Turn and Die (Jordan Lacey Mysteries Book 7) Read online

  “It does. But the hospital thought someone gave me the date-rape drug and I had severe confusion as well, remember?”

  “I think it was more likely to be a small dose of digitalis poisoning. You were tested for date-rape because that’s what we assumed it was. Have you ever seen the gardener?”

  “No.” Note: check Tom, the gardener.

  “And in extreme cases, like Holly’s, it causes labored breathing, convulsions and death. Holly Broughton was already dead when she was impaled on the stake. That, at least, was a mercy for the poor woman.”

  I didn’t want to think about it. But I knew that I would and I was going to have to go back to Faunstone Hall and scout around. Warning: don’t drink anything, especially not out of a vase.

  “And what about this Pointer person? Why is he a threat? And who is he, anyway?” I asked. “If he’s the manager, he wouldn’t know me now. I was being a ghost hunter when he chased me out. And is there a connection? He isn’t even around the pub these days. You asked me to find out more about the suit of armor and that’s why I’m working there. Here, I’ve got some debris for forensic.”

  “Thanks. Pointer is the owner,” said James, putting the specimen bag on his table. He sipped some more wine, which meant its therapeutic properties were getting to him. “He has a record and a murky past. He’s sold the Medieval Hall to this Russian and stands to make a million, if he can move it. We opposed the move on the grounds of waste of public funds, but it may now be going ahead.”

  “I’m only working there temporarily,” I said.

  “Very temporarily. I don’t want you to go back.”

  “Hey, you can’t say that. I’m getting paid real money, cash in hand.”

  “You’re not broke any more, Jordan. You’ve got the reward money.”

  “It’s all tied up. I can’t touch it till I’m sixty.” I allowed myself a small smirk. Lady of means. DI James didn’t rule my life.

  “I’m glad to hear that you have bought yourself a pension,” he said. “I couldn’t bear the thought of having to buy chips for a geriatric private eye. Zimmer frames are pretty slow moving.”

  I didn’t know whether to smile or cry. Was he planning to be around here in thirty years’ time? No, it was one of his warped comments, not easy to understand but typical.

  “Carlo likes having me work behind the bar,” I said. “I can’t let him down. And he spotted the pellet and made me go to hospital. I’m good at bar work. I even get tips.”

  “Let him find someone else.”

  “So when will you be out of hospital?” I asked, changing the subject. “We must have dinner and celebrate.”

  “I think there is altogether too much celebrating going on.” He had finished his glass and the wine bottle had disappeared. I could guess where. I could hear glasses clinking outside.

  “I was suggesting fish and chips at Maeve’s Cafe. With Mavis and Doris, Jack and Carlo.”

  “Now, I’ll go for that.”

  “Why would someone turn out a dog that they loved?”

  “Perhaps it’s a crucial witness.”

  “A dog could hardly give evidence.”

  “I envy you, Jordan, all these complicated cases. You live such a high-powered life. Ask Sergeant Rawlings. He knows everything that goes on in Latching.”

  “Like the new look,” I could not resist saying.

  He was not amused. “A spinal waistcoat is hardly high fashion but it beats staying in bed. They say that the fragment of bone will eventually dissolve.”

  “If that bit of bone is going to dissolve, then what about your other bones?”

  “Ask my doctor. Something about lack of nourishment. Bones have to be fed, you know.”

  I phoned Carlo before I left the hospital, mumbling about the eye not being a pretty sight, but he stopped me abruptly.

  “I’m sorry, Pollee… but the pub has closed. They are moving the Medieval Hall. They started to jack it up this morning, inch by inch, on to a big trailer. I was here all night moving everything out.” He sounded tired and upset.

  “Oh I’m so sorry,” I said, repeating his words. “How awful, Carlo. You’re out of work now and you are so good.”

  “I’ll soon get more work.”

  “I might be able to help.” I was not sure how. Guilbert’s had a rooftop restaurant. I could ask Francis. “We’ll be in touch.”

