Poinsettias and the Perfect Crime Page 15

  There was a moment of silence as everyone took stock.

  “I still think he did it. We should get him arrested,” Fergus announced.

  “I could say the same to the police about you. I heard they were very interested in your whereabouts after you stopped talking to Charlotte and me and disappeared towards the toilets. Either you had a very bad stomach, or maybe you were upstairs committing a murder,” Samuel said, floating the possibility.

  “Why would I have murdered Bill Wrexton? I spent months setting it up so that they’d let me look at the diamond. I’m a trusted friend of the family. I think the police will see that it’s far more likely you arrived on the scene, recognised me, discovered you were going to be pipped to the post, and decided to steal the diamond yourself out of spite. I’m willing to accept that Bill Wrexton’s death was an accident. A well-travelled man like yourself probably has all kinds of knives in his collection,” Fergus replied.

  “I’m leaning towards what Fergus is saying,” I said, folding my arms.

  Samuel looked between us and then threw his head back in frustration. “Both of you are looking at this with blinkers on. Sure, I did recognise Fergus from the moment we met at the ball. I was hoping to trip him up by acting friendly towards you. I didn’t realise you weren’t actually together.”

  I frowned. That was hardly a point in his favour.

  “But I didn’t kill anyone, or even go near the diamond. I went outside to see what I could see of the house. I figured that if the diamond really was a matter of national security, there’d be some kind of device monitoring outside windows and things like that. It wouldn’t be that easy to steal. Probably anyone trying would be swiftly caught and questioned about their knowledge.” Samuel looked seriously at us. “Do you really think I would then try to steal the diamond, knowing all that? How would it benefit me? I don’t want to start a war with India!”

  “It could give you more reporting work,” Fergus suggested.

  “It could get me booted out of the country for good. I doubt they’d want any English people over there if they decided to fight us. Don’t be a fool.”

  “Did you see any monitoring equipment? Any booby traps?” I asked.

  “No, there wasn’t anything,” Samuel confessed. “But it probably just means that whoever employed the Wrextons to guard the gem was relying on it remaining a secret without the extra measures.”

  “Huh,” I said, thinking of Deirdre remembering that she’d heard about the diamond years ago… and then trying to follow the trail herself whilst spreading gossip without a second thought of the consequences. It certainly wasn’t her fault that Bill Wrexton was dead, that guilt lay with his killer, but could it have been the way the truth had got out?

  Both men were looking at me but I just shook my head. I was speculating. The only thing I could really take from it was that Samuel hadn’t been one of only a few who’d known of the diamond’s existence.

  But I still didn’t trust him.

  “Why did you come back to the manor the day after?” I asked, deciding once and for all that I had seen him running away.

  “I came back for the same reason you did,” he said, finally admitting the truth. “I wanted to see what I could see and do some investigating. It annoyed me that he’d got a head-start by being the one to find the crime scene.” Samuel inclined his head in Fergus’ direction.

  All of a sudden, I realised I’d had enough. I’d had enough of this man and his wild theories, and I’d had enough of this competition between he and Fergus, that may yet be the downfall of us all.

  “You are both sorting this out right now. This competition has got out of hand. The fact that I’m even considering you stealing the diamond to get ahead of Fergus is… it’s terrible!” I said, fully exasperated. “And you need to make things right with my sister. You don’t get to just walk away and forget it ever happened because its convenient to you. I know you were just using her, but at least be a man and make a good apology. She’s a great person and she deserves that much from someone like you.” I made it clear in my tone what I really thought about him. “I’m going,” I finished, and walked away, leaving the stunned men behind me.

  When I turned the corner of the street, I felt better. I’d vented my feelings in the open and, what’s more, I’d discovered I’d been right about Samuel all along. I’d known there was something off about him ever since he’d acted so strangely towards me at the ball. Now that I knew the reason, I thought even less of him. How petty did you have to be to pretend to be over-friendly to your girlfriend’s sister in order to make your rival take his eye off the game? It was all too obvious that Samuel was not the love of Charlotte’s life. The only issue was, I wasn’t sure which of us she’d end up hating more for it - Samuel or me.

