Black Cherry Betrayal (Claire's Candles Cozy Mystery Book 2)
Page 22
The ‘nice, for being vegan’ cake Janet had baked for Em sat on the corner of the breakfast bar. Following a recipe borrowed from Marley, Janet had baked the cake for Em as a way of apology for her suspicions during the investigation. Since Em was truly as nice as Claire had suspected all along, she claimed not to have noticed. Janet even submitted to hugging it out with Em, and even though Claire hadn’t previously seen Em eat or drink anything other than raw fruit and vegetables, she’d had a slice with breakfast that morning.
The sound of BBC Radio Four drew her to the bottom of the garden. Through the streaky window in the shed door, she found her father at his desk. Rather than repotting a plant, his nose was buried in paperwork; it had been a while since Claire had seen that. She knocked, something she rarely did.
“Hello, little one,” he said with a smile as she walked in. “Hope your mother didn’t put you through your paces too much.”
“You know she did.” Claire sat on her plant pot in the corner, her entire body still aching from the constant trips in and out to Ray’s bin in the yard behind his cottage. “Where is she?”
“Women’s Institute meeting,” he replied with a playful roll of his eyes. “To discuss how they can affect moral change in the village after what happened to Jane.”
“Somehow, I don’t think bake sales and calendars will make much of a difference.” Claire glanced at the abandoned paper on the desk. “Reading anything good?”
“Some old case notes.” He pulled off his glasses and rubbed them on the corner of his shirt. “Ramsbottom owed me a favour.”
“How many favours does that man owe you?”
“Enough.” He winked before putting his glasses on. “You were right to connect the dots between Diane’s comments about her husband and my old case.”
Alan pulled a photograph from underneath a paperclip in the corner of the folder and handed it to Claire. Taken at a party in a pub, a young woman lazily smiled at the camera behind a table full of drinks. She wore heavy eyeliner and had long, peroxide-yellow hair with a blunt fringe.
“Diana King,” he stated. “She dropped the ‘a’ for an ‘e’ somewhere along the way, but it’s definitely her.”
Claire saw a resemblance, but she looked more like a distant cousin of Diane than a younger version. And yet, the slight curling of her lips reminded Claire of the smirk Diane had sported from the moment she dropped the act.
“It’s hard to trace when exactly Diane joined the staff at Starfall House,” he said as he took the picture back, “but Diana King dropped off our radar around 1979. From the comment Diane made to you about him holding a knife to her throat, it sounds like he got what was coming to him.”
“Must feel good to have some answers for an old unsolved case?”
“It should,” he said with a sigh, “but it doesn’t. She was young, and he wasn’t. Diana King had no parents and no other family. I think she would have married anyone at the time, and she ended up with a man she felt she had to kill to escape. We might look at her as a monster now, but she was nineteen when she killed her first victim. A different time, and she might have felt like she could have sought help.”
“Or, she might have killed him anyway,” she pointed out. “By the end, she seemed to have a taste for it.”
“I can’t believe I didn’t see the truth then, nor can I believe I never put the two women together.”
“I don’t think she wanted you to,” Claire pointed out. “Now that I think of it, she talked about Starfall House like she was hiding there. She admitted she barely left the place, unless she was . . .”
Claire’s voice trailed off as she pulled her phone out. Looking at the enhanced picture Damon had sent her, Agnes Reid’s words about the photographer suddenly came to mind.
“Unless she was running errands or going for a jog around the square in the early morning,” Claire continued, zooming in on the picture. “Diane told me that herself. Jane must have been really out of it by that point not to recognise her. Diane must have seen Jane return in the taxi and closed everything up behind her before taking the cases.”
“We might never know.”
“She’s still not talking?”
“Hasn’t said a word since her arrest,” he said, sucking the air through his teeth, “and I doubt she ever will. Doesn’t matter, though. They found the arsenic in her bags. That, along with your statement and the connection to this old case, she isn’t getting out of prison for a long time.”
“Unless she lives as long as Opal.”
Alan chuckled. “Well, let’s hope she doesn’t.”
Claire stared down at the dusty floor, the guilt from disobeying her father still playing with her. He’d been right to warn her, but she’d been too focussed on the case to listen.
“Chin up, little one.” He lifted her head up with his finger. “It’s all over now, thanks to you.”
“I know, but I’m still–”
“Don’t apologise.” He pushed himself up with the armrests. “You only did what I would have done.”
Alan stood, but as he began gathering up the file, his left foot doubled over on itself. He fell forward and caught himself with the table, knocking his cup in the process. Tea soaked the soil-covered surface of the old desk, as well as the file atop it.
“It’s alright,” he said with a huff as he pushed himself up. “Bad foot day.”
“I’ll fetch a cloth.”
“No.” He straightened and pushed forward a smile. “I’ll get one. It’s only photocopies, anyhow.”
Alan grabbed his cane before making his way carefully out of the shed. Knowing he’d take a while, Claire picked up the folder and let the excess tea roll off the cover. She opened the top drawer of the desk where she knew he kept tissues; a gardener with hay fever needed a steady supply. The tissues were there, but her eyes drifted right past them to a crisp white letter amongst the mucky tools.
Claire wasn’t one for reading her father’s mail, but this letter was addressed to her. She picked it out, shocked to see a stack of five more, all addressed to her, behind it. Even without the ‘HM Prison Manchester’ logo on the envelope, she recognised the curl of the ‘C’ on her name; she’d seen the same one in a lifetime of birthday and Christmas cards.
The urge to rip open the envelope overcame her, but on the other side of the back garden, the kitchen door closed. With shaky fingers, Claire stuffed the letters back where she found them and plucked out some tissues before closing the drawer.
After wiping up as much of the tea-created mud as she could, she returned to her corner. Alan returned with a tea towel. She wanted to question him immediately, but she could see the embarrassment from his accident behind his barely-there smile.
Why had her murderous Uncle Pat been writing to her from prison? And more importantly, why was her father pilfering her mail?
These mysteries needed solving, but they could wait, at least until her father seemed ready to talk about his brother.
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Also by Agatha Frost
Claire’s Candles
1. Vanilla Bean Vengeance
2. Black Cherry Betrayal
3. Coconut Milk Casualty
Peridale Cafe
Book 1-10 Boxset
1. Pancakes and Corpses
2. Lemonade and Lies
3. Doughnuts and Deception
4. Chocolate Cake and Chaos
5. Shortbread and Sorrow
6. Espresso and Evil
7. Macarons and Mayhem
8. Fruit Cake and Fear
9. Birthday Cake and Bodies
10. Gingerbread and Ghosts
11.Cupcakes and Casualties
12. Blueberry Muffins and Misfortune
13. Ice Cream and Incidents
14. Champagne and Catastrophes
15. Wedding Cake and Woes
16. Red Velvet and Revenge
17. Vegetables and Vengeance
18. Cheesecake and Confusion
19. Brownies and Bloodshed
20. Cocktails and Cowardice
21. Profiteroles and Poison (NEW!)