Dead Funny (3 page)

Mum blushed.

“You’re forgetting Miss Sugarcandy’s English,” Sylvia said. And then she corrected herself. “
Was
English. At any rate, she had me well trained. She was fond of her tea. I do know how to make a ‘proper cuppa’.”

She did too. A few minutes later Sylvia placed two cups next to me and Graham and, with slightly shaking hands, poured in a dash of milk, then the tea: boiling hot, not too strong. Then she dropped in three lumps of sugar each. “Good for shock,” she said, patting me awkwardly on the arm before going off to pour tea for Mum. I appreciated the thought but I didn’t really need the sugar: I wasn’t particularly shocked. Surprised, yes. A little excited, perhaps, but mostly absolutely riveted.

After a long time in which Sylvia and Mum struggled to make polite conversation and Judy maintained a frosty silence, the kitchen door crashed open and a man who looked just like Friar Tuck in a suit walked in. He was so wide around the middle that he reminded me of a toy I’d once had that bounced back upright no matter how hard and how often I pushed it over. But despite his cuddly appearance there was a glint of steel in his eyes that said he wasn’t someone to mess with. He was the kind of man who was surprised by nothing, shocked by nothing and amused by nothing. I fervently hoped that my hunch about the murder was right. I didn’t fancy feeling his wrath pour down on my head.

He introduced himself as Lieutenant Weinburger, and spoke first to Judy. “I realize this is a difficult time for you Mrs…?” He paused, waiting for Judy to fill in her name.

“Miss,” she snapped. “And I’ve gone back to my mother’s surname since my divorce.”

“Sugarcandy?” the policeman asked.

“No!” she spat irritably. “That was her stage name. Her real name was Biddy Ford. I’m Judy Ford.”

“Miss Ford,” he said, “your mother’s body has been taken away now. There’ll be a full post-mortem, of course, after which we’ll know more about what happened.”

“Really! All this fuss over a broken heel,” said Judy. “Can’t you see it was an accident?”

“Maybe it was,” the Lieutenant answered calmly. “But we need to be sure, Miss Ford. I’d like to ask you a few questions, if I may? Would you care to come through to the living-room?” He phrased it as a question, but from the tone of his voice it was clear Judy couldn’t refuse. She stood up and followed the lieutenant through the open door. We heard her heels clacking across the floor and a few seconds later she let out a wail of genuine distress. For a moment I thought she was suffering from delayed shock and her mother’s death had finally hit her, but then I heard her words.

“My shopping! Where is it? What have you done with it?”

I couldn’t hear Lieutenant Weinburger’s reply, but Judy’s cries of protest rang loudly through the house. “Taken it? But it’s mine! Why do you need to look through it?” Another softly spoken sentence from the policeman, then Judy’s exclamation, “This is crazy! Absolutely crazy! Why the hell do you need to check on my movements?”

I could hear Lieutenant Weinburger saying something about “routine enquiries” as they moved away into another room. As soon as the door closed behind them the atmosphere in the kitchen instantly relaxed. Mum and Sylvia began to talk about the gardens and what Baby Sugarcandy had planned for them. Which was just as well because Graham and I now discovered that the floral-scented breeze wasn’t the only thing wafting in through the open window: we could hear the conversation Lieutenant Weinburger was having with Judy in the room next door.

Once he’d reassured her about the safety and future well-being of her shopping, the policeman began by asking about her mother.

“Did she seem happy to you this morning?”

“What? You surely don’t think she killed herself?” said Judy with withering scorn.

“Just answer the question please, Miss Ford. Did your mother seem happy?”

“Yes, as far as I could tell.”

“You sure of that? Was anything bothering her?”

“Of course not!” exclaimed Judy. “She had everything, didn’t she? Money, a great house, a beautiful wardrobe. What could possibly have been bothering her?”

“That’s what I’m asking you,” the lieutenant countered. “How long have you lived here, Miss Ford?”

“I was raised here. Left when I was eighteen. But I’ve been back a year now. Eighteen months. Something like that. I moved in with Mother when my marriage broke up.”

“And you rubbed along together OK?” asked the policeman.

“Just fine and dandy.”

There was a pause. I could hear the policeman’s shoes squeaking as he paced heavily about. Then he said, “You don’t work do you, Miss Ford?”

“What has that got to do with anything?” replied Judy rudely.