  “Thank goodness Christmas only comes once a year,” I muttered, wandering down Merryfield high-street. It was pretty empty as people continued to celebrate the festive holiday indoors by the fireside, or out in the countryside on a long walk. The shops were shut and there was a sort of peaceful feeling to the village, as if it were hibernating, waiting for the spring to come. Frost still tinted the roof tops and I shivered as I walked. I hadn’t expected to take an impromptu hike when I’d driven over to stop Fergus from doing anything rash. In the end, I’d probably behaved more rashly than he had. What had I been thinking, confronting my sister like that?

  I was rapidly sinking back into guilt-fuelled misery when I nearly bumped into a person walking the other way down the street.

  “Diana? What are you doing here?”

  I looked up into the face of my ex-boyfriend.

  14

  A Debt to the Community

  “Not now, George. I thought I told you to leave Merryfield.”

  “I had one more night booked at the hotel,” he said. “I’m not following you, I promise. This is complete chance. But maybe…”

  I shot him a look that warned him to not continue with this line of thinking. If he spouted anything about fate, destiny, or similar, I was going to keep on walking.

  “I know it’s not going to happen between us, and I’ve given up persuading you to come and work in London. After our conversation the other night, I, ah, actually looked into your business.” He shot me an apologetic look. “I’m sorry that I didn’t before. I just didn’t realise you would have been able to achieve so much in such a short time. At the lab, we sometimes spend a few years on one round of testing for a single client,” George said, before smiling a little. “But you already know that, of course. I suppose I just wanted to say well done. You really have built a life for yourself back here.”

  “I’m glad you understand why I’m not going back to London,” I said. I was surprised that he’d taken the time to look into my business, but I found that I was pleased. When George had arrived and immediately tried to tell me what to do and what to feel, I’d blocked him out. He’d been the old George I remembered, but this was different. Perhaps he’d changed as much as I had in the time we’d spent apart. Perhaps we’d been just as bad as each other when we’d been together.

  “Do you want to go for a drink? Not like a proper drink, but a ‘no hard feelings’ thing?” George asked.

  I glanced down the street and discovered that the cafe was open. “Sure,” I decided. I sensed that all of the pressure George had been under had somehow evaporated. I thought I believed that a drink was all he really wanted… and perhaps I could get him to open up a little more about what had really brought him back to Merryfield on such a crazy recruitment drive.

  Five minutes later, we were both sipping lattes and discussing colleagues I remembered from when I’d worked at the London laboratory. When I was halfway down my drink, I gently steered the conversation in the direction I wanted it to go. “Are you working on anything interesting at the moment?”

  I’d been watching George’s hands when I’d asked him the question and they didn’t tense up. “Not particularly. We’re helping out with a dr
ug that’s supposed to have undergone a few medical trials but keeps throwing up some strange side effects. We’re searching for a possible cause, potentially caused by a reaction between the drug and the acid present in the human digestive tract. Hopefully, we’ll find something. If not, the drug will never see the light of day.”

  I nodded, knowing the protocol for drug testing. We’d done a lot of detective work when I’d worked in London. No drugs had ever been developed by us, but we were the chemical analyst equivalent of the cleanup crew when the chemists who’d created the drugs had failed to account for one factor or another. We’d saved countless chemists’ butts during my time working there. “Are you keeping busy outside of work?” Now his hand tensed up. Interesting.

  “Not particularly. I still play squash with some of the guys I used to go to school with. They’re all top bankers now and love to laugh at me.” His hand tensed again when he said it. “But I think there’s a bright future for me ahead. You know what they say… it’s a marathon, not a sprint.”

  “Is that what you want? To make more money?” I was genuinely curious.

