She wanted me to make myself at home. And it was such a beautiful day that I wandered into the garden. I saw a berry tree near the kitchen and picked one to have a taste. Before I knew what was happening, Fiona had pushed me to the ground.’

  Arrina’s heart skipped a beat. This was it! Fiona’s attack on Maggie was the evidence she needed.

  Then she realised what had happened. ‘It was a yew berry,’ Arrina said, remembering the glass-walled kitchen and the huge tree just outside it. ‘The seeds in them are deadly poisonous.’

  ‘I know that now,’ Maggie said. ‘Like I told you, I’m not so great with nature. It was a stupid mistake though—we did a whole term on naturally occurring toxins when I was at university. I’d just got so carried away with the cheeriness of the afternoon that I hadn’t even stopped to think what sort of berry it might be. Fiona made sure I spat it out, and she kept an eye on me all afternoon to be sure I wasn’t ill.’

  ‘And your bracelet fell off when she pushed you,’ Arrina said.

  Maggie nodded. ‘I didn’t notice at the time. And then the next day, I heard about... what happened to Hugo, and I couldn’t think about anything. I tried to go to Do-Re-Mi because I know him and my mum were happy there, but I couldn’t go in. I saw you in there, and I wanted to talk because you’ve always been so nice. But I... I couldn’t go in.’ She wiped a tear from her eye. ‘I only realised my bracelet was missing today, and I wanted to get it back before the funeral.’

  ‘So, everything was fine between you and Fiona?’ Arrina asked. She felt her chest tighten, even though this should have been a good thing. It didn’t help Olly.

  ‘The best,’ Maggie said. She fished in her handbag and pulled out her purse. From the corner of it, she took a tiny silver charm. ‘She even had this delivered to me so I could add it to my bracelet. It just arrived this morning. That’s what made me notice the bracelet was missing.’

  Maggie held the charm out for Arrina to see. It was a small silver paintbrush. Arrina thought of the beautiful landscapes that she’d seen in Fiona’s hallway.

  Arrina nodded slowly. She was glad to hear that Maggie wasn’t totally alone in the village and that the poor woman had Fiona to lean on as family. But it looked like Fiona’s motives were now far less clear.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know of any money problems between Hugo and Fiona?’ Arrina asked, feeling awful for probing the grieving young woman for information but needing to check out every possible avenue.

  ‘No,’ Maggie said. ‘I sent Hugo a photo of me and Fiona that afternoon, and he replied that he wanted to take us all on a family trip to the Caribbean at Christmas. I don’t think they had any worries about money at all.’

  Arrina forced herself to feel happy for Maggie, even though her hopes for Olly were dwindling. She did have one more clue to follow though.

  ‘Fiona didn’t perhaps mention Hugo’s will to you, did she?’ Arrina asked, her voice high-pitched and desperate. This was her last chance at finding the evidence that would help her student.

  ‘How did you know?’ Maggie asked. ‘We talked about it on Monday.’

  ‘Really?’ Arrina asked. She tried her best to sound casual, but she was sure her racing heart could be heard from several feet away.

  ‘Fiona said she’d asked Hugo to include me in his will. He was going to his lawyer’s office that afternoon to sort out the final details of handing his company over, and he was going to change his will at the same time.’

  ‘She wanted to include you?’ Arrina asked. Her mind whirred, trying to come up with some way that this proved Fiona’s guilt.

  ‘She wanted him to leave the whole farm to me,’ she said, sounding just as surprised as Arrina felt. ‘It was due to go to her, but she said that she had her house and the land around it, and that was all she needed. She thought that since I was the only child of the next generation, it was right for the farm to go to me.’

  Maggie smiled shyly. She’d probably given the same smile when she received the charm bracelet from Hugo. It was clear she didn’t understand the significance of receiving prime farming land in the heart of the Peak District.

  Arrina tried to remember the exact words that Fiona had used when shouting about the will on the phone the day before. Are you really saying there’s nothing? At the time, she’d thought that it meant Hugo was broke. But now she couldn’t understand.

  ‘So, the farm goes to you now?’ Arrina asked.

  Maggie shrugged. ‘I don’t know really. I...’ Her voice trailed off. She chewed her lower lip. Arrina could not imagine this young woman in charge of hundreds of acres of farmland. ‘I suppose so.’

