Saturday afternoon (continued)
Visitors often mistake the tall stone obelisk in the middle of Synne’s Square for a war memorial, erected during the spate of numb memorializing that followed the First World War. Unfortunately—or fortunately, depending on your perspective—there wasn’t a single villager who’d even joined up to fight the Great War, let alone given his life for King and country. But not to be out-commemorated by the neighboring village of Pigsneye, which had sacrificed half its male population at Passchendaele, the Parish Council of the time erected this monument to the one Synne resident who had gone down on the Titanic in 1912, two years before the war began (or five years before, if you’re one of Synne’s frequent American tourists).
After the Second World War, which also found Synne unrepresented in the armed forces, the Parish Council discovered that a man born in the village had died in the crash of the Hindenburg in 1937, oddly enough, two years before the war began (or nearly five years before, if you’re an American tourist) and his name was duly added to the memorial, conveniently omitting the fact that he had been part of the cabin crew and a keen member of the Nazi Party.
Oliver and Effie were sitting on the steps in front of the obelisk, sharing a stale jam doughnut they’d bought from the village post office across the street. In the afternoon sunlight, the stone cottages facing the Square exhibited a range of shades from cream to pewter, from ivory to amber, spattered with the seasonal primaries of window boxes and hanging baskets of petunias, and, in the case of one house that juts into the road, paint samples from many European car manufacturers.
Signs and displays in the windows added more color, since many of the restless homeowners, unable to abandon their entrepreneurial pasts and desperate for fresh company, had turned front parlors into antique “centres” or estate agencies showing pictures of thatched cottages for sale (of which Synne possessed nearly one) or cramped art galleries for the residents’ watercolors of the same buildings. Tourists pausing for refreshment in one of Synne’s five tearooms were often baffled to find that their twelve-pounds-fifty didn’t just buy them a pot of Earl Grey and a powdery scone, but also a lecture from the proprietor on current trends in conditional variance swaps.
Effie turned and looked at Oliver for several seconds, with a mixture of affection and pity.
“I can’t believe you told Simon that he was very tall,” she said.
“I was explaining the joke,” Oliver bleated. “With Simon, Uncle Tim also has a ‘friend in a high place,’ as it were.”
“I can’t take you anywhere,” Effie sighed, licking sugar from her fingers. The distant purr of a car engine began to drown out the conversation some rooks were conducting in a nearby hornbeam.
“Tell me something,” said Oliver. “How did Culpepper get away with calling you ‘Curly’? Why didn’t you put him in his place with that magic Look of yours?”
“My what? What on earth are you talking about?” She screwed up the empty paper bag and tossed it into a rubbish bin a few feet away, beside the bus shelter built to celebrate the Festival of Britain in 1951, although Synne had never had a bus service before or since.
The car was louder now, clearly a sports car, clearly being driven too fast for England’s meandering country roads. It was approaching from the west.
“No, I chose to give Simon a chance to explain himself,” she continued. She smiled contentedly. “It was worth it,” she added, remembering the tall detective’s compliment.
There was a cinematic squeal of tires and another throaty roar, suggesting that the car had reached the pointless double bend in front of the manor house.
“So I have competition, do I?” said Oliver, pretending to be fascinated by a pigeon that was ambling past them.
Before she could answer—before he knew whether he was going to get an answer—a black Lamborghini sped into view, barely slowing as it hurtled along the stretch of road in front of them, raising clouds of dust and rattling crockery on the small tables outside the tea shops. A small, elderly man stepping out of the post office leaped backwards in alarm and dropped an ice cream cone. Oliver thought he looked vaguely familiar, but not from Synne. The pigeon flew off, affronted. With a shriek of brakes, the car swerved onto the footpath that led to the Swithins’ house. The driver gave one more unnecessary prod to the accelerator and then turned the engine off.
“Ben’s arrived,” said Oliver. He stood up and offered a hand to Effie. She let him pull her to her feet, and then slipped her arms around his waist and kissed him briskly on the chin.
“Are you even slightly jealous?”
“Not a bit,” Oliver lied.
“Good. I don’t play those games, Ollie. If I ever want someone other than you, you’ll be the first to know.” She kissed him again, while he registered the fact that she’d said “if” and not “when.”
Ben Motley was Oliver’s friend and landlord, a photographer whose studio occupied the top floor of the Edwardes Square townhouse they shared with their friends Geoffrey Angelwine and Susie Beamish. Ben oozed his tanned and well-toned body out of the Lamborghini and reached behind the driver’s seat for a leather overnight valise and an aluminum case of photographic equipment. He caught sight of Oliver and Effie across the Square and waved delightedly, pulling his sunglasses from his handsome face.
“Tell me again where we’re going this evening,” Effie asked as they walked toward the house, trying to avoid the broken sticks, bedraggled paper flowers, discarded straw hats, and the occasional shard of a beer bottle left over from the previous morning’s May Day event, the annual Beating of the Morris Dancers.
“You and I and Ben and the egregious Toby are having dinner with some old family friends, the Bennets, over at Pigsneye.”
“Does Ben know them?”
Oliver spotted her subtext: Am I the only stranger?
“No, but Mother let slip that he was staying with us, so Wendy Bennet issued a very insistent invitation. She and her husband have five unmarried daughters, and a famous and famously single fashion photographer is irresistible husband material in these parts.”
“Hang on. A family called Bennet? Living in the country?”
“That’s right.”
“With five unmarried daughters?”
“Er, yes.”
“Is this some kind of put-on? Their names aren’t Elizabeth, Jane, Mary, Kitty, and whatever that slutty Lolita who runs off with Mr. Wickham was called, are they?”
“No.” Oliver cleared his throat. “They’re Davina, Catriona, Clarissa, Xanthe, and Lucinda.”
“Great. I can see I’m going to fit right in.”
She strode ahead to greet Ben. Oliver hung back, using the few extra seconds to recall the text of the blackmail note once again. It was probably the twentieth mental review, with increasing intervals, and he thought he had it by heart.
He didn’t agree with Culpepper. Whoever had sent Dennis Breedlove that letter drove the old man to his death. It was the moral equivalent of murder. And if the Warwickshire police couldn’t spare the manpower for moral equivalencies, and Scotland Yard was forced by etiquette to sit on his and her hands, then maybe it was up to him to find the murderer.
Did you think you could hide your history? Did you think this whole blessed plot would be covered up forever…?