Detectives Merry & Neal Books 1-3

by JANICE FROST

It’s a curse, Ava thought, that blushing is a reflex virtually impossible to control. In addition to colouring, she felt hot and prickly all over as though she were an animal whose hackles were rising in warning, or was it something else — a spark of sexual attraction? Was she really so shallow as to be flattered by the attentions of the demigod that was Professor Christopher Taylor? Warning bells sounded; she couldn’t afford to let him gain the upper hand by submitting so readily to his animal magnetism.

  Before she could take control of the situation, Taylor said,

  “I couldn’t help noticing that you’re limping, Sergeant. Why don’t you sit down and take the weight off that foot? I suggest you prop your leg up on my coffee table.” He gestured in the direction of a sumptuous leather sofa.

  Ava was flustered. Is this how he had impressed Amy Hill, turning on the charm until she couldn’t help but succumb?

  The thought brought Ava rudely back to her senses, but before she could speak, she heard Neal say, in what was, even for him, a dry Scottish accent,

  “Did anything happen between you and Amy?”

  “She was a very persistent young woman, Inspector, and disingenuous. She came to me saying that her friends had made a bet that she wouldn’t be able to persuade me to join them at their flat for dinner. To save her from losing face, I agreed, thinking there would be three other girls present. It wasn’t a date.

  “Amy invited me to dinner with the friends who had made the bet. At their flat. She said it was to be like some reality TV show, where a group of people entertain a celebrity for the evening.”

  “And that appealed to your vanity, did it?” Ava asked, released now, from the charm of Christopher Taylor’s spell.

  For the first time since their arrival, Taylor seemed ruffled. He gave every impression of being affronted.

  “Hardly, Sergeant. The thought of spending an evening in the company of a bunch of not particularly bright undergraduates was less than appealing. As it turned out, it was a trick. She was alone when I arrived. I should have guessed. Amy had invented the whole story to lure me to her flat. It was most embarrassing. Amy answered the door dressed somewhat provocatively. I could tell immediately that there was no one else at home.”

  “So you extricated yourself from the situation, leaving Amy in no doubt that you didn’t approve of her attempt to seduce you? “ Neal asked.

  “Of course, Inspector. What else would I do?”

  “May I ask what you were doing on the night of the twenty-eighth of October, Professor?”

  Taylor’s answer was immediate. No doubt he had anticipated the question.

  “I was at the theatre with a group of students. We’d travelled to London to see a production of King Lear at the Globe. We stayed overnight at a Premier Inn near King’s Cross and returned to Stromford the following morning.”

  Taylor looked at his watch. “Was there anything else you wanted to ask me?” he said, looking at Neal, “only I have to give a lecture in forty minutes.” Turning to Ava, he added, “On the Romantic poets.”

  “Never liked that lot,” she said, dismissively, “all that crap about lonely clouds and daffodils sent me to sleep at school.”

  “Then you must have had a poor teacher, Sergeant.”

  Taylor gathered up some papers from his desk and zipped them into a leather folder. He accompanied them downstairs and out the door. His remote garage door opened up to reveal, predictably, a flashy red Porsche. The university was only ten minutes’ walk away.

  As Ava and Neal approached their modest Ford Fiesta, Ava veered in the direction of the driver’s side, but Neal cut in front of her abruptly, saying, “I’ll drive. You should keep your weight off that foot.”

  For once, Ava didn’t object. As she bent to slip into the passenger seat, she caught Taylor’s eye; he nodded at her and a lock of blonde hair fell over his forehead. He tucked it back slowly, seductively, never taking his eyes off her. Ava matched him stare for stare, managing, she hoped, to conceal the discomfort he aroused in her, with a look of professional detachment.

  “Arrogant bastard,” Neal said as he pulled out of the parking space.

  “Good-looking arrogant bastard,” Ava remarked.

  “Not my type,” Neal answered and they both laughed. Then, on a more serious note, he added, “Make sure his alibi checks out.”

  “I’m on it, boss.”

