by Kate Adams
Joe stood up and adjusted his belt. ‘I’ll send someone over to take a statement from you later.’
Before he had a chance to walk away, I had a question for him. ‘Look, you’re going to get this a lot, but when are the stalls around here going to be allowed to reopen?’ Joe had told me not long after he’d arrived that the Food Festival was going to have to be closed, and now the area was buzzing with forensic officers in white suits, a number of them going in and out of the Airstream while police officers were carrying out interviews.
He was about to answer, but paused and looked intently at me. ‘Are you concerned about the festival, the stallholders and the enjoyment of the visitors, or are you just wondering when you can get your hands on another coffee?’ His eyes glanced down towards the mug in my hands, but when he looked back up at me, he was smiling. ‘I know you have a severe addiction, but that’s taking it a bit far.’
‘It wasn’t what I was thinking. I was just pre-empting the question you are going to start getting bombarded with, but now you mention it…’ I looked over towards the red campervan. Lucy and Kathy were sitting silently outside, waiting their turn to be interviewed, and any desire to lighten the mood vanished. ‘This is a pretty small community. Most of the stallholders know each other – they often end up at the same events, so this will hit a lot of people quite hard.’
I felt Joe’s hand on my shoulder. ‘I know. We’ll get them back up and running as quickly as possible. I would imagine being able to get back to work will make it easier for them. There’ll be a point when we can move the Airstream, which will make it all more bearable. Now, don’t you have some cafés to run?’
‘They’re all really quiet during the festival; everyone comes out here to eat, so my team are probably twiddling their fingers.’
‘Not all of them.’ Joe nodded towards a couple of my Library team who were standing off to one side, watching the drama. They were probably on their break, but still, it wasn’t very professional, especially as their uniforms were on display.
‘Bloody hell!’ I stood up, annoyed. ‘I’ll have a word. A bit of common sense wouldn’t go amiss.’
‘Go for it, dragon lady, speak later.’ Joe walked off, pulling a notebook out of his back pocket. I marched off in the opposite direction to have a word with my team members. After metaphorically giving them a clip around the ear, I sent them back to work. With the festival closed, there was a good chance that visitors would make their way to the cafés.
Mark had already returned to the house to deliver a tour, but I didn’t feel like following him yet. It seemed important to me to hang around; I was certain it wasn’t some sort of gratuitous rubbernecking, which would have been a bad case of hypocrisy after sending my team members away for doing just that, but I’d been here when the body had been found, with the people who’d had the closest connection to Ben, and I felt the need to stay nearby. I was also, if I was honest, interested in finding out more.
I watched Kyle. He still looked slightly dazed, but at least he was holding a mug of something warm and hopefully sugary. He walked away from the police officer who had been questioning him, ducked under a strip of crime scene tape and sat down on the bench I’d just left. I returned and sat next to him.
‘I’m so sorry.’ I didn’t know what else to say.
‘Thanks. I can’t believe it.’
‘Had he worked for you for long?’
Kyle nodded. ‘Couple of years. I’d gone to school with him not far from here – we’re both local. We hadn’t seen each other for years, then I went into business with Guy and we set up the office here in Derbyshire. Guy lives in London, but is on the road a lot so it didn’t matter to him where the office was. I wanted to be near my family.’ Kyle paused for a moment, his head hanging down. He hadn’t looked at me since we’d started talking. ‘I ran into Ben in a pub. He was looking for work and we needed an extra set of hands at events like this, so he came on board. He was great, a real hard worker. Pretty quiet, but he knew how to make a great cup of coffee.’ He sat back on the bench and sighed. For the first time, I noticed that there were tears in his eyes. ‘He was so excited about coming here – he loved Charleton, told us how his parents used to bring him here as a kid every summer.’
‘He sounds like a nice guy.’
‘He was.’
‘So who would want to hurt him? Do you know if he’d crossed someone?’
