Chapter 3 Whispers Over Earl Grey
The next afternoon arrived wrapped in a soft grey light that pressed against the windows of The Yarn & Needle and made the shop feel smaller than it was, more enclosed, as though the whole of Meadowbrook had drawn a little closer in the night.
I had opened at the usual hour and gone through the usual motions, setting out the new skeins of oatmeal-coloured wool and refilling the tin of loose-leaf Earl Grey beside the electric kettle, but nothing felt usual.
The image of Silas Blackwood’s still form at the foot of that tall bookcase had followed me through every task, a quiet shadow that refused to lift.
I had slept poorly. That much I admitted to myself as I straightened the basket of bamboo needles for the third time in an hour.
The shop was tidy and warm, the gas heating humming its low, familiar note, but I could not settle into the comfort of it.
My hands wanted to be busy, so I let them.
I wound a length of deep blue wool into a ball and listened to the sound of my own breathing in the empty room.
The bell above the door chimed at half past two, and Eleanor Finch stepped inside with her usual unhurried grace.
She wore a tweed skirt the colour of autumn bracken and carried her knitting bag over one arm, the leather handles worn soft from years of use.
Her expression, as she crossed the threshold, was composed but watchful, the way a librarian’s face looks when she has already read the last page and is waiting for everyone else to catch up.
“You’ve been thinking about it,” she said. It was not a question.
“I don’t think I’ve stopped,” I replied, and I heard the tiredness in my own voice before I could catch it. “Tea?”
“Please.” She settled into the chair by the counter, the one with the cushion I had embroidered the previous spring, and set her bag at her feet. “Alistair telephoned me last night. He said you raised several points at the scene that he hadn’t anticipated.”
I filled the kettle and switched it on, then turned to face her. “Did he say whether he was going to act on any of them?”
Eleanor’s smile was small and knowing. “He said you were persistent. From Alistair, that is high praise.”
Before I could answer, the bell chimed again, and Gareth Davies burst through the door with a tray balanced on one upturned palm and a look of barely contained excitement on his flour-dusted face.
His apron was streaked with what looked like lemon curd, and his cheeks were pinker than usual, whether from the walk or from the news he was carrying I could not tell.
“You will not believe what I’ve heard,” he announced, setting the tray on the counter with a flourish that sent a tiny drift of powdered sugar onto the floorboards.
“Lemon tarts, fresh this morning, and I’ve put extra zest in because the village needs cheering, and don’t tell me it doesn’t, because I’ve had six people through the door of The Daily Loaf before ten o’clock and every single one of them wanted to talk about the bookshop.”
Eleanor lifted an eyebrow. “And you obliged them, I imagine.”
“I’m a baker, Eleanor, not a monk. People talk to me. It’s the flour, I think. Makes me look trustworthy.” He pulled a tart from the tray and bit into it with evident satisfaction. “Now. What do we know?”
I poured the tea and handed a cup to Eleanor, then took my own and sat down on the stool behind the counter.
“We know that Silas Blackwood died yesterday afternoon, that Constable Finch believes it was an accidental fall, and that there are several details of the scene that don’t quite fit that explanation.”
“Several,” Eleanor repeated, her tone dry. “That is a careful word.”
“It’s the right word.” I wrapped both hands around my cup and let the warmth seep into my fingers.
“There was a book left open on a display stand. Silas never left books lying open. There was a button on the floor beside his hand, carved from horn or bone, with a pattern of interlocking circles. It didn’t belong to anything he was wearing. And there was a chill in the room,
and a scent I couldn’t place, something sharp and clean, almost like a cleaning solution but not quite.”
Gareth stopped chewing. “A button? What sort of button?”
“Ornate. Unusual. Not the sort of thing you’d find on a modern coat.”
“Vintage, then.” He said it with the certainty of someone who had just solved a puzzle, and then his face fell. “Oh. Vintage. Like the sort of thing Florence Albright wears.”
Eleanor set her cup down with a soft click. “Let’s not leap to conclusions before the knitting circle has even assembled, Gareth. A button is a button. It could have come from anywhere.”
“It could,” I agreed, though the same thought had already crossed my mind in the small hours of the night and refused to leave. “But it was there, and it shouldn’t have been, and that’s one of the things I can’t stop turning over.”
