Murder at the Fair

Book 0: A Maisie Cooper Mystery

by Greg Mosse

Genres: Small Town & Rural; Amateur Sleuth; Cozy Mystery

Synopsis

The fourth book in the Maisie Cooper cosy mystery series.

Readers love the Maisie Cooper series:

'Maisie Cooper is a brilliant main character, an everyday Miss Marple!... I love cosy crime and I loved this book!' Reader review 5 stars

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

'Classic cosy murder mystery... several red herrings, and I didn't guess the ending' Reader review 5 stars

'I loved the twists and turns in this book and can't wait for the next one' Reader review 5 stars

'A cosy mystery with a lot of heart that sucked me in from page one and kept me guessing until the end' Reader review 5 stars

'I loved the small village setting... I thought the characters were fantastic and I loved the gossip in village life. I kept guessing how everything tied in, and had a huge shock when the ending was revealed' Reader review 5 stars

Release date: August 29, 2024

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

Prologue

Bitling Fair was an extravaganza of woodland crafts, outdoor cooking, Morris dancing, cider and ale drinking, fiddle music and – usually – at least two or three dalliances unsanctioned by the bonds of matrimony. Tradition dictated that it should take place at the midsummer solstice and, for Christian communities, its importance was reinforced by the coincidence of the nativity of John the Baptist.

This was all very well but, unfortunately, tradition also dictated that the fair should find its home in the pretty but rundown village of East Bitling – not far from Framlington, where Maisie Cooper’s brother Stephen had been so callously murdered. And East Bitling was a feudal throwback, wholly owned by a minor Sussex aristocrat, populated by an entirely dependent community of what she doubtless thought of as her ‘serfs’.

Every door and every window frame of each poorly maintained East Bitling dwelling was painted the same shade of sickly green. Every resident, whatever their station – housewife, pensioner, labourer, entrepreneur – was only permitted to reside within the village boundaries at the whim of a
penny-pinching autocrat with a judgemental cast of mind and a vicious tongue.

In this mild summer of 1972, Lady Catherine Peahorn was close to eighty years old. None of her ‘serfs’ knew for certain when she had been born, but it was generally accepted that it must have been in the previous century. No one knew either what awful life events had contrived to warp her mind, making a woman of enormous financial means into a sad and withered miser, ‘jealous of every last farthing’ as Sergeant Dodd of the Chichester police put it.

Lady Catherine lived in chilly isolation, attended by a vague and put-upon ‘companion’, in a frigid mansion known as Baffins. Baffins was built atop a hill that had the advantage of fine views but, for three or four months of each year, it was scoured by winter winds.

But the threat of a ‘beast from the east’ or a ‘storm from the north’ was not currently a problem. The year of 1972 had almost reached its midpoint, approaching the longest day. Even lackadaisical gardeners had their pick of fragrant flowers in their Sussex gardens: sweet peas, ox-eye daisies, sweet rocket, lilies, peonies and – of course – roses.

Woe betide, though, any who allowed their lawns or verges to become overgrown. They could expect a terse phone call or – if they were not so equipped – a peremptory note in a spiky hand on Baffins-headed paper, instructing them ‘to remedy this neglect forthwith’.

The origins of Bitling Fair were documented by papers held in the crypt of Chichester cathedral, dating back to Tudor times. Some historians even suggested that the fair might predate the Norman Conquest, finding its roots with either the Anglo-Saxons or their intermittent enemies, the Vikings.

The fair was habitually enjoyed by the whole put-upon village of East Bitling, as well as by the residents of its counterpart on the other side of the road, West Bitling, and by the people of more or less every settlement for five or even ten miles roundabout, including Framlington, Bunting and Harden, including the city of Chichester. Once comprised of only a single evening’s festivities, Bitling Fair was now a midsummer party lasting two long days and, in between, one brief – hopefully warm and dry – night.

As costumes were sewn and pies baked, however, all was not well. In addition to the justified recriminations of the East Bitlingers concerning their feudal landlady’s neglect of their tied homes – and perhaps because of the unhappy and oppressive framework Lady Catherine imposed on their lives – many of the villagers were at loggerheads.

The Dodd brothers, butchers by trade, had recently come to the conclusion that their previously congenial working relationship could not endure. Because of their falling-out, the Bitlings now played host to two failing butcher’s shops, serving a population previously supplied by a single prosperous one. This was particularly painful for their aforementioned father, Sergeant Dodd of the Chichester police, a man whose many decades of exemplary, placid service were about to come to an end.

Sergeant Dodd had hoped, as the Bible promised in the Book of Micah, chapter four, verse four, that he should sit ‘under his vine and under his fig tree; and none shall make him afraid’. His wife had to get used to hearing him muttering as he brushed his exemplary but threadbare woollen uniform and shined his constabulary boots: ‘Well, I never did. Whoever would have thought. Where we’ll end up, the Lord knows.’

There was trouble, too, at Littlegreen sawmill, overseen as a fourth-generation enterprise by Old Mr Littlegreen, the sole village resident of comparable age to Lady Catherine herself.

The sawmill was on the brink of bankruptcy. Old Mr Little­green’s business acumen – more than

adequate for a previous, gentler age – had been found wanting by the passing of time. His three adult children declared themselves unable to agree on the best course of remedial action. The only thing on which they did agree was that it was urgent.

Muriel Littlegreen, the oldest and the most optimistic of the trio, favoured refurbishment and ‘moving with the times’, expansion and more debt. Linda, the youngest and most pessimistic, favoured selling up and moving on. Timothy, the middle child – inevitably – found himself caught between these two extremes. He reminded Linda that they owned
neither the land nor the buildings, that all they had to sell was the goodwill of the business and there was precious little of that left. In turn, he urged Muriel to consider the possibility that new loans might simply be a way of sending good money after bad.

Trouble and upset were not limited to the butchers and the sawmill. East Bitling accommodated three separate farming families whose livelihoods depended on the vagaries of the weather as well as the strength of their backs and the sweat of their brows. Back in April, at the start of the new financial year, Lady Catherine had raised their rent-per-acre and the effects were beginning to pinch.

Meanwhile, at the East Bitling public house, the Silver Garter, sorrows were drowned, talking politics was forbidden and skittles were routinely sent flying in the long back room. Somebody – only the perpetrator knew who – cut out a black-and-white photograph of Lady Catherine from the local paper, the Chichester Observer, and pinned it to the dartboard. It remained there for a full eight days until, at last, just a few shreds of newsprint were left, so often had it become a victim of the patrons’ joyous, vengeful accuracy.

The only resident of East Bitling whose life continued unaffected by all these stresses and disappointments – and there were more, lurking beneath the surface – was Adam Farr.

Adam was an unusual young man, very pale with gingery curls cut close to his scalp. Abrupt and hectoring in speech, clumsy in movement, he had no use for television or radio or cinemas or public houses. Friendless and, yet, self-assured, Adam seemed content in solitude, wandering the woods, setting traps for rabbits or birds, watching the night sky through a telescope he had purchased on a whim from a jumble sale.

Unknown to the other Bitlingers, though, Adam had a plan – a clever and picturesque plan. He had not yet put it in motion because it had to be timed to coincide with Bitling Fair and with the darkness of the one short night of midsummer. And it depended on the well-known but little exploited fact that, beneath the soft turf of the Sussex Downs, lay a bed of bright white chalk.

And, although he did not foresee it – how could he, after all – it would be Adam who would provide a murderer with their long-desired opportunity for violent retribution.

