Cocktails and Cowardice (Peridale Cafe Cozy Mystery Book 20)

by Agatha Frost

  Minnie thought about it for a moment, her brows tense, her eyes darting all over the valley.

  “Lots of people,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t know. Lisa deals with it. She says the same person never gives more than three offers, and then the names change.”

  “Did you tell this to the police?”

  “Like I said, I didn’t think it was important.” Minnie’s shaky hands rested against her cheeks. “I’m sorry, I just—”

  “Can’t you see you’re upsetting her?” Rodger pulled Minnie away from the railing and set her back down in the deckchair. “What she needs is a hot cup of tea or a stiff drink, not an interrogation.”

  Before Julia could retort that what she wanted was her gran back safe and sound and that no amount of tea would placate her, Minnie let out a tiny gasp.

  “No, sweet Julia is right.” Minnie’s trembling fingers rested against her lips. “I’ve been so distracted, so selfish, that I didn’t see the obvious. I thought it was random. I hoped it was random. But it can’t be, can it? It’s all my fault.”

  “Now, Minnie. You mustn’t torture yourself this way.” Rodger fired a sharp glance at Julia over his shoulder, so Julia glared right back. “Why don’t I make you that cup of tea you so clearly need right now?”

  “That would be lovely.”

  Rodger took himself to the dining room, where the tea-making station remained stocked despite the day’s lack of breakfast.

  Conspiracy theory or not, Maria’s café had considered the break-ins threatening enough to install cameras. And Julia didn’t forget the way Maria’s father had immediately shut down any conversation on the subject.

  “I’m sorry there’s no breakfast for you this morning,” Minnie said, changing the subject before Julia could press her further. “Let me fetch Lisa to make you something. She probably won’t see me right now, but the hotel still needs running, and you are a paying guest.”

  “Maybe it’s best to give her some space,” Julia suggested, even as her stomach rumbled at the suggestion of food. “If you point me in the right direction, I’ll happily make something for myself. After so many years running the café, I know my way around a kitchen.”

  “Dot was right,” Minnie said with a melancholy smile, “you really are a good girl.”

  Julia followed Minnie’s directions, pushing through the door behind desk, where she was met with an upward staircase to the living quarters and a downwards one. As she headed to the basement kitchen, Julia considered her great-aunt. On some level, deep down, Julia knew that Minnie cared. Obviously, she just wasn’t in the right frame of mind to deal with reality. As entertaining as she had been on their first night at La Casa, she had seemed a little frantic even then.

  Knowing what Julia knew now, they couldn’t have arrived at a worse time for the hotel – which made Minnie’s invitation out of the blue all the stranger. Julia hated to suspect her, but she wasn’t ruling out anyone or anything until she had her gran back.

  At the bottom of the dark staircase, Julia fumbled around for a light switch for a good minute until her fingers brushed against the plastic casing. The lights of the industrial kitchen flickered to life, revealing a kitchen so large she couldn’t help but be jealous. It was at least four times bigger than her café’s kitchen. Stainless-steel counters wrapped around the entire perimeter. There were two giant fridges and two sinks, and a large metal island filled the centre.

  Even with all of her worries, she imagined how many cakes she could bake if she had this much space at her disposal. Although she wasn’t sure how much baking she’d be able to do in this exact kitchen. Aside from the fridges and some pans and basic utensils, the kitchen was as good as empty. Not even a mixing bowl or a wooden spoon met her searching gaze.

  She did, however, find a plate. She carried it to the fridge, where she found the usual contents of the breakfast buffet on plates under plastic wrap. Though the food was there, and it seemed fresh, it hadn’t made its way up to the hotel. Strange. She filled her plate with enough sliced meat and cheese to tide her over until lunchtime.

  A slice of ham already in her mouth, she closed the fridge and turned around. She gasped, and the plate slipped from her hands and smashed against the floor. She didn’t spare it a glance. Her eyes were firmly locked on the puddle of blood on the other side of the island.

