Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Vera shuffled toward the village green exit, the very picture of an elderly woman overcome by shock. Her shoulders were hunched, her steps uncertain, her handkerchief pressed to her eyes.
She didn’t leave.
The moment she passed behind the judges’ tent—out of sight of Constable Oakes and the milling crowd—her shuffle vanished. She moved with brisk, silent efficiency, slipping into the shrubbery that bordered Major Barnaby’s property.
The fête was dissolving into chaos behind her. The tea tent was being disassembled, voices murmured in shocked speculation, and somewhere Mrs. Higgins was loudly declaring that she had always said the Major worked himself too hard. No one was watching the hedgerow. No one was watching Vera.
The Major’s cottage, ‘The Willows,’ backed onto the village green. It was a sprawling, ivy-strangled affair with a large Victorian glasshouse attached to the side.
Barnaby wasn’t just a grow-your-own enthusiast; he was obsessive. The glasshouse was his sanctuary. If he was hiding anything—and men who refused million-pound offers were usually hiding something—it would be there.
Vera scanned the perimeter. No CCTV—Barnaby hadn’t trusted “the digital cloud”—but he did have a sad-looking German Shepherd named Buster who was currently investigating a squirrel near the compost heap.
Vera reached into her bag and retrieved a small, sealed packet. Premium jerky, treated with a mild sedative—nothing harmful, just enough to encourage a pleasant nap. She didn’t always carry it, but she had learned long ago that dogs were the most common obstacle in her line of work.
She whistled softly. Buster trotted over, barked once, sniffed the air, and accepted the offering with a wag of his tail. Thirty seconds later, he was snoring peacefully under a rhododendron.
“Sleep well, soldier,” Vera whispered.
She approached the glasshouse. The door was locked, naturally. An old warded lock, sturdy but simple. Vera fished out her tension wrench and a rake pick from the hollowed needle case.
Click. Scrape. Click.
The door groaned open.
The air inside was thick, humid, and smelled of damp earth and tomato vines. Rows of benches were crowded with prize specimens: orchids, exotic ferns, and, of course, the petunias.
Vera moved quickly. She wasn’t looking for plants. She was looking for anomalies.
A disturbed pot. A loose brick in the floor. A hiding place specific to the tradecraft of a paranoid ex-military man.
She checked the potting bench. Trowels arranged by size. Fertilizer bags stacked neatly. Everything in its place—the workspace of a man who valued order above all else.
Then she saw it.
In the corner, under a bench dedicated to begonias, was a bag of potting soil. It was the only bag that was open, spilling dark earth onto the pristine tiled floor.
Barnaby was a man who shouted at people for stepping on his lawn. He didn’t spill soil.
Vera knelt. She pushed her hand into the open bag. The soil was loose, recently disturbed. Her fingers brushed against something hard and plastic.
She pulled it out.
It was a waterproof pouch—heavy-duty plastic, double-sealed. Inside was a small, leather-bound notebook.
“Bingo,” she murmured to an observing spider.
She wiped the soil from the plastic and opened the pouch. The notebook was old, the leather cracked and soft with age. She flipped it open.
It was some sort of ledger. But not the kind she had expected.
Page 1:
G. — 14 / Zn(?) T. — 6 / Neg. P. — Inquiry. L4.
Page 2:
V. — 22 / Li ? HP B. — 31 /ite H. — 8 / neg
Vera frowned. Initials and numbers. Weights? Payments? The abbreviations could be anything—addresses, codes, quantities of something.
G for Gable? T for Thorne? V for... Vickery?
The letters after the numbers were stranger still. Zn. Li. HP. They looked like chemical symbols, but that made no sense in the context of a village dispute over land sales.
Unless Barnaby had been tracking something other than money.
She turned the page. Tucked into the crease was a loose piece of paper—a letter, typed on heavy bond stock with a corporate letterhead she didn’t recognize. A stylized ‘O’ surrounded by radiating lines, like a sun. Or an eye.
Major B,
Our offer is final. The mineral rights to the entire aquifer zone are essential for the development project. Your neighbors have already agreed in principle. Don’t be the obstacle.
Obstacles are removed.
— A.P.
A.P. Arthur Pym? The man in the suit?
So Pym was pressuring the village on behalf of some corporation. And Barnaby was documenting... something. The numbers and chemical symbols nagged at her, hovering at the edge of comprehension like a word on the tip of her tongue.
She didn’t have time to puzzle it out now. She slipped the notebook into her knitting bag, nestling it between the wool and her compact mirror.
