Why on Earth had she agreed to cater for a funeral? She made cakes, not canapés, yet Shilpa had readily accepted the proposal. June Connolly wasn’t the pushy sort, not at all like Mrs Drew. She didn’t throw her weight around, she didn’t make demands, and yet she had managed to convince Shilpa, when she didn’t have the first idea how to go about it.
‘Don’t worry, dear,’ she had said. ‘It will only be a few guests. Let’s presume one hundred and fifty.’
Shilpa looked at her wide-eyed.
‘You think that’s too few to cater for?’ she asked. ‘Should you be taking this down? Although your memory is probably much better than mine.’
Shilpa, who wasn’t often speechless, picked up a notepad and pencil that lay on the coffee table beside her and started making notes. Ten minutes later, when June had paused for breath, Shilpa found her voice. ‘I don’t really do catering,’ she said. ‘Just cakes. Occasion cakes.’
June Connolly didn’t appear to hear her, or if she did, she had conveniently ignored her plea. ‘It’s just you did the cake for the engagement party,’ she said, holding a tissue to her right eye. ‘You knew Mason.’
Shilpa had tried to correct her, saying she hadn’t met Mason, that Mrs Drew had arranged the whole thing, but this too fell on deaf ears. Shilpa asked after the engagement party caterers, to which June replied, ‘You’re such a lovely girl for taking this on.’ Shilpa silently nodded, thereby sealing the deal. So, it wasn’t just Indian mothers who knew how to get their way by conveniently ignoring what they didn’t want to hear. Shilpa had only herself to blame. After all, she had years of experience dealing with her own mum. But June had just lost her son, her only son. She couldn’t say no.
Shilpa pulled her mobile phone from her bag and started typing a message to Olivia. Her brown leather Mulberry bag banged against her hip as she strode towards Leoni’s, past the pink thrift and sweet-smelling wild carrot growing along the perimeter of a picnic spot on Estuary Road. Today only a few benches were taken up by families in Devon for the summer holidays. The children sat eating their pastries, buckets and bacon in netted pouches by their sides, eagerly anticipating a day’s crabbing. Shilpa turned her attention back to her phone. Olivia was a fellow market stallholder who specialised in savoury nibbles. She hoped she was free and could help her get out of this mess she had found herself in. Pressing send, she slipped the phone back into her bag and turned her thoughts towards the cake she had agreed to make for the funeral. ‘A simple cake,’ June had said, before adding that she wanted something different. ‘Something to be remembered.’ Shilpa mentioned an Earl Grey-and-lemon cake she had once tried, and June nodded appreciatively. It was settled then – Earl Grey and lemon it was.
‘I’ll be with you in a minute, luv,’ Leoni said, wiping her hands on her apron and rushing back into the kitchen. She appeared a moment later, sweeping away a strand of hair from her brow with the back of her hand. ‘What’s in that banana bread, eh? They’ve been going crazy for it,’ she said, motioning to the customers seated in the café.
Shilpa touched her nose. ‘That’s a secret,’ she said.
‘Your usual?’ Leoni said, turning towards the coffee machine. ‘It’s been a mad morning.’ She turned and handed Shilpa a cup. She stepped out from behind the counter and looked Shilpa up and down. ‘This becoming a uniform?’ she asked.
Shilpa looked down at what she was wearing: black velvet French Sole Hefner slippers with vibrant blue butterflies on the toe, grey chinos and a navy-and-white T-shirt. Now that she couldn’t indulge in Louboutins anymore, she found herself drawn to the simple Breton. Looking for a new stripy T-shirt was how she whiled away her spare time, and she had quite a bit of that. Her lack of things to do in Otter’s Reach was part of the reason she had found herself drawn to the Connolly case. That and the knife she had seen the day Mason had been murdered. She looked at Leoni and then back at her garments. She was building quite a collection.
‘Looks like it,’ she said, and sighed at the loss of her once on-trend style.
They seated themselves in the corner of the coffee shop and Shilpa took a large sip of her double macchiato. It instantly perked her up as she felt the coffee slide down her throat. It wasn’t long before Leoni brought up the subject of Mason Connolly’s death, or ‘that terrible business’, as she referred to it.
‘His mother wants me to cater for the funeral,’ Shilpa confessed.
‘Poor thing,’ Leoni said. ‘He didn’t have a chance, not with Harriet’s history.’ Leoni explained how it wasn’t just Harriet whose black widow reputation made her a suspect in Mason’s murder.
‘Her dad tried to pay off her previous fiancé Finley. I don’t know how much,’ Leoni said. ‘The boy didn’t take it though. He said no.’
Shilpa considered this. She had never been in love enough to ever have to weigh up the fantastical notion that someone would offer her a large sum of money to step away from her one true love. ‘How do you know?’ she asked.
