“Nan and I are. But there’s a difference between a few innocent questions aimed at unsuspecting people and putting yourself out there as bait.”
“Which is exactly what I’m not going to do,” Eve said. “I’m not reckless, or naïve.”
“Speaking of which, how did your evening with Ben go?”
A blush spread over Eve’s face. “How did you hear?”
Hayley patted her arm. “Relax. Sue spotted him return to the car park by the woods when she took her dog for a walk. I told her he’d probably picked up something for his father, like usual.”
“Did she believe you?”
“She had no reason not to. I have a reputation for being charmingly blunt in my honesty.”
“He’s not coming back. It was just something we had to get out of our systems,” Eve said.
Hayley sniggered but didn’t comment. “Anything else you want ferreted out, Sherlock?”
“Did any of the confirmed singles give off the impression of being jilted about three months before the murder?”
“Heather or Bella should have an idea about that. But why?”
Eve bit her lip. “Promise this won’t go any further.”
Hayley crossed her heart and mimed zipping her lips.
“Donna fell in love with another person. Truly in love,” Eve said.
“Which explains the unexpected change in hair colour and style. Okay, but why not look for the new man?”
“Because he was a she, and she was at work, blissfully counting the hours until Donna shacked up with her.”
Hayley whistled. “I wonder if Ben had any inkling.”
“Why should he?”
Chapter 23
The owl peered unblinkingly at Eve, its yellow eyes bright disks in the mottled plumage.
Eve shaded her eyes against the sun. If the bird had a shred of the wisdom subscribed to its species, it would stay well away from human dwellings.
She wondered how long it had used the cabin roof as its private perch.
She searched for the fake rock with the key. The door opened silently, and she saw with satisfaction that her earlier footprints had disappeared. Although the cabin was deserted, wind and sand crept in through tiny gaps in the walls. She locked it again and pocketed the key, with the dim idea of using the fact Donna and her lover used to meet in the cabin.
If a rumour went around, about a strange, unspecified find in the cabin, or the police interested in retrieving the condoms and fingerprinting them, her quarry might be tempted to come and destroy the purported evidence. He wouldn’t know Ben threw out the contraceptives, and she could easily plant a new pack. Better still, she didn’t have to. It would be enough to lure the murderer into the cabin. His footprints would be visible in the dust for at least a day or two until the dust obliterated them. The police could work wonders with the imprints of soles.
Eve congratulated herself on this stroke of genius. Even better, if she could get a camera with a trigger wire installed in a tree. Didn’t proper birdwatchers use all kinds of technology?
All she needed was a photograph of whoever entered the cabin. Once the police force had a name and face, they could piece the evidence together. Donna’s colleagues would be able to identify the man.
She winked at the owl. Wise or not, it had helped.
Eve returned to the shop where she purchased her birdwatching binoculars. The shop assistant recognised her, which she attributed to the fact she was half the age of his normal crowd, and that she’d proved herself to be utterly clueless when she asked him for advice. This visit was no different.
As soon as he’d stopped reeling off pixel numbers, trigger times, audio boosting and angles, they decided she needed a simple video camera. It needed to be small and easy to camouflage, but swiftness of response wasn’t priority, whereas a clear picture was. Humans moved slower than most animals.
“I’m branching out into mammals,” Eve explained.
“Don’t underestimate them,” the shop assistant said. “Those critters can be fast too. Is it more squirrels, dormice, foxes, or what is it you’re interested in?”
“Does that make such a big difference?”
He tut-tutted. “I’m thinking about the angle. A fox stays on the ground. Dormice and squirrels are both climbers.”
“I see. Squirrels. My stepmother adores them.” Her choice of words surprised herself, as did the realisation she dragged Crystal into a perfectly normal situation at all.
That’s what a guilty conscience did. After years of turning the poor woman into a monument of greed and bad taste, she had developed a certain liking for her father’s wife. “Go figure,” she said to herself.
The shop assistant piled up half a dozen cameras. “Now these are all excellent models for your needs.”
“Can you programme it for me, so all I need to do is hide it?”
“No problem.”
They settled on a chunky camera in a camouflage body. It set her back two hundred pounds. This would be the absolute last investment she made for the case. Ben Dryden had turned out to be an expensive hobby.
“And you turn it just so, and fix it like this …” He demonstrated again how she could adjust the angle. “I’d advise a trial run, and when you check the video recording you’ll see if you’ve covered the correct field of vision.”
“Excellent.” Eve beamed at him. “Spare batteries, and then I should be done.”
“Exciting,” he said.
“You have no idea.”
In the evenings, her footpath belonged to joggers and dog-walkers, but installing the camera could wait.
She stroked the cardboard box. Once her plan was fully formed, she’d be ready to restore Kim’s peace of mind. As for Ben – she closed her eyes, a wide grin on her face. He’d be dumbstruck by her ingenuity. She’d point out Hayley and Letty’s contribution, modesty demanded it, but as for the rest…
Funny to think how one stroll had changed all their lives. Despite all the little frights and annoyances along the way, and the rapid depletion of her funds, at least she couldn’t complain about boredom.