  Already sensing what she’d find, Julia swallowed the ham and crept around the stainless-steel island. Lisa wasn’t in bed, sulking. She was lying hidden behind the island in a pool of her own blood, a knife jutting out of her stomach.

  A whimper escaped Julia’s lips. She assumed Lisa was dead, but as she took a single step closer, a rattling, weak breath escaped her cousin, and her eyelids fluttered.

  She was alive.

  Julia looked around for a phone, but there wasn’t one. She reached for her bag, but it was still upstairs behind the reception desk and not over her shoulder like usual. As the walls closed in around her, Julia doubled back to the door and screamed up the stairs, praying she wouldn’t faint again. It felt like an age before Minnie and Rodger appeared at the top of the stairs, even though it was probably only a few seconds.

  “Oh, dear God!” Minnie cried, tumbling back into the counter when she saw her daughter on the floor. “How can this be?”

  Rodger steadied her with one hand while he dialled his mobile phone with the other. As he spoke quickly down the phone in Spanish, presumably calling for an ambulance, Julia went to Lisa’s side. She clutched her cousin’s hand, and though weak, Lisa squeezed back.

  “Not like this,” Julia whispered to the universe. “We didn’t even get to know each other.”

  Looking away from poor Lisa, Julia’s gaze landed on something shiny under the island: a watch.

  12

  Dot

  “Ninety-nine,” Dot called out, pausing to sip her tea. “One hundred. Ready or not, here I come.”

  She carefully placed her cup on the coffee table, in no rush to get up. Playing hide and seek, of course, hadn’t been her idea, but as resistant as she had been to the juvenile game, at least it was passing the time until breakfast arrived. She rechecked her watch. It was already close to noon, and this time, it wasn’t a mistake.

  Even if this was the price they had to pay for Dot pushing too hard, she couldn’t quite regret it. And she couldn’t do much about it now. What she could do, however, was find her husband in one of the three hiding places he had picked for the previous seven games of hide and seek. She walked straight into the bedroom and opened the wardrobe doors.

  “You found me again, Dorothy!” Percy chuckled as she helped him up out of the wardrobe. “You’re far too good at this game.”

  “Well, you were either in here, under the bed, or behind the shower curtain,” she said, with yet another glance at the time. “I’m not sure this game is for me.”

  “How about another game of cards?”

  She exhaled loudly, the mere thought of trouncing him in another poker match somehow even more unpleasant than the prospect of spending the entire day finding Percy as he rotated through the same three hiding spaces.

  “No more cards,” she said. “No more hide and seek. I’m unbelievably bored. I thought only boring people could get bored, but when there is truly so little to do, the mind starts to rot. Another day locked in here and I’m going to be as batty as Evelyn. Can you imagine?”

  “I think you’d look quite fetching in one of her turbans.”

  “Ghastly!” Dot dusted the front of her crinkled but clean white blouse, glad to be back in her own clothes. “I did enough experimenting with my look yesterday to last a lifetime. Aren’t you bored, dear?”

  Percy perched on the edge of his neatly made bed and considered his response for a moment. He patted the covers next to him, so Dot took a seat.

  “With you, my love,” he said, holding her hand in his, “I could never get bored.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t say the same,” she said, before quickly
adding, “No offence, of course.”

  He laughed. “None taken. Perhaps it’s that I’m a simple soul, and you’ve got so much more going on upstairs than I have. To be totally honest, when I forget that we’re being held here against our will, I quite enjoy how uncomplicated it is.”

  “You’re enjoying this?”

  “Enjoyment might not be the correct word.” He tapped his finger against his chin as he thought for the right one. “Content? Yes, I’m quite content. While I’d rather be on the honeymoon we imagined or even back home in our cottage, there’s something refreshing about not having to think about anything other than how to keep ourselves entertained. Our meals are brought to us, and we’ve been given clothes. Not having to think about how I’m going to make my pension stretch for the week has been a relief in itself. This might be the first time since childhood that I haven’t felt any responsibilities pressing on me.”

