Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
The morning sun over Lark’s End was deceptively cheerful, bathing the village green in a golden light that belonged on a postcard. Tourists would have found it charming. Vera found it suspicious.
Nothing good ever happened in weather this pleasant.
She sat on a bench near the war memorial, feeding crumbs to a duck that seemed personally offended by her offerings.
In her lap was a hand-drawn flyer featuring a photograph of Watson looking particularly murderous—his default expression, really—beneath the words: MISSING CAT.
Answers to Watson. Reward offered. Please call Mrs. Calloway.
It was her standard woodland cover. No one questioned a worried senior citizen searching for a beloved pet. If she were caught snooping around where she shouldn’t be, she’d simply divert suspicion with a few tears about her beloved cat.
Watson himself was at home, sleeping off his traumatic experience in a patch of sunlight. He had made it very clear that field work was beneath his dignity.
Vera wasn’t actually looking for a cat. She was watching Mrs. Gable.
The baker had emerged from The Crumbly Crust at half past nine, locking the door behind her with trembling hands. She wasn’t wearing her usual flour-dusted apron. She was wearing a trench coat—in July—and carrying a wicker basket clutched to her chest like a lifeline.
Vera had seen that look before. It was the look of someone going to a clandestine meeting. Someone who was very bad at clandestine meetings.
Mrs. Gable glanced left, then right, then left again—the surveillance detection of an amateur who had learned everything she knew from television programs. Then she hurried down the lane toward the Old Woods.
Vera waited ten seconds. Then she rose from the bench, tucked the “Missing Cat” flyer into her cardigan pocket, and followed.
The woods were cool and dappled with shadow, the air thick with the scent of wild garlic and damp earth. Vera tracked Mrs. Gable’s footprints in the soft ground—the baker was moving fast, stumbling occasionally over roots, making no effort to conceal her trail.
Amateur, Vera thought, not unkindly. Terrified amateur.
The question was: what was Mrs. Gable afraid of? And who was she meeting?
Vera had her suspicions. Pym’s phone call had mentioned applying “pressure” to the Gable woman, expecting her to sign by noon. But pressure took many forms. Threats. Bribes. Blackmail.
What did Martha Gable have to hide?
The trees thinned ahead, opening into a clearing near the old folly—a crumbling stone tower that had been built two hundred years ago by an eccentric lord and had served no purpose since except as a destination for teenage romance and illicit cider drinking.
Mrs. Gable was there. She was pacing in tight circles, her basket swinging with each turn.
Vera slipped behind a large oak, pressing herself against the rough bark. She adjusted her glasses, activating the optical magnification—a custom modification from a lens grinder in Antwerp who owed her for that business with his daughter and the diplomat.
The clearing snapped into focus.
Mrs. Gable’s face was blotchy with tears. Her hands wouldn’t stop moving—wringing the basket handle, smoothing her coat, touching her hair. She looked like a woman waiting for a firing squad.
A twig snapped on the far side of the clearing.
Mrs. Gable jumped. “Hello? Is that you?”
A figure emerged from the trees. It wasn’t Pym. It wasn’t a sleek corporate assassin.
It was Reverend Thomas.
Vera blinked. Well. I didn’t see that coming.
The Vicar rushed forward and took Mrs. Gable’s hands—but not the way a clergyman takes the hands of a parishioner offering comfort. He pulled her close, one hand sliding to the small of her back, the other cupping her face with a tenderness that spoke of long practice.
“My dear Martha.” He kissed her forehead, then her cheek, lingering. “I was worried you wouldn’t come. With all the police about...”
“Oh, Thomas!” Mrs. Gable melted against him, her face pressed into the hollow of his neck, her fingers clutching the lapels of his jacket. “I couldn’t stay away. I needed to see you. It’s all falling apart.”
Ah, Vera thought, watching the way their bodies fit together with the ease of long familiarity. So that’s how it is.
A village vicar and the widowed baker. It was practically a cliché—but clichés became clichés because they happened so often. The loneliness of the cloth, the warmth of a woman who smelled of fresh bread and vanilla. Vera had seen stranger pairings in her time.
The Vicar stroked Mrs. Gable’s hair, murmuring something too soft for Vera to catch. Then he pulled back, holding her at arm’s length, his thumbs tracing circles on her shoulders.
“Tell me what’s happened. What did Pym say to you?”
“It’s dreadful!” Mrs. Gable’s voice cracked. “That awful man came to the shop this morning. He said... he said he knows.”
“Knows about us?” The Vicar’s face tightened with alarm.
