by H. Y. Hanna
I shoved the paper bag of sweets under the counter, tied on my apron, and hurried over to join Mabel and her friends in serving the customers. I was just explaining the difference between a Bakewell tart and a Bakewell pudding to a group of German tourists when a loud bang in the kitchen made us all jerk our heads around. Then I heard Cassie’s voice rising in a wail.
Uh-oh. I had a bad feeling about this.
I hurried into the kitchen. A scene of carnage met my eyes. Cassie was standing in the middle of the room, covered from head to toe in white flour. I had to fight to keep a straight face.
“Don’t laugh at me!” Cassie snapped. “It’s not funny!”
“What happened?” I asked, as I hurried forwards to help her clean up the mess.
“I was trying to make some Chelsea buns,” Cassie said. “I followed the instructions your mother left, except that I thought I’d use a blender as it’s such a bore mixing by hand in a bowl. So I put the flour and sugar and lemon zest and cinnamon and spices into the blender and then suddenly, the whole thing just exploded! I don’t know what I did wrong. Honestly, Gemma, I never realised baking was so complicated.”
It took us another twenty minutes to clean up the mess—flour and sugar had gone everywhere in the kitchen—and while we were doing that, the smell of burning suddenly made Cassie shriek and run to the oven. As I watched in dismay, she pulled out a tray of scones, each with a charred, black crust on top.
“Oh God, I’d forgotten I put these in to bake!” cried Cassie. She peered at them hopefully. “Well, they’re only burned on top. Maybe if we slice off the top section, we can serve them anyway?”
“I can’t serve those to customers!” I said, horrified. “We’ll just have to bake some more and throw this batch away.”
“It’s such a dreadful waste of food,” said Cassie, wincing. “Really, there’s nothing wrong with them other than the top being a bit burnt…”
I agreed silently. I hated the thought of wasting all this food. I thought suddenly of Owen’s cheerful face and Ruby wagging her tail as the two of them stood on that cold street corner, and grimaced.
“Maybe we can donate these,” I said suddenly. “I’ll ask Seth if he knows of any homeless shelters that might want them. I’m sure the homeless won’t mind if they get scones that have the tops cut off and are a bit shorter than usual. They still taste just as good.”
“Yeah, good idea. I’ll get rid of the burnt bits and store them in the fridge, in the meantime,” said Cassie. She sighed. “I hate to ask this, Gemma, but have you made a decision yet about those women you interviewed on Saturday?”
I gave her a despairing look. “Cassie, you saw what they were like! I can’t hire any of them!”
“We need a proper baking chef,” said Cassie. “I mean, I’m sure I’ll get better with practice but…” She trailed off.
I sighed. She was right. People might think baking is just mixing things together in a bowl and sticking it in the oven, but I was convinced that there was more to it than that. Otherwise, it would be like saying Art was just dunking your brush in a pot of paint and dabbing it on a canvas. A great baker was just as much a talent as a great artist. There was something—some magic—that happened beyond just combining the ingredients together. And neither Cassie nor I had it. Oh, we could have probably produced some passable baking with a lot of practice, but to succeed, my little tearoom had to produce incredible baking.
And we weren’t going to do it with Cassie in the kitchen. In fact, based on her progress so far, we’d be lucky to have something edible with Cassie in the kitchen.
“I’ve still got the advert running, so hopefully we’ll get some more applicants soon… And my mother’s back next Sunday, remember?” I said brightly. “So you’ve only got to manage until then.”
“That’s still another five whole days,” Cassie groaned. “You’ll be lucky if I don’t blow up the kitchen by then!”
***
The rest of the day passed fairly uneventfully, if slightly meagrely. We were already behind with the baking and Cassie kept having to throw out botched batches and start again, so supplies kept getting lower and lower. For the first time since the tearoom opened, I found myself having to tell customers that certain items on the menu were unavailable. I winced each time I saw their disappointment and annoyance, and hoped that it wouldn’t stop them coming back or recommending me to their friends.
