by Agatha Frost
“I know you’re scared, Dad,” she said, joining him in the kitchen when the last of the customers left. “Should I be?”
Without looking up at her, he continued making himself a cup of tea at the small drinks station she’d set up in the corner. His avoidance of her eyes was all the answer she needed. After a morning of being too distracted to think about it, her mind went straight back to the graffiti, and more importantly, who could have left it.
“It’s peculiar, I’ll say that,” he said, pouring a drop of milk into his cup. “Let’s just see what DI Ramsbottom finds out.”
Harry Ramsbottom and her father had worked together at the local station for years, with Harry ascending from DS to DI when Alan had to bow out. In the short time he’d been the village’s detective inspector, he’d blundered several cases and, according to local gossip, was hanging on by a thread. Everyone, including her father, knew Alan was the better DI – possibly the best the village had ever had.
“Dad?” she said quietly, stepping closer. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”
Picking up his tea, Alan turned and plastered on his fakest smile as he leaned against the counter. He lifted the hot tea to his lips and blew on it before taking a sip. Claire knew him well enough to know he always waited for his tea to cool down before he sipped, and for the second time in two days, she felt she was being stalled.
“What makes you ask that?”
“It’s just,” she started, pausing to consider her words carefully, “you seem confident in Harry’s skills all of a sudden, which makes me wonder if there’s something you know that I don’t.”
Alan sipped the hot tea again, grimacing this time from his lack of blowing. The shop door opened behind her, but she didn’t turn away from her father.
“Customers,” he said, shuffling off with his tea. “Can’t keep them waiting.”
Irked by his aloof manner, Claire followed her father back into the shop, although her mood immediately picked up when she saw Ryan. He’d promised he’d come in during his lunch break, although he hadn’t mentioned he’d be bringing flowers. He stepped fully into the shop, revealing Em right behind him. Both were in their work clothes from the gym, although they were very different outfits. Ryan wore one of the revealing vests that left more of his muscles uncovered than not and a pair of baggy grey shorts. Em, on the other hand, wore rainbow tie-dye joggers with a baggy orange tunic. The colours brought out the contrast of her skin, entirely inked.
“Just stopped by the local graveyard,” he said with a grin as he passed her the colourful bouquet.
“He did not!” Em said, pulling Claire into a tight hug. “He spent a considerable amount of time picking them out from the florists, actually.”
“He’s like that with shirts,” Claire said, returning the grin. “Good timing. You missed the rush.”
“Don’t get used to it,” Ryan said. “It’s the same at the gym. Once everyone fills their bellies, it’s back to shopping.”
Alan took the flowers from Ryan and shuffled back into the kitchen to add them to the plastic cups they were using in place of vases until they could take the several bouquets home.
“I hardly recognise this place as my mum’s tearoom,” Em said with no hint of sadness as she looked around the place. “You’ve done a terrific job. I imagine that if my mother were still here with us, and after she got over the shock, she’d have loved what you’ve done with the place.”
Claire reached around the counter and pulled out the gift she’d wrapped last night and put there this morning. She handed it to Em, whose eyes widened almost comically.
“I think I’m the one meant to give you a gift,” Em said, one hand resting on her chest as she accepted the present. She ripped back the paper, exposing the small sample of blue floral wallpaper Claire had salvaged from the tearoom walls and framed during the decorating process. “Claire . . .”
“I know you never wanted to run this tearoom,” Claire said, looking around and unable to see any trace of it beyond the general shape, “but I thought maybe a little memento would—”
“It’s perfect.” Em smiled, tears welling in her eyes. “Thank you.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a small red velvet box. “Since we’re giving gifts, I might as well give you this now.”
Claire accepted the box from Em, who had fast become someone she spent a lot of her time with. They’d always known each other enough to offer a vague greeting, but solving the murder of Jane, Em’s mother, had bonded them in a way Claire couldn’t explain. With Em being a fifty-year-old self-confessed hippie with a bald head and tattoos, they couldn’t have been more different, but Claire loved her. Em had a way of making Claire feel free and special whenever they were together. Claire opened the box with a snap, and a gold flame on a gold chain shone up at her from its bed of red velvet.
“Em, I . . .”
“I think it’s just costume jewellery,” Em said as she scooped it out of the box and walked around Claire to fix it around her neck, “but when I saw it, I immediately thought of you.”
Claire let the cold metal settle against her chest before pulling it out from behind her t-shirt to rest on the fabric. She’d never been one for jewellery, and yet already she couldn’t think of a reason to ever take it off.
“I get it,” Ryan said, nodding at it with his hands on his hips. “Candles.”
“And who said men weren’t smart?” Em said, giving Claire’s shoulders a little squeeze. “I’ll leave you two alone. Ryan had something he wanted to ask you.”
“He does?” Claire spun around and stared at Em, who could only offer a shrug and a cheeky smile. “Well, I’m sure I can take a little break.”
“Go on.” Em nodded at the door. “I’ve seen half the women at the gym with your little brown bags this morning. You’ve earned a bit of fresh air. I’m sure your father and I can look after this place.”