Snap.
A twig broke outside.
Vera froze. She didn’t breathe. She merged with the shadows of the tomato vines, becoming just another shape among the leaves.
Through the dirty glass, she saw a silhouette. A man. He wasn’t wearing a police uniform. He was wearing dark clothes, hood pulled up despite the mild evening. He was moving toward the cottage’s back door.
He wasn’t investigating. He was breaking in.
Vera checked her watch. Constable Oakes was still out front, taking statements. This was someone else entirely.
A second player.
She had a choice. Confront the intruder, or slip away with the intelligence she’d gathered.
She looked at her knitting bag. She looked at the intruder’s heavy boots—military-style, rubber-soled, the kind designed for silent movement on hard surfaces.
Discretion, she decided, is the better part of surviving to feed the cat.
She slipped out the side door just as the sound of shattering glass echoed from the kitchen window. She melted into the hedges, invisible, silent, just another grandmother taking a shortcut home.
But as she hurried away from The Willows, a cold feeling settled in her stomach.
Lark’s End wasn’t just a sleepy village with a murder. Something far larger was happening here, and she had stumbled into the middle of it.
Vera didn’t go home. Not yet.
Instead, she made her way to Primrose Cottage, a tiny, wisteria-smothered dwelling at the end of Church Lane.
It belonged to Dorothy Pemberton—Dotty to her friends—a woman who had been the village postmistress for thirty-seven years before retirement and who still knew everyone’s business, often before they knew it themselves.
Dotty answered the door in a housecoat and slippers, a cup of cocoa steaming in her hand.
“Vera! Good heavens, you look like you’ve been wrestling badgers. Come in, come in.”
“I need information, Dotty.” Vera stepped inside, brushing leaves from her cardigan. “And possibly a biscuit.”
“Information I have in abundance. Biscuits too.” Dotty led her to a small sitting room crammed with china figurines and back issues of The People’s Friend. “Dreadful business about the Major. Heart attack, they’re saying, though I have my doubts. That man had a constitution like a draught horse.”
“Your doubts may be well-founded.” Vera accepted a custard cream and sat in the chair nearest the fire. “Dotty, the man in the suit—the one who was arguing with Barnaby. Arthur Pym. Do you know where he’s staying?”
“The Jolly Miller, I expect. Only B&B in the village since the Crossed Keys closed.” Dotty’s eyes sharpened with interest. “Why? What’s he done?”
“I’m not sure yet. But I’d very much like to find out what he’s doing in Lark’s End.”
“Asking questions, from what I hear.” Dotty lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Mabel Fitch—you know Mabel, runs the wool shop—she said he came in asking about property values. Who owned what. Whether anyone was looking to sell.”
“Property,” Vera murmured. “Yes, that fits.”
“He’s been drinking at the Bull and Bush every evening, too. After eight, regular as clockwork.” Dotty shook her head. “Sits in the corner with his whisky and that phone of his, typing away like his life depends on it. Mabel says he looks like a man waiting for bad news.”
“The Bull and Bush,” Vera repeated. “After eight, you say?”
“Like clockwork. Ted says he tips well but doesn’t talk to anyone.” Dotty’s eyes glittered. “Vera Calloway, what are you up to?”
“Just curiosity, Dotty. You know how I love a puzzle.”
“Hmm.” Dotty didn’t look convinced, but she was wise enough not to press. “Well, if you’re going to the Bull and Bush, take an umbrella. Rain’s coming.”
The Rookery was a crooked little cottage at the end of Blackthorn Lane, all moss-covered stone and climbing roses that had long since abandoned any pretense of discipline.
Vera had chosen it specifically for its unassuming appearance—the kind of house that looked like it belonged to someone’s grandmother, which was rather the point.
The interior told a different story, if one knew how to read it. The locks were commercial-grade, installed by a man in Norwich who asked no questions. The windows were double-glazed and reinforced. And the garden, while charming, had been landscaped with clear sight lines to every approach.
But to the casual observer, it was simply a retiree’s cottage, complete with floral curtains and a welcome mat that said Bless This Mess.
Vera unlocked the front door and stepped inside. The hallway smelled of lavender and old books—a scent she had cultivated deliberately, because it was exactly what visitors expected.
A rumbling sound emerged from the kitchen, like a small diesel engine starting up.
“Yes, yes, I know,” Vera called out. “Mama has been gallivanting. Unforgivable.”
