Death at the Cafe (12 page)

Annabelle smiled triumphantly at the Inspector, who wiped a broad hand over his face. He glanced for a few moments at the unyielding expression on the Reverend’s face and then at the equally adamant expression of PC Montgomery. Slowly, he pressed stop on the tape recorder, ejected the tape, and put it in his pocket.

“Go make sure the coast is clear, Montgomery. We’d better leave from the rear entrance,” he said in a low voice. “I’m going to be saying Hail Marys for the rest of my life.”

Barely ten minutes later, the three of them were zooming back across London in the detective’s unmarked car toward Kensington. Annabelle had made the call to the Bishop’s office requesting a meeting. She had not said much else apart from a sly reference to “a deal.” Unsurprisingly to her, Sara claimed that Bishop Murphy was immediately available.

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” DI Cutcliffe said to himself once he had parked the car in a discreet parking spot a little way down the road from the Bishop’s house.

Annabelle shifted nervously in her seat. She was breathing deeply, feeling both incredibly exhilarated and increasingly nervous.

“Now listen to me,” Cutcliffe said, “these are the rules. Don’t, whatever you do, mention anything about me. If this blows up, I don’t want anyone to know I’m the one who allowed a cake-obsessed vicar from East London to conduct a sting operation to entrap a bent Bishop.”

“Oh, of course, I mean –”

“And get him to talk.” the Inspector interrupted. “Get him to confirm what you’re saying. We need him to incriminate himself or to at least explain some things that we can turn into evidence.”

“Yes,” Annabelle said, almost literally biting her tongue.

“And…” Cutcliffe looked from Annabelle to Montgomery and back again, “don’t be nervous. I don’t usually say this kind of thing to suspects, but I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t think you were on to something.”

Annabelle seemed to relax somewhat at this display of trust from the detective, however meager it was.

“Thank you, Inspector. I won’t let you down.”

“I hope not. Okay. Call my phone, then put yours on speaker. We’ll mute ours so you don’t hear us. I want you to say a few words once you’ve walked down the street, then turn toward us. If we can hear you well enough we’ll give a thumbs up. If we give a thumbs down, come straight back to the car, and we’ll figure something else out. Once the Bishop has said enough, we’ll enter. If we don’t like what you’re doing, we’ll enter and arrest you again. If it turns unsafe, we’ll enter. Got that?”

Annabelle nodded. “Yes.”

“Okay. Time to go. Call my phone.”

Annabelle promptly pulled out her phone, rang Cutcliffe, and then placed it on speaker. She gave one last nod to the Inspector and Montgomery, who nodded back with looks of nervous pride like parents reluctantly sending their child off on their first day of school, full of support but knowing that it was solely up to the child now. Annabelle exited the car, looking around, and began walking down the street.

“Um… Ah… Oh, I’m terrible at things like this. I feel like a madman talking to myself in the street. Ah… Is that okay?” Annabelle said, turning back to see the Inspector give a thumbs up. “Okay. Good. Well, off I go. Oh, I suppose I should stop talking,” she said, turning once again to see the Inspector give another thumbs up. “Yes. Well… Good.”

Annabelle walked slowly toward the Bishop’s house, up the path to the brass knocker, and paused. She shook her limbs, set her posture, and fixed her expression into one of casual nonchalance, tossing her hair back for good measure. Then she knocked.

The door opened to Sara’s smile, which seemed fixed in the same position in which Annabelle and Mary had left it.

“Hello, Reverend,” she said in her still unplaceable accent. She stepped aside and gestured Annabelle inside. “Bishop Murphy is waiting for you in his study.”

“Ah, good,” Annabelle said, as casually as she could.

She strode toward the study door, placed a hand upon the door knob and looked back at Sara.

“Please go right in,” Sara said.

Annabelle took a deep breath and opened the door.

“Reverend Annabelle!” Bishop Murphy said, standing up from his desk and walking around it to greet her. “A pleasant – and somewhat unexpected – surprise!”