Something else was bothering me too. I kept glancing at the clock on the wall and calculating the time difference… Shouldn’t my mother have arrived in Jakarta by now? I checked my phone for the tenth time but there was no text message or email from her. A glance at the airline website told me that her flight had definitely arrived. So why hadn’t I heard from her?
When my phone rang at last, I snatched it up, imagining all sorts of horrors, from the hospital calling to say that my mother had succumbed to some rare form of Ebola to the British Embassy calling to tell me that my mother had been captured by terrorists (okay, so I might have a slightly over-active imagination). I was so convinced it would be an overseas call that, for a moment, I was puzzled by the deep male voice in my ear and couldn’t quite place it.
“Gemma? Are you there?”
“Devlin!” I said. “Sorry, I thought you were… I got a bit confused—”
“Can you talk?”
I was surprised by his uncharacteristically brusque tone. Then I heard the suppressed anger in his voice and realised that Devlin was furious. Casting a quick look around the tearoom, I went into the little shop area and shut the glass door behind me.
“Yes,” I said cautiously. “Is something wrong?”
“Maybe you’d like to tell me why Seth rang you last Friday night.”
Oh hell. My heart slammed in my chest. How did he find out?
“It was nothing,” I mumbled. “He just needed support from a friend. I mean, he’d just found a colleague dead and then he was arrested for a murder he didn’t commit… Anyway, how did you know he rang me?” I said, getting on the defensive. “I thought you were entitled to some privacy when you made your phone calls from the police station.”
“You are—but you are also expected to be honest. Seth told the custody sergeant that he was ringing his solicitor for legal advice. He didn’t say he was calling his friend to tamper with evidence.”
I said nothing, my heart pounding uncomfortably.
“What did he ask you to do, Gemma?”
“Nothing! I told you, he just needed a friendly ear.”
“Don’t lie to me,” said Devlin harshly. “I know he asked you to go to Wadsworth to get something.”
I swallowed. “Ho-how did you know?”
“Cassie told me. Oh, she didn’t mean to, but it slipped out. She came to see me last night, to beg me to help Seth, and unintentionally mentioned that he’d rung you. When I asked her about it, she fobbed me off with some lame explanation about a joke or something. But I’m not stupid, Gemma. Seth wouldn’t ring you at that time of the night—and from the police station no less—unless it was something urgent and to do with the murder.” Devlin’s voice was cold and hard. “So are you going to tell me or do I have to bring Seth in again for questioning? And this time he will not be released on bail. In fact, I may even add ‘attempting to obstruct a police investigation’ to the list of charges against him.”
I gritted my teeth, feeling a mixture of fury and betrayal. Devlin was supposed to be on my side! He was supposed to help, not be the enemy! Now, it felt like he was the one after Seth.
“It really wasn’t a big deal,” I said tightly. “Seth was still fuming when he got back to Gloucester, so he wrote a note to Quentin Barrow to sort of… well, have the last word on their argument, I guess. You know what it’s like! And he put it in the old don’s pigeonhole when he went back to Wadsworth—he popped into the Porter’s Lodge first, before going to the Cloisters to look for his phone.”
“If it wasn’t a big deal, why did he need to
wake you up in the middle of the night to go and fetch it?”
I shifted uncomfortably. “Well, it wasn’t a very polite note…”
“You mean he made threats to Barrow.”
“He’d had a bit too much to drink,” I said quickly. “You say all sorts of things you don’t mean in the heat of the moment. Don’t tell me you haven’t done it yourself.”
“Yes, but I didn’t murder anyone afterwards.”
“Neither did Seth!” I snapped. “This is exactly why he wanted me to get rid of it—because he knew the police would think like that. He was already in such a bad position, he knew that even a harmless note could be incriminating.”
“If he was innocent, then there was nothing to incriminate,” said Devlin evenly. “Have you still got the note?”
“No, I destroyed it.”