I – ROWAN

Signifying strength in
solitude

 

One

Maisie was astonished to realise that only six weeks had gone by since the extraordinary dénouement of the investigation into the murder at Chichester Festival Theatre, resulting in what Sam Smithers, the chief electrician, referred to in court as a ‘show stop’, albeit right at the end as the audience were on their feet applauding. Since then, the wheels of justice had been turning, like the stones of a flour mill, little by little testing and grinding the evidence, until finally the guilty had been judged and their sentences handed down. Likewise, all the distressing sequels to the trials ensuing from the Murder at Church Lodge and the Murder at Bunting Manor – the appeals and secondary convictions – had at last been deemed complete.

Maisie was finally free.

She left the courthouse in company with Sergeant William Dodd, a rotund man on the brink of retirement in a worn but well-kept police uniform. He told her: ‘You’re a marvel. You saw things no one else did, in all three investigations.’

‘Thank you, William.’

‘Of course, being with you throughout, I saw that the theatre trial was less onerous for you. And I was very sorry about your brother, though he was a scamp and no two ways about it.’

‘He was,’ admitted Maisie, smiling.

‘Scamp’, though, was an odd way to refer to a man in his forties who had dabbled in fraud and theft.

‘And it wasn’t fair,’ Sergeant Dodd persisted, ‘for you to get drawn into another upset up-along in Bunting, all the more painful with Mrs Pascal a relative of yours, I dare say?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Of course, your insight and excellence as a witness were a boon every time for Jack Wingard. You’ve got a knack of reading people that’ll serve you all through life, I’ll be bound.’

‘You have it, too, William, surely?’ she suggested. ‘Looking back on your career, there must be dozens of times character was more important than fingerprints or alibis.’

‘I won’t say you’re wrong. What’s next for you, then?’

‘I’m meeting Jack,’ she said with a smile.

‘I won’t stand in the way of young love,’ said Sergeant Dodd, laughing kindly. ‘What a change you’ve made in that man.’

‘For the better, I hope.’

‘Oh, yes. There was a moment when I thought . . .’

He didn’t finish and Maisie assumed his abrupt change of mind was because he was wary of overstepping with police station gossip.

‘We both found it hard,’ she told him.

‘Yes, I dare say. But it’s been a right treat getting to know you by looking after you in the courthouse and all that. Would you come and see me and my Edith and my boys in Bitling? The fair’s coming up. Would you have known Bitling Fair when you were a littl’un back in Framlington?’

‘No, I don’t remember it. But I’d be honoured to visit. Thank you, William.’

She left him and walked happily up South Street, past the hunting and shooting and fishing shop that – up on the first floor – also sold children’s toys and games. On the other side, the greengrocer and the fishmonger were conveniently side by side, the latter with a marble slab as a windowsill, open onto the pavement. A little grey-haired woman with an upright tartan shopping trolley was haggling over what she called ‘an extra shilling’ but which the fishmonger, in his blue-and-white-striped apron, insisted was ‘a very reasonable five new pence’.

Maisie hesitated for a moment outside the travel agent, seeing advertised a three-day ‘1972 midsummer’ coach trip to Paris. She expected to feel an ache of loss for the life she had decided to leave behind: her flat in Place des Vosges; the wonderful food and drink; the fun and satisfaction she had as a high-class multilingual tour guide to the city’s attractions. To her surprise, the hollow feeling didn’t come.

She checked her watch and then the clock on the south side of the medieval Market Cross, the traditional Chichester meeting place at the intersection of its four cardinal streets: North, South, East and West. Either her watch was two minutes fast or the one on the cross was two minutes slow. It didn’t matter. She was early, in any case.

She went to look through the window of the shoe shop, Russell & Bromley’s, wondering why people wore such uncomfortable-looking contraptions on their feet: narrow winkle-pickers in aggressively shiny red leather for men; high platform

shoes or stiletto heels for women. Then, reflected in the plate glass, she saw herself, looking trim and fit in her knee-length black-and-white-check dress, gathered becomingly at the waist. She had successfully overcome the diet of healthy – but copious – food provided by Jack Wingard’s grandma Florence by embarking on an early morning swimming regime at the local baths.

The cathedral bells rang for four o’clock and, suddenly, she knew she was no longer alone in the busy street. Of course, she was surrounded by shoppers and children in the green blazers of the twin high schools – one for girls and one for boys – on their way home for tea. But this was different. There were important eyes upon her, a gaze she could feel that warmed her inside.

She turned and saw Jack, a little above her, standing on the step beneath the Market Cross, looking like he had been watching her for some time.

She smiled and skipped across the road, dodging between a milk float and a single-decker Southdown bus. Despite the fact that he was on duty and, therefore, wearing his sergeant’s uniform, he put his arms round her and kissed her as if it had been a week since they’d met, rather than just that morning at the front door of the courthouse, before the usher came to call her inside.

‘It’s over, then?’ he asked, finally breaking away.

‘It’s over.’

‘And you’re not going back to Paris?’

‘I’d rather be here with you,’ she said simply. She dropped her eyes. It had been true for weeks. Why had she taken so long to say so out loud? She looked up again. ‘If you’ll have me.’

He took a step back and, to her surprise, knelt on the worn stone.

‘Maisie Cooper,’ he began, his right hand in the top pocket of his dark blue uniform, ‘will you . . .’ He broke off. ‘Damn, it’s stuck.’ He struggled for a few seconds then drew out a small black ring box. ‘As I was saying, I mean asking, Maisie Cooper, will you—’

He opened the ring box to reveal a silver band set with blue stones that twinkled in the warm sunlight.

‘Obviously,’ said Maisie, smiling. ‘Stand up, you daft apeth.’

‘No, we have to do it properly,’ said Jack.

A small crowd began to gather, including the grey-haired lady from the fishmonger’s and a couple of people Maisie recognised, including her friend Charity Clement – looking like she was on the way to the bank from the solicitor’s office where she worked – and Harold Farr, an elderly farm labourer fallen on hard times who lived in one of the villages, but often mooched around Chichester to beg. There was also a little knot of schoolchildren, appalled at the extraordinary behaviour of grown-ups.

‘Go on then,’ she told him.

Jack held up the ring box.

‘Maisie Cooper, love of my life, ever since we met when we were sixteen, and come back to me in 1972 after all these years, will you marry me?’

Maisie let the words hang in the warm June air, revelling in the certainty she felt, at last.

‘I will.’ She helped Jack stand up and invited him to kiss her again to a round of applause from the

bystanders. ‘Shouldn’t you put the ring on my finger?’ she asked, innocently, not wanting the moment to end.

‘Oh, yes, of course.’

Maisie felt a tiny pang of disappointment as he removed his arms from round her shoulders to take her hand and slide the beautiful silver band onto the third finger of her left hand. Maisie noticed that the metal was worn, although highly polished and the stones beautifully clean. As usual, Jack was able to read her thoughts.

‘Yes, it’s Grandma’s engagement ring. Her husband Jack gave it to her, then almost immediately set sail for South America.’

‘Doesn’t she wear it ever?’

‘No, she wears her wedding ring. Apparently, that’s what you do. Her wedding ring superseded her engagement ring and, ever since, this one has lived in a paper bag underneath her tights in her chest of drawers, unseen for nearly forty years. I got Austens the jewellers to buff it up, but there was really no need.’

‘It’s beautiful, Jack. I couldn’t be happier.’

Maisie realised that the people who had gathered to eavesdrop on their public display were moving away, even Charity who blew Maisie a kiss and called: ‘Venez me voir.’