Kyle shook his head. ‘No, I really don’t. I know he’d got himself into debt a couple of years ago, but that was all cleared up, or at least I thought it was. He…’ Kyle shrugged and fell silent. I felt like I’d pushed him as far as I could.
‘Kyle?’ It was Joe, walking towards us. ‘I’m sorry, but I’m going to need you down at the station. Routine, nothing to worry about.’
Kyle rose from his seat and turned towards me. He attempted to smile, but there were still tears in his eyes. Joe touched his arm gently and directed him towards a car that was waiting on the nearest gravel path.
As I stood up, I saw the next item on my agenda heading my way. Bruce from the Northern Bean Company was striding across the grass. Of course, when we’d agreed to reschedule our meeting to this morning, we’d had no idea that coffee would be the last thing on our minds.
The Northern Bean Company was a medium-sized business based in Manchester, our nearest large city, supplying numerous cafés and restaurants in the area. It was big enough to keep its prices lower than companies like Signal Box or Silver Bullet, but small enough that customers could feel pleased with themselves for not using the big international coffee roasters. The Northern Bean coffee was OK, but not particularly special. In my experience, it was quite dark and had a sort of smoky carbon flavour, so it was hard to taste the origins of the bean. It wasn’t awful, just a bit on the predictable, commercial side for me.
‘Hi, Bruce, I was just about to come looking for you. The police are closing off the gardens, so I’ll walk you back towards the car park.’
‘OK, fine,’ he replied, looking rattled and sweaty.
‘Are you OK?’
He nodded and pulled a bottle of water out of a pocket in his baggy cargo shorts. ‘What a horrendous start to the day. I was meant to meet Ben yesterday. Poor guy. I just don’t know what to say.’ Bruce was glancing around as he spoke, looking as if his eyes weren’t taking in anything that he saw. After a few moments’ silence, he finally looked at me. ‘Sorry I couldn’t see you yesterday, something came up. I just wanted to check in with you. We have a new line of beans that you might be interested in, but now doesn’t seem like the time to discuss it.’
It wasn’t, and it certainly wasn’t the time to tell him I was planning on finding someone else to supply our coffee beans.
Bruce was tugging at his shaggy beard as he spoke. With that and his shorts, he looked like the climbers on boulders and rock faces in the Peak District, practising their skills before heading off to climb mountains in Scotland or further afield in the Alps, maybe even fulfilling a dream of making it up Mount Everest.
All of a sudden, he seemed to pull himself together. ‘Look, Sophie, Charleton is a really important contract for us. I’ll send you a couple of bags of the new stuff gratis and I’ll do you a decent discount on your first order.’ He sounded pretty confident that I’d like it, but I didn’t have high hopes. I just nodded and politely thanked him. I hadn’t been at Charleton House long before I’d learnt that Bruce was all about the sale; I don’t think I’d ever had a conversation with him about the origins of his beans or what the company was doing to support the farmers, let alone what flavours he was passionate about or why he had got into the coffee business. It didn’t look as if I was about to today, either.
‘Any idea what happened?’ It took me a minute to realise he had switched the conversation to Ben.
‘No, none.’
We’d reached the path that would lead him to the car park. There were a couple of police officers standing guard, making sure no one came bac
k into the gardens.
‘Right, well, I’d better be off.’ He stared back across the gardens to the stalls and the police activity around them before finally looking at me and shaking my hand. ‘I’ll have someone deliver those bags to you.’
With that, he was gone, his long strides powering him across the grass. He looked as if he was in a rush, but I wasn’t at all sorry that our meeting had been shorter than usual.
I dismissed Bruce from my mind and set off towards the house. There were plenty of far more important and productive things I needed to do with my time. My feet crunched up the wide gravel path and I caught a glimpse of Mark in one of the windows, pointing out towards the gardens and probably explaining the history of the estate to a group of Russian businessmen. They’d asked for somewhere to land their helicopter, to borrow one of the Duke’s private rooms to smoke cigars and drink champagne, and that none of the public go anywhere near them. What they’d got was the address of a football club ten miles away that might be prepared for them to land on the pitch, a tour with Mark in the same parts of the house as the general public, and extra members of our security team keeping an eye on them just in case they got difficult. The Duke and Duchess were happy to accommodate all sorts of requests, so long as they were reasonable and not the by-product of arrogance and wads of laundered cash.
