The Advent of Murder (A Faith Morgan Mystery) (15 page)

“Pageant costumes. Adam paid me a visit last night. He was very drunk – I thought he was a vagrant. He woke me up.”

“What?” Ben’s bark made her start. “Do you get many vagrants calling in the middle of the night?” he asked.

“Vicarages attract them,” she said soothingly. “Especially around Christmas. It’s the reputation for charity.”

“You must have an alarm?” His frown had deepened.

“Yes, but I don’t use it. You see, I sort of have a cat…”

Ben rested his palm against his forehead. “Fay, come on,” he said. “You know better than that.”

She shrugged, deliberately casual. “They’re just hungry for food and human company.”

Ben’s jaw set stubbornly. He would come back to the alarm system, she was sure, but right now he decided to return to the case in hand.

“What did Bagshaw want?”

“He was grieving – the first week anniversary of Lucas’s death. And he had some bad news.” She took a breath. This was important news. It could alter the course of the case. “Apparently Trish and Lucas benefited from a trust fund that paid the mortgage and more on that house in The Hollies. Now they are dead, the trust is to be wound up and Adam is likely to be homeless.”

She had to admit to a flicker of disappointment. Ben didn’t seem surprised. He was just watching her with his usual acuity, as if aware of every breath and eyelash. “You knew about the trust fund,” she said.

“I only found out a few hours ago,” he gave her the consolation prize.

“Do you know who’s behind it? I am presuming it’s from the absent father?”

“Best guess – but he’s keen not to be identified. Legal are negotiating their way through various roadblocks. We haven’t identified who it is yet, but we will. Meanwhile, we know the money was purely for the benefit of Trish and Lucas and ends with their deaths.”

“So it was clearly not in Adam’s interests to do away with Lucas,” she pointed out, glad for the opportunity to emphasize Adam Bagshaw’s status as a victim, not a suspect.

“If he knew about the trust.” Ben never gave in without a fight. She held his gaze.

“He knew about the trust.”

“Then I’ll give you that,” Ben conceded.

The costumes were in a neat pile on the pew. She sat down on the other side of them, so they formed a fabric boundary between her and Ben.

“So what did
you
think of the flowers?” she asked. Ben got his phone out of his pocket and flicked up a series of pictures of the bouquet on the bridge. He held it out, leaning over the costume barrier so that she had to join him there to see the screen.

“Those aren’t cheap flowers from a petrol station,” Faith said.

“No?” His bright eyes behind their long black lashes were amused.

“Well, look at it – twisted willow? And that red amaryllis, that won’t be cheap. Not what I would expect your average man to choose. That’s a sophisticated selection put together by a professional.”

“OK. So he went to a florist.”

“So he must have bought them yesterday, which indicates pre-planning. Any clues in the card?” Ben flicked up fresh photographs with his thumb, views of the card front and back. Faith leaned closer.

“He used capitals – but it’s not like he can’t write. He doesn’t want his handwriting to be recognized – that suggests he’s local.”

“And cautious,” she commented. “Fingerprints?”

“We’ll check, of course. But gloves in this weather wouldn’t be uncommon.”

Their faces were only a few inches apart. She could feel the energy emanating from his skin. She realized that she was biting her lower lip. She sat back and flicked her hand over the fabric between them, erasing the dent made by the pressure of her arm.

“Do you think Adam Bagshaw knows who the dad is?” Ben asked. His face was turned away as he put his phone in his pocket.

“I think so. He told me he was keeping a secret Trisha had asked him to keep. I am not sure he will tell you, though. He is desperate not to let his sister down again. Keeping the secret she left him with is the last piece of loyalty he can show her.”

Ben snorted derisively. “He’s a drunk. If I get him in my interview room, I can make him talk.”

“Surely you’ll know via the lawyers soon enough,” she said gently. “You don’t need to take that last thing from him.”

Ben rolled his eyes at her. “I’ll see.”

She felt the shift in mood. He propped himself up against the pew end.

“Thursday night was fun,” he said. She gave him a hard look sideways – he was really going to go there? He smirked at her.

“I have one word for you,” she said. “Immature.”

