Keeley sank farther into her chair, her legs trembling.
“Burn it down?” she parroted, her mind skittering in a hundred different directions, trying to get a grasp on this new information and failing. She had a sudden and vivid craving for a bacon-and-sausage sandwich—for years, her favorite comfort food.
Breathe, she told herself. Find a focus point and breathe into your center.
Taking a deep breath, she focused on a point on Ben’s shirt directly in front of her and noticed how it skimmed over obviously defined pectorals to tuck neatly into the waistband of his dark trousers, which fit his lean hips and strong thighs in a way that reminded her more of a catalog model than of the quintessential country cop.… Okay, maybe this wasn’t helping.
“Miss Carpenter?” Ben looked more than a little bemused, and Keeley’s eyes snapped back up to his face.
“Yes. Sorry. It’s just a shock.”
Jack patted her arm in sympathy again, and Tom pushed a glass of water over the counter toward her. Keeley went over and took it from him with a smile, grateful for the small kindness. This, as well as her father’s shop, had been one of the things that had pulled her back to Belfrey; the sense of community and of looking after their own that had felt so suffocating to her at the age of seventeen was like a balm ten years later.
Except that when she looked again at Ben, his eyes didn’t seem kind at all. They looked suspicious.
“I’ve been trying to call you all day, Miss Carpenter. We spoke to your mother, and she told us you should have arrived in Belfrey two days ago.”
Keeley froze as the meaning of Ben’s words sank in. He thought she was to blame for this. She took a sip of water to calm the stab of anger in her belly.
Which she then spat all over that well-fitting shirt. As Ben jumped back, cursing, Keeley turned horrified eyes to Tom.
“What on earth was in that water?”
“Water? That was vodka,” Tom said, grinning. “It’s good for shock.” Across from her, she heard Jack starting to chuckle. Keeley slammed the glass down onto the table, spilling the offending vodka, and stood up, glaring at Ben, who was now wiping his shirt with a bar towel and looking less than pleased.
“Can I see the premises?” Only now did the full implications of the news hit her. If the damage was severe, then her plans to open the café would go up in smoke along with the building! There was no way she would convince her mother to pay for a full renovation.
Ben cocked his head to one side a little, as if weighing up both her words and the possibility that she was responsible for the fire.
“I’ll take you over there now.”
“It’s my shop,” Keeley pointed out. “I hardly need a chaperone.”
“It may be your shop,” Ben said, unfazed by her curt tone, “but it’s also a crime scene.”
He placed a hand on the small of her back, the briefest of touches, as he guided her toward the door. Keeley flinched away at the heat of his palm through the thin fabric of her blouse, an image of him in the school canteen flashing through her mind unbidden. He hadn’t given any sign of recognizing her, though he must know who she was by the name; everyone in Belfrey knew everyone else. Ignoring the outstretched hand ready to take her luggage, Keeley stepped out into the warm air, blinking as the bright spring sunshine hit her. While she followed Ben down the meandering hill of the High Street, her heart thudded as she waited to see what damage had been done. Thankfully, the front of the shop at least looked fine. Fumbling for her keys in her handbag, she noticed her fingers shaking. A few openly curious faces peered out of shop windows nearby, but Keeley ignored them, swung open the door, and stepped inside, Ben close behind her.
A wave of nostalgia hit her. Although the shop itself was empty apart from a small counter, she immediately pictured her father behind his rows of meat, a smile on his adorably fat face, and felt again like a schoolgirl running in to embrace her dad on her way home from class. He had never judged her, never made her feel less than adequate or pinched the roll of puppy fat at her waist with a pursed mouth and disapproving eyes—unlike her mother. Darla Carpenter’s dissatisfaction with both her husband and her daughter had been evident pretty much every day that Keeley could remember.
Pushing the memories and sting of tears aside, Keeley strode through to the small kitchen at the back of the shop, aware of Ben’s keen eyes upon her. The smell of charred wood and brick hit her instantly, and she surveyed the damage with an unsettling mixture of emotions. Relief that it wasn’t as bad as she had feared—though the back door and frame were all but burned to a crisp and the back wall was seared black—and horror that someone, anyone, could deliberately do such a thing. It seemed almost a macabre joke that it should happen here, in this very room, defiling her father’s memory.
“Was it kids, maybe?” she asked hopefully. Teenagers perhaps, hanging around, playing a silly game, a prank that had gotten out of hand. Ben paused, obviously unsure how much to tell her, and Keeley felt like stamping her foot with frustration.