‘I’ll come and see you soon,’ Maisie replied. Then she fished in her purse for a green one-pound note. She went and put it in Harold Farr’s rough workman’s hand. ‘They say it’s good luck to share your happiness, Harold.’

Overwhelmed, he looked at the ground and said: ‘Thank you, miss. Or should I say missus?’

Maisie laughed. ‘Not yet, but soon I hope.’

‘You were a great help in the Chichester Festival Theatre business, Mr Farr,’ said Jack with the respectful formality that was one of his trademarks, whoever he was speaking to.

‘Thank you, Sergeant. I was sorry to give up those gloves.’

Harold was referring to a pair of string-backed driving gloves that had formed an important clue.

‘Well, it’s summer, now. You’ll not need any for a few months. When the weather gets cold, come and find me and I’ll see what I can do.’

‘Thank you, Sergeant.’

Harold Farr wandered off. Maisie wondered how he would fill the rest of his day and if he could possibly be happy, living from hand to mouth on charity and scraps.

‘Are you feeling sad, now?’ asked Jack.

She smiled at him. ‘No, not sad, just sympathetic.’

Left alone under the clock of the Market Cross, the provincial cathedral city of Chichester seemed to have made space for them to speak to one another unobserved and un-eavesdropped. But, instead of speaking, she put her arms up over his broad shoulders and brought his mouth down to hers.

For Maisie, time stopped once more and there was only now – and now lasted a long time. Still, though, in the end, it was not long enough. Jack pulled away and told her: ‘Perhaps we should get on.’

‘Get on where?’

‘To share the good news.’

They walked together hand in hand up North Street, receiving the congratulations of grey-haired Mr Chitty, the owner of Chitty’s Cycles who, busy changing a tyre in

front of his shop in his impeccable brown warehouse coat, had heard the news from Charity.

‘If you need a pageboy, my grandson Nicholas would be delighted. I know you have no nieces or nephews, either of you.’

‘Thank you,’ said Maisie, ‘but we’ve made no plans as yet.’

They walked on and she felt Jack had stiffened a little and wondered aloud why.

‘Oh, nothing. Just people do like to sort of muscle in, don’t they? And their thoughts are always on the future, not the here and now. Let’s just enjoy the moment.’

‘Yes, let’s.’

As they went past the Chinese restaurant, two fourteen-year-old boys from the high school came out with a bag of thick chips and a pot of curry sauce to share, making Maisie peckish.

‘Are we going to tell Florence, Jack?’

‘She knows, obviously, because of the ring, but yes.’

‘And do you have no other responsibilities, Sergeant?’ she asked, smiling.

‘I went off duty when the bells chimed four. But I’m on again overnight. We’re short-staffed because of summer colds.’

They left the confines of the city walls and carried on up
St Paul’s Road, past the post office and general store, then Strickland’s second-hand warehouse – closed up and padlocked – that had played such an important role in the investigation into Maisie’s brother Stephen’s murder. Then they turned left into Parklands, a pleasant suburban street of bungalows with tidy gardens of lovely flowers in full, midsummer bloom. They headed for number 147, where Jack lived with his grandmother. A brand-new Land Rover was parked outside.

‘You assumed I would say “yes”, then?’ she teased. ‘You invited other guests.’

‘I did. Was that rude and presumptuous?’

‘I’ve been saying “yes” inside my head ever since that day in the graveyard. I just didn’t know it.’

‘Maisie, I do love you so much,’ Jack told her.

He looked like he was going to fold her in his arms and kiss her again, right there on the pavement, with one of the neighbours watching with a trug on her arm and her secateurs poised to snip off a white rose. But the moment was broken by another voice and a rapid tread as Zoe Pascal, the sixteen-year-old ward of Phyl Pascal, came running out to meet them.

‘Come inside, we’ve been waiting for ages.’ Zoe stopped and blurted: ‘You did say “yes”, didn’t you?’

‘Obviously,’ replied Maisie for a second time.

The neighbour with the secateurs asked Zoe what was happening and the young woman shared the happy news, drawing Jack into the conversation. Maisie looked from one to the other.

Yes, it’s obvious and, yet, how is it that so much upset and drama and unkindness could have led me to such profound contentment?

She lightly shook her head.

Surely there’ll be some kind of price to pay, like needing to give Harold Farr a pound note to share our happiness.

‘Zoe, tell Grandma and Mrs Pascal that we’ll be in shortly,’ said Jack. ‘There’s one more thing Maisie and I have to talk about, first.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Zoe.

Once she had gone, Maisie realised that Jack’s face had become serious.

‘What is it?’ she asked, a shadow on her heart.

‘Let’s go and sit down somewhere and I’ll tell you.’

 

Two

‘You’re sure you don’t mind?’ asked Jack with a worried frown.

‘Absolutely not,’ Maisie told him. ‘You deserve your promotion. It can’t happen soon enough.’

Maisie and Jack were sitting on the garden seat beneath the Laxton’s Superb apple tree, in the back garden of his grandma’s house. They had been intercepted by Florence on the way past the kitchen and she had given them an earthenware bowl and instructions to fill it with peas. Later on, Maisie would always associate the moment when she discovered Jack’s news with shucking the perfect little green spheres from their crisp pods.

‘What persuaded you, at last?’ she wanted to know. ‘Fred Nairn has been telling you to do it for years.’

‘Just because Fred’s an inspector already never meant that I had to go for a promotion, too,’ said Jack. ‘It was old William Dodd. He told me he could see himself as a younger man in me. I told him I was honoured to hear it. Then he said that he’d always regretted not making the move himself and that I would find it a breeze because I was “quicker on the uptake”.’

‘William always seems very happy in his lot.’

‘Appearances can be deceptive.’

‘I know. Anyway, what do you have to do?’

‘First up, there’s a residential course in Exeter.’

‘Why Exeter?’

Jack shrugged and told her: ‘It’s the first step and, I suppose, they have a training centre all the way down there.’ Maisie smiled, hearing Jack refer to the county town of Devon as if it was a world away from Chichester, the county town of West Sussex, rather than a mere hundred and forty miles of picturesque roads due west. ‘I’ve written down the address for you.’

He gave it to her and she put it in her handbag.

‘Is William really full of regret?’ she asked, not sure why the question bothered her.

‘He is.’

‘I’ve always thought of him as the most stolid and straightforward . . .’ Maisie stopped. ‘Actually, I’m reducing him to a “Dixon of Dock Green” cliché, aren’t I? But perhaps he has a difficult home life?’

‘Not exactly,’ said Jack. ‘But the village he lives in isn’t the easiest. It’s a kind of feudal throwback. He told me he was going to invite you to Bitling Fair. Did he do so? Will you go?’

‘He did and, yes, of course.’ Maisie pushed her thumb along the seam of another pod, decanting the fresh green peas into the earthenware bowl. ‘You’ll be away until . . . ?’

‘Till Sunday, if there’s a late train. Otherwise, Monday.’

‘And you won’t take up with some gorgeous West Country milkmaid while you’re there?’

‘Are there such things?’ Jack asked.

‘Oh, yes. Rosy-cheeked and generous-hearted.’

‘Well, I never did,’ said Jack and they both laughed at him using his grandma’s old-fashioned Sussex expression. ‘I’ll have to stay in touch with Fred because of an ongoing investigation around the antiques dealer, Montague Meek. I’m just telling you because there may be a connection to Bitling. Meanwhile, Maisie, you should perhaps try and avoid investigating another murder, don’t you think?’

