“Yes, please.”
“Cake?” I began to cut it with the fearlessness of the damned. “I call this one Tea and Terror.”
“That’s an unusual name for a cake. What can I do for you, Daisy?” Tarquin asked.
“Well, you can keep me out of prison,” I said, laughing slightly hysterically and dropping the mug down harder than I meant to on the table. I put the slice of deadly cake next to it. “You know I didn’t strangle Lennie.”
He opened his briefcase and marbles cascaded from the pocket at the top. As I helped him gather them up, I felt a surge of guilt for the children who were not going to be laughing that night.
I looked at the cake, so far untouched, and thought about snatching it away. Then I was seized with inspiration.
“There’s no money,” I said.
He looked up, surprised.
“James’s business is a scam. He’s made his staff redundant, and he’s been selling all his stuff.”
“I don’t know about that, but it’s funny you should say because what I came to tell you is that unfortunately, I can’t represent you anymore. James hasn’t been paying his bills, and we’ve run out of patience with him. Plus, after the interview last week, we were thinking that this case is not what it seemed and you and your husband seem to be at loggerheads now.”
Now?I thought.
“I understand you don’t have funds of your own?”
I shook my head.
“You should be able to get a public defender, then.”
He picked up his cake and raised it to his lips.
“Do you know what? I think I forgot to put sugar in that,” I said, snatching the cake as it came within millimeters of his jaws. I dropped it into the bin.
Tarquin looked crestfallen, so I said, “Wait there,” and checking he wasn’t following, ran to the priest hole for the packet of Jaffa CakesJames had missed. “You can have these.” I tipped most of them into his hands, and he cheered up.
After he’d gone, I checked he hadn’t taken a sneaky slice of the cake while I was at the priest hole. He hadn’t. The reality of what I’d been about to do overcame me, and I had to sit down and eat the remaining Jaffas myself. As I sat there, my phone beeped. When I looked at it, it was for an article in theWestern Bulge Online, the one Emma Beddoe had been working on all summer.
“WHO LIVES IN A HOUSE LIKE THIS?” the headline ran. “By Emma Beddoe, junior reporter, crime.”
“From afar, Langley Hall, just outside the picturesque village of Upper Iffley, looks tranquil and idyllic, but draw closer and it’s not long before you notice the crumbling battlements, cracked windowpanes, and overgrown flowerbeds.”
I made a mental note to speak to Mr. Billings about the flowerbeds. “The dereliction outside, it seems, only speaks of a rot at the heart of Langley Hall, for presiding over it all is lady of the manor, Daisy Dixon, née Langley, otherwise known as the Upper Iffley Poisoner. I was invited in…”
Then she described the old kitchen as “on the shabby side of shabby chic” and the biscuits we gave her as “humdrum.”
She said Mrs. B was “busy, lively, and youthful” and I was “nervous, guarded, and fidgety.” I wondered if she’d got her notes mixed up. “Despite having all the money in the world, Daisy dresses as if she doesn’t have a penny. Her outfits are always mismatched, and she has no eye for color.”
I nearly had a fit when I read that. People in glass houses! I looked at the picture of Emma at the top of the page—it was only a headshot, so her readers couldn’t see the hypocrisy in what she had said.
Then she got down to the nub of it.
“Despite welcoming me into her home”—that was one way of putting it—“Daisy was strangely reluctant to speculate on why the police might be digging up the graveyard attached to Langley Hall. We could tell ourselves that is because she has thought of reasons but knows they are wrong; we can tell ourselves she is uniquely unimaginative”—charming—“or we can tell ourselves it is because there is something she doesn’t want us to know. My only facts are that James and Daisy Dixon were at the same party as Lennie Green on the night he vanished, and weeks later the police were digging on their property. And now Daisy has been linked romantically to Doug Newman, whose body was found in the river just days after Lennie Green’s.”
I looked at the date, the article had been written before the latest developments. I braced myself for an onslaught of veiled allegations and insinuations, but Emma had chosen to take a different path.
“Of course, speculation on this has been rife, but to really understand life at Langley Hall, you have to go back a few decades to what must have been a formative experience in Daisy’s adolescence. I spoke to a number of residents about what happened all those years ago.”
Oh, she’d really done the rounds. She’d spoken to most of the village, but to my surprise, most of what they said wasn’t too bad.
“There’s nothing more dangerous than someone with a little bit of knowledge,” Mrs. Dobson said. “She thought she knew what she was doing.”