Watson appeared in the kitchen doorway. He was an enormous ginger tabby, easily fifteen pounds of muscle and attitude, with a torn left ear that gave him the look of a retired prizefighter.
His fur was the color of marmalade streaked with darker stripes, and his eyes were a pale, unsettling green that seemed to assess everyone he met and find them wanting.
Vera had acquired him seven years ago, during what she referred to as “the Lisbon incident.” He had been living behind a fish market, scarred and half-starved, and had bitten the hand of every person who tried to approach him.
Vera had simply sat down on an overturned crate, opened a tin of sardines, and waited.
It had taken three hours. But eventually, Watson had crept close enough to eat from her hand.
He had been insufferable ever since.
“Don’t look at me like that,” Vera told him as he wound between her ankles, his purr vibrating through her shins. “I’ve had a very trying day. A man was murdered and I broke into a greenhouse. The least you could do is be supportive.”
Watson meowed—a sharp, imperious sound that clearly translated to feed me first, then we’ll discuss your problems.
Vera hung her cardigan on the hook by the door next to the dark coat with the hidden kevlar lining. It looked like a regular coat to most, but came in handy to stop a bullet when situations got sticky.
She made her way to the kitchen. It was a small, tidy space with copper pots hanging from a rack and a window that looked out over the back garden. She retrieved the good salmon paté from the refrigerator—the expensive kind, imported from Scotland and spooned a generous portion into his bowl.
“Guilt offering,” she said. “Don’t get used to it.”
Watson ignored her entirely, his face buried in the paté with the single-minded focus of a creature who had once known hunger and never intended to know it again.
Vera put the kettle on. While she waited for it to boil, she retrieved Barnaby’s ledger from her knitting bag and spread it open on the kitchen table.
The entries stared back at her, cryptic and maddening.
G. — 14 / Zn(?) T. — 6 / Neg. P. — Inquiry. L4. V. — 22 / Li ? HP B. — 31 / ite H. — 8 / neg
She copied the entries onto a fresh sheet of notepaper, her handwriting small and precise.
Initials, certainly—she was confident now that G was Gable, T was probably Thorne.
V could be Vickery, the farmer whose land bordered the church.
The numbers might be weights, measurements of some kind. Sample sizes?
And those abbreviations. Zn. Li. HP. Neg.
They nagged at her like a half-remembered song. She knew she should recognize them, but the connection refused to form.
The kettle whistled. Vera made herself a cup of Earl Grey—no sugar, a splash of milk—and returned to the table. She read the corporate letter again, holding it up to the light as if it might reveal hidden watermarks.
Our offer is final. The mineral rights to the entire aquifer zone are essential for the development project.
Mineral rights. That phrase kept snagging in her mind. Mining companies bought mineral rights. Oil companies. Gas extractors. But the Cotswolds weren’t known for any of those things. The geology was chalk and clay, limestone and sandstone—pretty to look at, useless to dig.
Unless she was missing something.
Obstacles are removed.
Vera set down the letter. Major Barnaby had been an obstacle. And now Major Barnaby was dead.
Watson finished his paté and jumped onto the table with the heavy thud of a cat who had never learned to be graceful. He walked directly across the ledger and sat down on the letter, his tail swishing.
“You’re contaminating evidence,” Vera informed him.
Watson began to wash his face, supremely unconcerned.
Vera scratched behind his torn ear—the spot he pretended not to like but secretly loved—and checked the clock on the wall. Half past seven. If Pym kept to the schedule Dotty had described, he would be settling into his corner booth at the Bull and Bush within the hour.
She closed the ledger and tucked it into the drawer of the Welsh dresser, behind the good napkins that only came out at Christmas. The letter she photographed with a small camera disguised as a lipstick case—old technology, but reliable—before hiding it with the ledger.
Watson watched her preparations with the air of a supervisor who found his employee’s work barely adequate.
“I need you to guard the house,” Vera told him, refreshing his water bowl and checking that the back door was locked. “I won’t be long. An hour, perhaps two.”
Watson yawned, displaying an impressive array of teeth, and stretched out on the warm spot where the ledger had been. His eyes were already half-closed.
“Eternal vigilance,” Vera muttered. “That’s what I ask for. Eternal vigilance.”
The cat began to snore.
Vera retrieved her knitting bag, checked that her compact mirror and pepper spray were in place, and stepped out into the evening air. The first drops of rain were beginning to fall, just as Dotty had predicted. She raised her umbrella and set off toward the village, leaving Watson to his dreams.