Murder by the Book

by Debbie Young

  “You could always ask Hermione Minty to come and give a talk here,” said Julia. “She lives in the Cotswolds.”

  It was the Wendlebury Writers’ first meeting of the new year. As we sat in the Hector’s House tearoom after closing time, all our thoughts were focused on planning something different and special for the coming season. Well, that and the delicious Victoria sponge that I’d saved for us to share. I’d been telling the others about Hector’s plans to start a new series of author events to boost the bookshop’s takings.

  “How do you know where Hermione Minty lives?” I asked, genuinely puzzled.

  “I’ve just started following her on Twitter,” said Julia brightly. “It says on her profile that she lives in the Cotswolds.”

  She dug in her capacious handbag for her phone, dislodging notebooks, pens, tissues and make-up to find it. Tapping the Twitter icon, she quickly found Minty’s account and held it up to show us.

  “See? Cotswolds.”

  I cursed myself for being so stupid. In Minty’s official bio on her website and in the “About the Author” section in her books, it said only that she lived in an English village. I’d added Cotswolds as the location to her Twitter profile, thinking it would be a good selling point. After all, the Cotswolds are the perfect setting for romantic novelists. Katie Fforde lives in the Cotswolds, as does M C Beaton and loads of others. It had never occurred to me that anyone I knew might follow Hermione Minty on Twitter. I’d been targeting people I didn’t know – all those who would never have the chance to see her books piled high at Hector’s House. I didn’t expect her to start bonding with my neighbours.

  “Then she’s got no excuse to refuse if we’re on her doorstep,” said Dinah, with a finality that alarmed me.

  Julia clapped her hands together excitedly. “She might like to launch her next book here at Hector’s House. I think she’s got one due out soon. Surely Hector would like that, Sophie? He’d get people coming to his shop from miles around.”

  “The Cotswolds is a big region,” I said hurriedly, resolving to change Minty’s Twitter location to an untraceable ‘English village’ as soon as I got home. “She might be at the opposite end of the Cotswolds to us. She might not be willing to drive that far to sign a few books.”

  “She must earn enough to have a driver, or she could get a taxi,” said Julia.

  Dinah snorted. “I hardly think so. It’s difficult enough even for a bestseller to make a living wage from writing these days, never mind afford a chauffeur.”

  “I wouldn’t mind going to pick her up in my car if it would help,” said Karen. “What a great opportunity for a one-to-one chat.”

  I played for time. “It would take an awful lot of planning.”

  “We once had a royal visit at a school where I used to work,” said Julia. “It was run like a military campaign, with security officers and all sorts of red tape. But everyone agreed it was worth the hassle. It couldn’t be any worse than that.”

  “It might help persuade her to come if we arranged for the local paper to send a photographer,” said Bella. “Her publisher would probably appreciate a bit of local press coverage.”

  “Or we could make it into a whole-day event, with a VIP reception on her arrival,” said Dinah. “We’d be the VIPS, along with Hector, of course, and we could get Donald to lay on a special lunch at The Bluebird, before we bring her over to the shop for the actual book signing.”

  “Yes, you’ll need Hector,” I said faintly, sitting back in my seat, arms hanging limply by my sides.

  “Can you fill him in with our ideas tomorrow, please, Sophie?” said Dinah. “He’ll be more likely to cooperate if the suggestion comes from you.”

  Ticking the item off on her agenda, she moved on to the next item, as if Hermione Minty’s visit was a done deal.

  “Over my dead body,” said Hector when I carried out Dinah’s instructions in the shop the next afternoon.

  “Where’s a dead body?” said Tommy. “Who’s died?” He looked up from the tearoom table where he was busy popping the bubbles on a sheet of bubble wrap that Hector had given him to distract him from ‘helping’ customers. Then he pulled his magnifying glass out of his pocket, ready to investigate.

  “Figure of speech, Tommy,” I said. I knew he wouldn’t know what a figure of speech was, but I thought it might keep him out of the conversation. “We’re talking about Hermione Minty.”

