The Claresby Collection: Twelve Mysteries (23 page)

“Florence settled down to sleep easily enough,” commented Laura.

“Well, she’d been up since six,” replied Rupert.

Laura placed the bowl of fresh salad on the table and joined her husband. “Any hope with the car?” she asked amiably.

“Well, it wouldn’t be a cheap enterprise because of the need to repair the engine. As a matter of fact, I found most of it abandoned in a far corner, but it will need a lot of work and expensive new parts. I do quite fancy the idea, though.”

Laura nodded as she uncorked a bottle of chilled Chardonnay.

“But I found something else of interest in the car,” continued Rupert.

“What, other than mice nests?” asked Laura.

“Yes: it was in the trunk, actually. The trunk was probably fitted later – onto what looks like a custom made aluminium rear luggage rack. Anyway, inside it was a wedding dress.”

“A wedding dress? Was it in good condition or had it decayed?”

“Oh, it wasn’t old,” continued Rupert. “In fact it was brand new and in pristine condition, all rolled up in a plastic bag. A good one too, if I’m any judge – designer made.”

Laura frowned. “By brand new, do you mean never worn or put in there recently? – I was imagining it had been dumped there out of the house; although I can’t see why.”

“I mean that is was put there recently – in the last year or so. The bag was modern enough and it was all still clean; no damp at all.”

“Why would someone bother to break into Claresby coach house to dump a brand new, expensive wedding dress?” mused Laura.

“That’s what I wondered. Perhaps you can have a look after lunch before Flo wakes up. I also found a tool box in the car – all original tools from 1920; but that is more useful than intriguing.”

Lunch was finished, Florence still slumbered, and the dress was spread out, a gleaming white against the dark polished oak of the table in the Great Hall. It was quite a voluminous dress and would have swamped the svelte Laura had she chosen to try it on. It was also of an elaborate style with flounces and bows, and the neckline was cut daringly low. Laura wrinkled her nose in mild distaste,

“It wouldn’t be my choice of style – far too fussy – but there’s no doubt it was expensive. This isn’t a readymade dress and the fabric, as least, is fine quality: satin with handmade lace. The beadwork is done by hand too; beautifully done, but way over-the-top given the lace and flounces. This was made to the customer’s request – I can imagine the designer and dressmakers wincing as they carried out instructions. Someone wanted all the bells and whistles on their wedding day.”

“Do you think it was ever worn?” asked Rupert eyeing the garment.

Laura examined the dress carefully, paying special attention to the hem and small train. “My guess is that it wasn’t. If you marry in church you will be walking outside at some point and the train at least will gather a bit of dirt and dust. Even if the whole wedding was conducted inside on a single site, say in a hotel, you’d expect a bit of a grubby mark on the pure white of the hem – and this is pristine.”

“Which begs the question: why would anyone dump a lovely dress, unworn, in the back of a derelict car?”

“Perhaps the engagement was broken off,” suggested Laura. “The bride couldn’t bear to look at the dress that she would never get to wear and dumped it.”

“Possibly: but why come all the way out to Claresby Manor?” replied Rupert. “She could have stuffed it into a black plastic bag and left it out to for the bin men.”

“What a waste!”

“Well; she could have taken it to a charity shop.”

“Maybe – but perhaps whoever it was didn’t want to be rid of it. Perhaps she hoped that the marriage might go ahead after all and she could retrieve it.”

“Or she planned to find another man to marry,” suggested Rupert, cheerfully.

Laura frowned at this suggestion and then said, “Well, if the bride-to-be was local to Claresby, the person to ask would be our very own vicar, Veronica Dahl: she would know about any cancelled wedding. I was going to walk down to the vicarage with Florence for tea – why don’t you come along and we can see what she has to say?”

An hour later Rupert, Laura and Veronica sat in the cool of an arbour drinking tea whilst Florence ran around with a pink balloon which was doomed to pop on one of the rose bushes. Veronica, whose dark beauty and voluptuous figure always held Rupert’s gaze – despite his devotion to his pretty, auburn-haired wife – was looking particularly striking in a red dress with a tight black belt.

