Best Murder in Show (Sophie Sayers Village Mysteries Book 1)

by Debbie Young

  “How much do you charge to display a postcard, please, Carol?” I asked.

  “Ooh, no charge, dear, the board’s just there as a service to villagers. You’ll find the postcards between the plums and the potatoes. What are you wanting to advertise?”

  As I started to tell her, the shop bell jangled and an old boy entered, wearing wellingtons and ancient twill trousers with braces over his string vest.

  “I teach English as a foreign language.”

  He gave a hearty laugh.

  “English as a foreign language? You won’t find any foreigners round these parts, girlie. Saving yourself, of course. And that poncey Mr and Mrs Absolom who just moved into Jay Cottage. They came from up that London five years ago. I can’t understand what they’re saying with their lah-di-dah ways. You might try giving them a lesson or two.”

  “Oh, Billy, now don’t you be so rude to young Sophie, she’s doing her best,” said Carol. “She’s only trying to keep the fox from the door, and that’s to be encouraged. You won’t find May Sayers’s niece putting her feet up and living off state pension and benefits, unlike some I could name.”

  Her pointed jibe washed over Billy who went to search through the alphabet for a can of stout.

  “But I’m afraid he’s right, my dear, we don’t have anyone living in the village who isn’t a native English speaker. You’d have to drive into Gloucester to find anyone like that, though I dare say you’d find plenty when you got there. If it’s a job in the village that you’re looking for, I suggest you try Hector’s House. I hear he’s got a vacancy.”

  “He’s a bit vacant, more like,” called Billy from by the S shelf. “That man wants to spend more time with the real world and less with his books.”

  “Hector’s house? Thanks, Carol, but it’s not a cleaning job I’m after. I need something a bit more cerebral.”

  “Cerebral? What, like Weetabix?” Billy, pausing by some cans of Whitbread, helpfully waved a yellow packet from the W–Z section.

  “Not cereal, Billy, cerebral,” I called to him. “That means brainy.”

  “Not your special subject, Billy.”

  Carol waved her hand in his direction dismissively. Billy put down the Weetabix, picked up a four-pack of stout and flipped open one of the ring-pulls as he came to queue behind me.

  Carol got the conversation back on track quickly. “I don’t mean Hector’s house, I mean Hector’s House. Remember the old antique shop up the High Street? Belonged to old Mr and Mrs Munro? Well, they moved to the seaside a few years ago, and gave the shop lease over to their son, Hector. He’s turned it into a nice, clean bookshop, much better than those dusty old antiques. Successful, too, by all accounts. He’s even got a little tea shop in there, and he’s so supportive of other villagers.”

  “Tea shop, my arse!” muttered Billy. “We all know about Hector’s tea.”

  “Ssssh!” said Carol quickly. “It’s a tea shop, and no mistake. And his buns are so fancy, Sophie, you wouldn’t believe them unless you saw them.”

  “And as to his buns…”

  I thought it best to cut Billy’s conversation short, said goodbye and left. However, I determined to head to Hector’s House the next day, once I’d finished unpacking. I was sure Auntie May would have approved. She’d encouraged me to write, giving me beautiful notebooks, exquisitely tooled pens and padlocked diaries that she’d brought back from exotic locations on her travels. I think she’d regarded me as the daughter she never had, hoping I’d continue her line after she’d gone.

  I hoped Hector stocked May’s books in his bookshop. But I was even more eager to discover the secret of Hector’s special tea. Not another local source of poison, surely?

  5 Clean Sheets

  Before I dared try my luck at Hector’s House, I thought I’d better get myself organised. After travelling from Frankfurt early that morning, following a sleepless night worrying about missing the plane, I had neither my wits nor my CV about me. If I was serious about trying for a job, I wanted to give it my best shot. This meant showering, changing, and revising my employment history to make it look as if all my life so far had been building up to working in a bookshop.