Maisie frowned, not wanting him to make light of the series of extraordinary events she had – despite herself – been drawn into.

‘You know I don’t seek it out?’ she told him. ‘Trouble just seems to find me.’

‘I know, my darling.’

They kissed again, then went indoors to share their news properly with Jack’s Grandma Florence, Zoe, and Zoe’s guardian Phyl Pascal, starting with Jack’s decision at last to embark on the pathway to promotion, following that up with the engagement band and confirmation that Maisie and he were ‘betrothed’.

‘That’s such a beautiful ring,’ said Zoe, wistfully.

‘My own Jack gave it to me so many years ago I daren’t count,’ said Florence.

‘Get on with you, Grandma,’ said Jack. ‘You’re not so old.’

‘When did he die?’ asked Zoe with the brutal matter-of-
factness of youth.

‘That’s a sad story,’ said Florence. ‘We were promised to one another when I was just fourteen. Things were different then.’

‘When was that?’ Zoe insisted.

‘At the end of the war, in 1918. He was two years older and completing his Royal Naval training to become an able seaman. But, with the armistice, he was laid off and went into the merchant navy instead, with a company that traded with South America. Two years later he was signed up for a long voyage, more than six months, so we got ourselves wed and took a three-day honeymoon. We went to Lyme Regis on a charabanc. The road down into the town was that steep I thought the poor old bus would never climb out again.’

‘Then what?’ insisted Zoe.

‘Another time,’ said Florence. ‘This is Jack and Maisie’s day.’

‘I want to say that I’m very grateful,’ Maisie told her. ‘You’ve been a special friend to me, Florence, even when I was a foolish schoolgirl. Why was that?’

‘Because,’ said Jack’s grandma with a warm smile, ‘I always hoped this day would come. I don’t know why Jack’s been so slow about it.’

‘That was my fault—’ Maisie began.

‘No, it wasn’t,’ Jack interrupted. ‘Circumstances were against us.’

Maisie looked at Phyl, sitting very upright on a hard chair, and realised she was feeling excluded.

‘You being here makes it more special,’ she told her. ‘But let’s talk about other things. Do you have the planning permission for Bunting Manor to become a respite home?’

Phyl opened her mouth to reply, but Zoe didn’t let her.

‘No,’ said Zoe. ‘I want to know what happened next to Mrs Wingard.’

Florence put a lined and liver-spotted hand over Zoe’s youthful fingers. ‘He never came back, dear.’

‘Oh.’

‘Very sad I was.’

‘Your Jack died and you were left on your own to bring up Sergeant Wingard?’

‘Hang on,’ said Maisie, laughing. ‘How old do you think my fiancé is?’

Zoe frowned, doing some quick mental arithmetic: ‘Oh, no, that doesn’t work. There must have been another generation in between? Who was that?’

‘I had a daughter. I named her Pamela. Much later, she fell pregnant and Jack was born.’

‘Who did she marry? Where did she live?’ Zoe demanded.

‘She never married,’ said Florence very quietly. ‘But Maisie’s right. We can talk about all that another time, if you’re itching to know.’

‘Is it a sad story?’ asked Zoe, simply.

‘It is,’ said Florence, nodding.

There was a tiny pause, as if everyone was wondering about or remembering the ‘sad story’ of Jack’s mother Pamela, then Phyl spoke in a loud voice: ‘You may all be interested to know that I climbed down into my cellar this morning and liberated two bottles of champagne from 1952 for our celebration, as an apéritif.’ She left a pause. ‘You’re all supposed to say: “Fifty-two? That’s an excellent year.” Never mind. They’re in the Land Rover. Zoe, go and fetch them, will you?’

‘Of course.’

Zoe left and Phyl embarked on a clumsy apology for her ward’s inquisitiveness. Florence didn’t let her finish.

‘It’s natural for children to want to know things about where people come from and how they got to be who they are. They’re not sure who they’re going to be themselves and they mostly haven’t learned to separate curiosity from prying.’

‘Zoe means well,’ said Maisie.

‘Of course she does,’ agreed Florence.

‘So, is no one interested in engagement rings and promotions any more?’ asked Jack.

Zoe came back in and, over the next forty-five minutes, between the five of them, most of the twenty-year-old champagne was drunk. After everyone had drained a second glass, Florence saw a couple of inches left in the second dark-green bottle and told everyone that she would keep it ‘for gravy’.

‘That’s a noble vintage,’ said Phyl, ‘so, if you don’t mind, I’ll take it home and finish it in the kitchen at Bunting Manor. Now, it’s time to go. Dinner at the Dolphin and Anchor on me.’

They all bustled about, Florence putting on outdoor shoes and removing her apron, Maisie and Jack washing up the glasses and putting the bowl of fresh-shucked peas in the pantry on a cold shelf, next to the butter and cheese, by the wire-mesh window that opened onto fresh air on the north side of the bungalow. Maisie complimented Phyl on her new car and Phyl drove them with careless abandon into town, parking conveniently at the back of Woolworths. They were met at the front door of the Dolphin and Anchor by the hotel manager, a wiry man named Hume who always wore a dark-blue blazer that seemed to hang from his bony shoulders as if on a wire coat hanger.

‘Good evening, Mrs Pascal. How delightful to see you. Our best table is ready. And Sergeant Wingard. How are you, Sergeant?’

‘Very well, thank you, Mr Hume,’ said Jack.

The manager turned to Maisie. ‘And a little bird tells me congratulations are in order?’

Maisie didn’t know which gossipy passer-by had told Mr Hume of her and Jack’s engagement. In truth, she was uncomfortable that the news already seemed public property. It was another unfortunate repercussion of having been several times in the local newspaper, the Chichester Observer, as ‘bereaved sister’ and ‘brave young woman’ and ‘amateur sleuth’. All the same, she dutifully showed him her lovely ring and accepted his kind good wishes.

They sat down to dinner in the hotel restaurant, choosing from menus that had been Roneoed that afternoon, with a distinctive spirit smell and the ink smudged from a badly maintained machine. Zoe slipped away to put on her uniform because she was working and would serve their table rather than sit at it.

Jack had an appetite and ordered three courses, as did Phyl. Maisie and Florence watched them devour their melon and Parma ham starters, then joined them in a main course of beef carved from the bone at the table on a heated trolley. Zoe accomplished this feat of waiterly dexterity beautifully. They finished with profiteroles. Maisie couldn’t finish her portion and passed the remainder over to Jack.

‘Please, no,’ he told her. ‘I don’t want to be putting on weight. The training programme will keep me off the beat and behind a desk. I’m already worried about what you’ll say when I come home flabby and unfit.’

‘I don’t think that’s likely,’ said Maisie with a smile. It was true. Jack was naturally slim and strong. ‘And you could join me in my morning swims.’

‘Isn’t it very cold,’ said Phyl, ‘and don’t you come out smelling of chlorine?’

‘Yes and yes,’ said Maisie.

‘You’re lucky your hair is naturally curly,’ said Florence, ‘or it would undo your perm.’

Zoe was back at the table in her own clothes. ‘Mr Hume’s allowed me off early to celebrate the big day. You won’t have to wait around for me, Phyl.’

She pulled a chair over and sat down. Maisie saw that she had a letter in her hand, addressed ‘care of the Dolphin and Anchor Hotel’ in the distinctive handwriting

taught in all French schools.

‘Is that from Adélaïde?’ asked Maisie.

‘I don’t know. It’s for you,’ said Zoe.

