A Scone To Die For (Oxford Tearoom Mysteries ~ Book 1) (17 page)

“
What?
Hughes was murdered?”

“His body has just been discovered. I’m at the crime scene now.”

“But… are you sure it was murder?”

“Well, if it was suicide, then Hughes must have been the most dextrous man in history to be able to bash himself in the back of the head with enough force to smash in half his skull.”

I shuddered. The image was not a pleasant one. “Hughes is dead…?” I whispered, sinking slowly down on my bed. “I was so sure that he was Washington’s killer…”

“Oh, I have no doubt that his death is related,” said Devlin grimly. “Two murders in the space of a week is too much of a coincidence, especially with the connections between them. I’m willing to bet that the person who murdered Hughes is also the person who murdered Washington. Which means that—nice as your theory is—it couldn’t have been Hughes who killed Washington on Saturday.”

Devlin’s voice hardened. “And it also means that this murderer is dangerous, Gemma. I know you’ve been doing some investigating on your own. I appreciate your efforts to help and I know that with your knowledge of Oxford and the University, you have an insider’s advantage. But I’m telling you to leave it well alone now. In spite of what Mabel Cooke thinks, this isn’t some Agatha Christie novel where everything will be nicely explained in the library—this is the real deal. And this killer has just shown that he’s not afraid to kill again. You could be in serious danger, Gemma. The next person the killer decides to silence could be you.”

In spite of myself, Devlin’s words sent a shiver up my spine. Even though I had been the one to find Washington’s body, it had all felt slightly surreal. It was only now that I felt the breath of menace on my neck for the first time and realised that this wasn’t some TV crime drama… this was the real thing. And I was caught in the thick of it.

I cleared my throat, not wanting to show Devlin that his words had scared me. I was pleased my voice sounded quite calm and steady as I asked, “Do the other suspects on the case have alibis for last night?”

“I’ve spoken to Mike Bailey and no, he hasn’t got an alibi. He claims that he was at home watching TV—not something that’s easy to prove or disprove.”

“What about Justine Washington?”

There was silence at the other end of the line. “Justine doesn’t have an alibi either, although I wouldn’t class her as a strong suspect in this case.”

“Well, of course you would say that.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing,” I said. Then I burst out, “Why are you so reluctant to consider Justine as a suspect? You know as well as I do that she has a perfectly good motive to kill Washington.
And
she lied about not knowing that he was in Oxford… and about meeting him on Friday night… She
should
be one of the prime suspects and probably would be if it weren’t for you tiptoeing around her dainty stilettos.”

“Jealousy doesn’t become you, Gemma.”

“I’m not jealous!” I snapped. “But I know a suspect when I see one, which is more than I can say for some people!”

I ended the call and slammed the phone down. Seething, I finished dressing and left the house. I was an hour late, I realised. The call with Seth and then the conversation with Devlin had delayed me. But I knew that Fletcher and Cassie would be at the tearoom already—hopefully they could hold the fort until I arrived. If there was any fort to hold, I thought dourly.

My spirits didn’t improve when I arrived in Meadowford-on-Smythe. I pulled up in front of the tearoom and could see at a glance through the windows that the dining room was empty. I sighed. It didn’t look like today’s business was going to be any better than yesterday’s. I felt fear clench my stomach again. If this case didn’t get solved soon, my little tearoom was doomed.

Cassie looked up as I walked in and said, “So Hughes is dead.”

My mouth dropped open. “How did you know? I only just heard from Devlin myself and he can’t have even spoken to the press yet.”

She grimaced. “Fletcher found the body.”

“What?”

“Yeah. He was out searching for Muesli again this morning—just near where we were last night—and he found it, dumped behind some bushes. He was the one who notified the police.” She sighed. “He’s really upset about it, as you can imagine. He called to let me know what happened and I told him to take the day off. I didn’t think he’d be much good here anyway.”

“Oh my God… do you think we should go and see him?”