“We don’t get many weddings in Claresby Church,” she admitted in answer to Laura’s preliminary question, “mainly because I’m not very accommodating to people from outside the village who want to get married here just because it will look picturesque in their photos. They don’t come to church and have no intention of ever setting foot in the village again. I’ll always marry villagers, of course, regardless of whether or not they are regular churchgoers. My two most recent weddings were both for villagers. Well, both brides and one of the grooms were local. Just this Saturday I married Lisa Jones and Bill Smith – he was divorced, but his wife had left him for her boss. She actually came to see me to say that he was blameless in the divorce – and as a committed Christian it was important for him to have a church ceremony. He wasn’t local, but Lisa is and they are settling here, so I hope to see more of them both after the honeymoon. The wedding before that was over a month ago. That was Amy Price, and what I most remember about her was the fact that, at our pre-wedding chats, all she could talk about was how she wanted to festoon the church with flowers and satin bows and how they were going on a romantic honeymoon to Bermuda. I do find it depressing how some of these girls seem to think the wedding day is the point of the exercise and that the marriage itself is a regrettable by-product. Admittedly Dean Phipps impressed me as a particularly uninspiring young man, but I almost felt sorry for him – it was as if she was just marrying him so that she could have her dream wedding. She was talking about having a chocolate fountain at the reception, vintage champagne; all that sort of thing. I guess all girls have their dreams – anyway, the reality was somewhat more modest, with a reception at The Claresby Arms and a few pints for Dean’s mates, followed by a week in Eastbourne. I do remember that she wore a particularly beautiful lace veil – it didn’t match the dress, which was a cream off-the-peg number, rather frilly. When I commented on how lovely the veil was, she said that it had been her grandmother’s and she wore it for sentimental reasons. I counted this as a point in her favour.”

“No weddings cancelled or broken engagements?” asked Rupert.

Veronica shook her head. “Not that I’m aware of. I had one cancelled wedding in my last parish which caused all sorts of upset; but nothing like that here. By the way, if Keith and I marry, it will be very private, with just two witnesses and a slice of cake afterwards.”

“Yes – but you must promise that Rupert and I can be the witnesses,” smiled Laura, who knew Keith Lowe, the local doctor, very well. She also knew that, many years ago, his fiancée had left him only weeks before his wedding; but this fact was not alluded to.

“Maybe,” replied Veronica inscrutably.

Further discussion on this sensitive subject was precluded by a sudden bang and a howl of grief from Florence as the inevitable happened to her balloon. Rupert, the doting father, had come prepared, and immediately fished a new balloon (also pink) out of one of the pockets in his trousers and started inflating it. Florence, her attention caught by the apparent magic of a new balloon appearing from her father’s mouth, ran over and clambered up beside him, poking the expanding balloon with an investigatory digit, the fresh tears still beading the peachy skin of her cheeks. Laura smiled indulgently at this scene, and gazed fondly on Rupert, whose face – which was ugly at the best of times – was distorted by the process of blowing air into the balloon. Naturally he could not resist letting a few squirts of air out of it, so that Florence giggled at the “rude” noise produced. Eventually the new balloon was tied off and the little girl happily resumed her game.

“I hope you have a whole pocketful of those things,” commented Laura. Rupert obligingly put his hand into his pocket and displayed a hand full of multicoloured balloons. “You spoil that girl!” Laura retorted – but with a smile that said she both understood and approved.

“Why the question about cancelled weddings?” asked Veronica, returning to their original topic of conversation.

“Simply because I discovered a very beautiful, apparently expensive and unworn wedding dress in the old Rolls Royce in one of our outbuildings.”

“Oh: I didn’t know that you had a Rolls Royce.”

“It’s left over from the 1920s and has most of the engine missing,” replied Laura. “Rupert’s thinking of restoring it.”

“And the dress was in the car? What makes you think it was put there recently?”

“Style, condition, and the fact that it was in a supermarket carrier bag,” said Rupert. “It certainly wasn’t from the same period as the car.”

“Not ominously bloodstained?” asked Veronica.

“No: immaculately clean.”

“So just a mystery about why it is there – no hint of a crime?”