  “Ciao, Pollee…”

  I obeyed all the road rules driving towards Faunstone Hall, as I did not want to be caught by a camera or breathalysed. My clothes had dried out and my hair looked like a war zone. It had sand and petals in it and smelt of hospitals.

  Faunstone Hall looked as if it was in mourning. There was no scene-of-crime tape. Curtains were drawn across some windows, glass panes too scummy to wink back the pale sunlight. Even the garden seemed to have gone fallow, daffodils and tulips faded and finished, wallflowers drooping. Not a foxglove in sight. Surely that wasn’t a cobweb hanging off a shrub? Somewhere a bird sang a flat note.

  I parked and knocked on the front door.

  The brass lion-headed knocker needed a polish and there were crumpled leaves blown into the porch. Where was Mrs Malee and her broom? It was not like her to let things go.

  She was not answering the door. No twitchy curtains here. The house was very still, with a growth of grieving. I expected to see a ring of mushrooms sprouting on the front lawn.

  I went round the side of the house to the back entrance. It was the same there. No answer to my ringing the bell. I peered into the kitchen area. No welcoming light, counters bare and wiped, the table unlaid. It did not look as if it had been used for days.

  “Hello,” I called out, knocking on the window. “Is anyone at home?”

  It was a house voided of feeling. It had lost its soul. Nothing but bricks and cement round an empty shell. But I knew Faunstone Hall would recover. It was an old house with a long history. It could not be the first time it had been branded with tragedy and one day it would recover with new life and a new family.

  I am not normally reticent about entering a house if it will help with my investigations. But this was different. It seemed wrong to go into Holly’s home without being invited. I fiddled with the handle of the back door. It was a purely reflex action.

  And it opened. They had forgotten to lock the back door. People do that when they leave in a hurry.

  I slipped in and closed the door behind me. No more calling out hello. I put down my bottle of water and took off my trainers so that I made no noise. As I moved through the kitchen I picked up a mallet, the kind you beat the hell out of sirloin steak with. It settled comfortably in my hand.

  Downstairs seemed to be much as I remembered it but curiously forlorn. Holly and Mrs Malee had given character to the house but now they had both gone. There were dead flower arrangements but none of them were foxgloves. The water in the crystal vases had the aura of verdigris. The furniture had not seen a duster in days.

  I crept upstairs, slowly and silently. The house might not be empty. I clutched the mallet tightly.

  Holly had shown me her bedroom and dressing room, full of expensive clothes. I went along the landing, not counting the other doors. Someone might come flying out with a bigger mallet.

  The door to her bedroom was ajar. I noticed that the pile of the carpet was brushed the wrong way as if something had been dragged along. A body. Had the police been here at all? I pushed the door open slowly. The room was silent.

  Her king-sized bed was as before, smooth and unslept in. So she had died before she’d slept in it. Or had someone made the bed after her death? The dressing table was a clutter of expensive cosmetics and creams. Her bottles of perfume in orderly rows. She had a wide taste. I looked closer.

  The lid to her jar of classic retinol moisturizer had not been replaced, nor the cap to her black extra-length mascara. Was this carelessness or had nobody noticed? I went into the dressing room. Drawers were open and a sliding cupboard door drawn back, some
outfits and undies were thrown across an armchair. Had she been in the middle of dressing when this toxic drink had been administered? Yet she had been found fully clothed. Or had she? I needed a list of what she had been wearing.

  Something was not right. Something that the police would not have noticed. Nor necessarily me, with my lack of knowledge of the right thing to wear or the current fashions. But I had the feeling that Holly had been disturbed in her dressing routine and that the murderer had finished putting on her clothes. Perhaps he’d enjoyed it.

  So who had come into Holly’s bedroom, her dressing room? Surely it could only have been her husband? Mrs Malee was far too slight to have removed the body to the beach and put it on a stake. It would have taken two to drag her downstairs and into a car. There had never been any mention of a current lover or a boyfriend. Holly had been in love with her husband, as she said.

  Richard Broughton. Maybe he had wanted her out of the way before she did any more damage or tried to have him killed again. She was an expensive wife, even if she’d never meant him any harm.

