Afternoon Tea at the Sunflower Café

by Milly Johnson

  He hoped Connie would be all right by herself. She was a simple soul, bless her. No harm in her at all, she didn’t have any hidden sides to her, no malice, only good. But why was the thought of her moving on to another man and giving him her heart making him feel sick to his stomach?

  Chapter 49

  ‘You are not very nice lady,’ Ivanka said into the phone a second before she crashed it back onto its cradle. ‘Bloody bitch.’

  ‘Please tell me that wasn’t one of our clients,’ Della said, hoping it was.

  ‘Mrs Fretwell. Old bag. She says that we do not treat our staff well and is going to other agency.’

  Mrs Fretwell was one of Sandra Batty’s clients. That must mean that Sandra was going to jump to Lady Muck, which was marvellous, but they really needed Hilda to defect because she was the main barometer of what the other cleaners should do.

  ‘That’s just awful,’ said Della, putting on her best cross face. ‘But then as Jimmy always says’ – she put that in because she knew that Ivanka would take extra notice of it – ‘these women have a false sense of their own importance. They think we can’t get anyone to take their place if they leave. They don’t know that there’s a red stripey file there’ – and she pointed to the shelf where it sat and watched Ivanka’s eyes follow her finger – ‘stuffed full of women’s names who are ready to work here when we can match them up with clients. They think they’re indispensable and they’re wrong. People like Hilda and Ava and Cheryl ought to be careful. Jimmy always says that people who give in to any sort of blackmail are first-class idiots.’

  Oh gówno, thought Ivanka with an inner wince. Hearing Cheryl’s name had just reminded her that she had forgotten to pass on a message to her. She would just have to play dumb and pretend she never received it.

  *

  As the bus approached Brambles, Cheryl could see that there was a bright yellow skip in the garden and the front door was open. What the heck would Edith want with a skip? she thought.

  She got off at the stop and crossed the lane, and as she opened the front gate she noticed the stack of paintings on the grass. The rubbish Van Gogh Sunflowers were on top and one side of the frame was broken off. Lance appeared carrying Edith’s coffee table out of the house which he then launched into the skip.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Cheryl called.

  Lance tilted his head towards her. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘It’s Thursday,’ replied Cheryl, matching his tone for blatant hostility. ‘I always come on Thursday.’

  He blew out his cheeks with frustration. ‘I rang your office and told that daft foreign girl that I didn’t need your services any more.’

  I? That single letter ratcheted Cheryl’s anger up by tens of notches.

  ‘I don’t work for you. I work for Edith,’ she said, hoping her looks really could kill.

  He ignored that and disappeared into the house again only to emerge seconds later with Edith’s ancient footstool.

  ‘I’m afraid Auntie Edith is no more,’ he replied with a put-on smile and threw the stool into the skip, then strode back inside again.

  ‘What do you mean she is no more?’

  Out of the corner of her eye, Cheryl saw the Watsons from across the lane come out of their bungalow, no doubt to watch the entertainment.

  ‘Oy, I said what do you mean?’ Cheryl didn’t care that she was shouting.

  Lance emerged with Edith’s small drop-leaf dining table this time. He stood it on the grass with its two dining chairs and the stack of Edith’s precious paintings.

  ‘She’s dead. Dead as a dodo. She is no more, she is a late aunt,’ he said in a comedy voice, chuckling, amused by himself.

  Cheryl felt numb. Edith gone? She couldn’t be. She wasn’t aware that the Watsons had walked over until she felt a hand on her arm.

  ‘It’s true, love,’ Mrs Watson said, her voice heavy with sympathy. ‘She passed away a couple of weeks ago. I thought it was strange that you weren’t at the funeral. Didn’t anyone let you know?’

  Cheryl shook her head. This couldn’t be happening. The bastard in the sky had had a good night’s sleep and was back in fine malicious fettle.

  ‘Nobody put it in the paper. We were disgusted.’

  Lance came out of the house again with what Cheryl thought was a vase.

