Murder at Sunny View

Book 0: A Maisie Cooper Mystery

by Greg Mosse

Genres: Animal Cozy Mysteries; Craft & Hobby Cozy Mysteries; Culinary Cozy Mysteries

Synopsis

Don't miss the next instalment in the Maisie Cooper Mystery series, Murder at Sunny View. Available to pre-order now!

Everyone is gripped by the Maisie Cooper Mysteries:

'Maisie Cooper is a brilliant main character, an everyday Miss Marple!... I love cosy crime and I loved this book!' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'Fans of Osman are in for a treat!' Peter James

'Fabulous, full of wit, mystery, romance and small town politics... The characters are witty, quirky... The plot is twisty and engaging with lots of red herrings' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'I loved the way that I was pulled into the mystery... I found myself constantly looking for potential clues which made it feel like a real puzzle to get stuck into. I had a lot of fun reading this book' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

'I was addicted from the first page' Fern Britton

'Mixes classic whodunnit with cozy mystery elements... Kept me guessing... I thoroughly enjoyed it' Reader review ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Release date: January 31, 2025

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 320

Sample

Prologue

The small Devonshire town of Kirton had few claims to fame. Its medieval bishop so outgrew the place that he upped sticks and went to exercise his missionary zeal in Belgium and Germany, rather than among the soft hills and red dirt of his native lands. The cathedral duly moved away from Kirton to Exeter. The prosperous textile industries also left, heading north, following coal and the Industrial Revolution. Decline became ingrained, with only farming and retail as significant employers, plus a little tourism for visitors who loved the green hills, the twinkling rivers and the rust-coloured soil.

Among the vestiges of former grandeur, there remained the grandly named Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School, a co-educational establishment where the daughters and the sons of West Country families were instructed in the standard secondary curriculum – all three sciences, English, maths, history, geography and French. Plus, they had to make a choice between music or art, as if too much self-expression might not be a good thing.

One warm day, in late June of 1972, in a gymnasium converted into an exam hall, the fifth-formers ‘put down their pens’ at the end of a gruelling two-hour marathon on ‘How World War I caused World War II’. At that very moment, three-forty-five by the gymnasium clock, a small, thin-limbed boy of eleven – floppy blond hair, pale skin, long lashes and wary eyes – began his journey through the building, swinging a loud handbell, announcing that the wearisome school day was at an end.

The children spilled out from their labours in his wake, some to board the buses that stood ready at the gates, others to walk or cycle away. What awaited them? Orange squash and bread-and-butter for a snack, Blue Peter or Magpie on the telly, beans on toast, fish fingers with chips and peas, sausage with mashed potatoes and onion gravy.

The small, thin-limbed boy was almost the last to leave – apart from those in detention for various misdemeanours – once he had returned the handbell to the school secretary, a nervy lady of advanced age called Miss Pond. Thanks to her weekly visit to the grandly named Kirton Coiffeur, Miss Pond’s unnaturally black hair was curled and sculpted in such a way as to cling round her wind-burned face like an improbable wig.

‘Thank you, young Sturgess,’ said Miss Pond.

‘Good afternoon, miss,’ said the boy, accustomed – as were all the Grammar School children – to being referred to by his family name.

He went outside. The sun was still high in the western sky. His arms ached from the weight of the bell. A few groups of Kirton children had yet to disperse, some of them in his class. He knew them but they didn’t seem to feel his lonely gaze upon them, enjoying their own private communion from which he was inexplicably excluded.

‘Young Sturgess’ had a five-pence piece in his pocket, what his mother still referred to as ‘a shilling’ or ‘a bob’ in pre-­decimalisation language. He crossed the road to the newsagent and, for just three pence, bought a Curly Wurly, a chocolate bar made of strands of caramel, covered with milk chocolate, like intertwined sticks.

