Turn and Die (Jordan Lacey Mysteries Book 7)

by Stella Whitelaw

  None of the stuff had been recovered and the police were no nearer finding the thieves. They never would find them. Long gone, off to play the CDs and open their junk mail with the ivory letter-knife.

  Somehow, I felt I was missing something.

  Afterwards, I wandered round the garden, enjoying the peace and solitude. It was far enough away from Latching to escape all the traffic noise. The late spring flowers were in full display, daffodils and tulips and wallflowers in abundance, even bluebells growing wild in the far reaches of the garden. Their gardener kept everywhere spick and span, not a leaf out of place. I wondered how the burglars had got in past the security gate. The high wall would have needed a ladder. It might even be electrified. I’d checked the French door and it had been recently repaired.

  It was easy to find the kitchen, a big modern room, probably two rooms and butler’s pantry and larder knocked into one. It had all the latest gleaming equipment, granite work surfaces, eye-level oven and grill and large mirrorball pendant lights. Mrs Malee was washing up the china with quick, neat movements. No dishwasher for fragile Spode.

  “Thank you for the tea,” I said again. “I’m going now. I’ll see myself out.”

  “Thank you, Miss Grimm. Please to close the front door. It is not warm yet. Still cold.”

  “I will. Goodbye.”

  I took those damned shoes off as soon as I got into my car and rubbed my aching feet. Big mistake occurred to me at once: I should not have come in the ladybird. Ladybird car would be remembered. Now, when I came again as myself to see Holly Broughton, I would have to find alternative transport. Perhaps Jack would lend me his flash blue Jaguar. Perhaps he wouldn’t.

  Mrs Malee came running out of the house, in tiny steps because of the tight skirt. She was carrying a big bunch of wallflowers cut from the garden.

  “I have spoken to Mrs Broughton on the telephone and she would like you to have some flowers from the garden. She says as a thank-you for coming.”

  “How lovely,” I said, opening the passenger door so she could put them on the seat. “I love flowers.”

  Second big mistake: Mrs Malee saw that I had taken off the shoes, realized maybe that I was not used to wearing heels. Perhaps the significance would escape her, but her eyes glinted for a second with amusement.

  Third mega, horrendous mistake: the itchy wig lay on the passenger seat and my own unruly tawny-red hair stuffed in a hairnet. A hairnet with holes.

  “Didn’t have time to wash it,” I said, hoping she believed that too.

  Three

  My burglary report for DI James was ready for posting when the shop door opened and a man and a dog came in. I could hear the dog sniffing about. It sounded big. Thank goodness I didn’t have that valuable period dress on display any more. It had gone back to the museum. Modest reward and free admission ticket for life.

  “Hello,” I said collectively to man and dog. It was big. A vast shaggy dog, the size of a small donkey. It grinned at me, tail wagging, sure of a welcome anywhere. The man did not look strong enough to keep the dog under control. He was small and wiry, jerking like a monkey on a stick, a brown cap on his head, tweed jacket and raincoat dating from the sixties. They didn’t look at if they had ever been washed.

  “You the detective lady who found the lost dogs – them miniature things, all hair?” he asked.

  “Word does get around fast,” I said. “I found one dog and replaced the puppy, to be more accurate. The chihuahuas. Can I help you?”

  Even if it was business, I was not asking either of them into the FCI office. The dog would probably sit on my pink-velvet button-back and I wasn’t having that.

  “There’s a thief about,” he said. The dog was pulling on the lead, eager to explore. “Sit,” he said, and the dog sat, clumsily, legs splayed, but still grinning. Dog went up one degree in my estimation.

  “Several,” I said, finding a notebook. “Tell me about it.” I put the date, time, man and dog with brief descriptions of both. I felt mean about not asking him back into the office, but I wasn’t having him sitting on my button-back either. I fetched my desk chair for him. Dog got up, sensing biscuit tin in vicinity. Shopping list: plain wooden chair for shop.

  “Sit.” That was man to dog, not me.

  “Please sit down,” I said, trying not to make it sound like a command. “Now may I have your name?”

