Murder At The Bake Off (Celebrity Mysteries 3) (10 page)

Getting to my feet, I mutter my apologies. “Sorry, I’ve got to take this call. Won’t be long.”

I think I hear Simone sigh and mumble about young people these days always being obsessed with their mobile phones as I close the cottage door behind me and step out into the bracing February sea air.

“Jack! Where are you? Are you OK?”

“I’m fine. The police let me go an hour or so ago. They can’t pin this business with Cherry on me, and they know it. I swear the chief inspector is just using it as a way to bug me. He’s not keen on me working as a private investigator on his patch. Anyway, more to the point, where are you? I’m here at Eskdale, and you are nowhere to be seen.” Before I can open my mouth to speak, Jack continues, “Now, let me guess. You wouldn’t be over in Witherby with Simone Barker, now would you?”

“How did you know?” I gasp.

“Easy. I know you too well, for starters. You’re getting very keen on this amateur sleuthing stuff these days. Second, I realised I left my notebook on your kitchen table. You probably checked through it, going over the information we’ve gathered so far, and you’d have seen I was due to meet Simone today. As I was otherwise engaged, you thought you’d take the meeting for me. How am I doing so far?”

He sounds more amused than annoyed. Good. I decide to capitalize on this and tell him what I’ve just found out about Carla. “Turns out it was a useful trip,” I say. “You’ll never guess who Simone’s daughter is.”

“Carla,” he replies instantly.

Now,
I’m
the one who is annoyed. How did he know that? He just stole my thunder; my big reveal about this case.

I sigh. “Why can’t I be the one who knows stuff first, just once?”

I can hear the smile in his voice. “Sorry, one of my contacts just came through for me with that detail.”

“So, is she the person who killed Cherry, do you think? Out for revenge on behalf of her mother about this recipe scandal?” I turn and lean one shoulder against the outside wall of the cottage to shelter from the wind blowing in off the sea. “It all fits, doesn’t it?”

“Yes.” He pauses a moment before adding, “And no. Carla has an alibi. She was in her office in London with clients, from ten in the morning until six at night on the day Cherry was poisoned. Which, of course, doesn’t rule her out completely. It’s possible she could have paid somebody to do it.”

“But that person would need to have easy access to the Roseby. I guess it could have been somebody Cherry knew, and when they pitched up to see her, reception rang to say she had a visitor, and then she agreed to let them into the hotel to meet with her,” I muse, hijacking his train of thought.

“Exactly.” His tone softens. “Hey, Catwoman, thanks for doing all of this. I do appreciate it, and when you get home, I’ll show you just how much I appreciate it. But having said that, I’m a big boy, and I can look after myself and clear my own name. Having you be my sidekick and help out with research and stuff is great, but I draw the line at you going off on you own like this. It could have been dangerous, and I don’t want you ending up in serious trouble. Leave that stuff to me in future. Promise?”

“Jack, stop sounding like a macho special agent,” I reply, hoping to distract him from making me promise.

“Lizzie, I want you to promise you won’t go off on your own again like this as part of an investigation.”

My distraction tactics:  0. Jack:  1.

“I’m not on my own,” I counter. “Petula is with me. She insisted. Refused to stay at Eskdale on her own.”

Jack swears under his breath. “Just get back as soon as you can, please. Then we’ll talk properly.”

“See you soon,” I say, ending the call. Hah! I got away without promising.

For now.

When I return to the cosy cottage living area, Simone and Petula are chattering away like old friends. I settle into the chair I vacated ten minutes ago and listen. Not surprisingly, they’re talking about food in all its guises. In the space of only a few minutes, topics include a rant about how cupcakes are poor excuses for cakes, being basically just good, old-fashioned fairy cakes masquerading as something fancier and far more expensive, through to how trendy baking is these days.

When Petula eventually pauses for breath, I’m poised for action. “We should get going now. It’s a long drive back, and I’ve got heaps of farm stuff still to sort today.”

Petula looks disappointed but gets to her feet, and soon we’re on our way back to Eskdale.