“Immature?” he teased. “I wasn’t the one bringing a potential suspect to a social occasion at an investigator’s house in the middle of a murder enquiry.”

“Oh, come on, there’s no ‘potential’ about it,” said Faith. “Anyway, how about the lead in an active murder investigation playing footsie with the pathologist off duty?” she retorted.

“I didn’t know you cared.”

An unworthy thought slipped up from her subconscious. Had Ben been trying to make her jealous? She pulled herself back, crossly. No. That was absurd and dangerous self-regard. Ben was a master at this game; a reflexive flirt. It didn’t have to mean anything. Time to return to safer ground.

“So this trust fund – do you think Lucas’s death could tie to that?” asked Faith.

“In what way?”

“Well, both beneficiaries die within a few months of each other.” She hesitated as an awful thought struck her. “Trisha Bagshaw’s death was so sudden. She was only in her early forties…”

The corners of Ben’s mouth twitched up. “Checked the autopsy report. A brain aneurysm, probably there all her adult life. It blew and she was gone.”

“Just like that?”

“Pretty much. According to the dates she was in a coma for twenty-four hours or so at the hospital before they turned the life support off.”

“That poor boy, Lucas, and her poor, poor brother,” she said.

Ben shifted in his seat. Sentiment made him uncomfortable. “Let’s stick to what we know. This is about drugs, I’m sure.”

Faith looked past him for a moment, thinking automatically of Jim. “Sebastian Keep?” she said.

Ben shook his head. “Not Keepie himself. He alibied out.”

Faith felt something inside her slump with the disappointment. It would have been so much simpler if Keepie, a career criminal, had been to blame; then Jim would be in the clear and she would never have to tell what she
saw. “Keepie was picked up on suspicion of supplying banned substances in town that Saturday lunchtime,” Ben explained. “He was held at the central station and questioned. Released just after 10 p.m. that night – so he’s out.”

She checked her watch and stood up, contemplating the pile of costumes with her eyes, but Jim Postlethwaite with her mind. She wasn’t ready to bring him up. Not here, and not now. “Well, it’s official. I am short a costume for Joseph. This pageant is not what you would call going smoothly.”

“What does Joseph wear?”

“One of those sort of stripy, Eastern-looking robes with undershirt and sandals, I imagine.” Ben rolled his eyes. He didn’t have to say anything. She got the message.
So this is how you spend your days…?

He was lolling at his ease on the pew. She hadn’t seen him this relaxed in a church before. The sight of him was so familiar. He had always liked smart suits in dark colours – never brown or green or anything wild like that. You wouldn’t catch Ben Shorter in a peacoat – unless he was undercover.

“What are you doing for Christmas?” she asked.

A shadow passed over his face. He straightened up. “Working.” He had always been impatient of the empty fuss around the Christmas holiday. “You know it’s not my thing. Those who can, huddling together, pretending they like one another, just to show that
they
aren’t alone, like the rest of the human race.”

“There’s that, but there’s also the real meaning of the festival,” she suggested quietly.

“What? You’re telling me there’s something real under all the tinsel and carolling? Come on, Fay. You can’t pretend you’re some naive suburbanite. You’ve glimpsed the real world. Christmas is no more real than the painted nativity scenes
wheeled out every year. You know what Bethlehem looks like these days, don’t you? There’s not a lot of gold, frankincense or myrrh to be found.”

“That’s rather an impoverished view,” said Faith quietly.

Ben shrugged. “It’s what I see. Boxing Day morning, real life’s still waiting. You just get to face it with a hangover, indigestion and a pile more debt.”

From behind the doors with their square safety glass windows, came the murmur of classes in progress. Faith had finished her Monday morning assembly. She waved goodbye to the school secretary in her office and crossed the car park. She had failed to get Ruth on the phone all weekend. This was getting ridiculous. Her sister would be at work at the council offices only five minutes’ walk away. Why not go and call in? She paused on the kerb opposite Mavis Granger’s florist shop. Ruth liked flowers.