  She thought of Julie and how hard she and Phil struggled to keep their place going. It was awful to think how the small farms in the area struggled so terribly. And here Maggie was, being offered a golden ticket in the form of numerous flat, fertile fields, and she didn’t even realise what it meant.

  When Arrina looked up from her thoughts, she saw that Maggie was crying silently.

  ‘I wish I could have Hugo instead of the farm,’ she sniffled. ‘I wish I could have him back.’

  Arrina reached over and gave the crying young woman a long hug. Then she pulled out the brownie tin and bottle of sloe gin from her bag and passed them over before driving Maggie home.

  When she was alone in her car once again, Arrina turned the issue of the will over in her mind. She couldn’t find any way in which the change to its terms could be a motive for Fiona to commit murder. She had suggested the alteration. She wanted Maggie to be a part of the family.

  And if that was the case, then there was no reason for Fiona to kill her husband. Even less reason to do it in the bathroom of the college.

  Arrina drove up the hill to her house in first gear. The deep rumble of her engine usually shook loose any tension she was carrying. But not that day.

  She had failed Olly. She’d got nothing she could take to the police to get the young boy free. And no leads regarding anywhere else to look.

  From her parked car, she called Olly’s parents. Their voices were distant with the shock of everything. They told her that no, Olly had not been released. They stuttered through an explanation of what had happened so far—Olly had been processed, charged, and held for further questioning. They drew out long silences in the place of ideas about what they might do next.

  When the call finally ended, Arrina found her cheeks wet with tears.

  She had failed Olly. She had failed him entirely.

  Her phone was hot and heavy in her hand. When she noticed the voicemail light blinking, she almost ignored it. But then she saw Julie’s name on her screen. If anyone could make her feel better right then, it would be Julie.

  As Arrina listened to what her best friend said, she realised that even that hope had been entirely wrong.

  28

  ‘I wish I didn’t have to leave a message about this,’ Julie said, her voice even more rushed and garbled than usual. ‘I’ve tried calling a couple of times, but you’re busy, and things are going crazy here, so if I don’t tell you now, then you’ll hear it from someone else, which would be worse. I think. Maybe. I’m not sure.

  ‘I really wish you had answered your phone. In fact, I really wish I could drive over and see you, but some guy from the Environment Agency has just showed up at the farm, and I don’t even know why he’s here, but it can’t be anything good. I’m dashing over to the milking parlour in a minute to see what the guy is poking around at in there. Phil looked so worried when the agency man said he was here about the cows.’

  Arrina heard the noise of a door opening at Julie’s end. Then a breeze crackled in her ear.

  ‘But anyway,’ Julie said, ‘I got a message fro
m my dad that he’d spoken to Ken, who was in that Parish Council meeting today, and apparently, Ken’s not supposed to say anything, but you know how persuasive my dad can be. He plied Ken with some baijiu and got him to spill the beans on the access road vote.’

  Julie finally paused to take a breath. Arrina could already guess from her tone of voice what the news would be, but she held her own breath while she waited.

  ‘I’m sorry to have to tell you, but they turned you down. They’ll be posting the results of the planning applications in the village hall like always. Ken said they should be in there by the end of the day. But with the way this village works, most people probably know about it already.

  ‘I’m really, really sorry to be the bearer of bad news. But I wanted you to hear it from me rather than some gossipy know-it-all.’

  Arrina heard voices in the background of Julie’s call. Two men were speaking sternly about milk and contamination.

  ‘There’s one other thing Ken said,’ Julie continued, her voice soft and swift. ‘And I’m not even sure I should tell you, because it sounds like the sort of crazy nonsense that drinking too much of my dad’s baijiu can bring on. But just in case there’s a grain of truth in it...’ She paused, and Arrina felt her heart rise up into her throat. ‘He said that Gillian DeViers has been made head of the college.’

  The stern words in the background turned to shouting at Julie’s end of the call.

  ‘I’m really sorry to have to drop that bombshell on you, and I hope it’s not true. But I’ve got to go now, or I think... Yes. Right. I’ve really got to go.’

  Then the message ended abruptly, and Arrina was left to sit in her car, halfway up a hill, with no idea whether she should carry on up it to her house or down to double check the result of the access road application. Or perhaps she should drive out of the village and never look back.