  It wasn’t hard to feel enthusiastic – I was looking forward to starting afresh and reinventing myself. No longer would I be a bored peripatetic teacher in a failing relationship . Now that I had my own permanent home – or a home as permanent as I chose to make it – I hoped the work would somehow fall into place. A relationship could come later. In my experience, relationships don’t pay the bills. Quite the opposite, in fact.

  I wondered what this Hector would be like. His name made him sound old and grumpy, and I hoped he wouldn’t be the sort of boss who would make my life a misery. I decided to prepare as thoroughly as I could before approaching him.

  Taking a much-needed ham sandwich and a cup of tea into the sitting room, I sank down onto the green Chesterfield, wondering how on earth May had managed to get such a chunky piece of furniture in through the narrow front door of the cottage. As I gazed around, chewing, I spotted on the bookshelf beneath the window the old wooden flower press Auntie May and I used to preserve whatever flowers took my fancy in her garden or on our strolls around the surrounding lanes. Together we’d painstakingly lay them out, uncurling every petal on the blotting paper sheets. Then we’d stack them on top of each other like the layers of mille-feuille pastry, before replacing the plywood square on top and screwing down the nuts on the bolts at the corners as far as we dared. At the beginning of my next visit, we’d release the pressed flowers from where they’d lain all year, before gluing them down onto cards for framing or turning them into bookmarks for my parents. The dried versions were only ever pale echoes of the original flowers. But more importantly, they preserved the quality time we’d spent together.

  After finishing my sandwich, I washed up the plate and mug then headed upstairs with my rucksack to unpack. At first I turned into the tiny guest bedroom in the attic where I’d slept during my childhood visits. It was even smaller than I remembered. The only furniture was an ancient brass bed, spread with its familiar patchwork quilt in faded yellow floral prints, and a small chest of drawers. This was enough for what I’d brought for my fortnight’s summer holiday, but not for a grown-up’s permanent bedroom.

  I felt my heart flutter as I crossed the small landing to Auntie May’s room. I would not have been surprised to find her sitting up in bed drinking tea.

  Like the guest room, it was almost unchanged from when I’d last seen it. Her favourite face cream and perfume stood on the pine dressing table, but lying in one of the scarlet Venetian glass trinket dishes was a purple and white rubber band bracelet, which could only have been made the previous summer, when every other child in the developed world was busy making jewellery out of those tiny rings. I wondered who had made it for her, feeling a foolish pang of jealousy that there had been another child in her life besides me.

  I half fell onto the stool in front of the dressing table, steeling myself to claim May’s bedroom, and her bed, as my own. Despite the warm evening, I shivered as I wondered whether she had died sleeping in the sheets that were on the bed. Then I leapt up and turned back the eiderdown for evidence.

  To my relief, beneath the eiderdown was the bare mattress. I was grateful to the anonymous housekeeper for not disturbing May’s personal effects elsewhere in the room.

  On the nightstand lay her small folding alarm clock with the luminous green figures, which I knew to have been her constant companion in her travelling days. Beside the clock was propped a small Moleskine notebook with a dark green cover. She always had one of these on the go, and she had three shelves full of them downstairs in the alcove above her writing desk, the raw material of her many published travelogues. The stump of a pencil lay beside this one, worn down to its last few inches. I wondered whether she knew, when she bought the pencil, that it would outlive her. Without thinking, I plucked a few tissues from the squat cardboard box behind t
he alarm clock. I’d dried my eyes and blown my nose before it occurred to me that she must have touched the one on top as she lay dying.

  Then I remembered that I didn’t even know whether she had died at home or in hospital. Another wave of guilt washed over me at the thought that as she was breathing her last, I was hundreds of miles away, preoccupied with something as unimportant as coaching German children to conjugate English verbs.

  A knock at the back door made me pull myself together. Scrubbing quickly at my cheeks with another tissue, I ran down the stairs, forgetting the low beam half way down and banging my head. When I flung open the back door, I saw two of Joshua standing on the path, and wondered for a moment whether he was one of twins.