“It’s my shop,” she pointed out. “I have a right to know what happened.”
Ben shrugged. “As I said, Miss Carpenter”—she wondered why he didn’t call her Keeley and concluded that he didn’t remember her at all—“we have been trying to reach you. Your mother seemed to be under the impression you were arriving here before today. You’re renting Rose Cottage from Mrs. Rowland, I believe.”
“My mother,” Keeley said with impatience, “barely remembers I exist, never mind keeps track of my plans. I had my things sent up to the cottage two days ago, but I’ve been staying in London with a friend. I wasn’t due to arrive until today, as I’m sure Mrs. Rowland will be able to confirm.”
Ben didn’t respond to that, and she had a suspicion that Mrs. Rowland had already been questioned.
“Your phone?”
“I had no signal on the train, and the battery was going anyway, so I turned it off. See?” Keeley pulled her phone from her bag and thrust it in Ben’s face. He looked at her calmly.
“Thank you.”
Feeling foolish, she returned her phone to her bag and walked toward the back door. Ben followed, placing a hand on her arm. He was very close, standing over her so that she had to tip her chin to look at him, and she could smell the musky scent of his cologne and the faint tang of male skin. Her mouth felt dry as he gazed down at her and lifted those full lips into a half smile.
“It’s still a crime scene, so I’m going to have to ask you not to touch anything. We’ve cordoned it off round the back, and upstairs.” He nodded toward the stairwell in the far corner of the kitchen that led up to a small studio flat.
Stepping away from him, Keeley felt her cheeks burning with a combination of embarrassment, desire, and anger. Even so, she didn’t miss the mysterious way he had said the last two words, hinting at darker things. Things he wasn’t sharing with her.
“Why upstairs? You didn’t say the damage was that bad,” Keeley accused. “I’m supposed to be opening in two weeks! I’m going to be delayed as it is, sorting this mess out.”
“Don’t you want us to find out who it was? These things take time, Miss Carpenter.”
His constant use of her surname was getting on her nerves. “It’s Keeley, or at least Ms.,” she snapped. “As for uncovering the culprit, it would help if you told me exactly what has happened. Like I said, couldn’t it just be kids?”
Ben looked serious.
“I’m afraid not. Thankfully, the fire services were alerted almost as soon as the blaze started, thanks to Jack Tibbons’s dog barking its head off, but it was no prank. There’s evidence that gasoline was poured all around the back door. ‘Kids,’ as you put it, don’t tend to go to those lengths. If help hadn’t arrived so quickly, you may not be opening at all.”
Keeley blanched as the reality of the situation began to hit her. Ben went on, seemingly oblivious to her distress.
“Forensics will be back tomorrow to see what—if anything—they can find in the way of evidence to identify the perpetrator. It wasn’t a particularly professional arson attempt, but it was definitely deliberate.”
“But who would do such a thing? And to an empty shop?” Keeley shook her head. Whatever she had been expecting upon her return to Belfrey, it wasn’t this.
Arson. It sounded so, well, sinister.
Ben looked at her intently.
“Unfortunately, arson is often one of the easiest crimes to commit and one of the hardest to prove. But there are usually two reasons: revenge for some kind of grudge, or an insurance scam.”
“Well, I certainly had nothing to do with it.” Keeley drew herself up to her full height—just under five foot four—and glared at him. As gorgeous as he might be, she wasn’t going to stand here in her own shop and be accused of something so heinous. Or at least, he was making it sound heinous. She wondered if he really was hiding something, or if the mysterious air was just part of his ego trip.
Ben didn’t bat an eyelid at her indignation.
“If you say so. In that case, Miss Carpenter—Keeley—you need to ask yourself this: Who carries enough of a grudge to attempt to derail your business?”
Keeley couldn’t answer him. There was no one—how could there be? She hadn’t set foot in Belfrey for ten years, and everyone had loved her father. Perhaps her mother hadn’t been quite so popular, but Keeley couldn’t think of any reason why anyone would want to do this to her. And besides, who carried a grudge for ten years? She shook her head mutely at Ben, who continued to regard her with an intensity that made her uncomfortable. To think, for years at school, she had longed for him to look at her.
“You’re absolutely certain,” Ben said slowly, “that you only arrived in Belfrey today?”
“Yes!” she snapped, exasperated. “I told you, you can check.”
He went on as if he hadn’t heard her. “And you have no quarrel with any of the residents in Belfrey?”
