Chapter 2
Tom
Tom’s head was thumping so hard he was tempted to rest it on the old oak kitchen table in front of him.
But that wouldn’t be a good look, seeing as he and Amelia were sitting across from Sergeant Sahima Kamdar of the Moorleigh Village Police Station.
Plus, the table was smeared with dried remains of whatever meal he and Amelia had consumed in the early hours.
“No one’s been reported missing,” the sergeant said, tapping her stylus against her tablet.
Tom stared out the window, at the spot he’d seen the shadowy figures carrying the rug.
The morning sun, weak as it was, hammered shards of pain into his brain.
“But if it only happened last night?” he said.
“We haven’t been able to find Duncan this morning.
He’s not answering his phone or messages, and we tried knocking on the door to his cottage. ”
“And how unusual is that? He’s a groundskeeper. And this estate is—what?—five thousand acres?”
“Three thousand now, including the woodlands. We sold some to the neighbors, along with the livestock.” Tom linked his hands behind his head, mostly just to support it. “It’s not at all unusual,” he conceded. “I just have a…”
“You have a…?” the sergeant prompted.
“I’m worried. No one else around here has gray hair like that.” Sergeant Kamdar had been the local cop since Tom was a kid, but he wasn’t about to admit that he merely had a bad feeling.
“What time do you think you saw this incident?”
Wincing, Tom looked at Amelia, who gave an apologetic shrug.
She’d been quiet all morning, though if her head was pounding as badly as his…
And if they had indeed witnessed a murder…
What a mad night—the parts he could remember.
And he suspected that the parts he couldn’t remember were even more bonkers.
He did recall thinking with absolute conviction sometime in the night, as he’d run a fingertip around the contours of Amelia’s collarbone, that she was the one and only woman for him.
But he couldn’t remember exactly why, beyond the fact she was fun to hang out with, and the obvious physical attraction.
There was something more, he was sure of it.
Not love at first sight, because that wasn’t a thing, but more than a simple case of boy meets girl.
He’d been convinced that fate had at last delivered him something that might actually have a future—a future that was booked to fly back across the Atlantic in a matter of days.
More likely, he was just desperate to see into any future.
It was strange. He’d spent the last year alone in the house, and suddenly the thought of her leaving him to it made him feel like he was shrinking and the house was growing.
In fact, that exact thing was happening, right now—the table began to expand, the ceiling rose, the walls moved away…
He slammed his palms on the tabletop, and everything reverted to regular proportions.
“Tom?” the sergeant said, eyeing him curiously. “Did you hear me?”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“What time did you witness this incident?”
“Uh, sometime after midnight? We came downstairs for…”
“Something to eat!” Amelia finished.
The sergeant looked around the kitchen. Dirty pots and pans were stacked up by the sink, a broken plate lay on the floor beside several smashed eggs, wine bottles were strewn across every surface—though most had been undrinkable—and there was a distinct smell of bacon and stale wine, with a chaser of citrus.
“If the lights were on down here, how’d you manage to see outside, pet? ”
Tom tipped his head to one side. His neck crackled. “Uh, good question?”
Amelia screwed up her face. Her warm brown eyes were rimmed with red. He recalled staring into them yesterday as the two of them sat by the fireplace in the music room, transfixed by the way her irises took on the amber glow of the flames. “We decided to eat in the light of the moon fog,” she said.
The sergeant pointed the stylus at her. “The what now?”
“The fog. It was glowing, from the moon. We turned off the lights and just sat here, ‘moon-bathing.’”
Tom idly flicked at a piece of dried bacon that had settled in a groove in the table. That sounded familiar. It was like trying to piece together a shifting dream. A dream from which he hadn’t completely awoken.
“For how long?”
“I don’t know.” Amelia grimaced, glancing at Tom. “Hours?”
Tom shrugged. “It was a full moon last night, so it would have been bright.”
“It was one of them spooky glowing fogs we get, for sure, so you’re not off the mark there, pet. Can you describe these two people you saw carrying the rug?”
“Uh…” Again, Amelia looked at Tom. “Dark coats? Like the one Tom’s wearing—thick winter overcoats.”
The sergeant wrote a few words on her tablet and paused, expectantly.
“And a…” Tom touched his fingers to his forehead, trying to pin down the memory. Dark clothing sounded right, but what else was tugging at him?
Suddenly, Amelia stood. “Yes, a…” Her eyes widened, and she sat down hard. “No, that’s not right.”
