Chapter 18
Sarah’s delicatessen, The Pepper Tree, was on St Jude’s Hill, a cobbled street that ran down into the Market Square.
The street was edged on both sides by narrow gulleys that were now flowing with fast running water from the recent rain.
The thoroughfare was quiet and all the shops were shut.
Making their way up the street, Lara spotted the figure of Jason Honeybourne hurrying across the road at the top of the hill that ran at right angles to it.
A few seconds later the figure of Richard Porter passed the same way.
His head was down and for once his bouffant hair was plastered to his head, pressed flat by the wind.
It struck Lara that he might be trying to catch up with Jason.
Abby followed her gaze. ‘Now I wonder where they are off to in such a hurry.’ Conversationally she continued, ‘Have you ever noticed that there are some men who are short but it is the very last thing you notice about them? My grandfather was one such man,’ Abby reflected, ‘and indeed Thomas the gardener is too.’
Lara interrupted, momentarily distracted, ‘Is he? Somehow I imagined a tall, gangly man.’
‘Oh no, very short and very bent,’ Abby informed her.
‘On the other hand, there are some short men who take their lack of stature as a personal affront and try to fill the physical gap between themselves and their peers with bluster and loud words. Unfortunately for them, their height is often one of the first things one notices about them. In this respect I suspect Richard Porter to be an extremely short man.’
By now, they had reached the entrance to Sarah’s shop, so Lara only grunted her agreement.
There was a broad slate stepping-stone over the gulley just in front of the deli’s wooden and glass door.
The door was painted the deep red of cooked peppers, and this is how the shop had got its name.
Sarah had changed almost everything else about the shop after she bought it, but had kept the door colour and now, ten years on, considered it her lucky colour.
The checked tea towel she wore to tie her hair back was in the same colour red.
On each side of the door was a large window into the shop.
On one side the window gave a view of a long counter packed with cheeses, hams, savoury tarts and large bowls filled with freshly made pesto, hummus and guacamole.
On the other side were a number of small wooden tables.
The chairs around the tables were painted in a mixture of Mediterranean colours, from deep orange to purple to azure blue.
A low unit of shelves at the end of the shop was stacked with terracotta pottery edged with a shiny white glaze.
This glaze was decorated with red chillis and peppers.
Wine goblets in blue and green glass were lined up alongside the piles of plates and bowls.
On top of the low shelf unit was an old-fashioned display cabinet made of wood and glass.
On the glass shelves were arranged several cakes.
There was a large coffee cake, a pile of blush pink meringues and a chocolate cake so dark it was the colour of blackberries.
There was also a small silver tray filled with glossy Florentines.
The shop was empty and the lights had been turned down low, but a candle was burning on one of the tables. Beside it were three wine glasses.
Lara looked at Abby questioningly. ‘Maybe Mrs M is joining us?’ she guessed.
‘Or maybe Sarah is going to offer me a glass of wine,’ Abby said with more hope than expectation.
Lara knocked gently on the window and immediately a door at the back of the deli opened and Sarah came hurrying forward.
She still had a tea towel tied in her hair, and she was still smiling.
Exactly how Abby remembered her from her visit to the flower shop.
Lara, however, was no longer smiling. She had just seen another figure emerge into the shop behind Sarah.
It was the woman she had seen going into the coffee shop with Sarah on the day of the rainstorm – Kate, the local hairdresser.
Abby caught sight of Lara’s expression of ludicrous dismay and tutted, ‘Lara will you please pull yourself together. You are not a child going to visit the dentist. You are a grown woman. Remember Lady Porter. And remember your mother’s advice. ’
‘Yes, I know, do the right, bloody thing,’ Lara said under her breath. But she did manage to turn and smile at Sarah as she opened the door. Why was it that she felt outnumbered? Then she remembered she had her own Kindred Spirit and she suddenly felt braver.
‘Come in,’ Sarah said, ushering Lara across the threshold and locking the door behind them.
‘Do you know Kate?’ she asked, introducing her friend.
Kate looked about the same age as Sarah – early thirties – but there the similarities ended.
While Sarah’s colouring was strawberry blond with fair skin and freckles, everything about Kate was dark.
