Page 1 of The Spy Who Loved Tea

CHAPTER ONE

The stranger, Vera Calloway noted with a sigh, was wearing entirely the wrong shoes for a village fête.

She adjusted her oversized, thick-rimmed spectacles and peered over the top of a jar of Mrs. Higgins’s Gooseberry Jam. To the casual observer—which included everyone in Lark’s End—Vera was merely checking the consistency of the preserve, perhaps looking for that tell-tale shimmer of over-pectinization.

To Vera, however, the jam was much more than food. It was a lens. A reflection.

In the curved glass of the jar, she watched the man in the charcoal suit. He was standing by the oversized petunias, arguing with Major Barnaby. The man’s shoes were Italian leather, pointed at the toe, and currently caked in the thick, clay-heavy mud of the Cotswolds. He shifted his weight from left to right, checking his watch every fourteen seconds.

Nerves, Vera thought, marking the behavior on her mental clipboard. Or a tight schedule. Professional? No. Professionals don’t wear suits to a garden party unless they’re trying to look like government officials, and he’s too sloppy for that.

She had seen enough professionals in her forty years with the Service—most of them on the wrong end of a surveillance lens—to know the difference.

Movement caught her peripheral vision. Near the tea tent, a tall man in a dark blazer was surveying the crowd. He carried a leather medical bag in one hand, but he held it like a prop, not a tool—fingers curled loosely around the handle rather than gripping it with the unconscious familiarity of daily use. His eyes swept the fête with methodical precision before settling on Major Barnaby and the suited stranger.

Vera filed him away. Dark hair, clean-shaven, perhaps forty. Good shoes—sensible brogues, recently polished. He looked like a doctor. But something in the way he moved suggested otherwise. Doctors bustled. This man prowled.

“It’s a bit tart, isn’t it, Vera?”

Vera gathered her wits and her smile, turning to face Reverend Thomas. He was holding a scone as if it were a holy relic.

“The gooseberry, Vicar? Oh, sharply so. But it has a certain... aggression that one must admire.” She placed the jar back on the gingham tablecloth. “Like our guest over there. Do we know him?”

The Vicar squinted. “Who? Oh, the fellow with the Major? I believe that’s a nephew. Or a cousin? The Major was shouting about family earlier. Something about ‘worthless inheritances.’”

“Indeed,” Vera murmured.

“Has anyone seen my walking stick?”

The querulous voice belonged to old Mr. Henderson, who was making his way along the preserve table with the shuffling determination of a man who had misplaced something precious. He stopped beside Vera, his wispy eyebrows knitted together in distress, his glasses glinting in the sun.

“Ebony with a silver handle,” he announced to anyone who would listen. “My father brought it back from Rhodesia. Heavy enough to brain a rhinoceros, that stick. I’m sure I set it down by the pie stand not twenty minutes ago, and now it’s vanished.”

“I’m sure it will turn up, Mr. Henderson,” Vera said soothingly. “Perhaps someone moved it for safekeeping.”

“Safekeeping,” Henderson muttered darkly. “More like sticky fingers. That stick has seen me through three wars and four marriages. If some light-fingered youth has made off with it⁠—“

“I’ll keep an eye out,” Vera promised, though she filed the description away. One never knew when a rhinoceros might need braining.

Henderson grumbled his way toward the pies, still scanning the ground as if the cane might materialize from the grass.

Vera turned her attention back to her knitting bag—a heavy, floral tapestry affair that clanked softly when she moved. It contained three balls of sensible grey wool, a half-finished scarf for the statue of the village founder, a set of titanium skeleton keys tucked into a hollowed-out needle case, a brass door knocker heavy enough to knock someone out, and a small compact mirror useful for checking blind corners without turning one’s head.

“I think I shall go and compliment the Major on his petunias,” she told the Vicar. “They really are quite violent this year.”

“Violent?” The Vicar blinked, startled. “Surely you mean violet, Mrs. Calloway?”

“Did I say violent?” Vera patted her cheek feigning fluster. “Oh, dear. I must be desperate for my tea.”

Vera drifted away, moving with the slow, shuffling gait she had perfected over the last five years of retirement. The “Lark’s End Shuffle,” she called it. It made people look right through her.

As she passed Mrs. Gable’s baking stall, she noted the baker pressing a small paper bag into Major Barnaby’s hands. Lemon shortbread, if Vera’s nose was any judge—Mrs. Gable’s signature recipe, with just a hint of lavender from her garden.

“For you, Major,” Mrs. Gable was saying, her round face flushed with the particular anxiety of someone who desperately wanted to please. “Fresh this morning.”

Barnaby accepted the bag with a distracted grunt, already turning back toward his argument with the suited stranger. He fished out a biscuit and bit into it without looking, crumbs cascading down his tweed lapels.

Vera noted the exchange. She noted Mrs. Gable’s nervous hands, wringing her apron. She noted the way the baker’s eyes darted toward the man in the suit with something that looked remarkably like fear.