I held up my hands in a ‘pause’ sign. Mother needs visuals sometimes. ‘I’m sure it won’t matter.’
She was defiant. ‘You’ll have to decide who’s taking Mirabelle.’
‘No one’s taking Mirabelle!’ My mouth hung open as if I had something more to say. I didn’t. Mirabelle is hateful, and if it was going to be up to me, I’d make sure Mirabelle wasn’t coming.
Mother has dragged Mirabelle around with us for years like a comfort blanket, unpleasant to everyone but her. She couldn’t bear to be parted from Mirabelle.
‘She’s already got an invite.’ Aunt Charlotte sounded uncharacteristically apologetic.
Mother adopted what I call her ‘cattle prod’ face. This is when I imagine how she’d look if someone used a cattle prod on her.
‘What, Mirabelle as well?’ Mother said flabbergasted. ‘She never mentioned it. Who’s she taking?’
Aunt Charlotte looked at the floor.
‘Well, come on. Who?’ Mother leaned forward.
Aunt Charlotte cleared her throat. ‘Bridget,’ she said quietly. ‘They’ve . . . they’ve . . .’
‘What?’
‘They’ve moved in together.’ Aunt Charlotte looked at Mother as if there might be a slim chance of mercy.
Mother was silent, which is never a good sign. Finally, she drew herself up as if gathering all her energy. ‘Mirabelle hates dogs.’
‘Bridget’s got a cat now. A sphinx. It’s completely bald so there’s no problem with hair. Mirabelle’s allergies—’
‘How long has this been going on?’
‘A while I think,’ Aunt Charlotte said sheepishly. ‘They wanted to keep it secret for as long as possible.’
‘Secret? Who from?’
Aunt Charlotte didn’t respond.
‘How could she? She knows how much I detest secrets!’
Which isn’t entirely correct. The only secrets Mother doesn’t do are other people’s. She has plenty of her own. Almost as many as me. And Mirabelle’s failure to mention her new living arrangements was not the only secret that was going to be revealed on that fateful weekend.
CHAPTER 2: THE MOOR
Mother drove in a ferocious silence until we finally hit the borders of Dartmoor. She likes to ‘get the drive done’, which always requires relentless driving with no stopping, small talk or music. But rather than making the drive pass quickly, it somehow made time slow down. A cloud of anxiety settled over the car about ten minutes into the journey and grew darker with every hour. It was like sitting an exam entitled, ‘How to travel with Mother’ and the only word that would surface was ‘don’t’.
As we crossed into Dartmoor, the road seemed to rise and twist. It was disorientating at first, both sides flanked with thick, high hedges, as though we were being overwhelmed by the landscape.
The light was already beginning to dwindle. The only strip of sky I could see rolling out on the road ahead seemed to take on a new steely edge. As the road widened and the hedges ended, the vast stone landscape opened out. Great crags rose up from broken earth and met the sky in dark, crooked lines.
There was so much movement here. The mist travelled in smoke clouds over the cold dusk. Wind twisted trees bent against distant outcrops of rocks. Clouds were driven fast across the dark sky.
Granite boulders were piled randomly, some cracked and worn into vague faces and shapes. The holes of their eyes watched our car drive by. Gorse ran in wild yellow streaks across the open, bleak land.
As we rounded another bend, the world seemed to end and fall away down into a steep valley. Mother braked hard and surface water sheered up and away from the sides of the car.
‘Maybe we should stop,’ Aunt Charlotte murmured.
‘We’ll be there in half an hour.’ Mother drove on.
‘I need to eat.’
‘You always need to eat.’
The shadows were drawing out across the thin, grey road. There were no street lamps. The occasional small house we passed reflected on our car window. Sheep ambled round in small, lost groups.
‘Look!’ Aunt Charlotte pointed in awe. By the side of a roughly paved car park, just nestled beneath a string of gnarled trees, stood the dim lights of a small mobile café. On the opposite side of the road, rising steep, was a broken granite tor lifting up into the low sky.
‘Hound Tor,’ I read from the small sign. ‘This was online. It was supposed to have inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle!’
‘To do what?’
I turned and looked at Aunt Charlotte, who had colonised the entire backseat. I didn’t attempt to explain.
