Chapter 11 Constables Growing Frustration
The summons arrived at half past nine, delivered not by telephone but by a young constable I did not recognise, a boy really, with pink cheeks and an Adam's apple that bobbed when he spoke.
He handed me a folded note and stood on the doorstep of The Yarn & Needle with the rigid posture of someone who had been told to wait for a reply.
"Constable Finch would like to see you at your earliest convenience," he said, and the formality of it struck me as odd. Alistair and I had spoken half a dozen times in the past ten days. He had never before sent a messenger.
I unfolded the note. The handwriting was hurried, the ink pressed hard into the paper.
Mrs. Croft, if you could spare a moment this morning.
My office. Not a request, I decided, despite the polite phrasing.
I told the young constable I would come directly, and I turned the sign on the shop door to CLOSED before I had even poured my second cup of tea.
Constable Finch's office occupied a narrow room on the ground floor of the old parish hall, a building that had served too many purposes over the years to have retained any single character.
The walls were the colour of weak tea, and the single window looked out onto the churchyard, where the yew trees stood dark and still against the October sky.
I had walked past the office a hundred times without needing to enter it, and as I stepped inside I understood why Alistair rarely invited visitors.
The room was small enough that the desk dominated it entirely, leaving barely enough space for the two straight-backed chairs that faced each other across a sea of paperwork.
Alistair rose when I entered, but the gesture was automatic, not welcoming.
He looked tired in a way that went beyond a single sleepless night.
His uniform was neat, as it always was, but his collar seemed to sit too tightly, and he had pushed his chair back from the desk as though he could no longer bear to be close to the papers spread across it.
"Mrs. Croft. Thank you for coming." He gestured toward the empty chair and waited for me to sit before lowering himself back into his own. "I apologise for the formality. I thought it better to speak here than at the shop."
"Has something happened?"
He did not answer immediately. Instead he picked up a pen from the desk and set it down again, aligning it with the edge of a blotter that had seen better days.
The silence stretched, but it was not the comfortable quiet of two people who knew each other well.
It was the silence of a man trying to decide how much to say.
"Nothing has happened," he said at last.
"That is precisely the problem." He leaned back and his shoulders met the chair with a soft thud.
"It has been eleven days since Mr. Blackwood died, and I am no closer to understanding how or why than I was on the morning we found him. The coroner's report confirms what we already knew. A fall. A head injury. Nothing in his system,
no sign of a struggle beyond what the fall itself would account for. The bookshop was locked from the inside. There is no evidence of forced entry, no weapon, no witness who saw anything unusual."
He spread his hands, palms up, as though offering me the emptiness of his investigation.
"I have interviewed every person who knew him. I have examined his records, his correspondence, his financial accounts. And I have found nothing that points to anything other than a tragic accident."
I kept my hands folded in my lap and my expression carefully neutral.
The ledger was hidden in my upstairs room.
The two buttons, the horn one and the mother-of-pearl one, were wrapped in a handkerchief inside my dresser drawer.
The hidden key to the bookshop was in the pocket of my cardigan even now, a small cold weight against my hip.
I thought of all of it and said nothing.
"And yet," Alistair continued, and his gaze settled on me with an intensity that had not been there a moment before, "I cannot shake the feeling that I am missing something. Something that the village knows and is not telling me."
"The village is not a single person, Constable. It does not keep secrets collectively."
"No," he agreed. "But it does talk. And I have heard, from more than one source, that you have been talking rather a lot lately."
I met his eyes and did not blink. "I have lived in Meadowbrook for nearly eight years. Talking to my neighbours is not a new habit."
"Talking to my aunt about Silas Blackwood's bookkeeping habits, however, is."
He said it without accusation, but the words landed between us with the weight of a question he had not quite asked.
"Eleanor has been remarkably quiet about the case. For a woman who knows more about this village than anyone alive, she has offered me almost nothing. I find that unusual."
I thought of Eleanor at half past four in the morning, bent over the dark green ledger with a magnifying glass and a reference book on ciphers, working her way through Silas's coded entries with the patience of the librarian she had been for thirty years.
Alistair had no idea what his aunt was doing, and I could not be the one to tell him.
"Your aunt is a careful woman," I said. "She would not offer opinions without being certain of her facts."
"And you, Mrs. Croft? Are you certain of your facts?"
The question hung in the air. I could feel the shape of the button in my pocket, though it was not there, the phantom pressure of evidence withheld.
A part of me wanted to tell him everything: the hidden compartment in Florence Albright's shop, the trampled hedge beneath the bookshop window, the coded entries and the missing first edition and the two buttons that matched the one missing from Florence's blouse.