Feeling rather self-conscious, Maisie opened the envelope, learning that Adélaïde Amour, star of screen and stage and a central figure in the murder investigation at Chichester Festival Theatre, was now employed – to Adélaïde’s very great satisfaction – in a new theatrical production in Paris. She told Maisie that her appearance on the Chichester stage had boosted her career, making her ‘much less likely to be cast as a mere clothes horse’. Adélaïde asked – demanded, almost – that Maisie come to Paris ‘to look after me as you did in Chichester and I promise there will be no murder’.

Once more, Maisie felt that making light of the series of crimes she had been involved in was an error – a way of tempting fate. But she hid her disquiet, translated the letter for her companions, putting it in Phyl’s hand because she was capable of reading it for herself.

‘Do you want to go?’ asked Jack, apparently lightly, but with concern in his eyes.

‘No, Jack. I’m with you, now, forever, whether you want me or not.’

‘Maisie, you are all that I want.’

Zoe finished Maisie’s profiteroles, pronouncing them ‘not bad, but too much sugar in the cream’. Phyl paid and they went outside into a still-pleasant evening, the street lamps only just coming on, the sky still light.

‘It’s nearly midsummer,’ said Maisie.

‘Bitling Fair,’ said Phyl.

‘That’s a coincidence,’ said Maisie. ‘William Dodd was talking about it earlier this afternoon. He’s invited me to lunch and to see what’s what.’

‘Bitling is an unhappy place,’ said Phyl. ‘I have land and other responsibilities over that way.’

‘Then let’s not talk about it,’ said Jack. ‘Today is a celebration.’

The three other women said they would wait by the Land Rover, round the corner by the back door of Woolworths, leaving Maisie and Jack to say goodbye to one another alone.

‘We’ll just have a turn round the cathedral cloister,’ Maisie told them.

She and Jack walked hand in hand through the nine-
hundred-year-old stone passageways. Maisie didn’t speak and she thought Jack was remaining silent in deference to her mood.

‘I couldn’t be happier,’ she finally told him. ‘No, not happy, content.’

‘I agree. You make me happy every time I see you, but happiness lasts only as long as you are by my side. Now we’re “promised”,’ he said and Maisie could hear the smile in his voice as he used another of his grandma’s expressions, ‘I feel contentment, too, and that’s a longer-lasting thing.’

They retraced their steps, pausing beneath the trees that shadowed the eastern end of the cathedral green to embrace, then he left her to make his way to the police station at the southern end of the town, by the canal, where he was on night duty. Maisie went to find the others.

They went via Parklands Road to drop off Florence, then Phyl drove erratically out into the darkening countryside, through Framlington where Maisie’s brother Stephen had been killed, then the right turn just after the pub, the Fox-
in-Flight, and into the narrow, winding lanes of the Downs to the village of Bunting, the site of Maisie’s second adventure in crime.

They drove with the windows open, smelling the sweet air, feeling a touch of dew on their cheeks. As

usual, Phyl drove too fast, but it was a relief not to hear the crunching of gears and sudden lurches of speed Maisie had become unhappily used to in the previous unreliable Land Rover.

Just before Bunting village green, Phyl swung sharply onto her gravel drive. Maisie heard small stones sent flying by the wheels into the waxy leaves of the rhododendrons. Then Phyl slowed as the ugly-but-impressive Jacobean manor house emerged from the trees, giving Maisie her usual smiling delight.

‘I’m glad you decided to leave that awful hotel and stay with us again,’ said Phyl.

‘I am, too,’ said Maisie.

‘Can I practise driving tomorrow, please, Phyl?’ asked Zoe.

‘Yes. Of course. We’ll stay on the tracks round the manor.’

‘Not on the roads?’ asked Maisie.

‘I’m too young,’ said Zoe in a sulky voice. ‘And when I’m seventeen there’ll be a huge backlog for licences.’

They all got out and went round the side, through the kitchen garden to the back door. Phyl opened it without unlocking.

‘Can’t find the keys?’ asked Maisie, lightly.

‘No one locks up round here,’ said Phyl. ‘You know that. And, since you fixed everything with your brilliant sleuthing, there’s no need.’

Maisie sighed audibly so that Phyl knew she didn’t agree, but said nothing.

‘I’m on late again tomorrow,’ said Zoe. ‘I’m going to bed and I’m going to sleep in. I probably won’t see you till lunchtime. Goodnight.’

Maisie and Phyl sat down at the untidy wooden table in the stone-flagged kitchen with its rudimentary Calor-gas stove and battered fridge, so out of keeping with the magnificence of the rest of Bunting Manor.

Phyl poured the last two measures of champagne from the unfinished bottle into glass tumblers. ‘I have a bit of a scratchy throat. I hope it’s nothing serious. I’m expected at Bitling Fair.’ She sipped the excellent vintage. ‘No regrets?’ she asked.

‘About what?’

‘Turning Adélaïde down. That would be quite the adventure and you’d be back in Paris.’

‘But away from Jack.’

‘He’ll not be as available in any case. It seems to me the promotion path he’s about to embark upon will keep the two of you apart. He might end up in Liverpool or Carlisle.’

‘Exeter for the time being, though,’ Maisie replied. ‘But, yes, what you say is true.’

‘And you’re free, now. There are no more trials to attend or statements to give.’ Phyl drained her glass. ‘You know I’m not telling you to go? But I do want you to take any opportunities life offers you.’

‘I know, Phyl. That’s what Mum and Dad would have said, too.’

There was a pause as – Maisie hoped – both of them thought about her parents, Irene and Eric, with affection and regret, but without rancour or recrimination. The family wounds Maisie had uncovered during the investigation into the murder at Bunting Manor were, she thought, no longer raw.

‘I was so glad when Charity told me you had accepted my little donation, at last,’ said Phyl.

‘A hundred pounds is a tidy sum, Phyl. And I was paid the same from Chichester Theatre for looking after Adélaïde so I’m in funds and was able to send my flatmate in Paris some money for bills.’

‘What will you do about that in the long term?’

‘Sophie has a friend at the temping agency who needs my room.’

‘What about all your things?’

‘Sophie will pack them up nicely and put them under the bed or something. I don’t have

 much.’ Maisie frowned. ‘I never have had much. It’s as if I’ve always known I might not be staying, wherever I was.’

‘It’s the training you got in the Women’s Royal Army Corps – a few essential bits and pieces and nothing extraneous, no more than you can carry on a day’s march.’

‘Perhaps you’re right,’ said Maisie, quietly.

‘I’m sorry. Have I made you think about Stephen?’

‘He would have been my best man.’

‘It’s the groom who has a best man, not the bride.’

‘Well, I would have had a best man whatever anybody said,’ Maisie insisted with a smile. ‘And it would have been my wastrel brother.’

There was another brief silence. Maisie let it stretch out. She wondered if Phyl was building up to another apology for how she had behaved when Maisie had been a tiny child. Maisie hoped not. It was all so long ago. What could it possibly matter?

Then she thought about Jack, no doubt busy with overnight business at the police station, drunks or break-ins or traffic violations. Nothing serious.

Nothing like murder.