Keeley was becoming seriously annoyed. She took a deep breath, trying to remember everything she knew about staying calm in the face of anger. It seemed the ancient yoga masters of India had never had to deal with the likes of Benjamin Taylor.
“How about a man named Terry Smith? Remember him?”
His question confused her enough that she momentarily forgot her fury at him. Clearly, his questions were leading somewhere.
“No, I don’t think so. My mother might. Why, do you think he did this?” If that was the case, why insist on interrogating her? Then Ben’s next words took all the breath from her body, like a sucker punch to her stomach.
“Hardly. Considering that he was found dead upstairs.” Ben jerked his head up to the ceiling, indicating the studio flat above the shop, where Keeley had planned on holding evening classes. Her gaze followed the direction of his movement with a kind of morbid curiosity.
“Dead?” she echoed.
Ben nodded, his full mouth flattened to a grim line.
“Not just dead. Murdered.”
Keeley stepped back and away from him, pressing her hand to her chest and feeling her eyes widen in disbelief. She groped for the kitchen counter and leaned against it, forcing herself to relax. Ben just continued to look at her with no trace of sympathy. Surely he didn’t think her responsible for that?
“Murdered … but why?”
“Well, that is precisely what I intend to find out. You’re certain you don’t recall him?”
Keeley shook her head. Then she began to feel angry again as he continued to regard her with that level gaze. Despite the neutrality of his tone, there was an obvious implication that she knew more than she was telling him. She let go of the counter and stood straight, if not tall. (Expressions such as “drawing oneself up to one’s full height” didn’t tend to work very well when the one in question was only five feet four inches, she reflected wryly.)
“I can assure you, Detective Constable, I have no idea who, how, or why anybody was murdered or my premises vandalized. I came back to open a successful business, and certainly wouldn’t be involved in anything that would jeopardize that.” She glared at him, feeling quite proud of her little speech. Ben lowered his eyebrows, still looking at her, then gave a slight nod as if he had reassured himself about something. Keeley, whose muscles were quivering because she was so tense, let her shoulders drop and exhaled with relief, though she wasn’t entirely sure what she was relieved about.
“Okay,” Ben said. “But I have to advise you that I’ll most likely be in touch with further questions.”
Keeley swallowed down a retort, not wanting to crank up the tension between them any further. She motioned toward the stairwell.
“Has everything … been cleaned?” She felt suddenly queasy. A corner of Ben’s mouth twitched as if he was amused again, though she certainly couldn’t find anything funny about the situation.
“Yes, it’s all been taken care of, but as I said, I can’t let you up until forensics have finished. But there’s no noticeable damage upstairs.”
Thank God, Keeley thought, her overactive imagination having conjured up visions of having to clean up puddles of blood—or worse.
“How did he die?” she asked, her natural curiosity kicking in once more. Ben looked suspicious again and hesitated, as if wondering how much to tell her, before he said in a quiet tone:
“Hit over the head with a blunt object, by the look of things, though our postmortem guy couldn’t determine with what, exactly.”
Which meant they hadn’t found the murder weapon, Keeley realized. She began to wish she had paid more attention to the reruns of CSI that her flatmate in New York had been constantly watching.
“Maybe he just banged his head?” she offered. Ben’s lips quirked again in that half-smile she was sure meant he was laughing at her. “Or maybe he interrupted whoever was trying to set the fire?” That was a viable suggestion, she thought, but when the smile vanished and he looked suspicious again, she wished she hadn’t said anything.
“We’re working on that assumption,” he said carefully as a thought hit Keeley with a jolt of anxiety.
“How did they get in? It should have been all locked up.”
Ben gave her another nod. “The estate agent reports that none of the keys were missing. Before you give me the ‘it wasn’t me’ speech, an inspection of the back door lock does suggest it was picked. Honestly, I’m surprised the place was left so unsecured.”
Keeley bit her lip, feeling guilty—though in all truth, up until now, security had been her mother’s responsibility. The back gate was bolted and the back door fitted with a standard Yale lock. There had never been a burglar alarm installed. In a small, sleepy town like Belfrey, who would want to break into an empty shop?
Perhaps Belfrey wasn’t as sleepy as she had thought.
* * *
Once she had locked the shop back up, Ben offered to drive her to Rose Cottage, and after a moment of hesitation, Keeley agreed. As much as she didn’t relish the prospect of spending any longer than absolutely necessary in the detective constable’s company, considering that she seemed to be Suspect of the Moment, neither was she looking forward to the twenty-minute, predominantly uphill walk to Rose Cottage on legs that were now decidedly shaky. Buses in Belfrey came only a few times a day, and even then were rarely on schedule. It was high time she got herself a new car.
