by Agatha Frost
“Not here,” he said, holding the door open and nodding out into the alley. “Let me take you out for breakfast. I’ve found this place that looks like a dump, but the food is fairly decent. I think it’s called The Comfy Corner. Dreadful name.”
“You must be out of your mind.”
“Do you want me to share information, or not?” he asked with a leer. “Come on.”
Jerrad walked through the door and turned into the alley. Julia looked back at the coffee shop, wondering how desperately she wanted to crack the case. If it hadn’t been for seeing Timothy clinging onto the photograph of a man he had loved and been cheated by, Julia might have retreated to the safety of her dying café.
She didn’t want to believe she would follow him, but that’s just what she did.
The Comfy Corner was the only place in Peridale that could call itself a real restaurant. It was tucked away on a small backstreet directly across from the tiny library where Sue’s husband, Neil, worked. From the outside, the restaurant wasn’t much to look at, but everybody in the village knew it had the best food in Peridale, if not the whole of the Cotswolds.
Julia climbed out of Jerrad’s sports car, glad to be in the fresh air again. The new car smell had practically knocked her sick when coupled with his erratic driving and overly spiced aftershave.
He held open the door of the restaurant, and she couldn’t help but feel he was trying to take her out on a date, which was the last impression she wanted to give him.
The Comfy Corner was run by Mary and Todd Porter, two kind villagers in their sixties. When people talked about true love in the village, Mary and Todd were usually the standard that people looked up to. They had met when they were children at St. Peter’s Primary School, and had been married since they were eighteen. Unlike Julia and Jerrad, Mary and Todd seemed just as in love as the day they had married.
“Julia!” Mary exclaimed. “Couldn’t get enough of the carvery yesterday? Good to see you.”
Mary’s eyes landed on Jerrad, bulging so hard out of her face, they practically popped out and rolled across the carpet. Julia wondered if Mary would wait until she had left to call everybody she knew to tell them Julia had been in there with a man that wasn’t Barker. If gossiping were a sport, Mary would take the gold medal. She seemed to know everything before everyone, and it was known that you only said things in her presence that you were happy for the whole village to find out. Dot had suggested on more than one occasion that Mary had planted bugs around the quaint eatery, but Julia didn’t quite believe that.
While Jerrad helped himself to three of everything from the breakfast buffet, Julia settled on a single slice of toast. She didn’t want to give Jerrad the idea that she wanted to be there, even if her stomach did grumble as she walked past the bacon, sausages, beans, and scrambled eggs.
“Watching your figure?” he commented as they took a seat in the corner. “Probably for the best. You’re creeping up to your forties.”
Julia reminded herself why she was there and inhaled a deep, calming breath. She wished peppermint and liquorice tea were on the menu because she needed a cup to soothe her.
While Jerrad wolfed down his breakfast, Julia slowly buttered every millimetre of her toast, if only to figure out what she wanted to know first, and if he could be trusted.
“Where did you meet Anthony?” Julia asked, starting easy. “Sometime in the last two years?”
“Six months ago at a franchise convention in London,” Jerrad mumbled through a mouthful of beans. “We bumped into each other by accident. He dropped all of his paperwork, and when I saw that he wanted to open a Happy Bean in Peridale, I knew I couldn’t pass it up.”
“You said you sunk all of your money into the project,” Julia said, trying to remember everything Jerrad had already told her. “How much?”
“Everything I had,” he said, pausing for air before tucking into the next sausage. “It wasn’t cheap keeping up with the younger women. Hair transplant, new teeth, abdominal sculpting. It all cost money.”
“I knew you looked different!” Julia exclaimed, snapping her fingers together as she peered at his lower and thicker hairline.
“If I would have known the upkeep, I might not have switched.”
Julia knew by ‘switched’ he meant from her, a normal thirty-something with a normal body, to a young, blonde, skinny twenty-something. It had been a long time since Julia had realised that Jerrad had done her the biggest favour of her life. Deciding not to mention this, she thought about the next question.
“What did Anthony promise you in return for your investment?”
“That we would take over the world,” Jerrad said sternly. “I should have known it was too good to be true. He told me we would have a location open in every town in England before Christmas, if only I –”
“Put up the money?”
“Bingo,” Jerrad said. “He was good at the sale, I’ll give him that.”
“You’re not the only person he conned,” Julia said. “It was all he knew. Does the name Timothy Edwards mean anything to you?”
Jerrad paused, a slice of bacon hovering near his open mouth. He looked up at Julia for a second before cramming the meat into his mouth and chewing slowly. She took his silence as a yes.
“That’s who died,” she continued. “Did you know about his real relationship with Anthony?”
“I guessed something funny was going on,” Jerrad said, as though he found the situation comical. “I heard a man’s voice sometimes in the background of phone calls, and then when I came to the village, I realised it was him.”
“You’ve met Timothy?”
“I went to his flat with Anthony about a month ago after one of our meetings,” Jerrad said with a shrug. “Total cesspit. I don’t know how a man could live like that.”
Julia thought back to their apartment in London. It had been barren and devoid of any real personality, except for the calculated pieces Jerrad had approved. She wasn’t surprised he had gotten on with Anthony so well.
