Murder Is a Must
Page 30
“Well, what do you know—here I am, the exhibition manager.”
Val grabbed me round the waist. “Well done, you,” he said, and kissed me.
I put my arms round his neck and grinned. “I’m just where I thought I would never be. And would you credit it—Mrs. Woolgar said she trusted in my judgment and thought I could do it.”
“Oh, and you don’t remember me saying the same thing?” Val said. “That you would be a great exhibition manager?”
“You said that because you love me.”
His eyes crinkled at the corners as he smiled. “I do love you—but can’t both be true? I love you and you’ll be a great exhibition manager?”
Modesty overtook me. “I don’t think she said ‘great.’”
“I’m sure she was thinking it.”
“Well, here we are in February. We’ve a great deal of work to do, and very little time,” I said. “I’ve decided we’ll go with Oona’s suggestion for the entry—and give her full credit—using Lady Fowling’s desk.”
“We’ll have to move everything out of the cellar to get to it.”
“Yes,” I agreed. “Also, remember my idea to add audio to the exhibition? Clara has interviewed board members and wants to pull quotes for signage—I believe we should combine the ideas. Then, last night, Adele told me she remembers Lady Fowling recording one or two of their afternoon teas at the Royal Crescent and also reading aloud some of her François Flambeaux stories. Mrs. Woolgar remembers, too, but they don’t have any idea where the recordings are. They’ve got to be here somewhere. I’m going to search.”
“Perhaps,” Val said, “Lady Fowling left a clue to their whereabouts.”
I gasped. “Yes! I’ll need to go through the notebooks again. Wish me luck.”
“Luck.” And a kiss. “I’ll see you this evening—here, or would you rather meet for a meal?”
“The Raven?”
“Pie and a pint it is.”
I saw him out and went back up the stairs, stopping on the library landing to take in Lady Fowling’s portrait—just in case she had anything else to tell me.
“Ms. Burke?” Mrs. Woolgar stood at the bottom of the stairs.
“Yes?”
“When you have the time, would you come down to my flat?”
Surely I hadn’t heard her correctly. To her flat? To her flat?
“It’s only that,” she continued, “I have a length of fabric, a lovely deep, dusky purple. It’s quite enough for an evening gown cut on the bias, which would give it an elegant drape. I thought it might just suit you. Are you interested?”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to my fabulous editor, Michelle Vega, as well as Jennifer Snyder and everyone at Berkley Prime Crime for cheering on the First Edition Library Mysteries. And when a writer has a question about any little thing regarding the business or creative side, who’s she gonna call? Her agent, of course. Thanks to Christina Hogrebe of the Jane Rotrosen Agency for knowing the answers or finding them out in short order.
My other “editors”—aka the weekly writing group—keep me on my toes, helped along, no doubt, by the wine and chocolate. Thanks to Kara Pomeroy, Louise Creighton, Sarah Niebuhr Rubin, Tracey Hatton, and Meghana Padakandla. And grateful thanks to family and friends who cheer me on.
All Bath buildings and businesses mentioned in Murder Is a Must are real—except for the ones that aren’t. I have inserted Middlebank House into one of those grand Georgian terraces that rise above the city center. There is no Charlotte (although I’m sure it would be a popular exhibition venue if it did exist), but you can certainly have coffee at the café inside the Assembly Rooms. Maybe I’ll see you there.
The Golden Age of Mystery continues to intrigue. This book, the second in the First Edition Library series, was inspired by Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise. If you have not read it, I highly recommend you do. It is my favorite Lord Peter book by Sayers—too bad it wasn’t hers. She dashed it off to meet a contract obligation, relying heavily on her own experience as a copywriter at S. H. Benson’s on Kingsway in Bloomsbury (the offices had a spiral staircase and all). I confess I am a sucker for her snappy patter and will reread sections of this book for the banter alone. Such inspiration!
Shall I be mother?”
Charles Henry Dill didn’t wait for a response, but reached across the library table for the pot, the sleeve of his baby-blue linen jacket pulling up and exposing his hairy arm. He poured, managing to splash tea into the saucers and onto the highly polished walnut surface before, at last, hitting the cups.
Beside me, Mrs. Woolgar flinched and leapt up to get a towel—either that or she was about to go for his throat, a prospect I found not all that unappealing.
I stood. “No, let me.”
Retrieving a small towel from the trolley by the door, I mopped up the spill as Charles Henry distributed tea around the table, after which each of us poured the excess from the saucers back into the cups before adding milk. I noticed he had handed board member Maureen Frost, sitting next to him, a saucer with no spills.
“Well, now,” Dill said, with a smirk of self-importance, “let me just say I’m ever so glad to be joining you here at Middlebank House and the First Edition Society, and I look forward with eager anticipation to working with our esteemed curator, Ms. Burke, in my new role as her assistant and, I daresay”—he chortled—“general dogsbody.”
* * *
* * *
How had it come to this?
It had started on Monday. I had returned from a week at the seaside with my boyfriend, ready and rested for the First Edition library’s inaugural public open hours in two days’ time. I believed it to be the logical next step in increasing the awareness of the Society, gaining new respect and members, and contributing to the overall knowledge base about those wonderful women writers from the Golden Age of Mystery—Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers. And the others.
But a library open to the public had been a shocking proposition— at least to the Society’s secretary, Mrs. Glynis Woolgar. It took a fair bit of song and dance to convince her that our founder, the late Lady Georgiana Fowling, had intended for her impressive collection of books of first editions—as well as rare and unusual printings—to be enjoyed, not hidden away. She had agreed, but with reservations.