“I was just wondering who pays for your shopping. You had quite a haul there, you must have been hard at it all day.”

“That’s none of your business,” she snapped.

“Actually it is,” the policeman answered smoothly. “Someone dies unexpectedly, we have to look into everything, consider every angle. It’s what I draw my pay cheque for.”

“I charge my purchases to my mother’s account,” growled Judy.

“She must have been one generous lady,” Lieutenant Weinburger commented. He changed tack. “Did you see anyone when you left the house this morning? Waiting by the gates, say, or walking in the grounds – did you notice anyone who shouldn’t be here?”

“No.”

“You didn’t let anyone in?”

“Of course not!”

Lieutenant Weinburger cleared his throat. Then he said, “I have to ask, ma’am… Baby Sugarcandy was a rich lady, wasn’t she?”

“Yes,” Judy agreed reluctantly.

“Who gets her fortune now she’s gone?”

“I don’t know the contents of my mother’s will,” Judy said coldly. “But I should imagine she’s divided everything between me and my brother. That would be the fair thing to do.”

“Your brother?”

“Toby. He’s away. Somewhere in South America, I believe, saving the rainforests or something. I don’t know exactly.”

“We’ll find him. Thank you, Miss Ford, you’ve been very helpful.” Lieutenant Weinburger brought the interview to a close. But Judy hadn’t finished.

“When will I get my shopping back?” she asked.

“As soon as we’ve verified your movements,” he replied. “You can return to the others now, Miss Ford. Would you be good enough to send your mother’s secretary to me?”

Judy gave one last, indignant sniff and then we heard her heels clacking out of the room and back across the hall. When she reached the kitchen, she sat down at the table and began to pick off her nail polish again, but I noticed a smile had crept into the corners of her mouth.

Mum didn’t even attempt to talk to her. Curling up in an armchair near the Aga, she fell into a doze.

“Arguments over money or property,” whispered Graham, “come number five on the list of the most common motives for murder in the USA.”

“You think Judy did it?”

“It seems a highly plausible theory, don’t you agree?”

“Yes. She’s definitely dodgy. But what about that man we saw? Why was he running away? That was very suspicious.”

Graham didn’t answer. Sylvia had left the room to speak to the lieutenant and now we could hear his voice through the window.

“Welcome, Miss…?”

“Sharpe,” she answered. “Sylvia Sharpe. How can I help you, Lieutenant?”

“How long have you been working for Miss Sugarcandy?”

“A little over a year.”

“Did you arrive before or after Miss Ford moved back in with her mother?” asked the lieutenant.

“About a month after.”

“Uh huh. And how did they get on?”

“Well … fine, really, most of the time … but…” Sylvia ground to a halt.

“Yes?” prompted the policeman.

There was the scrape of chair legs as Sylvia moved closer to the lieutenant and we had to strain to catch her next words. “Well, strictly between ourselves, Lieutenant, money was getting to be an issue. Judy loves retail therapy – it’s virtually impossible to keep her away from the mall. They’d argued about it, but Judy seemed quite unable to stop herself. As a result of which Miss Sugarcandy had just asked me to close the accounts she had at several stores.”

“Interesting,” murmured Lieutenant Weinburger thoughtfully. “And how had she seemed to you lately?”

“Miss Sugarcandy? To be honest she’d been very tense. These last few weeks she seemed close to the edge: snapping for no reason, bursting into tears. And this morning she was…” Sylvia groped for the right word. “You know, it was almost as if she was scared of something. Or someone.”

“Any idea who?”

“I’m afraid not. She didn’t confide in me, Lieutenant. I had the impression that it might have been an old flame. There was a letter from England a couple of months ago that seemed to unsettle her, but she didn’t divulge the contents to me. I was her employee, not her friend.”

“So who did she talk to? She must have been close to someone.”

“Her son Toby. He phoned her regularly and they talked for hours. But no one else. You know, in lots of ways she was a very lonely woman. Many stars are, I believe.”

Lieutenant Weinburger grunted. Then he asked Sylvia the same question he’d asked Judy. “Did you see anyone when you left for the airport today? Anyone who shouldn’t be here?”

“Not when I left. But when we got back there was a man – a stranger. An intruder! He was running towards the gates. The girl spotted him. I can’t imagine how he got in.”

“What did he look like?”