Mavis herself stood behind the counter today. “Did you enjoy the reindeer?” she greeted Faith as she stepped into her shop. So Mrs Granger was letting her know that she knew all about last Thursday’s visit and her chat with Anna.
She’d have made a good interrogator
, Faith thought.

“It’s charming,” she answered lightly. “I chose it for a friend as a house gift. It was very much admired.” She looked about the shop. The wreaths that had covered the counter before were gone. “How’s business? I would imagine things are pretty hectic just now in the run-up to Christmas.”

“Our busiest time – although it is a little easier now that the wreaths have gone out, but there is still plenty to do.” As
they talked, Mavis was shaping what looked like one of a set of table decorations with poinsettias and frosted silver-white stars on pins with quick, assured fingers. “There are a lot of dinners this time of year.”

Faith pondered the selection of flowers on offer. Ruth liked tulips, but it was hardly the time of year for them.

“The policemen investigating the Bagshaw boy’s death came to talk to me the other day,” Mrs Granger offered conversationally.

“They did?”

“They were checking my Vernon’s alibi.” The statement had a flicker of accusation behind it. Faith met her eyes coolly. “He was with me,” Mavis stated, “that Saturday afternoon when the boy disappeared.” She dropped her eyes. She simpered like the silly woman she most certainly wasn’t. “The truth is Vernon’s been rather naughty. I blame his friends for leading him astray.” She punctuated the words with a little laugh to take the sting out of them. “The police tell me they’ve been seen drinking at a local pub. Not alcohol, of course. Vernon knows better than that – a shandy at most. I spoke with young Anna about it. She may be eighteen, but I don’t want her leading Vernon into bad ways – though I don’t think she meant any harm. It was most likely that Bagshaw boy.”

Faith thought about mentioning Lucas’s teetotal habits, but she’d rather the conversation didn’t become antagonistic. “Did they give you any idea of what happened to Lucas?”

She caught the tail end of a speculative side-glance but it was so quick, she wondered if she had imagined it. Mavis had finished one arrangement. She started on the next.

“A motherless and fatherless boy,” she was saying. “He left school as soon as his mother died, you know. Well, it’s hardly surprising he slipped into bad ways.”

“Not in Vernon’s company, surely!” Faith interjected unkindly. She couldn’t help it. Mavis Granger seemed so ready to blame Lucas for his fate.

“Of course I didn’t mean that!” Mavis flashed back. “It’s just…” she hesitated.
She’s making a performance of it
, Faith thought.
She knows what she is going to say
. “It’s just that Lucas Bagshaw – well, he had money when he shouldn’t.” Mavis’s limpid eyes met Faith’s with just the right measure of regret and sorrow for the poor, misguided boy. “I had my suspicions.” She tilted her well-groomed head. “Perhaps you’ll remember – Pat Montesque mentioned it at that meeting we had in your church hall; we had a break-in at home earlier this year.”

“Ah yes – I remember; in the first week of June, wasn’t it?”

Faith caught the flicker of a double take at her guess. Mavis pursed her lips.

“The police called it a crime of opportunity,” she went on. “An amateur, they thought – but some valuable items were taken.”

“What sort of things?”

“Portable; easily sold – gold jewellery, small silver, that sort of thing.”

“How distressing for you. And you suspected Lucas?”

Mavis gazed at her significantly across the counter. “It was soon after Vernon began bringing Lucas Bagshaw into our home – my son and Anna were kind to Lucas after his mother died.”

“Did you tell this to the police at the time?”

Mavis wouldn’t meet her eyes. “It didn’t seem right,” she said. “The boy had only just lost his mother. But I did warn Vernon.”

In other words, you didn’t like the boy, he was poor and so you thought it would be neater if it were Lucas who had stolen
from you
, thought Faith sourly. The fight at the pub! Her attention was caught. But the boys had made up…

“So you told your son you thought his friend might be responsible for your break-in?”

Mavis nodded, her lips pressed together in a thin, reddish-orange line. Her hands were still on the decorations. “Lucas convinced my son that he hadn’t been anywhere near us on that day. Vernon believed him. I never did entirely. Lucas was never short of money, you see; an orphaned boy; his mother was a cleaner…”

Faith felt a pulse of revulsion at this contemptuous dismissal of the loving Trisha.

