‘Where is it?’ Shilpa asked Tanvi the following day.
‘What?’
‘The journal. The one that Caroline had given to me for safekeeping.’
Tanvi looked at her blankly.
‘It was right here,’ Shilpa said. She ran her hand along the kitchen island. It had been foolish leaving such an important book in the kitchen; she just never expected someone to move it. Usually, Brijesh was so considerate of her things. She silently cursed Tanvi.
‘What’s the fuss?’ Brijesh said, as he walked into the kitchen.
‘I can’t find Roy Arden’s journal. Have you seen it?’ she asked hopefully.
‘It’s in my room. I thought I’d take a look.’
Shilpa marched straight past him into his bedroom. She stormed out with the book in her hand. ‘You had no right,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ Brijesh said, crossing his arms over his bare chest. ‘Calm down.’
Shilpa was standing in the corridor shaking. Tanvi put an arm around her. ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘I’ve never seen you like this.’
‘Caroline trusted me,’ Shilpa said. ‘I need to get to the bottom of who killed her father, of who killed Caroline.’
‘Let me make you a drink,’ Tanvi said. She led her friend to the sitting room and Brijesh followed, after getting a jumper from his room.
Once they were sitting on the sofa with a cup of tea, Tanvi put a hand on Shilpa’s arm. Brijesh had opened the bifold doors, and as the tide slowly came in and the salt-laced breeze filled the sitting room, they began to relax. The gulls outside were particularly noisy today as they swooped into the estuary for their supper.
‘I found this,’ Shilpa said, passing the note she discovered by Caroline’s bed to Tanvi.
Tanvi squinted as she rotated the paper, trying to read the letters. ‘Where?’ she asked. Shilpa explained.
‘Have you lost your mind?’
Shilpa shook her head. She always felt like a child when Tanvi told her off, because Tanvi was the irresponsible one. She didn’t like it when Tanvi had the upper hand.
‘What if Jack had come back?’ she asked. ‘He could have been the one to poison his wife and it could have been him trying to access her phone. He’s probably the one who broke it in the first place.’
‘I knew what I was doing,’ Shilpa said sheepishly. Brijesh took the note from Tanvi and turned it around and then upside down.
‘Baby,’ he said.
‘What?’ Tanvi asked.
‘It says baby,’ Brijesh said. He showed Tanvi and Shilpa how the letters were formed. ‘If you were lying down and very weak, this is how you would hold the pen.’ Brijesh sat down and took a pen from the coffee table. He then proceeded to show them how the skewed letters had been written.
Now that Brijesh said it, it made sense. The word baby didn’t. ‘Annabel’s pregnant. That would be a worry to anyone even if there wasn’t an estate at risk. No one wants a sister young enough to be their grandchild. That was probably what she was getting at. She thinks Annabel killed her father… or thought,’ Shilpa said, correcting herself.
‘It’s not your responsibility,’ Tanvi said to Shilpa. ‘Leave it to the police.’
‘Caroline told me that the verdict at the inquest was that Roy’s death was accidental. The police are not revisiting the case.’
‘Even now, after what’s happened to Caroline?’
‘And what did happen to Caroline?’ Shilpa asked bitterly. ‘She knew who killed her father and she was going to expose them, so someone got to her to prevent her from talking. The poisoning could have been a case of Caroline picking the wrong sort of mushroom. That’s what the killer wants everyone to think, and I have no idea if the police will believe that Caroline mistakenly picked the wrong mushrooms or if they’ll think she was poisoned.’
Shilpa took a breath. ‘Caroline’s husband was shaken when I saw him at their house. But there was something about the look he gave me as I left the hospital that made me wonder.’
‘What d’you mean?’ Brijesh asked.
‘It was a warning to stay away.’
‘Some people are just private,’ Tanvi said.
‘A minute ago you were confident Jack was a killer,’ Shilpa said.
Tanvi shrugged.
‘He readily accepted that Caroline had made a misjudgement about the mushrooms when the doctor suggested that that was the cause of his wife’s death. Of course, we won’t know for sure until they do an autopsy,’ Shilpa said.
‘Caroline was going through a lot,’ Tanvi said. ‘Maybe she was confused.’
‘Caroline had been foraging for years. She had said so when I was at Arden Copse. It was at one of our first meetings. She was so confident.’
‘I read somewhere that around fifty people die from ingesting poisonous mushrooms a year. There was even one mushroom specialist who ate the wrong sort and was rushed to hospital.’
Shilpa pulled out a tissue from the box on the coffee table. She dabbed her eyes. ‘I read that article too, Brijesh. The timing is just too convenient though. Especially as Caroline was going to tell me who killed her father.’
Tanvi picked up the blue book from the sofa which Shilpa had put down beside her. ‘Didn’t you say that it was only after Caroline read her father’s journal that she believed she knew who killed her father?’
Shilpa nodded. ‘She just wanted to check a few facts first.’
‘You read it,’ Tanvi said, turning to Brijesh. ‘What did it say?’
Brijesh frowned. ‘I started reading it. From what I could tell, it was a boy talking about superheroes. How could a young child foretell what was going to happen seven decades later?’
Tanvi passed the journal to Shilpa. ‘You don’t have to be anywhere today, do you?’ Shilpa shook her head. ‘Well then, it’s time to read what Roy Arden had to say all those years ago.’
Shilpa closed the journal. She tried to make sense of what she had just read. Watching a child die like that was a terrible ordeal for anyone, but for a boy of eight to witness that, it must have scarred him for life.
Was the death of a little boy what Caroline had confronted Martin about the day of his party? It made sense now as to why Martin had asked Caroline why she was bringing the incident up after all this time. Shilpa had assumed the reference to the past had been to Cecelia, but it had nothing to do with her.
Shilpa flicked through the blue journal again. Brijesh was right, there was little in the book that foreshadowed what had happened to Roy at his birthday. Eventually, after staring at the old pages, Shilpa snapped the journal shut and stood up. She paced around her sitting room a couple of times and then stopped at the bifold doors. The tide was coming in, and the wind was blowing. The sky was overcast, as it often was when the tide changed. Heavy grey clouds hung in the sky. She watched, waiting for the rain, but none came.
Shilpa’s phone rang.
It would be Robin again. He had left half a dozen messages for her already, but she wasn’t ready to speak to him yet. She had fallen for him harder than she had thought. That was her mistake. That was always her mistake. Her phone stopped ringing and then started again. He was persistent; she’d give him that.
She walked away from the view of the estuary and picked up her phone. She slipped it in her brown leather bag and looked at her watch. Tanvi and Brijesh were out viewing the apartment overlooking the estuary that they were keen on, and she had time to kill. She knew where Martin lived; she could drive up to Bigbury now. She could ask him what Caroline had confronted him about. How had the death of a young boy seven decades earlier led to Roy Arden’s death? If anyone knew what the link was, she was sure it was Martin.
Shilpa slung her bag across her shoulder and grabbed her keys from the kitchen island.
By the time Shilpa had reached the whitewashed house, it was raining. Fat drops pelted her as she ran from her car to the front door. She rang the doorbell and waited.
‘You made the cake,’ Martin said from the shelter of his doorway. ‘You’re Caroline’s friend.’
Shilpa nodded. ‘Can I come in?’