Keeley sat stiffly in the passenger seat of Ben’s Saab, hoping he wouldn’t continue to question her. She had no idea who could be responsible for the fire or the alleged murder of a man she didn’t know, and right now wanted nothing more than a cup of soothing herbal tea and some deep stretching. She pushed any thoughts of bacon-and-sausage sandwiches firmly to the back of her consciousness. An hour in Belfrey, and she was already reverting to the chubby teenager of ten years ago. Perhaps it was a good thing Ben didn’t remember her.
“You’ve changed since school,” he said, making it clear that in fact he knew exactly who she was. Keeley felt herself cringe.
“I suppose so,” she said, aiming for nonchalance and ending up with sulky instead.
“When I spoke to your mother, she said you were opening a vegetarian café. Seems kind of funny for a butcher’s daughter,” he remarked, his earlier reticence seemingly forgotten. Keeley was wary of his desire to chat. No doubt some tactic meant to trip her up and get her to confess to murdering the poor man found in her café. She shrugged to suppress the chill that came over her and sat staring out the window.
“Not really. I want to show that food can be tasty as well as good for you, and ethical to boot.”
“You think it will catch on? In Belfrey?” Ben sounded doubtful. Keeley nodded, any grudge against Ben momentarily forgotten in her usual enthusiasm to talk about her favorite subject.
“I’m not pushing some New Age fad here; there are proven benefits to a nonmeat, organic diet. And yoga itself is booming—the yoga classes at the local gym are packed full, I checked.”
“So what has one got to do with the other?” He actually sounded interested, and Keeley twisted in her seat toward him. If she could get the local detective on board, that would certainly help her credibility.
“Yoga isn’t just a form of exercise, although it can be used like that, it’s actually a whole lifestyle system, of which diet is a big part. Not that you have to eat a vegetarian diet to practice yoga, it’s a personal choice thing, but they definitely reinforce each other. Lots of people come to yoga as a means to lose weight too—something else a nonmeat diet can assist with.”
Ben glanced over at her, taking his eyes off the road for a moment to trail them down her body. Keeley shifted in her seat self-consciously; the temperature inside the car seemed to have kicked up a few notches.
“Is that what got you into it? The weight loss?”
Instantly Keeley felt herself morphing into the girl he would have remembered; the shy, overweight girl with frizzy hair and buckteeth, and she shrank back away from him.
“Well, I certainly got fed up with being called Lardypants,” she said tightly. Ben snorted in amusement.
“People called you that, really?”
“You were there,” she said in a small voice. At that, Ben slowed the car, a funny expression on his face.
“I’m quite sure,” he said slowly, as if offended, “that I never called you that name.”
“Not you,” Keeley amended, “but some of the kids in your crowd did.” She heard the bitterness in her own voice and winced. She had spent many hours on the yoga mat learning to let go of both old grudges and poor body image; half an hour in the company of Ben Taylor, and it all came flooding back.
Next to her, Ben was quiet.
“Well,” he said after five minutes of increasingly uncomfortable silence, “I’m sorry about that. If I had known, I would have said something. I never have been able to stand bullies.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, although all of a sudden it did matter, and very much so. She would have preferred him not to remember her at all than to see her as some poor victim. An overweight victim, at that. Still, she supposed it was marginally better than him viewing her as a murder suspect.
They drove the rest of the way to Rose Cottage with Keeley’s eyes firmly on the landscape. Amber Valley truly was a beautiful part of the country, and one of the things she had missed most during her ten years away was the views. In every direction lay a visual feast of rolling green and gold hills, merging into a blue and gray horizon dotted with the inland cliffs and heights of the Peak District. There was such unspoiled beauty, it seemed almost inconceivable that anything bad could ever happen here.
Ben finally turned onto Bakers Hill and paused outside the cottage. Keeley breathed a sigh of relief and, in spite of the day’s revelations, felt her heart leap at the sight of her new home, a postcard-pretty quintessential country cottage, complete with blush roses climbing around the arch of the doorway and a thatched roof. When she had shown a picture of it to her friends in New York, they cooed with delight. Her mother, more used to the practicalities of living in the country, shook her head with disdain. “You’ll get squirrels,” she had said, wrinkling her nose at the thatch. When Keeley was younger, they had lived in one of the more modern town houses in the center of Belfrey, but Keeley always secretly wished to live in one of the more traditional cottages, even those at the end of the High Street that were so old and uncared for, they had subsided into triangular shapes as if the ground were about to swallow them up.
