Lemonade and Lies (Peridale Cafe Cozy Mystery Book 2)

by Agatha Frost

  “What have I missed?” Julia heard her gran call through the crowd. “What are you all huddled over for?”

  Julia looked up at the broken window, along with many others, all seeming to want to find a clue worthy of gossiping about. The only remnants of the window were tiny, jagged shards around the perimeter of the frame. Charles had fallen through the window with some considerable force.

  “He’s dead,” Barker whispered quietly as he checked the man’s pulse. “Julia, can you call for an ambulance?”

  Julia scrambled for her phone, her heart pounding in her chest. Pushing the phone into her ear, she turned to see the shock on her gran’s face as Sue told her what had happened. Jessie was staring down at the body, her mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water.

  Minutes later, an ambulance and two police cars were speeding towards Peridale Manor while Detective Inspector Brown attempted to clear the scene. In a village where everybody needed to know everything about everyone, it was a task easier said than done.

  “What’s everyone crowding around for?” Julia heard Katie’s shrill shriek call across the garden. “Will somebody answer me?”

  People dropped their heads and guiltily backed away from the body on the ground. A path cleared for Katie to stumble forward, still in her heavy work boots, jacket, and yellow safety helmet. She saw the limp body of her brother on the ground, and her wide eyes scanned the crowd as tears gathered along her heavily coated lashes.

  “No!” she whimpered, burying her head in Brian’s chest as inky mascara streaked down her rouged cheeks. “No!”

  Brian stared ahead at the body, his eyes wide and unblinking as he comforted his sobbing wife. As her pained screeches grew louder, the thinner the crowd around the body became.

  The uniformed officers got to work securing the scene and successfully brushing away the remaining villagers. Julia, her gran, Sue and Jessie all hung back, and it was obvious none of them knew if they should also leave. Julia heard her gran mutter something about being related when an officer approached them, which seemed to give her a pass to stay and stare. Julia on the other hand had something more important to do when she caught Barker slipping away from the madness and into the house.

  “I need the bathroom,” Julia whispered to Sue as she slipped away.

  Taking the mahogany staircase as carefully as she could, she crept up them for the second time that day. When she reached the top step, she spotted Barker at the end of the hallway, crouched under the broken window. The noise from the garden fluttered through the curtains of the empty frame.

  “I’d say he was pushed,” Julia said as she approached Barker. “Quite hard too, if you ask me. Knocked the entire window out of its frame.”

  “You know you can’t be up here, Julia,” Barker mumbled as he inspected a stray shard of glass that had fallen inwards. “It’s a crime scene.”

  “I won’t touch anything.”

  Julia crept forward, scanning the hallway for anything out of the ordinary. The lavishly decorated walls were lined with ornate landscape paintings in heavy gold frames. Ornaments on tall stands sat under the paintings, illuminated by sconces jutting out of the walls.

  “This stand is empty,” she thought aloud, summoning Barker up from the ground. “If you look, there are three display stands on each side of the wall, between the window and these two doors, all containing an ornament, but this one is empty.”

  Barker looked from a vase to an ornate figure of a glass ballerina on the two stands on either side of the empty one, but Julia’s frustration started to bubble when she noticed familiar dismissal in his eyes.

  “That’s hardly a clue, Julia,” Barker said, turning his attention back to the window. “Who says there was anything on that plinth?”

  Julia stared down at the empty stand, noticing a definite wobbly line in the centre, indicating that something had been there. She crouched down so that she was eye-level with the stand, and under the bright light, there was an unmistakable layer of dust everywhere, apart from the centre where whatever had been taken had stood.

  Julia pulled out her phone and snapped a quick picture of the shape etched in the dust while Barker’s back was turned.

  “I’m calling this a crime scene, so you need to leave.”

  “Yes, sir. Good luck with the investigation.”

  “You’ve got that look in your eyes again,” Barker moaned. “Please, Julia, I implore you to leave this one to me.”

  “What is this look people keep talking about?”