“I am keeping you too long,” she said. “You are so busy. I just wanted to buy something cheerful for my sister.”

Her eyes roamed over the riot of colour and texture in the window. Pussy willow, and in a blue enamelled bucket on the counter, heather sprigs. At the back, a stand of twisted willow shafts, and near the front a pail of white, six-petalled stars with their delicate yellow centres – paper-white narcissus. She looked again.

“You don’t happen to have any red amaryllis?”

Mavis’s eyes inventoried her stock. “We did have some in,” she answered, “but Anna must have sold the last of them on Saturday. We’ll be getting another delivery this Wednesday.”

Faith picked out a poinsettia in a ceramic pot wrapped round with a crushed taffeta ribbon in an edible caramel colour and tied off with a bow.

“This will be perfect,” she said.

She set off for the council offices clutching her peace offering for Ruth. She hadn’t thought of it before, because Winchester
had plenty of florists, but Mavis’s shop was well situated on the way out of town toward the Lion’s Heart pub and the bridge. Her blood quickened with the delight of the chase. If the chain of her speculation was sound, and if Anna Hope had sold the last of the amaryllis on Saturday, she might very well have met Lucas’s father. It was frustrating that Anna hadn’t been in the shop. Faith glanced back over her shoulder at Mavis, standing in her window. She didn’t have any other means of finding the Dot. She would have to wait until tomorrow to talk to her.

The Winchester City Council offices resided in an ugly eighties’ building faced with contrasting dirty pink and reddish brick with window strips of dull glass. Her sister worked as a valued administrator in an open-plan office on the second floor. Her desk was near to the boss’s office.

Ruth spotted Faith at once. She pushed back her chair and stood up.

“What are you doing here? Is everything all right?”

Seeing her sister’s anxious face, Faith realized that the unexpected visit was ill-conceived. Her sister must be thinking something awful had happened to one of the family.

“Oh, nothing to worry about,” she said. “We keep missing each other, that’s all. I should have called ahead. This is for you.” Faith put the poinsettia on Ruth’s desk, and bent to give her sister’s cheek a kiss.

“You shouldn’t have.” Ruth shifted the pot a few inches and fluffed the flower’s petals. Knowing her, she was figuring out whether she still had any plant food in her drawers.

“They’re Christmassy – don’t you think?” Faith said. “Remember how Mum always had one on the hall table?”

Ruth’s mouth tilted in a small, fond smile of shared memory. “On that blue and white dish to stop it marking.
She still has it. It’s on the front room windowsill.”

Ruth was petite and neat. All their adult lives Faith had envied her that. She always picked up such bargains in the clothes department, but today she looked extra well-groomed. Her thick dark hair in its smooth bob shone. Her eyebrows had been recently plucked.

“You’re looking well.”

“I’ve got news.” Ruth cast a glance around the office. She seemed satisfied that the coast was clear. “Brian and I, we’ve been spending time together.” She looked so vulnerable and pleased. Faith’s heart sank. “Susie’s walked out on him. Apparently the relationship hasn’t been good for years.” She squared her shoulders defiantly. “He’s been having a tough time of it, poor thing.”

“Ruthie…”

Her sister’s face set in its stubborn look. “I know what you’re going to say, but I have my eyes open. I am just being a friend.”

“Right.”

Ruth put out her hand and touched Faith’s arm. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you for ages, but you’ve been so busy.”

Guilt and love overwhelmed Faith in a rush of feeling. She wrapped her arms around her sister and hugged her. Ruth wasn’t a demonstrative person, especially in public, but she gripped her back. Why had she left it so long? They released one another.

“Once this week is done, I am all yours,” she said. “We’ll have a good, long catch-up, OK?”

Ruth surreptitiously wiped moisture from her eyes. She pulled a paper handkerchief from the box on her desk and blew her nose. “We really need to talk about Mother,” she began.

Faith frowned. “Oh yes?”

“You know Cindy – from accounting?” her sister asked.

“Cindy?” Faith’s puzzlement deepened.

“You know! We do quiz night together on Wednesdays. Cindy’s been through it already with her gran.”

