Body on Baker Street

by Vicki Delany

  A house on the ocean would be very expensive. I couldn’t help glancing at Kevin. If he married Linda, he might be coming into money. Had he helped that fortunate set of circumstances along?

  “Excuse me, excuse me. My party is already seated.” I glanced up to see a woman pushing her way through the patrons clustered in the doorway.

  “Incoming,” I said. “No time to hide.”

  “I thought I might find you here.” Paige Bookman arrived at our table. She stood over us, feet apart, hands on hips. “I went around to your hotel, but they said you’d gone out.” The table for four beside us had recently been vacated, and Jocelyn was collecting used dishes and gathering stray crumbs. Paige grabbed a chair and flipped it around. She dropped into it and attempted to wiggle herself between Linda and me.

  “Go away, Paige,” Kevin said. “This is a private meeting.”

  “Good. I’ve arrived in time. Have you considered my proposition?” She helped herself to the lemon tart.

  “Proposition?” Linda asked.

  “Didn’t he tell you?” Paige glared at Kevin.

  “No, I did not,” he said. “It’s not worth wasting Linda’s time over.”

  “I’ll be the judge of that,” Paige said.

  “You’re not in the position to be the judge of anything.” Kevin jumped up. He took hold of Linda’s arm and half-lifted her to her feet. “We’re leaving. Thanks for the tea, Gemma. Your restaurant is great, but some of your patrons are not.” His voice was loud and angry. Heads began to turn.

  “It’s a good idea!” Paige shouted. “Hear me out, Linda. I can continue the series. I’ll keep it faithful to Renalta’s vision. It’s really my vision, but I’ll give her some of the credit. I’ll make sure they keep her name on the cover. Under mine, of course.”

  “You’re a nutcase,” Kevin said. “The sooner you’re locked up, the better.” He almost dragged Linda out of the tea room. Startled patrons watched them go. Someone murmured, “Renalta’s people,” and someone else snapped a picture.

  “I’ve written to McNamara and Gibbons!” Paige shouted after them. “I’m confident they’ll agree, but it would be nice if we had Renalta’s family’s official approval.” The door swung shut. Paige turned to me. “I’m just trying to be considerate. I was thinking of hiring Linda to work for me because she managed Renalta’s schedule and things, but I’m certainly not going to do that now. Are you going to have that last scone?”

  “Help yourself.”

  “Thanks. I’m running low on funds, I don’t mind saying. Everything’s so expensive here in the summer, isn’t it? I’m expecting a hefty advance soon, and that’ll help.”

  “I’m sure it will. What advance is this?”

  “For the next Hudson and Holmes book, of course. It’s quite common now, isn’t it? For new authors to take over popular series when the original author dies.”

  “It’s been known to happen. Will you look at the time? I’d better get back at it.”

  “How about I do my first signing at your store? Can we arrange something now?”

  “Call my secretary.” I pushed my chair back and stood up. Linda had left her tissue packet behind. I scooped it up.

  I considered telling Fiona to present Paige with the bill, but my better nature took over. I left her with the last sandwich and her dreams of literary grandeur.

  * * *

  “That was a long lunch,” Ashleigh said.

  “Your turn,” I said.

  I took a quick glance around the shop, noticing that seven copies of Hudson House had been sold in my absence, along with five of the earlier books in the series, one copy of House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz, one of Jewel of the Thames by Angela Misri, a set of Sherlock coffee mugs, two packages of playing cards, a complete set of the Jeremy Brett DVDs, and two jigsaw puzzles.

  The chimes over the door tinkled, and Grant Thompson came in. He gave me a smile. Moriarty hurried to greet him, and he leaned over to give the cat an enthusiastic pat. When he straightened up, he said, “I’ve learned something you might find of interest.” He glanced at two women browsing the gaslight shelves.

  I led the way to the reading nook in search of some privacy. “What?” I asked.

  “A copy of Hudson House has come on the market. It’s signed by Renalta and dated Saturday.”

  “The day she died.”

  “Yup.”

  “Is there something particularly special about this book? Other than the speed with which it’s being sold.”

