‘That’s because I’m not. Things looked more than a bit compromising when I called on my way here to try and find Pye. But I am surprised they were so careless, because I always thought she liked having both of you on a string, telling her how wonderful she was.’
He wasn’t listening, self-absorbed as usual. ‘It was a huge shock to me! And when I confronted them, she said I’d driven her into Jeremy’s arms by accusing her of lying about you, so I might as well divorce her because she wasn’t coming back.’
‘I had a feeling it would all turn out to be my fault,’ I said. ‘What happened then? I mean, pretend I care what the three of you get up to any more.’
‘Jeremy said he was sorry, he hadn’t meant it to be this way and he hoped we could stay friends. And then I hit him,’ he added.
‘I can’t say I blame you, really,’ I said. ‘Was that the end of it?’
‘Pretty much, because Kate got hysterical and told me to leave, so I did … but if it wasn’t for you, we’d still be together and none of this would have happened.’
‘Look, face facts, Luke,’ I told him wearily. ‘Even if I had committed fraud, which I hadn’t, Kate started the whole ball rolling by contacting that TV programme. No one forced her to do it, or to tell lies. You might like to ask yourself why she was so keen to incriminate me.’
There was a pause. ‘You think she wanted you out of the way?’
‘Hand the man a coconut,’ I said sarcastically, and switched the phone off.
As I passed the almshouses on my way home, Old Nan appeared at one of the doors and beckoned me in, where she regaled me with shop-bought Chelsea buns, stewed tea and a lot of gossip about the Martlands, including the complete history of Guy’s jealous relationship with his older brother and how it had only been when Holly came along that the breach was finally healed between them.
‘But Guy was always a child who wanted what someone else had got, then threw it away the minute he had it,’ she said acutely.
I don’t suppose you spend a lifetime being a nanny without being able to put your finger on a child’s character! I suspected he hadn’t changed much.
Chapter 38: Give Me a Ring
Q:What did the beaver say to the tree?
A:Nice gnawing you!
On the morning of Randal’s brief visit, I was down at the mill when he arrived and then he and Mercy were due to go and see the solicitor and accountant, so I knew they’d be out all day.
I thought I could put up with him at dinner, especially since he was flying off on Saturday to Vietnam, followed by another trip to Thailand, so wouldn’t be back for ages.
This suited me, but I wondered how Lacey felt about seeing so little of her fiancée.
At the mill, the electricians had finished rewiring and putting new lights and sockets into the museum rooms, according to Silas’s careful floor plan of where the lit displays would be placed, so I retouched the undercoat where it had been damaged, without getting any drips on the new floor.
The professional painters were coming in to apply the final coat of the soft, pale dove-grey chosen by Silas and Mercy, so other than waiting for window blinds to be fitted and the display boards and cabinets to be delivered, there wasn’t much more for me to do in there.
Mercy had left me a long list of people to call and instructions to give to the various workmen, which I did, then I went on an errand to Great Mumming. Luckily she’d gone out in Randal’s car, so I didn’t have to outrage Job by taking the estate.
I made crackers all afternoon with the others (we were still completing the last orders for the old ones), until they clocked off at four and went home, but I could see that Randal’s big car had returned and was parked at the garages near the house, so I turned down past Hope Terrace and went for a little walk along the lane at the bottom. I wanted to avoid any risk of having to be polite to him over an afternoon tea I didn’t really want anyway.
I headed the other way for a change, right to the T-junction with the steep road up the hill to Little Mumming, where one of the rare buses was coming down, brakes squealing wearily as it reached the bottom.
There was a real seat at the roadside just there, a wooden bench weathered a shiny silver grey, and I sat on it to check my phone for messages. I hoped there’d be something more from Emma, and there was: she said Des was off to Qatar on the 11th and she’d ring me for a good catch-up after that.
I had no idea where Qatar was, but presumably they wanted structural engineers just as much as Dubai did.