  “It’s the same look you had when you were trying to outsmart me by finding Gertrude Smith’s murderer before I did.”

  Julia concealed her smile as she turned on her heels, not wanting to remind Barker that she had outsmarted the Detective Inspector by finding the murderer before he had.

  As she walked along the hallway and back towards the staircase, she looked down at the floor, the nervous bubbling in her stomach growing louder each time she spoke to Barker. She was sure he was about to re-ask her out on that date in the garden before Charles and Richard’s fight, and this time she was sure she would have said yes. While she looked down, she spotted muddy boot prints barely visible on the oak floorboards. Glancing over her shoulder, she concentrated on the floor as Barker spoke on the phone. The boot prints ran all the way down the hall, stopping just before the window. They then trailed back into the bathroom where Julia had hidden earlier. The door was open so she glanced inside, noting that the boot prints suddenly vanished in front of the bathtub, almost as if somebody had sat on the edge of the bath and removed their boots.

  Julia thought about attracting Barker to the boot prints, but he had told her to stay out of his investigation. If he were worth his Detective Inspector badge, he would notice the faint footprints and come to his own conclusions. Julia decided she would let Barker get on with his investigation, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t get on with her own. She pulled her recipe notepad out of her bag, flipped past a page of ingredients for a new chocolate orange scone she wanted to try, and scribbled down everything she had just learned.

  Back in the garden, Julia re-joined her gran, Sue and Jessie just at the very moment a stretcher covered in a red blanket was hoisted into the back of an ambulance.

  On the edge of the stage, Katie was still sobbing into Brian’s arms, while Brian watched the stretcher, still unblinking. Vincent Wellington gawked at the grass from behind his oxygen mask, unaware of what had just happened to his son.

  “If I get like that, I want you girls to put me out of my misery,” Dot said when she noticed Julia looking at the wheelchair-bound old man. “Take me out to a farm, and put a bullet in my back. I won’t stop you.”

  “Gran!” Sue whispered, slapping Dot’s arm with the back of her hand. “A man has just died!”

  “I’m just saying!” Dot protested, rubbing the spot where Sue had just tapped her. “That’s no life. I’m not surprised he agreed to let Katie turn this place into a spa. She probably asked over dinner while a nurse dribbled soup down his chin. Poor man wouldn’t have had a clue what he was agreeing to.”

  When Dot finished talking, neither Julia nor Sue spoke. Instead, they looked uncomfortably at each other, both hearing truth in their gran’s statement, but also not wanting to give her permission to keep ranting at the scene of a man’s murder.

  “Should we say something?” Sue whispered to Julia, as they both looked over to their father. “Poor man looks in shock.”

  “I think we should leave it,” Julia whispered back.

  “He’s still our father, Julia.”

  Julia’s heart twitched in her chest. She knew that was true, but the unblinking coldness of his eyes had shaken her to her very core. It was the exact same look that had taken over him when Julia’s mother had been lowered in the ground all those years ago. Sue probably didn’t remember, but it was etched in Julia’s memory like a red-hot stamp on a cow’s backside. She particularly remembered how he had spent the entire day
wordlessly staring into the distance, ignoring his two distraught daughters.

  They watched on as officers wrapped crime scene tape around the spot where Charles Wellington had been. Julia knew it wouldn’t be long before the forensics team turned up to document every detail of the scene. For now at least, there was nothing to be gained from lingering around at Peridale Manor.

  After driving back into the village, Julia and Jessie parted ways from Dot and Sue, heading back up the winding lane leading to Julia’s cottage. When they were alone, Julia noticed a similar vacantness in Jessie’s eyes. It hadn’t gone unnoticed that she hadn’t said a word since the garden party had turned sour. Julia had just been waiting until they were alone before attempting to talk to her young lodger.

  “I’m sorry you had to see that,” Julia whispered, nudging Jessie softly with her arm. “It’s never easy seeing your first dead body.”

  “That’s not my first,” Jessie said with a shrug, facing away from Julia.