“Oh, yes,” Alan said as he returned with his tea. “Take as long as you need. I’m sure we’ll manage.”
Em wrapped her arm around Alan and gave him a small hug, and though Claire wasn’t keen on the idea of leaving her shop so soon, she was more than a little curious to find out what Ryan had to say. She followed him out of the shop into the bright afternoon sun.
As they headed quickly towards the gym, which had taken over the old library building on the other side of the square, the police officers leaning against the clock tower responded to something on their walkies. For a moment, she dreaded the thought that her father had asked them to tail her, but they cut across the square and went in the direction of the church. Claire let out a sigh of relief.
Pumping pop music playing on the TVs inside the gym greeted them as the automatic doors slid open. A couple of women chatted as they lazily cycled on bikes, and a lone man checked himself out in the mirror, baring his teeth as he pumped the heavy-looking weight. Em had already laid out her yoga corner, but her next class didn’t start for a few hours.
“I could have shown you on my phone,” Ryan said as he walked behind the glass counter, “but I didn’t want your dad to see. I know he’s not in the police anymore, but I didn’t want him to add two and two if I’ve got this wrong.”
“About what?”
“This.” He tapped the spacebar on the keyboard and turned the computer screen to face her. “I completely forgot about this until I saw him again this morning. Don’t know the fella, but he comes in often, and given his height, he’s not hard to miss.”
Claire squinted at a grainy video taken from what appeared to be a camera in the men’s locker room. Before she could ask what on earth Ryan was trying to show her, one of the cubicle doors opened, and an incredibly tall, muscular man walked out with a half-open backpack slung over his shoulder. As he resettled the backpack, a flash of silver fell out. He scooped it up casually, and it was back in his bag in an instant. He zipped up the backpack and looked around, his eyes homing in on the camera long enough for Claire to recognise his
face. The tall man walked under the camera and out of view, and seconds later, Ryan emerged from another cubicle in the clothes he’d been wearing when Claire had arrived at the B&B yesterday.
“I remember hearing the sound and thinking it sounded like someone had dropped an empty can of beer or something.” Ryan tapped the spacebar to pause the video. “I thought ‘someone’s keen to start their Friday night early.’” He rewound the clip back to the can falling out of the man’s bag. “Could be a coincidence, but that looks like spray paint to me. I only caught the back of him as he left. I knew he was the same guy when I saw him this morning because of the sheer size of the fella.”
“He’s six foot six,” she said, almost under her breath.
“You can tell that just from looking at him?”
“I know him.” Her mouth was dry as sandpaper. “He’s called Nicholas Bates. Everyone calls him Nick. He works at the candle factory.”
“The factory?” Ryan recoiled, and he frowned. “What if it wasn’t him?”
“It was.”
Rather than try to explain it to Ryan, Claire left the gym and set off across the square, her heart thumping in her chest. She felt dizzy, but never in her life had she been more certain of something. She felt Ryan rushing after her, but the anger and frustration bubbling up in her spirit welled in her eyes. She rubbed away the tears, angry at herself for letting that man make her cry again.
She hurried past Trinity Community Church, ignoring the wedding taking place. There was another small square, Christ Church Square, directly behind it. It was made up of nine terraced cottages in three rows of three, with the back wall around the church completing the square. Rather than a clock tower commanding attention in the centre, there was a small car park with a sign demanding that it was for ‘Residents Only – No Exceptions.’
Christ Church Square was a quiet, closed-off part of the village, seen as a desirable place to live for those who couldn’t stretch to the luxury of one of Northash’s many detached cottages. Today, however, the usual quiet was nowhere to be found.
Claire stopped on the corner, her heart shuddering when she saw an elderly woman sobbing in front of the slightly open door of the very cottage she’d been heading for. One of the police officers who had been outside Claire’s shop all day was attempting to calm the woman. Presumably the other was inside, dealing with the source of the woman’s screaming.
“Claire.” Ryan grabbed her forcefully and shook her until their eyes met; fear filled his green gaze. “What is going on? Who is this man, and why would he want to scare you like that?”
Claire tried to speak, but nothing came. Neighbours were emerging from their homes to see what was causing all the noise, but Claire could only stare at the howling woman. Somehow, someway, she had a strong feeling about what was behind that door.
Her legs kicked into gear and she left Ryan almost without realising what she was doing. The neighbours, a mixture of people at least sixty and older, flocked to the woman.
“What is it, Geraldine?” asked the first woman to reach the sobbing woman’s side. “You’re screaming the entire square down.”
“It’s Nick!” Geraldine cried, clutching the woman’s shoulders as though to hold herself up. “I was walking past. I just happened to look in and . . . and . . .” She paused, clutching her throat. “He was just hanging there, a rope around his neck.”
“What?” the neighbour cried.
As the rest of the neighbours reacted in similar disbelief, Claire stumbled to a stop and gazed through the open door.
There, at the end of the hall, a long, muscular frame hung suspended from the ceiling. She turned away and straight into Ryan’s chest. He wrapped his arms around her and squeezed.
“Oh God,” he said, pulling her away from the door to a bench on the edge of the square. “Claire, what is happening? Why would Nick want to do this?”