 

Three

The walled Roman city of Chichester – Noviomagus Reginorum – was home to all the usual shops associated with everyday commerce in 1972 in a market town in provincial England. There was a Woolworths, of course, and a Boots the Chemist, a Marks and Spencer’s, a city-centre Tesco and its rival, Sainsbury’s. There were three butchers’ shops, all independent, one of which specialised in pork, the other two generalists. The newsagents – of which there were five – all made more money selling tobacco products than keeping the public informed of events outside of their control at home and abroad. Chitty’s Cycles was one of a number of specialist outlets where craft skills or design experience were sold, as well as objects that the proprietors had bought cheap in order to sell dear. In the same arena were the furniture store, the soft- furnishings specialist, two countryside outfitters, Moss Bros where suits and shirts could be bought or hired, nine or ten ladies’ clothiers with interchangeable garments in bright tones and loud patterns. For youngsters, there were two toyshops, one at the top of North Street and the other at the bottom of South Street – one the first floor of the outdoor sports specialist – as if they had signed some kind of non-aggression pact.

In addition to all these charming and practical concerns – which drew visitors to the cathedral city from thirty and even fifty miles round about – there were two auction houses that faced one another behind the Granada cinema, across the small gap of tarmac known as Baffins Lane. On the east side was Stride’s and on the west side was Meek’s.

Montague Meek was a smallish man who wore tweed three-piece suits as if it was expected of him, rather than because he liked them. Certainly, he was never to be seen out in inclement weather where the warm, water-resistant weave might prove useful. He was much more at home indoors, perusing sale-room catalogues of second-hand goods – antiques, ephemera and genuine tat – which he ordered by post from his competitors in other picturesque cities: Arundel, Wickham, Salisbury, even Dorchester. In that way, he kept on top of the evolution of prices and could, with confidence, make offers to his distressed clients that undercut the price at which he would later sell their treasures.

Montague Meek had no conscience. He knew that, very often, he was relieving people of possessions of enormous sentimental value that they would rather have ‘kept in the family’. But they were driven by taxation and inflation to sell up ‘Mother’s engagement ring’ and ‘Grandfather’s fob watch’ and ‘Uncle’s Toby mug’. If challenged, Montague would always remind his challenger that, if not him, then somebody else would profit from their desperate need.

On this particular evening, Montague was working late. He wouldn’t be up all night, as Jack Wingard would. His wasn’t a night shift. He simply enjoyed his premises when no one else was present, not even his loaf-haired secretary.

In the lobby, just inside the draughty front door, he turned on his secretary’s desk lamp – a brass one with an old-fashioned dark-green glass shade, such as one saw used by accountants in Hollywood films. Having done so, he looked through the papers on her desk and opened her drawers, seeking titbits of personal knowledge. There was very little beyond a shopping list and an unfinished letter of unparalleled dreariness to a sister in Stoke that, Montague assumed, she would finish the next day at lunchtime as she ate a cheese roll and a slab of bread pudding from the baker in the Butter Market.

Done with prying into his secretary’s private affairs, Montague made a circuit of his auction room in which a phantasmagorical array of diverse valuables was laid out for inspection by dealers and the general public. He would earn a percentage on

every object sold. It was in his interest that each item should go for the highest possible price but, at this point, that was largely out of his control. There was nothing of special interest.

He went to sit at his desk in the office beyond the lobby. There were six or seven letters that needed replies, three of them asking why certain accounts had not been settled. There was no good reason, except that Montague liked to see his clients’ money sitting in his own bank account and would delay its egress sometimes until the threat of legal repercussions forced his hand.

More interesting than these letters was a brown-paper package from Baffins with a gummed slip carrying Lady Catherine Peahorn’s embossed address. He had recently visited the big house that overlooked the feudal village of Bitling, in company with Maurice Ryan, the solicitor, who acted on her ladyship’s behalf. For some reason, it seemed, Lady Catherine wanted an inventory of all the valuables distributed about her gloomy dwelling. Montague had pressed her for a motive. None had been forthcoming.

Had Montague been someone endowed with a conscience, Lady Catherine’s request would have caused him moral disquiet. An assiduous member of the cathedral congregation, he was worried not for his mortal soul, but for his reputation. He had endured a very sticky moment three years earlier. His clever plan to sell, on the black market, goods for which he had already claimed theft insurance had been on the point of backfiring. Luckily, he had been able to manoeuvre Arthur Tate – a man of suitably meagre moral fibre – into carrying the can alone. Now, Arthur Tate was out of prison and, perhaps, no longer quite so pliable. Time would tell.

Could there be a link between a petty criminal’s recent release and Lady Catherine’s abrupt request?

Montague sat down, holding the postal package in his hands. It was about the size of two packs of cards and, probably, the same weight. It was marked urgent in a spidery hand.

Is it possible that Lady Catherine has come to doubt the provenance of a jewellery box or a set of silver-backed hairbrushes?

The parcel was sealed with Sellotape – a modern product for which Montague had no affection. He would have preferred it tied with twine, as all parcels used to be in his youth. He had to root about for scissors sharp enough to open it. Finally, once the package had revealed its contents, he smiled in surprise, unfolding the note that accompanied the contents.

With thanks, in advance, for your forthcoming kind visit.

It was, in every way, unexpected.

Still, it would be foolish, he thought to himself, to look a gift horse in the mouth.

In this, he was wrong. Within less than a quarter of an hour, he was dead.

 

Four

The next lovely June morning, in Bunting, Phyl felt under the weather – ‘just a summer cold’, she said, though it seemed much worse – so it was Maisie who accompanied Zoe, driving the Land Rover over rutted farm tracks, clinging to the passenger seat as the young woman bounced her way from pothole to verge.

‘I’m getting good,’ said Zoe.

‘You don’t lack confidence,’ replied Maisie, judiciously.

‘Can we go on proper roads, if you’re finding it bumpy?’

‘Not without your licence.’

‘But nothing will happen.’

Maisie shook her head. ‘Except it might.’

Zoe drove a little more carefully on the way back home, parking sedately at the foot of the steps to the impressive front door of Bunting Manor, then ran in to change. Maisie slid across, preparing to drive into Chichester by making an efficient three-point turn, almost meeting Archie Close, Phyl’s farm manager, nose to nose with his tractor on the drive. She got out and he got down.

‘How are you, Archie?’

‘Too much to do but the days are long and most of it’ll get done.’

‘I understand from Phyl that you’ve got old Harold Farr to give a hand? That’s very kind.’

‘For what he’s worth,’ said Archie.

‘Where’s he working?’

‘On the turkeys.’

‘Turkeys?’ asked Maisie.

‘Mrs Pascal’s got a turkey shed over Bitling way. I’d have thought you’d know that by now.’

‘Turkeys for food?’

‘Not for pets, Miss Maisie.’

‘I’d like to see them. Are they out of doors?’

‘No, they grow up in the barn.’

‘Oh,’ said Maisie, disappointed. That was much less enticing. ‘So you’re not glad to have Harold as a spare pair of hands? It’s true he doesn’t have a very good reputation.’

‘No, but that’s where ’tis,’ said Archie, using the characteristic non-committal Sussex expression for not knowing how things will turn out, accepting that fate would take a hand. ‘Good labour is always in short supply. Harry’s what we’ve got.’

Zoe came skipping down the steps in a clean top – having applied eyeliner and a pale lipstick – with a five-pound note and a brief shopping list from Phyl. They set off, through the pleasant country lanes and villages, past brick-and-flint cottages warmed by the sun. In Chichester, Maisie dropped Zoe at the back of Woolworths, getting out as well. Zoe asked when Maisie would next see Jack.

‘He’ll be at home in bed now, after the night shift.’

‘Oh, yes, of course. And you don’t mind coming to pick me up later?’

‘No, I’m going to see him at teatime before he gets his train. Then I’ll sit with Florence until you finish or, perhaps, we’ll go to the pictures.’