I stopped to run my hand through a row of lavender plants that filled a long bed along the side of the path, and then brought it up to my nose, taking a deep breath. I’d picked up this habit from my father when I was a child and now I couldn’t walk past a lavender plant without trailing my hand through it.
‘Lavandula angustifolia, or common lavender.’ Malcolm walked over to join me. ‘Not a huge fan myself, reminds me of old aunts and grandmothers, but I once dated a girl whose family ran an enormous lavender farm in Provence so I know a bit about it. Beautiful – both the fields of lavender and the girl.’ He was wearing, appropriately enough, a lavender coloured t-shirt tucked into cream cargo shorts and straining over his stomach. He was as ruddy faced as he had been at the drinks reception; even more so, if that was possible.
‘Thought it was time I got out and about, got a bit of fresh air. Alex and I finished off a bottle of port last night. Well, I finished it off and he kept me company. Quite a night, eh?’ He seemed to have no clue that the morning had been infinitely more eventful. I didn’t have the energy to break it to him, and he’d find out soon enough if he tried to get into the gardens, so I played along.
‘How was the Duke? Was he very upset?’
‘Stoic, I guess you’d say. He talked a lot about the ceramicist. It was all rather dull; it’s never been my kind of thing, but I guess it was part of my role as supportive friend to listen to him.’ Malcolm didn’t seem too concerned about any of it, but if he hadn’t been in the Duke’s life for a while, then maybe some of the emotional connection between the two men had waned.
‘Were you very close when you were at university?’
Malcolm thought about the question for a moment. ‘I suppose we were, not that we discussed that kind of thing. We left that for the girls. I was a little surprised, to be honest with you; I didn’t think I had enough money to be accepted by his crowd as I had a very different upbringing. Normal, you’d probably call it. Father was the manager of a small local bank, mother stayed at home and looked after the children. It was the talk of the town when I got into Oxford. Of course, that was expected for Alex. Grandfather went, father went, Alex was next in line.
‘There was a group of us who always dined together. Lots of champagne flowed and late nights drinking extortionately priced whisky. Of course, none of them had to worry about money. They spent summers in French châteaux, enjoyed endless skiing trips, that sort of thing. They were good enough to invite me on a couple of their jaunts and pay my way – very generous, but it certainly stung a bit, I can tell you. Sense of pride and all that.’ He laughed, although it sounded more like a snort. ‘They probably viewed it as a charitable act. Made me work damned hard, though. I was determined I’d be able to pay my own way once we graduated, show them I could match them pound for pound.’
He stopped and stared off into the distance. After what felt like a few awkward minutes, but was probably only seconds, he turned to look at me and smiled, and with a much more upbeat tone brought the subject to a close.
‘Well, it seems to have worked. I’ve done pretty well for myself and the Duke remains a very generous man. I’m off for a stroll; it’s too nice a day to be inside. Hope to run into you again later, Sally.’
I was about to correct him, but he had already set off.
I had expected the Library Café to be quiet, but not this quiet. However, I couldn’t imagine it staying this way for long, unless the visitors assumed that the entire house was closed too. Tina was sitting at a table in the far corner, catching up on paperwork, a cappuccino and chocolate cookie beside her. A young member of staff stood behind the till, looking bored until she saw it was me who had walked in, at which point she jumped like someone had poked her from behind with something sharp.
‘Sophie, is it true?’ She started talking nineteen to the dozen. ‘We saw all the police cars and someone said something about a dead body in the Great Pond, but I’m not due on a break yet so I’ve not been able to go and find out. Were you there?’
Tina joined us and tried to calm the girl down. ‘Breathe, Chelsea, breathe. Let the poor woman sit down, I’m sure she’ll tell us what she can in a moment.’
