Chapter 7 The Scent of Lavender and Secrets
The morning of the seventh day since Silas Blackwood’s death arrived without ceremony, a pale October sun burning off the last of the mist that had settled overnight in the lanes of Meadowbrook.
I had opened The Yarn & Needle at the usual hour and served three customers before half past ten, but my attention kept drifting away from the counter and the skeins and the pleasant small talk that ordinarily anchored my days.
The scent I had detected in the bookshop two days earlier had not left me.
It clung to the edge of my thoughts the way the real thing had clung to the pages of that disturbed volume, sweet and floral and entirely out of place among Silas Blackwood’s dusty shelves.
And I had seen Florence Albright’s hands tremble at the pottery class.
I had watched her composure fracture when Constable Finch arrived.
Those two facts sat side by side in my mind and refused to be separated.
At twenty minutes past twelve I turned the sign on the door to CLOSED and pulled on my mustard-yellow cardigan.
The walk to Florence’s Antique Shop took me along the high street and past the bakery, where Gareth Davies was setting out a fresh tray of scones in the window.
He raised a hand in greeting, and I waved back, but I did not stop.
I had the particular feeling that comes when a question has been left too long without an answer, a kind of forward pressure that made the short walk feel longer than it was.
Florence’s shop stood at the far end of the high street, a narrow building with a bowed front window and a sign painted in gold leaf that read ALbrIGHT ANTIQUES & CURIOS.
I had passed it a hundred times without going in, and now, as I pushed open the door and set a little brass bell ringing above my head, I understood why.
The place was beautiful in a way that discouraged casual browsing.
Every surface gleamed. The air smelled of beeswax and old wood and something else, something floral that I recognised at once.
Florence emerged from behind a tall lacquered screen at the rear of the shop, and for a moment she did not see me.
She was wearing a deep burgundy velvet coat over a silk blouse, and her silver hair was pinned up with a tortoiseshell comb.
A heavy amber bead necklace caught the light as she turned.
When her eyes found me, her expression shifted through three distinct stages in quick succession: surprise, a brief flicker of something sharper, and then the smooth, cultivated smile I had seen her deploy at the pottery class.
“Miss Croft,” she said, and her voice was exactly as I remembered it, low and careful and polished. “What a pleasant surprise. I don’t believe you’ve visited the shop before.”
“I’ve been meaning to for years,” I said, and the lie came out more easily than I had expected. “Eleanor mentioned you’d taken delivery of some new stock. I thought I might find something for the shop. A small display cabinet, perhaps.”
Florence inclined her head. “You’ve come at a good time. I’ve just finished cataloguing a shipment from an estate sale in Bath. Some lovely pieces.”
She gestured towards a cluster of furniture arranged near the window, and I followed her, letting my gaze move across the room as I walked.
The shop was larger than it appeared from the street, two rooms connected by a wide archway, and every corner was filled with something: a grandfather clock with a painted face, a set of silver candlesticks, a glass case full of mourning brooches.
But my eye caught on the things that did not fit.
A stack of porcelain plates had been set down on the wrong shelf, too low, too close to the edge.
A drawer in a walnut sideboard stood half an inch open.
The disorder was subtle, the kind that only someone who had been watching carefully would notice, and I had been watching carefully for nearly a week.
“You’ve been busy,” I said, stopping beside a small writing desk with turned legs and a worn leather surface.
“The season’s been busier than usual,” Florence replied.
She had positioned herself near the window, where the light fell across her face and made it difficult to read her expression.
“Autumn always brings the collectors out. They summer in Italy and winter in London, and in between they come to the Cotswolds and decide they need a Georgian tea table.”
I smiled. “And do you oblige them?”
“I oblige them when it suits me.” She smoothed the front of her coat with one hand, a gesture that might have been casual if her fingers had not lingered on a loose button at the cuff.
She was fiddling with it, turning it over and over between her thumb and forefinger.
“Was there a particular style of cabinet you had in mind?”
“Something with drawers,” I said. “I need a place to keep the patterns. Silas Blackwood had a lovely old filing cabinet in the bookshop, you know. I always admired it.”
The name landed in the quiet of the shop and stayed there. Florence’s fingers stopped moving on the button. She looked at me, and for the space of a single breath her face was entirely still, the way a reflection in water goes smooth just before the wind picks up again.
“Silas,” she said, and the word was clipped, as though she had decided at the last moment not to say more.
“I was in the bookshop a few days ago,” I continued, keeping my voice light. “The constable let me in. I noticed the most unusual scent in the second room. Sweet, floral. Lavender, I think, but not quite. Something more particular.”
