Further Titles by Veronica Heley from Severn House
The Ellie Quicke Mysteries
MURDER AT THE ALTAR
MURDER BY SUICIDE
MURDER OF INNOCENCE
MURDER BY ACCIDENT
MURDER IN THE GARDEN
MURDER BY COMMITTEE
MURDER BY BICYCLE
MURDER OF IDENTITY
MURDER IN HOUSE
MURDER BY MISTAKE
The Bea Abbot Agency mystery series
FALSE CHARITY
FALSE PICTURE
FALSE STEP
FALSE PRETENCES
FALSE MONEY
FALSE MONEY
An Abbot Agency Mystery
Veronica Heley
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author's and publisher's rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
First world edition published 2010
in Great Britain and in 2011 in the USA by
SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of
9–15 High Street, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM1 1DF.
Copyright © 2010 by Veronica Heley.
All rights reserved.
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Heley, Veronica.
False money. – (An Abbot Agency mystery)
1. Abbot, Bea (Fictitious character)–Fiction. 2. Widows–
England–London–Fiction. 3. Women private
investigators–England–London–Fiction. 4. Detective
and mystery stories.
I. Title II. Series
823.9′14-dc22
ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-057-9 (ePub)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-6985-2 (cased)
ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-305-2 (trade paper)
Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.
This ebook produced by
Palimpsest Book Production Limited,
Falkirk, Stirlingshire, Scotland.
ONE
Widowed Bea Abbot ran a domestic agency whose watchword was ‘discretion’. Every now and then people brought her problems they couldn’t or wouldn’t take to the police. Occasionally this meant she dealt with murder.
Friday afternoon
Bea walked into her office and found a bouquet of flowers on her desk.
Was it a gift or a bribe?
The flowers wouldn’t be from her live-in assistant. Maggie had green fingers and looked after their secluded back garden with energy and style; both of which she had in spades. In the winter Maggie filled the huge planters in the paved courtyard garden with a selection of bulbs, winter pansies and cyclamens. Through the French windows Bea could see a host of miniature daffodils just beginning to show colour.
By this time in March the trees should be budding and the birds should be shouting that spring was on its way. Unfortunately the country had plunged into a cold spell, and the outside temperature indicated midwinter rather than spring.
Maggie did not care for cut flowers, so it wasn’t she who had put the bouquet on Bea’s desk.
Bea rarely bothered to buy cut flowers either, being content with one or two strategically placed pot plants, which didn’t object to central heating.
So, who had brought her flowers?
A name leaped into her mind.
Ah. Of course. She picked the bouquet up to make sure, but there was no card with it. It wasn’t an expensive bouquet. It was made up of carnations, chrysanthemums and one rose bundled into a cellophane wrapper, with a sachet of plant food taped to it. It looked as if it had been plucked from a bucket on the way out of a convenience store. Bea could see where an attempt had been made to rip off the price tag.
She weighed the bouquet in her hand, thinking about the one person who was always asking her to do things for him that she didn’t want to do . . . and dropped it into the waste-paper basket.
She liked flowers. What she didn’t like was bribery and corruption, and she could smell that a mile off.
He’d be lurking in the vicinity, of course.
She threw her suit jacket over the back of her chair and stretched to ease her back. She was tired. She’d been out of the office all morning, even skipping lunch to do some shopping for her daughter-in-law, and this was the first moment she’d had to sit at her desk and boot up her computer. In a minute, her elderly and pensionable but refusing-to-retire personal assistant would knock on the door – which was entirely unnecessary, but the elderly Miss Brook liked to observe the formalities – and enter with the few items from the day’s post that she felt her employer should see.
Meanwhile, Bea accessed her emails.
‘Boo!’
Of course. He’d concealed himself behind the long curtains framing the French windows.
Bea set her teeth. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Whatever it is you want, the answer is, “No.”’
‘You don’t really mean it.’ Chris slid into the chair before her desk. Nineteen years old, he had a narrow head under a mop of chestnut hair, was of medium height and well made. He had startlingly blue eyes and charm enough to get his own way ninety-nine times out of a hundred. He was out-of-this-world clever in some respects but, in Bea’s opinion at least, made up for it by being totally lacking in common sense.
As Bea had expected, Miss Brook now tapped on the door and brought in the post. Chris jumped up and reached out to take the stack of letters from her, but fumbled the job and let the papers fall to the floor.
Bea rolled her eyes at Miss Brook, who pinched in her lips and said, ‘I don’t know how he got in, but Maggie’s back from her last job and she’s upstairs. No doubt he got round her. How is your grandson today?’
Bea’s son Max and his wife had produced a baby boy some months ago and Bea had been called over to help out that morning. ‘A trifle fractious, I’m afraid. Don’t you bother to pick up those letters, Miss Brook. Chris knocked them down, and Chris can pick them up.’
Which, indeed, he was scrabbling around on the floor to do.