  But why had Richard Broughton decided to kill her? She must have known something else. She had prior knowledge, extra knowledge, something that would have ruined his financial dealings. I starting to get the feeling of a more complex web of relationships.

  The room began to swim as all the convolutions of Holly’s death began to come to me. She had been poisoned here, in her dressing room. Had Mrs Malee brought her the drink in a cut-glass tumbler, or hot tea in a bone-china cup, to refresh her while she dressed? I wanted to believe that Mrs Malee had not known the contents of the drink and that she also had been removed before Holly was dragged downstairs to the sea front.

  I wanted to hear her voice but the room was silent. I was missing something. Holly was trying to tell me but I was too thick to notice. What should I do? Stay or leave? Search through more rooms? Take her bedroom to pieces? If only the walls could talk. I wanted to put my ear to the floor and listen.

  I began to make notes. Position of clothes, cosmetics, the state of her bathroom. The bathroom. She had been disturbed at some point, but at which point? The bathroom had been tidied and cleaned but not to Holly’s standard. I could see areas that had only had a perfunctory wipe round. The towels were only roughly folded. Then I looked at the lavatory. The seat was up. What does that tell you? A man had relieved himself in her bathroom.

  I was beginning to feel what might have happened. Holly had been having a bath and asked Mrs Malee on the internal phone to bring her a drink. She had not yet decided what to wear. But it was her killer who’d brought the drink, and maybe sat around talking while she drank her last cuppa.

  Holly had died here. Had the police taken samples from the sides of the bath where she had convulsed and died? It had been wiped clean. The killer had watched her die, then dried and dressed her with the nearest clothes – those from the previous day, probably – and dragged her down the stairs to a car. He had driven to the beach and impaled her on a stake in the wooden garden. His moves had been cold and calculated.

  It was time to get out of the house before he came back. Because he might come back. He knew the house was unoccupied. Mrs Malee had gone. I hoped that she was still alive. If I could find her, she might have some crucial information.

  The house was giving me the creeps. I hurried downstairs and got out as fast as I could, struggling into my trainers as I hopped towards my car. I had opened the driver’s door when I suddenly remembered what I had left in the kitchen. My bottle of mineral water was on a counter. If the killer came back and spotted something different in the house, he might come looking for me.

  I turned to go back and grab my bottle. As I did this, there was a loud explosion and a sudden rush of hot air. I was thrown to the ground. Flames leaped skywards, smoke billowed all around. I struggled up, shocked and horrified, coughing, staring at my car.

  I don’t normally cry. I’m not a weeping woman. But now I wept as my black-and-red ladybird car burned before my eyes. My sweet companion. My fun car. My unique and wonderful wheels. She was wrecked and burning, flames shooting in all directions, bits flying and cracking, the noise like an inferno, a small inferno. The door had been wired to explode when I got into it. But I had not got in. I had turned back.

  My hands were trembling as I keyed James on my mobile. Twice I made a mistake in the number.

  “James?”

  “Yes. Jordan?”

  “Someone has just b-blown up my ladybird,” I said.

  “Get out fast, wherever you are. Move, girl.”

  “I’m at Faunstone Hall.”

  “I’ll send out DS Morton and a team immediately. But you start walking now, Jordan, start running. They thought you would be in it when it blew up. They might still be around.”

  “I’m not leaving her. She’s burning to bits. It’s awful. I’ll stay till it’s finished. I can’t leave her.”

  There was a long pause and I suppose he heard my sobs.

  “You’re quite mad,” he said.

  Fifteen

  DS Duke Morton arrived in a patrol car at the same time as the fire brigade lumbered up the drive. It was far too late to save anything of the ladybird. The hunky firemen rushed around with fire extinguishers and hoses but they were left with a steaming pile of twisted metal and debris.

  I stood watching, not caring if the arsonist/murderer was still around. I felt like going back into the kitchen and bringing out the sharpest knife.

  “What happened?” asked a helmeted fire officer.

