A week later, Shilpa was sitting at Leoni’s with the local newspaper. She rarely read a physical paper, let alone a tabloid, but the front page was calling out to her.
Annabel Arden and the photos she had seen well over a week ago were splashed over the front page. At the bottom was a reference to another article on the Ardens’ wealth in the same newspaper.
Shilpa had spoken to Martin and Jack and discovered that she had nowhere else to go with her enquiries. Every time she tried speaking to Annabel, she was cut off. Monty and Jacob had left South Devon, and they made no attempt to respond to her when she reached out on social media. Shilpa was getting nowhere fast and was on the brink of giving up. She had said to herself, this morning, as she stood under her rain shower, that maybe she had already given up. Tanvi had returned to London, and with her imminent move to South Devon, Brijesh was too busy to concern himself with a stalled investigation.
After a busy few weeks with cake orders, Shilpa found that her diary was a little easier to manage, and she was thankful for that. The regular orders from the cafés around Otter’s Reach and Mermaid Point kept her going, and she was getting more enquiries from other cafés in the surrounding area. She’d even had a call from a coffee shop in Dartmouth, which had made her day. Dartmouth was big news. She had shared that with her mother, who congratulated her but after a moment’s silence had asked about the state of her love life and in doing so had made Shilpa think about Robin.
He had called incessantly after confessing to being a journalist, and she had ignored all his calls and messages. There was no crime in being a journalist, but Shilpa had felt that he had lied to her, or at least concealed who he really was from her, and that was enough of a warning sign for her. Too often she had ignored the signs. This time she wasn’t going to be taken for a fool.
‘Be with you in a moment,’ Leoni said. Shilpa smiled at her before going back to her paper. She turned the page to the article written about the Ardens’ wealth and saw a small picture of the journalist who had written the piece at the bottom of the page. Her heart gave a little leap when she saw Robin’s picture and his name under the article. She closed the newspaper and fiddled with the handle on her cup of tea, but moments later she couldn’t help herself. She reopened the paper, turning to the page she was after.
‘Any good?’ a voice said.
She could smell the citrus in his fragrance and knew who it was before she looked up. She resisted a smile. ‘I’ve not got very far,’ she said.
‘Mind if I join you?’ he asked, and she gave a small shrug. ‘I can wait while you read it.’
At the counter he ordered a pot of tea. Leoni winked at her and mouthed that she would catch up with her later, and Shilpa found herself blushing.
Shilpa tried to focus on the article, but her mind wandered, so instead she read a few key sentences as her eyes navigated down the page.
‘It’s good,’ she said when she was halfway through. Robin had returned to the table and was sitting next to her. He poured himself a cup of tea and offered her a refill. Shilpa accepted. She didn’t look up from the page until a name caught her eye. ‘Cecelia James,’ she said, turning to Robin. ‘Did you investigate how she died?’
‘Not as a crime reporter,’ Robin said, holding up a slice of cake. ‘Is this one of yours?’
Shilpa studied the coffee-and-walnut slice. She smiled. She would have taken it personally if Leoni had found another supplier.
‘I wrote the piece as an investigative journalist. It was certainly an interesting story filled with the glamour of the swinging sixties. Who can resist reading something like that?’
‘You didn’t make the front page though,’ Shilpa added, turning away.
‘No. My mate did. I’m no armchair detective. It was just an interesting story linked to the Arden boys. In some ways I suppose they were like the Hiltons of their day.’
Shilpa snorted and quickly covered her mouth with her hand. ‘Hardly,’ she said.
‘Two wealthy young men with a million pound mansion, boats, cars and staff at their disposal.’
Shilpa tilted her head to one side. He had a point. ‘I’m not an armchair detective, by the way,’ she said.
‘Armchair detectives are the best kind,’ he said, giving her a wink.
Shilpa put the paper down and took a sip of her tea that Robin had kindly refilled. She sighed.
‘What’s that big sigh about?’ Robin asked, and even though Shilpa wanted to play the ice maiden, she found that she couldn’t.
‘I thought there was something to what Caroline had told me; that her father had been killed. I’ve stepped back from it all this last week, and I’ve had some breathing room, time to think. Now I can see that maybe I was looking for something that wasn’t there. I think my time as armchair detective is up.’
‘You’re more than an armchair detective. You were the one who spotted what the police couldn’t last summer, weren’t you?’
Shilpa closed the newspaper and folded it in half. Annabel was on the front page. ‘I don’t usually buy the paper,’ she said.
‘Especially a trashy one like this,’ Robin said. ‘Don’t worry, your secret’s safe with me.’
‘I didn’t mean that,’ Shilpa said, realising that Robin was probably a regular journalist for the tabloid. When would she learn to stop putting her foot in her mouth? She looked away from Robin, out of embarrassment more than anything else, and unfolded the paper again. She studied the pictures on the front page.
It was clear from the pixelated images that the photos had been taken with a long lens. The one in the bar would have been easy to take, but the one from her bedroom didn’t quite make sense. Annabel was standing in her bedroom with the bump suit in hand, and although the pictures were grainy, if you looked close enough, you could see that there was a small smile on Annabel’s face. The photo had been taken from the main road outside Arden Copse. Not covering up at home when you were so far from the main road made sense, even if you were being deceptive. The press were going to have a field day with this. Shilpa scanned the article while Robin checked his phone.
