Cigarettes. MacAdams kept an emergency pack in the car. He snatched it on the way out of the station, then walked as far as Robbie Park in a drizzling rain. When he reached the bridge over the duck pond, he lit one and inhaled deeply. Air, quiet, and space to think: that’s what he wanted. What he was about to get, however, was company. And not the sort he enjoyed. Because Jarvis Fleet, blazing blue umbrella and all, was approaching from the bandstand.
“Good afternoon, lovely day for a stroll.”
There wasn’t even a hint of irony in the statement, even though MacAdams—hatless—was wet through and smoking ferociously.
“I thought you were out with Cora.”
Fleet responded by pointing beyond them, into the hazy distance.
“Yes. At Longside. We were visiting the grave of her father. It’s the anniversary, today.”
Oh. MacAdams felt the creep of self-reproach and stubbed out the cigarette.
“You knew him well, I hear.”
Fleet joined him, offering his edge of umbrella.
“Very well. From my earliest days in service. I owed him a great deal.”
“Cora tells us all about his perfections,” MacAdams said. It sounded sour, but was the absolute truth; she worshipped the man. Fleet didn’t reproach him, however.
“It isn’t slander to admit a man is only human, and to mourn them despite their faults.”
MacAdams agreed with these words so heartily that it gave him a turn coming from Jarvis Fleet. He summarily cast his mind back; old Alex Clapham always seemed a sort of board game version of himself, blow hard and rattle the pebble monkeys1 or some nonsense. The sort of man who referred to all police personnel as “snowdrops.” His daughter excepted, no doubt.
“You weren’t friends?” he asked.
“You mistake me. I was very fond.” Fleet adjusted his mustache. “I came to the funeral.”
“Cora mentioned it. Said she found you invaluable at paper sorting.”
An anemic sort of smile creased Fleet’s stiff features, and his mustache gave a fractious twitch.
“Odd that you have a reputation for being taciturn. Yes, I came to help during the period of grief when personal effects were too much for Cora to consider.” He paused. “You did not like the commodore?”
MacAdams was being chastened, and he deserved it. He was nettled, but it had a lot more to do with Cora’s lack of faith in him than her preference for Fleet. Annie would have said this was unbecoming of him, and he would have to agree.
“Honestly? I didn’t. Why did you?” he asked. Fleet stepped closer, the umbrella over them both for a moment.
“We held things in common,” he said. “We served in Afghanistan together. You might say we bonded over a mutual admiration for military mechanism.”
“I assume you’ve seen his War Room, then.” War Room, everyone in a hundred mile radius had been invited to see the air commodore’s museum of medals while the man lived.
“I am led to believe that everyone has,” Fleet said, and for a moment, MacAdams almost caught a hint of companionable humor.
“We may as well walk and talk,” he said, making an after you gesture in the direction of town. “The Selkirk interview did not go well. We can’t actually pin him with anything appreciably illegal.”
“Ah. I understand your frustration. Lawyers are particular.”
“It’s not just a lack of evidence,” MacAdams admitted. “I’m struggling to find a motive. I thought Rupert was being blackmailed for being gay, but Sid lost that power over him a year ago.”
“Can you be certain?”
“Easy enough to check. We can ask his son or past clients to verify. Apparently he lost a few. Emery and Rupert are still each other’s only alibi, but that checks out, too, and has come with an admission that they shared a hotel room in Uxton.”
“Ah,” Fleet said. MacAdams sighed.
“Meanwhile, Green suspects Lotte and Olivia have motive, and then there’s the first wife, Elsie, who has been conveniently difficult to find. But none of them broke into the cottage last night.”
“You’re sure?”
“I usually can tell a man from a woman,” MacAdams said testily. “The window prowler was tall, thin, squarely built, with the arm strength to bend a metal casement.”
“That’s rather a lot of information from the glimpse of a hand,” Fleet said. “And Green may correct you about the necessary strength.”
Dammit. She would, too. MacAdams attempted to smooth his bristling ego.
“It wasn’t Olivia or Lotte. They might be taller than Jo Jones, but they’d be reaching up through the window, not downward. Elsie might be tall enough, but doubtful she’s the sort to do her own dirty work.”
Fleet maintained silence for a few moments, long enough for them to reach the station’s car park. When he spoke again, he’d taken an entirely different tack.
“Perhaps we’ll start from the other direction, then, objects and not subjects. The painting, let’s say.”
MacAdams shook himself, divesting water in several directions.
“You can’t be serious.”
“Why not?”
“Yesterday you suspected Jo of murder.” MacAdams pulled the door open and ushered them both inside. Fleet gave a faint, though oddly precise, shrug.
“Everyone is a suspect. But she did not break into her own cottage.”
Fleet had just given the enormous compliment of taking MacAdams’ word for it.
“Go on,” he said. Fleet acquiesced.
“The murderer wants something. Perhaps that something is still here—or perhaps one of the suspects you mention has it in possession.”
MacAdams felt the heavy pressure of coincidence descending. Because, of course, the theft of the painting immediately preceded Sid’s death. But if Sid did steal it, they didn’t know why or even if the two events were related.
