by Fiona Grace
Lacey reached the holiday village on the cliffside, where there were several small cottages nestled amongst static homes and a couple of motorhomes. Bright bunting flapped in the wind.
She drew up to the small worker’s hut at the entrance, where Ivan’s assistant was inside. Lacey recognized her from her early days in Wilfordshire, when Ivan had been her landlord at Crag Cottage and his holiday cottage empire was in its infancy.
“Oh,” the woman said, peering down at Lacey in the Volvo. “I know you.”
“Lacey, from the antiques store in town. I own Crag Cottage now.”
“That’s right! How can I help you? Are you okay? You look stressed.”
“Long story,” Lacey said, leaning out of her car window. “I’m here to visit someone. Ronan Pike.”
“Sorry,” the woman said. “I can’t let visitors through without preapproval. What unit is Ronan in? I’ll call him.”
Lacey checked her paperwork. “Two.”
The woman picked up her phone and dialed a number, before waiting for a while.
“No answer,” she said. “He’s probably asleep. It’s still pretty early.”
“It’s urgent,” Lacey said. “Is there any way you can wake him? Go and knock on his door or something?”
The woman shrugged. “No, not really.”
Lacey frowned. It felt like she was being deliberately unhelpful.
But just then, a silver car pulled up behind Lacey, and she recognized it right away. It was Ivan.
Lacey hopped out of her own car and hurried to him, knocking her knuckles on the window. It buzzed down, revealing Ivan’s face.
“Lacey?” he said. “Is everything all right?”
“I need to speak to one of your guests,” Lacey said. “He’s a client of mine and there’s been a huge problem with the sale I made for him. It’s really important I tell him in person what happened.”
Ivan looked worried. “Of course. Come on, I’ll escort you inside.”
His assistant did not look pleased at Ivan for ignoring their security protocol and allowing Lacey inside the holiday cottage grounds. Lacey wondered what Frank would say about Ivan’s lax approach to security if he were here to witness it.
They went over to unit two together, Chester galloping along with them. Lacey rapped her knuckles on the door. No answer.
“He might be sleeping,” Ivan said. “It’s still early.”
Lacey tried the door handle and discovered it was unlocked.
“He’s probably not sleeping if he’s left the door unlocked,” she said, pushing it open and stepping inside. “Ronan? Ronan, are you there? Ro—”
Her voice cut out mid-call, and turned into a gasp. Lacey reeled back. There, lying dead on the floor, was Ronan Pike.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Lacey stared, stunned, at the dead man lying face down on the floor of the holiday cottage. How had he died? It must have been a sudden but natural death, for she could see no signs of foul play.
Just then, Ivan’s walkie-talkie buzzed, and his assistant’s voice crackled out. “Mr. Parry? The cops are here.”
Ivan’s gaze darted up to meet Lacey’s. He gasped.
Lacey swirled on the spot. As she looked out through the window, she saw the cop car on its way down the hill toward Unit Two. She recognized the driver behind the wheel as the same cop who’d visited her at the store earlier, the one who’d escorted Lord Fairfax and his skin-head valet in the cream-colored Rolls-Royce. And to her astonishment, the Rolls Royce was indeed following along behind the cop cruiser.
Lacey’s heart leapt into her throat.
“We’d better get out,” she said rapidly to Ivan.
Even if Ronan had died naturally, being caught standing over a dead body was never a good look, especially when factoring in the dead man was a client of Lacey’s who had just lost her hundreds of thousands of pounds…
In a state of stunned shock, Lacey and Ivan staggered out of the holiday cottage and onto the porch step. They were just in time. The cop car rolled to a stop, its tires crunching on the gravel, and the engine shut off with a sound like a sigh. A blink of an eye later, the very same cops Lacey had been confronted by earlier that day emerged from their vehicles.
“What are you doing here?” the first, the curly-haired man, said, eyeing her with suspicion.
“I came to speak to Ronan about reversing the sale,” Lacey explained, jutting her thumb over her shoulder toward the open door.