“Did it have something to do with a painting?” Julia asked.
“So, you know about the painting,” Jerrad said with a roll of his eyes. “Everybody wants to know about the painting.”
“What do they want to know?”
“How they can get their grubby hands on it.”
“Is it worth something?”
“Oh, like you wouldn’t believe,” Jerrad said, his eyes sparkling. “Anthony reckoned it could go for around a million.”
“Certainly enough to murder somebody for,” Julia said before taking a bite into her toast, which was now stone cold. She chewed it slowly and let her words stew in the silence. “Where is the painting?”
Jerrad crammed an almost full sausage into his mouth, his nostrils flaring angrily. From the way he looked glassy-eyed down at the plate, she knew his exact answer.
“You don’t know,” Julia said, sitting back in her chair with a small laugh. “That’s why you’re here. You want to get your hands on it.”
“He wouldn’t let me see it!” Jerrad snapped, leaning in across the table. “He made me wait outside the flat until he covered it up. I helped him carry it down, but he had chained sheets all around it. He only gave Timothy five hundred quid for it. He didn’t know what it was worth. It’s his own fault really.”
“He loved Anthony,” Julia snapped back, tilting across the table and meeting him halfway. “Anthony tricked him into falling in love with him for the sake of robbing him. It wasn’t his fault. We all do stupid things in the name of love.”
Jerrad narrowed his eyes before leaning back in his chair. He pushed his empty plate away, his right forefinger and thumb twirling the ring around on his left hand. Julia wondered if he even knew he was doing it.
“The slimy git could have hidden the painting anywhere,” Jerrad said. “I wouldn’t even know if I passed it in the street! I just know it’s worth something, and he owes me that money! He turned me upside down and shook e
very last coin out of my pockets. I lost it all. That car outside is a rental. A rental! I’m disgusted with myself. He didn’t put it in the business account like he promised. There’s barely enough in there to keep that place afloat. We’re running day to day.”
“Not a nice feeling, is it?” Julia replied, thinking about the money in her biscuit tin once more. “Where does Rosemary come into this? I assume you’re together?”
“Casually so,” Jerrad said, his eyes tapering. “For now.”
It took Julia a minute to realise what that meant, but a light bulb quickly sparked above her head, a crucial part of the puzzle slotting neatly into place.
“You’re hoping she knows where the painting is!” Julia exclaimed, shaking her head as she held back the laughter. “Oh, Jerrad, you’re no better than Anthony. You’re using a widow for the sake of money.”
“It’s almost a million quid, darlin’,” Jerrad remarked, his eyes widening with excitement. “It’s only what I’m owed. She knows about the painting.”
“But she doesn’t know where it is either?” Julia asked. “Who else knows about the painting?”
Jerrad shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He glanced at the gold watch on his wrist, motioning for Mary to send the bill over.
“Gareth knows, doesn’t he?” Julia responded for him. “That’s why you’ve given him the job. You’re hoping one of them is going to lead you to the pot of gold like a truffle pig.”
“Kids soak up things,” Jerrad mumbled as he pulled a twenty-pound note from his wallet and tucked it under his plate. “He must know something. They’re bound to slip up eventually.”
Julia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Dumping her things on the doorstep of the home they shared for twelve years was one thing, but using a boy and his mother to get to a dead man’s treasure was a new low she wouldn’t have thought even he was capable of.
“Why Peridale?” Julia asked. “And don’t tell me you wanted a fresh start. If you invested with Anthony, you thought he was going to run the business and make you rich. You’re not the type to get your hands dirty.”
Jerrad stood up and fastened his suit jacket. He picked up a knife and held it up to his face. First, he checked his teeth in the reflection, which looked to have been replaced with a full set of veneers, and then his thick hair, which had been balding and receding the last time Julia had seen him.
“Why do you think?” he replied, a sudden softness taking over his voice before he turned and walked to the door.
Julia didn’t move until she heard the roar of his sports car tearing down the road. She wondered what he had meant by that, but she didn’t want to go there. The way he had touched his wedding ring had made her wonder if there was still a shred of the human being she had married in there somewhere.
“You’ve barely touched your toast, love,” Mary said softly as she approached. “Would you like another go at the buffet? I won’t charge extra.”
“Thank you, but no thank you,” Julia said as she stood up. “I have somebody I need to warn.”
Julia headed straight for the exit and set off across Peridale, taking every shortcut she knew. She hurried down a small path and came out in front of Rosemary’s cottage, her legs covered in nettle stings. She didn’t care. She had already spent twelve years of her life making a mistake, she wasn’t about to let Rosemary repeat that mistake. Jerrad might have shown an ounce of humanity beneath his ruthless exterior, but it wasn’t enough. It only reminded Julia of how much she loved Barker, and how Rosemary deserved somebody like that, even if Barker could never bring himself to forgive her.
Julia unclipped the gate and hurried down the neat garden path towards the front door. Her finger lifted to the doorbell, but she stopped when she heard raised voices drifting through the slightly open sitting room window. She almost pressed the bell to make herself known, but she paused and decided to listen first.