  “Is she dead, then?” asked Tommy.

  “No, she’s fine,” I said quickly. “She’s alive and well.”

  “Phew,” said Tommy. “That’s a relief. I don’t want my mum upset.”

  He went back to popping bubbles.

  Hector folded his arms. “I presume you said no?”

  I looked away. “It would have seemed rude and defeatist to say no straight off. I want them to think it’s the sort of thing that Hector’s House could do in principle.”

  Hector sighed. “Well, of course we could do it in principle, but not with Hermione Minty. I should have thought that was obvious.”

  Tommy, all bubbled out, screwed up the flat plastic sheet and stuffed it in the tearoom’s bin.

  “I don’t see what the problem is,” he said. “Why don’t you ask someone else? Like Jane Ostrich or Charlotte Pronto?”

  Hector laughed. “Or how about Shakespeare? Thanks for the thought, Tommy, but they’re all long dead.”

  “Really? I’d better break it gently to my mum, in case she likes them too. I don’t think she’s read any of their books, but we’ve got at least ten books in our house, so there’s a good chance we might have something by one of them. So where does she live, then, this Hermione Minty?”

  Hector and I looked at each other in silence, wondering how to answer.

  “Round here somewhere, apparently,” said a middle-aged lady, browsing the fiction section. She’d been so quiet I’d forgotten she was there.

  “Really?” I said blankly, wondering where she’d got that from.

  She replaced the novel and turned to address us more directly. “Yes, I’m sure I saw something on Facebook about it yesterday.”

  “I think you’ll find it was on Twitter,” I said, while Hector ducked out of the conversation by pretending to be busy with the order book. “But you know what these celebrity authors are like. They pop up everywhere. Always on the move. Book signings and launches and festivals and the like.”

  “What does she look like, this Minty person?” asked Tommy, wandering over to the central display table to pick up one of her books. “I wonder whether I’ve ever seen her? Maybe I even know her already, but don’t know her by name.” He flipped the book over, then opened the front cover. “This is a rubbish book. It hasn’t got her picture anywhere.”

  I tried not to look at Hector for fear of giving the game away.

  “She might like to protect her privacy,” I said. “It’s hard for successful people to live normal lives if they’ve got everyone in the street recognising them every five minutes.”

  The lady in the fiction section nodded. “Yes, it must be awful for the Royal family, never being able to pop out to the shops or go to the park without having paparazzi after them.”

  Tommy perked up. “Paparazzi? Isn’t that a sort of sausage?”

  Hector sniggered. “You’re thinking of pepperoni. Though paparazzi would be a good name for pepperoni pizza. You should ask Carol to stock it. It would be right up her street.”

  “I could just eat a pizza now,” said Tommy, zipping up his Parka and heading for the door. “I’m going to the village shop to see if she’s got any.”

  “That reminds me, I really came in to buy a diet book,” said the lady, turning away from the novels. “New Year’s resolutions, eh? Just over a week in, and I’m already falling off the wagon.”

  I knew the feeling.

  When I walked home after work, Tommy was still lurking in the High Street, peering into all the parked cars in turn. As I approached him, he pulled his diary o
ut of his pocket to write the registration number of a blue saloon.

  “What are you doing, issuing a parking ticket?”

  “Can I do that?” He sounded keen. “Is that like making a citizen’s arrest?”

  “No, I’m kidding. Only policemen and parking attendants can do that. Sorry to disappoint you.”

  Tommy shook his head. “Don’t worry, I couldn’t do it now, anyway. I’m on a case. I’m tracking down Hermione Minty. I think I might be hot on her trail.”

  I recoiled.

  He pointed to the car’s rear window. “See? There’s a clue. There’s one of her books on the parcel shelf.”

  Only when I let out a puff of air did I realise I’d been holding my breath.

  “But that’s the vicar’s car. Don’t you recognise it?”

  Tommy stood back to appraise it. “Then why isn’t it outside the vicarage?”

  The vicarage was at the other end of the High Street.