“But he’s dead,” Ivan blurted.
Lacey’s stomach dropped. The cop looked from her to Ivan, and his expression switched from suspicious to aghast.
“What?” he cried.
He pushed right between the two of them into the cottage. His haste made Lacey stumble on the step, and she almost lost her footing. She jutted her hand out against the external cottage wall and managed to catch her balance.
As she righted herself, her gaze caught Lord Fairfax, emerging from the backseat of the Rolls. He looked startled and confused.
“Did you just say Ronan is dead?” he asked, his face paling. “Did I hear you right?”
Lacey bit her lip, hesitant, then nodded, affirming the terrible news. Lord Fairfax gripped the top of the open door, as if his legs had gone weak from shock and were no longer supporting his body weight. It was quite the theatrical reaction, and Lacey would expect no less from a man such as him.
Just then, the curly-haired cop came staggering back out of the cottage. His face was now ashen.
“Code blue,” he announced to his female colleague. “Call in a code blue.”
Lacey’s stomach dropped. She didn’t need anyone to explain what code blue meant. She’d seen enough British true crime documentaries. Code blue meant a body had been found, in suspicious circumstances, where foul play was more than suspected, but was a given.
But how? There was no blood, at least none visible, and no other signs that Ronan’s life had been unnaturally extinguished.
Luckily, the female cop seemed just as confused as Lacey was, and asked the question Lacey was unable to.
“A code blue? Are you sure?”
The male cop nodded. His face was blanched, and he appeared to be on the verge of throwing up.
“I turned the body to check for a pulse,” he explained. “He’s stiff. Rigor mortis is well established. Lividity has set in.”
“And the code blue?” the woman pressed.
“There was a single stab wound to the stomach. But very little blood. Whatever he was stabbed with must’ve been angled upward, beneath the rib cage and toward the heart. It pierced it, causing an immediate heart attack, and hence the very little amount of blood.”
“You mean like a penknife?” the female cop asked.
The male shook his head. “No. Something even smaller.”
It was astonishing to Lacey, that a man who had been walking and talking and going about his life like normal just yesterday could now be dead thanks to the single wound caused by a small, sharp, and perfectly angled weapon. It was almost clinically precise. Surgical. As if Ronan’s executor already knew how to kill. She shuddered at the thought of the person who could’ve done such a thing.
The female cop had clearly heard enough. She scrambled into action, leaning in through the driver’s side door of the cop car and grasping for the radio device attached to the dashboard, the car’s direct link to the command center.
“We have a code blue,” she said rapidly into the speaker, its curly wire pulled completely taut. Lacey noticed her fingers had turned white from how tight she was gripping the receiver.
She paced away. In utter disbelief, Lacey let the new horror of her reality sink in. Ronan had not died of natural causes. He had been murdered.
*
It seemed to Lacey that a mere second passed before she saw Superintendent Turner and DCI Beth Lewis’s black car come careening down the hill to the holiday village with urgency. It was, in fact, closer to ten minutes. But she was in a complete
daze of disbelief, a place where time lost all meaning, and the laws of the land were violated.
Murdered? she thought, desperately. Ronan was murdered!
She had been around death before, but it never got easier, and this one struck her painfully in the abdomen, like a dull blow.
Superintendent Turner was first out of the vehicle, emerging with purpose. He was wearing his light brown trench coat, like normal, but with the addition of a dark blue scarf for the cold weather. Detective Lewis, meanwhile, was in a fashionable khaki parka, and had her honey blond hair pinned back in a ballerina bun. Lacey always found it hard to reconcile the straight-faced Detective Lewis with the sweet woman, Beth, she became in her downtime.
Superintendent Turner’s boots crunched on the gravel as he took several heavy-footed steps toward Lacey and looked down his nose at her. “Why’s it always you?” he said, narrowing his eyes suspiciously.