Mother sighed and drew into the car park next to the van. I looked up at its faded sign: The Hound of the Basket Fills. Below was a notice explaining that they provided small picnics of four items with a choice of ham or cheese sandwiches, crisps, an apple or orange and a small biscuit in the shape of a large dog with red eyes. It was all in takeaway cartons designed to look like cardboard baskets.
Mother, Aunt Charlotte and I stood by the side of the car looking out at the grim dusk. Layers of grey drizzle blew across the jagged granite cliffs. The moor’s air was peaty and rich with the smell of damp grass, sharp and astringent. The thin, watery light drifted across the far hills. It was a stark sky. Puritan grey. It seemed strange to come so quickly from the cosy villages and main roads into this ancient world of crags and moorland where time was set into the rock in such distinct layers. There’d been only one small sign to mark our entrance into the moor, but it was beginning to feel like we’d crossed a much greater boundary.
There was no silence here. Water ran over moss covered boulders. Birds called and flitted through the high branches of the trees above. Far beyond the crags, I could see the shapes of ponies racing across the moors.
We sipped our hot tea and picked at the cling-film-wrapped food.
The woman at the sandwich bar watched us as she wiped a tea cloth slowly round the rim of a mug. She wasn’t just looking at us, she was studying us. Carefully.
‘We got stone rings.’ The woman said it as though she didn’t expect a response.
‘Ah, I sympathise.’ Aunt Charlotte took another bite of the limp sandwich. ‘I’m a martyr to them.’
I gave the woman a weak smile.
She pointed at the vast array of boulders. ‘’Ound o’Baskervilles.’
‘Yes, thank you.’ Mother managed to be far more dismissive.
‘Sherlock ’Olmes,’ she nodded.
‘Who?’
The woman looked at Aunt Charlotte in confusion.
‘Be quiet, Charlotte. We’re heading for Black Towers. Lord and Lady Black’s home. Perhaps you know of it?’
The woman’s face soured. ‘You should go. Get on there. Fast as you can. Dark’s coming.’
‘Oh, perhaps we could finish—’
‘Go. Rain’s coming.’ She sniffed deeply and drew her tongue across her bottom lip tasting the air. ‘Go.’ And she closed the front panel with one decisive movement as if she was quite used to telling people to leave.
‘Looks like shop’s closed,’ Aunt Charlotte spoke with a mouthful of food.
‘We should go. The light’s fading and I don’t like the look of those clouds.’ Mother threw her unopened cardboard basket into the bin as she walked towards the car. ‘I can’t see why we needed to stop. We’re going on this safari supper in a few hours.’
‘We hadn’t eaten today!’ Aunt Charlotte looked affronted. ‘You might be able to survive on air and irritation, but we can’t.’
Mother was already climbing into the car with a face that said there was a lot more irritation to come on this journey.
The endless, stark landscape rolled out on both sides of the car. Grey-white stones were broken teeth across the dark mouth of the moor.
The first spots of rain started almost as soon as we pulled back onto the main road leading through the moor and it gathered pace, falling faster as we drove into the dusk.
At a small crossr
oads was a low stone mound in the shape of an oblong next to the road. It was thick with moss and a withered bunch of flowers had been laid on it. There was clearly a headstone at one end. I folded out the map at the back of the guidebook.
‘We’ve got the satnav,’ Mother sighed.
‘Doesn’t tell you about Kitty Jay’s Grave though, does it?’ I flicked through. ‘Says it’s the grave of a young girl who committed suicide. She couldn’t be buried in consecrated ground. She had to be at a crossroads so her spirit couldn’t find its way back to people.’
‘That’s so sad,’ Aunt Charlotte said in a low voice.
‘Utterly terrifying, if you ask me,’ Mother said. ‘I don’t know why you always insist on telling us these frightening little tales.’
‘It’s part of the folklore. It’s important. It says here that fresh flowers continue to be put on the grave and no one knows where they come from.’
‘Utter nonsense,’ Mother speeded up a little.
‘They’re everywhere,’ Aunt Charlotte leaned through the gap between the front seats. ‘Look over there.’ She pointed towards a group of stones clearly arranged in a circle. They dotted the landscape, some small, others wider with larger stones. Time-worn arrangements half buried in the grass.