Back outside on the narrow pavement, he didn’t open the white wrapper straight away. He was hesitating between two routes home. One went over the top and then down the precipitous far side of Break Heart Hill: it would be tiring on the ascent, his legs aching in his grey cotton shorts; it would be jarring on the descent, his toes pushed forward and pinched in his tight school shoes. The other choice was known as Long Lane.

The harder way was – inevitably – the safer way, but that was a lesson that life hadn’t yet found time to teach him.

He chose Long Lane, passing the sign that said the road was closed to vehicle traffic after eight o’clock each evening and six on Sundays, winding between tall and bedraggled hedges, buzzing with summer insects. As he went, he teased his Curly Wurly out of its wrapper, nibbling the soft chocolate and caramel.

One day, he thought, I’ll make it last all the way to the railway gates at Trout Leap.

Not today, though. Five or six minutes later, he licked his fingers and, guiltily, pushed the empty waxed paper deep into the brambles and walked on.

There were bees on the hedgerow flowers, close at hand, and a dusty smell of ripening barley. Somewhere, not too far away, a farmer must have been muck-spreading, because there was a whiff of pig manure in the air, too. Just then, he heard the toot of the milk-lorry driver, probably thanking the railway gatekeeper for opening up to let him pass. Then came the intimidating crescendo of the approaching diesel engine, accompanied by the rattle of the churns, lined up like soldiers on parade on the flatbed behind.

Like any child born to country roads, ‘Young Sturgess’ knew to press himself back into the hedge, despite the brambles scratching at the tender skin on the backs of his bare knees, despite the worry that there might be a bee right there, by his ear or on the nape of his neck, and he would be stung.

The milk lorry came lurching round the corner, going too fast. The boy caught a glimpse of the driver’s face – it was Floyd Tubb – whose set expression of weary inattention suddenly transformed into focused action. Floyd tugged on the wheel, running the nearside tyres up onto the opposite verge.

It was a close-run thing, but he passed safely by, albeit upsetting one of the churns. It fell from the flatbed and landed on its side. The metal lid dislodged and the rich milk sloshed out across the tarmac.

‘Young Sturgess’ watched Floyd Tubb swing open the cab door and jump down, wondering if this – like most calamities that took place within his orbit – would turn out to be his fault.

‘What’re you doing, Tim? Do you want to get killed, then?’

‘No, Mr Tubb.’

Floyd rubbed a dirty hand over his floppy blond hair, not dissimilar to Timothy’s.

‘And I’ve gone and lost one,’ he said, looking ruefully at the fallen churn. ‘Where’s the lid?’

‘It rolled down there,’ said Timothy, pointing.

‘That’s a mercy,’ said Floyd, stomping off to fetch it. When he came back, the boy hadn’t moved. ‘Ain’t you got no home to go to?’

‘But look, Mr Tubb. There’s a rat.’

It was true. In the neck of the fallen churn, there was the unmistakable shape of a drowned rodent, its fur slick, its eyes glassy. Timothy Sturgess looked from the dead animal to the willowy dairyman. Something important had happened. He knew that from the aggressive – and also wary – look in Floyd’s eye. But he didn’t know exactly what.

‘Goodbye, Mr Tubb,’ he said.

‘No, you don’t,’ said Floyd, putting a heavy hand on ­Timothy’s frail shoulder. The boy’s blue eyes opened wide. Floyd demanded: ‘Who are you going to tell about this?’

Timothy gave it only a moment’s thought. The answer was obvious.

‘No one, Mr Tubb.’

The dairyman’s blue eyes returned to the awful incriminating evidence of the rat in the milk.

‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Not no one. Go on. Be on your way.’

With relief, Timothy walked on, round two bends to the railway barrier, held closed to traffic because the regular train services that passed through the hamlet of Trout Leap were more common than lorries and tractors and cars. He pushed open the pedestrian kissing gate, designed to be beyond the wit of errant cattle or sheep, looked left along the track towards Exeter and right towards Barnstaple. Finding his way clear, he crossed the rails and pushed through the corresponding gate on the far side.

