Cherringham--Murder by Moonlight Page 9

  Jack pressed the doorbell, then turned back to her calmly as if escorting a prisoner through the alleyways of Cherringham was a nightly occurrence.

  “How’s Chloe?”

  “Oh, she’s going to be fine,” said Sarah. “Brought her home this evening, she had a huge meal and now she’s fast asleep. Right as rain tomorrow, I’m sure.”

  “Good. All’s well that ends well. Eh, Thomas?”

  But Sarah could see that Thomas wasn’t up for chatting. Before she could ask either of them just what the heck had happened, the lights came on in the shop and Emma Hilloc approached the door and unbolted it.

  “What on earth is going on?” she said, swinging open the door to The Bookworm.

  “Why don’t you let us in Mrs Hilloc and we’ll all find out,” said Jack politely.

  “Well?” said Emma Hilloc briskly, her arms folded.

  There had been no invitation to sit. No offer of tea or coffee.

  Sarah stood with Jack and Thomas Hilloc and felt as if she had been called into the headmistress’s study to be punished.

  From the look on Jack’s face though she suspected that he was going to be the one doing the punishing. She’d seen that look before.

  “Go on, Thomas,” said Jack, nudging the poor man. “Tell everybody what you told me. After you crashed your wife’s car.”

  “What?” said Emma. “Don’t tell me — let me guess — with all the online orders in the boot? Typical!”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Emma. I’m sure the books survived, I just took the corner too fast”

  Sarah listened as, slowly, the story came out. The story of Thomas’s affair with Kirsty Kimball. Of how Kirsty had threatened to tell Emma and how — this she could hardly believe — he killed Kirsty himself.

  How he’d substituted a used EpiPen for her new one. And then how he’d gone to Kirsty’s house tonight to try and remove the evidence of the switch.

  As Thomas and his explanation — confession — droned on, Sarah watched Emma carefully. The woman’s face betrayed no reaction. Indeed, she seemed to be thinking hard, calculating.

  To learn that your husband’s been having an affair, that he’s killed his lover, that your life and business together are probably now over — maybe, thought Sarah, the immensity of all that is just too stunning to comprehend?

  Finally, Thomas finished his story.

  And Jack clapped. Slowly. Ironically.

  “Well how about that?” he said. “Some story hmm, Emma?”

  “I don’t know what to say,” she answered.

  “No, I’m sure you don’t,” said Jack, smiling. He turned to Thomas.

  “Just one thing I don’t quite understand, Thomas.”

  “Yes?”

  Thomas Hilloc stood, a bedraggled figure, blinking in the bright lights of the shop.

  “Just how did you put the poison in the biscuits?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “How did you make absolutely sure that Kirsty ate the one biscuit that had a peanut in it?”

  Sarah could see that Thomas was confused. She watched as he looked quickly at Emma — as if somehow she might be able to help him answer.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just — got lucky, I suppose.”

  “Got lucky?” said Jack. “Lucky, killing the woman you once loved? Funny choice of words there, Thomas.”

  Thomas opened his mouth to reply, but Jack wasn’t listening. Instead he turned to Sarah.

  “Do me a favour, Sarah would you?” he said, his voice now harder. “Watch these two for me.”

  And with that he walked through to the back of the shop and disappeared.

  “What the hell’s going on?” said Emma.

  Sarah waited. She didn’t know either. But she knew that Jack did.

  He returned with a pack of biscuits in a clear evidence bag.

  “Hope you don’t mind,” he said to the Hillocs. “I found this in your kitchen cupboard.”

  He laid the bag on the bookshelf next to Emma, on the old green crime paperbacks.

  “Cotswold Crunch,” he said — like a barrister in court resting his case. “Or — as I prefer to call it — the murder weapon.”

  “What do you mean, Jack?” said Sarah. “I thought all the biscuits were homemade by members of the choir.”

  “Oh they’re supposed to be,” said Jack, smiling. “But here’s an interesting fact. Pete Bull — our wonderful plumber bass — has a wife who is lovely in every way, he says, except that she doesn’t bake. And since Pete doesn’t bake, he found himself in a bit of a dilemma when it came to the old competitive baking of cookies for choir nights. So guess what he did?”

  Jack looked to Emma for an answer, but Sarah could see she wasn’t going to give one. Sarah could work out the answer:

  “He bought biscuits,” she said. “And passed them off as ones his wife had baked.”

  “Exactly,” said Jack. “And nobody was any the wiser.”

  She watched him pause — his detective timing just perfect …

  “Did I say nobody? Ah … Not quite ’nobody’. You see, one night, a certain choir member caught Pete Bull tipping his packet of cookies onto a plate just when he thought nobody was looking. Pete was horrified. A cookie scandal in the choir!”

  Sarah thought she could see Emma Hilloc’s expression change.

  Kind of a sick feeling now there, she thought.

  Jack continued: “But the choir member told him not to worry. ’Such snobs in the choir’, she said. ’Let’s keep this our little secret’, she said. And Pete agreed. He was very relieved. But then — when the police came round asking questions about the cookies, he got himself trapped in a little white lie.”

  Sarah jumped in:

  “Right! Nobody could work out how the peanut got into the biscuits. But of course all the killer had to do was bring along some doctored Cotswold Crunch, then — at just the right moment swap the biscuits when they headed over to Kirsty — and swap them back when the deed was done …”

  “All it needed was a trace — not more than a speck,” said Jack. “The only other part of the operation was fixing the EpiPens. But if you had access to a key to the cottage and could pop in one day and do the switch, it was just a case of waiting for the right opportunity. Then on the night of the murder — give the victim a good ten minutes head start down the lane, find the body then swap the phony pen for a good one.”