He shook Annabelle’s hand, while she looked away dismissively.

“Yes,” she said, “I suppose.”

The Bishop returned to his chair while Annabelle took hers opposite. She crossed her legs in what she thought would be an elegant movement of ease and grace, but found it such a terribly uncomfortable position that she quickly shuffled her legs to uncross them.

“So what brings you here, Reverend?” Bishop Murphy asked with a wry smile.

“Well, I have something that you want. And I want to see how far you’ll go to get it,” Annabelle said, enjoying the demureness of her own tone.

The Bishop raised a curious eyebrow.

“Oh gosh!” Annabelle exclaimed suddenly. “That sounds awfully flirty, doesn’t it? Well, I don’t mean that!” she laughed, awkwardly. “I’m talking about the emeralds, I mean. The Cats-Eye Emeralds. I’m saying that I have them, and, well…”

Annabelle trailed off in a series of stammers and snorted laughs, while the Bishop watched her sardonically.

After a moment’s consideration, the Bishop spoke.

“What makes you think that I’m interested in the emeralds?”

Annabelle gulped. Was the Bishop going to pretend he wasn’t? Did he know what was going on?

“Well,” Annabelle said, regaining some of her composure, “you said that the emeralds were exhibited very privately and that only prominent collectors were even aware they had been found. For you to have known that meant that you were likely one of those collectors yourself. Sara told us when we visited about your own ‘private’ exhibitions in the cellar beneath this very building.”

The Bishop laughed gently. “That’s true. I do have a rather excellent collection of artifacts. That doesn’t necessarily mean I’m interested in the emeralds, however.”

Annabelle shifted uncomfortably once again. A note of doubt entered her mind. She gazed around the study, as if some support could be found there but knew that she was on her own. Now or never, she thought.

“I must be mistaken then,” she said, placing her hands on the chair’s armrests to push herself upright, “I had thought you would be interested in a deal. I suppose I’ll just find someone else. Someone with better taste.”

“Sit down, Vicar,” the Bishop said, dropping his smile and replacing it with a mean sneer. “Of course, I’m interested.”

Annabelle sat back down.

“But how do I know you have them? Can you prove it?”

Damnit! The emeralds were at the police station. Annabelle should have asked DI Cutcliffe to give them to her as a negotiation tactic. She met the Bishop’s eye once again and laughed strongly.

“Do you really think I’d bring them here? Ha! I’ve seen how far you’re willing to go for them, Bishop, and I was rather hoping to have my tea tonight in one piece!”

The Bishop’s sneer grew into his sly grin once again.

“Clever. But I’m not sure what you’re implying, Reverend. I’m simply an interested collector.”

“Tosh!” Annabelle exclaimed, once again losing her decorum. “We both know that you’ve gone out of your way to get your hands on those emeralds!”

“Do we?”

“When your ‘inquiries’ about the emeralds were rejected, you decided to steal them and make Sister Mary take the blame. You even told us that somebody had stolen from Teresa previously and ‘gotten away with it.’ How would you know that unless you were the very person who had stolen from Teresa before?”

“Teresa was a friend of mine. She told me.”

“I believe that about as much as I believe that you tried to help us!”

The Bishop chuckled to himself at the memory of how easily he had double-crossed Annabelle and Mary.

“So you put Mary in touch with Teresa and waited for the perfect opportunity to steal the emeralds with Mary as the prime suspect. You underestimated the two women, however. Teresa, possibly suspecting something, arranged for her niece to meet Mary in a public space, and Lauren realized she was being spied upon. She wrote a note to hand over to Mary. You panicked and told your assassin to kill Lauren before she could reveal anything. However, Lauren still managed to hand over the note. The assassin even searched Lauren for it, but he found nothing.”

 “An interesting perspective,” the Bishop smirked.

Annabelle waited for him to say more, and when he didn’t, she continued.

