The Final Crumpet (2 page)

That had happened the previous October during a remarkable chain of events that even now seemed inexplicable. What magic had transformed a woman he disliked into a woman he loved—a woman who loved him back? And how did one explain the two bizarre side effects? Managing a tea museum abruptly seemed an utterly logical job for him, and
Royal
Tunbridge Wells—Nigel had grown fond of the prefix bestowed on the small city south of London by King Edward VII in 1909—had begun to feel like home. And so, against all odds, Nigel Owen—a lifelong Londoner, a financial whiz trained to lead major corporations with thousands of employees, a man who didn’t even like tea—had gleefully accepted the trustees’ invitation to become the museum’s managing director.

The mini excavator’s diesel engine roared even louder as it approached its prey. Nigel looked across the garden and saw Jim Sizer, an enormous smile on his bearded face, wave happily at him from the driver’s seat of the rented machine. Jim, who admitted to being seventy but was undoubtedly older, served as the museum’s jack-of-all-trades utility person. He had once again lived up to his reputation as a problem-solving genius by figuring out how to get the mini excavator into the tea garden. For all their ingenuity, the founders had not thought to provide a door through the brick wall. Jim had taken ten different measurements and calculated there was just enough clearance to wheel the pint-sized earthmover through the aisles of the museum’s greenhouse.

Jim steered the mini excavator in line with the pair of Assam tea plants and pushed a lever that activated the hydraulically powered digging arm.

Flick shouted above the noise, “This is like witnessing an execution!”

Nigel moved behind Flick and wrapped his arms around her. “This garden party was your idea. If you don’t stop shifting your mental position like the pendulum in a clock, I shall change your nickname to Tick.”

She looked up at him and smiled. “You wouldn’t dare.”

“I’d have centuries of tradition on my side. Ask your Anglophile parents back in York, Pennsylvania—Tick and Flick are both acceptable short forms of Felicity.”

Jim revved the diesel again.

“We can postpone this,” she said hurriedly. “We don’t have to rip out the Assam plants today.”

“Need I remind you that our two-week shutdown is about to come to an end? We plan to reopen on Monday; Jim Sizer will need all of Saturday to get the restored tea garden ready for visitors.”

“You’re assuming that the
vultures
will finish this afternoon.”

“The
appraisers
will be finished by noon—as you well know.”

Nigel thought of the two teams of professional antiquities valuers—twelve experts in all—who had worked their way from floor to floor in the museum. They were a lean, sallow-faced crowd who did resemble a flock of vultures. The recent death of Dame Elspeth Hawker made it necessary for the museum to purchase the many antiquities on display that were owned by the Hawker family. The first step of the process was to value the thousands of paintings, books, maps, woodwork, and pieces of crockery that served tea, praised tea, honored tea, celebrated tea, and explained its long history. One appraisal team was hired by the Hawker family, the other by the museum; the teams’ respective findings would be averaged to establish the collection’s value.

“Yikes!” Flick cried as the toothed bucket on the end of the arm tore a tea bush out of the ground. Nigel felt her shudder.

“Steady on, Dr. Adams.” Nigel tightened his hug. “The worst is almost over.”

Jim Sizer made a dozen more careful swipes with the bucket to knock down the other Assam tea plant and scrape away enough top soil to make a trench about seven feet long, three feet wide, and two feet deep. He finished by maneuvering the excavator close to the back wall and killing the engine.

“I finally understand the true meaning of ‘blessed silence,’ ” Nigel said.

“What happens now?” Flick asked.

“I believe that Jim takes over with a shovel.” Nigel looked over his shoulder. “Isn’t that right, Conan?”

“Quite right, sir,” said Conan Davies, the museum’s oversized chief of security, who today was also acting as excavation supervisor. Nigel noted that the big man was smiling; the museum’s staff seemed to approve of the blossoming relationship between their director and chief curator.

Will the trustees feel differently?
One of these days, we’ll have to find out.

Conan went on in his gravelly voice. “We can’t risk damaging the heating pipes. Jim helped to install them forty years ago. He knows the layout better than anyone else alive does. He’ll dig slowly and carefully around the pipes to prepare the bed for the new tea plants.” Conan cocked his head toward a flat of seedlings sitting on a table.

Nigel studied the foot-high replacement plants. They had arrived the day before on a flight from India, the gift of a tea estate in Kerala, a renowned tea-growing region in southern India. The seedlings had begun life as cuttings from established Assam plants. Flick had told him that mature tea plants were almost impossible to transplant successfully because their long taproots rarely survived the shock of a move. He and Flick had thought about cultivating cuttings in the museum’s greenhouse, but she decided to make a wholly new beginning for the Assam tea plants, starting over with imported seedlings that had a proven pedigree.

Flick unwound from his embrace. She moved closer to the trench, studied it intently from a distance, and then crouched down to dribble handfuls of loose soil through her fingers. Nigel chuckled to himself. The tea tree-loving softy had given way to the hard-nosed scientist with impeccable academic and industry credentials. Her encyclopedic knowledge of tea spanned the entire life cycle-from growing tea plants, to processing and blending leaves, to brewing a good
cuppa
, to preparing and serving a classic English afternoon tea. In short, an oversupply of skills for someone only thirty-six years old. Flick had so impressed the museum’s trustees that they took the radical step of appointing an American as chief curator of England’s leading tea museum.

Nigel remembered his initial meeting with Flick when she came on board the previous summer—and winced. He had deemed her pompous, arrogant, dreary, and much too good-looking to be an effective curator. It had boggled his mind that a stunning brunette with big brown eyes could also be a serious scientist.

