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

by Debbie Young

  “Minuted,” said Tilly, scribbling on her pad. “I’ll ask Julia.”

  “Quite right too,” muttered Billy. “We don’t want that good-for-nothing Rex getting involved. I don’t trust that old devil more than I could throw him. And I reckons I could throw him further than you might think.”

  He rolled up the grubby sleeve of his shirt and flexed a surprisingly muscly forearm on the table, as if about to challenge one of us to a round of arm-wrestling. It could prove dangerous if combined with his sharpened whittling knife. I hoped he’d left it at home.

  Stanley ignored Billy and turned to me. “Sophie, I suggest you pay a visit to the Wendlebury Writers when they meet in The Bluebird tomorrow to tell them about the new writing cup. Ask them to put in a float too, while you’re at it. Then next Tuesday evening the Wendlebury Players are having a meeting in the Village Hall about their next production, so you can go and buttonhole them about their float.”

  “Why would they do what I tell them?” I queried. My past experience with actors had not filled me with confidence.

  “For one thing, they’ll take notice of the new Assistant Entries Secretary,” he said. “Everyone in favour of Sophie’s appointment, I take it? Good, carried unanimously!” Tilly added my name to the list of Committee members inside the front cover of her minute book. “And for another thing, you’ll be offering the writers the chance to display their golden words to the world at large. As to the Players, Rex is a pushover for a pretty girl like you. And what Rex says, the women in the Wendlebury Players will do. It’s like he’s got hypnotic powers.”

  “Those women that are left,” put in Billy.

  “Well, he did used to be a conjuror, Stanley,” said Tilly. I wondered whether she’d ever fallen under Rex’s spell. “But it doesn’t always last. There’s been a steady trail of departures from the Wendlebury Players since Rex took over as director last year.”

  Billy looked thoughtful. “I could do with Rex teaching me a few tricks with the ladies,” he began, but was silenced by a sharp look from Stanley. I could see why Stanley was the Chairman.

  After they’d all left, I turned accusingly on Hector.

  “How on earth did that happen? I don’t remember volunteering to join the Show Committee.”

  Hector smirked. “Oh, you don’t have to volunteer to be co-opted on to village committees. Newcomers find themselves doing all sorts of things they didn’t mean to once they’ve been here a while.”

  Silently I hoped that didn’t include murder. He misinterpreted the look of horror on my face.

  “If you don’t want to join in the fun, you’ll need to learn how to put up more of a fight before they close in on you. Anyway, they probably won’t make you do much first time round, especially if you’re going to join the Writers, because you’ll be on a float. You’ll just be in reserve in case Bob gets hit by a tractor or something.”

  Did he mean by accident or murderous intention? My voice came out a little shrill. “Does that happen often in these parts?”

  He shook his head, and his winning smile overcame my resistance. I got on with clearing away the tea things to the accompaniment of a medley of English folk songs. As I did so, I started planning my approach to the Wendlebury Writers. I hoped they weren’t much good. I didn’t want my writing shown up.

  Hanging the tea towel up to dry, I served a young woman who had come in to buy a birthday card. Then I wandered over to the stationery shelf, entirely stocked by the Literally Gifted company, and selected a few items to lend myself an air of writerly experience at the meeting the next evening.

  As I left the shop to go home at five o’clock, Hector slipped a slim book into the “Books Are My Bag” bag that I’d found hanging over the back of Auntie May’s desk chair. I withdrew it for inspection once I reached my garden gate: The Elements of Style. For a moment, I thought it must be a fashion guide, assuming he hadn’t liked today’s artistic tunic, but I opened the book to discover a definitive guide for writers.

  I had to say this for Hector: he was nothing if not kind. I wondered if our growing friendship might work in my favour at the Village Show, fervently hoping that neither of us would be hit by a tractor or skewered by a sharpened whittling knife in the meantime.

  11 The Kindness of Strangers

  “Why have you been so kind to me, Hector?”