  George blinked at me as if he’d never been asked that question before. “Yes, why not? I wouldn’t have to worry about everything so much. You know it’s expensive living in London. Especially when you’re single and renting a place on your own.”

  I looked down at my glass mug, wondering if that was his unsubtle way of telling me he was no longer with the woman he’d left me for. I’d already guessed as much, or at least, I’d hoped they were over - what with him coming here to beg me to get back together with him.

  “Does chemistry make you happy, or do you think you’re doing it for the money?” It was an age old conundrum. You had a good job in the city which paid for your rent and bills… just about. You kept working the job because one day you’d have enough money to get yourself out of there. You didn’t realise that you hated the job, and it was the job itself that was keeping you paying extortionate rent. I was certain that many of the city’s workers would be happier seeking employment as village postmen and women if they could only cut their egos down to size when it came to how big your paycheque was. People should be congratulated on how much they were actually able to save of that pay, not how big a figure it was.

  “I like chemistry. I always have done. It’s a solid career and it’s going to get me where I want to go,” George said, sounding eerily like my mother when she’d suggested I pursue it as a career.

  “Where is it you want to go?” I asked, feeling that we were getting to the heart of it now.

  George opened his mouth and then shut it again. “Some place like this, I guess,” he admitted with a rueful smile, but somehow I didn’t believe it. He knew it was a clichéd answer and he’d given it because he expected me to accept it. George wanted something else out of life, but he wasn’t sharing it with me.

  “Do you know what the word Elephas means?” I said, as vaguely as I could. I watched George out of the corner of my eye.

  “No idea.”

  No tensing and nothing apart from bafflement in his expression. I’d already established that George was not going to make his fortune on the poker tables, so I was pretty confident that he really didn’t know anything about the mystery code word. But I still couldn’t completely rule him out. George had been left on his own very close to the study where Bill Wrexton had been found dead. When I’d spoken to my ex on Christmas Eve, I’d definitely sensed a desperation in him. One that had driven him to lengths I’d never have predicted. I couldn’t rule George out because, while I didn’t see a reason for him personally to steal a diamond and then kill a man he didn’t know, I knew that someone had something they were holding over him.

  “Have you considered part-time work?” George asked, breaking into my thoughts.

  “Part-time?”

  “I mean up in London with me. You must miss the chemistry work. I know you enjoyed it. I just think maybe, if I ask, they might let you work part-time. It would be a good way to earn a bit of extra money. I reckon they’ll give you a raise.” He leant forwards and smiled in what he probably believed was a winning manner. “You won’t regret it.”

  “I’m afraid I will,” I said, answering with a light smile of my own. The heart of the matter was I loved my life. I loved being part of a village full of locals who didn’t worry about politics or any of the big stuff. I knew I could be accused of avoiding a deeper and more meaningful life, but for some reason, my flowers felt more meaningful than my chemistry work ever had.

  In the lab, I’d been one member of a team, working towards a collective goal. Even when we’d achieved our aims, we’d never got to find out what happened next. Did the chemical engineering work we’d done on the drugs make patients smile when they were given a new and improved medication, or did it simply treat whatever was wrong with them, as opposed to attempting to cure it in the longterm? I knew thinking that way about big Pharma companies was a borderline conspiracy theory in itself, but it was one there was plenty of evidence for in the way of climbing profits and rising prescriptions. I didn’t have the statistics, but it seemed to me as if almost everyone was on some kind of medication these days.

  “You’ll reconsider. I know you will,” George said, looking sad for a moment.

  “If you’re in some kind of trouble, you can tell me. I will do everything I can to help you out of it.”

  “I’m fine,” George said, leaving the implication hanging that I was the one who should be concerned. I decided right there and then that my ex-boyfriend was a lost cause. Whatever he’d got himself tangled up in, it was clearly bad, but I wasn’t going to get involved. Fergus was supposed to be doing some research, but that was it. I wasn’t going to do anything rash, and I definitely wasn’t going to go back to London.

  “I’ll pay,” I said, standing up and walking over to the counter before he could protest.