Maisie locked the Land Rover and did her shopping at Boots the Chemist, Good’s the haberdasher, Fourboy’s the newsagent and Bancroft’s the bakery. She put her shopping in the back, then walked along West Street, past the post office and the Morant’s department store, to the solicitor’s office. Charity was behind her desk, wearing a tangerine twinset, signing and folding letters to slip into Maurice Ryan’s monogrammed envelopes.

‘What’s this?’ asked Maisie.

‘Maurice likes to send all his contacts a midsummer greeting.’

‘But you’re signing them?’

‘Don’t tell anyone,’ said Charity with a wink.

‘I suppose it makes a change from Christmas and new year,’ said Maisie, lending a hand. ‘Any post for me?’

Maisie had given her Paris contacts the solicitor’s office as a poste restante.

‘Nothing new,’ said Charity.

For as long as it took to sign and fold the letters and stuff all the envelopes, Maisie and Charity chatted in French, mostly about how well Charity thought Maisie was

looking.

‘Is it really swimming that does that or is it also essential for a person to fall in love?’

‘Come swimming with me,’ Maisie suggested. ‘Eight o’clock they open.’

‘Peut-être,’ said Charity. Perhaps.

They bid one another goodbye and Maisie emerged into the street just as the Prebendal choir came marching along two by two in tiny red cassocks, on their way to rehearse in the cathedral. Despite the charming prospect of listening to their sweet treble voices raised in song, Maisie didn’t follow them inside. In truth, she didn’t know quite what she wanted to do.

The end of the last trial had taken her by surprise, the closing remarks needing less time than the court usher had predicted, the judgement of the jury being handed down after only twenty minutes of deliberation and absence from the courtroom. All the time the hearings had detained her in Chichester, Maisie hadn’t needed to imagine a future for herself beyond the bottleneck of the court action. She now felt – though she didn’t like to admit it, even to
herself – unprepared for her new life. Jack’s imminent absence would only exacerbate the problem.

She walked back past the Market Cross into East Street to the Granada cinema – previously the Corn Exchange – where she learned that there was a showing that evening of an adaptation of the Robert Louis Stevenson adventure novel Kidnapped, set in the Jacobite rebellion in eighteenth-century Scotland, starring Michael Caine and Trevor Howard, both actors Maisie admired. She filed the information away, intending to suggest it to Florence later on. From there, she went down the side street, Baffins Lane, to take a look at the premises of the antiques dealer Jack had mentioned: Montague Meek. The door was locked and the windows dark – odd for a working day.

Feeling herself observed, she noticed a policeman in his dark-blue uniform in a doorway on the opposite side of the street. She boldly crossed the road and said: ‘My name is Maisie Cooper. I’m afraid I don’t recognise you, though I’ve worked with the police myself several times.’

‘I’ve been drafted in from Brighton to help out.’

‘Can you tell me why Meek’s Auction Rooms are locked up and dark?’

‘Not without proper authority.’

‘But it is police business?’

‘I shouldn’t say,’ he told her, looking pained.

‘No, of course,’ she told him. She tried another tack. ‘Who is in charge of investigating his suspicious death?’

‘Inspector Nairn, miss,’ said the constable, then he frowned and told her: ‘But you didn’t hear it from me.’

Feeling guilty for tricking the truth out of the tired police officer, Maisie realised it was lunchtime and she hadn’t eaten. She was lucky to find a table in the St Martin’s Tea Rooms in another side street where she was served Welsh rarebit with Worcester sauce and a side of drooping salad leaves. Emerging unsatisfied but full, she decided to drive back to Bunting via Bitling. Jack’s remarks about William Dodd had piqued her interest, as had Archie’s comments about Phyl’s turkeys. She wanted to understand how it was that such an extraordinary ‘feudal throwback’ could still exist in 1972.

The drive out of town was slow because of farm vehicles on the roads, harvesting and moving early crops: new potatoes, strawberries, overwintered onions, broad beans, asparagus. But it was only three or four miles.

Taking into account the new ‘development’ on the west side of the road, Bitling was almost a town, certainly

bigger than Framlington or Bunting. At the entrance to the village she saw a hand-painted sign: Turkeys. She indicated and turned off into a deep lane bordered with overgrown hazel hedges where she had to slow to walking pace for fear of meeting something coming the other way. When the gateway appeared on the right-hand side it didn’t take her by surprise because, through her open window, she could already smell the ammonia in the air from the birds’ waste.

Why is it so strong, though?

She turned in, over a cattle grid, finding the yard deserted. An old harrow stood unused and rusting to one side. Beyond it was a barn about thirty paces long, clad in overlapping timbers, looking quite rustic and pleasant. But the sound from within was anything but, the voices of many birds raised in frustrated complaint, thankfully muffled by the walls.

Maisie got out and listened for human activity. She heard scraping from behind the barn and followed the sound, passing a lower, smaller building made of modern materials, a steel frame and aluminium siding, without windows. She had an idea that must be the slaughterhouse.

The noise turned out to be the work of two men, one youngish and unknown to her, the other very thin and elderly – Harold Farr. The young man was shovelling turkey mess out of a wheelbarrow, with a handkerchief knotted around his face, presumably to lessen the stink. The older man was working with one hand, pinching his nostrils shut with the other, using a rake to spread the turkey guano across the concrete.

Neither noticed her presence, so she slipped away, leaving the Land Rover in the yard, taking a bridleway across the opposite field in the direction of a clock, visible in the V-shaped eaves of a chapel roof, over the hedges.

She came out through a kissing gate onto a road that ran parallel to the lane to the turkey barn. The chapel was opposite, a few feet above the level of the road, with several stone steps up to the door, either side of which was a lovely rose bush in a planter. To the north of the chapel was a hill surmounted by a lonely house and an even lonelier tree, covered with white blossom.

Maisie explored the village, finding a public house with a peeling sign that depicted a horn-shaped wicker basket full to overflowing with what looked like some kind of grain. It reminded her of classical paintings of the cornucopia, the horn of plenty, but it was hard to see clearly because of its poor condition. Then she connected it with another sign displayed over the front door in green paint: The Silver Garter – Property of the Peahorn Estate. She smiled. The dark grains were, in fact, peas. Then she frowned.

Shouldn’t the sign show a silver garter, not the landowner’s emblem?

Maisie took in the adjacent buildings: a vet’s surgery and country-goods store; a butcher’s shop with the name Sparkes above the window; uneven houses down either side of the road; the chapel with the high V-shaped eaves and clock. All the woodwork was painted the same green.

To mark the feudal possession.

Maisie enjoyed looking at bits and pieces of country ware, so she pushed open the door of the vet’s, making a bell ring enthusiastically on a metal spring. A pleasant-looking man was stacking a pyramid of tins of Friskies dog food next to a pile of carboard boxes of Bonio biscuits. The image on the packaging told her that Bonios were bone-shaped.

‘Good afternoon, can I help you?’

‘Just having a look round. Is that all right?’

‘Yes, please do. Call me if you need anything.’

She browsed some excellent labouring clothes, thick and warm and hard-wearing, and a display of expensive riding boots, both short and long. On a high shelf were hard hats for horse riding in brown and black and, beneath on hooks, were bridles and other leather tack, all of it soft to the touch and slightly shiny with saddle soap. Near the front window were three hessian sacks of feed: cob nuts, pony oats, dry mash that needed to be soaked before ‘serving’.

