“If I had that, I’d use it all the time,” Fenella said as the man drove sedately down the promenade toward Fenella’s apartment building.
“The rules about using it are pretty strict,” he told her. “But that was all about protecting a witness from potential press harassment.”
“For which I’m hugely grateful,” Fenella assured him. “I certainly didn’t want to talk to them.”
“Inspector Robinson doesn’t either, but he’s going to have a press conference in a few hours anyway,” the man said.
“Poor Daniel,” Fenella remarked.
“It comes with the job,” the constable shrugged. “That’s part of why I’m not in any hurry to move up to inspector.”
Fenella smiled. “It’s such a difficult job, any job in the police. I’m sure the rest of us aren’t nearly as grateful to you all as we should be.”
“Here we are,” the man said as he pulled to a stop in front of Promenade View Apartments. He stopped the car and switched off the engine. Before he climbed out, he put a “Police” sign on the dashboard.
“If I had one of those, I’d abuse that, too,” Fenella said, pointing to the sign that was letting the man park illegally.
“Again, there are rules,” the man replied. “But in this case, Inspector Robinson instructed me to escort you to your flat, so I’m covered.”
“That really isn’t necessary,” Fenella said as she watched the man drag her suitcase out of the back of the car.
“He’s the boss,” the man retorted. “You can argue with him about it, if you want.”
“I will, the next time I see him,” Fenella replied.
The man nodded, and then Fenella led him across the lobby and into a conveniently open elevator. While they rode up, she dug her keycard out of her bag. It felt odd to be walking back toward her own apartment again so soon, but Fenella felt tired, sad, and eager to get home.
“This is me,” she said as she stopped at her door. She waved the key in front of the lock and then pushed the door open. The constable followed her through the door, still dragging her suitcase behind him.
“Oh, you can just leave that anywhere,” Fenella said.
“What on earth?” Mona gasped, getting up from the couch with a surprised look on her face.
Fenella opened her mouth to reply and then quickly bit her tongue. Constable Hopkins couldn’t see Mona. He would think Fenella was crazy if she started talking to her.
“Are you okay?” the young man asked, glancing around the large room with its floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out at the sea.
“I’m fine,” Fenella assured him. “I’ll have to reschedule my trip at some point, but for now I’m ever so glad to be home.”
The man nodded. “I’ll get out of your way, then,” he said cheerfully. At the door, he stopped and reached into his pocket. “Here’s my card. Please don’t hesitate to ring me if you need anything.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Fenella replied. “I hope I never have an occasion to use it, though.”
The man nodded. “No one ever wants to need me,” he said. “I’m good with that.”
Fenella chuckled as she let the man out, quickly locking the door behind him as he disappeared down the corridor.
“What are you doing back here?” Mona demanded as soon as the door was shut.
“I must call Edward and tell him I’m not coming,” Fenella said, holding up a hand to stop Mona’s questions.
There was no one home at Edward’s house, so Fenella left a message on the answering machine, simply saying that the ferry had been cancelled and that she’d be in touch when she’d made other arrangements. With that out of the way, she sank into a chair and sighed deeply.
“What’s happened?” Mona asked, sitting down next to Fenella.
“I found another body,” Fenella said after a moment.
“You what?” Mona asked.
“I found another body. When I went to my cabin, there was a dead man in one of the berths. He had a rope around his neck. I called Daniel and he came and cancelled the sailing. I’d have been back a long time ago, but I had to wait to be questioned.”
“This is getting to be a rather unpleasant habit for you,” Mona said sharply.
“It isn’t my fault,” Fenella snapped back. “The cabin I was supposed to be in had some sort of plumbing issue or something. The girl at customer service just assigned me to a random cabin. It’s hardly my fault that someone had hidden a dead body in there.”
“So the man wasn’t killed there? He was just hidden there?” Mona asked.
“I have no idea,” Fenella replied. “And I don’t want to talk about it, either.”