  “Other than keeping ourselves alive?”

  “Even that is out of our hands,” he said, patting her knee. “Like you said before, if they were going to kill us, surely they would have done it already?”

  The question had played on Dot’s mind heavily. Knowing that Rafa didn’t want to kill them didn’t mean they weren’t going to be killed. She hadn’t told Percy about the revelation that Rafa’s step-grandfather was apparently the person giving the orders, and she wouldn’t. Knowing of the man’s existence did little to help them. In fact, Dot suspected it showed where Rafa’s loyalties would lie if the order ever came.

  “We still don’t know why we’re here,” she pointed out. “They’re treating us like pets, but why?”

  “I hadn’t given it much thought.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter.” Dot looked around the room, her gaze lingering in the window with the loose bars. “We have no idea how long we’re going to be here. Days? Weeks? Months? Years, even? How long will this be our life?”

  “It’s best not to get worked up.” He flashed her a wink and a smile. “Now, how about one last game of hide and seek? But this time, you hide and I seek. I’m sure you’ll be much more inventive than I was at finding a hiding space.”

  “Fine.” She rechecked her watch. “But only because we have little else to do.”

  While Percy counted to one hundred in the sitting room with his eyes closed, Dot took her time looking around the villa for somewhere unique to hide. By the time Percy was halfway through his count, she realised his three hiding spaces were perhaps the only three hiding spaces to be had. Knowing Percy would likely check his most recent space last, she opted for the wardrobe.

  The old wooden wardrobe smelled exactly as she would have expected. It had a hint of musk that only came from aged wood and the lingering scent of mothballs. In the dark, a sense of stillness and privacy that she hadn’t felt since before their chase through the market came over her. She crouched down, her eyes immediately heavy thanks to another night of agitation and sleeplessness. She closed her eyes to rest them.

  She must have drifted off for a couple of minutes, but the wardrobe doors ripping open startled her awake, making her heart drop so quickly it reminded her of riding the rollercoasters at Blackpool in her youth.

  “Oh!” She looked up at Rafa, her cheeks burning hot. “We were just—”

  “You found her!” Percy clapped his hands as he walked into the bedroom. “I was saving the wardrobe for last. It felt too obvious! Very clever, my dear.”

  After Percy helped her out of the wardrobe, they followed Rafa back into the sitting room and their breakfast. No yoghurts today, she noticed, but perhaps they were reserved for dinner time?

  Somehow, she didn’t think the conversation yesterday had pushed him too far away, after all. In fact, she sensed ease and openness around him that she hadn’t felt before.

  “It gets quite boring in here,” she explained, fully embarrassed. “I wouldn’t usually resort to such childish games to fend off the boredom, but one finds oneself willing to try new things in situations as strange as this.”

  “You do not need to explain this,” he said, offering another rare smile. “I understand this situation is not an ideal.”

  “You could say that,” Percy called from the kitchen table, already dishing up to plates of food. “But we make do and carry on. Although, saying that, I don’t think my Dorothy can take another day locked up in here. I can already feel her going stir-crazy.”

  “It’s quite all right,” Dot said, trying to laugh away Percy’s suggestion; it didn’t quite measure up with the sweet old lady image she had crafted for Rafa. “It’s not your fault that we’re here, is it?”

  Rafa smiled again, this time more regretfully. He scratched the back of his head, drawing attention to the bandage wrapped around his right hand. A little blood had pushed through the bandage, hinting at a deep cut. Some even stained the hem of his white t-shirt.

  “When I was slicing your bread, I cut this,” he explained quickly when he seemed to notice Dot’s lingering gaze.

  “Hope you didn’t get any on it!” Percy muttered, a buttered slice already in his mouth. “I must say, not as fresh today.”

  Rafa crammed his hands into his leather jacket, making Dot wonder if he wanted to hide the bandage to stop her from questioning him further. Her gut reaction told her that there was more to the cut, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to find out.