  As the two Joshuas merged into one, I noticed that in his arms lay a pile of fresh bedlinen.

  “You’ll need these tonight,” he said, ignoring my discomposure. “May’s sheets. I thought you’d appreciate fresh laundry on the bed when you arrived.”

  I took them and backed into the kitchen, beckoning him in for the sake of politeness, but feeling slightly uncomfortable, not to mention mildly concussed. Damian would have accused him of sneaking the linen from May’s deathbed to wash out the evidence of wrong-doing.

  “Did…did you wash them, or did someone else do that after she died?” I asked, fumbling for the right words. It struck me that he could easily have murdered May in her bed, especially if she was weakened by her illness. “I mean, I wasn’t sure whether she died in hospital, or—”

  I ground to a halt, staring at the floor till he put me out of my misery.

  “May was in a hospice for the last few days. She knew she wouldn’t be coming back. She asked me to make the house ready for you when you came. I was glad to be able to do something useful for her when otherwise I felt so helpless.”

  Looking up, I saw his grey eyes fill with tears. Not another actor in my life, I thought resentfully. They are always so dramatic. But while he was here, I might as well take advantage of his local knowledge.

  I set the clean sheets down on the kitchen table and pulled out one of the chairs.

  “Here, stop and have a cup of tea with me, Joshua. I was about to make one. And then I’d like to ask your advice about something.”

  He smiled. “Of course.”

  As he sat down, I filled the kettle and began to tell him my dilemma.

  “You see, I’m treating this whole inheritance thing as an opportunity to make a career change, in a direction that I know Auntie May would have wanted. I’m going to be a writer, like her, though not necessarily writing about travel. A peaceful, sleepy village like this would be the perfect place for me to start, and where better than at Auntie May’s old desk, surrounded by her books? But while I’m writing the first one and getting it published – getting on the authorial ladder, so to speak – I’ll need to earn my keep some other way. I was hoping I could find local pupils who need some English as a Foreign Language lessons.”

  Joshua let out a staccato laugh. I didn’t need him to tell me he shared Billy’s assessment of the local market for EFL lessons.

  “But plan B is to get a job at the village bookshop. I didn’t even know there was a village bookshop till Carol told me just now. It was still an antique shop last time I came to visit May.”

  Joshua looked reproachful. “It’s about five years since Gordon and Shona Munro retired and their son turned it into a bookshop.”

  I nodded, embarrassed by the reminder of my long absence. “The thing is, that would be a really fitting place for a writer to earn a bit of bread-and-butter money. Carol in the shop told me that the proprietor is looking for an assistant, so I’m steeling myself to go and apply tomorrow. What do you think? Do you know this man? Any clues as to how I should approach him?”

  Joshua chuckled.

  “Young Hector Munro? I’ve known him since he was a nipper, though he went away to university and didn’t come back for a long time, except for occasional family visits. That’s why you never met him. A man of singular habits, he’s done a lot of good for this village: brought in visitors with his fancy antics, provided a pleasant venue for us locals to go and enjoy a cup of tea together. Not in competition with the pub, mind you – he’s careful not to take any business from the pub, nor the village shop. Yes, there’s plenty of room in this village for the likes of Hector Munro.”

  “So is it a fancy bookshop? More Hatchards than W H Smith?”

  I was warming to the idea. A posh bookshop would be a much better source of inspiration than one that earned its keep selling trashy romances. Though I couldn’t see how a bookshop could possibly compete with a pub.

  Joshua leaned forward and rapped on the kitchen table with his knuckles. “Do you know, I don’t think there’s any other bookshop in the country quite like Hector’s House. You could do a lot worse than get in with Hector, my dear. It would be a fine way to make new friends in the village too, and to get yourself known as something other than May’s long-lost niece.”

  “I was never exactly lost.”

  I was saved from digging myself into a bigger hole by the sound of the kettle boiling.