Trout Leap was made up of five cob cottages in the shape of an L, with thick walls made of sand, straw and red Devonshire clay, plus a brick-built guest house known as Sunny View – by the bridge over the river Wivel – and a dairy farm on the hill beyond.

He went inside number three, the corner cottage, and found his mother kneeling on their oppressively dark Axminster carpet, laying out a dressmaker’s pattern of tissue paper, unfurling a bolt of slippery blue satin.

‘Good day?’ she asked, the words muffled by her mouthful of pins.

‘Yes, thank you, Mother,’ said Timothy.

‘Any news?’

‘No, Mother, nothing at all.’

One

A few weeks later, on a hot and stuffy Friday in late July, ­Maisie Cooper set off from Chichester railway station, a little regretful to be leaving, noisily transported by a slam-door British Rail train. She was thirty-five years old, in the prime of life. The weather was fine. She had a corner seat on the left-hand side, all by herself in a six-seat compartment right at the back. She was heading west, so that was the sunny side, like the port cabins on a cross-Atlantic cruise. The buttoned carriage cloth of the upholstery smelt of cigarettes. The floor was grimy and the windows were dusty and smeared. On the small shelf beneath the glass were her thermos flask of tea and the greaseproof paper wrappings of two rounds of sandwiches.

There was also a letter, sent – as it seemed – out of her own past by the owners of the Sunny View guest house in mid-Devon, where she had been working when the awful news of her parents’ deaths had tracked her down, changing her life forever. She picked it up and read it through for the fourth or fifth time.

Dear Maisie,

Audrey and I hope this little note finds you well and in a position to travel down to see us, preferably sooner and certainly not too much later.

I don’t want to write down exactly what it is we want to say to you. I’m a careful soul, as you’ll no doubt remember.

Perhaps, for the affection you bear us, you’ll consider making this small detour out of your busy life. Something has to be done before there’s a murder and the police just aren’t interested.

Yours affectionately,

Russell Savage

The idea there might be a murder at Sunny View was as ­far-fetched as it was surprising. She assumed Russell was exaggerating for effect. But Maisie was intrigued by what her old employers had to say to her, so decided she could afford a quick visit.

Anyway, just for now, I have nothing to worry about. Travel is time out of time.

Maisie’s fiancé, Jack Wingard, was heading in a quite ­different direction, north-east to Newcastle for the next phase of his career as a police sergeant in search of promotion. His journey would take longer – up from Chichester to London, across the metropolis on the Tube, then north from King’s Cross station. Maisie regretted the fact that they would spend the week at opposite ends of England, but she knew it was for the best.

It’s a shame to be apart so soon after finally being together.

She had set off at the crack of dawn, wanting to accompany Jack on his own very early departure, and soon her own journey was three-quarters done. She felt the grip of the brakes taking hold as they began their approach into Exeter Central station, heard the squealing sound as the train began decelerating.

From the luggage rack above her head, she got down her small suitcase – which Jack’s grandmother Florence referred to as a ‘grip’ – and put away the tidily folded greaseproof paper and the now-empty thermos. With the grip in her right hand and her handbag in the crook of her left elbow, she prepared to climb down onto the platform, seeing herself in the grimy glass.

Many younger women don’t carry handbags any more. But it’s so practical and means you don’t have to stuff everything into your pockets and spoil the line of your clothes.

Maisie was wearing a short-sleeved navy-and-white polka-­dot summer dress, with a comfortable full skirt that draped below her knees. She was feeling fit, almost athletic, from her regime of early-morning exercise at the swimming baths in Chichester. Her arms were strong and tanned from helping with summer labour in the woods and on the arable farmland at Bunting Manor. She had no need of a jacket or cardigan because it was July and the notoriously unreliable British weather seemed set fair.