  “There is. It’s personalized, which is normally not a good thing, but in this case it might be worth something. ‘For my darling Kevin. With thanks for all the marvelous things you do for me.’”

  “That is interesting.”

  “I thought you’d think so. Surely Kevin is Kevin Reynolds, the publicist?”

  “Plenty of Kevins in the world,” I said. “But not many men are fans of Renalta, and the meaning of the inscription is obvious. How much is the seller asking for this book?”

  “A thousand bucks. Unlikely he’ll get that, but it works as a starting point. He might end up getting a couple of hundred.”

  “Hold that thought,” I said. A customer was ready to complete her purchase so I hurried to the counter to help her. Grant wandered over to the collectors’ bookshelf where we carried second and later editions of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s books and those of some of his contemporaries. He pulled a thin volume off the shelf. Miss Cayley’s Adventures by Grant Allen.

  “Have you read this?” he asked me when I was free again.

  I shook my head.

  “It’s so quaint, it’s quite charming. The female protagonist is a cyclist, and he loves describing her ‘ankle action.’”

  I laughed.

  “No euphemism intended.”

  Chimes tinkled, and a large group came in. Judging by the number of store bags they carried, they were serious shoppers.

  “Thanks for telling me,” I said to Grant. “I’d better get back to work.”

  “Anytime,” he said. “I can pretend to be an interested buyer, try to find out if the seller really is Kevin Reynolds.”

  “I’d appreciate that,” I said.

  Kevin had now zoomed to the top of my suspect list. It was getting very crowded up there. Had Kevin and Linda acted together to get rid of her mother?

  Only one way to find out.

  As soon as Ashleigh returned from lunch, I placed a call to Ryan.

  “You’ve caught me on the hop, Gemma,” he said. “I’ve just left a meeting with the chief to update him on the Van Markoff case.”

  “How did that go?”

  “I have no comment suitable for the general public. What’s up?”

  I’d promised to keep him apprised of anything I learned. I hadn’t actually learned anything, but I could tell him my suspicions and about Kevin’s attempt to sell the book.

  “That’s interesting, Gemma,” Ryan said when I’d finished summarizing my thoughts. “Although, I can’t see the opportunity to earn a couple of hundred bucks on a signed book as a motive for murder.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “But there is the hand of the fair Linda to consider. I don’t know if Kevin and Linda were an item before Linda’s mother died, but they are now. Kevin might have kept his intentions secret, fearing that Ruth would forbid Linda from seeing him.”

  “Linda Marke is thirty years old, Gemma. She doesn’t need her mother’s permission to date anyone.”

  “True. But Ruth was highly domineering. Bossy even.”

  “When I spoke to Linda, I found her intelligent and competent although grief stricken. Does she strike you as a woman so submissive, she’d let her mother rule her love life?”

  I thought. “Hard to say. I only ever saw them together in the role of author and assistant. Her mother bullied her, and Linda appeared to let her do so, but that might have been only because she didn’t want an argument in public. However, considering the metamorphosis she’s appeared to have u
ndergone since Renalta’s death, I don’t think it was entirely an act.

  “I assume you’ve been investigating all the parties. Have you learned anything significant?”

  “We never know what’s significant until it becomes significant. Linda Marke has no police record of any sort, whereas Kevin Reynolds is known to the NYPD.”

  “Do tell.”

  “He was fired from a previous job for embezzling.”

  “Wow!”

  “Nothing major. Less than a thousand dollars, so he got off with a warning and no jail time.”

  “If he’d risk his job over a sum like that, then we have to ask what he’d do for a lot more. What about their educational backgrounds? Do any of the people in question have a degree in chemistry, or have any of them spent time working in some sort of lab?”

  “You mean like Donald Morris?”

  “You were pretty quick to point the finger of suspicion at Donald for that very reason.”

  “That and others, Gemma. To answer your question, we’ve found nothing even remotely like that.”

  “Doesn’t mean he or she is not an enthusiastic amateur.”

  I was standing at the rear of the shop, with my back to the room, but a woman coughed lightly behind me. I turned to see one of my regular customers smiling at me.

