The Last Supper

Book 0: Prudence Bulstrode

by Rosemary Shrager

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Female Sleuths; Mystery; Thrillers

Synopsis

When an old television rival, Deirdre Shaw, is found dead at the Cotswolds manor house where she was catering for a prestigious shooting weekend, Prudence is asked to step into the breach. Prudence is only too happy to take up the position and soon she is working in the kitchens of Farleigh Manor. But Farleigh Manor is the home to secrets, both old and new. The site of a famous unsolved murder from the 19th century, it has never quite shaken off its sensationalist past. But the more she scratches beneath the surface, the more Prudence becomes certain that Deirdre Shaw's death was no accident. She's staring in the face of a very modern murder. . .

Release date: February 24, 2022

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 80000

Sample

The Chelwood Ghyll Harvest Fayre was the most important date in the autumn calendar – and not only for the residents of the little village of Chelwood Ghyll. For the Very Green Gardeners’ Circle of nearby Godshill it was the society event of the season; for the Allotment Association of Rockbourne Abbey, it was the year’s star attraction; for the various rivals of the Langley Marsh Vegetable League it was the chance to win victories that could be savoured all through the long year. For one week in October, villagers from across the regions flocked into the old equestrian centre outside of Chelwood Ghyll and filled it with stalls, tents and tables where they proudly showed off the various pumpkins, marrows, turnips and parsnips from their autumn gardens. There were cakes built in staggering tiers, beetroots stacked in a wild variety of rich, deep colours, kegs of cloudy apple cider made from the local orchards, and so much more besides. But the biggest prize of all, the prize for which every kitchen gardener and allotment enthusiast hungered, was the Chelwood Cup, awarded each year to the fayre’s biggest pumpkin.

And each year, the prize was awarded by none other than Prudence Bulstrode herself.

The Chelwood Ghyll Harvest Association hadn’t been able to believe their luck when Prudence Bulstrode strode into their lives. The idea that Prudence Bulstrode – who, for years, the villagers had watched weekly on the BBC, leading them through wholesome family recipes in her succession of starry television shows – might be moving to their village had caused something of a stir. Of course, it was widely known that Prudence’s daughter and her family lived in the neighbouring village of Netley Pike – the Kitchen Garden Crowd there always put up a fierce display at the Harvest Fayre – but, even so, the idea of a celebrity in their own sleepy village felt like a shooting star touching down on the village green. Prudence, it was said, was leaving the starry world of television cookery behind for a simpler life. She was done with parties and award shows, done with the glamorous book launches and exhibitions that had so far characterised her life. But, the Chelwood Ghyll Harvest Association wagered, she wouldn’t be able to resist partaking in country life. She might have turned her back on the money and fame that London had given her for so many years, but she surely couldn’t have turned her back on the passions that had first driven her into that life – the passion for food, for recipes from near and far away, and the passion for sharing that knowledge with the world. Yes, Prudence Bulstrode would be quite an addition to the festivals and fayres Chelwood Ghyll was proud to host each season – and so she had turned out to be.

There she was now, surrounded in a half-moon by hundreds of excited villagers. She was standing on a decking area in the shelter of the Harvest Fayre’s biggest marquee, about to show them all how to make her famous, iconic raspberry roulade.

Prudence Bulstrode was a magnificent woman. Practically perfect in every way, her husband used to say (diligently pretending that he hadn’t stolen the line from an old copy of Mary Poppins). At sixty-five years old, she had the appearance of somebody fifteen years younger, with the same round cherubic features she’d had since being a girl, her face always adorned with the same pair of glitzy, aquamarine spectacles that had become her signature look in the days she used to grace the television screen. Her dress was as flamboyant a design as she’d worn on her most outlandish television show – Prudence’s Voyages, which took her as far away as Indonesia and Azerbaijan, looking for interesting flavours – and her wrists and neckline were adorned with strings of bright plastic beads, which she had always counted her favourite jewellery.

The members of the Chelwood Ghyll Harvest Association had been right. Prudence had grown tired of the London circuit, but a little step back into the limelight, on occasions like this, could work wonders for the soul. She adjusted her spectacles, looked out at the crowd, and felt that old, familiar frisson of expectation and excitement rippling through her. The ingredients laid out before her, the sparkle of light off an electric whisk, the young enthusiasts in the front row, poised with their pencil tips over their notebooks – all of it made her remember why she’d first set foot in the world of cookery.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ she began, ‘let me take you into my kitchen!’