“Surely you’ve been talking about it all day,” Mona said. “It won’t hurt for you to tell the story one more time.”
“I’m going to get Katie,” Fenella told her aunt. “She won’t want to hear all of the morbid details. She’ll just be happy to see me.”
“But Shelly will want all of the details,” Mona said. “At least ring her and have her bring Katie here. Then you can tell both of us what happened at the same time.”
Fenella shook her head. “How rude is that? Calling her up and asking her to bring me my cat back? I shall go and get Katie. You can listen in the doorway if you must.”
Mona sniffed. “Eavesdrop? How tacky.”
“Suit yourself,” Fenella replied. She walked to the door and unlocked it, deliberately leaving it ajar as she walked the short distance to Shelly’s door. When no one answered, she was hugely disappointed.
“Is no one home?” Mona asked when Fenella walked back into her own apartment a moment later. The woman was sitting on the couch, but Fenella reckoned she looked as if she’d rushed to get there after having been listening at the door a moment earlier.
“I have her spare key, but it would wrong to let myself in just to get Katie. I’ll have to wait until she gets home,” Fenella said, annoyed with herself when she heard how sad she sounded.
“I’m sure Katie will survive for a few more hours without you,” Mona said. “And while we wait, you can tell me about the body you found.”
Fenella sighed. “You aren’t going to leave me alone until I tell you, are you?” she asked.
“If you want me to, of course I’ll leave you alone,” Mona replied. “You know I don’t want to be a bother.”
Before Fenella could reply, Mona slowly faded away. Fenella dropped into the nearest chair and put her head in her hands. This day was not going at all the way she’d planned and she felt like screaming, crying, and eating chocolate, not necessarily in that order. After a minute, when tears didn’t come and shouting felt less appealing, Fenella headed for the kitchen.
As she poked around in her cupboards, she realized that she hadn’t had anything to eat all day and it was nearly three o’clock in the afternoon. She also realized that she’d cleared most of the food out of the apartment in anticipation of being away for a week. With a sigh, she pulled a box of chocolate-covered cookies out of a cupboard and opened it. For several minutes, she nibbled mindlessly on one after another, taking comfort in their sugary sweetness.
“Shelly, it’s Fenella. The ferry was cancelled. I’ll explain when I see you, but basically I’m not going anywhere for a while. I can get Katie back from you when you get this message,” she said into Shelly’s answering machine a short time later. She needed to go grocery shopping, but she couldn’t muster up the energy. Too full of cookies to really care at the moment, she decided she could get pizza delivered later and deal with her shopping needs another day.
She was reconsidering that decision a while later as she pottered around her apartment. She couldn’t seem to find anything to do. Reading didn’t appeal, there was nothing to watch on the television, and she didn’t want to go out. Sighing deeply, she glared at her reflection in the mirror in her bedroom.
“You should have just told Mona the whole story,” she said to her mirror image. “Maybe retelling it woul
d have chased it out of your head.”
When her doorbell rang a short time later, Fenella couldn’t answer it fast enough. Even a life insurance salesman would be welcome at the moment, she thought as she turned the knob and pulled the door open.
“Are you sure you don’t just want me to keep her?” Shelly asked as she held Katie out to Fenella.
“Oh, quite sure,” Fenella said. She took the animal from Shelly and buried her face in Katie’s back. The kitten squirmed as Fenella burst into tears.
“Oh, good heavens,” Shelly exclaimed. “Are you okay?”
Fenella nodded and then shook her head while Shelly gently pushed her backwards into the apartment. Shelly shut the door behind herself and then pulled Fenella over to the couch.
“Sit down and tell me what this is all about,” Shelly instructed Fenella as they sat down next to each other.
Katie let out a soft “meow” that interrupted Fenella’s tears.
“I shouldn’t cry all over you, should I?” Fenella asked the kitten.