When we arrive at the farm, Petula disappears off to her bedroom, saying she’s got a headache, leaving Jack and me facing each other on opposite sides of the kitchen table.

OK. Here we go. Is he going to whinge at me for going off to see Simone?

Nope. Instead, he completely surprises me by striding round the table and pulling me into a fierce hug. I melt into him. This is a much better reception than I was expecting in the circumstances. The hug becomes a deliciously long kiss, and I lean against the kitchen table for physical support, it’s all so knee-weakening in intensity.

When we finally come up for air he leans his forehead against mine. “I’m still mad at you, Catwoman.”

I grin at him, tugging playfully on his shirt. “Yeah, it looks like you’re still mad at me.”

“Yeah, well, I’m just pleased to see you back here, safe and sound. I mean it, Lizzie, don’t go doing stuff like that again. Jeez, people say I break the rules and go off and do my own thing when I’m working a case. You’re just as bad these days.”

His face is etched with concern for me and my heart aches. I love this man. I need to tell him so more often. I stand on tip-toe and wrap my arms around his neck. “Jack, do you have any idea how much I love you?”

The concern is replaced by desire. He eases away and reaches for my hand, already heading for the bedroom. “Come and show me how much you love me.”

I plant my feet and lift my eyes meaningfully towards the ceiling. “Petula’s up in her room.”

Jack nods, thinking fast. “OK. Plan B. How about a romantic outdoor interlude? There’s a pile of fresh hay in the big barn which could make a comfy bed.”

“It’s freezing out there,” I protest half-heartedly. “Hang on a second and I’ll grab some cosy throws off the sofa and we can take them with us.”

“So, speaking of the case, Carla herself is probably off the suspect list, though it still leaves the paid assassin option. Which leaves Terry at The Pear and…”

We’re back in the kitchen and back on the investigation. I still feel all deliciously warm and fuzzy after our quality time in the barn, but now I need to focus. We have a killer to catch. Jack silences me with a shake of his head. “About thirty minutes ago, I found out he’s off the list too. He has an alibi, but he didn’t want to tell us where he was, because he was up to no good on the afternoon Cherry was poisoned—just a completely different kind of no good. Turns out, he’s involved in some backhander dealing with one of The Pear’s suppliers. I got a mate of mine to tip off the police in London on that score. I didn’t think I should phone it in myself, seeing as I’m not investigating Cherry’s death as far as the police are concerned.”

“No, of course you’re not.” I flop into a chair and pull my laptop across the table towards me. “So, now what? More Internet searches and trying to uncover new potential suspects? What about poisonous herbs? We still need to look into those, especially as we only have Maggie and Rudy on the suspect list now.”

“Yeah, let’s get working on the herb angle and see if it gives us any leads,” Jack says, taking a seat next to me. He leans over and whispers in my ear, “And I haven’t forgotten about getting you to promise not to go racing off like that on a mission again.”

“Mmm hmm. We have a whole world of herbalism to dig into.” I change the subject, already tapping away at my computer. “We’ll sort that other stuff out later.”

I access an online herb medical dictionary website and start to work my way through the various herbs we’d noted are being dealt with by Metcalfe Supplements. The herbs we saw probably weren’t all of the ones that pass through the doors of that business, but these ones are as good a place to start as any.

Jack’s phone rings. He answers. “Yep, what have you got for me?”

I continue perusing the site as he listens to whatever the person on the other end of the phone is saying.

“Seriously? They’re playing their cards close to their chests on that one, aren’t they?”

More silence before Jack grabs a pen and starts to write. “OK, shoot. Let’s have the other ingredients, then. It might help.”

When he ends the call, I ask, “Any luck?”

“Nah. My contact has drawn a blank when it comes to finding out what the poison in the cupcake was. All she has for me is a list of the other ingredients in the cake, but it’s just the usual cake-type stuff.” He turns the notepad he’d been writing on around and pushes it across the pine table towards me.