I glanced down at the map. So many strange and ancient names — Coffin Stone, Hexworthy, Bonehill, Five Wyches Farm and Gibbet Hill. The area was littered with stone circles, cairns and hidden mires. This was a place filled with all manner of lurking dangers. In the darkness they’d be impossible to see.
A mist had fallen so quick it obscured the distant crags already. Perhaps the old woman had been right — we should move on as fast as we could. I felt Mother accelerate.
The lights from houses were sparse and distant, individual pin pricks glowing in the landscape until we came to the edges of the village. The small sign announcing Greystone was overshadowed by a tall, twisted tree bending itself away. The name was worn and barely visible anymore.
Wind buffeted the car. The road behind us had already sunk into the mist. The wipers flicked fast and the windscreen sparkled momentarily with the lights from each house we passed catching on the raindrops, our wheels scything water up high on both sides of the road.
The road slipped round unlit turns and jarred us with sudden deep potholes. I looked at Mother and could see the concentration starting to pain her face. Even Aunt Charlotte was quiet in the back now.
Finally, as the road rose up from the valley, we could see a cluster of lights ahead and the ominous shape of a large castle against the dark mottled clouds.
‘This must be it,’ Aunt Charlotte leaned eagerly between the two front seats. ‘It’s a castle!’
‘Well done, Kirstie Allsopp,’ Mother murmured.
‘Who?’
We don’t explain that sort of thing to Aunt Charlotte anymore.
As we neared the low outer wall, I could see the spire of a church against the wet slate of the sky. It was on the opposite side of the road to the castle and another large house stood close by. Lights were on in some of the windows of the house, and I thought I saw a shadow pass quickly through the light of a downstairs room.
The car rumbled over a wooden section of the driveway with two large chains lifting up from either side.
‘Oh my God, it’s even got a drawbridge!’ There was a childlike glee in Aunt Charlotte’s voice, her face lit from the side by the large flame of a torch.
‘If you’re going to be such a keen little puppy all weekend I will have to drown you in the moat immediately, Charlotte,’ Mother said wearily.
We passed through the gatehouse and below two heavy portcullis gates. Cannons flanked both sides as it opened out into a torchlit central courtyard. Mother drove straight towards a large open door over the other side where a lone figure stood with a hand raised.
Lady Marsha Black was framed in the light of the entrance to the castle, her slender arms spread wide with a whole spectrum of rings flickering across her fingers. She was the very essence of groomed. I’d seen her a few times, but since I was decidedly not a member of book club, I only ever saw the women arrive before hearing the raucous laughter as more Prosecco was opened. Lady Marsha looked very much like she’d moved on from all that. There’d been a strange, imperceptible shift that came with this new status and environment. She was a lot more Champagne than Prosecco now.
CHAPTER 3: THE CASTLE
The castle was every inch the vision of a dark fairy tale. We stood in the great courtyard staring up into that bruised, old sky. The turrets, arched windows, arrow slits and towers looked down on us like we were peasants waiting for some bread. It wasn’t hard to imagine Lady Marsha Black dismissing us all with a simple, ‘Let them eat cake.’ Her pink little twinset and immaculate, smooth brown hair was utterly untouched by the squally air. Mine instantly covered my face the moment I opened the car door, the wind thick with the scent of rain.
‘Welcome to our humble abode!’ She held up her hands and gave a simpering smile. ‘Black Towers.’
‘Like the wine?’ I enquired with a smile.
‘No.’ Lady Marsha tightened her mouth. ‘We have an “s”.’ She dropped her hands. Her voice had a weary tone to it as if I wasn’t the first person to have said this.
Mother gave me The Look.
‘Oh, it’s marvellous, utterly marvellous, Your Ladyship!’ Mother fawned. Numerous torches studded the castle walls, the flames apparently impervious to the wind-driven rain. The fire light glanced off the thick wax of Mother’s brand-new Barbour jacket. She lunged forward, displaying a level of desperation I’d only ever seen her employ at the John Lewis sale. But Lady Marsha was already turning into the hallway, leaving Mother to quickly disguise her move with a little skip forward.