“Merrooww,” Katie replied. Fenella smiled in spite of herself and gave Katie a hug. “Off you go, then,” she said, putting Katie on the floor.
The kitten ran off, straight to the kitchen. Fenella had already filled the water and food dishes in anticipation of Katie’s return.
“Now, what’s happened?” Shelly asked, taking Fenella’s hand.
“I found a body,” Fenella said. She took a deep breath and shook her head. “I didn’t mean to just blurt that out,” she added as Shelly gasped and stared at her.
“You poor thing,” Shelly said after a moment. “After last month, I thought you’d found your body quota for the rest of your life.”
“Yeah, me too,” Fenella told her. “I mean, I’m nearly fifty and I’d never found a dead body, ever. Finding two in less than a week was pretty traumatic, but I was feeling like I was getting over it. I can’t really get my head around the idea that I found another one.”
“Was it a man or a woman?” Shelly asked.
“A man.”
“And had he had a heart attack or something?”
Fenella shook her head. “He was strangled,” she whispered.
Shelly looked shocked as she sat back in her seat. “How awful,” she said.
“It really was,” Fenella agreed.
“Who was he?”
Fenella wondered for a moment if she was allowed to say, but she knew she could trust Shelly not to repeat what she was told. Anyway, Daniel was having a press conference soon. Surely he’d tell everyone the dead man’s identity. “His name was Robert Grosso,” she told Shelly. “Daniel said something about him working in imports and exports, whatever that means.”
“It can mean everything from being the owner of a huge multinational trading company to smuggling,” Shelly told her with a wry grin. “If the man ended up dead, maybe he was more towards the smuggling end of things.”
“Would it be wrong of me to hope he was involved in something criminal?” Fenella asked. “Only it seems like that would be easy for Daniel to discover; it gives someone a good solid motive, and maybe it means they’ll be able to find the killer very quickly.”
“How old did he look?” Shelly asked.
“Oh, I haven’t any idea,” Fenella replied. “He was lying on the top berth, and his face was all purple and,” she stopped and shuddered. After a deep breath, she continued. “His wife looked to be in her mid-thirties, anyway.”
“He had a wife? Oh dear, the poor woman. Unless she killed him, of course. Did she seem devastated?”
“When I saw her, she was still wondering what had happened to the man,” Fenella explained. “They were supposed to be having a short vacation, I gather, but as far as she knew at that point, he’d never turned up for the ferry.”
“That’s sad,” Shelly said. “They were planning a holiday together and now she has to plan a funeral instead.”
Fenella surprised them both by bursting into tears again. Shelly jumped up and found a box of tissues, handing them to Fenella as she tried to get herself under control.
“I’m sorry,” she said eventually. “It just sounded so sad when you put it that way.”
“I’m an idiot,” Shelly told her. “I knew you were upset. I should be changing the subject and talking about the weather or politics or something.”
Fenella shook her head. “I think I need to talk to someone about it,” she said. “My brain won’t settle and I felt a little crazy before you got here.”
“Well, talk away,” Shelly urged her. “I won’t ask any more questions, but I’m happy to listen if you want to tell me anything.”
“There was a problem with my cabin assignment,” Fenella said after a moment. Some considerable time later she’d taken Shelly through her entire morning, from boarding the ferry to her last conversation with Daniel Robinson. “So that’s what happened,” she said, blowing out a long breath. “And you must be bored to pieces. I am sorry.”
“I’m fascinated,” Shelly corrected her. “Possibly more so because I know a few of the people in the story.”
“Really? Which ones?”
“Justin Newmarket, for a start,” Shelly replied. “Although I haven’t seen him in years, I had him in school when he was younger.” Shelly had been a teacher before she retired.
“What was he like?” Fenella asked.
“Oh, disagreeable,” Shelly replied, laughing. “I would never have admitted that at the time, of course, and if you repeat it to anyone I will deny saying it, but he wasn’t a very nice child.”
“In what way?”