“So how do we find a missing painting?” he asked.
“What do you mean, flirting?” Jo asked. The ground beneath her feet squelched uncomfortably, and she was grateful for the bright blue wellies that Tula insisted she borrow.
“Jo, darling-heart, don’t be dim.” Tula lent her a hand. “Mind the stile as you come over, this one’s a bit rickety.”
“I’m not being dim,” Jo insisted, trying not to slip in the mud. The path began near Ardemore garden wall and led the back way into Abington, a good three miles one way. Right to Roam, they called it. “I just don’t see it. At all.”
“Gwilym asked for your number.”
“Yes, so he could call me with any answers—”
“And he texted before you even left the train station. Which means he surely knew already or had means to find it while you were still there. He just wanted your number. I’m surprised he didn’t ask you to lunch.”
“Oh. He did.”
Tula fairly cackled at this. Jo puckered her brow.
“At least I came back with her name!”
“You almost came back with a Welshman,” Tula chuckled. “Charming, the way you described him. Unkempt, mayhap, but charming. And he deals in antiques?”
“I think he means to,” Jo said. “He’s like a collector-gone-awry. Has subscriptions to all the ancestry sites and probably a few for treasure hunting or cryptozoology. He said he’d like to be an editor.”
“Instead?”
“In addition, I think. I’m not sure he collects antiques, really.” Jo ducked under a low-hanging furze. “I think he collects hobbies.”
“Oh, la—you snap him up, quick, then! He must surely have money, because if antiques were his stock and trade, he’d starve.”
Jo considered this. She’d meant to make a list of her old contacts by now, send a few emails. Get the ball rolling on her (not quite formed) freelance ideas. The murder had thrown off her plans a bit. Much the way her mother’s death had done. But if she planned to stay in Abington, she’d better start job hunting soon herself. The taxes were looming. Maybe marrying for money wasn’t all bad.
“Tula? How did you meet Ben?” she asked. Tula stopped walking and leaned against the wooden fence lining the path.
“Met him my first night in town. Was passing through for a walking tour, met at an open-air concert. Had him all night, by morning, he’d damn near proposed.” She coiled a strand of hair round her finger. “I might have agreed, but I was against marriage on principle. Then.”
“Not anymore?”
“I’ve softened in my years. Was bang against it, young. Left Limerick when I was seventeen, been everywhere—Australia, South Africa.”
“The States?”
“Nah, you all’ve quite enough Irish already.” She smiled, a little less sunny than her usual. “Started off following a man. Then followed a band. Ended up in the Peace Corps a few years. By the time I knew’t ten years had gone.”
“Did you go home, then?” Jo asked.
“I am home, love. But nay, I never went back. Not to Limerick.” She started walking again, and Jo followed. The old brain bell was ringing, and dots connecting, and she felt a sudden unutterable sadness.
“You see yourself in me, don’t you.”
“A bit,” Tula admitted. “Fellow outsider, and such.” Jo put her hands in her pockets.
“I guess I see myself in books,” she said. “Always. I love words. The way they look and feel and smell. It’s hard to explain. Words have just always been my people. And I don’t forget them after I’ve read them.”
“Ever? Like a photographic memory?” Tula asked. Jo scrunched up her nose. She’d never liked the term.
“It doesn’t work quite like that. I can recite from most of the books I’ve read—but it has to be triggered. I don’t have a search engine in here. But—” she looked out over the heath, the rolling hills dark with wet winter weeds. “This makes me think of ‘The Darkling Thrush.’
‘... frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast-beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom.’
“And the estate, that’s been mostly Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. The words just come, and I make connections.”
“And you really never forget?” Tula’s features had lit up, suddenly, in a quick burst of sunshine. “That’s incredible.”
Jo shivered a little all the same.
“Maybe. Mostly it’s just very crowded up here. And sometimes lonely.”
Tula had come a little closer; protectively, perhaps.
“Lonely how?”
“It’s not a perfect system.” Jo shrugged. “Sometimes the connections I see aren’t really there—I’ve just made an association. But sometimes it means I see connections other people can’t see—or a lot faster than they do. Plus, even though I never forget things, other people do. Often, I’m left living in a memory that has vanished for other people.” Jo tucked her fingers into her armpits. The cold was starting to seep in, despite the filtered sunlight. It was unpleasant to think about. She wanted to change the topic.
“On the day of Sid’s murder, you said something else bad had recently happened in Abington. Arson, or something?” Nice topic change, Jo, she thought. But Tula didn’t look put out.
“Oh, aye! Awful business. The victim was local, name of Douglas. His Da owned a garage in town, and handed it down. Now, when I met him, I’d have said he was an able-dealer, a real schemer if you know’t? But you know how it is—grew up here, so part of the fabric. You’ll never hear a word against him. And no speaking ill o’ the dead.”
Jo started. “I thought something was just set on fire?”
“Aye. Douglas himself. Or his car, rather, with him in it.”
“Shit.” Jo tried hard not to focus on the forming mental image. “Who did it?”