“The perfect chance soon presented itself, however, when Mary and I went to Teresa’s house. At the first opportunity, your assassin killed Teresa with us next to her. Now he simply had to wait for the police to take us away or for us to leave so that he could enter and take the emeralds easily. The good news was that we left immediately, the bad news was that we had taken the emeralds with us.”

“You know,” the Bishop said, examining his nails casually, “one thing puzzles me. You seemed so unaware that you had the emeralds upon you, I almost believed it. You are clever enough to lie, but Mary… she’s far too honest to have deceived everyone this well.”

Annabelle grinned. “The truth is, we didn’t know. Teresa baked the emeralds into a cake which she gave us.”

The Bishop set his eyes upon Annabelle in an expression of pure disbelief. “Are you joking?”

“Not at all, Bishop.”

“Ha!” he exploded. “That’s precisely the sort of cunning thing Teresa would do. She was almost as wily as me – almost.”

“Your assassin searched her apartment and found nothing, meaning that we had taken the emeralds. At a loss, you tried the direct approach, calling us to arrange a meeting and discern what we were doing.”

“You seemed entirely ignorant of the entire affair when we spoke,” the Bishop added. “I did suspect that Teresa had somehow given you the emeralds or at least a clue as to where they were.”

“At the time, we didn’t even know we had them,” Annabelle said.

“Leaving me with two choices: To kill you and hope that you had them, or to follow you until I found out more.”

“But if you killed us and we didn’t have them, you’d have lost the only chance of getting them.”

“It was a conundrum, to be sure,” Bishop Murphy said. “But there’s one thing I never told you. Those emeralds originate from West Africa. I was sure Teresa wanted Mary to have them so that she could sell them and fund her hospital there. A sense of justice and charity was always her big weakness. It’s the very reason her ex-husband was so generous as to give them to her. I was certain you had them. I just didn’t know where.”

“But you were confused by our meeting, when we didn’t seem to know anything about them.”

“Confused, yes, and you were getting a little too close to the bone. You suspected that somebody was framing Mary, and you knew that I was the one who had put Mary into contact with Teresa. Not only did you have the emeralds I wanted, but you were a day or two away from incriminating me. If it were just Mary, as I had planned, I wouldn’t have been afraid, but you,” he pointed a finger toward Annabelle and looked down it, as if aiming a gun, “you were sure to cause me a lot of trouble.”

“So you called DI Cutcliffe and told him that you were suspicious after speaking to us, in the hope he would find out what we didn’t even realize ourselves.”

The Bishop opened his hands in a gesture of mock-apology. “I’m good with Cutcliffe. Once he discovered the emeralds, I could have easily persuaded him that they were my property, or at least I would have a head-start on knowing what the police would do with them once they took them from you. Better in police custody than the unpredictable hands of two religious women who didn’t even know what they had. Which makes me wonder, Reverend, how are you sitting here with me, when you should be locked up about now?”

Annabelle squirmed in her seat.

“I blamed Mary,” Annabelle said, though she found it a struggle to even say the words. “She was, after all, intended to take the blame for the murders your assassin committed, wasn’t she?”

The Bishop laughed heartily. “Very clever, Reverend. Very clever indeed. You are as merciless and as sly a player of games as I. You will make a very intriguing Vicar, I should imagine. Now,” he said, slapping his hands upon the table, “let’s talk numbers shall we?”

Annabelle balked. Though he had insinuated plenty, the Bishop hadn’t actually confessed to anything. Was this enough for DI Cutcliffe? Was it too late? She searched for something she could say which would force him to reply with a definitive answer, but the Bishop was intently waiting for her answer to his question.

“Ah… Well… What are the lives of two women worth?”

“You tell me, Reverend.”

“Um…” Annabelle tried to think of a number that didn’t sound too preposterous. “Ten million pounds?”

The Bishop’s face slowly twisted into an amazed smile, before breaking out into such a fit of laughter that he almost fell backwards from his chair.

“Ten?! Haha! Ten million pounds?!” he bellowed, wiping tears from his eyes. “Oh dear!”

“Is that too much?” Annabelle asked meekly.