“He was mostly just lazy,” Shelly said after a moment’s thought. “He didn’t want to do any of the work, but he still expected high marks. I tried to tell him that he needed to study for his exams, but he seemed to think that his natural abilities would see him safely through.”
“And did they?”
Shelly chuckled. “Well, he passed everything, but only just barely. He was planning on some sort of technical school after his exams, but I don’t think he ended up getting a place there. I’m sure his marks weren’t strong enough, although I do remember his mother coming to the school and attempting to argue with the head about them. She seemed to think that we should be able to change all of his grades to whatever it was he needed to get accepted to the school. I recall her being very upset when she was told that wasn’t going to happen.”
“Parents who do that sort of thing aren’t really doing their children any favors,” Fenella remarked. “We saw them at my university all the time. The parents would pull strings or argue with high school teachers to get their kids the grades they needed to get into the university, but once the kids were there, on their own, they couldn’t handle the workload, or the pressure, or the freedom. Often they couldn’t cope with all three. Of course, then the parents would be in our offices, arguing with us to raise their child’s grades again.”
Shelly shook her head. “Maybe I’m glad I never had children,” she said.
“Children aren’t the problem,” Fenella said dryly. “It’s the parents who cause all of the trouble.”
Shelly laughed. “Anyway, Justin was never a favorite of mine, but I am sorry to see him tied up in a murder investigation.”
“You don’t think he could have had anything to do with it?”
“I doubt it,” Shelly replied. “Killing someone takes effort, and I can’t see Justin bothering, quite frankly.”
“Who else do you know, then?” Fenella asked.
“I’m not sure, but I think I know Sherry Hampton,” Shelly said. “She was another student of mine, if I’m thinking of the right person. She was Sherry Kelly in those days, though, but I do remember hearing that she’d married a much older man for his money.”
“Which is deeply unpleasant.”
“Yes, but I do think most women who marry for money end up having to earn it,” Shelly replied. “Unless their dear hubby dies right after the wedding, of course
.”
“Harry Hampton didn’t look as if he is going to be dying any time soon,” Fenella told her.
“Then Sherry will probably have to work hard to keep him happy. From what you said, they didn’t seem to be getting along terribly well.”
“No, they weren’t. She did seem to enjoy Justin’s company, though.”
“They’ll have been in school together,” Shelly remarked. “Although they aren’t the exact same age and they probably didn’t have any classes together, they’ll still have probably known each other.”
Katie walked back into the room and jumped up on the couch next to Fenella, who was more than happy to give her a cuddle and scratch behind her ears.
“So what are you going to do about your trip?” Shelly asked.
“I don’t know,” Fenella told her. “I have to admit that I hated the ferry and it made me feel quite sick. I think I might have to look into flying instead, although I hate to spend the extra money.”
“You should pop down to the chemist and get some tablets,” Shelly told her. “They’ll settle your stomach for you, no problem.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, I take them whenever I have to sail. They do a great job, as long as it’s a reasonably smooth crossing. If you have a cabin and can lie down, you should be fine, even if it isn’t the smoothest.”
“I told Daniel that I wouldn’t go anywhere for now,” she told her friend. “I’ll have to think about what I want to do, but for now I’m quite happy back at home.”
“But you haven’t any food in the house, have you?” Shelly asked. “Would you like me to drive you to the grocery shop so you can do some shopping?”
Fenella didn’t really feel like shopping. She really wanted to curl up in a ball with Katie and cry. But she needed food, and the offer of a ride was too good to pass up. Being afraid to try driving Mona’s fancy sports car, she nearly always walked to the nearest grocery store to get what she needed.
“Are you sure?” Fenella asked.
“Of course I’m sure. While we’re there, we’ll get the ingredients for my world-famous cottage pie, and then when we get back here, I’ll whip that up for us both for dinner. We can get a nice bottle of red wine to go with it and something chocolate for pudding.”
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