Empty Nest (9 page)

By the time I had returned to the TIC, Willow had left, taking her art project with her. As Vesta and I waited for the kettle to boil, I said, “It's strange, but I feel responsible for Gavin somehow.” She knew that I had kept him awake after his concussion and alerted the police to his injury. I hadn't told her about Gavin's eyesight, of course—I had promised, after all.

Vesta nodded. “It's often the case—you saved his life, didn't you, by being captured yourself and held in that pig hut with him? And now, you feel as if his life is in your care.”

“He's not quite one hundred percent yet, and he's no one to look after him. I rather feel like his big sister.”

“And is that how Gavin feels?” Vesta asked, the steam from the teapot fogging up her glasses so that I couldn't see the expression in her eyes. “That he's your little brother?”

“He knows the score.” I checked the time—just gone five. I went to lock up, but Detective Sergeant Glossop stood at the window peering in, holding a large, flat portfolio under one arm. I opened the door. “Sergeant, come in.”

“Ms. Lanchester.” He stepped in and up to the counter. “I'm sorry to interrupt—I was hoping to have a word.” He looked expectantly from me to Vesta to the teapot.

“Please come through. This is my co-worker Vesta Widdersham.” Glossop bobbed his head. “You're just in time—would you like a cup of tea? And I believe we've a slice of cake left.”

The appearance of the police meant news—I'd happily ply him with food if he'd answer a few of my questions.

“That's kind of you, yes, thanks. One sugar, please,” he said.

Vesta served the tea and said, “I'll be on my way now, Julia. Yoga tonight.”

“Yes, Vesta, thanks.” I walked her to the door.

“All right?” she asked quietly.

I nodded. I locked the door behind her and turned to the detective sergeant. “Have you come to tell me how Freddy died?”

“We don't yet know all the details of how he died—we don't think it was the smoke, but then…” He took a sharp breath and looked sideways, as if he expected someone to be lurking over his shoulder. Someone, such as his DI? His officious scowl made an appearance.

“But you've stopped by to…” I let my words peter out, waiting for him to pick up on the sentence.

“Inspector Callow has been in meetings all day,” he said. He took a breath. “I received quite high marks on my sergeant's exam.”

I tried without success to follow this non sequitur. “Well done,” I said, and waited for the next bit of information, hoping to see a pattern.

“Part of the responsibility of being a detective sergeant is knowing when to take the initiative.” Glossop ran a finger along the top of the portfolio. “Inspector Callow has been in meetings all day,” he repeated.

And the penny dropped. “You certainly can't let an investigation languish, can you, just because your inspector is busy?” I asked. “And this is an investigation, isn't it, Sergeant? You're looking into Freddy's death as…”

“Suspicious.” His face was grim.

“Murder,” I said, and swallowed hard.

He took the time to fill his mouth with cake and follow it with a swig of tea before speaking. “You're Rupert Lanchester's daughter—Lord Fotheringill told us that. I…we were hoping you could take a look at this for us.” He wiped his hands on his suit jacket before opening the portfolio and bringing out a large, flat, plastic bag—big enough to house a coffee-table book, but holding only a single sheet of paper, a woodcut print of a bird.

The paper, yellowed with age and scorched in a few spots, had a corner missing. The intricate etching showed the bird in detail—a dark head and gray back with a pale, barred breast and darker barred tail. He perched on a dead tree branch, his sharply curved beak open. The label read: “THE SPARROW HAWK.”

Evidence? My heart picked up speed.

“Was this in the room?” I reached out and touched the plastic bag with an index finger as my mind darted from the picture of a sparrow hawk to a heap of dead birds in a field. “Did Inspector Callow ask you to show this to me?”

The sergeant nodded, then shook his head. “She doesn't know yet. This is my first case, you see. But my gran always told me, ‘You must show gumption, Natty, it's the only way to get ahead.' ”

“Natty?”

“And so I'm gathering evidence. I want to know if this bird is important.”

I frowned, wondering for a moment if he was winding me up. “We reported dead sparrow hawks on the Fotheringill estate on Saturday.”

“Reported?” The sergeant's eyes widened. “But to whom?”

“To you,” I said, pointing at him in indignation. “Well, at least to the Sudbury police. Two police constables came out, and Rupert was there as well as Lord Fotheringill. There were ten or more birds. Didn't they file a statement or anything?” I dug in my bag, producing one of the PC's cards.