There was nothing further from Luke, but to my surprise there were two messages from Jeremy! I couldn’t think why he felt the need to try to involve me in his goings-on, too, but after hesitating for a few moments I opened them.
‘Ring me: I can never seem to get through on this number,’ said the first, while the second read, ‘I urgently need to speak to you on a matter of great importance.’
Importance to whom? I thought, and I couldn’t imagine what he could think I needed to hear, but that urgent bit got me in the end and so I did call him back.
He answered at the third ring and I could hear a piano being strenuously thumped in the background, so he must have been giving a private lesson. ‘Is that you at last, Tabby?’ he snapped. ‘Wait a minute, my pupil’s just about to leave.’
There was a pause, during which I could hear his voice saying, ‘That’s the end of the lesson, Joshua. No, I realise your mother’s not here yet, but she knows what time it finishes so you’ll just have to wait on the doorstep for her, won’t you?’
Then the door slammed and he was back.
‘Bloody cheek some of these parents have, thinking I’m going to be a childminder, too,’ he said. ‘That woman’s always dumping him here and coming back half an hour late.’
‘Well, that’s absolutely fascinating, Jeremy, but I didn’t call you back to hear that. What did you want? You said it was important.’
‘It is, and I’d have come over if you hadn’t rung me back today.’
‘Oh, you’ve missed me so much you just had to see me again?’ I said sarcastically.
‘No – it’s my mother’s ring I’ve just missed it and I want it back.’
‘Your mother’s ring?’ I echoed blankly. Then the penny dropped. ‘Do you mean my engagement ring?’
He’d presented me with the half-hoop of opals and pearls instead of buying a new one, which at the time I’d thought was a slightly weird measure of his love for me, though later I realised he was just too tight to spend any money.
‘Actually, it wasn’t an engagement ring at all,’ he asserted, to my complete astonishment. ‘When I told you I wanted you to wear it, you were the one who jumped to the conclusion I was proposing.’
‘Are you trying to say now that you weren’t? But you told me you wanted us to be together for ever and you’d like me to wear your mother’s ring, so I can’t imagine how else I was meant to take that!’
‘That’s not exactly the same as asking you to marry me, is it?’
‘I don’t see how I could have interpreted it any other way, and we told everyone we were engaged, too. We even celebrated.’
‘You told everyone and I just went along with it, because I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.’
‘How kind!’ I said. ‘Mind you, I did think an opal and pearl ring an odd choice, because it was too delicate to wear all the time. I was constantly taking it off, in case it got damaged.’
‘I didn’t notice it among your things when I was packing them up, though I suppose it could have been in that locked wooden box you’re so secretive about,’ he said, and I was so glad I’d always kept the key on my ring, so he hadn’t been able to paw through the photographs and mementoes of my mother that I kept in there.
‘I hope you weren’t wearing it when you went to prison and it’s gone missing,’ he said sharply.
I cast my mind back. ‘No, I’m sure I wasn’t, because they made a list of everything I had with me, including my watch and the things in my
handbag, and the ring wasn’t on it.’
‘Then you must still have it.’
‘Jeremy, after all this time I haven’t the faintest idea where it is, but if I can find it you can have it, because I certainly don’t want it any more,’ I told him. ‘But if it isn’t among my things, then it must still be in the house.’
‘Like where?’ he demanded.
‘I don’t know – anywhere, I might have taken it off before I washed up, or done anything else that would damage it. Sometimes I put it in a vase,’ I suggested helpfully.
‘I’m sure I’d have noticed it by now, so I think you’re just stalling, because you don’t want to return it,’ he said. ‘But it’s a valuable ring and if you don’t come up with it quickly, I’m going to report you to the police for theft.’
‘And I suppose Kate would back up your story, wouldn’t she?’ I said bitterly. ‘Luke told me the penny’s finally dropped about you two having an affair.’
‘Leave Kate out of this,’ he said, and rang off, leaving me feeling shaken, angry and worried.