She shook her head. “I’m not sure he’d appreciate it at the moment. He sounded like he just wanted to hole up in his house and be left alone. I think I can understand that—especially with the police crawling all over the woods next to his house. I think he just wants some peace and security, in an environment he can control.” She gave a wry smile. “I told him that maybe there’ll be a silver lining—that with the police combing the area, they might find Muesli. I think that cheered him up a bit. He said he was going to speak to one of the officers and ask them to keep an eye out for a grey tabby cat.”

I thought of our search in the woods last night and wondered if the body had been there already. We might even have walked right past it. I shuddered.

Cassie looked at me curiously. “So you spoke to Devlin at last?”

In a terse voice, I repeated the conversation I had had with him. “I can’t believe he said I was jealous of Justine!” I fumed.

“Well, aren’t you?” said Cassie with a teasing smile.

I glared at her. “Not you too! Why does everyone think that I must be motivated by jealousy where Devlin is concerned? I couldn’t care less if he wants to sleep with every woman in Oxford!”

“I’m not going to comment on what a blatant lie that is,” said Cassie. “But you have to admit, Gemma, that you took against Justine from the beginning. I mean, you were immediately convinced that Devlin must be biased towards her because he’s attracted to her. Isn’t that jumping to conclusions?”

“I’m not jumping to anything. I saw them together,” I muttered. “Anyway, my point is—Justine is just as strong a suspect as Mike Bailey but no one is focusing on her! We’ve all been chasing after Hughes—or Mike—when actually, she could be the murderer and getting away with it! Oh, she’s clever… She’s so smooth and she has an answer for everything. She even fooled me,” I said, shaking my head. “She played her part so well that, like everyone else, I didn’t take her seriously as a suspect. Instead, I got so distracted investigating Hughes that I never even considered her part in the affair…”

I paced up and down next to the counter, thinking furiously. Suddenly, I stopped. “I’m not going to accept it. I don’t care what Devlin says—I’m sure Justine is involved. In fact, if Hughes’s alibi for Saturday morning turned out to be false, why not Justine’s as well? She
says
she was at a yoga class, but if Devlin’s sergeant did such a poor job of checking Hughes’s alibi, he could have missed something with Justine’s too.”

Cassie rolled her eyes at me. “So what are you going to do—check it yourself?”

I smiled slowly at her. “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”

“Gemma, I was joking,” she groaned.

I ignored her, thinking out loud to myself, “We need to go to the dance studio and find some way of checking that Justine did attend her class last Saturday morning.”

“That’s easy,” said Cassie. “I’m sure this is what the sergeant did. All members of the studio have a concession card which gets stamped each time they come for a class. The stamp has the date and time on it. So just checking her card will tell you whether she was at that class.”

“Oh…” I said in disappointment. “That won’t work then. How am I going to find a way to see her card?”

“Well, actually, the members don’t keep their cards on them. We developed the system because people kept forgetting their cards, and nowadays everyone has so many cards, they hate having to carry another one in their wallet. So what we do is we keep the cards at the studio. It’s a pretty old-fashioned system: they’re basically like index cards, kept in those catalogue drawers, like from an old-fashioned library. Each drawer covers surnames starting with certain letters of the alphabet—you know, like one for A/B, one for C/D, then E/F… all the way up to Y/Z. Yeah…” She nodded ruefully at my expression. “This isn’t anything like modern gyms with their digital readers and barcodes and things… hey, this is Oxford. What worked for the Tudors is good enough for us.” She grinned.

“So members just ask for their cards when they come in and get them stamped for their classes?”

“Pretty much.”

“But—isn’t that easy to scam? I mean, anyone could come in and pretend to be someone else and scrounge a free class.”