The crowd cheered and laughed. Those were the very words with which she used to introduce her most famous series, Prudence’s Home Bakes. She still liked to roll them out on occasion. It gave her – and, more importantly, her audience – a thrill.

‘Later today, I’ll have the honour – third year running! – of judging all of your fabulous pumpkins, turnips, beetroot … and, this year, even a marvellous collection of rutabaga from a secret garden in Netley Pike. Naughty Mr Arkwright over there managed to keep that a secret all year long! But right now, well, let’s get down to business, shall we? This recipe, as some of you already know – indeed, most of you, I suspect, since I see so many familiar faces here – has been my loyal and trustworthy companion in life. In fact, my relationship with this recipe lasted longer than my marriage to my dear departed Nicholas – and may God rest his soul in peace. It was this recipe, as I recount at almost every after-dinner speech I’ve ever given, that first took me on to the television screens to begin a new, whirlwind life. Forty years ago, I was demonstrating this recipe at a little fair in Southend-on-Sea, when a producer happened across me and said: “Darling, I think I like the look of your face.” ’ Prudence grinned; she was used to telling this legend, and it had, of course, been embellished across the years – but she didn’t have to embellish the words or tone of that television producer, because he’d always been as camp as Christmas, and Prudence loved him for it. ‘Now, I can’t promise that this recipe will change your life like it changed mine. But it’s simple and beautiful and, if you get it right, you’ll never be in want of a quick, easy dessert again. Ladies and gentlemen, my … raspberry roulade!’

White fluffy cake, raspberries rendered until they were almost becoming a fresh coulis, a layer of pure crystalline meringue (which was Prudence’s signature) and more whipped cream than a saintly man could contend with – what wasn’t to like about a recipe as easy and indulgent as this?

Prudence was cracking the first eggs into her mixing bowl with one hand and dazzling her faithful whisk with the other when everything changed.

From somewhere beyond the crowd of faces eagerly watching her, there came the guttering roar of an engine. Prudence looked up, eggs and whisk still in hand, just in time to hear the first scream. Suddenly, the crowd was no longer watching her. Suddenly it was scissoring apart – and there, rumbling through the gap they’d left behind (with, mercifully, nobody getting hurt), came a camper van.

It was a brightly coloured camper van, the colour of a peach with cyan window frames and bedecked in floral bunting as if it had rolled directly out of the Woodstock festival in 1969. The engines, which had fired so suddenly, died away just as quickly – but, by now, the camper was already rolling unstoppably forward, pointed straight at Prudence herself. Caught in its headlights – there was a fault in the electrics and, so long as the engine was running, they never turned off – Prudence brandished her whisk. It was all that she had.

She looked up. People were shouting her name, telling her to run – but she could not take her eyes off the camper van. It was the strangest thing.

There was nobody at the wheel.

At the last moment, some hidden camber in the ground turned the camper’s front wheels. Arcing past Prudence, it ploughed on parallel to the stage, picking up speed as it rolled down the hill toward the equestrian centre itself. The crowd, now that they were in no immediate danger, turned as one to watch the camper van go. Twice more its wheels hit some bump in the earth and turned; twice more, the camper van careened at some wild, unstoppable angle on its uncharted journey to the bottom of the hill …

… where it crashed directly into the stalls where all of the fayre’s pumpkins, turnips, squashes (and rutabaga) were waiting to be judged.

Mrs Moriarty, who had been running the Chelwood Ghyll Harvest Fayre tombola for sixty-four of her seventy-six years, had narrowly avoided being flattened by the camper van – but she had not narrowly avoided being splattered with the remains of a dozen prize marrows. Now she stood there, dripping with the marrow innards, with a look on her face plucked directly out of a 1970s folk-horror movie.

Prudence thought it had been a narrow escape – more narrow, even, than the time the television executive with the famous ‘wandering hands’ had made a beeline for her at the Kitchen Pride Awards, held each year in Covent Garden. She staggered out of the marquee and stood at the top of the incline, watching the rest of the fayre attendees rushing to the scene of the drama. She could already hear various howls of rage and consternation from the keen kitchen gardeners who had dedicated their year to cultivating those vegetables in the hope of winning a prize. Now, all of their dedication and hard work was spread across poor Mrs Moriarty’s face.

Prudence would have smiled at the vegetable-ridden horror of it all, if only her heart hadn’t been sinking.

There was a very particular reason why Prudence’s heart was sinking at that moment.

The camper van that had come careening past, seemingly with no driver at the wheel, had an exceedingly memorable numberplate.

It read PRUBU 1 – and it belonged to her.