Glossop read the name and his eyebrows lifted. “Right, well—he's on traffic school this week and might not have caught up with his paperwork. What happened to them—the birds?”

I locked my eyes on the sergeant's face. “They'd been poisoned.”

Natty Glossop leapt out of his chair. “Poisoned?” he whispered.

I jumped up as well. “Sergeant, was Freddy poisoned?”

“How do you know those birds were poisoned?”

“Because my dad—Rupert Lanchester—has seen it before. Gamekeepers use a pesticide to kill predator birds. It's a disgraceful practice,” I said, my voice choked with emotion, but not for the birds.

“I must get back.” The sergeant slid the plastic sheet back into the portfolio.

“Wait.” I stuck my hand in before he could close it. “Please—could I see the print again? There's something written at the bottom.”

The sergeant's eyes cut from the portfolio to me and back again. He gave a sideways nod and removed the print.

In the lower right, just above a scorched corner, it read: “To my own sparrow hawk—swift, silent, sure.” At least, I think that's what it said—it wasn't the clearest penmanship.

I grabbed my phone and focused its camera.

Glossop spread his hands out in front of the print. “No, Ms. Lanchester, please don't take a photo. Inspector Callow…that is, this is an ongoing investigation.”

“But, Sergeant Glossop, if I can study it later, I may think of something else I need to tell you—some vital clue. Please. And besides, I know this print belongs to Lord Fotheringill.” I knew nothing of the sort. “Would you like me to ring him and ask if it's all right?”

The sergeant drummed his fingers on the plastic for a moment and then straightened his shoulders. “There's no need for that,” he said. He stuck his hands in his pockets and looked away. “Go on, then.”

Before Detective Sergeant Natty Glossop left, portfolio under his arm, I had made promises to contact him if anything else occurred to me—wishing I could ask him to reciprocate. I sat back at the table and stared at the photo I'd taken of the print, enlarging it so that every etched line of the bird's wing and breast and beak stood out. I moved to the bottom, where I read the inscription over and over.

Who would want to be compared to a sparrow hawk? Was this a compliment? Why did Freddy have this print and how much was it worth? Could it be that Freddy was not only admiring the antiques in Hoggin Hall, but also casing the joint—I remembered that phrase from watching old American detective films with my mum. I tried to picture this: he steals a priceless print, is caught, and then…gets poisoned? No, that didn't make sense. Wouldn't you just call the police?

I would ring Dad—tomorrow, after Beryl had left for Bee's. But this evening I had a meeting to conduct. And something else to do first. I drove down and stopped in at the Royal Oak, hoping to catch Louisa working.

The swinging sign above the door of the Royal Oak displayed not only the massive canopy of its eponymous tree, but also its equally massive root system, as if the soil had washed away. It looked like a leafless mirror image of the top. The interior of the Royal Oak had a decidedly more rustic ambience than the Stoat and Hare, the other village pub. Darkness held sway indoors whether day or night, with light coming only from yellow lamps that protruded from the walls. Coupled with its dangerously low oak beams, traversing the space could be dicey, although locals had learned how to avoid both lamps and beams by walking across the room as if they were on the deck of a rocking ship, bobbing and weaving, but always keeping their pint level.

“Hello, Hutch. Is Louisa working?” I asked the barman.

“She's sworn off evenings,” he growled, whipping a bar towel over his shoulder. As far as I knew, Hutch spoke only in growls. He had a mat of hair on top of his head that may or may not have been his own, a prominent brow—like a ledge hanging over a steep descent—and a mouth that looked as if he'd just removed a large slice of lemon from it. “Says she's booked up with tutoring.”

“Students from the local school?” I asked.

“Not my business. All I know is she's got them coming and going up those back stairs of hers,” he said, nodding to the ceiling where, upstairs, Louisa lived in a three-room flat large enough to accommodate students and waiting parents, but in desperate need of refurbishment.

“It's good she's taking on more tutoring.”

“She's left me shorthanded—and me providing her housing and all,” he said.

“She's paying you rent for her flat, isn't she?” I asked.

“Yeah, well,” Hutch replied as five people wandered in the door and crowded up to the bar to place drink orders.

He didn't seem in the mood to offer more, so I took my half pint of Bugg's Best and a packet of crisps and retreated to a table.

