Winter of Discontent

by Jeanne M. Dams

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  ELEVEN

  TWELVE

  THIRTEEN

  FOURTEEN

  FIFTEEN

  SIXTEEN

  SEVENTEEN

  EIGHTEEN

  NINETEEN

  TWENTY

  TWENTY-ONE

  TWENTY-TWO

  TWENTY-THREE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  TWENTY-FIVE

  TWENTY-SIX

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  TWENTY-NINE

  THIRTY

  DOROTHY MARTIN MYSTERIES

  Copyright Page

  To Barb and Mark,

  who never let me get by with a thing,

  this book is gratefully dedicated

  ONE

  I LOOKED AT THE CALENDAR AND SIGHED. NOT ONLY A MONDAY, but December eighth. Exactly seventeen days till Christmas and I had done almost nothing. No cookies had been baked, no cards sent, no presents bought, let alone wrapped.

  It’s true that I’m a chronic procrastinator, but this time I had a good excuse. Recent events, including a fairly narrow escape from being murdered, had taken up a good deal of my time and every bit of my energy.

  However, excuses notwithstanding, Christmas was going to be here in a little over two weeks, and I wasn’t going to be ready, not unless I got my act together immediately. I poured myself the last cup of coffee in the pot, checked to make sure that my husband was happily occupied with his memoirs, and sat down to make a list.

  Half an hour later I kissed Alan on the top of his head as he sat absorbed in front of the computer. “I’m going shopping. I may not be home for lunch. There’s soup in the fridge.”

  He muttered something. I knew he’d really heard me and would remember what I’d said when he got hungry and I wasn’t there. I patted his shoulder fondly and went out the back door, clapping an old plaid tam on my head.

  It was an incredibly beautiful day for December. The temperature was at least fifty, the sun was shining brightly, and the jasmine on the south wall of my house was in full, fragrant bloom. Perverse creature that I am, I resented the weather. My soul, nourished by more than sixty years of life in the Midwestern United States, insisted that there should be snow. It was a foolish longing. We seldom got much snow here in the part of southeastern England I’d adopted as my home.

  Never mind. By the time I got back home I’d be glad enough of dry feet and warm hands and would, I hoped, be imbued with the somewhat frenetic Christmas cheer forced upon me by the merchants.

  I knocked on my neighbor’s back door. Jane Langland, my best friend, was often willing to accompany me on my jaunts, and I find shopping much less tiring with company.

  I was greeted by Jane’s bulldogs. I’m never sure how many she has. Soft touch that she is, she’s forever bringing home a new one from the animal shelter and then placing it in a good home, so the population varies. They are all invariably good-humored, gregarious, and extremely interested in the way I smell (perhaps because I have two cats). I patted the nearest ones, shoved away the too-curious ones, and waited until Jane herded them all out of the way and motioned me into her pleasant kitchen.

  “Sorry. Miserable beasts,” she said in fond tones that belied her words. “Coffee?”

  “Thanks, but I don’t have time to stay. I’m off to do my extremely belated Christmas shopping, and hoped you’d come with me.”

  “Well.” She considered. “Laundry folded, washing-up done, no committees today—right. Why not? Want to stop at the museum in any case.”

  She looked at her feet as she muttered the last remark, and I tried hard not to smile. “Do you have a present for Bill?”

  “No. Need to talk to him.” She spoke gruffly and stumped out into the vestibule. She pulled a sweater off a peg. “Coming, then?”

  “How has Bill been?” I pursued as we walked past my house. It’s at the end of the street, which is a dead end terminating with a gate into the Cathedral Close. The quickest route to the High Street and most of the shops is through the Cathedral. “I haven’t visited the museum lately.”

  “Hmph! Blinking fool!”

  I took this to refer to Bill, not me. And I was pretty sure I knew why she was upset. “So he still won’t come to live with you?”

  “Hah! Sensible thing to do, with both of us lonely, and nearly eighty, and him an old crock who can barely walk. Not taking proper care of himself.”

  “Well, I’ve said before and I say again, I think there’s a reason. Don’t look at me that way! I don’t think he’s suddenly lost his fondness for you, so it must be something else. Maybe he doesn’t like your house. Maybe he doesn’t care for dogs. Maybe he hates the idea of living so close to the church bells. Maybe he’s just afraid of losing his independence.”

  “Hmph!” said Jane again. I thought she was going to say something else, but she shook her head and closed her mouth firmly.

  I was thoughtful as we took the shortcut through the Cathedral and out again and turned onto the High Street. Jane had told me, in bits and pieces, about her decades-old romance, and I found the story infinitely pathetic.

  She and Bill Fanshawe, neighbors in Sherebury long ago, had known each other from infancy, but love had blossomed when they were just eighteen, in 1943. They desperately wanted to marry, but that was a bad time for romance. Their families insisted they were both too young and times too uncertain. Bill had enlisted in the RAF as soon as he was old enough, promising he would marry her as soon as the war was over and he came home.

