Flora was surprised. Kate had been serving customers the day after her father had died, so why the decision to close now?
‘I’m not up to managing it at the moment,’ Kate defended herself.
‘Of course,’ Flora said soothingly. ‘But Bernie? Couldn’t he work at the café for a while, until you feel ready to go back? Where is he, by the way?’
Kate looked down at her feet and didn’t speak for some time. ‘To be honest, Flora, I’m not sure.’
‘Drinkin’,’ Alice said, overhearing Flora’s question and bustling up to them. ‘Under the table somewhere.’
‘Alice!’ Kate protested.
‘No good beatin’ about the bush, my love. That’s what’s happened, take my word for it.’
While they had been speaking, the vicar had glided up to them, ready to detach Kate for a private word.
‘Poor Cyril,’ Alice said. ‘What a day to be buried on.’ She held her hands open to the heavens. ‘And poor Kate, so alone. The sister up in Scotland’s broken her leg and can’t travel, and t’other one can’t afford the fare from Canada. As for that no-good son-in-law of his not even botherin’ to turn up!’
‘Most other people did,’ Jack said. ‘It seems like the whole village has turned out.’
Alice looked round with satisfaction. ‘That’d be about right. Cyril deserved it. Though he could have done without some of ’em.’ She glared at the figure of Polly Dakers, resplendent in a violet top coat and pink hat. ‘Some people have no decorum.’
Jack shuffled his feet, his gaze fixed on Flora. Talk to Polly, his eyes were saying, while I keep Alice occupied.
‘She does look a bit awkward,’ Flora conceded. ‘Perhaps I should have a quick word.’
‘Polly,’ she called to the girl, walking towards her, ‘I wanted to thank you for your invitation. It was kind of you.’
‘Why not? I’m drowning in happiness and I want to spread it around.’
‘I heard you had some luck. I’m so pleased. Last time we spoke, you were very downbeat.’
‘That’s when I had no chance of going to London. No chance of escaping this place.’
‘Then a fairy godmother came your way,’ Flora suggested lightly.
‘More like a fairy godfather.’ Polly gave a hoot of laughter, causing the mourners gathered nearest them to turn and stare.
‘Uncle Ted, I imagine. Did he back the right horse?’
Flora sounded frivolous, but inside her stomach was screwed tight. She had no idea how Rawston and his supposed customer fitted into this, but she was sure Polly had had some involvement in Kevin’s demise, whatever Jack said. It was simply too fortuitous that a large sum of money had fallen into her hands shortly after the young man’s death.
Polly moved closer, her voice little more than a whisper. ‘Actually, Flora, I can tell you. You’re not like these old biddies.’ She gestured dismissively to the people around them. ‘It’s a friend of Uncle Ted’s that’s come up trumps. He’s ever so rich, lives in a big house near here. Pots of money, would you believe?’
‘Really?’ Flora was thinking hard, wondering just what had been agreed between this lovely girl and a man who must be so many years older than her.
‘He’s going to sponsor me,’ Polly said, a huge smile splitting her face.
‘That is kind of him. What sort of work will you be doing?’
‘Work? You can call it that, I suppose.’ Polly smirked. ‘He’s my uncle’s age, and I’m young – and beautiful.’
She left it at that, but Flora immediately understood the deal the girl had made. She felt genuinely sad that Polly had decided on such a future but, then again, she was a young woman who knew what she was getting into. She was sharp, determined and worldly. She had tried to enmesh Kevin for the same reason. That hadn’t worked out, and this was another chance.
‘I wish you luck. At least, no more sitting behind the desk at the Priory.’
‘No more working for that pig.’ Polly glared at the sleek back of her employer. ‘I’m off now, but I’ll see you tomorrow.’
She would, Flora thought, in between the search for a damaged typewriter.
‘Well?’ Jack had sidled up to her. ‘Does she have the treasure chart tucked into her sleeve? A spade beneath her coat?’
‘Don’t mock – I was wrong and you were right. I’m still sure she was hoping to use Kevin, but she’s found an easier way. Or so she thinks.’