On my first day back at work, I had expected to find Mrs. Woolgar with her knickers in a twist about the launch of the Wednesday afternoon opens, but instead, at our morning briefing, I had been met with an ashen face across the desk from me. Even before we had exchanged “Good mornings,” she made the pronouncement: “It’s about Charles Henry.”
Rarely was any news that involved Charles Henry Dill, Lady Fowling’s lout of a nephew, good, unless it was that he was out of the country. Because when he wasn’t, he applied himself to his life’s goal of trying to get more, more, more money out of his aunt’s estate.
“But,” I had said when I could find my voice again after Mrs. Woolgar had told me his latest scheme was to become my assistant, “surely the board wouldn’t allow it? Mr. Rennie wouldn’t allow it?”
Duncan Rennie, the Society’s solicitor, did his best to keep Dill and his machinations at bay. Sadly, as Mrs. Woolgar had pointed out, “Asking for a job isn’t nefarious unto itself.”
The board members’ reasons for acquiescing had been another matter. The board comprised four dear old friends of her ladyship, plus a young one: Mrs. Audrey Moon and Mrs. Sylvia Moon and Jane Arbuthnot, in their eighties; Maureen Frost, in her early seventies; and my friend Adele Babbage, several decades younger than the others and ten years or so my junior.
Dill had worked his subterfuge quickly while I had been away and he had kept under the radar of Mrs. Woolgar, aided and abetted by Maureen. First, he had worn down resistance from the Moons by “stopping in for a cuppa” every afternoon the week befor
e. Under the guise of sharing stories of his aunt, he had revealed to them his wistful hope to be a part of the Society as a way of honoring her. In other words, he had badgered them into it. Jane Arbuthnot had been easily swayed by Maureen. But I had been shocked to learn that Adele—the turncoat—had agreed to Dill’s proposal, too.
The meeting had been arranged for the next afternoon— Tuesday. When the attendees, including Mr. Rennie, had arrived, Mrs. Woolgar had taken them up to the library. I had stayed on the ground floor in the kitchenette to get the tea tray ready, and so when the front-door buzzer went off with the last in—Adele—I answered.
“I know it sounds dire, Hayley,” she said, following me back to the kitchenette, “but those women have had to endure four years of Dill’s trickery to get hold of Georgiana’s fortune.”
“And house,” I had added as I arranged pastries on a tray.
“And house. And it just seemed that a half day a week as your assistant would be a small price to pay to keep him quiet.”
Possibly, but who would pay that price? Me.
I had handed Adele the tea service and taken the pastries. We had headed upstairs to meet my doom.
* * *
* * *
It was done and dusted, and now Charles Henry reached out to nab the last black-currant macaron. He held it aloft for a moment. “I know my dear Aunt Georgiana would be so pleased to know that the last member of her family is once more involved in her great undertaking.”
Pairs of eyes darted round the table. No one attempted to contradict him even though they all knew—even I, who had never met Lady Fowling in person knew—pleased was not the word that would’ve described his aunt’s reaction to the situation. Not after he had absconded with that set of eighteenth-century silver basting spoons. During her funeral reception. He had best watch his lies or the late Georgiana Fowling, founder of the First Edition Society and its library, might just rise from her grave—or walk out of her portrait that hung outside the library door on the first-floor landing—and set her nephew straight.
“And now, Ms. Burke,” Charles Henry said in his oleaginous fashion, “to the particulars of my employment. Shall we set our day and time now while we’re all gathered? What about Monday mornings?”
“No,” I said quickly, “I’m sorry—that won’t suit.” Did he think I wanted to spend my weekends dreading the start of the workweek?
“Friday mornings?” he offered with what he might’ve thought looked like a polite smile.
“Sadly”—happily—“that won’t work with my schedule, either. I have a local adult-learning student starting on a special project Fridays.”
“Well, then,” Dill said, his voice practically gurgling with pleasure, “what is left but the middle of the week? Shall we say Wednesday afternoons?”
He had tricked me. He had wanted Wednesday afternoons all along, so that he could be present during our public openings. What sort of devilry might Charles Henry get up to during those four hours when he could mingle with the public? We’d have to put everything under lock and key—even the silver plate. And whose ear would he try to bend in the process—reporters, bloggers, academics— to support him in his desires? No, I would do everything I could to keep the proverbial ten-foot pole between Dill and the public.
“You know,” I said, “now that I think about it, Monday mornings just might work.” There go my carefree days off.
At the end of it all, Mrs. Woolgar showed everyone out and returned to the library to find me unmoved—not an inch.
“Ms. Burke.”
“Yes, I know I must buck up. I’ll tidy in here, Mrs. Woolgar. You go on.”
“Thank you. Mr. Rennie and I do have a few items to go over. But I want you to know that in no way will Charles Henry Dill be let loose to do as he pleases in Middlebank House. He remains as he always has been—not to be trusted. He will be watched.”
I followed the secretary out onto the landing, dragging one of the Chippendale chairs from the library behind me. She continued to the ground floor, but I stayed, placing the chair in front of the portrait of Lady Georgiana Fowling.
Even though I had never met her ladyship, I felt as if I knew her through this full-length work. She was dressed in retro fashion from the 1930s—decades before the painting had been executed—in a burgundy satin evening dress with a halter top. The gown was cut on the bias and draped elegantly to the floor. She was turned slightly, revealing a low back, and had a hand on an empty chair—representing her late husband, Sir John.
I sat down, heaved a great sigh, and said to Lady Fowling, “Well, now what?”
About the Author
A Seattle native, Marty Wingate is a member of the Royal Horticultural Society and leads garden tours through England, Scotland, and Ireland when she is not killing people in fiction.
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.