  But he hadn’t come home when the war was over. His plane had been shot down over Germany and Bill taken prisoner. His prison camp was liberated in due time, of course, but under the harsh conditions his injuries had never healed properly. A broken leg, badly set, left him crippled and unable to work at his previous factory job. Even after English doctors did the best they could, he was unfit for factory work and untrained for any other job that could support a wife. Jane had begun her teaching career by that time, so she was earning a little. Bill doggedly worked at whatever menial jobs he could find while he studied history at Sherebury University. They both lived with their parents and tried to save, but the post-war austerity programs made life hard and saving almost impossible.

  Then, in the early fifties, Bill’s father was offered a better job in Norwich. The family moved, and Bill, unable to support himself, had little choice but to go with them. In the bigger city, Bill, too, was able to find a better job, his knowledge of history leading to work in the city’s museum. The two lovers tried to keep up a correspondence, but since neither had the time or the money to travel to see the other, the letters became unsatisfactory and eventually lapsed. Jane lost touch with Bill except for the occasional Christmas card. Neither married. Time went by.

  It was in the mid-nineties, as I recalled, that Bill retired and decided to return to Sherebury. He fou
nd a comfortable little flat in what had been a wool merchant’s grand house in the seventeenth century. He had finished his degree and become a curator of some note by that time, so when the small Museum of Sherebury moved into the splendid old Town Hall and lost wispy little Mr. Pym, its old curator, Bill was a logical successor. He settled in happily and began to see Jane now and then.

  The trouble was, they’d both become set in their ways. If they’d hoped (as the gossipy little town, eagerly awaiting developments, certainly hoped) to take up where they’d left off, they were disappointed. A late-life romance did not develop. But they still shared many of the same interests and enjoyed each other’s company. The town held its collective breath and kept hoping, until a major rift developed.

  The trouble arose when Bill fell on the stairs getting to his flat, which was on the top floor of the old house. He wasn’t hurt, only shaken up, but Jane was extremely upset. Being Jane, she tried to take charge. Bill, with the old weakness in his leg, had no business climbing all those stairs, she insisted. In fact, he had no business living alone at his age.

  When she had recounted the conversation to me, I had refrained from saying that she lived alone, in a house with many stairs, and that she was the same age as Bill. I wasted my tact. It seemed that Bill had pointed out that very fact. Jane had then changed tactics and said there was no sense in both of them living alone. She would be more than happy to have him move in with her, as a paying guest if he liked, and they’d be there for each other in case of illness or other disaster.

  Well, that put the fat in the fire. Bill backed off like a scalded cat. I thought, personally, that he took the suggestion as a backhanded sort of marriage proposal, and was scared to death of the idea. I didn’t say so to Jane, of course. She was mortally offended, and became even more upset when Bill up and moved to Heatherwood House, a retirement home in a beautiful old manor house on the edge of town. At one blow he had rejected her, dealt with all her objections about his unsafe living conditions, and distanced himself from her physically as well.

  Jane Langland is one of the kindest people I know. She’s also one of the stubbornest, and I’m well equipped to recognize the trait. She didn’t give up. She called on him at the museum every chance she got, raising some new argument. I suspected that they secretly enjoyed the quarrels a good deal, and I was looking forward to watching them spar today.

  Not yet, though. Shopping came first. List clutched in my hand, I steered Jane firmly in the direction opposite the Town Hall.

  Two hours later, only halfway through my list, I was more than ready to stop for lunch. My feet hurt, my arms were weighed down with packages, I had a headache, and I was starving. So much for Christmas spirit. “Jane, let’s go to Alderney’s. It’s about halfway home, and even with your help, I can’t carry all this stuff much farther. Besides, they have wonderful food and I don’t have much at home.”

  “Better idea. Town Hall’s just across the street. Pop in there and leave your parcels.”

  “That is a good idea! And maybe Bill will come to lunch with us, if his assistant is there today.” I glanced slyly at Jane, but she refused to meet my eye.

  We staggered across the street. Jane opened the heavy old oak door and I negotiated the half flight of stairs to the level where the museum occupied the space vacated some years before by the city offices. The architects, with Bill to advise them, had done a lovely job with it. The building retained its Elizabethan dignity, and the artifacts of centuries of Sherebury history were displayed attractively.

  The desk he usually occupied in the corner was vacant, and there was no sign of his assistant.

  “Jane, he must be upstairs looking something up, and I positively cannot climb any more stairs.” Bill, I knew, had been doing a lot of work lately in the storerooms, pulling out odd bits and pieces that had been donated to the museum years ago and trying to make some sense of them.

  “HELLO-O!” Jane’s stentorian bellow raised some dust motes that eddied in the sunlight coming through a leaded-glass window. There was no other response.

  “Old fool’s fallen asleep up there. Suppose I’d best wake him.”

  Jane made for the stairs while I sank gratefully into a chair. Jane’s older than I, but better able to climb stairs, especially when my arthritic knees are acting up. I often think it’s unfair that I feel about thirty-five on the inside, but the outer shell sometimes seems to be approaching a hundred. I leaned back as far as the rather hard chair would allow and closed my eyes. I’d have time for forty winks before Jane persuaded Bill to leave his work and come to lunch with us.