‘I should think so, too,’ said Miss Brook, who was one of the few people impervious to Chris’s charm. ‘There’s nothing in that pile that can’t wait, so if you don’t mind, I’ll be off now.’
Bea looked at her watch. Of course, Miss Brook always liked to leave early on Friday afternoons.
The elderly lady continued, ‘I’ll be in tomorrow morning with the new girl, who’s shaping up well.’
The ‘new girl’ would never see sixty again. Bea – in her sixties herself – liked to give older women jobs, believing them to be more stable and better trained in office work than girls fresh out of school. They took less time off work, too.
Bea nodded, and Miss Brook closed the door soundlessly behind her.
Chris dumped a messy pile of papers on her desk and opened his mouth to speak.
‘No,’ said Bea. ‘Whatever it is that you want, the answer is, “No.” As I’ve said many times before, you may not move into the spare room. You may not bring your synthesizer in here to practice, and I am not taking you out in my car to give you a driving lesson.’
‘That’s not fair. I’ve passed my test.’
‘At the eighteenth attempt?’
‘Oh, come on! It was only my fourt
h try.’
‘Is your driving instructor now on tranquillizers?’ She held up her hand to stop him. ‘Let me continue. I’m delighted – though surprised – to hear that you’ve managed finally to pass your driving test, but no, you may not borrow my car under any circumstances. What’s more, whether you are gainfully employed at the moment or not, you may not waste Maggie’s time by chatting to her when she ought to be working. Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be out and about, making another art-house film?’
He opened his mouth to reply, but she got there first. ‘No! Don’t tell me. The film’s held up for some reason, your father’s fed up with you hanging around the house, and you can’t go back to university till next terms starts—’
‘I’m not going back to university.’
‘But you will, Chris. You will. In due course you’ll see the sense of it. Whatever you decide to do in life, a university degree helps. What’s more, it teaches you discipline, which is something you lack. At this very moment you should be catching up on all the work you’ve missed by dropping out. I suspect you haven’t opened a book in weeks. So, the answer is, “NO!”’
He grinned. ‘You haven’t heard what it is I want yet.’
‘I don’t need to,’ she said, returning to her computer and deleting some spam. Why did you always have to check your spam nowadays? To make sure nothing had dived into the wrong slot?
He put on his puppy-dog face. ‘I only wanted you to—’
‘Cloth ears, have you?’
‘My father suggested that—’
She lifted her eyes from her screen. His father was some sort of high-up civil servant, a grey man with influence. She liked CJ, and she rather thought he liked her – not in that way, of course. But she trusted him, which is more than she did his likeable but harum-scarum son. ‘If your father wants me to do something for him, he can ask me himself.’
‘He’s busy. Tied up with a court case, being an expert for the prosecution, hanging around for days, you know. Never at home.’
‘You’ve always got an excuse.’
‘Honest. He did say I should ask you to help.’
Despite herself, she hesitated. ‘To do what?’
‘To find my library books.’
‘WHAT! Get out of here before I lose my temper completely!’ She jabbed at her mouse and lost the email she’d been trying to read.
Chris fished his bouquet out of the bin, went down on one knee and presented the flowers to her elbow. ‘Please, pretty please?’
Bea closed her eyes and counted five. She knew she ought to count to ten, or even twenty, but failed to get further than seven. ‘Get out of here before I call the police.’
‘You wouldn’t do that.’ His smile was blindingly white, full of confidence.
‘The trouble with you, Chris, is that no one said, “No,” to you when you were a child. You think you only have to express a wish, and the world will rush to grant it. Now, I have work to do, so if you don’t mind—’
‘Oliver said that if anyone could find them, you could.’
‘What?’ Oliver was her much-loved adopted son, who’d propelled the agency into the big time with his computer skills and know-how, and was now in his second term at university. Oliver and Chris had been at school together and, despite being opposites, had remained good friends. If Chris was a little boy made of charm and flashes of genius, Oliver was a steady, hard-working, trustworthy, intelligent young man who could make computers do a fandango.
Bea frowned. ‘Oliver suggested you approach me about your lost library books? I don’t believe it.’
He hunkered down, folding his legs into a lotus position. ‘Oliver knows her, you see. The girl who took my library books home with her. He says she wouldn’t go missing without returning the books. I mean, it’s the sort of thing I might do . . . Have done, come to think of it. But she’s like Oliver. Conscientious. She’d never go off like that without at least telling me where I could find the books.’
‘What?’
He leaned forward, confident at last that she would listen. ‘Some people look drab and ordinary when you film them, and some light up. The planes of their cheekbones reflect the light, they can act with their eyes, and when they turn their heads they still look elegant. Tomi is—’
‘Who?’
‘Tomi. Short for Tomilola, which is short for something else. Her parents are Nigerian, doctors, came here when she was two. Her name means “God is enough for me”. Cute, isn’t it?’
Bea struggled with the impulse to box his ears. ‘I am not even going to ask who Tomi is. For the umpteenth time, get out of here!’