“Well, in theory, yes,” Cassie admitted. “But in reality, you’d have to know the full name of the person you’re pretending to be, pick a class that that person has signed up for… and besides, it’s a small place. The receptionist pretty much knows all our members. You couldn’t walk in there and pretend that you’re Nicky Wilcox. Aside from the fact that they’d recognise you look different immediately, they’d ask you where your baby was, whether you had blonde highlights done last week, how your husband’s promotion was coming along, and whether you liked the cake recipe Mrs Doyle gave you.” Cassie grinned. “You won’t believe how much gossip and idle curiosity there is in small villages. It’s probably harder to fake your way past the locals than to get into the Pentagon with a false identity.”

“Okay… so basically what you’re saying is if we can get access to that drawer catalogue behind the reception desk, we’d be able to check Justine’s card and see if it was stamped for Saturday morning.”

“Yes, but I don’t know what you’re trying to achieve. I’m sure the sergeant would have already done that.”

“I can’t explain it, Cass—I’d just like to see it for myself.”

She threw her hands up. “Fine. I’ll tell you what—why don’t we go over this afternoon, then, after we close here? I could distract Barb, the studio receptionist, while you sneak behind the counter and have a look.”

I looked around the empty dining room. “I don’t know why we don’t just go now,” I said despondently. “I might as well close for the day.”

“Hey, you never know—things might pick up around lunchtime,” said Cassie.

She turned out to be right—but only marginally. We had a tenth of our usual business at lunch and a little dribble for the rest of the day, but I was grateful to have
any
customer at all. At least it was better than yesterday when the tearoom had sat empty all day. But it still wasn’t enough to save me from closure. I needed faith restored in my tearoom and business to return to what it had been—and the only way I could see that happening was if the mystery of the murder—
double
murder now—was solved.

I’m not sure what I expected when we headed down to the dance studio late that afternoon. Okay, so maybe I had a vision of Cassie and me in skin-tight black bodysuits, ducking expertly around corners and skilfully picking locks to secret drawers while a creepy soundtrack played in the background…

The reality was far more banal than my
Charlie’s Angels
fantasy. We arrived at the studio to find the reception fairly empty and a class obviously in progress from the sound of mystical music coming from Studio 2. The only person we could see was Barb behind the reception. She looked up at the jingling of the bells attached to the studio door and smiled as we came in.

“Hiya, Cass—I didn’t think you were teaching any classes tonight?”

“I’m not,” said Cassie. “I just came in to… uh… take a look at some of those new dance shoes we ordered recently.”

Barb’s eyes lit up. “Ooh, they’re beautiful. I’ve been thinking of getting a pair myself, even though I don’t do ballroom dancing. Shame they’ve got soft suede soles—they’d get ruined if I had to wear them out and about, especially in the rain. Otherwise, I really fancied a pair.”

“Which was your favourite?”

“Here, I’ll show you. There’s one in gold satin with a T-bar that’s just gorgeous!” She came out from behind the counter and led Cassie into Studio 1, where a shoe rack stood in the corner, displaying several pairs of dancing shoes. Cassie gave me a wink and followed her into the room. They disappeared from sight around the corner of the doorway but I could see their reflection in the mirrors that lined the studio walls.

I kept my eyes on that reflection. As soon as I was certain that they were safely in the corner with the shoe rack, I darted behind the reception counter and went up to the chest of miniature catalogue drawers sitting against the back wall. I found the drawer marked “W/X” and searched hurriedly.
Walsh… Webster… Wilcox… Willeton… Woodley… Wright…
No Washington.

Dismayed, I rifled through the cards again. No, definitely no Washington.

Then I had a thought. Quickly, I shut the drawer and opened the one marked “S/T” and looked through the cards there.

Bingo.

I pulled out the card labelled: “Justine Smith”. Of course! Justine had mentioned at the book club meeting that she mostly used her maiden name these days. I flipped it over and looked at the grid on the back. There it was, clearly stamped, the date and time for her Saturday morning yoga class. My hopes sank. Looked like she had been here after all.

The jingling of the bells alerted me one second before the studio front door opened. I managed to shove the card back and slam the drawer shut before I whirled around to face who had just come in.