  By now Sarah realized that all three of them — she, Jack and Thomas were staring at Emma.

  Emma Hilloc — the killer.

  “Sorry, Emma,” said Thomas. “I’ve let you down again, haven’t I? Truth is — I just don’t think I could have kept telling that silly story for long.”

  Emma Hilloc shook her head.

  “My fault for thinking you could,” she said. “But you’re too weak, aren’t you? And that’s been the trouble all along,”

  And with that she turned and dashed through the bookshop and into the kitchen.

  Sarah stepped back in surprise.

  “Jack! Shouldn’t we follow her?”

  “No rush,” he said, pushing Thomas ahead of him towards the back of the shop.

  Sarah followed and they went through into the little kitchen.

  Emma Hilloc was sitting on the floor by the kitchen cupboards. A drawer had been pulled out and it lay next to her on the floor, its contents strewn everywhere.

  Emma was jabbing an EpiPen hard into her thigh, over and over again, tears falling from her face.

  “Bloody thing, won’t …”

  “No,” said Jack, crouching down. “It won’t work, Emma. Because I swapped it just now for a used one. See?”

  And he reached into his pocket and pulled out an EpiPen in another evidence bag.

  “This is the one with — I imagine — your prints all over it, Emma.”

  And Sarah watched as Emma broke down in sobs and her head crumpled onto her chest.

  “By the way, Emma,” Jack said finally. “
It wouldn’t have killed you unless you had a very weak heart. Though considering things, not sure how much of a heart you have at all, weak or not.”

  18. Deep and Crisp and Even

  As Jack sang the last verse of the final carol he truly felt he’d been transported into a Dickens novel.

  His fellow singers stood in thick coats and scarves, holding songbooks in one hand and lanterns on staves in the other. In the basses, Pete Bull was giving it everything he had.

  Next to Pete, he spotted Simon Rochester. Simon winked at him as if nothing had ever happened and leaned in to a young soprano at his side. Down at the front, Martha delivered brisk chords from an upright piano which had miraculously appeared from out of one of the pubs.

  And at the centre, on a small block, Roger the Dodger, in period breeches and waistcoat, waved his baton as if he was conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

  Behind him in Cherringham’s packed square, Jack could see the great Christmas tree which glowed not just with multi-coloured lights but amazingly with real candles, too.

  From the stalls which lined the square — serving mulled wine, cider, hog-roast, sausages, turkey rolls and minced pies — the smells and scents were positively medieval. And strung from all the lamp-posts and shop fronts, the famous Cherringham Christmas lights … and they couldn’t have been more perfect.

  The whole crowd, hundreds of adults and children, their faces alive with excitement, joined in the last chorus, the school brass band hit all the high notes (nearly) and if ever the word exultation had real meaning, thought Jack, it was right here and right now.

  Maybe I am a joiner in after all, he thought.

  I’d also like a drink, he thought as the applause finally finished.

  And just on time, Sarah and her whole family came out of the crowd to shake hands and congratulate the singers.

  “You were amazing, Jack!” said Sarah, giving him a great big hug.

  “I think I could hear you, Jack,” said Daniel. “All the way through …”

  “Hmm, not sure that’s a good thing or a bad thing, Daniel,” said Jack. “But I’ll take it as a compliment. How’s your sister by the way?”

  “Nothing wrong with her, she’s at home watching telly,” said Daniel as if there’d never been an emergency.

  Jack caught Sarah’s glance as she rolled her eyes.

  There was a tap on his shoulder. Jack turned — it was Beth.

  “I wanted to thank you Jack — for taking me seriously when nobody else would.”

  She held out her hand, and Jack took it.

  “Just glad I could help, Beth.”

  There was an awkward silence — Jack hated these moments — and then luckily Sarah’s father, Michael, joined them and Beth moved away.

  “I know just what you need now, Jack,” he said.

  “Too right,” said Jack. “But the queues are a mile long,”

  “Forget the queues,” said Michael, taking a hip flask from one pocket and a small metal tumbler from another. “Twenty-year-old single malt. Just what the doctor ordered, eh?”

  And he poured a large tot and handed it to Jack.

  “Cheers!” said Jack.

  Sarah was holding a glass of mulled wine and she caught his eye and raised the glass.

  “To us, Jack — and another case solved.”

  Jack raised his tumbler.

  “To us,” he said. “You know, I’m not quite sure — looking around — what could make this whole thing more perfect,”

  And then it snowed.

  Gentle flakes that landed and stuck and quickly made Cherringham — just briefly — a picture-postcard village.

  “Your first snow in Cherringham, Jack,” said Sarah.

  “I do believe it is,” he said. “And not the last, I suspect, knowing your English weather.”

  Next episode

  Two Cherringham locals, roaming a farm with metal detectors, discover an amazing treasure – a silver Roman plate worth millions. They must share the reward with both the farmer and the owner of the land, the formidable Lady Repton, but there will be plenty for everyone. That night, while the village pubs do a roaring trade, archaeologist Professor Peregrine Cartwright offers to keep the plate safe in his massive wall safe. But when the British Museum expert arrives to verify the find next morning, the safe is empty! Police blame a notorious gang of art thieves operating in the county. But Jack and Sarah have other suspicions …

  Cherringham - A Cosy Crime Series

  Thick as Thieves

  by Matthew Costello and Neil Richards

  Cherringham — A Cosy Crime Series

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