“Just how many hours a week do you put in for the Fotheringill estate?” my sister asked me on the phone the next morning. I stood at the sink in the back of the TIC, fishing a tea bag out of my mug and longing for one of Nuala’s scones to go with it.
“I have regular hours the same as anyone,” I said, although that wasn’t strictly true, as I worked six out of seven days. “It’s only that living at the Hall, it’s so easy to slip into work-related conversation.”
“Especially during those late-night chats with Loverboy Linus?”
“Bee,” I said, chastising her. I had mentioned early on that Linus had taken a fancy to me and my sister had not let up since. “How are you feeling?”
“Beryl caught me scrubbing out the cupboards in the laundry room and made me take a nap yesterday afternoon,” Bianca said. My sister had developed the nesting syndrome to the extreme a week or so before each of her first three children were born, so this event held great significance.
“Any day now,” I said.
“God, I wish it was any minute. I’m about to go round the bend.”
“Well, when Ezekiel arrives…”
Bee sniggered and said, “Don’t start.”
I couldn’t help the dig. Her first three children were Emelia, Enid, and Emmet, for no reason that she or her husband, Paul, had ever revealed, and so I had spent the months of this pregnancy trying to guess what they’d come up with. Trouble was, I had long ago run out of normal names that begin with “e” and had lately resorted to biblical references and Greek playwrights. “Euripides?” I had asked one day, and Bee had laughed so hard she had to go change her knickers.
“How will you come down when the baby arrives if you’re working that Dickensian schedule?” Bianca demanded.
“I’m not a slave, Bee. I’ll ask Linus for a few days off, and he’ll say yes. Vesta can take care of everything here with no trouble.”
“How’s Michael?”
Bianca loved to hear details about Michael and me—I mean, every single detail—but she’d have to wait. The bell above the door jingled, and Cecil walked in. Right, buck up, Julia. Be kind.
“Good morning, Cecil, come through,” I said. “Tea?”
To my astonishment, Cecil carried a pink bakery box. I stared at it for a moment, and when I looked up to him, his face was just as pink.
“I stopped at Nuala’s Tea Room,” he said, clearing his throat and holding out the box. “Cheese-and-bacon scones. She said to tell you she hadn’t finished the chocolate cake yet.”
A peace offering. He wasn’t such a bad sort, now was he?
“Well, let’s sit down and talk—quiz night, Christmas Market. I can go over the preliminary schedule for the Boxing Day Bird Count. What do you think?”
I pretended not to notice Cecil’s phone, which he placed between us on the table, recording our session. He asked questions and I answered them, and we seemed to do just fine. Until I brought up the subject of Freddy.
“Were you able to give the police any more information about Freddy when you went in this morning?” I asked.
Cecil stopped the recording and put his phone in his jacket. “My father has quite taken you into his confidence, hasn’t he?”
I let that remark sting for only a moment. “He isn’t telling me the family secrets, if that’s what you’re worried about. He’s concerned about you. I don’t see a problem with that.”
“Yes—concerned I’ll make a shambles of the estate. Wishing he had another chance to make the perfect heir, someone who meets all the standards of a proper Lord Fotheringill.”
He said the hurtful words, but the odd thing was, they sounded memorized, as if he were repeating someone else.
“I don’t believe your father would want such a thing—even if you haven’t spent your whole life here. I know he treasured the school holidays you spent at the Hall. Where did you and your mother live? Where did you grow up?”
“I grew up at school,” he said without looking at me, and I could not begrudge him his little-boy pout.
Before I left for dinner at the Hall, I rang DS Glossop. I wanted to hear him say that, of course, Cecil was under no suspicion and that asking him into the station had been routine. I wanted to tell Linus he had nothing to worry about.
Natty Glossop did not oblige.
“He’s the only one who knew Freddy Peacock, and yet he won’t say where he was or with whom on Monday evening—only that he was not at the Hall. It never looks good when that happens,” the sergeant said in a world-weary voice, as if he’d worked on a dozen murder cases.
“Are you saying he’s a suspect?” I whispered furtively. I was alone in the TIC, but it didn’t seem like news that even those four walls should hear.
“Why will he not even try to give a reasonable explanation?”
“It’s only if he were guilty of something that he would feel compelled to cover his tracks,” I said. “To make something up and give you loads of false details.”
The sergeant paused. “Well, possibly.”
“Last week, a woman in a red sports car dropped Cecil and Freddy at the Hall. She and Freddy seemed quite…close. A crime of passion? Sergeant, you are keeping an open mind, aren’t you?”
“I can do no less,” Glossop replied airily. “Mr. Fotheringill could give us only her first name—Katya. That evening was the first time he’d met her. Mr. Thorne offered a description of the scene you mention, and we are endeavoring to track this woman down.”