“Gemma!” Glenda Bailey and Ethel Webb looked at me with delight. “What are you doing here?”

I slid casually out from behind the reception counter. “Oh, I’m just waiting for Cassie. She wanted to check out some dancing shoes.”

At that moment, Barb and Cassie re-joined us in the foyer. Glenda looked at the receptionist eagerly.

“Oh, Barb—are we still in time for the Seniors Yoga class?”

“I’m afraid you’ve missed quite a lot of it already. It starts at 4:30 p.m., not 5:30 p.m. You could join now but I don’t think there would be much point and you wouldn’t have had a proper warm up.”

“Dearie me, it’s all my fault,” said Ethel. “If only I’d remembered about changing the clocks. It’s no wonder I’ve been late for everything this week. We were over at my house and thought it was still four-ish until Glenda looked at her watch.”

“Never mind,” said Glenda. “You can always come with me to try the Saturday morning class.”

I looked at Glenda with interest. “You do the yoga class on Saturday mornings? Were you there last weekend?”

Glenda beamed. “Yes, I’ve been doing that class for three months now. Oh, you must try it, Gemma. Yoga is ever so good for you! I was reading an article in
Cosmo
which said that yoga is how all the celebrities manage to look so young and stay so—and it does wonders for your sex life!”

I wondered why on earth Glenda was reading
Cosmo
, whilst Cassie muttered under her breath, “Too much information…”

I tried to bring the conversation back on subject. “Is the class on Saturday normally quite busy?”

“Oh yes, it’s very popular. I think half of Oxfordshire must be here.” Glenda laughed. “The teacher is marvellous so I know several ladies who come from miles away to attend the class.”

“I suppose… you know a lot of the regulars?” I didn’t know where I was going with this line of questioning but I was just following an instinct.

Glenda nodded. “It’s mostly the same people who come every week.”

“There’s an American woman called Justine who’s in that class too, I think?”

“Oh, Mabel was telling me all about Justine,” Ethel piped up. “She’s in Mabel’s book club too. She’s very attractive, isn’t she? Mabel says she’s a real man-eater.”

“Ooh, I’d better take some lessons from her!” Glenda giggled.

Cassie rolled her eyes. I stifled the urge to laugh.

“And apparently she’s the wife of the man who was murdered in your tearoom,” added Ethel. “Fancy that! It’s a small world, isn’t it?”

I could see Barb listening with wide-eyed fascination and realised suddenly that all of this would be on the village grapevine by tomorrow morning. I gave Cassie a look and she took the hint, turning and dragging Barb behind the reception counter on some pretext. I put a gentle hand under Glenda’s elbow and steered the little old lady away from the counter, so that we were out of earshot.

“So, this Justine… was she at your class last Saturday?” I asked casually.

Any hopes I might have had that the stamp on the card was wrong were dashed when Glenda said, “Oh yes, she was right next to me. We usually have the same spots, you see, every week. I’m normally in the front right corner and Justine’s right behind me.”

“So she was
definitely
at the class last Saturday,” I said desperately. I knew I was grasping at straws but something egged me on.

Glenda nodded. “She was there already when I arrived.” Then she paused and added, “But she hardly stayed for the class! She left so early. We were doing the Three-Legged Down Dog and she suddenly got up from her mat and left.”

“What time was this?” I asked sharply.

Glenda frowned. “I think it was about ten to fifteen minutes after the start of class.”

Which would have made it around 8:15 a.m. at the latest. Washington had been killed sometime between 7:45 a.m. and 8:40 a.m., when I had discovered him. Geoffrey Hughes had arrived late for his meeting with Washington—probably around 8:25 a.m.—and the American was already dead by then. It was tight but there would have been time for Justine to nip down the road from the studio and do the deed.

“Gemma, dear—are you all right?”

I came back to myself with a start. “Yes, sorry, Glenda.” I smiled warmly at her and gave her hand a squeeze. “Thank you so much! You don’t realise how much you’ve helped me!”