“Anything like a mystery intrigues Rupert,” said Laura. “It wouldn’t surprise me if he did unravel a crime linked to the dress in due course.”

It was a blustery October evening and Rupert was sitting in his favourite corner seat at The Claresby Arms, a virtually untouched pint in front of him as he waited for his friend, Keith Lowe, and amused himself by eavesdropping on his fellow drinkers – most of whom were familiar to him. The topic of conversation was the troubles of Pam Holmes, a local woman of about forty-five whom Rupert had occasionally encountered at the village church.

“Well, of course suspicion fell on her,” a plump little woman was saying. “It’s been nothing but spend, spend, spend since Christmas. They’ve had that conservatory put on the back of their place and now she’s talking about booking a winter cruise in the Caribbean.”

“Yeah, but she said that aunt of hers from Australia left her all the money,” commented a skinny man who was leaning against the bar.

“So she says,” replied the little woman, scepticism in her every syllable. “She’d never even mentioned the aunt before – and I’ve known her these forty years. And she’s got some silly name like “Eunuch”!”

“Eunice,” corrected a voice from further down the bar, helpfully.

“Whatever! She never visited Pam and I know Pam never went to Australia: so why would she want to leave her pots of money?”

“I’ve seen these programmes on telly about people who die without writing a will and they’ve got no close relations at all – and then they trace someone who is a distant cousin and they get all the money: maybe that’s what happened with Pam.” The man down the bar seemed to be full of helpful explanations and the little woman gave him rather a sour look.

“I’ve seen that programme too,” confirmed the skinny man. “Maybe this was a long-lost aunt and Pam didn’t even know about her until she was told about the money.”

“Hope I’ve got a long-lost aunt with pots of money,” commented another man, and everyone laughed.

“Still, I can understand Pam being annoyed,” said the skinny man. “I’d heard rumours that they thought that someone had been pinching money from Baines and Hayes, but there’s no proof it was Pam.”

“Yes, but she does work in accounts, so it looks a bit suspicious,” chipped in the little woman, who seemed determined to think the worst.

“Not if they don’t have any evidence: innocent until proven guilty,” said the man down the bar.

“Yes, and Pam could sue if they suggest it was her – that’s defamation!” added the skinny man, as if he too wanted to look like he had inside knowledge of the law.

“No smoke without fire,” muttered the woman.

Rupert was distracted by Keith’s arrival and, by the time the two men had exchanged greetings and Keith had gone to fetch a pint for himself, the conversation had moved on. Keith soon returned and launched into the subject of the Rolls Royce which Rupert was repairing, more than usually eager to offer his assistance as he shared Rupert’s love of classic cars. By the time Rupert had bought them both a second pint, his mind returned to what he had heard about Baines and Hayes, which he knew to be a small engineering company based in the nearby town and which employed a number of people from Claresby village.

“As a GP, you must get to hear a bit of local gossip: have you heard anything about someone helping themselves to money at Baines and Hayes?”

“As it happens,” replied Keith, after taking a long swig of beer, “I was chatting with Bill Baines just the other day – we play golf sometimes on a Saturday. They have picked up on the fact that there seems to be an unexplained black hole in their finances. He’s checked through the accounts himself, but can’t find any anomalies. They haven’t called in the police yet, because they are not sure whether this is actually a case of fraud, poor accounting, or just that their expectations were unrealistic.”

“You mean they don’t know for sure that someone is taking money?”

“Not for sure. The problem started when one of the people who worked in accounts was seen to be splashing cash around in such a way as to start tongues wagging. This made Bill take a look at things and he did wonder if there might be something in the rumours. Having said that, they don’t have any hard evidence that anyone has been siphoning money off and, now that they are keeping a sharp eye on things, everything seems above-board.”

“I suppose it would – if someone thought they had been rumbled, they might be a bit more careful,”

“Perhaps. You know me; I hate rumours. It brings back memories of when Veronica was first appointed vicar here and there were all those malicious stories about her just because her first husband was so much younger than her and died suddenly. I hear all sorts of things said, but I never pay much attention unless there is incontrovertible evidence.”