Lacey held her ground. Superintendent Turner had a good foot on her, and she had to resist the urge to shrink under his glower. “I wish I had an answer for that,” she told him.
The cops went inside the unit, pulling on their gloves as they went. Lacey strained to overhear their conversation.
“Sarge, it looks like he was stabbed with a fountain pen,” she overheard Beth say.
She grimaced. What a terrible way to go.
The detectives exited again. They went over to the cops and conversed with their heads bowed. Finally they came back to the group.
“We’ll need to take your statements,” Turner said. “Sounds like there’s some complicated stuff going on here with a forgery and a huge sum of money. I’d like you to stay in town. Don’t go anywhere. We’ll be round to collect your statements later.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
With a heavy heart, Lacey drove back to the shop. She felt awful for Ronan. Who could have killed him? And for what possible reason? He’d seemed like a nice man, if a bit nervy, and certainly not the type to easily make enemies.
“What do you think, Chester?” she asked the dog in the passenger seat. “Was he killed for the money?”
Chester let out a morose whine.
Lacey pulled onto the high street and drove the length of cobblestone road to her store. She parked in her usual spot in a side road, then she and Chester exited the vehicle and headed for the store. The bell tinkled above as she and Chester went inside.
Chester rushed straight over to Boudica and greeted her with sniffs and a wagging tail.
“Oh, hullo there, boy,” Frank said, looking over from the “spy” camera he was busy disconnecting. He peered over at Lacey as she shut the door behind her, making the bell ting-a-ling angrily overhead.
Gina and Finnbar stopped their shelf restacking tasks and scurried over with expectant expressions.
“Lacey, is everything okay?” Gina asked. “Frank filled us in about what happened this morning. With the police and Lord Fairfax. Is it true that the letter is a fake?”
Lacey nodded glumly. “Yup.”
“How did Ronan take the news?” Finnbar asked, worrying his hands anxiously in front of himself.
Lacey took a deep breath, not quite believing what she was about to say. “Ronan didn’t get a chance to react. He’s dead.”
A stunned silence fell. Gina gripped her hand over her mouth. Finnbar’s eyes widened with terror. The energy in the store became shell-shocked.
“Dead?” Finnbar echoed, while Frank abandoned his task and paced over. “What do you mean?”
“I mean dead,” Lacey reiterated. “Dead. Gone. Deceased.”
Frank paced up beside the other two, and they stood in a cluster, staring at Lacey for clarification she knew she could not give.
“How did he die?” Frank asked.
“Too much booze?” Gina immediately suggested. “He’d just got a huge windfall, after all. I bet he went overboard with the celebrations.”
Lacey shook her head at Gina’s distasteful guess. “It wasn’t a natural death,” she corrected. “He was murdered.”
“Murdered?” the three cried in unison, glancing at each other with matching expressions of shock and horror. Finnbar gripped Gina’s arm as if for support. The poor boy was anxious at the best of times, and troubling news like this would surely rock him even further.
Lacey nodded sadly, her heart lurching again for the poor dead Ronan Pike.
“Who do you think did it?” Frank asked.
“And why?” Gina replied.
“Money?” Frank offered. “It’s almost always money. Someone must’ve found out about the sale.”
“But it’s not even in the papers yet,” Lacey said. “I made sure Gina delayed the press so they wouldn’t harass the guests. No one knows about it.”
“Except for everyone at the auction,” Finnbar said, ominously.
It was the first time he’d spoken since Lacey’s shocking announcement that Ronan had been murdered, and everyone turned to look at him.
“Think about it,” he continued. “We didn’t advertise the auction publicly. The only people who even knew there was a million-pound letter on sale in the first place were the ones who were personally invited. The only people who saw how much it actually fetched in the end were the people still in the room at the moment the gavel went down.”
“You don’t think…” Frank began.
“You mean to say…” Gina added.
Finnbar nodded. “If Ronan was murdered for the money then…”
“…the killer was someone at the auction,” Lacey finished.