‘And what’s that?’
‘A sugar daddy – I believe that’s what the newspapers call them. Polly’s very own treasure map! Is it time to go looking for ours?’
Twenty-Two
Flora made tea for them both in the cupboard that her aunt had designated the bookshop kitchen. It had a sink so tiny it barely accommodated two hands, but there was water, a kettle and a gas ring, and what else did they need, Violet had argued.
The funeral might have been brief, but Flora had known the afternoon would be a long haul – there were four shelves of books to examine, some of them very heavy and very large – and she’d made sandwiches before leaving home, nursing them in her basket throughout the ceremony.
‘Here,’ she said, unwrapping a package in greaseproof paper. ‘Cheese and pickle.’
‘An unexpected treat.’
‘We’ll need fuel for the work. I’m already feeling daunted by the thought of it. I almost wish that horrible man, Rawston, had never found his way here.’
‘You shouldn’t wish it, if you want to uncover the full story. By coming, Rawston has helped fill a few blanks.’
Flora set two cups of tea down on her work desk. ‘He alerted us to what the All’s Well might have under its roof, but—’
‘But… there’s something else. I’m still curious as to how he’d learned of the legend. If he’s been in Sussex as long as he says he has, he could have heard the tale at some point, but let it slide off him. It’s the kind of story people smile at and then dismiss. So what made him suddenly sit up and take notice? Who made him take notice?’
‘Kevin? You think it was Kevin?’
‘I think it’s likely. As a guest in – what was it, the premier suite? – the chap had the use of an Aston Martin. He could have zipped over to Worthing and back without anyone noticing. Perhaps after he failed to find what he was looking for at the Priory? By then, he’d already asked a lot of questions and would have known of the auction, if he hadn’t been aware of it before. Known there were books missing from the present-day library that had been sold locally. This man, Rawston, specialises in rare books. If Kevin asked around, he wouldn’t have had too much trouble finding the shop.’ Jack waved half a sandwich in the air. ‘These are delicious, by the way.’
‘Good. I’m glad they survived.’ Flora fidgeted on her stool, leaving her own food untouched. ‘Let me get this right. Kevin goes to Worthing, finds Rawston’s Rare Books and asks about the Priory sale. Rawston shows him the books he bought at the auction, hoping to sell him one, but then what?’
‘Kevin wouldn’t want to buy all the books, if Rawston’s lot was as big as your aunt’s, but he’d want to check every one of them thoroughly. I reckon he’d have no other option but to take Rawston into his confidence. Maybe they agreed some kind of split and searched through the books together, but found nothing. They’re disappointed – until Rawston remembers that your aunt had been at the same auction and bought a part of the library, too. A whole other section.’
‘So Kevin comes looking for them,’ Flora finished for him. ‘It’s why he broke into my shop.’ She thought a while, sipping her tea slowly. ‘He could have been coming back from Worthing when he nearly ran me down.’
‘The timing fits. It was that evening he visited the All’s Well.’
‘Why not simply come as a customer, as he did with Rawston? Try and broker a deal with me?’
Jack grimaced, his eyebrows shooting up. ‘That would have happened? Somehow, I don’t think so. I imagine he got the measure of Rawston pretty quick
ly. He was a bloke that Kevin could do a deal with. He could have asked around and realised you weren’t going to be as easy. And maybe, by that stage, he reckoned he’d put in enough work to justify taking the whole of whatever treasure there was for himself.’
‘How does Rawston fit in now?’
‘He must have heard of Kevin’s death – it’s been in the local papers. He would have read how the chap died here in this shop and realised that Kevin had been going it alone. Maybe reneging on any agreement he had with Rawston. Our plump friend must have decided that it was his turn now to scour your aunt’s books. As far as he was concerned, Kevin died from an unfortunate heart attack. That’s the official line and there’d be nothing to suggest that Rawston should be wary, so why not pursue the search for himself?’
‘It makes sense.’ Flora emptied her cup. ‘You’re so annoying, Jack. You reason step by step and turn out to be right. Mostly.’
