The Case of the Missing Letter

by Alison Golden

  “’Morning, Janice. To what do I owe this pleasure?” Constable Jim Roach asked, looking up at her from behind the desk, slipping his phone onto his lap and from there into the desk drawer. It had been a slow morning, and he’d taken advantage of the peace and quiet to catch up on yesterday’s soccer results.

  “Just thought I’d pop in, Jim. See how things are going. Anything interesting?”

  “Nah, nothing really. I’m just catching up on paperwork. Bazza’s out and about. He’ll be back soon.” Jim sipped greedily at the coffee Janice offered him.

  “How was your Saturday night? How’s things going with that nurse you were telling me about?” Janice grinned.

  Roach opened a file on top of a pile in front of him and shrugged. “She’s alright.”

  “She’s more than ‘alright’ from what you told me,” Janice pressed. “I didn’t even know you liked blonds.”

  Roach looked up and smirked at her. “There’s quite enough romance going on around here at the moment, wouldn’t you say? How’s things going with Jack?”

  Jack Wentworth was a computer engineer. He provided digital forensic support to the constabulary when they needed it. He was also Janice’s boyfriend.

  Try as she might, Janice couldn’t keep the flush from her cheeks. After a period of being single so long that it threatened to become permanent, Janice was beyond delighted to be regularly going out to restaurants, movies, and, most recently, the farmer’s market with the handsome and thoughtful Jack Wentworth. The young man was proving to be cultured, well-read, and a gifted cook.

  “Fine, just fine,” she said. “He’s a nice guy.”

  Roach chuckled and hummed the first measures of Here Comes the Bride.

  “Wind your neck in, Sherlock,” she said, regretting she’d ever brought up the subject of romantic entanglements. “I’m going to check in with Viv Foster while I’m here.”

  “Ah yes. Gorey’s Mother of the Year,” Roach muttered.

  “I hope Billy’s alright. He’s hanging around the library more these days. Viv left a message yesterday, but I didn’t have time to call her back.”

  “Welp,” Roach said, continuing to leaf through a report, “Let’s hope she’s doing better.”

  “Yes, let’s,” Janice said, heading to her office. It was seldom that she received good news from the Fosters, whose paths had crossed hers several times over the six years she had been on Jersey. Ever since she’d found a three-year-old Billy snuggled up to his unresponsive mother, Janice had kept a concerned and proprietary eye on him. The image of the tiny boy patting his mother’s face as he tried to wake her had never left her mind. Recently, Billy had complained of being bullied at school, but he was doing a little better according to his teachers. He was unbelievably smart but not very socially adept, and it was easy to imagine him falling afoul of those with more muscle than brains.

  She dialed Viv Foster’s number. “Hello?” It was Billy’s voice on the end of the line.

  “Oh, hello Billy. It’s Sergeant Harding from the station. How are you doing?”

  A big sigh came down the line. “Mum’s not very well.”

  Janice knew that meant Viv was either drunk or high. At eleven-thirty on a Sunday morning, it could be either. “Okay, Billy. Is she asleep right now?”

  “I can’t tell. But she’s breathing. She hasn’t said anything for an hour or two.”

  High, then. “Alright, son. You want to come here for a while?” Along with the library, the police station was a sanctuary for Billy. Although he felt a little uncomfortable “running to the police” when his mother relinquished her duties, it was a safe place. Even at the library, he’d occasionally run into groups of older kids, and they just loved to tease him about his glasses, his mother, his penchant for reading and memorizing facts, and his ungainly, uncoordinated movements. One tried nicknaming him “Puppet Boy” but it hadn’t yet stuck.

  “Er, no thanks. I’ll stay with her for a bit longer.”

  “Okay, Billy. I’ll call in an hour and see how you’re doing, alright?”

  “Yeah, okay,” he replied. Then he whispered, “Should I take it away from her again?”

  “No, lad. I think that’ll cause more harm than good, don’t you?”

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” Billy agreed. “I don’t want her chasing me around again. And I’ve run out of places to hide the stuff.”