  “Gotta run,” I said to Ryan. I stuffed my phone into my pocket and gave my customer a smile.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Gemma. But I was out of town on the weekend and asked you to get Renalta Van Markoff to sign a book for me. I heard she died, and it seems rather crass now, but I do want to read the book. Do you have it?”

  “Let me get it for you.”

  * * *

  At three thirty-eight, I called to Ashleigh that I was going next door for my business meeting with Jayne. She waved good-bye.

  My favorite table in the window alcove was free, so I settled into the chair looking out over the street. I’d had afternoon tea earlier, so I asked Fiona to just bring me a pot of Lapsang Souchong. I was in the mood for something exotic and flavorful. Outside, traffic moved slowly as visitors eager to get an early start on their summer weekend poured into town and classic rock fans departed. A steady stream of pedestrians popped in and out of the shops along Baker Street.

  “Another good day.” Jayne put a tray on the table. My pot of tea, another pot for her, and a plate of tea sandwiches. “I’m cautiously optimistic that this is going to be a great summer for the business.”

  “It’s hard for me to say what’s regular traffic and what was brought to my doors by all the news around Renalta Van Markoff and her new book,” I said. “But I have to agree with you.”

  “No one’s being put off by the shop being the scene of a murder?” Jayne asked.

  “Not so as I’d notice, although I am getting tired of cleaning up flower arrangements every morning.”

  “The hospital’s happy to have them, Mom says.”

  “Always a silver lining. Tell me, Jayne, theoretically speaking, if you were rich, I mean moderately wealthy, not billionaire status or anything, and a friend of yours suspected your new lover was only interested in you for your money, would you want your friend to tell you?”

  She peered at me over the top of her Sherlock-themed cup, decorated with a pipe and deerstalker hat. I thought the set—cups and saucers, sugar bowl and cream pitcher, teapot—hideous and tasteless, but Jayne’s customers loved it. Who am I, of all people, to tell our patrons they can’t have Sherlock Holmes accessories? “What brought this up?”

  “Just wondering.”

  “You never just wonder about anything, Gemma. Everything you do has a purpose.”

  “You say that as though it’s a bad thing.”

  “Whatever. Yeah, I’d want my friend to tell me, for sure. I hope I’d be smart enough to figure out that the guy didn’t love me for myself, but it’s easy to be fooled in matters of the heart, isn’t it?”

  I considered making a comment about the ever-unemployed Robbie. But once again, who am I to judge? Look at my marriage. Even I, supposedly so observant about people, hadn’t recognized the signs that my husband was having an affair with the newest of our part-time shop clerks. Willful blindness, probably. One of the older clerks had taken me aside one afternoon, after my husband and the woman in question left to have a “coffee” together. She told me straight to my face, in no uncertain terms, that I was being made a fool of.

  I was angry at first, of course I was, angry at the person who’d told me most of all. But I soon realized she’d done it because she cared about me, and I left the cheating rat shortly thereafter.

  Now here I am in West London, Massachusetts, happy in my new life, enjoying a cup of tea with my best friend. “You’re right,” I said. “Love makes fools of us all.”

  “That’s a good thing, Gemma.”

  “Is it?”

  “What would we be without love? Look at Sherlock Holmes. Has anyone ever suggested the great Sherlock was at all happy? No, he was nothing but a thinking machine.”

  “He loved Irene Adler. In his own way.”

  “For all the good it did him. He spent the rest of his life looking at a photograph in a drawer. He could have gone after her, chased her across Europe, swept her into his arms and vowed undying love. I liked the way they did it in the TV show better, where he saved her from being killed by terrorists in the desert.”

  I smiled at her. “You’re such a romantic, Jayne.”

  “And you should be too, Gemma. You don’t keep a photograph of Ryan in your top drawer, I hope.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She sipped her tea and avoided my eyes. “Nothing.”

  “It had better mean nothing. I don’t like the way this conversation has moved from Sherlock Holmes to me. I’m nothing like him, man of his times that he was, but I will admit that we have one thing in common: I’m finished with romance. It addles the mind. Speaking of romance, have you talked to Andrew lately?”

