The Case of the Missing Morris Dancer

by Cathy Ace

  ‘We don’t really mix with designers and such,’ said Sheila quietly, eyeing Clementine’s foot.

  Unsure about taking a seat, Sheila Timbers hovered beside her husband, becoming gradually paler beneath her tan. Mavis felt sorry for the couple, especially when she worked out that Stephanie’s fiancé was probably only a few years younger than her father – dwelling on the unpredictability of love sent Mavis’s mind back to the case of the missing Aubrey Morris. She sidled toward Althea and hissed, ‘Where’s the New Buttery?’

  ‘Pardon?’ replied Althea.

  ‘The New Buttery, where they found the Anwen Morris artefacts. Where is it?’

  Mavis noticed Althea was smiling as she whispered back, ‘You’ve seen it. It’s that neoclassical monstrosity out behind the stables. They built it in the 1700s to replace the old buttery, which I suppose they used to simply call the buttery.’ She paused and looked around before she added, ‘Given the size of it, they must have liked their butter around here. It’s huge.’

  Mavis tried to visualize the building Althea had referred to. It wasn’t at all what she’d have imagined to be a buttery – old or new. She and Althea often walked the grounds around the hall, and she was now more than passingly familiar with most of the parts of the hall itself, and the many buildings that adjoined or surrounded it. From the folly in the water garden to the original Elizabethan stables, she was in awe of it all. The building Althea had mentioned was about half the size of a football field, had a collection of classical female figures wearing diaphanous garments made of intricately carved stone acting as though they were supporting the portico and roof, and blank, windowless walls. Mavis wondered how they’d had enough light in there to churn butter all those centuries ago, and why on earth they’d made the building so large.

  ‘Did you have a lot of dairy cattle back then?’ asked Mavis quietly, nodding and smiling as though having a much more socially engaging conversation than she was.

  Althea followed her lead and laughed a little too loudly, drawing a surprised glance from Henry, who was occupying his favorite spot in front of the fireplace. ‘I’m not quite that old, dear, but I know what you mean. And no. I understand the Twysts provided buttery facilities for any and all of the dairy farmers in the area. A sort of community service, I suppose.’

  ‘The Morris farm was all sheep, wasn’t it, back then, as it is now?’ asked Mavis.

  Althea paused and gave the matter some thought. ‘I do believe there was a friendly rivalry between the Twysts and the Morrises about something to do with the church and sheep, but that would have been back before the New Buttery was even built. Does it matter?’

  ‘Isn’t it lambing season?’ said Mavis, rather more loudly than she had meant to.

  ‘Yes, it is for some farms,’ replied Stephanie. Mavis suspected it was because the poor girl was trying to find a topic of conversation that wouldn’t flag. ‘The farmers hereabouts try to plan it so that their ewes – all being well, of course – give birth over about a three-week period, and they also try to stagger those times. Some might go for an early start date, like March 1st, or some might hold back until April. That way it means they’re more likely to be able to call upon experienced local help with the lambing, get easier access to vets as needed, and, of course, there are the students who get work experience through the National Sheep Association. From next week for the next couple of months it’ll all be about the lambs around here.’

  Mavis was surprised by Stephanie’s very comprehensive answer.

  ‘Thank you so much,’ she replied quietly.

  ‘It sounds so odd, thinking about creatures all giving birth to some sort of a timetable,’ said Sheila Timbers brightly. ‘It’s not how I’ve ever thought about country life.’

  ‘But your family business relied upon the natural cycle, didn’t it?’ said Henry airily from beside the hearth. ‘The growth of trees, their harvesting and processing into lumber. You cannot have been completely unaware of the natural rhythms of country life, surely?’

  Mavis could tell John and Sheila Timbers were far from familiar with Henry’s dismissive tone, and she felt sorry for Stephanie who – now used to her fiancé’s ways – rushed to her parents’ defense.

  ‘Not really, Henry, dear,’ she said cheerily. ‘Trees take such a long time to grow – even the fast-growing softwoods – that those who plant them are rarely those who benefit from their harvesting. And the connection between grower and harvester isn’t as clear either. Daddy used to buy swaths of timber, not saplings, didn’t you, Daddy?’