  Janice gave him some more words of encouragement. She bit down the urge to say much more, and hung up. There had been perhaps four of these calls over the past eighteen months, and each one left her feeling angry and despairing. As a police officer, Janice’s instinct was to arrest Viv for possession of a banned substance and arrange for Billy to be taken into care, but she believed in keeping families together wherever possible. Billy’s mother was an addict and utterly unreliable. Her own child parented her and yet he loved her. So while Billy’s was a far from ideal situation, Janice couldn’t see that moving him to a foster home, most likely on the mainland, would be much better. Keeping him close, in a small place like Gorey, meant she and the local community could keep an eye on him.

  As she put the phone down, Janice heard a lot of banging and clattering, accompanied by a significant degree of colorful language. She recognized the voice. “Oi, you. Watch your language,” she called out. Janice stood and walked out into the reception area. Constable Barry Barnwell was wheeling his regulation police bicycle into the back where they stored everything they wanted to keep out of sight from the public.

  The area needed a good cleaning out. Tins containing an assortment of teas, biscuits, and coffee lay atop reams of paper. Next to that sat a toolbox that couldn’t be closed due to the claw hammer and screwdriver haphazardly thrown into it. The floor space was largely taken up by a discarded desk and a file cabinet between which the Gorey police team had resorted to storing a couple of riot shields. Barnwell propped his bike up against the desk.

  “There has to be a better way. It’s like Piccadilly Circus in there,” he grumbled. “Couldn’t I just leave it out front when I’m off duty? Or take it home? Trying to get a bike through those doors at the end of a shift is a nightmare.”

  “Had a good morning, Bazza?” Janice asked cheerily.

  “Not especially, no,” he replied. There was a mulish look on his face. Janice raised her eyebrows. Barnwell took it as a sign to air his grievances. “First, we lost at the rugby yesterday. Second, that new couple in the flat upstairs didn’t invite me to their housewarming party. And third, they kept me up all night with the noise!”

  “Why didn’t you tell them to keep it down? You are the police,” Jim asked reasonably. Barnwell merely grunted before carrying on.

  “And then this mornin’, old Mr. Golightly at number seven bent my ear off for a good fifteen minutes about his neighbor’s trees blocking his view again.”

  “Neighbor disputes are the worst,” Janice said sympathetically.

  “You’re telling me. Been going at each other for five years, they have.”

  “Won’t stop until one of them’s in their grave, mark my words,” Jim said sagely.

  “Well, I’m off down the pub.” Barnwell started to unbutton his reflective jacket. “A pint and a Sunday roast will do me right.”

  “And a snooze, I reckon,” Jim said.

  “Yeah, that too. Ha, I’m cheering up already.” Barnwell went to hang up his jacket and replace it with a beat-up leather jacket.

  “Anything else to report before you go?” Janice inquired.

  “Nope, all’s quiet on the Western front. Everyone seems to be enjoying the good weather. A few tourists are around, but everything’s pretty sleepy and uneventful. No trouble other than those bloomin’ trees.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  DON FELT LIKE a new man. In contrast to Shropshire’s weather, which apparently, hadn’t yet received the springtime memo, Jersey was a riot of color. Yellow, blue, pink, and white flowers lined the roadside and beamed from the window boxes
and front gardens of the neat houses near the B&B he had chosen.

  Although the denizens of BedAdvisor.com had insisted that the White House Inn was the place to stay in Gorey, their rates had been a little beyond Don’s modest budget, and he’d already spent a small fortune hiring a car for a few days. Instead, he opted to stay at a townhouse owned by an elderly widow just off the main thoroughfare through Gorey. His landlady was obviously supplementing her meager pension by letting out a spare room, but his accommodation was pleasant and the breakfast tasty and plentiful.

  Don closed the wrought iron gate to the townhouse’s postage-stamp-sized front garden and walked the few steps to his rental car. He settled himself behind the steering wheel and let out a deep sigh, pausing for a second to consider his plan. Leaning forward, he turned the key in the ignition. The car’s engine started with a quick shake and a low purr.