The shop, of course, smelled delicious, reminding Maisie of the stables in Framlington and of the grey stallion that Stephen’s neighbour Nigel Bacon had kept there – though Nigel

had been too frightened to ride the muscular animal. It was groomed and exercised by Bert Close, brother of Phyl’s Archie. Maisie had taken it out twice and, the second time, it wasn’t too much to say that it had saved her life.

Of course, the stallion had only been able to save her because she was a fine horsewoman herself with, as Bert Close had told her, ‘an excellent seat’. In the army, Maisie had ridden more or less every week, including competitively in the inter-regimental pentathlon events sponsored by the Women’s Royal Army Corps, though she had never competed seriously, unlike Stephen, who had been to the Melbourne Olympics in 1956.

Without breaking off from what he was doing, the vet began chatting to her, beginning with ‘the marvellous weather’, then asking if she was new to the village. When she admitted she was staying nearby, he didn’t pry, but told her about his own business. She assumed his shop served as an antechamber for an antiseptic treatment room at the back.

‘My preferred work is with larger farm animals. You know, out of doors, on the properties round about, though I enjoy treating domestic pets and I’m always keen to help out when I can.’

Maisie thought there was a slight shadow of weariness or disappointment in that statement, but she was pleased to make the vet’s acquaintance. He seemed a charming man, dressed as if for a day at the beach in a cheesecloth shirt and sagging cotton shorts with sockless sandals on his feet. She was about to introduce herself – though she knew it would be risking an inquisitive glance if he recognised her name from the Chichester Observer – when a wiry middle-aged woman came in wearing slippers and a grubby pink housecoat, carrying a basket covered by a tartan blanket. She placed it gingerly on the counter and said: ‘I don’t know what’s wrong, Mr Quinn, but you’ve got to help. She’s all somehow.’

‘Let’s take a peek, shall we?’ said the vet, springing up from his pyramid of tins of Friskies, leaving one to roll away across the polished floorboards. ‘I don’t expect it’s anything to worry about.’

Maisie picked up the escaped tin and balanced it on top of the others. She approached the counter. Mr Quinn vet lifted the blanket from the basket revealing a tabby cat that did, indeed, look very down in the mouth, curled round itself as if trying to appear as small as felinely possible. When he gently lifted it out, the cat barely acknowledged his presence.

‘Perhaps I’d better take her through,’ he said.

The vet gently carried the tabby away through a swing door, reminding Maisie of the one that led from the restaurant to the kitchen at the Dolphin and Anchor.

‘I’m sure she’ll be all right,’ she told the unhappy, worried woman, wanting to be supportive. The poor thing looked frail herself. ‘Have you had her long?’

‘She came in from the back garden one day just after New Year. I think someone gave her as a Christmas present, perhaps for a child who had promised to look after it but then they didn’t, so the parents took her off, far away from where they lived, and left her at the side of the road.’

‘How awful.’

‘Hoping she’d be run over and that would be an end of it.’

‘Oh dear. Do you know that actually happened?’

‘I can’t say for certain. It’s just the time of year makes me think it – or made me think it, back when it happened. Of course,’ she added, lowering her voice as if about to utter something risqué or slanderous, ‘that was when people started moving into the new development over at West Bitling, so it could have been one of them.’

She stopped, as if nothing more needed to be said. Maisie kept her face neutral. She didn’t want to argue

argue with the poor woman, worried as she was for her tiny tabby – a cat that she had taken in out of the goodness of her heart – but Maisie hated when people were distrustful of strangers without any good reason. She asked, rather weakly, she thought: ‘Have you got to know any of the West Bitling people since? Do they come to church or will they take part in the fair?’

‘Some of them,’ said the little grey woman, grudgingly.

‘And your cat is very dear to you?’

‘Oh, yes. I don’t know what I’d do without her. I’ve got nobody left, you see?’

‘Your relatives are all deceased?’

‘Dead or in prison,’ she replied.

The door swung open and the vet came back through, his hands behind his back, looking like a severe headmaster about to give a naughty pupil a formal telling-off.

‘I gave her an emetic to make her sick,’ he said, a serious expression on his face. ‘Can you think why?’

‘No, Mr Quinn, I can’t.’

‘You know I can smell that delicious bacon you had from Bill Dodd for your lunch on your clothes?’

‘Why shouldn’t I have a nice bit of bacon?’

Mr Quinn laughed. It was a lovely, warm sound. It almost reminded Maisie of Jack.

‘I’m not saying you shouldn’t. I’m telling you that you shouldn’t give the rinds of your rashers to a tiny little tabby cat that doesn’t have the stomach for them and doesn’t know what’s good for herself.’

‘Who says I did?’

Maisie realised why the vet had his hands behind his back. Like a conjuror, he showed them a kidney-shaped stainless-
steel dish in which two stringy rinds of bacon rasher lay curled, like sinewy worms.

‘I rinsed them off before bringing them through so don’t worry. Really, Miss Strickland, there isn’t any point me giving you good advice if you aren’t going to take it, is there?’

‘Did you say “Strickland”? Are you related to—’

Maisie stopped and there was a pause. She glanced from one to the other. Miss Strickland looked guilty about her cat and Mr Quinn indulgent. But neither of those things interested her right now.

‘Yes, my brother, good-for-nothing though he is. How do you know him? Is it because you read about him in the paper?’

‘No,’ said Maisie, not wishing to get any deeper into what was clearly an unhappy family situation – and intimately connected to her own. ‘I just know the name because I’m local.’

Miss Strickland – clearly an unmarried spinster – gave her a sharp look; then her eyes widened.

‘No, but it’s you, though, isn’t it? You’re the one who solved the murder at Church Lodge.’

Maisie’s heart sank. She’d wanted to glide through Bitling unannounced and unrecognised, and it was her fault she’d given herself away.

‘I had much less to do with any of that than the paper made out.’

‘That’s not what I heard from Archie and Bert Close,’ said Miss Strickland. ‘So, it’s your fault about my brother.’

‘I can’t be held responsible for other people’s actions.’

‘No, you can’t, and I’m not saying he hasn’t got what he deserves.’ She turned back to the vet. ‘Anyway, Mr Quinn, I don’t expect you’re going to charge me for a drop of 

medicine and five minutes of your time, are you?’

‘I’ve a good mind to charge you for not following medical advice,’ he told her, feigning severity. ‘But no, it’s on the house. Come back at the end of the afternoon and I’m sure she’ll be right as rain.’

‘Thank you, Mr Quinn.’

With a furtive look at Maisie and a sly smile of triumph over the vet, Miss Strickland left the shop, the bell on the door sending her jauntily on her way.

‘I recognised you, too, of course,’ said Mr Quinn. ‘But I didn’t like to say. I’ve met her brother – an awful man.’

‘Yes,’ said Maisie, feeling trapped, both by the abruptly personal nature of the conversation and by her memories. ‘Least said soonest mended.’

‘You’re very photogenic, by the way, even in poor-quality newsprint, though you are much more beautiful in real life.’

As he said this, he lowered his eyes to a cash book on the counter, turning the pages, she thought, in order not to appear too forward, despite his compliment.

‘I’m sorry to have interrupted your pyramid-building,’ said Maisie. ‘It’s been a pleasure to meet you.’

‘Will you come back to Bitling any time soon, Miss Cooper?’ asked Mr Quinn quickly, his eyes still on his accounts. ‘My first name is Vaughan, by the way. You might enjoy the fair, you know, our “midsummer madness”.’

‘Perhaps I will,’ she said lightly. ‘Goodbye.’

She went outside, carefully closing the door behind her, wondering what it was that had been said or done that had caused the hairs on the back of her neck to bristle. ...