  “I don’t know. He must be visiting someone. Maybe he was late for a meeting and jumped in the car to speed things up.”

  There were plenty of mornings when I wished I had a car to get me to work on time, even though Hector’s House was only five minutes’ walk from my cottage.

  “The Reverend Murray.” Tommy wrote the name in his diary. “I think his wife must be my number one suspect.”

  “His wife?” I was genuinely surprised. “Why his wife?”

  Tommy looked at me like I was stupid.

  “Because she’s a woman, of course. Hermione’s a girl’s name. Honestly, don’t you know anything, miss?”

  I smiled. Tommy had clearly forgotten that I’d pointed this very same fact out to him a few days ago.

  “You’re right, Tommy. That’s why you’re the detective, and I work in a bookshop.”

  9 Angel Heart

  Lying on my sofa after tea, toes towards the comforting glow of the wood-burning stove, I realised that reading Minty’s books would help me tweet credibly on her behalf. Familiarising myself with her turn of phrase would enable me to mimic her way with words, so that her fans didn’t think her social media was managed by a minion at her publishing house.

  At least, that was my official justification for reading the books. I thought they might also explain why Hector was so keen to protect his anonymity. Perhaps they espoused a world-view of which he’d be ashamed, or revealed past secrets better kept hidden from the world. Tommy’s obsession with detective work was catching.

  I’d been going to sneak one of her books out of the shop that afternoon while Hector wasn’t looking, despite the risk of a citizen’s arrest for shoplifting if Tommy spotted me. Then I remembered that Auntie May had a shelf full of them in the cottage, given to her by Hector as a thank you for being his financial backer when he started the shop.

  I braced myself to open the first of her books, Angel Heart, at the About the Author page. That was the only part of the book’s interior that I’d ever read, and it told me nothing I didn’t already know.

  I flipped past the copyright page to the dedication: ‘To Celeste’.

  Despite her having left him some years before, he’d left this message in place for all the world to see. A wave of nausea washed over me. Perhaps all his books bore the same dedication. Perhaps this was why he’d never pressed them on me to read, as he’d done with so many others. I had no illusions that I might have usurped Celeste in his affections yet, as we had only been dating since the autumn, but it struck me as unnecessarily heartless to continue to fly the flag for her like this right in front of me, every day, in the shop.

  I snapped the book shut without reading any further and threw it down on the coffee table, knocking my mug over and spilling my tea. I’d read more than enough.

  The cheery knock on my front door was a welcome distraction from my misery. My unexpected visitor was the vicar, standing hunched in the doorway against the rain.

  “Come in, vicar,” I said warmly, feeling like a character from a farce. “What can I do for you this dark and stormy night?”

  He slipped off his long, dark cloak, hung it on the hallstand, and followed me to the fireside, where he made himself comfortable on the sofa.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your new role at Sunday School.”

  Inwardly I groaned, regretting my rash agreement, following the success of my nativity play before Christmas, to fill the vacancy for Sunday School teacher.

  He held his damp hands towards the wood burner.

  “So fortuitous that we should gain a trained teacher in the village who no longer works in a classroom,” he continued. “All the skills and experience, with none of the daily grind.”

  I frowned. “I may be a trained teacher, but I’m pretty ignorant about the sort of thing you teach at Sunday School. We used to go to church when I was little, but I’ve fallen by the wayside since then.”

  He smiled. “Don’t sell yourself short, Sophie. You’re clearly sufficiently au fait with church jargon to use Christian analogies. We’ll make a Sunday School teacher of you yet. It won’t be that difficult. At this level, it’s as much about storytelling as theology. And it only needs to be for an hour or so, including crafts, activities, snacks, a couple of songs and a prayer.”

  I opened my mouth to protest, but was cut short by the vicar suddenly gasping and starting a coughing fit. By the time I’d brought him a glass of water from the kitchen, he’d recovered enough to unwrap a sweet from a plastic packet in his jacket pocket. He offered the bag to me to take one for myself.