So much for the perspicacity of your first impressions—and your deep understanding
of women.

“The soil feels and looks healthy,” Flick said. “I wish I knew why our Assams didn’t thrive.”

“Well, ma’am,” Conan said, “one of our security guards set up a modest betting pool that has generated many different suggestions as to the exact cause of the stunted plants. One thought is bad soil in this corner of the garden. Another is a leaky uncharted gas pipe somewhere beneath the bed. My belief is that we’ll find a layer of construction rubble further down that prevented the plants’ roots from reaching the proper depth. We’re really quite close to the building proper; the workmen may have inadvertently buried a stack of unused bricks.”

“My money is on moles,” Nigel said. “I think the little blighters built a subterranean city and ate the roots as fast as the plants sent them out.” He extended his hand and pulled Flick to her feet when Jim Sizer arrived with his shovel.

Nigel took a step backward to make room for the clods of earth that Jim removed from the trench at shockingly high speed. Doing all manner of odd jobs at the museum had kept the lanky septuagenarian in such vigorous shape that he steadfastly refused to retire.

“I should be so healthy at his age,” Nigel murmured. In February he would be thirty-nine, a painful milestone he found difficult to contemplate.

A deep
thunk
from the trench interrupted his reverie. “What did you hit?” Flick asked.

“Not sure, ma’am.” Jim poked about with the shovel. “It may be that Mr. Davies thought right. It could be a layer of rubble, except…”

“Except what.”

“It’s not rubble,” Jim said excitedly. “This is a roof slate. Someone laid a layer of roofing tiles about three feet down.”

“Well, now we know what blocked root growth.”

Nigel watched Jim lever two slates loose with the tip of the shovel. He lifted them out of the way.

“Why would someone bury roofing tiles?” Nigel asked. No one answered him; Flick, Conan, and Jim had directed their complete attention to the trench.

“Do you see anything below the tiles?” Flick asked. “Only one way to find out.” Jim thrust the shovel into the earth—and immediately brought forth an ominous crunching noise.

“Blast!” Conan said. “I hope that wasn’t a heating pipe.”

“Oh no, sir. They go clang when you bang ‘em. I can see some sort of green plastic sheeting, perhaps a tarpaulin. Whatever is there is beginning to crumble.”

Nigel leaned over to look into the trench. “What do you make of that yellowish object?”

Jim used the tip of his shovel to draw back the plastic sheeting. Nigel at once recognized a discolored skull and several human bones.

Jim made a throaty moan. “Blimey! It’s a skeleton!”

Nigel might have fallen face first into the trench if Conan had not grabbed his belt and tugged him away from the edge.

Flick perched against the edge of the windowsill and said, “I feel it in my bones. I don’t care if you laugh at me for saying that.” When she peered at Nigel, she didn’t see any laughter—merely an indifferent shrug.

A few moments later, he finally spoke. “More than one detective inspector serves in Kent Police’s Major Crime Unit. It’s hardly likely that the plods will dispatch the only investigator in the county who has had the opportunity to yell at you.”

“Want to bet?”

“Not especially.” Nigel was sitting behind his desk, tilted as far backwards as his swivel chair would allow.

“Come on. You’re always game for a wager. How about dinner tonight, at Thackeray’s on London Road? If I’m right, you pay. If you’re right, I pay.”

“Okay—if that’s what you want to do.”

“Make reservations.”

He rocked forward in his chair and reached for his telephone, but stopped in midstretch. “Shouldn’t we first arrange for a sitter for Cha-Cha?”

Flick looked across Nigel’s office in time to see a pair of pointy ears perk up. The smiling mouth below them emitted a yodel-like yip. Cha-Cha had raised his head at the sound of his name, although the rest of him lay sprawled along the sofa, a piece of furniture he now considered his own.

Cha-Cha, a Shiba Inu, an ancient breed of dog from Japan, was compact and foxlike, with a heavy reddish coat and white puffy cheeks. He had become a ward of the museum upon the death of Elspeth Hawker. He spent alternate nights in Nigel’s flat on Lime Hill Road, near the Royal Tunbridge Wells’ town center, and Flick’s apartment on the Pantiles’ Lower Walk, opposite the three-hundred-year-old colonnaded walkway that was one of the Wells’ leading attractions.

“I have custody of the hound tonight,” Flick said. “We’ll drop him off at my flat; it’s on our way to Thackeray’s.”

“That’s true.”

“And you can withdraw the necessary funds to pay for dinner from the cash machine in the Pantiles.”

Nigel sighed. “I adore scintillating small talk, my dear, and I appreciate your valiant attempts to amuse me in times of trouble; but when do we tackle the elephant standing in the corner of the room?”

Flick rolled to her feet. Nigel’s melancholy mood had begun when Jim Sizer unearthed the skeleton and had grown worse as they waited in his office for the police to arrive. His enthusiastic “hail fellow, well met” demeanor had vanished, and his usually ruddy complexion looked strangely colorless compared to his reddish-blond hair. Even his tall, slender build seemed to have compressed several inches.

Let’s find out what’s bothering the poor dear.

“What would you like me to say, Nigel?” Flick asked. “We don’t have enough information to discuss the corpse in the tea garden. For all we know, he—or she—is a two thousand-year-old Roman expatriate.”

“Another nice try, but the Romans didn’t wear green plastic togas, nor did they bury their dead under modern slate roofing tiles.”