Dead as a Scone (39 page)

Without much fear of being seen herself.

There were also five freestanding display panels in the Processing Salon, any of which would provide a convenient hiding place. Flick could imagine Elspeth feeling secure and comfortable amid the various machines and exhibits as she watched the thief replace one of the tea caddies with a sham look-alike.

Comfort would be important, because she had to watch the Antiquities Gallery over several nights running to catch the thief at work. Elspeth could only guess when he or she would return to substitute another piece of counterfeit Tunbridge Ware.

Don’t jump to conclusions!

The thief also replaced the
tansu
tea chest near the entranceway. What if Elspeth had been watching that evening?

Flick moved alongside the small chest. Its glass-panel doors glittered in the sharply focused beam of light from the fixture overhead. She was now much closer to the Tea Processing Salon, almost next to one of the connecting archways. When she looked toward the salon, she could see only one corner of the cut, tear, and curl machine.

No problem! It’s still a good hiding place.

Flick looked back at the tansu chest—and froze. The shock wave of disbelief that coursed through her body made it difficult to catch her breath.

She could see Nigel’s face!

Straight ahead was the reflection of the tea processing machine on the chest’s glass panels, and there—to one side of a large metal linkage—was Nigel watching her, unaware that she could see him.

The same thing happened to Elspeth Hawker.

Images advanced like projected slides in Flick’s mind.

Click.
She saw the thief tugging the squat chest, making sure that the replacement was in exactly the same position as the original.

Click.
The thief, stunned by Elspeth’s reflected image, had to struggle mightily as Flick had just done so as not to give away the startling discovery.

Click.
There was the thief leaving the Tea Antiquities Gallery, knowing that Elspeth Hawker fully understood how the thefts had been committed—wondering what would be the best way to silence her.

Click.
Finally, Flick saw Elspeth emerge from her hiding place and return to the Hawker Suite, having no idea of her desperate peril.

Flick waved at the reflection on the glass. “I can see you, Nigel—just like the thief spotted Elspeth Hawker. Now we know why she was poisoned.”

“Blast!” He stood up. “Should you ever decide that curating is not your cup of tea, you ought to apply for a crime-reconstruction post at the Kent police.”

Flick slipped her trainers back on. “Thank you, kind sir.” Nigel had delivered a tortuous compliment—certainly not the most gracious she had ever received—but a compliment nonetheless. To her surprise, it erased much of the gloom she had felt a moment before. She rewarded him with an amiable smile.

Unfortunately, Nigel didn’t seem to notice. He was deep in thought, his eyes gazing intently into space. “The fact is,” he said glumly, “we have only reconstructed bits and pieces of this crime. We understand how the thief got around the motion detectors. We have guessed where Elspeth hid and how the thief caught a glimpse of her. The next question is the biggie: How did the thief get in and out of the museum? I doubt that he or she marched nineteen antiquities past the security guard in the kiosk.”

“Could there be a way into the building that we don’t know about?”

“I doubt it. Conan Davies knows every nook and cranny of this museum. He certainly would have discovered a chink in our armor long before this.”

“As Uncle Ted said, ‘There’s
always
a way in and out.’ ”

“If there is, we will find it.”

“Tonight?”

He shook his head. “You are beginning to look knackered again. It is time to go home; you have done quite enough for one day. We will enlist Conan tomorrow morning. The three of us will tour the museum.” He added with a grin, “Perhaps our building is riddled with clichéd sliding panels and hidden passages after all.”

“Instead of an actual tour, let’s do a brainstorming session with Conan,” Flick said. “It’s a more efficient way of picking his brain.”

Nigel seemed to hesitate at first. Flick wasn’t surprised; many people have misgivings about the hoary technique of brainstorming. But then, few of the doubters had tried her unconventional approach. He finally nodded. “Brainstorming it is. You are in charge.”

They climbed together to the third floor. Nigel locked the old copybook in the small safe in his office. They descended to the ground floor, reset the security system, and left the museum through the side door.

Flick slid into the BMW and watched Nigel turn the key in the ignition. He seemed preoccupied, as if his mind had focused on another challenging problem. He wore much the same cheerful expression she had seen earlier that evening when he had made the bizarre comment about watching her run. She had been bewildered at first, then delighted that her snap decision to echo the comment back at Nigel had been the right thing to do. They had laughed about running for most of the short drive to the museum.

Brits have a strange sense of humor.

“I have been thinking about Desmond Hawker,” Nigel said. Flick peered at him. Was this the start of another odd British joke?

Nigel continued. “We both agree that he found serenity during the second half of his life—something that he lacked during the first half.”

“I agree that we agree.”

“Yes, well, this Sunday…would you…
uh
…consider…
ah
…accompanying me to St. Stephen’s?”

He’s invited you to go to church with him.

“Oh?” “If you are busy, I certainly understand.” “No.” “No?” “No, I’m not busy,” Flick said emphatically. “I think going to church is a lovely idea.”

“Ah.”

She swallowed a sigh. She had sounded like a complete ditz.

He’s probably sorry he asked.

It was almost eleven thirty, late enough for Nigel to risk stopping his BMW on the no-parking side of the Lower Walk. Flick looked up at her apartment and wondered if it would be possible to revive the tub full of bath salts. She reached for the door handle.

“Hang on,” Nigel said, “I will escort you to your front door.” He leapt out of the driver’s seat, came around the front of the car, and gallantly opened her door.

“It is only six thirty in Pennsylvania,” he said, a soppy grin breaking across his face.

“That’s true,” Flick said, as evenly as she could. Her heart had begun to race. Nigel was up to something—but what?