  “Murray Mint, Sophie? I never travel without them. I use them as my calling card to help people remember my name.” He seemed pleased to introduce someone new to his joke and warbled in a pleasant tenor, “‘Murray Mints, Murray Mints, too good to hurry mints!’” He leaned towards me. “You’re too young to remember the old advertisement, but its jingle used to be a useful chat-up line when I was a young man.”

  I wondered whether this was before or after he’d taken the cloth.

  However, it would take more than a peppermint to convince me I was the right person to run a Sunday School class. “The thing is, vicar, I’m a bit tied up at the moment with other projects.”

  “On Sundays?”

  I couldn’t lie to a vicar. “No, but Sunday’s my only day off.”

  In truth, I could have taken more days off during the week, but I wanted to spend as much time as possible with Hector. The vicar gave me a knowing look, which made me want to explain exactly what was keeping me so busy.

  “Business in the bookshop has been really quiet since Christmas, so I’m doing extra work to help to keep it afloat,” I said. “Plus Ella and I are helping Donald arrange a special Valentine’s Night at The Bluebird, because he’s also feeling the pinch.”

  The vicar raised the glass of water that I’d handed him.

  “Never give two excuses when one will suffice. It’s suspicious. But let’s help each other however we can. Perhaps you might start at Easter?” He set the glass down on the coffee table. “Palm Sunday would be ideal. The live donkey parading down the High Street is a real draw for the children, who all want a turn at leading it. On Easter Sunday there will of course be a church tea with hot cross buns and Easter eggs, and a decorated bonnet contest.”

  “Isn’t that a bit sexist?” I asked, picturing little girls in flower-trimmed straw hats.

  “Good Lord, no,” said the vicar. “Lots of boys join in, and quite right too. And the dads. It gets very competitive. I suspect the PTA runs a book on it, but if that’s what it takes to get them into church, I’m prepared to curb my disapproval of gambling for once. Mysterious ways, and all that. So you have my blessing to get your Valentine’s Day business out of the way first, and then we’ll have a good run-up at it. Don’t feel you’re letting the side down, because Valentine was a Christian martyr.”

  “Valentine was a martyr? Gosh, yes, he must have been.”

  “In the meantime, you could practise for Sunday School by
helping me raise awareness of the true meaning of Valentine’s Day. I’ve written a little pamphlet about him. Perhaps Hector might like some for his shop window. He always sets up a good display of romantic novels for it.”

  I bet he does, I thought, and I know whose books will have pride of place.

  “I can ask him. What exactly is the religious story behind it? I presume it’s something romantic.”

  The vicar smiled ruefully. “Actually, like so many saints’ tales, there are lots of alternatives. One of them is rather grim. The fourteenth of February is thought by some to mark the day that Saint Valentine was beheaded, back in two hundred and something AD, in the reign of a Roman emperor called Claudius the Cruel. Not the kind of name to endear you to your subjects. The emperor was having trouble recruiting into his army because men didn’t want to leave their wives and children. He thought his existing forces would fight better if their womenfolk weren’t, er, sapping their strength before they went into battle. A bit like footballers before a match, if you know what I mean. So he came up with an ingenious solution: he banned marriage.”

  I laughed. “He didn’t think that one through. If he ruled long enough, he wouldn’t have any men left at all, or women either.”

  The vicar smiled. “It was certainly no way for a society to conduct itself.”

  “So how did Valentine come into it?”

  Reverend Murray got up to put another log on the fire for me, quite at home now.

  “Well, my dear, Valentine was an old romantic after your own heart. He defied the emperor and continued to conduct marriages in secret. When Claudius found out, he was livid, and ordered Valentine’s execution. The poor man was sentenced to be clubbed to death, and then have his head cut off.”

  “Ugh! That’s not very romantic at all.”

  “While he was imprisoned awaiting his execution, he befriended the jailor’s daughter. Legend has it that when he died, he left her a farewell note signed ‘From your Valentine’.”

  “Gosh. And that was the last she saw of him.”