I scan the list, and another flutter of excitement, much like the one I’d experienced when I’d discovered Carla is Simone’s daughter, surges through me. “Yes, it is all cake stuff, but one item on this list could prove to be significant.”

Jack looks up from where he’s been busy on his phone again. “Oh?”

“Gluten-free flour,” I say, pointing at the words on the paper, all but lost among the rest of the cupcake ingredients list like eggs and margarine and self-rising flour. “I found out in the baking workshop that Maggie and Rudy’s son Maxwell is gluten intolerant. Maggie bakes with gluten-free ingredients all the time because of him. The whole workshop was about how to make gluten-free stuff,” I finish triumphantly.

Now Jack definitely looks interested. Yay me! This time, I
did
come up with something useful for the case which Jack didn’t know about first. At least, I hope it’s useful for the case. The big event is getting close now, the baking festival and bake-off is tomorrow, and we need to have this case cracked before Petula Musgrove steps onto the dais for her cookery demonstration and potentially becomes baking legend murder victim number two. The police might be saying Cherry’s murder was personal, not a vendetta against baking legends, but they don’t know that for sure.

Jack grins at me. “Fantastic work, Catwoman. You might have found our key lead on this case, linking Cherry’s estranged daughter Maggie with the cupcake which poisoned the Queen of Baking.”

“There could be other stuff, too,” I say, pointing at my computer screen. “There are a few possibilities for bad reactions in the herbs we saw at Metcalfe’s. Look at this—if a person is taking certain prescribed antidepressants and then also taking the herb St. John’s Wort, it can cause serious health problems. And here as well.” I scroll down and point to a different part of the webpage. “Echinacea can cause an allergic reaction if the person taking it is allergic to any flowers in the Asteracae family—that’s the daisy family to you and me.”

Jack nods, taking it all in. “Right, I’m on it. I’ll see if I can find out if Cherry was on any medication and if she had any known allergies.”

He goes off to make a call, and I opt to take a break and conjure up a cup of coffee. It’s only as I’m absentmindedly stirring the contents of the mug and thinking about herbs and gluten-free baking that I remember the big bake-off is less than twenty four hours away, and I have done nothing whatsoever about getting my head around another cake creation attempt. I’ve hardly had the chance with everything else that’s been cracking off lately, plus Petula is here. I can’t try and bake with her peering over my shoulder, can I?

Or maybe I can. What if I asked Petula for some help? She might be willing to share some tips of the trade and coach me to bake a cake that’s actually edible and not a major embarrassment. Then I could enter it in the bake-off. I’m not thinking I have any chance of winning, but at least it would be worthy of entering and go some way towards following in the footsteps of another (more local) baking legend, my lovely Aunt Molly. 

I go up to the tiny bedroom which is currently my chilly office, and scramble around in the desk where I keep all my farm invoices and general household paperwork. My fingers close around the bake-off entry form I’d hidden away in here. The final deadline for entering cakes in the competition is one hour before the judging is due to begin. That makes it three o’clock tomorrow afternoon. I’m due to work at the village store on a shift with Brenda tomorrow morning, so if I’m to stand any chance of making a cake for the competition, I’m going to have to end up doing it in the middle of the night at this rate.

“Lizzie? You up there?” Jack’s voice and his footsteps carry up the wooden staircase. I quickly shove the form back in the desk drawer and hurry out onto the landing.

Closing the office door behind me, I head down stairs. “Any news on the herbs and Cherry’s medical status?”

“No recorded allergies, but yeah, she was on antidepressants. Had been since she’d had the falling out with Maggie, apparently. So, if Maggie or Rudy had hidden some of that herb in the cake which poisoned her, then it could be a factor in this investigation.” He sighs in frustration. “If I could just find out what the poison was, then we’d know what we’re dealing with.”

I don’t even want to know how Jack managed to access Cherry’s medical records so swiftly. He clearly still has a lot of good contacts prepared to do him favours. I suspect he’s also hacking into and accessing websites he shouldn’t in order to further our investigation. Oh, well, that’s Jack for you. Always bending the rules.