She had black hair that fell in waves down her back, deep olive skin and dark brown eyes under beautifully shaped black brows.
She wore her clothes with an off-hand, stylish grace and looked like something between a festival-goer and a Russian princess.
Abby thought it an unusual but attractive combination.
Kate reminded her of someone, but she could not, for the moment, place who it was.
Lara nodded. ‘You’re a hairdresser, aren’t you? I’ve heard lots of great things about your…’ At this point Lara got tongue-tied, ‘about your… hair,’ she finished lamely.
Abby rolled her eyes.
Kate looked nonplussed. ‘Thanks,’ she muttered.
‘Right let’s get a drink,’ said Sarah with forced gusto.
Lara began to wonder why she had come. She wished she had followed her own instincts – rather than a ghost’s.
She threw Abby a reproachful look, but she was currently occupied studying the display of cakes.
She glanced at Kate and was surprised to see a look of mulish resignation on her face.
It occurred to her that Kate was feeling and thinking exactly the same thing she was.
At that moment Kate caught her eye and despite herself Lara smiled with genuine warmth.
Kate grinned back. ‘So, who do you know whose hair I do?’ Kate asked with a slight trace of an Irish accent.
‘Didn’t you used to visit Lady Porter?’ Lara said.
Kate shut her mouth like a trap. All the camaraderie of the last few seconds dissipated. Sarah, who had just finished pouring three glasses of wine, looked searchingly at Lara and then at Kate. It appeared she had come to a decision. ‘Right you two, come and sit down. The three of us need to talk.’
Abby sat herself down at a neighbouring table, wishing there had been space for a fourth chair at Lara’s table. Still, she contented herself with tucking her apron comfortingly around her and got ready to listen.
‘I called in to see Mrs M,’ Sarah began, taking a sip of her wine. ‘She said you’d been round to talk about Lady Porter and that you’d been asking about her death.’
She got no further. Kate was behaving in the most peculiar manner. She was leaning forward in her chair, holding both knees with her hands. She started to rock back and forward on the seat.
Sarah looked at Lara significantly. ‘That’s why I asked Kate along. I think she needs to talk to you,’ Sarah said softly.
‘Ah, you know yourself, Sarah, she was a good woman, the best. But the truth is I just don’t know…
look I know the doc said an overdose, but was it?
I keep thinking, and I can’t sleep… and…
well… do you think it was because of me?
’ Kate’s stream of agitated speech stopped for a moment, but she kept rocking.
Lara was completely lost. Where had this come from? She glanced over her shoulder to where Abby was sitting at a table behind her. For once Abby was looking equally blank.
Kate was off again, this time looking at Lara, ‘Do you think the family knew? That poor sweet woman, she was one of kind.’
Eventually Lara spoke, ‘Kate I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
Kate just looked at her and shook her head.
It was left to Sarah to explain. ‘Kate used to go there to do Lady Porter’s hair and so was often in the house.
Well, Lady Porter told her that the family kept trying to stop her drinking, and made a big fuss about doing her shopping, saying they were helping her out, but they stopped buying the stuff she really liked, and that included what she liked to drink.
So Kate used to sneak a bottle of her favourite gin in with her sometimes. She always drank Hendrick’s.’
‘Yes, I know,’ Lara nodded. ‘She always used that when she was mixing us a Pink Gin.’
Sarah gave Lara an appraising look. ‘So you were quite friendly then?’
Lara nodded again, but did not want to go into details.
She was much more interested in getting to the bottom of what Kate was talking about.
Kate had by now drunk most of her wine and was looking appealingly at the two other women.
‘Do you think it’s the drink that killed her?
Do you think it was because of me?’ she said again.
Sarah turned once more to Lara. ‘Kate’s got it into her head that it was the medication mixed with the drink she’d brought that killed her, and maybe that was why the family didn’t want her drinking. I mean, she obviously was on some sort of medication.’
Lara thought about the sleeping pills that Lady Porter did not apparently have a prescription for, and of the bottle of pills they had found in Penny Porter’s bathroom. But she could hardly tell Sarah and Kate about these.