The train finally came to a complete stop, hissing and wheezing. She climbed out, slamming the door behind her, discovering that the train had been busier than she had imagined, alone in her isolated compartment at the very rear. The platform was abustle with people of all types and classes. Some hurried while others strolled, reorganising their belongings. Plus, there were the uniformed British Rail staff in their dark woollen jackets, with insignia reminiscent of military ranks.

Maisie presented her ticket at the barrier and emerged onto the pavement, looking for the bus to take her across the city from Exeter Central station to Exeter St David’s. Very fortunately, it was there, ready and waiting, a smart dark-green double-decker with a very overweight driver and a friendly guard. She paid her fare of eight new pence – which she thought quite steep given the brief journey – and found herself surrounded by schoolchildren making their way home, their shrill voices shocking after the quiet of her solitary compartment. Very soon, she learned from their excited conversation that it was the last day of term, that the long summer holiday was about to begin.

The roads were busy and they were held by several traffic lights. Twice, after a stop, considerate drivers allowed the double-decker to go first. They pulled up in front of Exeter St David’s and Maisie went to one of three open counters to purchase a ticket for Kirton, just eight miles outside the city.

Once again, a connection was ready and waiting. She ran up and over the bridge, worried it would pull out and leave her waiting for twenty minutes for the next service on the Barnstaple line. Her low-heeled shoes made a clip-clopping sound on the tarmac of the platform as an attentive porter held open a door for her, then wolf-whistled.

This was not an unusual occurrence. Maisie cut a striking figure. She was quite tall at five-foot-eight, with a slim ­physique, short curly hair bleached almost blonde by the summer sun and the chlorine in the water of the public baths. And she had clear skin and large brown eyes – a combination many men found attractive, generally without unwelcome consequences.

In she climbed, finding herself among more schoolchildren – possibly the same ones, making a similar journey to her own – but was able to sit alone in a two-person bay at the front of the short, two-carriage train. The eight miles to Kirton were rapidly eaten up, with a brief stop halfway at Newton St Cyres, making Maisie smile, remembering the characteristic West Country names that she found it hard to say out loud without adopting the local accent.

But that’s fair enough, isn’t it? For a while, ten years ago, I was local.

As the green hills hurried past, with occasional scars in the landscape revealing the deep red dirt of the iron-rich soil, Maisie summoned memories of those happy times. After two ‘tours’, she had left the Women’s Royal Army Corps, aware that significant promotion was unlikely for a woman in the British military. Uncertain of what direction she wanted her life to take, she had responded to an advertisement for a ‘manager’ at a guest house called Sunny View and made this very same journey through Exeter and Kirton to meet the owners, Audrey and Russell Savage. She had been deemed ‘a proper job’ – meaning ideal – and employed on the spot.

We got on so well, but then . . .

Maisie sighed. In 1962, life had taken an unexpected and unhappy turn with the accidental death of her parents in a road traffic accident in a London pea-souper fog and her adored and admired older brother, Stephen, had let her down by turning to drink and dissipation. She had gone to live in Paris to escape her grief and her disillusionment.

And now Stephen’s dead, too.

Maisie made an effort to escape both those unhappy memories and the shadow of intrigue in Russell’s letter. Happily, at just that moment, she began to recognise features of the landscape: the winding river Wivel; a particular stretch of woodland; an oddly shaped hill, like a currant bun, but studded with sheep rather than dried fruit. Beyond that, the town.

Kirton had one main street that tracked quite steeply uphill, past the Home and Colonial Stores, Townsend’s ­Furniture & Bed Shop, Moore’s car showroom, the Churchworkers’ Institute, the Masonic Hall, the Liberal Club. ­Maisie’s favourite was the general store, C & C Supplies, run by Clive and Cherry Atwill where, as Dylan Thomas had it in Under Milk Wood, ‘everything was sold’.