  “Incendiary device,” I said. “It was timed to go off when I opened the door. You’ll no doubt find a few wires or something.”

  “Doubt if we’ll find anything,” he said. “It’s pretty much burnt out.”

  “There’ll be something,” said DS Morton. “There’s always a trace of a toxic material, and as you were the target, Jordan, we’ll have to regard this as attempted murder.”

  “Third time lucky,” I said dryly. “There was the poisoning, then the pellet, now the car. I’ll make the Guinness Book of Records at this rate.”

  “If you wouldn’t mind coming to the station to make a statement,” said Duke. “Then I’ll drive you home.”

  “Story of my life, making statements. I’ve made more statements than you’ve had hot dinners. I could write a book on statements that I have made. Good title. ‘Statements I Have Made’. It would be a best-seller. They could make it into a TV series. Amanda Burton could play me.”

  “She’s a blonde.”

  “Hair dye. We could easily find the exact shade. How about Holly Hunter? I like her. A good actress.”

  “She’s very short and you are tall. DI James said you talk a lot of nonsense. Now I know it.”

  “What about my ladybird? We can’t leave her here.”

  “I’ll get the Council to come and clear the wreckage after the forensic squad have looked it over.”

  “No way,” I said vehemently. “She’s no ordinary wreckage. I’m not having her taken away and dumped at some breaker’s yard as if she was rubbish. The ladybird was special, vintage, my friend, companion, trusted member of the team.”

  DS Morton looked at me with suspicion, as if he might have to fetch a straitjacket.

  “She was a car, Jordan. Bits of metal. A very old car.”

  “An old car with black spots and brand new wheels. I’m not having her carted away by the Council.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What do you want? Full-scale funeral, hymn sheets, local vicar, flowers, wake in a pub?”

  I tried to simmer down. “I don’t know what I want,” I said. “Give me time to think about it. It has to be something special, different. The ladybird was no ordinary car. I’m not having her tipped into a dip.” I was still rhyming.

  “You’ll need a new car now.”

  I clamped my mouth. “I’ve got a mountain bike.”

  “Hope you don’t get blown off. We’re in for some windy weather. Summer’s not h
ere yet, running late this year.”

  “I don’t mind the weather. I like wind, rain, storms, gales. They don’t worry me. Rain is good for the skin. It’s a natural moisturizer.”

  “Naturally wet,” said Duke with a grin. “Get in the car, Jordan. The natural moisturizer is about to descend whether your skin needs it or not.”

  I liked him. He didn’t try to put me down as DI James often did. He was genial without being excessive, kind and straightforward. I got into the passenger seat, without looking at what was left of the ladybird, smouldering in a heap on the ground. I couldn’t bear it. I was silvered with sweat. She wasn’t just a car. She meant more than that to me.

  I remembered when I had fallen in love with her, up in the hills, at a tree nursery where a pond of valuable waterlilies had been stolen. Somehow, I’d managed to scrape together the asking money and driven her home, the proudest car owner in Latching. Not exactly the right car for undercover surveillance, all those black spots; but she had never let me down.

  No point in looking back. The ladybird had gone. Nothing left for a cosmetic makeover. But she had been wonderful for my morale. The perfect vehicle for someone like me. A scatterbrain, an eccentric, an oddity, brave and foolhardy.

  DS Morton noticed my quietness. “You need a cup of tea,” he said. “Shock. It’s been a shock. We’ll stop at the next pub and get some tea.”

  Pubs were scarce along this part of the coast. But a red brick row of three cottages appeared, now operating under the collective name of the George. Duke parked well to the back of the car park so that the resident drinkers did not take fright at the sight of a patrol car. I appreciated his tact.

  He took me to a quiet corner of the pub. It was a friendly, low-ceilinged place with a small fire burning in a stone grate to take off the chill. A big dog lay stretched out, gathering the heat on his back. Faded brown pictures of the village and the cottages in earlier times hung on the walls. There were also ancient farming implements hung from the ceiling, some still with wisps of straw. I began to relax as a tray of tea appeared, complete with teapot and jug of hot water.