Florence blinked. She blinked again, rapidly, and her hand went to the amber beads at her throat. “Lavender is a very common fragrance, Miss Croft. It’s in half the soaps and sachets in England. I’m sure Silas kept something of the sort among his personal effects.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “But it was strongest near a particular book. A large volume on a high shelf. The one with the silver bookmark.”
Her jaw tightened. It was a small movement, barely perceptible, but I saw it because I was looking for it.
She opened her mouth to reply, and at that moment the brass bell above the door rang, and a woman in a tweed coat stepped into the shop.
Florence turned towards the newcomer with a visible effort, her professional smile sliding back into place, and I took a step backward, then another, until I was standing beside the archway that led to the second room.
The distraction was a gift I had not expected.
I moved quietly, the way I had learned to move in the bookshop, and I let my eyes travel across the furniture in the rear room.
There were more desks here, older pieces, their surfaces dark with age and polish.
I walked slowly along the row, trailing my fingers across the wood, feeling for anything that did not belong.
The third desk was a small writing bureau with a slanted front and a row of pigeonholes above the writing surface.
It was beautiful, walnut by the look of it, and it had been pushed slightly out of alignment with the wall behind it, as though someone had moved it in a hurry and not quite set it right.
I heard Florence’s voice from the front room, smooth and unhurried, explaining the provenance of a silver tea service.
I had perhaps two minutes. I ran my hand along the underside of the bureau’s writing surface, and my fingers found a small metal catch, recessed so neatly into the wood that I would have missed it if I had not been searching for exactly that kind of thing.
Silas had been fastidious about his records, Eleanor had told me, and a man who kept a ledger for thirty years did not stop keeping it because he had found something valuable. He hid it better.
The catch gave way with a soft click, and a narrow compartment slid open from the side of the bureau, no wider than a book and half as deep.
Inside, there was a small leather-bound ledger, dark green with a cracked spine, and beside it, a single button carved from horn, its surface incised with a pattern of linked rings.
I had seen its twin in Constable Finch’s evidence envelope five days earlier.
I did not pause to examine the ledger. I slipped it into the deep pocket of my cardigan, and I picked up the button and closed my fingers around it.
The horn was cool and smooth, and the carved circles pressed into my palm.
I pushed the compartment shut and heard the catch engage, and then I was walking back towards the front room, my heart beating in a way that I hoped did not show on my face.
Florence was wrapping the tea service in tissue paper when I reappeared. The customer in the tweed coat was counting notes from a worn leather purse, and neither of them looked at me.
“I’m afraid I can’t stay,” I said, and my voice sounded steady, steadier than I felt. “I’ve just remembered I promised Eleanor I’d meet her at the bakery. But I’ll come back about the cabinet.”
Florence looked up, and for a moment her eyes searched my face with an intensity that made my stomach tighten. Then the customer asked a question about the hallmark on the teapot, and Florence turned away, and I was out the door and into the pale afternoon light before she could speak again.
I walked quickly up the high street, past the bakery and the post office and the little stone church with its clock tower, and I did not slow down until I had reached the door of The Yarn & Needle and turned the key in the lock behind me.
The shop was quiet, the skeins of wool still arranged in their neat rows, the afternoon sun falling across the counter in the same clean rectangle where it fell every day.
Nothing had changed, and everything had.
I set the ledger on the counter and opened it.
The pages were filled with entries in a cramped, precise hand, row after row of dates and titles and sums of money, but near the back, on a page that had been folded over and pressed flat, there was something else.
A series of letters and numbers, written in groups of three and four, with no spaces and no punctuation, as though someone had taken a perfectly ordinary sentence and scrambled it beyond recognition.
A code. Beside it, in the same cramped hand, a single line in plain English: Acquired 14 September. Buyer to collect 1 October.
October first was the day Silas Blackwood had died.
I looked at the button in my palm, at the carved circles that matched the one Constable Finch had found beside the body, and I thought about Florence Albright’s rapid blinking and the loose button on her cuff and the way her voice had tightened when I mentioned the lavender scent.
The pieces were beginning to fit together, not neatly, not yet, but enough to show me the shape of the thing I was chasing.
I closed the ledger and set the button beside it, and then I reached for the telephone.
Eleanor needed to see this. Eleanor, who had visited the bookshop for twenty years and knew Silas’s habits better than anyone, would know what to make of a coded message and a hidden compartment and a scent that had no business being in a dead man’s shop.
I lifted the receiver and began to dial, and outside the window the afternoon light shifted, and a cloud passed across the sun, and the shop grew dim for a moment before the brightness returned.