  “Perhaps a walk?” Rafa suggested, hooking his unharmed thumb over his shoulder. “Around the clearing only. Nobody will come until the afternoon.”

  “A walk?” Percy jumped up, knocking the table and clattering the plates. “Outside?”

  “In a circle,” he said quickly. “Separately. If you try anything—”

  “We won’t,” Dot jumped in. “The fresh air would do us good.”

  He nodded that he understood, and Dot wondered if he’d come in intending to let them to stretch their legs outside, or if he was simply reacting to their pathetic antics. Either way, she certainly wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity.

  They followed him out into the empty clearing. Stepping out into the fresh air felt somewhat alien after so many days locked up. She closed her eyes and let the sun warm her skin for a moment. As uncomfortably hot as it was, she intended to savour every second.

  “In a circle,” he repeated as he stood slap bang in the middle of the clearing. “Around me.”

  Dot set off first, walking in the biggest circle she dared. His bandaged hand was still in his pocket, but the other one was hooked over his belt, inches from where the gun was hiding. When she was parallel to the villa, Percy set off, his strides comically wide as he followed the pattern she had set out on the dusty ground.

  On her laps, Dot inhaled the warm air, her lungs enjoying the freshness. It wasn’t that the air in the villa was stale, but not being able to open the windows and feel the natural breeze made the outdoors taste that little bit sweeter.

  It wasn’t until her fourth lap around the clearing that the abstract concept of escape even came to mind. While she wasn’t foolish enough to make a run for it now, she still hadn’t given up on the idea of getting them out of the situation. Initially, she’d wanted to do it to save Julia the chore of having to track them down, but as the days passed, her focus had shifted from wanting to escape for Julia’s sake to needing to escape for their own.

  The vague sound of a car engine registered in Dot’s brain. It snagged her ear from the left side of the clearing. Distant at first, and then closer, and then distant again. Arriving at the villa under a veil of darkness was already a foggy memory, but she knew they’d arrived from the left, which meant the road was in the direction of the car she had heard.

  She took in the rest of their surroundings, hoping for an indication of how high up they were. The thick, dense trees entirely closed them in – which was likely the precise reason the place had been chosen. She’d spent the last few days assuming they were miles and miles from any civilisation, as one would when being held captive, bu
t she heard another car on her sixth lap, and then two, one after the other, on her ninth. By her twentieth lap, she’d counted twelve cars.

  “Time’s up,” Rafa called. “Back inside.”

  Dot finished her final lap and followed Percy into the villa. Before she could thank Rafa for letting them out, he closed the door and locked them in. She watched him head back to the outbuilding. She almost expected him to look at the villa on his way, but he didn’t. She couldn’t help but wonder what conditions he was living in over there. While the villa left much to be desired, at least it was clean and tidy. The outbuilding looked much older and was in a much worse state of repair.

  “Wasn’t that marvellous?” Percy exclaimed as he resumed his seat at the table and continued eating his breakfast. “It’s amazing what a little fresh air can do for the soul.”

  “It is.” Dot turned on the television and sat at the sofa, the cogs in her mind spinning too quickly to allow room for eating just yet. “I don’t suppose you noticed the cars?”

  “What cars?”

  “I’ll take that as a no.” She adjusted her brooch as her eyes glazed over, piecing together the first concrete plan she’d had since their arrival. “I heard at least twelve cars drive by.”

  “That many?”

  “It means we’re not as far away from civilisation as we thought.”

  Percy loaded up another slice of bread with ham and cheese. “I suppose we’re not.”

  Dot hadn’t expected Percy to pick up what she was dropping, so she took the following silent minutes while he ate his breakfast to solidify the plan forming in her mind. What she came up with was risky, but considering their limited options, some danger was expected.

  “Now, why don’t you tell me what’s causing that look in your eyes?” Percy asked as he set down two fresh cups of tea and joined her on the sofa. “Does it have anything to do with those cars you mentioned?”