  Chapter 6

  Richard Turner had been taken aback by Nancy Hill’s sudden proposal. Considering the circumstances, he was not convinced that Nancy meant what she had said. She was in that state of mind that lay somewhere between shock and grief, and Richard was not the kind of man to take advantage of her vulnerability by allowing her to commit herself to a course of action she might later regret. He had permitted himself a moment’s elation, before going on to reassure her kindly but firmly that he would be glad to accept her proposal, but not yet.

  To his disappointment, Nancy had seemed to accept his reply with indifference; she seemed relieved almost, and he wondered whether he had just lost his one chance of marrying the woman he had loved for the better part of eight years.

  To make matters worse, another thought nagged at Richard; it had occurred to him that Nancy’s relief might have been because she had not meant to make the proposal at all, that she had been on the verge of making some other revelation and had blurted the words out as a kind of compensatory afterthought.

  Richard had long suspected that there were secrets Nancy kept from him. It wasn’t anything she said, but rather what she left out, as though her life before her arrival in Shelton had been lived in some other country. She was always particularly reticent about Amy’s father.

  In a literal sense, part of Nancy’s past had been played out in another country. Amy’s father was a backpacker, and Amy the product of a promiscuous period in Nancy’s life, after she had left foster care and gone travelling ‘to find herself.’

  What she had found, upon her return, was that she was pregnant. For some reason, she had concealed her pregnancy and given birth alone, revealing Amy’s existence only months afterwards when she realised she needed to register her daughter’s birth.

  Richard’s attempts to uncover the finer details of the story were met with evasiveness, and even hostility, a clear warning not to pry any deeper. He had learned to accept this; otherwise he might have lost her.

  Richard Turner knew very well what it was like to lose those you love. After fifteen years of marriage, his wife had left him for another man who had two children of his own, taking with her their son and daughter. Richard had felt their loss as a physical pain, and then his daughter Julia, on reaching the age of sixteen, had declared she’d had enough of her ‘new family,’ and returned to Shelton to live with him.

  Richard couldn’t claim to have been a father to Amy, and he acknowledged this with some regret. It was not that he couldn’t love another man’s child, nor was he fearful of displacing his own children by loving someone else’s, for he possessed the strength of character and, perhaps more unusually for a man, enough sensitivity to deal with these kinds of emotional complexities.

  If Richard had been prevented from being a father to Amy, it was for the same reason as his failure to be a husband to the woman he loved; Nancy’s resistance. She kept him at a distance, never allowing him to be her equal in Amy’s affections, as though she were afraid that including another person would eclipse her position at the centre of Amy’s universe. Amy had once called him ‘daddy,’ only to be admonished by Nancy. He had accused her of denying Amy the father she so obviously needed and wanted.

  To his surprise Nancy had agreed with him, and begged him to accept things as they were. So Richard had let it go. Their arguments were all now in the past, but as he held Nancy in her grief, sad too on his own account, Richard knew that Amy’s death changed everything. However painful it might be for Nancy, he now needed to know the truth.

  * * *

  Amy Hill’s funeral service was held at th
e fourteenth century church in the village that Nancy had brought her tiny daughter to seventeen years previously. Richard Turner had noted the presence of a number of young people, and was grateful, knowing that it would be a comfort to Nancy to know that her daughter’s friends had come to pay their last respects, even if at that moment she was unaware of anything around her.

  He was grateful too, for the presence of his son and daughter. Julia had cried when she heard the news of Amy’s death. Whenever his children came to stay, usually during the school holidays, Julia and Amy had played together companionably enough, though never becoming, as he had once hoped, as close as sisters. Of the two, Julia was the more level-headed, the kinder, Richard believed, thinking of all the times when Amy had got Julia into trouble, or allowed Julia to take the blame for her misdeeds.

  Bradley was another matter. He and Amy had been close as children, but Bradley’s feelings for Amy had changed, and he had been unable to accept that they were not reciprocated. After that, the special relationship they had always enjoyed was irretrievably lost, so much so that on a recent visit to see his father, Bradley had not even bothered to look Amy up.