Sarah now turned to Kate. ‘Look, all you did was bring her a gift occasionally. Of course you didn’t poison her. She was an adult, why shouldn’t she have a drink in the evening if she wanted to? She was perfectly capable of working out whether she could mix it with her medication.’
But would she have been able to, Lara wondered, if she had had a few too many?
‘I just thought they didn’t do right by her,’ Kate had now stopped rocking but was still very distressed.
‘Lady P said Richard and Penny kept going on about her wasting money. She was fiercely upset about it. They treated her like a child. I just thought if I got to my seventies and I had a family like that I would want a drink.’ Tears were now welling up in Kate’s eyes.
‘And I know when Penny did her shopping, Lady P always said there were things on the receipt that she never gave her and the stuff Penny did bring her was always the cheap stuff. She said the gin she brought was disgusting and tasted like loo cleaner.’
Lara suddenly recalled the few times Lady Porter complained of feeling ill, she had said it was because she was drinking the wrong gin. Lara had thought she was joking.
Kate said defiantly, ‘But she wasn’t a drinker. I don’t care what her family said. She never had more than one drink while I did her hair.’
Lara had now got the gist of what Kate was saying, and she joined Sarah in reassuring her that she had not killed her friend by bringing her the odd bottle of gin.
By the end of ten minutes Kate was calmer and they even managed to make her smile.
Eventually, she headed off to the cloakroom to get some tissues and to tidy up the mascara tracks smearing her face.
Lara looked at Sarah. ‘Wow,’ she said.
‘I know,’ Sarah replied. ‘Kate is fantastic, but she does worry a lot. I knew this had been eating away at her.’
Lara thought of the woman who she had sometimes seen around the town and who had occasionally bought flowers from her.
Kate had always seemed so confident and popular.
She seemed to know everyone in the town.
But as Dr Patil had said, how well did you ever know what was going on in someone’s mind?
There was one thing Lara was sure of and she voiced it now.
‘She really loved Lady Porter, didn’t she?’
‘We all did,’ Sarah replied. And Lara felt something easing within her and the expression, ‘You are among friends’ came into her mind.
‘The thing is,’ Sarah continued, glancing quickly at the door to the customers’ bathroom, ‘Kate won’t hear a single bad word about her. I’m sure Lady Porter did drink. She was in here a couple of times when she’d had a few. I just don’t tell Kate that.’
Lara nodded, thinking it was not something she would want to tell Kate either.
Sarah glanced in the direction of the customers’ bathroom and leant forward, her voice urgent.
‘Look, Lara, there’s something I’ve been wanting to say to you.
That time at the fete. I’m so sorry I said that about your stall.
It really was beautiful and afterwards I thought what a bitchy thing it was to say. ’
‘But true,’ Lara said ruefully.
‘Oh, we all make mistakes. My God, if someone picked me up on everything I did wrong in the early days I would never have got out of bed. I’m really sorry. It was just—’
At that point Kate reappeared in the shop and Lara was left wondering what Sarah had been going to say.
Something about Julian? She looked towards Kate who was unpacking a bottle of wine that she had brought with her, giving it to Sarah to open.
She remembered Kate’s scoffing laughter and wondered if she could ever ask her about that.
In the end she said, apologetically to Sarah, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t bring any wine with me. ’
‘You can walk around with some flowers tomorrow,’ Abby suggested.
Lara nearly fell off her chair. She had completely forgotten that her Kindred Spirit was behind her.
‘She talked about you,’ Kate said unexpectedly.
‘Did she?’ Lara was surprised and touched.
‘She mixed us a cocktail once which she called a Chelsea Rose. She said she was going to order it for you when you went to the Chelsea Flower Show. She said it reminded her of you as it was fragrant and sweet, but with a pleasant kick to it.’
It was Lara’s turn to well up.
Sarah then got to the heart of the matter. She took a deep breath.
‘You don’t think Lady Porter killed herself, do you?’
All Lara could do was shake her head.
‘I don’t either,’ Kate said in solidarity.
‘Well, that makes three of us,’ Sarah concluded.
‘Four,’ came the voice from the next table.