  “No. Why do you ask? Do you think Robbie might take me to the café for dinner one night? My birthday’s coming up, but he can’t really afford it right now. I suggested he paint some nice Cape Cod pictures to sell to the tourists. Maureen might take some on consignment at Beach Fine Arts, and maybe we could hang some in the tea room . . .”

  I suppressed a shudder.

  “. . . but these days he’s experimenting with a different form of art. Brutal realism, he calls it. I had to tell him we couldn’t hang paintings of disembodied heads on the lighthouse grounds in a tea room. He said he understands, but he has to remain true to his artistic muse.”

  I was about to let Jayne know that I thought Robbie should worry about being true to his bank account, but before I could say so, Fiona came to our table to tell me that I had a phone call in the shop.

  Thus ended the day’s business meeting.

  * * *

  I took Linda’s packet of tissues out of the drawer where I’d held it for safekeeping. I’d been planning to give her a call and tell her to pick it up next time she was passing, but I changed my mind.

  “You left an item in the tea room,” I said when I got her on the phone. “How about I pop around to your hotel with it? Are you there now?”

  “What did I leave?”

  “A packet of tissues.”

  “Oh, that. It’s not worth anything, Gemma. You can keep it.”

  “Oh, no. I insist. It’s your property, and I want to return it.”

  “I don’t . . .”

  “Are you at the Harbor Inn now?”

  “Yes, but . . .”

  “Brilliant. I can be there in ten minutes. It’s no bother at all. We British people believe in the proper care and storage of possessions. I’ll come straight to your room. What number is it?”

  “Two-ten, but . . .”

  “Cheerio.” I hung up.

  If Linda Marke now believed that the British were obsessively concerned with individual ownership of dollar-fifty packets of tissues, so
be it. We are a nation of shopkeepers, after all.

  “I’m heading out. Won’t be long,” I called to Ashleigh.

  “Not again!” she said. “I was hoping we could talk about my franchise ideas.”

  Moriarty yawned, and I shoved down my guilt at once again abandoning my business.

  The Harbor Inn isn’t far from Baker Street so I didn’t have to go home for my car. This time, if Linda called Kevin to tell him I was coming over and he insisted on joining us, I’d have to equally insist that he left.

  “Good afternoon,” I called to Andrea as I sailed across the lobby. Then I had a thought, and turned around abruptly. “I hope the change in the Van Markoff party’s situation hasn’t upset your booking arrangements too much.”

  Andrea grimaced. “Always something in the hotel business, Gemma. Keeps me on my toes. The regular rooms and smaller suites are pretty much booked solid right through to August, but fortunately the largest suite wasn’t reserved for the next few days, so I was able to move Ms. Marke into what had been Ms. Van Markoff’s room. I’ve told her she has to leave by Friday morning. I have annual visitors coming then, and no way can I put them into smaller rooms.”

  Her phone rang, and I left her to answer it.

  I didn’t wait for the elevator but took the steps two at a time. I knocked on the door of room 210, and it was promptly opened by Linda herself. She gave me a forced smile. “Thanks for coming, Gemma. I’m sure you’re busy, so I won’t keep you.” She held out her hand. For a moment, I wondered why she’d done that—it wasn’t in the position for a shake—and then I remembered I was ostensibly here to return her tissues.

  “I see you’ve got one of the nicest rooms,” I said, slipping past her. She could have blocked me, stopped me from entering, but like most people, she was just too darn polite. “I came on a tour of the hotel when they had the grand opening. They’ve done a marvelous job with this place, haven’t they?” We were in the sitting room, sofa and chairs arranged around a coffee table and a desk tucked into a corner. Crystal vases of carefully arranged fresh flowers sat on the table and desk, and the art on the walls was original. The door to the bedroom stood ajar, and I could see a huge four-poster bed covered in a red-and-gold duvet about a yard thick, piled high with matching pillows. The rooms were decorated in period style, as matched the age of the house, with red wallpaper below a thick band of wooden wainscoting, cream walls, and foot-high baseboards. Sunlight streamed in through French doors opening onto a spacious balcony. In the distance, the ocean sparkled in the sunlight.