There was silence at the other end, but I could feel Devlin’s anger and frustration coming down the line. I cast around for something to lighten his mood and thought suddenly of my encounter along the canal and the recreation in Wadsworth last night.
“Devlin, there’s something else I’ve got to tell you.”
“What is it?” His tone was curt.
“That tramp who was outside Wadsworth College on the night of the murder—I’ve been asking around town about him… His name is Jim… and… and he’s got a pretty foul temper. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s the kind of man who would bear a grudge.”
“How would you know?”
“Well, I met him,” I admitted. “I talked to one of the Big Issue sellers in town and got some information… And then I tracked him down by the canal.”
“Gemma, are you playing at being amateur detective again?” said Devlin irritably.
“I’m not playing at anything!” I snapped. “I’m trying to help find the real murderer.”
“You can help by staying out of the investigation.”
“Well, it’s too late for that,” I said. “And you should listen to me! Last night, I did a recreation of the murder with Lincoln. I got him to run from the Cloisters to the main gate of Wadsworth and time how long it took. Even accounting for his limp, I think there was more than enough time for Jim to—”
“You were at Wadsworth with Lincoln?” Devlin cut in.
Was I imagining it or was there a note of jealousy in his voice?
“Yes, Lincoln invited me to go to the Oxford Society of Medicine dinner, which happened to be at Wadsworth this term,” I said impatiently. “So anyway, I think Jim could be a strong suspect. He had no good reason to be loitering outside the college at that time of the night; he hated Barrow and had a motive for wanting him out of the way; he—”
“Gemma,” Devlin cut me off. “It’s unlikely that Jim was the murderer.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ve had new information about the timeframe of the murder. Barrow’s phone was damaged during the struggle, but the IT department have finally managed to retrieve some data. Barrow sent a text message at 12:17 a.m., so he was still alive then.”
“How do you know it was him?” I said quickly. “I mean, anyone could have used his phone to send a message, to give a false impression of the time of murder.”
“True,” Devlin conceded. “But this was part of an ongoing conversation. It looks like Barrow had some kind of text message interchange with a colleague at Harvard just after midnight. They were discussing a research project they’re collaborating on and there were several messages back and forth, with the last one being from Barrow. The message contained too many details of the project—I doubt it could have been the murderer just sending a fake message.”
“So what does this mean?”
“It means that Barrow had to have been killed between 12:17 a.m. and 12:30 a.m. when Seth found the body. But Jim was seen on CCTV outside the college at 12:23 a.m.—which only leaves a gap of six minutes when he could have committed the murder and made his escape. He would have had to kill Barrow and then run through the tunnel, around the Walled Garden, through the two quads before finally getting out the front gate. It’s a long roundabout route. He couldn’t have done that in six minutes.”
Devlin was right. Even when the gap had been twelve minutes, Lincoln had said that it would have been a stretch for a man with a limp. Now, with it reduced to half that time, there was no way Jim could have killed Barrow and made it out of the college in time to be seen on camera on the other side of the street.
“Look, just stay out of it, okay, Gemma? Leave the investigation to the police,” said Devlin. “You’re playing around when you have no idea what you’re doing.”
I smarted at his condescending tone. “Well, I wouldn’t have to get involved myself if you’d agreed to help prove Seth’s innocence!” I snapped.
There was a stony silence from the other end and I realised suddenly I had gone too far. I heard Devlin take a deep breath and let it out slowly, then he said, his voice sounding colder and more furious than I had ever heard him, “I can’t believe you have the gall to ask me to compromise my professional ethics when you’ve been lying to me and withholding evidence from the police!”
I winced. When he put it like that, it did sound pretty bad. But what did he expect me to do? I felt my own temper flare. At the end of the day, Devlin was an officer of the law and, in this case, we were on opposite sides of the fence, with Seth’s freedom hanging between us.