  “Oh. Right.”

  Julia was rendered speechless by the lack of emotion in Jessie’s voice. She knew people could become detached when talking about death, but Julia hadn’t expected somebody so young to be so weathered towards it. She wondered if she should push the subject, but like talking about Jessie’s time on the streets, Julia knew it was probably best to wait for Jessie to voluntarily open up than pry for information.

  “If you ever want to talk, I’m here,” Julia offered, pulling her house keys out of her handbag as they climbed out of Julia’s vintage aqua blue Ford Anglia.

  Jessie didn’t say anything, instead choosing to nod as she chewed the inside of her lip. Julia unhooked her peeling white garden gate. As they walked towards her old cottage with its low thatched roof, she decided they were going to spend the afternoon baking, if only to keep both of their minds occupied.

  Monday morning in Julia’s café was usually the quietest time of the week. It was when she spent her time deep cleaning the kitchen, and checking which ingredients were starting to run low. On the Monday morning following Charles Wellington’s death, it became very apparent that her deep clean and stock check would have to wait.

  For as long as Julia had owned the café, this was the first Monday morning in Julia’s memory that there was a small cluster of residents waiting as she pulled her Ford Anglia into her small parking space. At first, Julia had thought the villagers just wanted to use her café as a base to hear all of the latest gossip regarding the recent death, but it turned out they had created a connection between Julia and Charles and they intended on using it.

  “Has your father said anything yet?”

  “How is your father doing?”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss, Julia. Your family must be going through such a difficult time.”

  “Were you close to Charles?”

  “How’s Katie holding up? Poor woman having to see her brother like that.”

  By lunchtime, Julia was tired of repeating over and over that she knew no more than anyone else because she wasn’t close to her father, and she had only met Charles once previously at her father’s wedding. For most people, this didn’t settle their insatiable thirst for more information, so they continued to quiz her regardless, certain she must be hiding something.

  “Has your father called?” Dot asked, after hurrying in a little after one, her hands filled with bags of shopping. “He hasn’t called me. The cheek of the man!”

  “Why would he have called?” Julia poured Dot a cup of tea. “I doubt he even has my number.”

  “He’s your father! You deserve to know what’s going on,” Dot said, dumping her bags at the table nearest the counter, which was where people usually sat when they wanted to talk with Julia as she worked. “I haven’t heard a thing since yesterday! Everyone is talking, but nobody knows a thing.”

  Julia set the cup of tea in front of her gran, along with a bowl of sugar cubes, and a small jug of milk. Dot dumped four lumps of sugar and half of the milk into her tea, once again defying the doctor’s warning of age-related Type 2 diabetes.

  “I bet it was Richard,” Dot exclaimed suddenly after taking a deep sip of her hot tea, the cup barely pulled away from her lips. “It has to be! We all saw that fight between him and Charles right before he was pushed to his death.”

  “But why would Richard May want to kill Charles?” asked Roxy Carter, who was in the café on her lunch break from the local primary school. “You can’t accuse people of murder without any proof.”

  “What more proof do you need?” Dot cried, stamping her finger down on the table. “You saw Richard trying to bash Charles’ face in, didn’t you?”

  “I heard him and Sally had called their wedding off,” Roxy said, taking a bite of one of Julia’s brownies. “Maybe Richard was just taking his frustration out on the wrong person?”

  “Or maybe he was getting ready to murder him!” Dot insisted. “Mark my words, young girl. The truth will come out with the dirty laundry.”

  Roxy’s face turned a deep shade of red as she stared down at her brownie. Julia wasn’t sure if her gran knew what she had just said, but the hurt was written all over Roxy’s face. It hadn’t been long since Roxy’s romantic relationship with her teaching assistant, Violet, had been used to blackmail her by Gertrude Smith, thus putting her in the frame when Gertrude was murdered. Julia loved her gran, but along with the rest of Peridale, her first reaction was often an overreaction. It wouldn’t be long until her gran’s declaration of Richard’s guilt spread around the village as fact, as it had done with an innocent Roxy.