‘We don’t know that I am, and sometimes inspiration is more valuable than logic. It’s simply the way my brain works. Don’t forget I was a journalist. You put together facts after what can be painstaking weeks of research, and you make a story with them.’
‘Do you miss it? Being a journalist?’
‘It served a purpose,’ he said laconically. ‘Enabled me to be independent at a fairly young age.’
Flora wondered whether to broach what must be a difficult subject, and then decided to be brave. ‘You said your parents had separated.’
Jack brushed the crumbs from his fingers. ‘Divorced a good twenty years ago. But, yes, they separated when I was ten. I lived with my mother for a few years when I wasn’t imprisoned in boarding school, then when I reached the dizzy age of fourteen, my father suddenly noticed me and invited me to move in with him during the holidays.’
‘Did you?’
‘He seemed marginally easier to live with. My mother either smothered me with kisses or screamed at me for looking too much like my father. It wasn’t exactly a calm existence.’
‘And living with your father was?’
‘I wouldn’t say calm, but it was interesting. Dad was always on the move. He made his living doing deals and either he had money flowing out of his pockets or he was having to do a moonlight flit.’
Flora tried not to look shocked, but didn’t succeed.
‘Most of the time he was very good at it, the deal-making,’ Jack offered, as though in mitigation. ‘I never spent a holiday in the same place. He was always on to the next opportunity – and the next woman. He was what I’d call louche. It got tiresome having to remember all their names. As soon as I landed my first job, I rented my own room. Dad gave me enough to see me through to my first pay cheque. I think he was glad to resume his old life and not have a surplus adolescent to consider.’
It explained a lot about Jack Carrington, she thought. He had wanted to build a home, never having known one. He’d tried to live a different life from either of his parents, carving out a respectable career, taking time before he married, only to have his dream broken apart by the woman he loved. No wonder he had taken cover.
‘Where was your first job?’ She was keen to know more.
‘A local paper in a part of London where I’d once lived. The North London Observer. They took me on as a junior reporter. I was wet behind the ears, but it was a grand way to learn the job.’
‘When you’d learned, did you stay?’
‘You never truly learn. I was there for three years. Three years of attending court hearings, reporting on council meetings, following up petty crimes. Then I had a stroke of luck, not that I didn’t like working for the NLO, but I was in my early twenties by then and keen to move on. By sheer good fortune, I hit the jackpot.’
Flora had started towards the cupboard to refresh the pot, but at this she turned, her face expectant.
‘I wrote an exposé of a local gang. They’d started with small crimes but, by the time I was writing my article, they’d graduated to blackmail, protection, violent intimidation. My landlady’s son was a friend of the gang leader’s. It sounds unbelievable but this chap, the gang leader, led an outwardly respectable life, his wife belonging to the Mothers’ Union, his son going to the local school like every other boy. Anyway, Terry knew him from school, they’d been classmates, and had stayed friends. My landlady couldn’t have known what kind of company her son was keeping – Terry was the apple of her eye.’
‘It was Terry who gave you information?’
‘He did, without realising it. Information that, when written up in a suitably dramatic fashion, attracted the attention of a national newspaper and led to them offering me a job.’
‘That must have felt like winning the football pools.’
‘It did – for a few hours – but the day after I got the offer, I was called up, like a lot of young chaps.’
‘The paper kept your job open, though? It was why you were in New York?’ Flora brought fresh tea and refilled their cups.
‘And Rome and Sydney before that. I became their senior crime reporter.’
‘You’ve had more excitement in one day than I’ve had in my whole life.’ She was wistful. ‘Why didn’t you stay with the paper? You could have asked for a different posting, rather than giving it all up for a woman who wasn’t worth it.’