Ben got out of the car with her, lifting her luggage out of the boot. The cottage had been let fully furnished, and the rest of Keeley’s things been delivered the day before, so there was little for her to do except unpack a few boxes.
“Thank you,” she said to Ben, feeling awkward and wondering if she should invite him in.
“Call me,” he said, and Keeley frowned, momentarily misreading his intention until he continued. “If you think of anything that might help me figure out who torched your shop, or you remember anything relevant about Terry Smith, let me know straightaway. Otherwise, I’ll let you know when the forensics have finished.”
“Yeah, sure,” she mumbled, all but snatching her suitcase away from him. She didn’t look back as his car purred its way down the hill away from her. Seeing Ben Taylor again, and in such circumstances, was certainly not the homecoming she had expected. That, nor her shop being turned into a crime scene.
The key was under the mat as Mrs. Rowland had promised it would be, so it surprised her when the front door turned out to be open. Nervous, Keeley pushed open the door and peered around it. In the kitchen, a small, plump woman with a chestnut-colored bob was arranging flowers in a large, brightly colored vase on the table. Annie Rowland. Keeley let her breath out with relief and wheeled her luggage into the cottage, shutting the door behind her. The scent of freesias filled the air as her landlady turned to her, a large and welcoming smile on her face, her small blue eyes shining.
“Keeley! Look at you,” the older woman exclaimed, wrapping Keeley in a warm, comforting hug that had her blinking back unbidden tears. Finally, someone who seemed pleased to see her back in Belfrey. Although Keeley had not really known Annie in her younger days other than as a customer in her father’s shop, she was so relieved to see a friendly face that she returned the hug as if greeting a long-lost friend.
“You look amazing,” Annie exclaimed, then rather ruined the compliment by adding, “so much like your mother.”
Keeley grimaced. After her weight loss, she had indeed seen her mother’s more angular features appear from underneath the puppy fat, like a sculpture emerging from a dollop of clay. With the addition of a deep tan from her time in India and some shockingly expensive New York highlights, Keeley had hoped the resemblance had somewhat softened.
“I’ve made it all as nice as I can for you, dear, made the beds up and everything,” Annie trilled, then picked up her coat from the peg it hung on and started to shrug it on. Keeley felt a little stab of panic. She had been so looking forward to her first day back in Belfrey and to moving into Rose Cottage; had envisaged herself puttering around on her own, arranging her things the way she wanted them and maybe even uncurling her yoga mat in the garden and moving through a few Sun Salutations in the crisp spring sun. Now she felt as though being alone were the last thing she wanted, and wondered if she wasn’t having some kind of delayed reaction to the shock.
“There was a murder at my father’s shop—well, my café now,” she blurted out, “and someone set it on fire, or tried to.” Annie’s mouth dropped open, and she promptly hung her coat back up.
“Oh, dear. Do you know, I saw something on the front of the Belfrey Times this morning on my way into Ripley, but I didn’t think to stop and have a look. I didn’t realize it was your place. You poor lamb, did you know the victim?”
Shaking her head, Keeley filled her in on the morning’s events, sitting down at the kitchen table with weak legs. Definitely a touch of shock.
“Ben—DC Taylor—suggested maybe the victim interrupted whoever tried to set the fire. He seemed to think it was someone with a grudge.” Or me, setting up an insurance scam, she thought bitterly but didn’t want to say that to this kind-faced woman. Keeley didn’t think she could take another suspicious look.
Annie waved a hand dismissively. “That Taylor boy, he’s been watching too many detective shows on TV, fancies himself as a star in one of them. Not enough going on in Amber Valley for his liking, he should transfer over to Derby. Who would have a grudge against you, or your father? He was a well-liked man. Most likely whoever set the fire got caught in it themselves.” Annie nodded decisively, as though her word were the final say on the matter. Keeley didn’t share what Ben had told her about blunt objects. She wondered how much information had been released to the newspapers, and if this Terry Smith was a popular person in Belfrey. What if the whole town thought it was her? Or down to some kind of family feud—but that was preposterous, surely?
Then a cold curl of doubt began to unfurl in her chest as something Annie had said niggled at her. There certainly seemed to be little reason why anyone should wish to target Keeley herself, or her late father, but there was one member of her family who made a habit of getting people’s backs up.
Her mother.