  ‘Indeed,’ was all that John Timbers could manage.

  Mavis sensed yet another avenue of conversation had been run to ground, so decided to act in a rather cavalier manner. ‘Lady Clementine was telling us about her accident. She’s very fortunate to have come out of it so well, weren’t you, Lady Clementine?’

  Mavis judged that giving Clemmie a chance to act the wounded diva would provide an entertaining distraction that would last just long enough to get them all into dinner. She hoped it would be a light, and not overly long, meal, because she had to unpack her bags, settle in to her room, and get a good night’s sleep. She was determined to go out and take a good look around the New Buttery early the next morning, before she headed off to St David’s Church to be an extra pair of hands for the flower arranging there. She didn’t want to rush to any conclusions, but she hoped as soon as she refreshed her memory of the lay of the land around the building in question, she might have one more inkling about how the ancient Morris implements had come to be delivered, unseen, to Chellingworth Hall.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Thursday, February 27th

  Carol had slept very poorly, and suspected the midnight snack of ice cream might have had something to do with her discomfort. Bunty was curled on the chair next to the Aga when Carol shuffled into the kitchen. ‘Not even going to acknowledge I exist, are you?’ she said to the sleeping cat. Bunty didn’t stir. Not even a whisker.

  ‘I’d do the same if I were you,’ said Carol aloud. ‘Nice and cozy in here, it is. Rest of the place could do with a bit more heat, and a few more draft excluders. I’ll pull out that old pattern I had for making decorative stuffies to put at the bottom of our doors. What do you think, Bunty, my girl? Fancy some stuffies to play with?’

  At the word ‘play’, Bunty deigned to open an eye and peered at Carol. But that was it.

  When David Hill joined his wife for breakfast she’d already finished. ‘Right, I’m off to the office, which, for the sake of comfort, will be the table in the dining room today,’ she announced. ‘Nothing too strenuous, I promise. As you know, I’m going to help with the flowers at the church later on, but I’ve got some stuff I need to do here first.’

  Her husband kissed the top of her head and fussed about with something in the fridge as he replied, ‘I’m glad you’ll just be doing some quiet desk work. It’s what you need after a fall like that. I’m sure the others can manage without your help on this case.’

  Carol decided it best not to mention she was working on two new cases on behalf of the WISE women, so she simply grabbed her glass of milk, and set herself up at her makeshift desk.

  Right-ho, she thought as she powered up two laptops, checked her phone signal and set about seeing if the plans she’d put in place the day before were beginning to pay off. She was eager to see what had happened overnight, and was delighted to see a good deal of useful information in her inbox.

  Sitting at a dining table in deepest Powys, Carol thanked the logistics genius in Hong Kong for supplying her with data she’d been able to unearth about the mobile phone sent to the duke. Carol’s purpose had been to track the manufacturer, shipper and ultimate retailer of the mobile phone that had been dumped into the box, and then to speak to the retailers who had sold the phone, in an effort to discover who had bought the item. With the answers her contacts had furnished her with, she was able to contact a curious shopkeeper in Cowbridge, who confirmed the ident
ities of two young men who’d bought the phone a couple of days earlier. He happened to know both their names because they were local lads, and he was delighted to pass the names on to Carol because he was sick and tired of them lolly-gagging about outside his shop.

  Carol phoned Stephanie’s still distraught dressmaker, Megan Davies, and discovered she knew the two young men in question – referring to them as local Jack the Lads who had a running dispute with one of her brothers. She assured Carol she’d pass the information on to her local police, who’d already been to her workshop to investigate the break-in. Carol made Megan promise to phone her back when she had any news, which the grateful woman did.

  Carol knew she couldn’t just twiddle her thumbs while she waited for an update about The Case of the Severed Sleeve, so decided to follow through with her other, unpaid, work. A lengthy conversation the previous afternoon with an old colleague of hers, who now worked for the Met Police in their data management center, had helped her formulate what she thought was a rather cunning plan. Her friend had told her the sign Christine had seen on the King’s Road was not unusual; many people who needed witnesses to an accident would display such notices close to the scene, hoping people who traveled a regular route might have spotted something useful.