“He’s gone!” she heard Rosemary exclaim. “We can do what we want now. Be who we want to be. We don’t even have to stay here.”
“What if I want to?” she heard Gareth reply.
“Is it for that painting?”
“No!”
“Because if it is, we’re never going to find it,” Rosemary snapped, the freeness and contented calm gone from her voice. “Your father hid that thing good and proper, which means he died for nothing, but I don’t care! We can start fresh! You and me, somewhere new. We can go to the coast! You always said you wanted to live by the sea.”
“You’re just as bad as him!” Gareth cried, his voice cracking at the top of his register. “All you care about is yourself!”
A door slammed, making Julia jump back. She thought about pressing the doorbell, but she had only come to warn Rosemary away from Jerrad. From the way she was talking, she wasn’t the damsel in distress she had assumed she was.
Julia tiptoed down the garden path and back the way she had come, stinging her shins with the nettles once more. Wherever the painting was, Julia hoped it was beautiful enough to explain why it had driven everybody in Anthony’s life to insanity.
Chapter Twelve
“All of this for a painting,” Sue said as she sipped her raspberry lemonade at the table closest to Julia’s counter later that afternoon. “I wonder what it looks like.”
“It’s probably some boring landscape,” Jessie mumbled as she wiped down the tables for the fourth time since Julia had returned, despite there having been no customers. “Expensive art is always stupid. Galleries are pointless.”
“It’s a shame Rachel Carter is in prison for murder,” Sue said with a heavy exhale as she remembered the owner of Peridale’s only art gallery, which had remained closed since she had been locked up. “She would have been able to help.”
“Are you forgetting the part where you destroyed her irreplaceable Georgia O’Keefe painting?” Julia reminded her with a playful smile.
“You asked me for a distraction!”
“And what about that priceless vase at Seirbigh Castle in Scotland?” Julia added, tapping her chin. “That was a family heirloom you sacrificed in another distraction.”
“I’m clumsy,” Sue said with a shrug as she rubbed her stomach. “What happened in Scotland stays in Scotland.”
“What happened in Scotland?” Jessie asked, a confused expression on her face.
“Nothing,” Julia and Sue replied in unison, having sworn not to mention the murder they had solved several weeks ago during a spa trip to Scotland, which their gran had won as part of a radio contest.
“Who are your suspects?” Sue asked, draining the last of her raspberry lemonade and shaking the cup for a refill. “You must have quite a few by now.”
“I wish I did,” Julia said with a sigh as she walked around the counter with the freshly pressed lemonade. “It seemed Anthony wasn’t in short supply of people who wanted to kill him.”
“It had to be somebody who knows about the painting,” Jessie said. “So that could be practically anybody in the village the way people ‘round here talk.”
“We know Rosemary and Gareth know about it after what I heard this morning,” Julia said, pulling out her notepad to read the things she had scribbled down. “And Jerrad, obviously. I don’t know if Maggie knew about the painting.”
“She could have still killed him though,” Jessie suggested as she tossed the cloth down and took the seat across from Sue. “I saw people do the craziest things on the streets when they were drunk, especially on vodka. It always made them so angry.”
“I totally forgot about that,” Sue said, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “After you told me about Maggie’s story, I remembered a text Debbie sent me. I never put two and two together until last night when I was in bed going through my messages. My storage was full, so I was deciding which ones to delete. Ah, here it is! ‘You’ll never guess who just turned up at my door drunk as a skunk’ with the crying laughing face emoji. That was at half ten on the Saturday night. I was asleep, but
I woke up at four to throw up. Lime trouble.” Sue paused to rub her stomach before continuing. “I sent her a message saying ‘Omg! Who?’ with the confused face emoji at four minutes past four, and she replied ‘Ceramic Pug Maggie! Came in and crashed out on my couch and then just jumped up and left ten minutes ago!’ with the shrugging girl emoji and the cocktail emoji, so I replied ‘Omg! No way!’ with the shocked face emoji, and then she replied –”
“Alright!” Jessie cried. “We get it! I can’t take anymore.”
Sue pouted, locked her phone and tucked it away before crossing her arms and sulking.
“It rules her out,” Sue said. “Anthony died before midnight, and she was at Debbie’s between half ten at night and four in the morning.”
“That’s when he died, but that’s not when he was murdered,” Julia whispered, drumming her fingers on the counter as she hovered over Maggie’s name with the pen. “Whoever poisoned him did it over a long period of time. She had access. It just means it wasn’t her at the scene of the crime.”
“What if Timothy poisoned Anthony and then poisoned himself?” Jessie suggested, her finger tapping thoughtfully on her chin. “Romeo and Juliet style, except everybody is dead when they say they are.”
“You know Romeo and Juliet?” Sue asked suspiciously.
“Julia made me watch the film,” Jessie replied, staring down her nose at Sue in a way only Jessie could. “The one with the dude from Titanic.”
“That doesn’t count!”
“It totally counts.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Julia butted in before a full-scale fight broke out. “It’s a good theory, brilliant in fact. It just doesn’t feel right. I looked into his eyes, and I don’t think he would try to frame me in the process.”
“Who else knows about the painting?” Sue asked, staring off into the corner of the café.