“Her gran…?”

Ruth’s pause was pregnant with meaning. “Forgetting things,” she prompted. “It’s the first sign. Cindy’s given me some leaflets. I can lend them to you.”

An involuntary giggle, like a hard bubble, ascended from Faith’s gut. She choked it off. “You think our mother…?” she heard the outrage in her tone and caught herself. She tried a lighter note. “Oh, come on!” she teased. “Mum’s only in her early seventies. She’s as bright as a button.”

“I know Mum’s not stupid,” said Ruth. “She’s very clever at covering up. It’s not her mind, it’s her memory. You only see her on visits. I talk to her every day. There are signs…” There was a quiet conviction in Ruth’s voice that got under Faith’s skin. Annoyance prickled at the back of her neck.

“Like what?”

“Losing things – glasses, her keys… The other day, for instance; I called at 10 a.m. and she was still in her dressing gown. Mum never gets up late. She was notorious for popping wide awake at 6 a.m. ‘I’m an early bird, not a night owl,’ she always said.”

“Maybe she just wanted a lie-in,” said Faith. Did her sister really speak to her mother every day? “She’s retired, after all. And everyone mislays things – I do it all the time.” Faith caught her breath.

Her sister inhaled deeply.
Here it comes
. “If you made more time for your own family instead of trying to save the world, you might have an idea of what is actually going on with our mother.”

Faith felt the kick deep inside of her. Ruth had never understood her vocation. She unclenched her jaw. I am not going to be drawn into these old childish routines, she repeated to herself. I am
not
!

“Come on, Ruthie, you know you can be over-solicitous sometimes.” There! That sounded perfectly rational and kind. “Has Mum asked for help?”

“You don’t see because you are never here to see; I am. I know what is going on,” her sister argued stubbornly. “I think we need to take her to the GP to be tested.”

“Surely you’re overreacting? Let’s just hold fire before taking drastic action. Look – we’ll be together at Christmas. We can discuss it then. OK?”

A young woman with bleached hair approached them, carrying a pile of manila folders.

“Hey, Ruth. These are for you. Peter says he needs them processed as soon as you can.”

The woman eyed Faith’s dog collar with open curiosity. Ruth dismissed her with a firm: “Thank you, Kim.”

In the space of the distraction, Faith made up her mind. While part of her wilted at the thought of the extra pressure, it was beyond time she paid attention to her family. There seemed to be a lot of catching up to do.

“Before I let you get on,” she began, “I’ve been thinking of what you said about Christmas. How about you bring Sean and Mum to me for Christmas Day this time? I’ll be tied up with the service until one-ish, but then, it’s traditional for Christmas lunch to be late, isn’t it? We can eat at three or so. That front room at the vicarage is made for Christmas. We can give the Aga a run…”

She knew Ruth had been yearning after the Aga that came with her vicarage ever since Faith had given her the
tour and she’d laid eyes on the glossy, four-door beast. It was one of life’s little ironies that Faith, who considered food just something you needed to consume to live, had ended up with a country kitchen and an Aga, while Ruth, the great hostess, was stuck with her doll’s house kitchen in her modern semi. Ruth’s expression reflected the conflict between irritation and the possibilities of the vicarage kitchen. The Aga won the day.

“Sean and Mum and I can have everything ready for you for when you’re free,” she agreed thoughtfully. The decision was made. “You don’t have to worry about the food,” she added. “You can email me what you want and I can bring all that. We can settle up later. Just give me a set of keys.”

Faith winced internally at the thought of her space being invaded. She could see the plans bubbling up in Ruth’s brain. Would she ever get her keys back? But Ruth looked happy.

Her job was done. After swearing that, however busy she got, she would not forget to have another set of house keys cut and would drop them off with Ruth just as soon as possible, she left her sister making lists at her desk.

She had almost all her Christmas presents. Just one more purchase to make – an overpriced and nicely presented box of soap for Aunt Hilda. She headed down Great Minster Street toward a shop that stocked Crabtree & Evelyn, when she spotted George Casey hurrying toward her on the opposite pavement. She tried to turn her face away, but he’d already seen her.