Ben wished his father would stop brooding. Any son in his right mind would have cut his losses long before.
After a silent dinner, with John’s eyes fixed on him with an intense stare, he pushed back his chair. “Go on,” Ben said. “Say your piece.”
“You promised. No more chasing after a skirt and landing us in a mess.”
“I told you before, there will be no repetition. You used to be keen on having a grandson, to carry on the name and the tradition.”
“The price is too high.”
“What do you expect from me? To live like a monk?”
John’s breath grew harder. “Hayley would do fine. There would be none of this other business.”
“She doesn’t give a toss about me, and rightly so.” He touched his father’s shoulder. Under his hand he felt the bones and muscles. The massage and physical exercises Chris performed with his father worked well on the good side of his body.
Up close, Ben saw something else in John’s eyes, something that took his breath away; fear. He softened.
“I promise you there’s nothing to worry about.” For a heartbeat, they shared a moment of unspoken affection.
Eve formed a camera with her hands in front of her eyes as she dashed around from one tree to the next. She needed to establish the perfect shot of the door area.
The key was back in its hiding place, and she kept a copy in her backpack.
The undergrowth rustled. Her heart skipped a beat until she saw a small bird dart away, a twig in its beak. Clandestine work tested her nerves to breaking point.
She settled on a large chestnut. The camera fit perfectly into the fork between two thick branches, and the wide leaves covered everything but the lens. If she made sure to keep it that way, she could monitor the comings and goings in the cabin.
Eve wished she could get a notification on her phone, similar to h
er private security system, but it really made no difference if she retrieved any information straight away or with a delay of a day or two. If she fussed with the video camera too often, Ben might catch her red-handed, forcing her to lie even more to him.
She stepped back and admired her handiwork. The camera was almost invisible, and the camouflage body blended in with the bark and the leaves. She mentally congratulated herself as she strolled home, a happy little spring in her step.
Eve gave her troops, as she’d come to regard Hayley and Letty, a spirited report of her preparation for the plan. They rewarded it with the enthusiasm it deserved.
“It could work,” Hayley said. “You’ve really hit on something, Eve.”
“I know, and best of all, nobody will be in danger at all. If the camera does its trick and I’ve got the angle and everything right, we’re onto a home run.”
Letty appeared confused.
“It’s a sports term,” Eve said. “We’re in for the win. All that’s left is for us to come up with a bait the murderer can’t resist.”
Chapter 24
Eve performed a few wobbly twirls in the privacy of her cottage. Her elation survived even another urgent work assignment requested over the phone. Her bank account sorely needed an infusion of cash and dealing with boring technical details on a translation would keep her hands and her conscious mind busy, while her subconsciousness whirred away in the background and hopefully came up with a stroke of genius.
She switched on her laptop. A reminder pinged onto the screen. Her flight tickets; she’d promised she’d book them as soon as possible.
How long should she stay, if she seriously intended to mend fences with her dad and get properly acquainted with his wife? Two weeks in Seattle should do it, she decided. Long enough to chat and do things together, short enough to afford a hotel if the visit went wrong.
Twenty minutes later she was officially down to a three-figure sum in her account and had committed herself to spending the longest period with her dad since she finished school. In grey and wet November, of all months. Eve emailed a copy of her flight schedule to her dad. “What could possibly go wrong?” she asked herself. The answer was a depressingly long list.
Eve rose at the crack of dawn. So far, her subconscious had let her down, possibly because she was too tense. More work might do the trick. At worst, it would get her assignment out of the way.
Her wrists ached, and her foot was numb from sitting on it when she paused for a snack. Her unladylike posture at her desk had been on the top of her things-to-change-asap-list for a decade, without success. She rolled her shoulders to relieve the tension. Better, but still painful, like stabs with a blunt needle.
Eve grabbed her backpack. She deserved a break, and with any luck, the video camera had recorded test footage of some two-winged or four-legged visitor passing the entrance to the cabin.
She trotted along the path with a sense of exhilaration tempered by the pain in her muscles. Too much sitting took its toll on her body since she’d hit thirty.
The cabin lay deserted in the midday sun. Reaching the camera and taking it down took less than a minute.
Eve squatted behind a tree, in case Ben appeared out of the blue. Her pulse quickened at the thought, but that was because she needed to be undisturbed, not because she missed him. Which she didn’t, much.
The camera had 87 seconds of recorded footage. Eve tried to remember how to play it back. Luckily, she’d had the foresight to keep the instruction manual in her pocket. She pressed three buttons and was rewarded with the sight of a furry animal bolting across the path. A rabbit. At the top of the screen, the door was cut-off about a metre from the ground. She’d need to adjust that. Showing a pair of legs and a bum would hardly allow a reliable identification.
Eve fumbled with the settings. The shop assistant had made it all look deceptively easy.