  A smaller group escorted Amy’s coffin down the sloping path of uneven flagstones, dangerously slippery with the soggy remains of lingering autumn leaves, to the spot where she was to be laid to rest. It lay on the other side of a beck that cut the graveyard in two, effectively separating old graves from new.

  As the coffin was lowered into its black hole, Richard gave up all pretence of being strong for Nancy’s sake and wept openly, matching his lover’s grief, sob for racking sob.

  When the gravediggers began shovelling earth onto Amy’s coffin, Richard, stoic again after his lapse, led his family back up the path to the village pub where refreshments were waiting for those with the heart or stomach to eat.

  * * *

  That night, as he drew the curtains in Nancy’s bedroom, he stood for a moment at the window and watched the rain battering against the glass, thinking of Amy’s frail, broken body lying in the saturated ground of the South Common. Sadly, he turned away and crossed the room to sit on the end of his lover’s bed and began unbuttoning his shirt. He had already removed his black suit trousers and hung them in Nancy’s wardrobe, the one he had made himself five or six years ago, saying he needed somewhere to hang the clothes he left at her house. Nancy had protested at first, no doubt concerned that he was trying to move in by the back door, even though the room already contained so many of his clothes.

  The history of their relationship was peppered with such absurdities. Some weeks Richard would spend every night at Nancy’s house, and then Nancy would insist that he go home for a couple of nights.

  “My home is with you. We both know it,” he told her often, and Nancy had never denied it. To please her he had gone home, slept alone for a couple of nights in his cottage that reminded him of his unhappy life with his ex-wife, and waited for Nancy to call. Amy had been dead for five days. Tonight was his sixth night in Nancy’s cottage. She had not yet asked him to leave.

  Richard removed his socks and joined Nancy in bed. He said, quietly,

  “Bradley was very upset.”

  For a moment he thought that Nancy was asleep, for she made no comment, and no sound came from where she lay curled up under the patchwork quilt, one of many she had made herself. This particular one was a favourite of his, made from scraps of material in autumnal colours, shades of brown, russet, gold and ochre. “Nancy?” he whispered, “Love?”

  “I’m alright,” she answered.

  “I was just saying . . .”

  “I heard what you said.”

  “He loved her like a sister.”

  Nancy sat bolt upright in bed. Without her make-up she looked very similar to Richard. This was one of the things that he loved about her, her naturalness. But tonight there was something else about her features. It was not simply the red and swollen signs of prolonged crying that had transformed her face. There was a hardness that had not been there before, as though all the strength she had mustered to steel herself against her loss had robbed her of some part of her humanity. Richard hoped that this was a temporary change, that time and resignation would soften his lover’s features and restore the face of the woman he loved.

  “Don’t ever use that word in connection with Bradley and my daughter again.”

  The vehemence in Nancy’s tone took Richard by surprise. He wanted to stick up for his son, to protest that Bradley really had loved Amy, but Nancy’s hostile look warned him off.

  “Why doesn’t she love me, Dad?” Richard had had no answer to give his seventeen-year-old son three years ago, when Bradley had pleaded with him to persuade Amy to take him seriously.

  Try as he might, he could not convince Bradley that his pursuit of Amy was doomed to failure. Bradley had been smitten the previous summer, and could not be persuaded that she had no romantic feelings for him. He had experienced this as a kind of epiphany over the breakfast table one morning as he was tucking into a bowl of cornflakes.

  Looking up sleepily from his cereal bowl, he had suddenly truly ‘noticed’ Amy for the first time. He watched her stir sugar slowly into her coffee cup and wipe a crumb of toast lazily from her bottom lip, the fullness of which he had been quite unaware of until that moment. He had been so smitten that his heart had quite literally missed a beat. Or so he claimed when he described the moment to his father.