  What had really interested Carol was that her friend also mentioned that, although no pattern was yet discernible, such signs were appearing with increasing regularity near places where no injuries had been reported to the police other than those sustained by a motorist who’d – somehow or other – managed to crush a bicycle. Bound by professional ethics, Carol’s old chum hadn’t been able to say much more, but Carol had got the gist; there was some sort of con going on, and it looked as though Clementine Twyst was just about to be dragged into an unpleasant situation.

  Off the record, Carol and her mate had discussed an ‘hypothetical situation’ which involved a moneymaking scam perpetrated by an organized group comprising ‘victims’ and ‘witnesses’, with hapless, and often injured, motorists being convinced they could make an expensive lawsuit go away by paying off a cyclist they’d ‘hit’ who was suffering from whiplash. Carol’s idea had been to use social media to try to build a profile of ‘evidence’ from the public at large, so she was delighted to find that #crushedcyclistcon was trending on Twitter by the morning.

  As she scrolled through the online feed her initial Tweets to her considerable list of networked contacts had spawned, she saw snippets of despair and anger from all parts of London, and even beyond. Hiding behind their anonymous ‘handles’, people seemed happy to share information about times, places, amounts paid, threats received and injuries sustained in what appeared to be a spate of ‘accidents’ that bore a striking similarity to that which had caused Clementine to break her leg so badly.

  Carol typed in a few more Tweets with judicious wording, and watched as the responses rolled in. It was quite clear Lady Twyst was not alone in believing she’d hit a bicycle but no cyclist, she just hadn’t been contacted about the amount she’d have to cough up to shut up her ‘victim’ yet. Carol was delighted – not for the poor people who’d already been conned, of course – because she could now go back to her Met Police contact with enough evidence to allow them to start piecing something together that might at least stop the scam from spreading. Maybe, if the police had known about the con when they’d interviewed Clementine, they could have warned her about possible demands for money. Carol knew such a warning would be a great comfort to those who’d suffered the trauma of an accident, so she phoned her friend and directed her to the trending information on Twitter. A conversation about the usefulness of social media ensued, and Carol finally hung up feeling she’d achieved a great deal by tackling what she thought of as The Case of the Crushed Cyclist Con, even though the WISE Enquiries Agency wasn’t being paid a bean by anyone to even look into it, let alone solve it before it impacted someone they knew.

  Carol finally realized she needed to get herself sorted out if she was going to be on time to meet Mavis at the church to help with the flowers, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to settle her mind until she’d spoken to Stephanie’s dressmaker again. She wondered about the wisdom of phoning a woman who’d promised to give her any updates, but did it anyway.

  ‘Hello again, Megan – sorry to bother you, but I wondered if—’ she began, only to be interrupted with a joyous: ‘They’ve got it!’ at the other end of the line.

  ‘They’ve found Stephanie’s wedding dress?’ asked Carol, wanting to be clear.

  ‘Yes,’ squealed Megan. ‘They’ve been ever so good, our local bobbies. Went right over to the house of one of the boys, who wasn’t home, so then they went to the other one’s house and found both dresses there. Only the one sleeve is damaged, they said, and they won’t hold it for evidence or nothin’. I can go and get it now. I was going to phone you before I jumped in the car, honest I was. Isn’t it wonderful? Aren’t they lovely?’

  Carol was delighted, of course, but curious too. ‘So the boys stole two wedding dresses, did they?’

  ‘Yes. Stephanie’s and another one.’

  ‘And who’s the other dress for?’ Carol thought she might have an inkling.

  Megan sounded wistful. ‘An old schoolfriend of mine, from up your way. Ann Roberts. Due to collect it on Monday, she is. So now she won’t even need to know it was ever missing. Bit of luck, really, ’cause I’ve still got some hemming to do on it, but maybe that can wait until after I’ve sorted out Stephanie’s sleeve. You’ve got it there, safe, haven’t you?’ Panic tinged the poor woman’s voice. ‘And you promise it’s not badly ripped or nothing, right? I’ll never be able to match the fabric, see.’