Her palms were sweaty as she put the camera back in its hiding spot.
Back on the path, she had the eerie sensation someone was watching her. She stiffened her back and trudged on, willing herself to resist the temptation of looking back.
“That’s unexpected.” Hayley came face to face with Ben at the back entrance to the pub. It had been well-used once upon a time, when late-night revellers beat a hasty retreat from the local copper after hours, or from their wives.
Beer barrels still were transported along this way, if with less frequency than in the last century. The flagstones sagged in the middle and moss sprouted in between the grouts, another job for her to tackle soon.
“Come in,” she said and took him upstairs.
Her nan’s face lit up. “What a nice surprise.”
“That’s not something I hear very often,” Ben said. “Are you sure I’m not in the way?”
“I’ll leave you to it.” Hayley ran downstairs. Her nan could be relied upon to give her a blow-by-blow account later. Bloody pub, she thought. Maybe she really should consider handing it over to a manager. Selling was out of the question, at least while her nan was alive. It would have been different if Hayley had a child, but since she had no plans to procreate ever, succession was a moot point. The Trowbridge bloodline would end with her.
“I’d like your advice,” Ben said.
“I’ll be glad to be of help, my dear boy.” Letty offered him the biscuit tin. He declined.
“It’s about my father,” he said.
“Yes?”
Ben blew out his breath. “I’m stuck about what to do. We’re stuck. At the moment, Chris is enough, but how much longer until my father needs more care?”
Letty said, “There are excellent retirement villages, with doctors and nurses on call. He’d have some independence left, and you’d have peace of mind. I’ve been considering moving into one myself, while I still can.”
“You?” Ben stared at her in amazement.
“It’s not fair on Hayley to expect her to give up her life for me,” Letty said with a calm that surprised him. “I know she says she likes things the way they are, but she hardly has a choice, and neither do you.”
“My father would never agree to leave the house of his ancestors. He’s like a tree. When you uproot him, he’ll die.”
“Could you afford daily or live-in help?”
“I’d intended to sell the leased orchards to the man who works them. He wants them. That will give me the money, but who would take the job? Nobody local.”
“Eve is right,” Letty said. “You need to get out from under that cloud.”
“Eve has been chatting about this?” A steely glare came into his eyes. “That’s interesting.”
“Only in private. She cares about you.” Letty’s gentle voice held a biting undertone. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“My father thinks otherwise, and I’m not having him being upset again. Donna was enough.”
“You could advertise further away for a helper.”
Ben was grateful to Letty for changing a painful subject.
“Hire a male nurse, a young man. Then John can put his mind to rest about your love life, and he’d have a new companion. If you ask me, its unhealthy to live like a hermit. For both of you.”
“That’s not a bad idea. I’ll think about it,” he said.
“How about a cruise?”
“Pardon?”
Letty opened a drawer and took out a stash of brochures. “Bella’s given me these. A week or two in the sunshine, and they have doctors and masseurs and what have you on board. Some of the ships are floating spas for us oldies these days. It would do him a power of good, give him a few interests.”
Ben took the brochures, but he doubted John would even look at them.
“If you see Eve, tell her to come and visit.” Letty’s blue eyes were guileless.
“I will. If I happen to run into her.” He prided himself on his inscrutable face. At least she had kept quiet about their private affairs. Or, the notion hurt him more than he’d expected, she was ashamed
of having slept with him.
The mail landed with a soft thud on Eve’s floor. She ignored it. She received nothing but advertising material or invoices on ninety-nine out of a hundred occasions. Both were not worth interrupting her work flow, or anything else.
She read her translation out aloud. She’d tried a software, to have it read to her, but its ignorance of any but the most basic foreign words made the pronunciation both hilarious and disruptive.
Dusk washed the sky with an orange and pink tinge. Eve considered going down to the “Green Dragon”. On a Friday evening, the pub would by now be three-deep in customers, with conversations reaching dangerously high decibels, perfect for losing herself in a mindless crowd.
She picked up a handful of envelopes and flyers and put them on her table, to be opened later.
The “Green Dragon” presented itself exactly the way she’d expected. Hayley and Dom had their hands full with pulling pints for the men and mixing gin and tonics for Bella and Sue. Eve shook off the impression of having been watched along the way. Her imagination ran away with her lately.
Grace flitted around, collecting empty glasses and darting through the swing door to the kitchen without so much as a second’s break. She’d found her rhythm.
Hayley greeted Eve with a nod. “House red?”
“Lime soda. Take your time.”
One of the men made space for Eve at the bar. She squeezed in between him and his mate, both weather-beaten old age pensioners with callused hands and a huge capacity for beer.
“Yoo-hoo,” Bella called out.
Eve signalled she’d soon be over. Music washed over her, a few bars rising above the general din. She liked the noise in British pubs, and the banter between regulars and staff. The men next to her started to talk about sheep, and football. She took her drink and weaved her way through the throng to Bella’s table.
Let Sleeping Murder Lie: A cozy mystery Page 19