  After closing the café at the end of a long day, Julia sent Jessie back to the cottage with the house keys, leaving her to drive up to Peridale Manor alone with a beef casserole secured in the passenger seat. Pulling up alongside a lone police car, she secured her handbrake, casting an eye to her casserole, which she hoped would serve a dual purpose.

  Julia unbuckled her seatbelt and pulled her keys out of the ignition. She opened her small black handbag, pulled out her small ingredients notepad, immediately flicking to the notes she had made. She had written a long list of things she wanted to find out. The first point, which she had circled multiple times, was to talk to Katie and her father.

  Julia knew they would be too distraught to think about food, so she had baked a casserole out of concern, but she also hoped it was a valid excuse for visiting uninvited.

  “Yes?” the surly housekeeper grumbled through a crack in the door after Julia rang the doorbell. “The Wellingtons aren’t taking visitors.”

  Julia applied her kindest smile and pushed forward the casserole. The dumpy woman with the heavily lined eyes and pulled back wiry hair sourly looked Julia up and down.

  “I was here yesterday,” Julia offered.

  “So was half the village, sweetheart,” the woman snapped, her bulging eyes rolling. “Clear off.”

  “I’m Brian’s daughter,” Julia said, wondering if the housekeeper really didn’t remember their meeting yesterday.

  “Oh,” the woman said with a heavy sigh, opening the door and stepping to the side. “I remember. You brought that insolent child with you.”

  Julia bit her tongue, knowing the venomous housekeeper could easily deny her entry if she wanted to. Taking her chance, she stepped over the threshold and into the grand entrance hall.

  “I didn’t catch your name yesterday,” Julia said.

  “That’s because I didn’t give it. I’ll fetch Mr. South for you. Stay here.”

  The housekeeper shuffled away and headed towards the staircase, looking over her shoulder at Julia as she went. Julia smiled at her, which only seemed to anger the woman more. When she reached the top of the staircase and turned along the hall, Julia let out the breath she had been holding in, and took a couple of steps forward. She wondered what could have happened to the housekeeper to make her so bitter.

  Julia placed the casserole on the lily filled table. The tin containing her Victoria sponge cake was still there
, seemingly untouched from the previous day. Julia walked along the entrance hall towards the open door of the kitchen. Through the large windows above the stove, people moved back and forth. At first, she thought they were police officers, until she realised they were builders.

  “Julia?” Katie called from the top of the staircase, the surprise loud and clear in her voice. “What are you doing here?”

  Julia turned on her heels and scooped up the casserole dish as Katie made her way down the stairs. Julia hadn’t expected to see Katie. She had assumed she was going to be curled up in bed, grief-stricken and distraught after her brother’s death. Instead, she was as put together as always, her makeup thick and her hair voluminous. She was wearing all black, perhaps as an outwardly sign of mourning, but her stomach and chest were still poking through the sparse material.

  “I made you a casserole. I didn’t think you would want to be cooking today.”

  Katie stared down at the gravy and beef mixture through the plastic wrap, her lips pursed into what was obviously a fake smile.

  “You know we’ve got our housekeeper, Hilary, for that,” Katie said, awkwardly accepting the dish. “I’m sure your father will enjoy this. I don’t eat meat on Mondays.”

  “Oh,” Julia said, narrowing her eyes at the strange woman who was the same age as Julia but different in every possible way. “I was hoping to speak to my father. Is he around?”

  “He’s at the station,” Katie said as she walked through to the large and immaculate kitchen. “He’s making a statement.”

  “A statement?” Julia asked, hurrying after Katie. “At the station?”

  “I didn’t want more police up here,” Katie said as she pulled open the giant double doors of her fridge before balancing the casserole on wrapped trays of leftover canapés from the garden party. “The sooner things get back to normal, the better. Can I get you a drink? Perhaps some lemonade? There’s plenty left over.”