  ‘She’s here if you want to say hello,’ he said and bobbed the pot up and down, saying in the voice of a ventriloquist, ‘Hello Cheryl. Got a gottle o’ geer?’

  It wasn’t a vase, it was an urn.

  Mrs Watson made an appalled ‘Oooh’ noise. Cheryl’s mouth dropped open in horror.

  ‘You cremated her? Why would you do that? She wanted to be buried with Ernest and you knew it.’

  ‘Did I?’ said Lance, pretending to think. ‘Can’t remember that. Catch.’

  He threw the urn in the air. Cheryl lunged forwards to grab it and hugged it protectively to her when it was safely in her grasp. She was too shocked to cry or scream at that vile man. Adrenaline was making her heart bang like a bass drum.

  ‘Don’t suppose you want all that original artwork,’ scoffed Lance. ‘I can’t fit it in the skip. And my aunt would so have wanted to leave you her fortune. There you go, they’re all for you. I insist you take them.’

  The beneficent tone in his voice totally belied the meaning behind the words. He was taunting her and loving the effect his sadism was having on her.

  ‘She loved those paintings,’ said Cheryl, hiccupping with emotion.

  ‘Oh yes, she loved them so much she was always shifting them about and that’s why she ended up falling off the ladder down the stairs and killing herself. I can’t bear to look at them. My poor Aunt Edith. Please take them. They harbour such awful memories for me.’ He touched his fingertips to his forehead in ham distress. ‘Do let me help you to the bus stop with them. It’s the least I can do.’

  That amused him because Cheryl couldn’t have got on the bus with even one of them, never mind the piled-high load.

  ‘I’ll drive you home, love,’ said Mr Watson, glaring at Lance. ‘You want locking up, you.’ He jabbed his finger at Lance. ‘I knew you were no good from the off. I said to my wi—’

  ‘Oh piss off, you stupid old fuckwit,’ jeered Lance, sauntering back inside and slamming the door to Brambles behind him. The Brambles that Edith said she had bequeathed to Cheryl.

  Cheryl had always thought Mr Watson and his wife were a pair of prize busybodies but now they humbled her with their kindness.

  ‘Come on, love. There’s nothing you can do for her now,’ Mr Watson whispered, casting a hex with his eyes at the present inhabitant of Edith’s cottage. ‘Sylvia, take her to the car and I’ll get these pictures for her.’

  Mrs Watson steered Cheryl back across the road.

  ‘I always said to Derek that there was something not right about that nephew of Edith’s,’ she confided. ‘Poor old lass.’

  ‘I can’t believe it, I just can’t.’ Cheryl couldn’t take it in. Edith couldn’t be gone. It was as if someone had pressed a fast forward button on her life and she couldn’t make sense of the speeded-up chunk. She sat in the car with the urn in her lap. The idea that Edith was in that small jar was too weird for her brain to compute.

  After four trips across the road, the paintings were loaded up and Mr Watson and Cheryl set off for her home.

  ‘He started stripping her house before the funeral, you know. If that isn’t cold-hearted, I don’t know what is. He no more cared for his auntie Edith than I cared for Margaret Thatcher.’

  ‘When exactly did she die, Mr Watson?’ asked Cheryl, still unable to register that she would never see Edith again, or visit her lovely cottage. She was too full of sadness and shock to consider what Lance might have done; that would come later.

  ‘Let me think,’ said Mr Watson, as they pulled up at some traffic lights. ‘It was the week before the snow. Yes, definitely, it was early Friday morning that we saw the paramedic car because I’d j
ust been out to the papershop to buy the Chronicle. Then we saw the private ambulance mid-morning and I said to my wife, I said, “Sylv, it looks like Edith’s gone.” He arranged that funeral as fast as you like and didn’t tell a soul. It’s only because Sylv’s niece works at the crematorium that we found out and turned up at the service. Ooh, you could tell he wasn’t happy. It was terrible as well, no flowers, no collection, no one else there but us three and the vicar bloke. A disgrace. We were surprised not to see you there, I must say. Sylvia said you couldn’t have known but we didn’t know how to contact you. I did ask that . . . that thing, but as you can imagine he wasn’t helpful. I’m sorry, love. It must be a terrible shock for you. We know how fond you were of each other.’