“I suppose you will call your mother when you get upstairs?”

“If I don’t, she will call me. It happens every time she talks to Uncle Ted.”

“Well, if she should ask about your love life…”

Without warning, Nigel cupped her face in his hands and kissed her gently on the lips.

“Assure her that it is alive and well,” he said.

“
O–okay,” Flick murmured, her heart now thumping. She looked up at Nigel. He still had the soppy grin on his face. She hoped that her smile looked just as silly to him.

Flick wasn’t caught off guard when Nigel kissed her again.

A dog yapped somewhere overhead.

Nigel laughed. “Cha-Cha, your companion and chaperone, knows you are back.”

“Okay,” Flick said again, unable to think of anything else to say. She quickly let herself into her building. She drew several calming breaths and listened through the door as Nigel started the BMW and drove away.

“Wow!” she murmured and trudged up the long staircase to her apartment.

Cha-Cha raced around her feet as she let herself in. She walked into her parlor and sat down in her only armchair. The dog jumped up next to her and tried to lick her cheek.

“I just made a terrible mistake, didn’t I, Cha-Cha?”

The dog replied to the sound of his name with a soft, squeaky bark.

“You are absolutely right. I did act dumb! I should have kissed him back.”

Seventeen

N
igel awoke in an emphatically jovial mood on Thursday morning. He stopped at the bakeshop on Mount Pleasant Road and bought a dozen French pastries for the museum’s staff. When he arrived at his desk, he used his first twenty minutes to send cheerful email notes to former colleagues throughout England. And by midmorning he had found a way to settle scores with Conan Davies.

Although Conan was chief of security, a management position, he chose to wear the same discreet uniform as his team of security guards: sharply creased gray trousers, a blue blazer adorned with the Royal Tunbridge Wells Tea Museum crest on the breast pocket, and comfortable black shoes—the sort with thick rubber soles that cushion the blows of walking and standing on marble floors.

Nigel applauded Conan’s logic: The museum had a small security staff and Conan often had to pitch in and perform routine chores. This morning, for example, he stood on the museum’s loading dock watching a food delivery lorry back slowly into the single concrete bay. The museum’s security policy—written and enforced by Conan—ordained that a security guard monitors all transfers in or out of the museum. Nigel, however, felt personally aggrieved by the chief of security’s shoes. They allowed Conan to move ghostlike through the museum and arrive silently behind Nigel in a wholly unpredictable manner. Conan shocked him to the core at least once each week. Today presented a golden opportunity to get even.

Nigel approached stealthily, the sound of his leather-soled footsteps entirely masked by the beep, beep, beeping of the lorry’s reversing signal, and clapped Conan on the shoulder. The big man rose a foot off the loading dock and screeched an unfamiliar phrase that Nigel took as a mild Scottish oath.

Revenge is mine!

“Oh, it’s you, sir,” Conan said as he readjusted his dislocated eyeglasses.

“Sorry, Conan. I didn’t mean to alarm you,” Nigel said innocently. “Can we talk while you watch the driver unload? I have a remarkable story to tell you.”

“Certainly.” Conan gestured toward a pair of scruffy metal office chairs that overlooked the loading dock. They sat down as the driver rolled open the back of the lorry and began to move cardboard cartons to a low-slung trolley.

Conan listened stony-faced, from time to time murmuring, “Poor Dame Elspeth.” He interrupted Nigel’s narrative only once, when the lorry driver demanded that someone sign for the delivery. Conan scrawled his name on the driver’s tablet computer and pushed the button that closed the loading dock’s overhead door.

“Sorry, sir. You were telling me how Dame Elspeth first discovered the thefts.”

Nigel could see Conan growing more and more upset as the balance of the sad story unfolded. The pained expression on his face proclaimed unmistakably how much he hated to learn about a problem on his patch from someone else—especially his boss. Conan was gripping his chair’s armrests with sufficient strength to flex the metal tubing. Nigel wondered if the chair would survive their chat.

“And you say that my name was on her list of possible thieves, sir?” Conan asked when Nigel had finished.

“Yes, but only halfheartedly. You see, you are in the building so often that it was probably hard for Elspeth to eliminate you as a suspect.” Nigel grinned. “We did it by reasons of your ancestry.”

“Thenk ye,”
Conan said in a thick burr.

“We need your help.”

“You shall have it, sir.”

“Felicity Adams has set up the Hawker Suite as our incident room. Let’s join her.”

Conan tipped his head toward the trolley full of cartons. “As soon as I push these provisions into the kitchen.”

“You push; I’ll pull.”

When Nigel entered the Hawker Suite, he noted with some surprise that Flick had rearranged the furniture while he was gone. She had moved the sofa and armchair away from the back wall to create a large area of easily accessible surface. On one side she had taped public relations photographs, borrowed from Nigel’s files, of the four remaining suspects. On the other side she had affixed floor plans of the museum’s four levels.

Conan, who walked in right behind Nigel, said, “What’s this all about, then?”

“A backward brainstorming session,” Flick said. “We have two questions on the table today. First, how can someone get in or out of this building without triggering the perimeter alarm? Second, what do we really know about these four people?” She tapped the page-sized color photos of Marjorie Halifax, Dorothy McAndrews, Matthew Eaton, and Iona Saxby.

Nigel could imagine what Conan, a man of action, must be thinking about the idea of doing detective work via brainstorming. The chief of security seemed disorientated by Flick’s initial explanation, but he was clearly too good a soldier to express his doubts verbally. He sat down on the sofa
—
knees together, his hands resting in his lap—and awaited further orders. Nigel sat down in the armchair.