An eerie, uncomfortable silence descended. Gina was the one to break it.
“At the risk of sounding disrespectful,” she said, tentatively, “what happens to the money now? You sold a fake item. Presumably Lord Fairfax will want it back.”
“He does,” Lacey said, her chest sinking at the memory of the awful earlier encounter with the lord and his valet. “But he will have to wait. I already deposited the money into Ronan’s account. With him dead, there’ll be a freeze on his assets and we’ll have to wait until his estate is settled before we can get it back.”
“And Lord Fairfax is okay about the delay?” Gina asked, sounding skeptical. “He didn’t strike me as the type of man who practiced patience.”
“Of course he’s not okay,” Lacey replied. “He wants the money back in twenty-four hours.”
“Twenty-four hours!” Gina cried. “That won’t be possible! We don’t have the funds to cover it.”
“Not to mention the additional bank charges,” Finnbar said knowingly. “There’ll be a huge fee to pay to reverse a sale that large.”
“Will we lose our jobs?” Gina asked, sounding perturbed.
“Will the business go under?” Finnbar added anxiously.
Lacey tensed. From where she was standing, the situation did indeed look rather dire.
“Wait,” Gina said. “That’s a thought. All the money was exchanged through the bank. Nothing physical exchanged hands. So if Ronan was murdered by someone at the auction for the money, then how would they have gotten their hands on it?” She tapped her chin in contemplation. “Someone must have tortured him for his pin number first!”
Lacey grimaced. “Gina, please,” she snapped. “That’s a horrible thing to suggest. And there’s absolutely no evidence of it. I’d like to request we keep the speculation to a minimum. A man is dead. Murdered. Spurious speculation will only muddy the water. We need to work only with the facts of the matter.”
Her lecture was met by a guilty silence.
“Do you think he knew?” Finnbar asked, tentatively. “Ronan? That the letter was a forgery?”
Lacey shrugged. “He seemed genuine, but what do I know? I’ve been proven to be a bad judge of character in the past.”
“Chester’s usually a good barometer,” Finnbar said.
“But he was locked out back,” Lacey said, frustrated. She’d not wanted her pup to bother her upper-class guests. Was that a decision she was going to com
e to regret?
“Didn’t he have an authentication letter, though?” Gina asked.
“Maybe that was a forgery, too,” Finnbar offered.
“Maybe Ronan forged all of it,” Gina added. “And someone got mad and killed him over it!”
Lacey held her hands in the air. “EVERYONE STOP!” she cried.
She’d had enough of the speculation. Everyone’s tendency to gossip infuriated her. Because that’s what everyone would be doing now about Lacey, and her involvement. How soon would it take before people learned she’d sold an item that turned out to be fake? It could easily ruin her reputation and sink the shop.
Frank came to her and looped an arm around her shoulders. “We’ll get through this. Together. I’m not going anywhere now.”
Lacey was grateful for his support.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The sound of clattering from the kitchen woke Lacey from a deep, exhausted slumber the next morning. She sat bolt upright in bed. Chester was not stretched out at her feet. Tom was not dozing in the space beside her.
He was already planning on staying over last night, since Frank was supposed to have left. When she’d told him about Ronan’s murder—and Frank’s subsequent extension of his visit—she’d been relieved that he’d not withdrawn that offer. She needed his support.
But it meant it was the first time he and her father had slept under the same roof since Frank had come to stay. No one had had much to say on their return to the cottage, too shell-shocked from Ronan’s murder to squabble, and then they’d all crashed out early from sheer emotional exhaustion to stay up. But now, in the cold light of day, as the sound of kitchen pans and crockery penetrated her subconscious, Lacey was struck by the sudden realization that both Tom and her father were awake, and she was not there to referee them.
A host of competing smells wafted into her nostrils as she grabbed her bathrobe from the hook and went hurrying down the staircase. Chester was hot on her heels as she pelted along the corridor and into the kitchen. She scudded to a halt, taking in the scene with a gasp.