  On my second day working at Hector’s House, while slipping some used printer paper into the waste paper box in the store room, I discovered a pile of completed application forms for the assistant’s job. All had been submitted the week before I arrived back in the village. At the top of each one was a brief note in Hector’s looping handwriting, summarising the merits and demerits of the candidate. Three of them bore favourable comments, and all of them lived in the village.

  “What do you mean, Sophie?” Hector looked up from his keyboard for a moment, fixing me with his green-eyed gaze. “I’m kind to everyone. What makes you think I’ve singled you out for special treatment?”

  I stepped out of the stockroom doorway, wiggled my way around the tearoom tables, and produced the pile of discarded CVs with a flourish from behind my back. As I spread them on the wooden counter in front of Hector, he minimised the screen into which he’d been typing hard for the last twenty minutes.

  “You told me no-one else had applied for the job when you took me on.”

  He turned his gaze to the window, pretending to consider. “Really? What I meant was, no-one else local.”

  “Oh, Hector, that’s not true! These are nearly all from villagers. Why are you doing this? Anyway, I have yet to see why you need an assistant. There’s only a trickle of visitors all day, apart from the tea trade, and never a queue. Hardly enough to justify two salaries, even if you’re paying us both minimum wage.”

  Hector got up from his stool, swept the CVs into a neat pile, and then tore them easily in half. I wondered how he’d be with telephone directories.

  “That’s what you get for snooping. Confused. Misinformed. False conclusions.” He sighed. “Make us both a latte and I’ll tell you why.”

  He took the ripped CVs out to the stockroom, and as I frothed the milk I heard him tearing them into smaller pieces before dumping them back in the paper recycling box. He returned to settle on one of the tearoom chairs as I set a tall glass of coffee in front of him. Then I pulled out the seat opposite and sat down with one for myself.

  “OK, so perhaps I wasn’t telling the whole truth. What I should have said was, no-one else applied who was the niece of Miss May Sayers.”

  “You make it sound like she was a member of the Mafia, as if she had some hold over you.”

  Hector stirred the latte with a long-handled spoon, dispersing the cocoa powder I’d sprinkled on the top. “She sort of did, only not intentionally. You see, May Sayers was very supportive when I first set up the bookshop. She was a close friend of my parents, and she knew when they retired that antiques were not my thing. I’d always worked in bookshops since university, and even at uni, and she knew how much I loved them. She helped me persuade my parents that converting the shop for my preferred purpose was a good idea. In return, I let her choose its name. How was I to know she was especially fond of a 1960s television puppet show about a dog called Hector? Still, if that was the worst of my mistakes, I wasn’t doing so badly.

  “I had no capital, only the premises, which my parents gifted to me. The deal was that it was down to me to raise the money to buy my initial stock, and your aunt kindly gave me a personal loan to set me up. She also gave me lots of her own books to sell, every time she had spare author copies from her publisher. She’s always been one of my two bestselling authors, given her local profile.”

  “Who’s the other one?” I asked, thinking there was another author that I didn’t know about lurking in the village.

  Hector scraped back his chair and headed over to the modern fiction shelves, where he picked up a thick paperback with a pale lavender cover featuring a young blonde
woman burying her face in a bunch of sweet peas.

  “Hermione Minty,” I read off the cover when he passed me the book. I flipped it over to read the blurb. “I’ve heard of her, of course. But she’s not local, is she?”

  “There’s no-one Minty in this village, unless they’ve just cleaned their teeth. But she’s prolific, and her romances fly off the shelves. That’s why I always have her full range in stock, an honour not granted to many authors by bookshops.”

  “You’ve got a couple in the window too, I noticed.” I hoped this might score me some points.

  “So there you go,” said Hector. “My secret’s out. May Sayers helped get my business off the ground, and I never found a way to repay her kindness while she was alive. I’d repaid the loan in full, I hasten to add, by the end of my first two years of trading, but she refused to let me pay her any interest.”

  “But you stock all her books.” I admired the beautiful display he’d made of them against a background of vintage maps in the travel section.