Tina had always been a steady, calming influence on the staff, and I often reminded myself how lucky I was to have her. When I’d arrived at Charleton House, she’d made my transition into a new job so much easier by keeping things running smoothly while I’d spent my time in endless meetings and learning the ropes.
I sank into one of the armchairs, the cold leather against my skin a relief after the intense heat out in the gardens.
‘So, what’s the gossip?’ Tina was as keen as anyone to hear what had been going on.
‘The body wasn’t in the lake, it was in the back of that coffee Airstream. One of their staff. He’d been hit over the back of the head.’
‘Was it a break in?’
‘Joe said there were signs of a disturbance and things were missing, so that would make sense.’
I looked around the room. Only one table was taken and I recognised the customer as the Charleton House Health and Safety Manager. In a stiff grey suit, Anthony Leggett looked every inch a rule-making bureaucratic robot, but having sat in countless meetings with him, I knew that his exterior concealed a wicked sense of humour and someone with a firm grasp on the realities of working with the public.
‘You can’t account for the stupidity of people,’ was one of his most often-used comments.
‘Has it been this quiet all morning?’ I asked Tina.
‘Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it looks. We had a mid-morning rush, three muffins and a packet of nuts. You’ll be able to give us all pay rises.’ She grinned. ‘Really, don’t worry, this happens every year. No one expects the cafés to make any money when the festival is on. Well, maybe a little in the Garden Café. Some of our older regulars still like to go in there for their afternoon tea, and dog walkers stop by the Stables Café.’ Visitors didn’t need a ticket to the house to reach the Stables Café, which took up a small space in an attractive cobbled courtyard within the eighteenth-century stable block, so it was hugely popular with cyclists, hikers and others exploring the 40,000 acre estate.
‘Here in the Library,’ Tina continued, ‘we’ll only see the staff who are too busy to go into the garden, which as it’s a weekend is down to three people in IT with deadlines to meet and Anthony who’s here to check everything’s OK at the Food Festival. Mind you, that might change now. I’ll make some extra sandwiches.’
I looked over at Anthony; he had his phone wedged between his shoulder and ear and was frantically making notes. I wondered if he’d expected to spend the day g
etting free food, when instead he’d got a dead body and a mountain of paperwork.
Tina looked up. ‘Hang on, we’re saved, the rush has arrived. We’re about to sell at least one blueberry muffin, I’ll go and book a cruise.’
I turned round to be greeted by a stony-faced Mark.
‘Are you alright?’
‘This is the face of a man who has spent the last ninety minutes talking into the wind.’ He dropped into the armchair next to me. ‘I love my job, I love telling the stories of this amazing house, and often I have to do that to people who aren’t as interested in it as I am. You know, schoolkids who would rather be chasing the ducks on the Great Pond, journalists who are here because nothing has happened and their editor has forced them to go and do a piece on local tourist hot spots, or corporate guests who are only interested in the free alcohol. But this lot took the biscuit. They spent their time pointing at things and laughing, presumably claiming they have “three of these at home”, ogling female visitors in shorts and checking their phones.’
‘You mean the Russian group?’
‘I do. But on the upside, a couple of little old ladies from Newcastle who attached themselves to the back of the group got a top quality tour for free, and the Russians’ interpreter, who, to be fair, was hugely apologetic, gave me two hundred quid as a tip.’
‘Bloody hell!’ Chelsea shouted out. ‘Maybe I should become a tour guide.’
Mark rolled his eyes at me and shouted back, ‘Don’t get too excited, I can’t keep it. I’ll take it down to the ticket office and get it recorded and put in the till.’
Chelsea looked disappointed and started straightening packets of nuts. Mark waited until she looked preoccupied by her own thoughts, and then focused on me again.
‘So, any more developments? Does Joe have any leads?’ As he talked, he removed his tie and rolled up his sleeves.
‘No. I think he reckons a robbery, but he didn’t say much. Far too early, I guess.’