“Yes—but that’s not the worst of it.” Mrs. Gable clutched his hands. “He has photographs, Thomas. Of us. At the folly. At my cottage. He must have been following us for weeks.”
Photographs. Vera filed that away. So Pym—or someone working with him—had been building a dossier on the villagers. Documenting their secrets. Preparing leverage.
“He said he’d send them to the Bishop,” Mrs. Gable continued, her voice rising toward hysteria. “He’d tell the whole village. He’d ruin you, Thomas. Your position, your reputation—everything you’ve worked for.”
“Let him.” The Vicar’s jaw set with surprising steel. “I don’t care about the Bishop. I care about you.”
“Don’t say that.” Mrs. Gable pressed her palm against his chest, over his heart. “I won’t let you throw away everything for me. You’ve given thirty years to this parish. These people love you.”
“And I love you.” He covered her hand with his own. “Martha, I’ve been hiding for too long. Sneaking around like a criminal, pretending I don’t count the hours until I can see you again. If Pym wants to expose us, perhaps it’s time we stopped being ashamed.”
Mrs. Gable’s eyes filled with fresh tears—but something else too, something fierce. “You dear, foolish man.”
“But there’s more,” she said, pulling away reluctantly, pacing in a tight circle. “He knows about the bakery. About the deed. About what my grandfather did during the war.”
Vera leaned forward slightly, her interest sharpening.
“He has documents,” Mrs. Gable continued, her voice thick with tears.
“He showed me copies. The original deed to the bakery—my grandfather obtained it fraudulently in 1943. The Hirsch family owned it before the war. They were... they were taken away. And my grandfather, he... he just moved in. Changed the paperwork. Pretended it had always been ours.”
The Vicar’s face had gone pale. “Martha...”
“I didn’t know.” Mrs. Gable’s voice rose to something close to a wail.
“I swear I didn’t know until Pym showed me the papers.
My grandmother never said anything. I thought we’d owned that building for generations.
And now he says if I don’t sign over the property, he’ll expose everything.
He’ll tell the papers. He’ll contact the Hirsch family’s descendants.
He says I’ll lose everything—the bakery, my reputation, everything my family built. ”
“It wasn’t your fault,” the Vicar said firmly. “You didn’t know. You were a child—you weren’t even born when—”
“It doesn’t matter!” Mrs. Gable clutched his hands. “The shame of it. The scandal. And Thomas, he said... he said worse things would happen if I didn’t cooperate.”
“Worse things?”
“He talked about accidents.” Mrs. Gable’s voice dropped to a whisper. “Kitchen accidents. Gas leaks. Food contamination. He said it would be such a tragedy if someone got sick from my baking. If the health inspector found... found something in my flour stores.”
Vera felt a cold weight settle in her stomach.
Rat poison in the flour. Barnaby had one of Mrs. Gable’s biscuits clutched in his hand when he died.
So far, they were sticking to the heart failure story.
The poison was likely injected through the needle hole Vera had seen, but the authorities could make it seem like it was in what he had eaten.
No one would know enough to question that. No one but Vera.
It wasn’t just a threat to ruin Mrs. Gable’s business. It was a frame waiting to be sprung. If someone died of poisoning in Lark’s End—if Pym himself turned up dead, for instance—the evidence would point straight to Martha Gable’s kitchen.
The perfect scapegoat for whatever OmniCorp’s “alternative methods” might require.
“He gave me until noon tomorrow,” Mrs. Gable was saying. “If I don’t sign, he’ll... Thomas, I don’t know what to do. I can’t fight these people. They have lawyers and money and documents I can’t even understand.”
“We should go to the police.”
“And tell them what? That I’m being blackmailed over a decades old property fraud committed by my dead grandfather?” Mrs. Gable laughed bitterly. “Constable Oakes can barely handle parking violations. This is... this is something else entirely.”
She opened the basket. Inside, along with a Victoria sponge that was clearly meant to provide cover for this meeting, was a sheaf of papers.
“These are the contracts Pym wants me to sign.” She thrust them at the Vicar. “I can’t understand half of it. Legal jargon. But it signs over the mineral rights to something called OmniCorp. Not just the bakery—all the land underneath it, going down... I don’t even know how far.”
“Mineral rights?” The Vicar frowned, leafing through the papers. “What could they possibly want with the minerals under Lark’s End?”
Vera knew the answer. Lithium. High purity. Worth more than the entire village.
But Mrs. Gable and the Vicar clearly didn’t.
“I don’t care what they want,” Mrs. Gable said. “I just want them to leave me alone. Maybe I should just sign. Give them what they want. Then it would all be over.”