  “Arthur Spiddock and this is my dog, Fruit and Nut Case, Nutty for short. He’s got a lot of retriever in him.”

  “Hello, Nutty,” I said. Dog sprang up to rush over and say hello back, double-sized grin, tail thudding the floor.

  “Sit,” shouted Arthur Spiddock.

  “Sorry, my fault. I won’t speak to your dog again.”

  “I’ve got an allotment see, out Topham way, my pride and joy. Spend all my time up there since I lost my job with the railways.”

  I nodded. Ouch, I knew the unemployed feeling. “Yes?”

  “I grow cabbages and spuds and beetroots and swedes, then runner beans in the summer. Can’t grow carrots, though. Wrong soil. Don’t grow that namby-pamby lettuce or salad stuff.”

  “Beetroot is for salads,” I murmured.

  “I don’t eat no salads. I like my beetroot hot.”

  “Wow, hot beetroot. Very Russian. So what’s the problem, Mr Spiddock? Has someone been swiping your cabbages?”

  “I’ll have you know I count my cabbages. No, it’s worse than that. Someone has stolen my hens and my rabbits. All my hens and all my rabbits, all gone. Two nights back it was. Next morning they were all gone.” His face crumpled. I daren’t ask if they were next week’s lunch.

  “Dear, oh dear,” I said. “All your hens and all your rabbits. How many would that be?”

  “Eleven hens and four rabbits. Six brown hens, three brooding hens and two pedigree bantams. I’ve got pictures of the rabbits.” He fished out a worn photograph and handed it to me. Surely he wouldn’t have been taking photographs if they were meant for the stew pot. “Them lop-eared rabbits.”

  Not exactly on the menu, more like pampered pets. All four rabbits were large, white, overfed and had long floppy ears and crafty expressions. I began to like Nutty quite a lot. “And the hens?”

  “All good layers. Get my breakfast from them every day. Even Nutty likes a fried egg.”

  “Good for Nutty.”

  “Sit!”

  “You’re surely not expecting me to find your hens and your rabbits?” I doubted if they were still alive, but said nothing.

  “Course I am. You found them puppies, didn’t you? They took feeding stuff and the cages. And a load of straw.”

  “Pedigree puppies are more traceable.They have papers and chip numbers.”

  “I ain’t got no papers for my hens but I want them back and I’m offering a reward.” Mr Spiddock was getting quite worked up now. I hoped my office chair could stand the jerking. Nutty gave a deep bark of encouragement. “I’m offering a hundred pounds reward for the return of my hens and my rabbits.”

  It was quite a lot of money for Arthur Spiddock. You could see it was, the way the words trembled on his thin lips. Probably his entire savings, give or take a few cabbages.

  “Mr Spiddock, I can’t promise to find your hens or rabbits, or even find out who stole them. My rate is ten pounds an hour. I also have a daily rate but I don’t feel this case needs a full day’s commitment.” I didn’t tell him I’d already got a daily commitment. “Did you report this to the police?”

  “Yes, they came and trod all over my allotment. Found nothing. No wheel marks, nothing. But it had rained so there weren’t nothing to find. I could have told ’em that.”

  I had once found a missing tortoise and my fame from that success was not entirely deserved. He’d been found by a police car, wandering down the A27. I’d discovered him in the police canteen, eating leftover lettuce. But hens… I didn’t even know what a pedigree bantam was.

  “You must think carefully about this, Mr Spiddock. Surely it wou
ld be better to buy some new hens and new rabbits with the reward money. A hundred pounds is a lot of money.”

  “You don’t understand,” he raged, face contorted. “These animals were my friends.”

  Nutty howled. It was a terrible noise. I retreated to my office. “I’ll get a registration form for you to fill in.”

  It was going to be a criminal waste of time and I probably wouldn’t even charge him. How could I? He didn’t have any money. Call me crackers. I grinned at Nutty. We had something in common.

  I made more notes: dates, times, addresses. His allotment was at the foot of Topham Hill where the prefabs used to be during the war.

  After the Council pulled them down, the land became allotments for hot-beetroot eaters. I noticed he did not put a home address. Slight problem there with invoicing. Do you invoice an allotment?