  She came back before I’d reached even the edge of sleep. “He’s not there,” she announced.

  Her tone of voice roused me. “But—he’d surely never leave the place unattended. He must have gone to the loo.”

  “Knocked. Then peeked in. No one.”

  This was unexpected. Bill Fanshawe was fanatically reliable. He viewed the museum’s collection as virtually his own property, and guarded it jealously. He would never have walked off with the doors unlocked. I tried to make my weary brain function properly. “Maybe he isn’t here at all today, and his assistant has done something foolish—gone off for a sandwich or whatever, and left the museum open.”

  Jane, prowling restlessly, reached Bill’s desk and did some rummaging. “No,” she said, holding up one of the papers. “Schedule for the week. Bill’s here alone today.”

  I looked at her blankly. “Well, then, where is he?”

  TWO

  WE DID THE OBVIOUS THINGS FIRST “WHERE DOES HE USUALLY go for lunch? Do you know?” I asked Jane.

  “Usually brings a sandwich and an apple and a flask of tea.” Jane opened a bottom drawer of the desk and produced a plastic bag with food in it. The tea flask was on the desk, some of the tea poured out into a mug. The mug was about half full, and was stone-cold.

  So we searched. We searched the whole building, including the basement storage area and the attic, my knees protesting loudly. We found stacks of old documents and artifacts, file cabinets, shelves, display cases—all the things one would expect to find in a museum. In the basement and attic we found, also, evidence that spiders, mice, and bats had enjoyed the hospitality of the City of Sherebury. We opened the secret room in the attic (the one that everyone in town knew about) and found an inhabited mouse’s nest. That wasn’t the high point of my day.

  We did not find Bill Fanshawe.

  Exhausted, we retired back to the main room of the museum, collapsed into chairs, and tried to collect our thoughts.

  “Could he have run out to get something he urgently needed? Some—oh, paper clips or something?” I asked hopefully.

  “Not without locking up. Always locked up. Be back by now, anyway.”

  That was reasonable. Jane and I looked at each other. I nodded slowly. “Something’s happened, then. He’s fallen, or become ill, and someone’s taken him to the hospital without bothering about closing up the museum.”

  Jane got up without a word, went to Bill’s desk, and picked up the phone. In quick succession, she phoned Sherebury’s one hospital, Bill’s doctor, and the St. John’s Ambulance Service. After each call she shook her head.

  I bit my lip. “Maybe he was feeling so ill he went home and forgot—”

  Jane looked exasperated. “I tell you, he wouldn’t forget. This museum is his life.”

  “Well, we can at least see if his car is here. And we can call Heatherwood House.”

  Jane knew Bill’s car and where he usually parked it. While she went out to check, I called the retirement home. He wasn’t there, and Jane came back to report that his car was in its usual place.

  “Did you think to feel the hood?”

  “Cold.”

  I sighed. “Then it’s time to call the police, isn’t it?”

  Neither of us had wanted to admit that the matter might be serious, but it was looking more and more that way.

  “Won’t be any use. Won’t consider
him a missing person so soon.”

  “You could be right, but I’ll bet if I have Alan call we’ll get some action.” For my husband is the retired chief constable of the county of Belleshire, in which Sherebury is located, and his influence at police headquarters is still considerable.

  But Alan, when I made the call, wasn’t home. I’d told him I’d be out for lunch; he probably took advantage of my absence to run some errands. I hung up on the answering machine, pondered a moment, and then dialed the police myself.

  I was lucky enough to reach Inspector Derek Morrison—Detective Chief Inspector, to give him his full title. He was a friend and virtually the only man I knew on the force anymore. He listened patiently, even though he deals only with major crimes.

  “Well, you know there’s very little we can do at this point, officially, that is. Unofficially I can ask our people to keep their eyes open. I agree it’s somewhat puzzling, but people do sometimes behave in unexpected ways.”

  “I know, but—”

  “Dorothy, I do understand your concern. Have you considered the possibility that he may simply have wandered off? I hate to mention it, but people his age do, you know.”

  I was glad Jane couldn’t hear him. “I doubt it, in this case.” My tone had become somewhat frosty.

  “All right, I’ll tell you what. It’s well past time I found some lunch. Suppose I take a little jaunt out to Heatherwood House. They might have some suggestions. Meanwhile, try not to worry too much. I’m sure he’ll turn up.”

  I hung up the phone and turned to Jane. “No good, really. He was kind, but a little patronizing.”

  “Suggested Bill had got lost? Old, absentminded, all that rot?”

  “More or less.”

  Jane snorted. “I’m more likely to get lost than Bill is. So are you.”

  “I get lost all the time. I admit it. It’s your wretched medieval street system. I’m used to nice rectangular blocks. However, I agree about Bill. Now, look. We’re both tired and hungry. I think we need to take a little time to replenish our energy and think sensibly about what to do. Is there a key on the premises anywhere, do you think? I hate to leave the place unlocked again.”