  He easily pulled away from the curb, the hour being early and the streets of Gorey less than busy. Don spun the steering wheel calmly as he made his way through the town’s mostly empty streets. The drive to the museum was peaceful as he took the small roads out of town at a deliberately steady speed.

  At around ten o’clock the previous night, Don had found to his surprise that he was further from home than he’d ever been in his life. Although his mother traveled extensively after meeting Sir Thomas, Don had never been invited on their luxurious Caribbean cruises or their romantic weeks hiking their beloved Rockies. Don’s departure from the mainland had involved six tiring hours of train journey and a nerve-wracking change in London. Don had rushed headlong across town from Paddington to Waterloo, only to find that he still had another hour to wait for his train to Poole.

  The ferry ride across the Channel, however, was a real joy. Leaving behind the smog and chaos of the capital, and the drab, nondescript port town from which he’d left the mainland, Don reveled in the fresh sea air and spent most of the journey enjoyably wandering around on the deck. There was nothing like crossing a body of water to remind a traveler that they were arriving somewhere brand new.

  In truth, Don was more than ready for a change of scenery. Everything in his life and everything about it reminded him of his mother, so the decision to head to Jersey had been an unusually decisive one. Within an hour of his call to Carl Prendergast, he found himself staring at a half-empty whisky bottle on one hand, and his growing pile of research notes on the other. “Bugger,” he said to the forlorn living room. “I’m off.” It had likely been the only time in his life that he had possessed enough mettle to make a snap decision and carry it through.

  Don parked the tiny hire car at the museum. He was early. It didn’t open until midday on a Sunday. He took a walk around the area while he waited. The museum building was a large, ostentatious house with a plaque inset into the sandstone façade. The plaque announced that the building had been built in 1613 and was the original home of John Cateshull. Don presumed he was a local wealthy man of note, but in whom he wasn’t sufficiently interested to delve further. The house was located on a quiet, expansive, and verdant part of the island, about a mile from Gorey itself. He could see the Gorey Grammar School playing field beyond the house’s grounds on one side, and there was a large park on the other, complete with a bandstand and duck pond.

  His plan, so far as he actually had one, was to merely lay eyes on the desk and try to judge what might be required for him to closely examine it. He meant the masterpiece no harm whatsoever, but his suspicion, fanciful as he told himself it might be, was that it may just contain something very meaningful indeed.

  Don dearly wanted to fill in the gaps of his mother’s mysterious story. Who was this wealthy individual she had holidayed with? Who wrote the letter she had talked about, and what did its contents contain that were so secret? Don felt sure the Satterthwaite Desk was the key to answering these questions and besides, traveling down here to Jersey and working on this mystery were all a lot more fun than sitting on his couch at home, trying to ignore the ceaseless allure of the scotch bottle.

  When it opened, Don found the entrance to the museum exceptionally grand. Converted to its new function after a lengthy funding drive, the house now acted as a display space for artifacts related to Jersey’s history. A large chandelier sparkled above a hallway lined with paintings of Jersey luminaries and leaders, none of whom Don recognized. He paid the entrance fee and walked into the main display space, which was the former ballroom. Don’s shoes tapped crisply on the highly polished wooden floor. More portraits and works by local painters adorned the walls, and in one corner sat a beautiful, jet-black grand piano, a storied possession of the house’s former owners, according to a sign mounted on a music stand in front of it.

  There was another musical instrument, a clavichord, and several sculptures crafted from local stone. But, Don noted, there was no desk.

  The ballroom led out into a three-room suite that occupied the back of the house. There were mannequins wearing ball gowns and wedding dresses, displays of military medals and ceremonial swords, signed first editions of classic books Don had never read or even heard of, and a large, framed, nautical chart of the waters to the east of Jersey.

  Frustrated, Don quietly muttered, “Come on, come on, where the hell is…”

  And then he saw it, sitting on its own, surrounded by red rope under the back window. It stopped Don dead in his tracks.