He grinned. ‘You’re a harsh judge, Flora. It wasn’t only the business with Helen that led to my decision, though I suppose she was the catalyst. I loved my job but even jobs you love can pall. And it was beginning to. As a crime reporter, you see the worst of people and realise that justice is a blunt instrument. Innocent people get trampled on, the guilty can go free. I reckoned it would be good to turn the tables, if only in fiction, and when Helen humiliated me, I knew it was time to change my life completely. I’d been writing fiction in my spare time, no more than bits and pieces, but I’d had some good comments, published a story, won a competition or two. I decided to take the plunge and resigned there and then. I’d enjoyed a comfortable lifestyle, and if an author’s life didn’t work out, I had savings to live off. Though only until the big break arrived!’
‘And that’s how you ended up in Sussex.’
‘If I was going to find an agent and a publisher, I needed to be reasonably near London, but I didn’t want to live in the city. I had fond memories of Sussex – I think I told you – and it was on a day trip here that I found Overlay House. It was spacious, tucked away, and the rent was reasonable.’
‘And near enough to London to find your agent?’
‘Arthur Bellaby. He’s sixty with the energy of someone forty years younger. I had a letter from him this morning. It was what held me up, in fact. He wants to meet tomorrow in London to discuss a new project.’
Flora was taken aback. If they uncovered anything this afternoon, Jack wouldn’t be here for the next step, whatever it was. ‘Tomorrow could be important,’ she said. ‘Do you have to go?’
‘I think I do, even if it’s to say no, though I’d much rather be staying. I’m not looking forward to the slow train from Worthing – but I do get lunch at the Ritz.’
‘It must be quite some project,’ she remarked drily. ‘OK, if you’re going absent without leave, we need to get on with this job. I’ll be at Polly’s party while you’re away, and before I go to the Priory it would be good to know just what, if anything, is secreted in the books Aunt Violet bought.’
Twenty-Three
The shelving her aunt had chosen for the second-hand volumes she loved lay towards the rear of the building, at a point where the interior narrowed to little more than a passageway. Here, the shelves, instead of being angled as they were in the wider sections of the shop, had been crammed against one wall, to allow customers just enough space to view.
‘We’ll do this systematically,’ Jack announced, arriving in front of the shelves. ‘Strip each shelf one by one and we should end up with four separate stacks.’
Left to herself, she thought wryly, she would have pulled the books out in
any order and then forgotten which ones she had looked at.
‘Two piles for you, two for me,’ he said. ‘Once we’ve finished with a book, we’ll put it back where it came from.’
Flora dropped to the floor and squatted cross-legged. ‘Let’s hope we won’t have to trawl through every one of them.’
‘Amen to that. You know what I think about missing manuscripts. If we find nothing, I’m hoping you’ll give up the search.’
‘Then all I’ll be left with is a rogue typewriter, and you don’t like that either.’
It was a wearisome task, the books heavier and dustier than Flora had expected. Her cleaning evidently wasn’t up to her aunt’s standards. The leather-bound volumes might have been fat, but their pages were thin, and a long time was spent trawling through each and every one of them.
By the time she was halfway through her first column of books, Flora was ready to give up. She desperately needed to find the person who had murdered Kevin Anderson and left her with a dying business, but she was losing heart. Perhaps she should trust to finding the damaged typewriter, either in Polly Dakers’ room or Vernon Elliot’s private office. And, who knows, she might strike lucky and uncover evidence that would point definitively to one or other of them having typed that note.
Reshelving a book she’d searched unsuccessfully, Flora hesitated before picking up the next, and thought about tomorrow’s party. She was glad to be going. It would be an opportunity to chat with people who might know more than they’d previously admitted. It would provide cover, as well, for the clandestine activity she was planning.
Would Bernie Mitchell put in an appearance? He worked at the Priory, and Polly appeared to have invited everyone who had any connection with the place. Alice was convinced the man was lying drunk somewhere, but Flora wasn’t at all sure. He had disappeared shortly after she’d seen him on Fern Hill. He couldn’t have been drinking all that time, surely? If so, by now he’d be in a coma and lying in a hospital bed. Kate had seemed to accept Alice’s view, but perhaps the poor woman was so worn, so sadly resigned to an unsupportive husband, that she was prepared to believe anything of him.
The Bookshop Murder: An absolutely gripping cozy mystery (A Flora Steele Mystery Book 1) Page 17