  “Yes, but they more than pay the rent on their shelf space, and I make good money from her work, so she’s still doing me favours from beyond the grave. So when you pitched up, I felt as if I had a golden opportunity to repay her in kind.”

  I stared into my coffee, trying to take this news in. “I’m sure she’d approve,” I said eventually. “Of what we’re both doing.”

  Hector gave a gentle smile. “Yes, I’m sure she’d approve of us both.”

  In the distance, the school bell clanged, and Hector got up from his chair. “So, enough gossip for now. Jump to it. The after-school rush will be with us in a minute.” Already some mums with pushchairs were heading past the shop towards the school gate. “Back to work, Miss Sayers, before you stretch my good nature to its limits. And don’t forget, after that, you’ve got a Wendlebury Writers meeting to prepare for.”

  I whisked his empty mug away to the sink, feeling that I had landed on my feet. I could hardly believe my good fortune, all of it attributable to Auntie May’s generosity. Yet somehow everything seemed to be falling into place too easily. I couldn’t help thinking that there must be a catch, and I wasn’t looking forward to finding out what it was.

  12 Writers Afloat

  It wasn’t hard to spot the Wendlebury Writers in the pub. They were gathered around a circular table in the bay window, three of them sitting on the curved oak window seat, four more on rickety old cane-seated wooden chairs . All had ring binders or notebooks in front of them. Discovering they were all women startled me. I’d assumed that they would be roughly half men and half women. No chance of recruiting a new boyfriend here.

  They all looked up as I came towards them from the bar, where I’d bought a glass of Dutch courage.

  “Hello, you’re Sophie, aren’t you?” said a slim, pale woman with cropped dark hair. She stood up to drag a stool across from a nearby empty table and gestured to it invitingly. “Here you go. I’m Dinah, and I’m the Chair.”

  “But don’t sit on her!”

  The voice from the bar was familiar.

  “Hello, Billy.” I gave him a little wave, thinking it best to keep on the right side of him after his surprising show of strength and interest in sharp knives at the Show Committee meeting.

  Dinah ignored him. “Don’t worry, we haven’t started without you.”

  “How did you know I was coming?”

  “Billy told me when I arrived,” said Dinah.

  “Oh, really? Carol told me when I called in for my prescription earlier,” said a woman about my age in an old-fashioned thin pink cardigan.

  “I found out from Hector,” added a middle-aged lady in a floral cotton shirtwaister: the sort from catalogues for the age group that embraces elastic waistbands. To be more accurate, it was actually a shirtwaistless, but at least its shades of cornflower and forget-me-not blue suited her blonde colouring nicely. “I bumped into him at the allotments, when I went to pick some salad leaves for my tea. But the ground was like concrete, and I couldn’t pull a lettuce.”

  There was a chortle from the bar. “Couldn’t pull a lettuce, eh? A bit like young Hector. Poor lonely young Hector.”

  “I notice you never say a word against Hector when you’re ensconced in his shop, Billy,” said Donald the publican, wiping the bar with a towel.

  Billy growled something unintelligible into his beer.

  “So, we all seem to know you already,” continued Dinah. “Or at least we know who you are and where you live. Why don’t you tell us a bit about your writing?”

  She put her hands on her strong jodhpured thighs and leaned back expectantly. To my relief, another member of the group came to my rescue while I was still floundering for what to say. I hadn’t really expected an inquisition.

  “Now, Dinah, don’t put the poor girl on the spot,” said the slim woman in pink. “Why don’t we go round the table and say a line or two about ourselves to set the ball rolling for her?”

  Dinah thumped a bright orange charity collection box on the table. It was labelled “Readathon – Reading for Life”.

  “Cliché alert! 10p, please, Karen.”

  Karen fished a coin out of her purse and dropped it into the slot. “Sorry, Dinah. I’m Karen, and I write short stories for women’s magazines..”

  She looked to her left, to the shirtwaistless lady.

  “I’m Louisa, and I’m interested in writing detective stories, in the style of the Golden Age of crime fiction. I’ve had a few false starts, so I’m currently reading the complete works of the Queen of Crime herself, in the order in which she wrote them. I couldn’t wish for a better teacher.”