I arrived plenty early to the church hall, but Willow had arrived even earlier. She already had set up the coffee. I drank a cup down almost straightaway, hoping it would stop me from feeling as if I were under water. I functioned best on a full night's sleep—at that moment, I couldn't tell the difference between the four hours I'd got and no hours at all. After a few minutes, I had another coffee, and a few minutes after that, I got the jitters.

Willow had unfurled a paper banner—actually, successive pieces of paper taped together—that she had decorated with snowflakes and unseasonable butterflies. It read—“Welcome to the Smeaton-under-Lyme Christmas Market!!!” She had stretched it across a wall, securing the sagging middle with extra tape. Rickety wooden folding chairs were set two feet apart in six long rows, to mimic the stalls on the green. On the seat of each chair, Willow had placed a piece of paper designating which vendor where. I passed “Handle With Care—glass artist #42”; “Tiny Toes—children's footwear #47”; and “Fox in the Henhouse Chocolates—confectionary #51.” Each had its own graphic hand-drawn by Willow.

My intern stood talking with two women in the front of the room. As I approached, one woman pointed an accusatory finger at the other while saying to Willow, “You can't put her next to me—she's already stolen the design of my best-selling Christmas ornament.”

The other slapped the finger away. “You don't own the angel Gabriel,” she said. “He's copyright-free.”

“Hello!” I rushed forward and inserted myself between the two before they came to blows. “I'm Julia Lanchester. Is there a problem?”

The women each took a step back. Willow put her hand to her chest and exhaled deeply. “Oh, Ms. Lanchester, I'm awfully glad you're here.”

It took a bit of rearranging, but we got the two women in separate rows, and I called for everyone to take a seat. Vendors wandered the hall with cups of coffee in one hand and plates of Nuala's fairy cakes in the other, until they found their assigned chairs. As I waited for the noise to subside, I looked out the window for any latecomers. A car pulled in and Cecil got out. I couldn't tell the make of the vehicle, but I knew it wasn't Linus's Peugeot. When Cecil kept the passenger door open, leaning over to say something, I was afforded a fine view of the driver—her hair in a ponytail and her slightly receding chin in silhouette. It was Louisa.

Cecil walked into the hall and stood looking about. Willow spied this lone figure and made a beeline for him.

“Hello, how are you this evening? Are you one of our vendors? You've certainly come to the right place—and just in time, we're about to start. Now, let me see—don't tell me—are you the cheeseman from Puddledock?”

“Willow!”
I said, dashing forward.

“Oh, Julia—well, of course you have everything in hand, don't you?”

I took hold of her arm to stop her, if only for a moment. “Cecil,” I said, “may I present Willow Wynn-Finch, our intern at the TIC. Willow, this is Cecil, Viscount Palgrave. Lord Fotheringill's son.”

I added the last just to make sure it hit home, which apparently it did. She blushed a neon pink, fumbled to free a hand from the bundle of felt markers she held, thought better of it, and dropped her gaze to the floor, bobbing a tiny curtsy.

“Lord Palgrave, sir, I'm terribly sorry—it's only that we're awfully excited about the market and you see how incredibly popular it is with all the artists in Suffolk, well, all of East Anglia actually, because we have two amazing silversmiths who've just today told me that—”

I broke in. “It looks like everyone is here, Willow. Why don't we get started.”

By the end of the evening, every time I turned my head, it took a couple of seconds for my vision to catch up. This is what I get for drinking two—no, three—cups of coffee on an almost empty stomach and practically no sleep. And eating three fairy cakes. As far as I could remember, the meeting had gone well. All questions answered, all concerns laid to rest. Cecil had kept quiet, only standing and giving a nod when I introduced him.

I began folding and stacking chairs while our intern climbed up on a table to peel her banner off the wall. Cecil looked up from his phone, rushed over, and helped unstick it for her. Willow—glowing pink—thanked him, rolled up the banner, and stuffed it into her bag.

“Cecil,” I said, walking over just as he retreated with his phone, “would you like a lift back to the Hall? Only, I noticed you didn't drive this evening.”

Cecil's eyes jumped to the window and back as if he saw what I had seen earlier when Louisa dropped him off. “I don't want to put you out,” he said. “I was about to ring for a cab.”