  Returning to the table with a cup of tea in each hand, I diverted the conversation on to less self-damning territory.

  “I’m surprised that a bookshop can remain in business in such a remote spot. There must be a lot of keen readers in the village, and no library nearby to borrow books from.”

  “Oh, there’s a library all right, down the road a few miles in Slate Green, but it’s not the same experience as a visit to Hector’s House. He’s a smart man who has learned a lot from the few farmers still in business around here. Diversifying, that’s his secret.”

  “What, you mean like offering bed and breakfast?”

  “Not exactly, though there was a rumour that old Billy once accidentally got locked in the shop overnight after a particularly convivial meeting of the Village Show Committee in the tearoom. Let’s say Hector’s got plenty of other ideas to keep his business ticking over comfortably, including a few cards he plays close to his chest. He’s a bit of a man of mystery, is our Hector. If your application is successful, you may find out some of his secrets. Or maybe you won’t.”

  I was beginning to wonder whether applying for a job as his assistant was such a good idea. What if Hector turned out to be a contract killer, having inherited the position as head of the local village mafia from his father? Or godfather?

  “If you need a referee, do not hesitate to give my name. Although if you tell him you’re May’s niece, you’ll be in. He owes her a few favours. She used to bring so many customers in there for her book launches in the last few years. His shop was always her first port of call when she had a new book out, even before the big literary festivals or the Cheltenham bookshops. She was loyal to her village, was May, no matter how far away she ventured on her travels. Loyal to her village.”

  His voice petered out, and he gazed into the distance. I tried to bring him back to the present.

  “What do you think I should wear for the interview?” Only after I’d spoken did I realise I should not be asking fashion advice from a man in his eighties who, I’d just noticed, was wearing mismatched shoes. I guessed his eyesight must be failing. To be fair, as a tall man, his head was a long way from his feet.

  “Something officey or artistic? What’s more Hector’s style?”

  “Hector’s style? Hector’s a one-off. I reckon he’d prefer something unconventional. Idiosyncratic. Expressive. Certainly not an office suit. Wear what makes you feel comfortable, my dear, and what you’d like to see a lady in a bookshop wearing.”

  I tried to think of the last time I’d really looked at the clothes of the person serving me in a bookshop, or even been in a proper bookshop. I thought I’d probably always been looking at the book rather than the bookseller.

  “And something that isn’t too hot. It’s going to be a scorcher tomorrow, looking at that sky tonight.”

  He pointed an
arthritic finger towards the kitchen window, where a still-bright sun lit up the apple blossom.

  “Perhaps I should raid Auntie May’s wardrobe for something arty looking.”

  “Blue stockings, you mean? You could do a lot worse.” Joshua drained his teacup and raised himself unsteadily to his feet.

  As he reached the back door, he turned to look at me again, and ran a slow appraising eye over me from head to toe that set me a-shiver.

  He closed the door gently behind him, and pottered down the path to the gate between May’s garden and his – I mean, my garden and his. I hoped I wasn’t going to follow in her footsteps in every respect and end up murdered in my bed, poisoned by a dose of Joshua’s honey administered by one of Hector’s contract killers.

  I’d better make sure my interview went well.

  6 Hector’s House

  “Hello, can you tell me where Hector is, please? Carol in the village shop told me that he needs help.”

  “You can say that again,” came a familiar voice from the back corner . Arranged around three circular tin tables were a dozen old-fashioned folding garden chairs, one of them occupied by Billy, the non-cerebral stout-drinker from the day before. Despite the aspersions he’d cast on Hector’s tea, he was enthusiastically working his way through a large pot of the stuff.

  A lean olive-skinned man in his early thirties was leaning on the main shop counter with his arms folded, longish dark curls flopping forward to cover his high forehead.

  “I can. But should I?”

  Confused, I glanced across at Billy for a clue. That was a mistake.

  “She’ll be asking to see your buns next, Hector.”