‘Left your handbrake off, did you, Mrs Bulstrode?’ came the voice of some figure cantering past.

Prudence looked up and was about to exclaim, ‘I most certainly did not!’ when she saw that the figure loping past was none other than Constable Mick Hardman – who, it seemed, was the most senior officer on the scene. It was just a shame that he didn’t yet need to shave and, Prudence was quite certain, still had his mother lay out his clothes for him every morning.

‘Come on, Mrs Bulstrode, there’ll be questions to answer here.’

It pained Prudence to leave her raspberry roulade behind, but that was nothing compared to the pain going on at the bottom of the hill. Hurrying after the constable, she found the camper van crowded with all of the fayre’s many attendees. Some of the entrants in the competition were vainly trying to salvage their pumpkins. Old Mr Chesterfield was down on his hands and knees, wrestling carrot tops out from under the camper’s front wheel.

‘Yes,’ Constable Hardman began, dutifully taking notes, ‘PRUBU 1. It’s definitely yours, Mrs Bulstrode.’

Prudence thought Constable Hardman was a very diligent young man – but also a verifiable buffoon, because it didn’t take a close inspection of the numberplate to identify this camper van as belonging to Prudence Bulstrode. The sign on the side of it read PRUDENCE BULSTRODE’S TRAVELLING KITCHEN in florid red letters, expertly (and expensively) painted by an old signwriter who plied his trade out of Downton, just up the road. Prudence hadn’t meant to take up a second profession in her retirement; five years ago, she’d wanted nothing more than to leave the celebrity circuit behind and spend a long, happy retirement with her husband, Nicholas. But Nicholas had passed away a little more than three weeks after they moved into Chelwood Ghyll – and all those ideas Prudence had had about the future had been disabused in a moment. The camper had been her escape from all that. A reinvention, which was just what was needed to keep away the nagging little voice that told her she should return to what she knew – the whirlwind of London, the parties, the televisual life.

Now it stood there, its bumper creamed with smashed-up pumpkins, and all of Chelwood Ghyll baying around it like a pitchforked horde.

‘Stand back, ladies, stand back!’ declared Constable Hardman. ‘I need to establish a perimeter! A perimeter, ladies. Yes, please, Mrs Whiteley, you too. This is now a crime scene, ladies, and I simply must have control. There may yet be a dangerous felon inside this camper van, and it’s my task – as your appointed protector – to flush him out.’

Constable Hardman was so determined to drive back the horde of curious villagers that he didn’t see what Prudence saw: a rake-thin seventeen-year-old girl, with raven-black hair (a raven-black scalp as well, because she was so careless with the hair dye) and an unmistakable drunken stagger, rolling out from underneath the camper van, picking herself up and scrambling off across the equestrian centre, back into the village. Prudence watched her go with a single raised eyebrow and the heaviest of hearts.

Constable Hardman was still establishing his perimeter when Prudence, sighing wearily and still staring after the vanishing girl, said, ‘That’s enough of this nonsense! I’ll check the interior, Constable!’ – and, before the overzealous policeman could put up a fuss, she opened the camper’s sliding door, established that precisely nobody was inside, and shut it again.

‘The keys are still in the ignition,’ said the constable, appearing at her side. ‘Mrs Bulstrode, are you absolutely certain you didn’t leave the handbrake off?’

The eyes of the village were on Prudence. She thought about it, thought about it again, and said, ‘Constable, you’re barking up the wrong tree, I’m afraid. It’s obviously a case of teenage vandalism.’

‘In Chelwood Ghyll?’

‘Why, we have teenagers in Chelwood Ghyll, don’t we?’

Constable Hardman snapped to attention. ‘Then it’s settled. I’m afraid, Mrs Bulstrode, I’ll have to send for back-up. The police tow truck will have to come up from Lyndhurst.’

‘Tow truck?’ gasped Prudence. ‘Why, it’s only a bit of marrow, Constable. There’s a little turnip stuck in the bumper, that’s all. She’ll drive out of here easily enough. I can have her scrubbed up in no time.’

‘I dare say you can, Mrs Bulstrode,’ said Constable Hardman with a new sobriety, ‘but I’m afraid I couldn’t possibly let it happen. This, here, is a crime scene, you see. There’ll be forensics all over it. Fingerprints and blood samples. Tiny, microscopic bits of DNA. You wouldn’t believe the traces a human body leaves behind. If I told you some of the things we learned at the academy …’

Prudence resisted the temptation to say, Then you’d be able to tell me how to buckle my own shoes, and simply groaned instead.