  By the time he left, I’d missed the post. But I had made a friend. Nutty was obviously crazy about me.

  *

  “Read the report to me,” DI James growled. “You know I can’t hold anything.”

  I was not into counting his tubes but I had a feeling there was one less today. It might be indelicate to ask. Good news if he was less strung up to medical technology.

  “All beautifully printed on my new laser jet,” I said, waving the sheets. “Single spacing, left aligned, pages numbered.”

  “Get on with it.”

  “Just letting you know that I know what I’m doing.”

  “I doubt it.”

  My description of Faunstone Hall was detailed and accurate. The rooms came alive. I was a born estate agent. They ought to employ me. New career move: send sample of work to all local estate agents and suggest freelance employment.

  “So this struck you as a very odd burglary?”

  “Very odd indeed. Nothing normal about it at all. And I still don’t see how they got over that wall.”

  “An inside job, perhaps? Someone let them in. What about Mrs Malee?”

  “Inscrutable Thai.”

  “She might have a motive we know nothing about.”

  “What’s this – we know nothing about? The burglary is your case. Mine is the attempted murder of Holly’s husband.”

  “Jordan, think. They could be connected. A burglary where they take nothing of importance in a house that is bulging with valuable stuff. They took something that we don’t know about or were looking for something else. Mrs Broughton said she had been set up. What did they take of hers that was then planted? Find out how she was set up and you’ll find a connection to the burglary.”

  “This is making my head ache,” I said. “Now I’ve got stolen hens and rabbits to find and three of them are bantams, and I don’t even know what a bantam looks like.”

  “A bantam is a small species of domestic fowl,” said James wearily.

  “Not even the normal size,” I wailed. “I can’t cope with this.” It was clouding over and the room was getting gloomy. Even finding the light switch was beyond me.

  James pressed a small buzzer under his hand. A young fresh-faced nurse came in immediately. He smiled at her.

  “Nancy, this is my good friend Jordan, who saved my life. Do you think you could find her a cup of coffee? She’s in a state of not being able to cope.”

  “Of course, James.” Nancy was clearly besotted, almost blushing. Calling me a good friend didn’t help. But he knew: he knew I’d saved his life. “How would you like your coffee, Jordan?”

  I nearly said “in a cup’, but James would not have been amused. “Black, please. Thank you.”

  We talked about something else but I don’t remember what. I could not bear to see him chained to a bed. James was looking at me closely as I drank the coffee. I felt crushed between the past and the present. The vaulting halls of my head were filled with floating fragments like the other morning’s snow. Pieces of information swam in and out like silver minnows.

  “I’m phoning for someone to drive you home. You don’t look well,” James was saying. He’d got a voice-activated phone. Clever stuff. He was issuing orders down the phone as if he was on duty.

  “You can’t, I’ve got the ladybird here.” My voice sounded as if it came from the other side of the room.

  “An officer at Brighton owes me a favor. He’ll drive you home in your car and get the train back.”

  It was still snowing as the detective sergeant drove me home. His name escaped me

  – Luke or Duke something – but he was kind and amiable and did not try to make me talk. Then I discovered the snow was not in my head, but outside the car, clogging the windscreen wipers. The ladybird didn’t have an interior heater so he couldn’t heat the windscreen, but he did drape his coat over my knees. I was still in that short insurance-type-person skirt.

  It was enough to send me to sleep and I left him to cope with the weather. He got directions from James on his mobile and I didn’t even have to tell him where I lived. He stopped outside my two bedsits.

  “Thank you,” I remembered to say. “Very kind.”

  “I’ll park the car in a side road. I expect you’ve got a resident’s permit. Goodnight, Miss Lacey.”

  I couldn’t remember if I had.

  Somehow I staggered upstairs and rolled into bed, only stopping to peel off the skirt and jacket. The duvet was warm and I was asleep in seconds. Flaked out.

  *

  When I awoke, the snow had all gone and the dark sky was bright with stars. The headache had gone too and for once I felt the stirring of hunger. There was only tinned soup in the flat. I sprinkled on stale garlic croutons and grated hard cheese. Gourmet in lower case and a big soup plate.