The bell chimed a third time, and the rest of the knitting circle began to arrive in twos and threes, filling the shop with the rustle of coats being removed and the familiar murmur of voices finding their rhythm.
I moved among them with the tea and the tarts, greeting each person by name, accepting the small condolences and the larger questions with what I hoped was an even temper.
The mood in the room was subdued but not sombre, the way a village gathers itself after a shock, needing the comfort of company more than the solitude of grief.
Florence Albright was the last to arrive.
She swept through the door in a long coat of deep burgundy velvet, a heavy necklace of amber beads resting against her collarbone, and she paused just inside the threshold as though the shop required a moment of her full attention before she could commit to entering it.
Her silver hair was pinned up in an elaborate twist, and her earrings, large and gold and set with what looked like garnets, caught the light as she turned her head.
“Penny,” she said, and her voice was as smooth as polished wood. “I do hope I’m not late. The morning has been quite impossible.”
“You’re just in time,” I said. “There’s tea, and Gareth has brought lemon tarts.”
She took a seat near the window, arranging her coat around her with the careful precision of someone who has spent a lifetime being looked at. I handed her a cup of Earl Grey and watched her fingers close around it. They were steady. Perfectly steady. I filed that away and moved on.
The knitting began, needles clicking in their gentle, familiar rhythm, and for a few minutes the only sounds in the shop were the soft percussion of wool and bamboo and the occasional murmur of approval over Gareth’s tarts.
Then Mrs. Pemberton, who had been coming to the circle for three years and had never once finished a scarf, leaned forward and lowered her voice to a stage whisper that carried to every corner of the room.
“I heard he was found at the bottom of the tall bookcase in the second room. The one with the poetry.”
“That’s right,” Gareth said, before anyone else could answer. “And I heard from Marjorie, who heard from her husband, who does the deliveries on Lavender Lane, that the constable was there for nearly two hours. Two hours, for an accidental fall. That doesn’t seem quite right, does it?”
Eleanor looked up from her knitting, a half-finished sock in a complicated cable pattern. “The constable was there for two hours because Penny raised several pertinent questions about the scene. It would have been negligent of him not to examine them thoroughly.”
“What sort of questions?” Mrs. Pemberton asked, her needles pausing mid-stitch.
I set down my own knitting, a simple scarf in the deep blue wool I had been winding earlier, and chose my words with care.
“The shop wasn’t quite as it should have been. Silas was a meticulous man. He kept records of everything for thirty years. He used a stepladder for the high shelves without fail, and he swept the floors every morning before opening. But when I found him,
there was a book left open on a display stand, and a button on the floor that didn’t match anything he was wearing, and a chill in the air that I can’t explain.”
A ripple of murmurs passed through the circle. I watched the faces around me, the knitted brows and the pursed lips, the quick glances exchanged between neighbours. And then I looked at Florence.
She had not moved. Her knitting lay untouched in her lap, a half-finished square of moss-green wool that I had seen her working on for weeks without apparent progress.
Her hands were clasped around it now, the knuckles pale against the dark wool, and her gaze was fixed on a point somewhere just beyond my left shoulder.
When Gareth mentioned the button, her fingers twitched.
It was a small movement, barely perceptible, but I saw it.
“A button,” she said, and her voice came out a fraction too high, a fraction too bright. “How peculiar. What sort of button?”
“Carved,” I said, keeping my tone level. “Horn or bone, with a pattern of interlocking circles. Quite distinctive.”
Florence’s gaze flicked to the window, then to the door, then back to her knitting.
She picked up her needles and began to work them with a speed that did not match her usual careful pace.
“I’m sure it will turn out to be something perfectly ordinary. A stray button from a customer’s coat, perhaps. These old shops collect all sorts of debris.”
“Silas swept the floors every morning,” Eleanor said quietly. “He wouldn’t have left debris lying about.”
Florence did not answer. Her needles clicked faster, the stitches pulling tight and uneven.
Around her, the other women had resumed their own conversations in lower tones, but I could feel the shift in the room, the way the attention had settled on Florence like a spotlight she had not asked for and did not want.
Gareth, oblivious, reached for another tart.
“The thing I don’t understand,” he said, his mouth half full, “is why anyone would want to harm the old fellow in the first place. He kept to himself, didn’t bother anyone. Bit odd, maybe, with all those records and the way he’d never let you touch a book without asking first,