‘No, no. You’re not listening. Tomi is not a professional actress, of course – she works for some magazine or other during the week – but she’s the main character in the short film I made last year, which won that special award, remember? The one which my father said if I won the award I could leave uni and concentrate on film-making?’
‘He didn’t think you’d win.’
‘I know that!’ He grinned. ‘Of course, it was a fluke, and entirely unexpected and all that, but the fact is that the rest of the entrants were all terribly dreary and worthy and making left-wing political propaganda, whereas mine was thoughtful and, well, fun. People like fun. Especially when the going gets rough. And it’s gone down a storm on YouTube.’ He sobered up, allowing Bea a glimpse of the real Chris, layers below his usual light-heartedness.
Bea’s hands dropped from her keyboard. ‘So Tomi is someone you’ve known for quite a while, and you believe she’s not the sort to let you down. So what happened?’
His eyes dropped from her, and he picked at a speck of dirt on his jeans. ‘She’s disappeared. We were having a half of bitter together in the pub up the road one Saturday morning, and I was telling her what I’d like to work on next, and we got arguing about shadows and how they could be distorted. That’s what my next film is going to be about: people having the wrong shadows, or no shadow at all, and what that might mean. It’s a folklore tale set in modern London. Tomi was enthusiastic about it, hinted she might know someone who could put some money into it, which I’m telling you would be just great. Well, that doesn’t matter now.
‘The thing is, we went on to the library to take out some books on artists who use shadows in different ways, and there were quite a few, so she helped me carry the books out. I got talking to a friend outside, and she said she needed to catch up with someone on the other side of the road and went over to talk to them, and that was the last I saw of her. I rushed back home because I was going on to a party that night. She wasn’t there, but I didn’t think anything of it because we know all sorts of people and she might well have been going to someone else’s do. Only, next morning I discovered she’d walked off with a couple of my books.
‘It was a good party and I didn’t surface again till Sunday evening, when I rang her, but she didn’t pick up. So on Monday I went round to her place, and her flatmate said she must have slept over with a friend, though she didn’t usually. I expected to hear from her. Nothing. On Wednesday I rang her at work, but she’d sent them a text to say she’d taken some holiday time due to her and had gone to France for a week.’
‘Just like that?’
‘Just like that. So this Monday I tried everyone all over again. They’ve heard nothing from her at work and are most annoyed and surprised that she’s let them down. I tried her flatmate again. She said she’d had a text, too, saying Tomi had decided to go off with a friend who’d offered her a lift in his car touring France, and that she didn’t know when she’d be back. Tomi hadn’t left any money to pay for her room, and the flatmate was not pleased. She said she’d tried Tomi’s mobile phone and left a message, just as I’d done. Tomi hasn’t rung her back, either. The flatmate can’t afford to keep the flat on by herself so she’s cleared Tomi’s things out of her room and is going to relet.’
‘Flatmate’s name?’ said Bea, intrigued despite herself.
‘I hav
e it here for you, and the address. Flatmate doesn’t approve of me. Thinks I’m feckless; can’t imagine why.’
Bea took the piece of paper. A foreign name, an address not far off. ‘What about the man she went over to talk to, last time you saw her?’
‘The thing is, I didn’t really see who it was. Someone I know came up to me and we were chatting, you know how it is. Tomi said she was off, and I said, “See you!” or words to that effect, and that was it. It might have been anyone. A friend from her church, perhaps? They disapprove of me, needless to say. Tomi’s a committed churchgoer, by the way, and terribly moral, but she doesn’t talk about it to me because I get the giggles when religion’s mentioned.’
He held up his hand to warn off Bea’s protest. ‘Of course, that’s very naughty of me, and I’ll probably straighten out in middle age, but that’s the way it is at the moment.’
Bea blinked and tried to recap on what he’d said. ‘Going back to the flatmate. Miss . . .’ She accessed the piece of paper with the name on. ‘Drobny? Is that right? You went round and asked her if you might look for your books, and—’
‘She let me in, under supervision. She breathed on me heavily all the time I was going through Tomi’s things, which were piled up in the hallway. The books weren’t there. At least, I couldn’t spot them. Tomi might have left them somewhere else in the flat, but the flatmate didn’t like me being there and wouldn’t let me look.’
Bea got up and went over to the windows. The late afternoons were getting lighter, but the sun didn’t seem to have much warmth in it yet. Twilight was beginning to shroud the paved garden, but the sycamore tree at the end – still leafless – made pretty patterns against the sky. Through the tree she could see the floodlit spire of St Mary’s Church.
Tomi was a Christian. Tomi was a hard-working, responsible girl. It wasn’t like her to go off on a bender.
Bea checked that the French windows to the garden were locked, tested the security grille, let down the blind, and drew the floor-length curtains. From above her office came the faint sounds of pans clashing together in the kitchen. Maggie loved to cook when she got home. Bea had missed lunch and was looking forward to supper.
False Money Page 1