  It was too late to do any sleuthing but I wrote up my notes. I am a great note-taker. Then I listened to some slow jazz and the plaintive notes of the tenor sax player were healing. I wondered where my famous trumpeter was now. Probably cruising on the QE2, selling CDs in the interval between gigs. I had not heard from him for a long time.

  The next morning, I realized that I had done nothing yet for Holly Broughton’s case, nothing to earn a daily fee. I would have to take a taxi. In the good old days, I would have cycled. I phoned first to make sure she would be in.

  Holly Broughton answered the phone herself. “Yes, please come over. It’s my housekeeper’s day off and I hate being in the house on my own. Spooky and all that.”

  “Not a real spook, I hope,” I said flippantly, thinking hurrah, can use own car, own hair. “Any fifteenth-century ghosts?”

  “No, I don’t think so, not those kind of ghosts; but I don’t feel safe any more, not after all this hassle and the court case. I’m quite frightened.”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour,” I said. “Don’t be afraid. Put the kettle on.”

  “Sure, I can still remember how to do that.” The ladybird had a parking ticket but I didn’t have time to get into a fuss about it. Pay up and forget it. The driver detective had left his coat behind on the passenger seat. I hoped he hadn’t been cold going back to Brighton on the train. I wrote myself a Post-it note and put it on the windscreen: return detective sergeant’s coat.

  Faunstone Hall looked lovely in the morning sunlight. There was a touch of spring warmth in the air. It was such a low and mellow old house, nothing grand and stately, immensely appealing and gracious. No wonder Holly loved it. I felt an urge to get this couple back together, to sort it all out for them. The security gates opened for me.

  Holly was in the porch, looking like a model on a shoot – tight jeans and a music-clef brooch pinned to a brilliant-white shirt, suede gilet, gold watch and bangles, lovely hair. She made me look shabby and secondhand. I tried a bright smile to make up for unintentional shabbiness.

  “Hello, Jordan. I’m so glad to see you. We’ll have a cup of tea first and then I’ll take you on a tour of the house and gardens.”

  “Thank you. I particularly want to know if you have noticed if anything else is missing. Any little odd thing, quite small, something of yours. It co
uld be relevant.”

  The service was not quite up to Mrs Malee’s standard – no tray – but the tea was hot, the mugs pretty, and there were cranberry muffins on a plate. We sat on stools in the gleaming kitchen and I let Holly talk.

  She seemed to want to spill it all out.

  “I know I’m lucky. I have this wonderful Thai housekeeper, Mrs Sanasajja Malee. Isn’t that a fantastic name? I can hardly pronounce it. She looks after me and the house. But she has a sister who has a Thai restaurant in Brighton and she likes to see her once a week. So this is her day off.”

  “Does she do all the work?”

  “No, there’s a woman from the village who helps with the housework. We have five bedrooms and three bathrooms, rather too much for one person to look after. There’s a gardener, Tom, and a boy to help him. Some of the garden has gone wild.”

  “And downstairs?”

  “Three reception rooms, kitchen, Richard’s study, conservatory, and a gym in the tower. Richard uses the gym. I occasionally pump a few weights, very lazy. Some of it is very old. There’s bits that date back to a seventeenth-century manor house, even a priest’s hole somewhere. We’ve never found it.”

  As she took me on a tour, I was again surprised by the things that the burglars had missed. Lladro china figures, a collection of medals from the Boer War, a set of miniatures of former owners of Faunstone Hall. Then all of Holly’s fairy-tale touches. The peacock feathers, the ferns, the glass, loads of delicate pink items. She was a collector of odd pieces.

  “We discovered the miniatures in the attic. No idea who they are, but if they lived here once, then I’m happy to have their portraits around.” We peered at the expressionless faces in the tiny oval frames.

  “Gives a sense of continuity,” I said, with no idea of what I meant. I didn’t know any of my ancestors. Probably barmaids at rural hostelries or farm laborers.

  “Exactly.”