‘There was a big fuss at the time. Finley told Harriet what her dad had done, and she wasn’t happy, she made that known. The staff at the Drews’ were talking. There’d been fights between father and daughter, Harriet brought forward their wedding date, and then funnily enough the poor lad died abroad just before the wedding. Finley wasn’t good enough for Steven Drew’s daughter, and neither was Mason,’ Leoni said. ‘Drew has money, so he can make things happen,’ she added.
Shilpa ignored her last comment. ‘Mason came from a good family – a wealthy family from what I’ve heard. Surely that made a difference,’ she said, playing devil’s advocate.
Leoni finished her mug of tea. She looked up as a man in a blue T-shirt walked into the coffee shop and selected a baguette from the chilled unit and passed it to the cashier. Leoni agreed that Mason had wealth and was better-looking than Finley, but she was confident that it was his womanising that had put him on the back foot with Steven Drew.
‘He had this one girl that I occasionally saw him with before Harriet. Izzy was her name, and my, she was beautiful. Don’t get me wrong, Harriet’s a looker too. But there was something about this Izzy that just turned heads. You know, dark hair, olive complexion. She has a reputation for not letting anyone or anything get in her way. She was certainly something, but I think she got a better offer, because she dumped the poor chap – or so went the rumour.’
‘I saw someone matching that description at the engagement party,’ Shilpa said, remembering a beautiful woman of similar type with a polished look.
Leoni leaned in conspiratorially. ‘Was the woman you saw in green?’ she asked.
‘She was.’
‘Well then,’ she said with a smile, happy to have learned something new to gossip about. ‘Always wears green, that one; they even refer to her as the Green Goddess. I remember overhearing a bunch of girls in here bitching about her, and that stood out. No idea why.’
‘It suited her, I suppose,’ Shilpa said, noting that Izzy was a woman other women felt insecure around. Once again, she looked at her Breton top and chinos. ‘If you feel good in something, it makes sense to keep wearing it.’
‘Izzy moved to someplace near Mermaid Point a few years ago, so I never really kept up with her. Maybe she and Harriet were friends, because why would Harriet allow one of Mason’s exes to her engagement party? Especially a better-looking ex.’ Leoni threw her head back and laughed. ‘Ooh, it must have been some party.’
It was clear that June hadn’t known about Izzy, because she’d said that none of Mason’s exes were invited. Harriet must have known though.
‘Who knows what really happened to poor Mason,’ Leoni said. ‘What’s certain is that Mason died that day in the Drew house, and everyone is talking foul play. Steven Drew has form, doesn’t he? I’m just putting two and two together. Those police at Glass Bay keep a tight lid on things. It’s a shame they aren’t based here, because if they were, I’m sure I’d know a darned sight more about the case.’
If Leoni was right about the pay-off, then Steven Drew could have paid to have Finley killed. If it had been that easy, then maybe he had done the same with Mason. But in his house? On his property? Had he just wanted to protect his daughter, or had he enjoyed the power? It was plausible that Steven could have killed Mason at home to test the boundaries, to see if he could evade capture once again. Or perhaps he wanted to get caught, the guilt of Finley’s death weighing him down.
Shilpa was mulling over whether Steven Drew was a murderer when Leoni spoke again. ‘Harriet didn’t wait long before she found another victim.’ Leoni was a gossip who was rarely wrong, or so people said. But this was a stretch too far. Surely Harriet wasn’t dating already.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked. But as the words left her mouth, the door to the coffee shop opened and Harriet walked in with a tall man with dark hair and broad shoulders. The man ordered an espresso to go. Leoni kicked Shilpa under the table and Shilpa looked away. She noticed a few locals had stopped their conversations to stare at the couple.
Leoni was on her feet immediately. ‘Oh, pet,’ she said. ‘How are you holding up?’
Harriet tilted her head to one side and put her hand on her chest. ‘It has been difficult,’ she said a little too dramatically. ‘A shock, really.’
‘Terrible,’ Leoni said. ‘I’m glad to see you’re out and about.’
‘Evan has been a wonderful support,’ Harriet said, her perfectly manicured red nails giving his shoulder a squeeze. She was either oblivious to what people were saying about her or she didn’t care. Leoni wished Harriet well and sat back down. Harriet looked towards her and Shilpa smiled, but Harriet blanked her. She didn’t recognise her then as the woman who’d spent a good part of twenty-four hours making her engagement cake. Or maybe she had recalled her but didn’t like to acknowledge the staff.
‘That was Evan White,’ Leoni whispered as soon as the couple left the shop. ‘A college sweetheart. The two have dated on and off for years. They are each other’s backup plans,’ Leoni said, adding that they would be engaged before summer was out on account of Harriet wanting to be married before she hit thirty.
Shilpa finished her macchiato. She was thirty-five with no sign of a husband on the horizon. She understood how Harriet felt, but she would never just settle. She thanked Leoni for the coffee and the chat and stood up.
‘It’s ginger syrup and cardamom,’ she said.
‘Sorry?’
‘In the banana bread.’ Just the thought of her grandmother’s recipe gave her a warm feeling inside. She was glad she wasn’t the only one who loved it.