“Devlin, I—”
“No. I don’t want to listen to your excuses.” He cut me off, his voice like ice. “I’m going to hang up now before I say something I will regret. Goodbye, Gemma.”
I stared in disbelief at the dead phone in my hands. He had hung up on me! How dare he! Of all the arrogant, high-handed, self-righteous, odious… Oooooh!
I ignored the little voice at the back of my head which whispered that Devlin had justifiable reason to be angry and, in fact, had been pretty restrained and forgiving with me. Instead, I focused on my own anger and indignation. I was not speaking to Devlin again, I decided, until he crawled back grovelling to apologise!
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Devlin’s final words left me fuming for the rest of the afternoon and I was glad when I could finally flip the “OPEN” sign to “CLOSED” on the tearoom door. It had been a strain trying to maintain a cheery façade in front of the customers. Cassie had left already so I went around by myself, drawing the curtains, pushing the last chairs back into place around the tables, switching off the lights. As I got onto my bike to begin the cycle back into Oxford centre, I decided to drop in to see Seth before returning home. I hadn’t seen him since Sunday when we’d picked him up from the station, although I knew Cassie had popped in to check on him yesterday evening. I hoped he was keeping his spirits up.
I found Seth in his college rooms. From the papers strewn across his desk, it looked like he had been trying to get some work done, but from the expression on his face, I didn’t think molecular chemical reactions were what had been occupying his thoughts.
“Hi, Gemma,” he said in a listless voice as he let me in.
“I thought I’d pop in to see how you are…” I said.
He shrugged. “I’m okay, I guess. Trying to focus on other things—but it’s a bit difficult when all you can think about is the fact that you could be tried for a brutal murder you didn’t commit!”
I reached out and gave his arm a reassuring squeeze. “Don’t worry, Seth. You won’t go to court. I’m sure we’ll find the real killer before that and the police will drop all charges against you,” I said with more confidence than I felt.
“Have you had news on the case?” he asked desperately. “My parents are arriving home next week. I don’t want this to be the first thing my father hears when he gets off the ship.”
I didn’t know what to say. “The police are working on it,” I said. “I… I just spoke to Devlin this afternoon and he’s following up some leads.” I didn’t add that one of my top suspects had turned into a dead end. Then I remem
bered the original reason for Devlin’s call and said, “By the way, Devlin found out about the note in Barrow’s pigeonhole.”
“What?” Seth looked at me in horror. “You didn’t—”
“Cassie told him. By mistake,” I added hastily. “She went to speak to him and you know what Devlin’s like. He’s incredibly sharp and he’s a shrewd interrogator. And then he called me this afternoon and asked me outright—”
“What did you tell him?”
I gave him a rueful look. “I had to tell him the truth, Seth. But nothing in detail. Just that you’d written some things in the heat of the moment, after your argument with Barrow, and then regretted it afterwards. But given the circumstances… you didn’t really want the police to see the note.”
“Now Devlin will definitely think I’m guilty,” groaned Seth. “Because why would I be worried about the note being found unless it was incriminating?”
That was pretty much what Devlin had said but I didn’t want to make my friend feel worse. We sat in a morose silence for a moment, then I said brightly, “You should have seen the disaster we had in the tearoom kitchen this afternoon.”
Seth made a valiant effort to follow my lead. “What happened?”
“Cassie tried to bake—”
I got no further because Seth burst into laughter. I looked at him severely. “I don’t think she’d appreciate that.”
“Sorry…” he gasped. “But I’ve seen her try to bake before. She’s a public liability!”
My lips twitched. “Yeah, well, you wouldn’t have wanted to be anywhere near her today. Somehow, her blender exploded. There was flour and sugar everywhere. Took us ages to clean up the kitchen—and I don’t think she’ll ever get it out of her hair.”
This sent Seth into fresh gales of laughter and I joined in. It was nice to see him lighten up a bit at last.
“Thanks, Gemma,” he said with a grateful smile as he finally calmed down. He took off his glasses and wiped them. “God, I needed that.”