We walked through the great oak doorway and I looked up into the stony shadows above. The rough walls seemed to be hewn from the same stone we’d seen at Hound Tor, dark and scarred by weather and time. A lone flag hung limp in the rain and was caught for a moment on a gust of wind. Its emblem fluttered out into the darkness — a large cannon aimed up into the sky flanked either side by a large cannonball. In the darkness it could easily have been mistaken for something a little cruder.
I caught Aunt Charlotte’s eye and she was smirking. ‘Looks like a—’
‘Yes, Aunt Charlotte, I see it.’
‘Please let my housekeeper take your . . .’ Lady Marsha looked me up and down with obvious distaste. ‘Your coat and bags.’ She was pointing at an older woman, bent and squat as if the life was slowly being pressed out of her.
‘Oh, thank you! Thank you!’ Mother struggled out of the greasy new Barbour.
I wasn’t sure how I was going to cope if Mother was going to be this grateful for everything during the weekend. Mother doesn’t usually do gratitude. This had a distinctly nauseating edge to it.
I handed the woman my small, damp rucksack, which she dutifully held at arm’s length. I wiped back a strip of long wet hair in an effort to look a little smarter. ‘Thank you, Mrs . . .’
‘Abaddon,’ she snipped. ‘It’s biblical.’
‘Oh, that’s nice.’ I smiled.
‘A destroying angel, I believe.’
Mother and I paused. I heard her take a sharp breath. Lady Marsha looked first at me then Mother, then Aunt Charlotte, who was standing with her mouth hanging slack. An awkward silence weaved its way round as memories returned of those grisly deaths from a different kind of destroying angel we’d all witnessed at the Slaughter House. Each of us looked away in turn.
‘Mrs Abaddon, take the coats please and send Miss Morello to serve drinks, if she’s not too busy.’ There was a definite note of sarcasm in Lady Marsha’s tone.
She cleared her throat and turned to us. ‘Well, let’s get a drink, shall we? We can show you to your rooms later.’
Mother nodded frantically as if she was trying to dislodge something. Sadly, it didn’t shift her great big ingratiating grin.
‘Mrs Abaddon, any sign of His Lordship?’ Lady Marsha had a very obvious look of distaste.
‘No, Your Ladyship, I’m afraid not.’
‘How unsurprising.’ Her eyes were cold.
We followed Lady Marsha through the stone hall. The ceiling was high, but the room still felt darkly oppressive. It could have been down to the distinct lack of lighting or perhaps the vast array of weaponry on every wall. As Marsha walked, she randomly commented on huge displays of pikes and swords set out in over-sized, deadly flower arrangements above thick oak tables. Dark varnished chests were placed at random intervals like a strange display of old coffins. I was tempted to lift a lid and look inside, but the party was moving on at speed and this was definitely not the sort of place to get left behind on your own. Or fall into a large chest.
We passed a closed door on our left with black metal strips similar to bars running the length of the aged wood. As I looked up, I saw a white face peering from above the frame. I let out a quick high-pitched note. The party stopped and turned, almost as one.
Lady Marsha laughed. ‘Don’t worry, just a death mask. One of the old Lords. Not the current one though.’ She sounded disappointed.
I stared at its closed porcelain eyes. ‘Oh, that’s comforting.’
But the group were moving on at pace down the vast, stone corridor. I hurried after them.
Large, modern, gauche-coloured paintings that screamed expense were hung beside suits of armour, somehow cheapening both. Everything was mismatched as if this new decor might have been specifically chosen to insult the building. It was like dressing a stately grand dame as some sort of cheap, withered Barbie doll. My eyes landed on Mother, who was eyeing me suspiciously.
Lady Marsha flicked her wrist towards various rooms, explaining how they’d renovated and redesigned aspects that hadn’t been touched for centuries. It had the sacrilegious feel of someone explaining how they’d rearranged Stonehenge to improve its feng shui.
There was a flippant, almost careless manner to this woman, as if this wasn’t even her home. She was acting like a disinterested tour guide. I walked alongside her and Mother, trying to look like I was solemnly appreciating the grandeur — a sort of Stephen Fry visits Chatsworth kind of face.
THE SUPPER CLUB MURDERS a gripping murder mystery packed with twists (Smart Woman's Mystery Book 3) Page 2