“That’s where it gets messy, like,” Tula said. “They arrested a Newcastle fellow, can’t remember the name. Jack, maybe. Turns out they’d been stealing cars, and using Douglas’ garage to chop ’em. Somehow or other, this partner sets him ablaze. Get’s done for murder—manslaughter, I mean.”
Jo processed this: a manslaughter offence constitutes homicide. Involuntary meant you hadn’t meant it to happen—negligence. But this sounded a lot voluntary.
“That’s awful.”
“Too right, it is. Violent and vengeful. Sort of thing just doesn’t happen around here, especially not to people you know.”
Jo understood the sentiment, but it seemed everyone knew everyone, here. In Chicago, in Brooklyn, it didn’t work like that. Yes, Jo knew her immediate neighbors. But she’d left the country with none of them the wiser. She thought she preferred it that way. And by circuitous reasoning, that made her think once more of Evelyn.
“Someone must have known Evelyn. I mean, someone must have been friends with them, right?”
They had come to a slight rise in the path, which gave a decent vantage. Green and black hills, rumpled like bed skirts, with great gray billows overhead. Bracken and heath and stretching shadows, and here and there a bright spot of vanishing sun.
Tula gave her an open-mouthed smile.
“That’s right out of clear blue, love.”
“No it’s not! You know about a murderer victim’s dad’s job. Somebody must know about Evelyn.”
“Aye. Roberta Wilkinson,” Tula said, and Jo flinched. She hadn’t made a great first impression.
“Right. Yes. It’s just working up the nerve to talk to her. Hell, I haven’t even called the roofers, yet.”
“You’re joking! Jo, you must! We’ve storms all spring long!”
“I know, I know.” They’d arrived at the stone steps leading up from the path to the streets of Abington. Jo already agreed to dinner at the Red Lion, but she still planned to go back to the cottage. “Can we stop on the way? I need cheese and wine from Sainsbury’s.”
After three soggy miles, shopping, and a lot of brisk wind, Jo was in pursuit of the pub’s enormous fireplace—and a glass of something cheering. Tula had paused to hand over the groceries to Ben, and Ben had done some rather theatrical pointing in the direction of the far booths. Jo followed his mime to the back of a head, and an unmistakable flop of hair inexpertly trussed into a man-bun.
And because fate was a beast (and because Tula had just said Jo’s name, loudly), Gwilym turned about to wave.
“Oh. Dear.” Said Jo, but Gwilym had already bounded in her direction with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever.
“I should have called—I know it—but you said yourself, it’s not that far to travel.”
Jo wet her lips. Those had been her words, all right.
“Tula,” she said, because Tula was hovering rather gleefully at her elbow, “meet Gwilym.”
“Aye, and welcome!” Tula practically embraced the man. “Jo’s told us so much about you!”
“So you see, I have an account with each one of those ancestry sites,” Gwilym was saying. He went on to explain how he’d cross-referenced the Davies family with his archive, been through two library databases, and called a meeting with colleagues before deciding to come in person to Abington. But the fact he’d done it all in the last thirty hours for an almost perfect stranger meant it didn’t exactly look like a research trip. And it didn’t help that Tula could hardly keep from giggling out loud.
“That’s—a lot,” Jo said. Because frankly, she was impressed.
“Oh, it gets better!” Gwilym pulled out his laptop and turned it toward them. “You told me that William and Gwen Ardemore didn’t have children, right? Well, the Davies family line were fantastic breeders. Family tree like a willow hedge.”
Jo did not know what a willow hedge looked like. But from the diagram, it apparently meant lots and lots of kids.
“Every single member of the Davies family had more than five children a piece, right up to Gwen, Evelyn, and their brother, Robert.” Gwilym used his butter knife as a pointer. “Then Robert had eleven children, enumerated here. Gwen had none. That suggests someone was sterile, and I sort of assumed it was William. Syphilis, you know? All men had that back then.”
“Can’t be true, can it?” Ben asked.
“Oh, it really is,” Jo agreed. “One in three Victorians, by some estimates. And then there was all the congenital stuff, what they called saddle-face, or the stumpy little vampire teeth kids developed.” Jo chewed her lip at Ben’s horrified exclamation. “Erm. Sorry—I edited a series in the history of medicine. Anyway, that helps explain how my family had come into the property. I mean, we’re a distant branch. But what does it say about Evelyn?”
Gwilym’s face fell slightly.
“Not much. That’s why I thought I’d come down. The best history is always local history.”
So he had said. Tula rapped the tabletop with her knuckle.
“Perfect! Jo can introduce you to Abington’s local historian and museum keeper. She’ll love you.” Jo gave her a panicked look, but Tula tsked at her—then waved her toward the kitchen.
“Look at him, lass!” she said, pointing through the swinging doors. “He’d charm Satan himself. You bring him round to see Roberta. If he can’t melt her, no one can. And—there’s someone on the phone for you.”
“Which phone?” Tula handed her the landline, its cord stretched long from the bar.
“This one. I’ve got Fiennes & Sons on the line. Now order in some proper roofing before you’ve naught left of the mystery room at all!”