  After Mr Watson had gone home, Cheryl sat on her sofa, the urn at her side, two piles of Edith’s paintings on the floor next to her and she felt totally and utterly hollowed out. Dear, dear Edith who had believed that she really did own one of Van Gogh’s Sunflower paintings. She could see her now, pointing up at her study wall where the painting hung, telling her to remember that it was the most important of all her pieces. Cheryl’s eyes brimmed with teardrops. She couldn’t bear that she would never see that wonderful, sparky old lady again and that she would never know what happened to her because she certainly didn’t believe that she fell off a ladder and down the stairs. Neither would she live in the cottage as Edith had promised her. Another assurance in life, snatched away from her and crushed. Cheryl wouldn’t be able to look after Brambles and love it for her. Well, at least she could be the guardian of Edith’s paintings and treasure them as she did. She reached over and picked up the painting of the precious Sunflowers and one of the remaining three sides of the frame fell off in her hand. The bastard in the sky really was having a field day with her today.

  *

  It was only much later that evening when Cheryl’s mind at last began to close down through sheer exhaustion and her head started to empty to make way for sleep that meaningful thoughts were able to stretch and breathe. Cheryl was just nodding off when the conversation she’d had with Lance on the Sunday, the day of the snow, drifted back to her. He’d told her not to come on the Thursday of that week because Edith had a hospital appointment, hadn’t he? Yet she was already dead by then. He’d been calm as milk when lying to her that his aunt was fine and having a nap. Then, as if they had been suddenly released from a place where they were trapped, a cage full of thoughts rushed at her, bombing her brain. Edith’s words on that last meeting: All my artists upstairs are happy where they are and I think the downstairs lot are too now, so there will be no more changing. Her insistence that she never took the ladder upstairs any more. Lance snooping on their conversation. Lance hearing that he was going to be disinherited.

  Lance Nettleton had killed her lovely Edith.

  Cheryl scrambled out of bed to phone the police then thought better of it because it was after midnight and they’d think she was drunk. Instead she made a list of all the evidence and decided she would ring them at 9 a.m. sharp. Until then she made an attempt to get some sleep and managed it in fits and starts until half past seven.

  Chapter 50

  A watched pot never boils, they say. Well a watched clock doesn’t move either, thought Cheryl as she sat impatiently staring at its hands crawl round and round until they reached ten to nine, then she couldn’t wait any longer. She rang the non-emergency number and told the call centre operative that she wished to speak to a police officer as she believed someone had been murdered, even though it had been registered as an accident. It all sounded very melodramatic and unbelievable in the cold light of day and she was sure the operator was making circles at the side of her head as she transferred her call, indicating she was talking to a loony.

  Her nerve began to whittle away with every minute that she was kept on hold. She was contemplating putting down the phone when a burly voice answered, ‘DC Oakwell. Can I help you?’

  Cheryl took a deep breath. Even though she had practised what to say at this point, the words dried up in her mouth.

  ‘Hello,’ she began, ‘I’m ringing because I believe that an old lady was murdered by her nephew and it was covered up as an accident because she left me her cottage in her will—’

  ‘Just . . . just hang on there,’ the detective sliced off her gabbling. ‘Can I start with your name and address and the details of the person you are calling about.’

  ‘My name is Cheryl Parker,’ she told him, ‘and I live at twelve Joseph Lane. Until recently I was a cleaner for a ninety-three-year-old lady called Edith Gardiner who lives at Brambles, Iris Lane, Hopthorpe. She’s supposed to have fallen down the stairs trying to climb a ladder but I know she didn’t.’

  She gave him time to write that down.

  ‘Now, what makes you think she didn’t have an accident?’ said DC Oakwell eventually.