The train, though, pulled in at the bottom of the town, close to the course of the pleasant trout river, the Wivel, that wound through the valley to the south, linking several hamlets, including Maisie’s final destination, Trout Leap.

Once more she got her things together, ready to get down, alighting with two dozen children and grown-ups. She shuffled forward with them and showed her ticket to the collector, before stepping out into the warmth of the afternoon, the sun quite dazzling. She heard Russell’s voice calling out to her before she saw him.

‘There she is, my handsome.’

All at once, he was standing in front of her, in his sagging tweed suit, despite the warmth of the day, his grey shirt – that had once been white – open at the neck and revealing a mass of grey chest hairs. He was beaming, his eyes wide and smiling, framed by his salt-and-pepper whiskers and topped by a thick head of hair the same shade. She realised he must have come early, prepared to wait for hours, if necessary, in order to be there to meet her.

Oh no, I think I’m going to cry.

Despite her outward confidence, Maisie Cooper was a private person. She didn’t enjoy sharing her deepest thoughts and emotions. That had been one of the reasons that she and Jack had found it so hard to rekindle their relationship after so many years apart – that and Maisie’s involvement in several police investigations, including her brother’s murder at Church Lodge in Framlington. The crimes had, at first, erected a barrier between them, one made up of grief and constabulary formality. Now, in the little car park outside Kirton railway station, she was astonished by the depth of her emotion, taking out her handkerchief and dabbing her eyes.

‘Oh, Russell . . .’

‘Now, then, my lovely,’ said Russell. ‘What’s all this?’

‘It’s all right. Don’t worry. I’m just . . .’

Maisie couldn’t finish the thought. It was too complicated to express out loud.

I’m crying because I was happy at Sunny View, ten years ago, before I really knew that life was short and the people you love won’t be around forever, like it seemed when I was a child.

But Russell seemed to understand.

‘Come here, my lovely.’ He put his arms round her and the urge to weep faded, seemingly absorbed into the wool of his tweed jacket that smelt of wear and dust. ‘I know how ’tis. Last time you were here at Kirton railway station, it was to go up to that London for your poor parents. We wish we’d had a chance to meet them, Audrey and me both, to tell them the fine young woman they’d made.’

Maisie felt her emotion subside, marvelling at the fact that Russell, talking very directly about her loss, made it much less painful than someone else might have done by beating about the bush. She stepped away.

‘It’s wonderful to see you. How clever you are.’

‘I don’t know about “clever”, but I know you, Maisie Cooper. You may be what they call “self-contained”, but you feel things as deeply as anyone else – more deeply, perhaps.’

‘How are you both? You look so well.’

Russell gently contradicted her, repeating his phrase: ‘I don’t know about “well”. It’s the years weigh heavy, you know? I don’t seem to have the same vim I used to.’

‘That’s normal, isn’t it.’

He sighed and agreed: ‘I suppose.’

Maisie frowned, wondering how old Russell actually was. She hadn’t seen him for ten years and it was true that his face was much more deeply lined than the image she held in memory.

‘Will you soon be drawing your pension?’

‘Soon?’ He laughed. ‘I’ve had it these last three years – and very welcome after a lifetime’s scraping by.’

Maisie swiftly calculated that Russell must be sixty-eight, therefore, but she knew very well that he and Audrey hadn’t been ‘scraping by’. They were thrifty – ‘careful’ as they called it – by choice. Their charming four-roomed guest house in the hamlet of Trout Leap had always been a thriving business, so much so that they hadn’t needed to open twelve months of the year, making a living by welcoming most of their guests in the peak summer season and the other school holidays.

‘You look very well on it,’ she told him.

‘You’ve not aged a jot, Maisie. You look healthy and strong and as pretty as Norman Tubb’s prize-winning heifer.’ ­Maisie laughed at Russell comparing her to a cow and he quickly qualified what he meant. ‘There I go, saying something foolish. You know how it was meant, I hope?’