‘I’m sorry, Mrs Bulstrode. There’s really nothing I can do. Let’s just let the forensic boys do what they need to do. I’m sure you can have your camper back in – well, six, seven weeks, I should think?’ He looked around. ‘Ladies, gentlemen, I’m afraid, this year, the fayre has come to a premature close. Would one of you be kind enough as to give Mrs Bulstrode, here, a ride back into the village?’

There were a good number of offers. David Goliath – whose name was made even more unfortunate by the fact that he was quite the most diminutive man Prudence had ever known – was only too eager to give Prudence a ride in his motorcycle and sidecar (‘And perhaps we could drop in at the Fox for a spot of dinner too? You owe me a dinner date, as I remember’), but Prudence was determined to walk. It was only a couple of miles back to her house on the other side of Chelwood Ghyll, and it would give her some time to think.

It took the best part of the first mile for Prudence to stop being infuriated by the situation. It took her the best of the next mile for her to figure out that, as accidental as this afternoon’s events might have been, she wasn’t going to be able to forget them. No – she was going to have to do something about it. The question was what.

Prudence lived in a little bungalow on the edge of Chelwood Ghyll: two bedrooms, a cosy living room, a kitchen where her wonderful Aga pumped out heat all winter long, and the entirety of her garden given over to greenhouses and cold frames, trellises and wigwams of garden canes to grow her beloved sweet peas. It was all Prudence had ever wanted. She and Nicholas could have spent a very happy retirement here – Nicholas, who used to set crosswords for the Sunday papers, content with his puzzle books, and Prudence content to spend endless afternoons out in her kitchen garden. Alas, it was not to be – and, consequently, no matter how much she still loved the fayres and festivals she attended, Prudence was used to coming home to an empty, dark house.

Not today, though.

Today, as she turned along the winding lane that led down to her garden, she saw that the lights were on in the living room. The garden gate had been left open, and the plumes of steam coming out of the vent on the side of the house told her that somebody had put the central heating on.

Well, thought Prudence as she stopped on the garden path, her bracelets jangling – an apology counted for something.

She opened the front door.

‘Grandma!’

The same rake-thin, raven-haired girl who had scrambled out from underneath Prudence’s camper van threw herself across the hallway and dangled her arms around Prudence’s shoulders. Prudence wasn’t immune to expressions of love from her eldest grandchild, and she might almost have forgiven her there and then, if only the smell of cheap alcohol on the girl’s breath hadn’t been quite so pungent. It was the alcohol that reminded her that this was not a misdemeanour to be forgotten about; it was a situation that had to be dealt with now. The problem was, it wasn’t the first time something like this had happened. It wasn’t even the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh or eighth.

‘Suki,’ she said, ‘oh Suki, you silly girl. What on earth am I going to do with you?’

Prudence’s grand-daughter slipped backwards and said, ‘I’ve made a pot of tea – mint from the garden, just as you like it. I’ve laid it out in the lounge, Grandma. And I’ve—’

‘You’ve joy-ridden my camper van into a field full of pumpkins, and ended up with it impounded by the police.’

‘Impounded, Grandma?’ Suki hiccoughed in horror.

‘Yes, well, I’ve seen brighter ladybirds than I have police constables in this village. That Hardman’s a do-gooder to a fault – so desperate to do things by the book that he starts making up chapters and adding appendices himself. Anally retentive, I’d say. I knew enough eager young people pleasers like him in London. But it is what it is. The camper’s gone for forensics. I daresay I’ll get it back if I kick up a fuss – but there’s still the question of you, my dear.’ Suki’s body flagged. ‘Come through, Suki. You said you’d made tea?’

She’d taken care to lay it out as well. Prudence’s lounge looked more like a book-lined study than the regular cosy sitting room ordinarily associated with somebody of her age, and in its centre was an old wooden coffee table, one of the first wedding gifts she and Nicholas had received. On top of it, among the various wildflower books and garden glossaries Prudence had been perusing last night, was a china tea set, a bowl of brown sugar lumps, a strainer and a samovar of boiled water. Suki had dug out the shortbread too. Prudence was partial to a piece of shortbread.

‘I’ll pour. Sit down, Suki.’

So that was what Suki did.

After she had poured the teas, Prudence said, ‘It’s going to take more than a pot of fresh mint tea to sober you up, Suki. Wait there, I’ve just the thing.’

Among all the books on Prudence’s shelves was a clothbound, tattered old tome called Hedgerow Magic. Following one of its well-thumbed recipes (Nicholas had been partial to a drink as well), Prudence mixed fennel seeds and turmeric, pulv. . .