I found the threat of the police terrified me, since I knew at first-hand how easily the innocent could be imprisoned, and now I had previous form there’d be even less chance that I’d be believed.
Lost in thought, I trudged back up the hill. Pye, who was sitting on the wall of the bridge over the moat like a weird heraldic beast, greeted me with a yowl of welcome. Then, seeming to sense that I was in need of comfort, he jumped onto my shoulders and wrapped himself around my neck like a strange fur cape.
I went round to the kitchen, which was mercifully empty, and made for my rooms. There I ransacked my treasure box without finding any trace of the ring, before carefully sifting through everything else I owned, even checking the pockets of all my clothes.
The ring wasn’t to be found.
I realised time had whizzed by while I was searching when Mercy called me into the kitchen for dinner.
‘You look rather upset, my dear,’ she said with concern as I took my place next to Silas, who was tucking a chequered linen napkin into the collar of his Tattersall shirt. ‘Not bad news, I hope?’
Randal, who had evidently been helping her cook in my absence, put the last of the serving dishes on the table, removed a large blue and white striped apron and sat down opposite, fixing his dark hazel eyes on my face with his usual frown.
But despite his being there, I just had to tell someone what was on my mind and said, ‘I’ve had a call from my ex-fiancé, Jeremy. He wanted the engagement ring back.’
‘That seems a little curmudgeonly,’ she exclaimed.
‘It was an opal and pearl ring that belonged to his mother and now he says that when he gave it to me and told me he wanted us to be together for ever he wasn’t proposing.’
‘But under those circumstances, what else you were expected to think?’
‘I don’t hold with modern manners,’ Silas interjected. ‘Wait till you’re wed before you live together, that’s best.’
‘With hindsight, I’m sure you’re right,’ I told him. ‘But Jeremy certainly let me go on thinking we were engaged and talked about getting married, though he was always reluctant to set a date. Perhaps that’s why.’
‘Whether he meant it as an engagement ring or not, it does sound as if he gave it to you, rather than loaned it,’ Randal said. ‘I don’t think he can expect you to give it back, though if it was his mother’s perhaps it has sentimental value to him.’
‘I didn’t actually wear it much, because pearls and opals aren’t the most durable stones for an engagement ring and I’d be more than happy to give it back … if only I knew where it was.’
‘Don’t you have it?’ he asked, with another of the suspicious, searching stares he seemed to save just for me.
‘I’ve no idea where it is. I hadn’t even thought of it since I – since everything happened. Jeremy packed my stuff up himself, and I’ve been right through everything again, and it simply isn’t there.’
‘Where else might you have put it, dear?’ asked Mercy.
‘I could have taken it off while gardening, or washing up or something, but Jeremy said he’d have noticed if I’d left it lying about.’
‘I can’t see that you can do any more than you have, then,’ Silas said.
‘But he seems to be convinced I’ve got it and he threatened that if I didn’t return it he’d report the theft to the police.’ I shivered suddenly. ‘I don’t want to go to prison again!’
‘No, no, dear, we won’t let it come to that,’ Mercy assured me.
‘If you have witnesses who knew you were engaged and were shown that ring while your ex-fiancé was there, then I don’t think he’s got a case anyway,’ Randal said, and I was just about to thank him gratefully when he spoiled it by continuing, ‘I’d give it back if you know where it is, though.’
‘I’ve just said I don’t,’ I replied indignantly, and he raised one fair, disbelieving eyebrow.
‘I’ll go through all my things yet again later, but that’s all I can do, so I hope he doesn’t follow through with his threat and turn up here.’
‘You can leave me to deal with him if he does,’ Mercy said firmly, and then the talk turned to the mill and what they’d been doing today, though I could see Randal would rather not discuss it in front of me.
He was even less keen that I was there when Mercy told him over the apple crumble and custard that she and Silas were both still troubled by the nature of Lacey’s business interests.