‘Of course I do,’ Maisie reassured him. The car park was still busy with departing cars and a single-decker bus in the same dark-green livery as the one she had taken in Exeter, making an awkward turn. ‘How’s Audrey? Blooming, I hope?’

‘Aside from the worry, she’s bright as a button. She doesn’t seem to feel her years like I do.’

‘The worry?’ asked Maisie.

‘The worry that made me look you up. Like we said in our letter, something has to be done before there’s no goodwill left among neighbours and friends.’

The bus pulled away, leaving them alone in the little car park in front of Kirton railway station. Maisie was glad there was no one close by to overhear. She hoped Russell wasn’t ‘getting silly’, as Jack’s grandmother Florence would have put it. It was a fact, though. Sometimes, the imaginations of older folks were easily fussed and created all kinds of devilment that had little or no basis in reality.

‘Yes, your letter. You know it sounded very melodramatic, Russell. “A murder”. Can you really mean that?’

‘Perhaps there was a smidge of poetic licence,’ he told her. ‘But who can tell? I’ve never known passions to run so high.’

‘You must tell me all about it.’

‘I will, but not in the car park, here.’ Russell bent down to pick up her tightly packed grip and led her to his car, a weary Vauxhall Viva with rust on the sills and wheel arches. ‘I’ll just put this in the back.’

He slid the passenger seat forward and placed her ­suitcase on the bench seat behind, then gallantly held the door open for her to get in. She did so. He closed it without slamming and went round to the driver’s side, climbing in with an audible exhalation that told Maisie he was glad to be off his feet. The car started first time but, to Maisie’s ear, it sounded unhealthy, spluttering as if it was suffering from the same summer cold that had played an unexpected role in her solution to the murder at Bitling Fair.

Russell pulled away, chatting and driving with the nonchalant confidence of someone for whom the narrow country lane was second nature.

‘It’s been a good year for weeds and everything else the farmers don’t want to grow. All that wet in February, March and April, and some even more recent. Have you had the same up Sussex?’

‘We have.’

‘You see those banks of stinging nettles? They’re all over and flourishing like nobody’s business. Luckily the dock plants are doing just as well and, as you know, their leaves will take away the worst of the tingle.’

Driving along the country lane, Kirton was above them, out of sight beyond the hill. The windows were open and Maisie began to feel intoxicated with the fragrances of the warm afternoon.

‘Are those foxgloves?’

‘And parsnip flowers. There was a kiddie taken to hospital up Exeter for eating one or other of them, the daft little mite.’

‘Grockles?’ asked Maisie, using the West Country word for tourists. ‘I suppose the parents didn’t know any better.’

‘That’s the truth.’

The lane followed then crossed a curve in the river, before climbing gently uphill through pasture inhabited by somnolent cows. Then Russell swore and stepped on the brakes as a small, underpowered motorbike came swinging round a bend, almost on their side of the road. It was ridden by a lithe young man in a T-shirt and no helmet, leaning into the corner as he swung past them with a noise like an angry bee.

‘Who on earth was that?’ asked Maisie.

‘Young Paul Linton. There’s a chance he might turn out a bit of a tearaway. Time will tell.’

‘Isn’t there a law about wearing a helmet?’ Maisie asked, not completely up to date with UK news, having been living in Paris.

‘It might come in next year from what I’ve heard.’

‘I think I would use one. We wear hard hats for horse riding and that’s probably a lot less dangerous, even on dry summer roads.’

Russell drove on, remarking: ‘Talking of summer, the warm weather means there’s ticks hiding in the dry grass, only too pleased to hitch a ride on your trouser cuffs, and they can be the very devil once they latch on to your skin. Some people get the allergy. And battalions of bees and ­jaspers – you know, wasps? We had a big old nest up under the eaves of one of the dormers.’

‘Oh dear. What did you do?’

‘I knocked it down onto an old towel, folded it over quick and . . .