The news was already causing a debate. Annabel had claimed she had suffered a miscarriage, and a women’s rights group had taken her under their wing. Annabel had explained that she didn’t know how to tell the people closest to her that she was no longer pregnant and found herself more comfortable in the lie than having to disclose her miscarriage. ‘It shouldn’t be that way for women,’ one commenter said. ‘Not in this day and age. Miscarriage is still a taboo, and women are afraid to speak their truth.’ It was a powerful piece, and Shilpa wasn’t sure what to believe. She had never experienced a miscarriage. She couldn’t begin to imagine what it was like, so she thought it best to stay silent on the matter.
‘She’ll probably get paid more than her inheritance for her side of the story,’ Robin said.
‘You’re not interviewing her then?’ Shilpa asked.
‘It’s not what I do,’ Robin said. ‘Listen, I’m a journalist. You just read my piece. It’s investigative, not scandalous. I don’t want to shatter people’s lives. I just want to tell the truth.’
‘But is their wealth anyone’s business?’ Shilpa asked.
‘It’s interesting, and it’s all out there in the public domain. I just put it all in one concise article. People will read it today, and it’ll be forgotten tomorrow. Is anyone talking about Roy Arden’s death around here anymore?’
Robin was right. The local gossips had moved on. She sat back in her chair. ‘I’m not from a different era,’ she said. ‘I was just upset that you didn’t tell me what you did from the start.’
Robin put his hand on his chest. He was still in his blue fleece, and his blond hair was curling at the edges. ‘I should have come clean. It was a half-truth though. I concentrate on my photography, but sometimes it’s the words that pay the bills.’
Shilpa touched his leg. She looked at Robin, and he leaned forward and kissed her.
Shilpa pulled back, suppressing a smile. She turned to the paper again and looked at Annabel’s face. The smile on her lips told a different story to the one Annabel wanted everyone to see.
‘Do you know when these photos were taken?’ Shilpa asked.
Robin nodded. ‘Sure. Remember I was going to tell Caroline the day you had that accident? My mate knew I was writing about the Ardens, and so he sent me the pictures. I knew Caroline had been worried about her father’s death, and I thought I would share the information with her and ask her about her dad’s tax evasion while I was at it.’
Shilpa frowned. If Robin hadn’t told Caroline that Annabel wasn’t pregnant, did Caroline already know? Was that the reason why she had written the word baby on a note before she died? Or was it something else? Something Shilpa was missing.
‘You never told me any of this before. You had so many chances,’ Shilpa said. She made a face and turned to Robin’s article. ‘That was over two weeks ago. So why have the photos of Annabel and her fake bump only just been published?’
Robin smiled, and Shilpa could see why there had been a delay. Annabel had set the whole thing up. She couldn’t pretend to be pregnant forever. This was the perfect way out for her. She waited until the inquest and funeral were over with, then she made her move. She had called the photographer and set up the perfect pictures on the understanding that they were published when she gave them the go-ahead. It was clear to Shilpa that Annabel wanted out of her arrangement with Christian, whatever that was, and this was the perfect solution.
Shilpa had overheard Christian say how much he had risked for Annabel, and he had been at Roy’s party despite the lack of invitation. Shilpa couldn’t deny that he had been one of her suspects in Roy Arden’s death, but now Shilpa was beginning to think the risk Christian had taken wasn’t pushing his ex-friend off the cliff, but simply attending the party to see Annabel.
If Annabel was with Christian at the time of Roy Arden’s death, it would have explained why she was always so cagey with Caroline about her whereabouts when Roy fell.
It was quite possible that Christian had given Annabel the idea of the pregnancy to get more out of Roy. ‘I could’ve given you everything you needed,’ Christian had told Annabel the day Shilpa had been eavesdropping. Annabel wanted her own money. She no longer wanted to be under someone else’s control. Annabel may have felt obliged to Christian if he had helped her get Roy to change his will with news of a pregnancy. But Annabel wasn’t going to be controlled by another powerful and rich man. Not now she had her own wealth.
Annabel wasn’t the only one with an ulterior motive though. As far as Shilpa knew, Christian and Gill were childless; she had done a quick Google search on the retail mogul not long after Robin had told her about them. Christian had probably been using Annabel to get what he had wanted too, a new wife with a baby on the way. If Annabel had been sleeping with Christian, she probably had him believing that the child was his. Cunning. Talk about killing two birds with one stone. It explained Annabel and Christian’s heated conversation by the poolside the day Shilpa had been at Arden Copse to pick up her cake stand. What a smack in the face it must have been when Christian discovered that Annabel had duped him as well.
Shilpa momentarily closed her eyes. If Annabel had wanted financial independence and Roy had recently changed his will because of her pregnancy, a pregnancy she knew wouldn’t result in a living baby, then Annabel had a strong motive for murder.
Robin jabbed his finger at a little article squeezed in next to his as if he knew what she was thinking. The five-line piece detailed that the retail entrepreneur, Christian Walker, was leaving the UK with his wife for a sabbatical. The couple were moving to Italy, where they had a home, for some much-needed rest and relaxation.
Shilpa was certain that there was at least one person behind the killings and they were literally getting away with murder. What had she missed? Not knowing where to start, she decided to read Robin’s article again, slowly this time.