  I was met by the familiar face of the village baker Mrs Dovey.

  “Hello there! Did you have a good Christmas?” she asked, smiling and jolly as always. It was a combination of Mrs Dovey’s cheery personality and excellent cooking that had kept her bakery in business, in spite of the threats of larger supermarkets selling cheap bread in nearby Kingston Hill.

  “I had a Christmas,” I said, with a wry smile. “How about you?”

  “Family, eh? You love em and hate em all at the same time. I had a very nice Christmas. A busy one, that’s for sure! I opened to sell Christmas bread on Christmas morning, and now I’m doing double duty running the bakery and keeping the cafe open for Mrs Elm. She’s come down with a nasty case of the flu, but she’d promised the local crafting club that this place would be open today for their special coffee morning. For a lot of them, it’s probably the most people they’ll see all Christmas, and Mrs Elm didn’t want to take that away from them. I’m sure they’ll all be arriving soon.”

  “It’s good of you to do that. If you ever need help anytime, I’m close by now,” I said, realising that without the constraints of a full-time job, I could aid my community from time to time. Mrs Dovey was doing a good thing, and I wanted to do the same. No matter how much I’d once tried to push away from it, Merryfield was my home.

  “That’s a very kind offer, Diana,” Mrs Dovey said, running up the bill for me. “Did I hear that you were the one who found poor old Bill Wrexton? I was at the ball myself, of course, but I had no idea that you were there. In the room, I mean,” she said, not quickly enough to avoid reminding me that everyone knew one version or another of what had happened between me and Cordelia. I didn’t want to ask which one Mrs Dovey had heard.

  “It was terrible. I’ve no idea why anyone would have done that to him,” I said with complete honesty. So far, I was still struggling to see why anyone would have needed Bill Wrexton dead if they were simply there to do a bit of jewel robbery. Tying him up would have been more than sufficient. I supposed Bill Wrexton could have recognised the robber and caused them to panic, but th
e way he’d been killed - a single blow from a professional-looking knife to the centre of his chest. It had been dealt by someone who’d known what they were doing. It wasn’t the frenzied panic of a person who’d been caught committing a crime. They would have tended to make multiple wounds, just to be sure. I was stumped.

  “It’s a shame about the diamond I heard went missing. A stone like that could have certainly sorted out some money problems,” Mrs Dovey said, proving once and for all that the news of there being a diamond was well and truly out in the mainstream.

  “Money problems?” I queried.

  “You know me, I try not to pry…” Mrs Dovey said, completely untruthfully, “…but Cordelia Wrexton has run up several large tabs around town. I let her start one with me because she said it would just be convenient for her to pay me in one go, rather than carrying around cash like a peasant.”

  “That does sound like Cordelia,” I muttered.

  “Anyway, I agreed, and she has yet to pay for any of it! Those of us who’ve been left out of pocket have been discussing going to her… well, to her mother about it.” Mrs Dovey caught herself in the nick of time. “We were waiting until after the ball to do it because Mrs Wrexton supports so many local businesses on that night and, well… we didn’t want there to be any bad feeling. We all know what happens when…” She cleared her throat again, remembering once more who she was talking to. She meant that they hadn’t wanted to get banned from the ball because they were mean to Cordelia Wrexton. “And now with what’s happened to Bill, it hardly seems like the right time to be griping about money.”

  “Do you know why she hasn’t paid you?”

  “I don’t like to gossip but… I heard it from someone who heard it from someone else that Cordelia was taken in by a scam investment company. They wined and dined her and then took all of the money she’d already been given by her parents. My guess is she can’t bring herself to admit what happened.” Mrs Dovey made a noise of derision. “It’s high time that girl got herself a job! She’s not living in the real world. If it is true, then perhaps it’s a blessing in disguise. I would feel bad bringing all of this up with Gillian, but I do need that money, and I know there are others she owes even more. Christmas has been and gone, I know we could all do with that money.”