  CHAPTER NINE

  SIR THOMAS HAD firmly prohibited all of his children from entering his private study, so Don was seeing the Satterthwaite Desk for the first time. He had never suspected that it might be so beautiful. It wasn’t just the wood tone, which struck a balance between formal and playful, between depth and sheen. And it wasn’t merely the inlaid mother of pearl, which gave this singular piece of furniture a crystalline glimmer as the dark and light swept alongside each other in sumptuous, elegant curves. It was also the shape, the very proportions of the desk. It was a geometric perfection, conceived perhaps by a master mathematician but then realized in wood and leather and semi-precious stone by a consummate professional at the very height of his powers.

  Don stared, slack-jawed. This was, he tried to remind himself, a desk.

  Four sinuous, delicately feminine legs, so slender as to be unlikely, supported a broad, glass-smooth surface made, quite obviously, from a single length of the highest quality timber. There was a large, central drawer, flanked by two others, all with glinting, filigreed handles in solid brass. The sides were adorned with carvings so detailed and careful that they could almost have been etchings. The symmetrical blossoms, captivatingly three-dimensional, spoke of many dedicated, painstaking hours of work.

  The accompanying booklet described the Satterthwaite Desk as, “perhaps the perfect synergy of form and function,” a description that Don found somewhat overripe, but admittedly, only a little. The museum was proud of its most spectacular acquisition, and with good reason. It was, without exception, the most remarkable piece of furniture Don had ever seen. There was just one problem. After ten minutes of careful reconnaissance, he concluded that there was absolutely no way whatsoever he would be getting anywhere near it.

  The red rope was not simply an ornate deterrent to keep visitors from touching the desk. Discreetly taped to the floor underneath it was a thin, black wire that would assuredly trigger a noisy alarm if anyone crossed it. And there were four cameras in the room, as well as a permanently stationed security guard whose solidly muscular build would deter most would-be transgressors.

  Don asked for and received permission to take some photographs. He took just enough, he hoped, to avoid arousing suspicion. There were no switches, catches or buttons on the exterior, and he obviously couldn’t crawl on his knees to view the desk’s underside without attracting unwanted attention. Whatever Sir Thomas Hughes’ secrets might be, they would remain hidden for the time being. With frustration threatening to bleed into his behavior, Don hurriedly took his leave.

  Outside, spring was flooding the park and th
e school field next door to the museum with brilliant sunshine. Don breathed in the air, so different from back home, so much more nourishing, and then sat in his car with the windows open to digest what he had seen. The desk was a marvel, an absolute treasure. But security was tight. Accessing the closely guarded desk and searching for a secret compartment was, undoubtedly, going to be a three-pint problem.

  He started the car and drove around the island for a couple of hours, partly to clear his head, and also to enjoy the peaceful scenery in Jersey’s spring sunshine. With each passing mile traveled, he felt the stress and depression of the past few days leave him like a fog lifting on a spring morning. He found his thought patterns shifting as his mood improved.

  He took a back road through a quiet village with a bright, glistening green. In the middle of the grass stood a memorial to the village’s war dead. He thought carefully. The search for the letter was providing him with something to do in the quiet, sullen days after his mother’s funeral.

  As he continued down the country lanes, tall grasses serenading the car from both sides of the road, he realized that there was a dark side to his motivation for finding the letter. Certainly, it would be satisfying to come to a greater understanding of his mother’s life with Sir Thomas, their trips abroad, and their associations, but there was a suspicion in Don’s mind that the letter may reveal some information, some dirt on Sir Thomas Hughes. Don considered his mother’s treatment at the hands of her husband to have been cruel and inhumane while the rest of the family had stood aside. They had been complicit. If they were embarrassed or even scandalized in some way, it wouldn’t bother him a bit. Whatever secrets the letter may expose, he wasn’t above gaining some measure of revenge for his mother’s and his own unhappiness at their hands.