  ‘She wouldn’t have taken the ladder upstairs. She used to climb it downstairs but . . .’ Damn, she thought, too much information.

  ‘So, this ninety-three-year-old lady used to climb a ladder to do what exactly?’

  Cheryl knew she shouldn’t have mentioned that Edith climbed ladders on a regular basis but there was no way to undo the damage now.

  ‘She would swap her paintings around on the walls, but the last time I saw her she said she was happy with how they were. I asked her if she ever took the ladder upstairs and she said she didn’t.’

  ‘And why did you ask her if she took the ladder upstairs?’ posed DC Oakwell.

  Oh heck, she was fast making herself number one suspect here.

  ‘I saw that she had moved another picture and I said to her that I hoped she never took the ladder upstairs, and she said she never would again.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘Er . . . that’s right.’

  This isn’t going well, thought Cheryl. She wasn’t casting Edith in a very sane light.

  ‘Okay then. So what do you think . . . happened?’

  He didn’t believe her, she could tell. DC Oakwell was doing his duty and recording her statement, but it was clear to her that he thought he was wasting his time.

  ‘She has a nephew, Lance Nettleton. He lives in her house now. Until recently her will stated that he would inherit Brambles but Edith changed her mind and left it to me. She showed me the will the last time I saw her, which was the day, or the day before, she died. That’s why I’m convinced Lance killed her. She said that her house would fall to hell before she left it to him.’

  ‘You’re her cleaner, you say?’ asked DC Oakwell.

  Cheryl sighed. She could imagine what he was thinking. A ladder-climbing nonagenarian leaves her house to the cleaner not her next of kin and she’s not bonkers?

  ‘Yes. I’ve been her cleaner for years and I loved her. She was a wonderful old lady, bit batty but—’

  ‘Batty? Confused?’

  Oh bugger, something else I should have kept my trap shut about, Cheryl thought.

  She tried to temper what she meant. ‘Not batty, eccentric. But she knew what she was doing where it counted. Lance, her nephew, hadn’t been back in her life long and she didn’t like him. He was stealing from her. There were cheques missing from her book and I was going to have a go at him about it. The last time I saw her—’

  ‘Do you have a copy of this will?’ Was Cheryl imagining it, or was there a note of interest creeping into DC Oakwell’s voice.

  ‘No. She never got the chance to take it to a solicitor. I know that Lance overheard us talking about it because I found him eavesdropping on our conversation. I know he killed her. I rang when we had the snow to see if she was okay and he was there and told me that she couldn’t come to the phone, but was perfectly fine. Only she was dead by then. He kept the funeral quiet so I didn’t know anything about it until she was cremated, and she’d wanted to be buried next to her husband . . .’ Cheryl forced herself to stop and take a breath.

  ‘And you say that this man is living in her house now?’r />
  ‘Yes. He’s thrown all her stuff out. She’s not even cold in her grave . . . well, she’s not even in her grave. He was going to put her ashes in the skip but I brought them home with me.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘He was making fun of the urn. He threw it into the air for me to catch, so that should give you an idea of what an ars— awful person he is.’

  ‘So you have been up to the house, presumably?’

  ‘Yes, yesterday,’ said Cheryl. ‘I went up to clean for her but I didn’t know that he . . . Lance . . . had rung up Diamond Shine, that’s the cleaning agency, to cancel me because they never told me. That’s when I saw the skip and I knew something was wrong. Please will you go and talk to him? I know what it sounds like but he’s murdered my friend. I’m not bothered about the house, but I’m very bothered about what happened to Edith.’ She tried to keep a lid on her emotion but it was too hard.

  ‘You’re not bothered about the house, you say?’

  Oh, how Cheryl wished she could articulate properly what she meant. Like people did on Question Time.

  ‘Look, I loved Brambles, and of course I wish I owned it, but I didn’t have chance to get used to the idea that it would be mine anyway. And if Edith had changed her mind again and left it to the cats’ home I would have thought celery vee, but—’