Chapter Twenty-Five
“I saw Lance and Philomena in the teashop,” Mrs. Billings said, as she arrived the next morning.
She looked at me, waiting for a response, and I tried to remember who Lance and Philomena were. Oh! Of course: Mr. and Mrs. Dixon senior, James’s parents, who lived in Spain.
“Said they’d moved back,” Mrs. B said. “They’ve sold up abroad and are living in their old house again. Kicked the tenants out; they weren’t village folk anyway. Said it were too hot for them abroad—Lance and Philomena, not the tenants.”
“It took them a long time to work that out,” I said. They’d been there nearly twenty years. I wondered if it had been their or James’s decision to sell.
Once Mrs. B had started her rounds, I sat through a terrible 1990s episode of Columbo, while I waited for her to do what she had to do and leave.
Then, I headed out. It was time for me to put my plan for Tarquin into action.
I took with me a pair of gardening gloves and a Tupperware in a small rucksack and walked across the fields to the woodland my mum and I had walked through, day in, day out, all those years ago.
Time was, I could’ve walked round and taken what I needed in less than half an hour, just like shopping at the supermarket, but with the passing of the years since I last visited, it took me a while to find what I was looking for. But find it I did.
The flowers were over, but the small, dark berries were still there for a few more weeks: deadly nightshade. I put the gloves on and picked a few off. I put them in the Tupperware and headed home.
Next, I phoned Tarquin and asked him to come over to discuss my case.
“Can you get into the office?” he asked.
Not unless I’m going to poison the whole firm, I thought, and that might not be a bad thing, but it would be harder to engineer, and I’d certainly need to go back for more berries.
“No transport, car’s at the garage,” I said.
“Can’t you use one of James’s? He has about twenty.”
Was he mad? They were all classic cars. “James is out in the Audi. I’m not allowed to touch the old ones,” I said. “And he only has a few now.”
And Tarquin said fair enough, but could I wait until tomorrow? He’d call in midafternoon on his way back from another appointment.
“Great, I do have something I need to discuss with you,” he said, before I hung up.
Scene set, I drove to the Waitrose on the outskirts of Tippington and bought the ingredients for a cake.
***
James was out late that night and I spent the evening watching TV, or rather in front of the TV, thinking about what I was going to do the next day and how I didn’t have any actual evidence that Tarquin was corrupt.
Then I’d think about the consequences if I didn’t.
“They might up it to murder,” Tarquin had said.
Yes, if he got his way—James’s way—they might well do that.
I hardened: Sometimes you have to do what you have to do.
Then I softened. He had three children and he always seemed so affable. Then I made myself harden again.
When I went to bed, I slept the sleep of someone who is about to roll the dice and hope for the least bad of numerous bad outcomes.
When James had left the next morning, I took the cake ingredients out of the cupboard and baked.
It was so long since I’d made anything like that, it took me ages to weigh and mix, but in the end, I was quite pleased with what I’d done.
I iced with lilac icing to try to hide the slight tinge of purple the nightshade berries had given it.
Sure enough, Tarquin was round that afternoon, ready to add another billable hour, and I was ready with a kettle and two mugs, one Poirot (his), one Death in Paradise (mine).
I showed him in, said “Tea?” and began pouring before he could answer.
“Sugar?” I asked.
“No, thank you,” he said.
“Milk?”
“Yes, please.”
“Cake?” I began to cut it with the fearlessness of the damned. “I call this one Tea and Terror.”
“That’s an unusual name for a cake. What can I do for you, Daisy?” Tarquin asked.
“Well, you can keep me out of prison,” I said, laughing slightly hysterically and dropping the mug down harder than I meant to on the table. I put the slice of deadly cake next to it. “You know I didn’t strangle Lennie.”
He opened his briefcase and marbles cascaded from the pocket at the top. As I helped him gather them up, I felt a surge of guilt for the children who were not going to be laughing that night.
I looked at the cake, so far untouched, and thought about snatching it away. Then I was seized with inspiration.
“There’s no money,” I said.
He looked up, surprised.
“James’s business is a scam. He’s made his staff redundant, and he’s been selling all his stuff.”
“I don’t know about that, but it’s funny you should say because what I came to tell you is that unfortunately, I can’t represent you anymore.
James hasn’t been paying his bills, and we’ve run out of patience with him.