But I thought of what he would do with that information.
He would question Florence, and Florence would deny everything, and without the book itself there was no proof that would stand.
The official investigation would stall in exactly the same place it was stalled now, and Florence would know that I had set the constable on her trail.
"I am certain that Silas Blackwood's death was not an accident," I said, choosing my words with care. "Beyond that, I am still listening."
Alistair studied me for a long moment. His hand moved to his collar and tugged at it, a small gesture of frustration that he probably did not know he was making.
"I am not your adversary, Mrs. Croft. I know the village sees me as an outsider, and perhaps I am. But I want the same thing you want. I want to understand what happened in that bookshop."
"I know you do."
"Then help me. If you have learned something, if you have heard something, tell me. Let me do my job."
His voice had lost its formal edge. He sounded young, and tired, and more than a little lost.
I felt a sharp tug of guilt, the kind that settles in the chest and makes the next breath harder to draw.
He was a good man, I believed that. He was trying to do the right thing in a village that treated him like a stranger because he had not been born in the cottage his grandfather had been born in.
And I was standing in his office, withholding the very information that might help him.
But I was also standing in his office because I had found things he had not found, because I could go places and ask questions that a uniformed constable could not, because Florence Albright had given me a key she would never have given him.
If I told him now, I would lose that advantage.
And Florence would remain free, and the truth of what had happened to Silas Blackwood might never come fully to light.
"I have no proof of anything," I said, and it was not quite a lie. "Only impressions. Only small things that do not add up to a case you could take to anyone."
"Small things are all I have." He leaned forward, and for a moment his exhaustion gave way to something sharper.
"A button. A ledger I cannot decipher. A nephew who appeared after ten years of silence and claims to know nothing. And a village full of people who answer my questions politely and tell me nothing useful."
He paused. "You are not the only one who has been asking questions, Mrs. Croft. I know you visited the bookshop. I know you have spoken to Julian Blackwood. I know you have spent more time with my aunt in the past week than you have in the past year. Whatever you are doing,
you are not simply listening."
I said nothing. The clock on his desk ticked, a small insistent sound that seemed to grow louder the longer the silence lasted.
Alistair sighed and the sharpness went out of him as quickly as it had come.
He leaned back again and ran a hand through his hair, leaving it rumpled in a way that made him look younger and more vulnerable than his uniform allowed.
"Perhaps the village itself holds the answers," he said, and his eyes met mine with an expression I could not quite read.
"Perhaps someone who knows its rhythms better than I do will find what I cannot."
He was not asking me to stop. I understood that with a clarity that made my throat tight. He was asking me to be careful, and he was telling me that he knew what I was doing, and he was leaving the door open between us in case I decided to walk through it.
"Perhaps," I said.
He nodded slowly, as though I had confirmed something he had already decided. Then he stood, and the interview was over. I rose from my chair and smoothed down the front of my cardigan, feeling the hidden key press against my hip through the wool.
"Thank you for coming," he said again, and this time the formality was softer, almost an apology. "If you should happen to find anything more than small things, I hope you will tell me."
I paused at the door and looked back at him. He was standing behind his desk, surrounded by papers that held no answers, a good man in a small room in a village that did not yet trust him. "I hope so too," I said, and I meant it more than he knew.
The churchyard was empty when I stepped outside, the yew trees casting long shadows across the grass.
I stood for a moment in the cool air and let the door close behind me.
The guilt was still there, a quiet pressure beneath my ribs, but so was the conviction.
I had not lied to Alistair, not exactly.
I had only kept my own counsel, and I would keep it a little longer, until the small things added up to something large enough to bring to him.
I walked back toward The Yarn & Needle with my hands in my pockets and my mind turning over the conversation.
Alistair knew I was investigating. He had not forbidden it.
He had, in his own careful way, almost encouraged it.
That changed things, though I was not yet sure how.
It meant I was no longer working entirely in secret.
It meant that when the time came to share what I had found, there would be someone willing to listen.
But it also meant that he would be watching me now, and that the window of time I had to find the missing book before the official investigation caught up with me was narrower than I had thought.
The bell above the shop door chimed as I let myself back into The Yarn & Needle.
The familiar scent of wool and lavender wrapped around me, and for a moment I simply stood in the centre of the room, letting the quiet settle.
Then I climbed the stairs to my living quarters, opened the dresser drawer, and looked at the handkerchief that held the two buttons.
The horn one with its interlocking circles.
The mother-of-pearl one with its floral engraving.
Two small, silent witnesses to a truth that was still waiting to be told.
I closed the drawer and went back downstairs to reopen the shop.