  She clasped her hands together and emitted a little sigh of satisfaction.

  “Gosh, that’s a lot of books to get through,” I ventured. “How far have you got?”

  “Ooh, about half way. I’m learning so much. I’m hoping to start writing by 2020.”

  “I’m Dinah,” cut in the pale lady, apparently forgetting she’d already told me her name. “I write literary fiction with strong female protagonists. There aren’t enough of those around. Nor enough strong female writers either. Far too many who won’t even admit their sex in their name. As if the androgyny of J K Rowling wasn’t enough, she’s now calling herself by a man’s name, Robert Galbraith.”

  “You must admit, Dinah, it doesn’t stop her selling billions of books.” This came from a woman with dark hair in an expensive and intriguing asymmetrical cut, which made her look as if she’d gone to a sculptor rather than a hairdresser. She went on to introduce herself as Jacky, the local dentist interested in writing her memoirs, tentatively entitled Dental Records. She hoped none of her patients would recognise themselves and sue her – she’d posted a few tales on her blog about the misadventures of a dentist, written in the third person and changing the names and settings, but still people claimed that the incidents described were about them. “The funny thing is, those stories were entirely made up. I would never share actual case studies.”

  Next to Jacky sat Jessica, a lady in black leggings and a voluminous black smock, liberally scattered with white dog hair. I suspected her pockets contained a stash of dog biscuits. She explained that she wrote sweet poems about animals and was happy to take commissions for birthdays and Christmases. When she asked hopefully about my dog’s birthday, she was disappointed to find me petless. Her own dog lay beneath the table, wedged cosily between the wall and its owner’s ankles, tail occasionally thudding contentedly.

  “I write poetry too,” volunteered Bella, a lady of about sixty in a timeless linen shift dress that made her look cool as a cucumber. (Damn, another 10p gone, at least in my head. Good thing I wasn’t saying much out loud.) “But more about nature than animals.”

  “You can’t get much more natural than cats and dogs,” protested Jessica.

  “Not when they’re bred to the point of illness,” said Dinah brusquely.

  “Nature in its elemental state, then.” Bella added that she wa
s the Parish Clerk and the wife of the local GP, as if that were relevant to what she wrote. All it did was explain to me how she managed to be unperturbed by Dinah’s aggression. She was clearly used to dealing with powerful, influential people and putting them back in their box.

  I had never noticed before this meeting how many clichés I used.

  “I’m the only historical fiction writer in the group,” said a lady with grey closely-cropped hair. Her name was Julia. “I’m a history teacher by day, and a historical novelist by night. I specialise in the Tudor period, but these days we have to teach anything and everything the government tells us, and not necessarily in the right order. I have to say, being able to dictate what I put in my books really helps me cope with the nonsense at school each day. And it takes my mind off any other worries or disappointments.”

  “You mean like Rex not casting you as one of the Tudor queens for next autumn’s drama production?”

  I didn’t know why Dinah felt compelled to humiliate everyone in the group. I remembered how hurt I was to have been turned down repeatedly for parts in Damian’s plays, even non-speaking walk-on roles.

  “Oh, Dinah, it’s not as if Julia was the only one he turned down,” put in Karen. “I mean, we’d all have liked to have been cast, and there weren’t enough parts to go round. You can’t blame Rex for Henry VIII only having six wives, can you?”

  “Yes, but turning down a Tudor expert—”

  Karen cut Dinah short by turning pointedly to me with an imploring look. I took the hint and introduced myself as I was the only one who hadn’t done so, feeling as vulnerable as a newcomer at a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous – not that I’ve ever been to one of those.

  “I’m Sophie, and I’m May Sayers’s great-niece. I don’t know whether I met any of you when I used to stay with her in the summer holidays, when I was a child?” There were a couple of light nods from Louisa and Jessica. The others must have moved to the village recently, or else I’d made no impression upon them. “Auntie May left me her cottage, and I’ve just come back to the UK after teaching abroad for the last four years.”