“He didn’t,” she said, wiping away a stray tear, “he was put up to it.”
“By whom?”
“This was his house,” she said, nodding at the cottage, but unable to look at it. “They were housemates.”
“Whose house?”
Claire gulped, more angry tears filling her eyes. This time, Ryan used the pad of his thumb to banish them before she could even blink. The second police officer walked out, and with a single shake of his head confirmed what they all knew.
“My Uncle Pat,” she said, her throat closing around the name. “He was the one congratulating me.”
“Why?”
“To get my attention,” she said, her unblinking gaze fixed on the cobbled road, “and it worked.”
CHAPTER THREE
T he ambulance arrived, but Claire couldn’t stand the thought of staying to watch things unfold. She walked back to her shop in such shock, she didn’t realise she was clenching Ryan’s hand until she was back in the safety of Claire’s Candles and finally released it.
Two people were browsing separately, inhaling the various scents, and another waited at the counter. At that moment, Claire didn’t care whether they liked her candles. She never thought she’d long for an empty shop on opening day, and yet she wouldn’t have been upset if they’d left without paying for anything.
“We figured it out!” Alan said with a chuckle, one finger on the side of his face while another hovered over the till’s screen. “It took us a minute, but we got there in the end.” He beamed at the woman who was buying three large coconut milk jars and a handful of clean linen scented melts, and said, “Cash or card, madame?”
“Card, please.”
“Card.” He gave the screen a confident stab. “Do the tap thing when you’re ready.”
While the woman dug out her card, Em loaded the three candles, and the wax melts into one of the flame-emblem bags. Her eyes remained fixed on Claire, the firmness of her gaze clearly seeing right through the façade of calmness Claire was feigning for her customers’ benefit. One of the men walked out without buying anything, and before the door finished closing behind him, Claire flipped the sign to ‘CLOSED’ to prevent the post-lunch rush Ryan had warned her of. The woman at the counter paid and accepted her bag, with the final customer taking her place just as quickly. By the time she’d paid and was on her way out, Alan’s expression mirrored Em’s.
“Claire?” He rushed around, clinging to the counter and already reaching for the display unit to keep his balance. “What is it? What’s happened, little one?”
“Did you know it was him?” Claire asked, her tone blunter than she’d ever usually take with her father. “Did you know Uncle Pat was behind what happened to my shop last night?”
Alan winced, his head going to the side as though her words had slapped him across the face. He gritted his jaw and clenched his eyes shut. “Claire, please . . .”
“Nicholas Bates is dead,” she announced as calmly as she could. “Hanged himself, by the sounds of it.” She ducked to meet her father’s eyes and rested a hand on his shoulder. “Dad, did you have a feeling he was behind the graffiti somehow?”
Alan nodded.
“Ryan has footage of Nick at the gym, dropping a can that looks suspiciously like spray paint,” she said, looking at Em, who appeared the most shocked of them all. “I think he convinced Nick to do it. And now, Nick is dead. I can’t think of a single reason he’d want to vandalise my shop . . . but his former roommate? We both know . . .”
Claire’s voice trailed off to nothing; she could not bear creating more pain in her father’s eyes – pain he’d been hiding since the day he had to listen to his younger brother confess to murdering Nicola Warton and Jeff Lang. All this time, it had been there, barely under the surface. Claire had known it would come out eventually.
She wrapped her arms around her father and held him tightly. She wanted to tell him she knew about the letters Uncle Pat had sent her from prison. He’d been pilfering and hiding them in his potting shed for a while, and she’d only happened to stumble on them by accident. The co
nfession was on the tip of her tongue, but she couldn’t bring herself to say such a thing in front of an audience. Even if that audience was Em.
“I” – Em rushed around the counter, her eyes wide – “I need to go.”
“Did you know him?” Ryan asked, opening the door for her.
“Very well,” she said with a nod. “He’s – was – my good friend Ste’s brother. He can’t hear about this in the wind. It needs to come from someone he trusts. I need to go to him.”
Em left the shop, already at a full sprint by the time she passed the window. Claire imagined she was going straight to the Northash Taxi rank across from the park. Claire had met Ste briefly; Em had introduced him as a good friend from her high school days back in the eighties.
Claire guided her father onto the small stool behind the counter. He sat down and clutched her hand as though the roles had reversed and she was the parent.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Ryan said, squinting at the floor. “He was in the gym just over an hour ago. I saw him. That’s how I remembered hearing the can. He was working out . . . he was laughing . . . he seemed fine.”
Claire knew enough about suicide to recognise it wasn’t as simple as laughing or not laughing, but something about the events following last night’s paint discovery didn’t sit right with her. If Nick had acted on Uncle Pat’s instructions, could it be a coincidence that he chose the day after his act of vandalism to take his life?
Through the window, she spotted DI Ramsbottom walking across the square. Leaving her father’s side, she hurried towards him. Despite her own low-level of fitness, she crossed the distance more easily than he. DI Ramsbottom was a large, lumbering man in clothes that barely fit, with a shiny golden toupee Claire had seen resist the strongest wind.