  If Richard could have foreseen the consequences of what became his son’s obsession, he would have taken Bradley more seriously from the start. As it was, Bradley’s behaviour had almost cost Richard his relationship with the woman he loved; he had defended his son at the time out of a sense of paternal loyalty, instead of facing the truth. Nancy’s forgiveness had been hard won. Richard hoped fervently that the earlier unsavoury incident in the pub involving his son had not soured their relationship once more.

  “I’m sorry,” he whispered.

  Nancy had settled down again and pulled the bedclothes over her head. Evidently she was not in a forgiving mood tonight.

  * * *

  In her chilly flat above the bookshop on the Long Hill, Anna Foster considered the events of the day. At the funeral service she had sat in the row behind Nancy, resisting the urge to lean forward and give her friend’s shoulder a supportive squeeze. Nancy was sitting between Richard Turner and his daughter Julia, both of whom had slipped an arm around her waist. Without their presence, Nancy looked like she might have crumpled with the weight of her sorrow.

  After the service, outside in the churchyard, Anna had lingered by Amy’s graveside after the family had left, needing to distance herself for a moment from her friend’s distress. She bent to read the sad farewells written on the cards on the wreaths laid out ready to be placed upon Amy’s grave, wondering how Nancy could bear her loss. Not surprisingly, Simon was uppermost in her thoughts. He had been missing for five days now. What if something had happened to him too? She steered her thoughts away from the myriad possibilities because nearly all of them were unthinkable. Anna shuddered, looking around her, wondering where her son was, wishing he was with her.

  “You alright love?” one of the gravediggers asked. It was an absurd, if well intentioned, question to ask a mourner by a graveside, but Anna smiled and replied that yes, she was fine, feeling guilty that the tears she was shedding were not for Amy.

  She had been invited to a post-burial lunch at the village pub, The Black Horse. Hoping that Nancy might appreciate her presence there, she made her way out of the church grounds to the village green where the Black Horse door was propped open to welcome the funeral party. How long would it be before Nancy got to know that the police wanted Simon for questioning? Anna wondered, thinking that she should offer her friend comfort now, while it would still be accepted.

  The old-fashioned interior of the seventeenth century inn felt momentarily warm and welcoming, before the subdued atmosphere hit Anna and became oppressive. The tall, dark
detective and his attractive sergeant had attended the funeral and Anna spotted them sitting in an alcove near the bar. She slipped past them to the buffet where she concentrated on filling her plate and glancing unnoticed, she hoped, in their direction.

  Inspector Neal was a handsome man, she thought, estimating him to be in his early thirties. He was tucking into a plate of sandwiches and a pint of beer. Beside him, Sergeant Merry was picking at a salad. Their heads were close together as they talked, but Anna could tell that they were watching the mourners closely, and she was careful not to catch their eye.

  Nancy was sitting with her partner and his two children, Julia and Bradley. Anna recognised them from photographs Nancy had shown her of Julia’s graduation the year before. She studied Bradley for a moment, noting how distressed he was. Hadn’t Nancy told her that Bradley once had a crush on Amy? One that had bordered on the obsessive and had led to some unpleasantness? At least that’s what Nancy had hinted. Anna had had the impression that there was more to it and, watching them now, she wondered again what Bradley had done for Nancy to seem so impervious to his grief.

  A thought struck her suddenly; Bradley might actually qualify as a suspect. What if he had harboured feelings of rejection and loss that turned to rage? Was his grief genuine or did he have a terrible secret eating away at him, the expression of which had nothing at all to do with grief and everything to do with fear that he might be found out, particularly as the police were practically on top of him. Neal and the sergeant were eager to question Simon. Had they even considered that Amy’s killer could be sitting not ten feet away from them at that very moment?

  Anna was suddenly desperate to alert Inspector Neal to this possibility. She looked in his direction, but instead of catching Neal’s eye, she attracted Julia Turner’s. Anna reddened, fearing that Julia had somehow read her thoughts.

  “Come and join us,” Julia beckoned, sidling up closer to her father to make room for Anna.

  “Thank you,” Anna said, joining the solemn family group at their table. Nancy gave her a wan smile, Bradley was staring down at his half lager; Anna sensed an atmosphere.