As Tom stared at her bewildered expression, a crazy image rose from the fog in his brain, an odd crossover between a memory and a dream. That obviously wasn’t right, either. He rubbed his eyes, as if that would wipe away the mind picture, like clearing a whiteboard.
The sergeant put down her stylus. “That’s all you have? Did you see their faces?”
Tom couldn’t see anything except the ridiculous image in his head. He shook his head, and immediately regretted it. It felt like his brain had detached from his skull and was freely knocking about in there.
“Wait! I heard an argument last night!” Amelia said, holding up her index finger.
“You did?” Tom said.
The sergeant readied the stylus, perking up. “Well, that’s something. Who, what, where? What did they say?”
“Uh. I don’t remember.”
“Anything?”
“Just that there was one. Male voices! Or maybe female. Or maybe a mixture.”
“I see,” the sergeant deadpanned.
“The rug!” Amelia stood again, so fast she knocked over a bottle of wine—empty, fortunately.
Tom caught it before it rolled off the table, the sudden movement giving him a whoosh of vertigo.
“The rug they were carrying. It was a hand-knotted Axminster with a trellis border of lotus flowers. And a starburst.” She mimed an explosion with her fingers.
“And a dragon! A red and yellow dragon.” She looked up at the ceiling and did a figure-eight movement with her hands.
“Loop-de-loop,” she said to herself, before turning back to them.
“Early nineteenth century, clearly part of the lost saloon carpet from the Royal Pavilion at Brighton.”
Tom stared at her, open-mouthed.
“You know the carpet I mean, right?” she said, looking from Tom to Sergeant Kamdar, who appeared equally gobsmacked. “It’s one of the most famous in Britain. They reconstructed it a few years back.”
“You can’t remember what time it happened,” the sergeant said, speaking extra slowly, “or what the people lugging it looked like, or anything at all about this argument, but you remember the foliage on the rug?”
“Well, of course!”
“Amelia is a textiles conservator,” Tom explained.
“And this rug…” Amelia continued. “Well, not a rug, not originally. A carpet. Queen Victoria had the original removed from the Royal Pavilion and cut up into rugs for Buckingham Palace, and eventually they all disappeared except for one small fragment. And now this one… Omigod, I need to sit down.” She did, abruptly.
The sergeant sniffed. “But if this… body, or whatever it was, was rolled up in the rug, wouldn’t you have just seen the backing? You wouldn’t roll a rug so the fancy bit was on the outside.”
Amelia thought about it. “The edge of it had flipped over. That’s why only the border was visible, and a little bit of the main design. Here, I’ll sketch it for you.” She held out her hand for the sergeant’s stylus.
The sergeant pushed over the tablet. Amelia snatched the stylus and sketched an intricate, kaleidoscopic pattern—quickly, as if she were worried the memory would disappear. Tom raised his eyebrows—she was a decent artist—and immediately lowered them, because the movement hurt.
“Does that look familiar to you?” Amelia asked Tom, as she added a geometric flourish and held it up.
“No? Maybe? We have a lot of rugs, but they all look pretty much the same.”
Amelia looked as shocked as she had at their realization that they’d seen a body.
“Now, why would you even be carting a body in a rug?” the sergeant said. “Those old things can weigh a ton.”
“Good point,” Amelia said.
“To get rid of evidence?” Tom offered.
“Hmm. And why didn’t you call the police last night, when it happened?”
Tom and Amelia looked at each other, blankly. He didn’t want to say because we were off our faces.
“Did you go out to investigate?”
“I don’t think so,” Amelia said.
“You don’t think so,” the sergeant echoed.
Tom cleared his throat. “We had a look at the ground this morning, while we were waiting for you, but it’s a pebble path. There’s not much to disturb. Hold on, I heard something jangling last night. I just remembered! It was faint, but…”
“Jangling,” the sergeant repeated slyly. “Like … a ghost jangling chains?”
“No, not like that. Or maybe like that. Definitely metallic, but… I don’t know anymore.” He slumped in his seat. “I don’t know anything anymore.”
The sergeant scanned the room again, thinking. She pushed up from the table and walked to a worktop, where several empty or half-empty bottles were clustered.
“Exactly how much did you drink last night?”
“Er, quite a bit,” Tom said, running his hands down the thighs of his jeans. “But I swear it wasn’t the alcohol. It was … real.”