  ‘No worries, Megan. The sleeve is here, in its box, and it looks to have been ripped off at the stitching, so the fabric is fine. I’ll get it over to Chellingworth Hall. I’m guessing you’ll be visiting there for a final fitting?’

  ‘Absolutely. I’m going to phone Stephanie as soon as I’ve got the dress in my car, so I know it’s safe.’

  ‘Right-ho, I’ll leave that up to you then,’ said Carol, ‘but, tell me, did you have any other wedding dresses there at the time of the break-in?’

  ‘Yes, about half a dozen.’

  ‘But only Stephanie’s and Ann’s were taken?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And were the dresses labelled – did they have the bride’s names on them?’

  ‘Oh yes, and their contact details, fitting information and photos of them wearing them. Got to keep it all together, see.’

  ‘I see. Thanks for that. I just want you to know I’ll be getting in touch with your local police. I want to let them know about a connection with a possible missing persons case we’re working on up here. Nothing for you to worry about, but who would you say has been the most helpful person you’ve been dealing with there?’

  Carol thought she could hear Megan smile as she replied, ‘PC Duffy, she’s been great. If you need anything, you should talk to her. I’d better go now, alright?’

  ‘Yes, you go, and thanks,’ said Carol, and hung up feeling very satisfied. She immediately checked the number for the police in Bridgend and finally reached PC Duffy. She explained who she was and suggested she might have some useful information pertaining to the break-in at Megan’s workshop.

  PC Duffy turned out to be a good listener, but not very forthcoming with regards to the case. She grudgingly agreed to phone Carol if anything came of a possible link between Ann Roberts’s stolen wedding dress and Rhys Roberts, father of the planning-to-elope bride.

  ‘Modern technology mixed with good old-fashioned enquiring triumphs again,’ said Carol to herself as, feeling supremely satisfied with her efforts, she went to shower and dress. Ready to head out to help with the flower arranging, she made herself a Marmite and lime marmalade sandwich which she stuffed into her handbag and tramped across the green just in time to meet Mavis at the gate to the church grounds. As they walked along the path through the graveyard
catching up, Mavis was suitably impressed with Carol’s achievements of the day and was intrigued by her idea that maybe there was some connection between the two lads in Bridgend and Rhys Roberts. Neither woman could think of anyone else who might want Ann Roberts’s wedding dress stolen, but both were convinced it was a planned theft, because there couldn’t be a good reason for only stealing the two dresses that had been selected.

  Finally taking in their surroundings, Carol said, ‘I don’t suppose they bury anyone here anymore. All cremations now, I should think.’

  ‘Planning that far ahead, are you?’ quipped Mavis.

  Carol knew her colleague was half-joking, but she wasn’t. ‘Sort of. I like it here. It feels right. I fit. I never fitted in in London. Not really. I do here. And I think Bump will too.’

  Their pace slowed. It was a dry day, if bleak, so they both snuggled into their collars as Mavis said, ‘I’m glad of that. You deserve it. And I feel the same. I don’t know how long it will last, but I enjoy Althea’s company, and what’s not to love about living at the Dower House?’

  Carol smiled. ‘Yes, our house is lovely too. And now that we’ve cleared all our decorating plans with the estate office, we can make it more our own. They’re being very good to us, aren’t they? Us, and Annie and Christine too, of course.’

  ‘Aye, that they are. Seems to me Althea and the late duke set a good example to Henry, and they were following in some good traditions too. I went out to the building where they found the Anwen Morris pieces this morning – it’s in a place where almost anyone could have laid those pieces down and no one would have seen them. However, I think it would have been difficult to get there without being seen. I had a word with a few people in the kitchen, which looks out in that general direction, and a couple agreed they’d seen an old Land Rover out there for a wee while. Now I know that doesn’t narrow things down a great deal around here, but one of the things Tudor Evans told Althea and me yesterday afternoon was that Ann Roberts’s father used to drive such a vehicle. Tudor commented he’d had to leave it outside the pub on a few occasions when he’d had one, or five, too many. So that’s another indicator he might be mixed up in all this.’