“It's no trouble—silly of you to call a taxi out from Sudbury when we're going to the same place. I'll just need to finish up here—won't take long.”

I set to cleaning the refreshments table, and Willow came over to separate rubbish from recyclables. She looked over her shoulder at Cecil across the room. “He's awfully good-looking, isn't he?” Willow whispered. “And taller than I expected. Because of his Lordship, you know.”

“It's on his mother's side,” I said.

When Willow noticed Cecil glancing at her chart on the easel, she left off with me to offer him a detailed explanation of her process.

“Now, you'll see what I mean if you look at…oh, I've lost track,” she said, her finger running up and down the rows. “Do you see ‘Dabs of Delight' somewhere? They do mustards.”

Cecil stepped away and leaned forward again, but I could tell he wasn't looking at the chart at all, only pretending to. Willow watched for a moment, her head at a slight tilt before diving in.

“I've assigned them colors according to the type of business—food is orange, Christmas ornaments are pink, that sort of thing,” she said. “And I've a little drawing of each product. You see here”—she tapped a finger on one bit of paper—“a ring for jewelry. Also, I've grouped them to make it easier for shoppers to find what they need.”

Willow watched Cecil as his eyes began searching her chart.

“Here!” he exclaimed, pointing. “A pot of mustard next to the sausage rolls.”

“Well done—you've found them,” Willow said, and I half expected her to offer Cecil a gold star.

Cecil loaded Willow's paraphernalia into the back of her Ford Fiesta as I locked up and took several gulps of cold air. There, that felt better. “All ready,” I said. “Thanks for your help, Willow.”

“It was entirely my pleasure, Julia. We'll have a smashing market, I'm totally convinced.” She turned to Cecil, and even in the dim light of the car park, I thought she blushed. “Thanks awfully for your assistance, Mr. Fotheringill. Good night.”

Cecil folded himself up to get into my little Fiat, his knees ending almost under his chin and pressed against the dashboard. “You can push the seat back,” I said. “It's all right.”

He fiddled with the controls and slid back two inches.

The drive to the Hall took no time at all, but the awkward silence, with Cecil looking out the window into the black night, made even a short drive too long. It was crowded in the car, too, what with the two of us and the topic of Freddy's death.

“Do you know Freddy's family?” I asked. “They've been told, haven't they?”

“I don't believe he has any family.”

“Thorne knew his father.”

“Really?” Cecil said, sounding at least mildly interested. “Freddy never said.”

“It was a long time ago, apparently. When Freddy was quite young.” This was worse than being at dinner with him—no one else around to fill in the vast empty spaces in the conversation. “So you've returned to the estate for good?” I asked. “Moved home?”

Cecil blanched at the question. I thought he might tell me to keep my nose out of what didn't concern me.

“It's time I learn about the interests of the estate,” he said. “How it's run, how Father has managed all these years. It will be up to me to carry on.”

“I suppose Mr. Addleton will take on a fair amount of work?”

“A qualified estate agent is all well and good, but ultimately the responsibility for the success of an estate lies on its owners.”

That sounded quite good, actually—although a wee bit textbookish. Cecil fiddled with his seatbelt and adjusted the setting on his air vent, his hands restless in his lap. How odd, I thought as we motored up the drive to the Hall. In the few days we'd known each other, I'd mostly felt on my back foot when around Cecil—always defensive. Now the more uncomfortable Cecil appeared, the more at ease I became.

We were greeted by Thorne. I set my bag on the floor and took my coat off as Linus appeared from the library. He looked relieved, and for a moment I thought he might throw his arms round the both of us. Poor man—had he dined with Addleton alone? That must've been a jolly meal.

“Well, now, successful meeting?” he asked.

Thorne took our coats, and I was about to give an accounting when Cecil said, “It's quite a large event, but Julia appears to be well organized.”

I couldn't have heard that right—a compliment? “Thanks.”

“I'd like to drop in the TIC tomorrow for an update on other projects you have in store.”

Right, there's the meddling Cecil I've come to know in such a short time. “Of course—any time.” I picked my bag up off the floor, hoping I had enough strength to drag it and myself to my room. “Well, it's off to bed with me. Good night.”

I took all of two minutes in the bathroom before I stripped, got under the covers, and—the caffeine having drained from my body and taking with it my last ounce of consciousness—fell dead asleep.