“Well, I’m always glad to help if I can, dear,” she said, looking slightly bemused.

Leaving Glenda and Ethel to chat with Barb, I dragged Cassie back out into the street. Quickly, I recounted what Glenda had told me.

“You realise what this means? It means that Justine lied about everything! First she claimed that she didn’t even know Washington was in Oxford—when she actually met him on Friday night—and now we find that she lied about her alibi too. Why didn’t she tell the police that she left the yoga class early? She must be hiding something.”

“Hey, you’ve convinced me,” said Cassie with a shrug. “The thing is, I’m not the person who needs to be convinced—Devlin is.”

I compressed my lips. “Well, he’s going to have to listen to my suspicions about Justine now. He can’t ignore this and he can’t protect her anymore.”

Twilight was falling by the time I started cycling for home. Not that that bothered me. I’d cycled in the dark before and my bike headlights lit the road well in front of me. It was crisp and cold, my breath coming out in clouds of steam in front of my face and the wind stinging my cheeks as the bicycle picked up speed. I pumped the pedals hard, partly to warm up and partly to give myself something to do as my mind churned with doubts and questions.

I knew I had to speak to Devlin again. I had to tell him about Justine’s fake alibi for Saturday morning. But a part of me was dreading the discussion. Okay, so maybe I
was
a little bit jealous of her. Who wouldn’t be? She was the kind of woman that would make anyone feel insecure. And the thought of listening to Devlin defending her made me squirm.

Why did it bother me so much? I leaned slightly into the curve of the road as the bicycle negotiated the bend. Was it the thought that Devlin might care for her? But she was a suspect in the case…. He couldn’t seriously be contemplating getting involved with her? Surely, there must have been police rules against this sort of thing… conflict of interest… abuse of power… biased investigations…

Then I remembered the gossip at the book club last Sunday, how my mother’s friends had been talking about Devlin’s “scandal” up north where he had been accused of becoming romantically involved with an attractive female suspect on his last case. Maybe Devlin didn’t care about breaking the rules.

I frowned. There had always been a wild, rebellious streak about him—especially back when we were students together—but somehow I always felt certain of a core of integrity in him. I just couldn’t imagine him jeopardising a case for his own personal pleasures. At the heart of it, I knew he was a good detective and cared passionately about seeing justice served. Would he really let his feelings, and a passing physical attraction, cloud his judgement so much?

But what, I reminded myself bitterly, did I
really
know about Devlin O’Connor? It had been eight years since I last saw him—and people can change a lot in eight years. I had certainly never expected him to become a detective! I didn’t know what I expected him to be when I met him again—perhaps the leader of a rock band at the Glastonbury Music Festival. I laughed wryly to myself at the image.

I leaned back on my seat and let the bicycle coast for a bit as my thoughts drifted back into the past. I wondered if Devlin still played his guitar. He used to play the most hauntingly beautiful melodies, strumming them softly as we sat together on summer evenings in the college gardens, the air soft and balmy around us and the sky painted with streaks of sunset pink and orange… the long, carefree days of student life… I could still remember the way he had looked, that dark lock of hair falling over his eyes as he bent over the strings, concentrating on the chords… and then he would look up and lean across, lowering his head to mine…

I shook my head sharply, dispelling the memory. I had to stop doing this! Whatever we had was in the past now and I had to put it behind me—which meant accepting the fact that Devlin was now a different man and could easily let his feelings for another woman cloud his judgement on a case…

Suddenly, I became aware of a noise behind me. It had been growing faintly but I had been so lost in my thoughts that I had barely noticed it until now. I looked over my shoulder and saw a shape looming out of the darkness. It was a car. Big, powerful, and gaining on me.

I pedalled a bit faster as I felt suddenly uneasy. Devlin’s words from that morning came back to me.

“You could be in serious danger, Gemma. The next person the killer decides to silence could be you.”