Plus, after the interview last week, we were thinking that this case is not what it seemed and you and your husband seem to be at loggerheads now. ”
Now? I thought.
“I understand you don’t have funds of your own?”
I shook my head.
“You should be able to get a public defender, then.”
He picked up his cake and raised it to his lips.
“Do you know what? I think I forgot to put sugar in that,” I said, snatching the cake as it came within millimeters of his jaws. I dropped it into the bin.
Tarquin looked crestfallen, so I said, “Wait there,” and checking he wasn’t following, ran to the priest hole for the packet of Jaffa Cakes James had missed. “You can have these.” I tipped most of them into his hands, and he cheered up.
After he’d gone, I checked he hadn’t taken a sneaky slice of the cake while I was at the priest hole.
He hadn’t. The reality of what I’d been about to do overcame me, and I had to sit down and eat the remaining Jaffas myself.
As I sat there, my phone beeped. When I looked at it, it was for an article in the Western Bulge Online, the one Emma Beddoe had been working on all summer.
“WHO LIVES IN A HOUSE LIKE THIS?” the headline ran. “By Emma Beddoe, junior reporter, crime.”
“From afar, Langley Hall, just outside the picturesque village of Upper Iffley, looks tranquil and idyllic, but draw closer and it’s not long before you notice the crumbling battlements, cracked windowpanes, and overgrown flowerbeds.”
I made a mental note to speak to Mr. Billings about the flowerbeds. “The dereliction outside, it seems, only speaks of a rot at the heart of Langley Hall, for presiding over it all is lady of the manor, Daisy Dixon, née Langley, otherwise known as the Upper Iffley Poisoner. I was invited in…”
Then she described the old kitchen as “on the shabby side of shabby chic” and the biscuits we gave her as “humdrum.”
She said Mrs. B was “busy, lively, and youthful” and I was “nervous, guarded, and fidgety.” I wondered if she’d got her notes mixed up. “Despite having all the money in the world, Daisy dresses as if she doesn’t have a penny. Her outfits are always mismatched, and she has no eye for color.”
I nearly had a fit when I read that. People in glass houses! I looked at the picture of Emma at the top of the page—it was only a headshot, so her readers couldn’t see the hypocrisy in what she had said.
Then she got down to the nub of it.
“Despite welcoming me into her home”—that was one way of putting it—“Daisy was strangely reluctant to speculate on why the police might be digging up the graveyard attached to Langley Hall. We could tell ourselves that is because she has thought of reasons but knows they are wrong; we can tell ourselves she is uniquely unimaginative”—charming—“or we can tell ourselves it is because there is something she doesn’t want us to know.
My only facts are that James and Daisy Dixon were at the same party as Lennie Green on the night he vanished, and weeks later the police were digging on their property.
And now Daisy has been linked romantically to Doug Newman, whose body was found in the river just days after Lennie Green’s. ”
I looked at the date, the article had been written before the latest developments. I braced myself for an onslaught of veiled allegations and insinuations, but Emma had chosen to take a different path.
“Of course, speculation on this has been rife, but to really understand life at Langley Hall, you have to go back a few decades to what must have been a formative experience in Daisy’s adolescence. I spoke to a number of residents about what happened all those years ago.”
Oh, she’d really done the rounds. She’d spoken to most of the village, but to my surprise, most of what they said wasn’t too bad.
“There’s nothing more dangerous than someone with a little bit of knowledge,” Mrs. Dobson said. “She thought she knew what she was doing.”
“She brought a cake to the shop not long after her mum died. She wanted to see if we’d sell it,” Mrs. Thorpe had told Emma. “We had to say no, but it was only because of health and safety rules. I think she thought it was because of the incident.” Yes, I had thought that.
“Tragic accident,” Mrs. Billings said, but I would have preferred it if she’d said nothing.
Beneath the comments, Emma had surmised, were the words of a tight-knit community protecting one of their own. Then she’d got down to the nitty-gritty and the testimony of BigDreams.
“She has a vengeful side,” BigDreams told her. “She’s coldhearted and ruthless when she wants something.” And he went on to say I had been bullied at school, I had plotted my revenge for years, and when the time came I executed my plan.
***
I hated school. All through primary years, the words, “Daisy has fleas,” followed me around. It was thought, at Upper Iffley Primary, that this was an inevitable consequence of being hard up.