‘Not from any prudishness, because the physical love between two people who have committed their lives to each other in the sight of God is a beautiful thing,’ she said, and I found my face colouring hotly as I inadvertently caught Randal’s eye.
‘But making a business out of sex is far removed from that and your uncle Albert would have been very averse to such a thing being based at Friendship Mill.’
‘I’d be averse too,’ Silas said, between greedy mouthfuls of crumble.
‘I have to admit, it troubles me,’ Mercy agreed.
‘But times change and Lacey can’t understand why you feel that way,’ Randal said. ‘She’s already in two minds about whether she’d want to move up here now anyway, because I don’t think she’d ever been further north than the Cotswolds and she found Lancashire a very long way from London.’
‘It sounded like she was expecting a stately home like Chatsworth, too,’ I said helpfully, and got another glare for my pains.
‘I’m praying about it, Randal, and I’m going to ask for guidance at a Meeting,’ Mercy said.
I don’t think Randal was that keen on having such a personal subject revealed to the entire Meeting House of Friends, but he just said sarkily that perhaps she could let him know the outcome – if there was any.
After we’d had coffee in the drawing room, during which Pye tracked invisible creatures across the room, which seemed to unnerve Randal as much as it did me, he went out to see Jude Martland. I searched for the ring again, but drew a blank.
Then, assuming Jeremy still had the same email address, I went into the library and sent him a message telling him that I definitely hadn’t got it and suggesting all the places in the house where I might have put it. It was a fairly long list, including a tin can in the garden shed and the pottery dish in the flat in which I kept the washing-up sponge I used for Pye’s dinner bowls.
I felt a little reassured by what Randal had said, because I could produce oodles of witnesses to my being engaged to Jeremy, some of whom had admired the ring, which was distinctive enough to remember.
And although Randal himself might still think I had the ring, at least he didn’t think I could be prosecuted for it!
Chapter 39: Sweet Liberty
Q:Who hides in the bakery at Christmas?
A:A mince spy!
Randal came down to the kitchen while I was cooking my breakfast – I’d forgotten he’d said he’d need to start back to London really early.
; Despite his protests, I gave him my bacon and fried egg and cooked some more, and when I came back to the table I caught him feeding a bit of rind to Pye.
‘Oh, you’re friends now?’ I asked, surprised.
‘I wouldn’t go that far, because the way he was looking at me, I was either going to give him the bacon voluntarily, or be mugged.’
‘Mmmrow,’ agreed Pye, licking his whiskers.
‘Well, no more, because too much isn’t good for him,’ I said firmly.
‘You tell him to leave me alone, then,’ he said. ‘And why isn’t he after yours now?’
‘Because he knows he won’t get any from me, though Mercy is a soft touch, too.’
‘I am not a soft touch – which you’ll discover if ever you even put one foot out of line,’ he said disagreeably, and then became entirely monosyllabic: he’s really not a morning person.
Mercy and I waved him off on his journey (though only one of us felt any regret), and then I went to the library to check if Jeremy had answered my email. And he had: apparently he’d now searched the house with a fine-tooth comb, not to mention the garden shed and greenhouse, and the ring was nowhere to be found – presumably because I still had it.
Then there were more threats about reporting me to the police if I didn’t return it, so I felt quite grateful to Randal for making me see how hollow they were.
I relayed this to Jeremy, then said the only other thing I could do was come to the house myself and search in all the places I might have put it, in case there was somewhere he hadn’t tried.
There was no answer to that one at all, so I hoped that was the end of it.
On Saturday, still slightly softened by gratitude, I thought of poor Randal reluctantly winging his way across the world to Vietnam, Thailand and wherever else in that direction he had to go. I got most of my education from the nearest branch of the public library, and my geography was sketchy to say the least, but I knew it was a long flight.
I’d even less idea where Qatar was, but now that Des had finally left for his three-month stint there, I borrowed the car next day and met Emma and Marco at the Botanical Gardens in Merchester.
A Christmas Cracker Page 25