Sylvia gave a sketchy description and then apologized. “I’m sorry, I was driving – I only had a brief glance at him. The children are the ones to ask.”

“I’ll do that, Miss Sharpe. In the meantime, what can you tell me about Miss Sugarcandy’s will? Any idea who gets her millions?”

“Judy and Toby I expect.”

“Nothing to you?”

Sylvia gave an embarrassed cough. “She paid me very well, Lieutenant. I wouldn’t expect her to leave me anything. And now, unfortunately, I’m out of a job.”

Lieutenant Weinburger pressed on. “Tell me more about her son, Toby. What do you know about him?”

“Not much. He’s some sort of eco-warrior, I think. He’s in South America helping to save the rainforest. I’ve never met him,” explained Sylvia.

“These Brits… What are they doing here?”

“Miss Sugarcandy was getting nostalgic in her advancing years. She wanted the estate to be turned into an English country garden. Lili Fields is a landscape gardener. She was invited here to do the design.”

“Why did she choose Lili Fields?”

“Oh… Well…” For the first time, Sylvia stumbled over her answer. “Er… I invited them… I mean her. On Miss Sugarcandy’s instructions of course. I’m not quite sure why she chose Lili Fields, to be honest. She gave me her contact details and I took it from there.”

“Thank you, Miss Sharpe, you’ve been very helpful. Send the Brits in now.”

Sylvia came back and gently shook Mum awake so that we could all be interviewed. I didn’t have a chance to say anything about it to Graham, but I wondered why that particular question had ruffled Sylvia’s calm, efficient manner so badly.

Baby
Sugarcandy’s lounge was odd rather than stylish. The floor was covered with yellow-ish slabs of stone. Glass doors opened out onto a terrace, where a blue-tiled square pond reflected sunlight back into the room, sending patterns dancing across the ceiling. The red-and-white striped curtains on either side looked thick enough to stand up by themselves, and there were so many sofas and armchairs upholstered to match the curtains that they reminded me of deckchairs lined up on a beach.

Lieutenant Weinburger asked us to sit down and we did as we were told. I sank into a chair so soft that I felt as if I was being swallowed like a prawn in an anemone.

Stifling yawns, Mum answered all the policeman’s questions. No, she hadn’t had any direct contact with Baby Sugarcandy; no, she’d never met Sylvia or Judy before today; no, she hadn’t seen the raccoon that Sylvia had braked to avoid; and no, she hadn’t got a good look at the man running down the steps – she’d been on the wrong side of the car. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m not very helpful, am I?”

Lieutenant Weinburger shrugged and smiled. “No problem,” he said. Then he turned to me and Graham.

“It was you who called 911, right?” he asked, fastening his steely eyes on me.

I swallowed and nodded.

“Let’s see what you said on the phone…” He looked at his notebook to pinpoint my exact words. “‘She’s dead. It looks like an accident but I don’t think it is.’” Lieutenant Weinburger pierced me with a steady gaze. “What made you say that, kid?”

I took a deep breath. “I thought it looked like murder.” My voice came out all squeaky. I cleared my throat and tried again. “It was just a feeling, really. Something wasn’t right. Her hair was wet for one thing.”

“Maybe she was washing it.” Lieutenant Weinburger batted my words away with an impatient flick of the wrist.

“With her earrings on?” I asked pointedly.

“So she forgot they were in.” He was unimpressed. “It happens, believe me. When you get older you forget what’s what. My own mother doesn’t know what day of the week it is half the time. So, tell me about this guy you saw. You get a good look at him?”

I shut my eyes and tried to remember. But what flashed through my head was something completely different: an image of the production of
Mary Poppins
Mum had taken me to when I was little. “He looked like an old-fashioned English gentleman,” I said. “Like someone off the stage.”

“The stage, huh?” The policeman looked from me to Graham with one eyebrow raised. “You like the theatre? Movies? TV? Crime shows?”

I shrugged but didn’t answer. I could see him thinking my imagination had been working overtime and it made me really cross.

“What was the guy wearing?” he asked.

I described the man as fully as I could: the white trousers, the waistcoat, the stripy blazer with the flower in its buttonhole.

“Like this?” Lieutenant Weinburger put a plastic evidence bag containing a tattered red carnation into my hands. The stem was broken. Like Baby Sugarcandy’s neck, I thought, and my stomach gave a little heave. “My men found it by the gates,” he added.