DCI Eacles, Tom had told me, had been recently brought in from Eastern Division to fill the vacancy when Tom’s failure to follow orders in the Finchley Hoard case had cost him his promotion. My fault—a fact he’d never once brought up.
Eacles took the third chair and pulled it slightly behind mine in the narrow room—just enough to make me feel uncomfortable. It brought back my grandmother’s warning about that old boar: “Look him in the eye, girlie. Never turn your back on him.”
Tom turned on a recording device. “Tuesday, May fifth.” He looked at his wrist. “Twenty-five minutes past one PM. DI Mallory and DCI Eacles interviewing Mrs. Kate Hamilton concerning the death of Mrs. Evelyn Villiers.”
He opened his black notebook. “Let’s begin with yesterday morning, Mrs. Hamilton. Can you tell us how you first met Mrs. Evelyn Villiers?”
I told my story again, trying to picture the meeting in my mind so I wouldn’t omit any potentially relevant details. When I finished, I said, “She told me to contact her by text. Then she left the shop, crossed the street, and turned toward the river. She appeared to be in a hurry, and I wondered if she’d driven herself from Little Gosling or if someone had given her a ride.”
“Do you remember which street she turned into?” Tom asked.
“The one just before the Suffolk Tea Room, leading to Dash End Lane.”
“Weavers Street,” Tom said.
“Send Cliffe to see if anyone saw the damn car,” Eacles growled. “If we’re going to solve this case, we need facts.”
“Already done, sir.” I saw a muscle tighten in Tom’s cheek. He flipped a page in his notebook.
I heard Eacles move behind me. “You said you felt uncomfortable about Mrs. Villiers. Why was that?”
“Intuition, I suppose—and her demeanor.” Being questioned by someone I couldn’t see felt weird, so I addressed my answer to Tom. “When she entered the shop, she made sure no one was observing us from the street. Then she asked if I had somewhere private to talk. She seemed wary, suspicious, but maybe it was just because the jar was worth a lot of money—although she didn’t seem to know that. Or because Ivor wasn’t there as she’d expected. Or maybe”—I hesitated, trying to put my thoughts into words—“because she wasn’t used to dealing with people face-to-face. Vivian Bunn said Mrs. Villiers had been a recluse since the death of her husband eighteen years ago.” I looked over my shoulder at DCI Eacles. “Miss Bunn is the woman I’m living with on the Finchley estate.”
Eacles grunted.
“Mrs. Villiers specifically said not to telephone her about the appraisal. I was to text her, and she’d call me.”
“Does that have some significance?” Eacles asked.
“I don’t know. You asked me to tell you why I felt uncomfortable.”
Eacles exhaled slowly, like a leaky balloon. “That word she said—Meissen. What do you make of it?”
“Meissen is an old and very fine porcelain manufacturer in what used to be Eastern Germany. Mrs. Villiers told me Meissen was one of her late husband’s favorites. That’s what she must have meant, although I can’t imagine why she said it.”
“Is there anything else you can tell us?” Tom asked. “Maybe something that didn’t seem important at the time.”
I thought for a moment, going over my conversation with Mrs. Villiers. “There is one thing. As I was preparing the contract for her to sign, she mumbled something—sort of under her breath. It sounded like ‘wagon bell,’ but when I asked her to repeat it, she said something completely different. I decided she’d been talking to herself and didn’t realize she’d spoken aloud.”
“Wagon bell?” I felt rather than saw Eacles roll his eyes.
Tom made a note. “What can you tell us about the Villiers’s art collection?”
Eacles’s chair scraped the floor as he moved into my peripheral vision.
“Only what Mrs. Villiers told me. I got the impression she hadn’t shared her husband’s passion for art and antiques and was taking an interest now only to prevent her daughter from inheriting.” I wanted to add my mother’s comment about something having changed recently in Mrs. Villiers’s life, but I’d save it for later, when Tom and I were alone.
Tom glanced at Eacles, and some message passed between them. He opened the top drawer of his desk and pulled out a polythene bag. “Mrs. Villiers was wearing this necklace when she died. What can you tell us about it?”
I peered at the heart-shaped gold locket inside. “I noticed her wearing it when she came in the shop.”
Tom handed me a pair of latex gloves. After putting them on, I unzipped the bag, took out the pendant, and pressed the release. Inside, under a rock-crystal window, was a coil of black hair and an inscription: “M. Grenfel, born Mar 5, 1805, died Feb 4, 1853.”
“It’s a mourning locket—mid-nineteenth century—a floral design embedded with paste stones—not diamonds. The surface and edges are worn, so it hasn’t spent much time in a jewelry box.” I turned it over to examine the markings. “It’s engraved on the back with the initial E. For Evelyn, I suppose. This is the kind of thing a young girl might receive on her birthday. It’s twelve carat gold filled—pretty, but not especially valuable. Might sell for a couple of hundred pounds on a good day.”
“How about this Grenfel person?”
“He—or she—was in their late forties when they died. A great-great-grandparent, perhaps. Or maybe someone found the locket in a thrift store and bought it because they thought it was pretty.”
“We’ll check the name Grenfel,” Tom said. “Maybe Evelyn Villiers had relatives who would know where Lucy is living now.”
“What about the aunt in Essex?” I asked. “The one Lucy was sent to live with after her father’s death.”
“Someone’s on that now.”
DCI Eacles cleared his throat. “I don’t fancy our chances of recovering the stolen item—the hoonping.” He stretched out the vowel. “In the meantime, we need to
