“Did you try to talk to Colin’s mother?”
“She wasn’t there. I thought Colin must have taken her off to get away from the publicity, but she never came back. A few weeks later someone put up a ‘For Sale’ sign. That’s when I realized Colin wouldn’t be coming back either. Not that I didn’t hold out hope. I got the idea he’d gone to Belfast as we’d planned—that he’d be waiting for me there. Stupid, right?”
“Not stupid.” I sat on the floor next to her chair and petted Fergus. “Human. Our hearts break. We tie them up and go on.”
“Do hearts ever heal?”
“They do, Lucy. If we let them.” Did I just say that? I’m turning into my mother.
“Kate—Lucy, dear.” Vivian called out from the kitchen. “Join me for a glass of wine and some cheese straws before dinner. Fresh out of the oven.”
Lucy made a move, but I stopped her. “Did your mother ever contact you while you were at your Aunt Winnie’s?”
“Why? She’d said it all in that note—‘You’re no daughter of mine.’”
Something about that note bothered me. Could Evelyn Villiers have meant it literally?
I drove Lucy back to the inn after supper and made arrangements to pick her up at nine thirty for our trip to Hapthorn. At least Vivian had cheered her up a little with stories from her childhood, growing up in Suffolk after the Second World War.
Tom called while I was getting ready for bed. He’d tried me three times while I was with Ivor, finally leaving a message saying he’d phone later.
I heard laughter and the clinking of glasses in the background. Was he at a party? “Speak up. I can’t hear you.”
“Sorry. We’re at The Trout.”
“We?”
“I’m with Sophie. Mother had a headache.”
A migraine? “How is Sophie?”
“The divorce has been difficult. She’s shattered, trying to piece her life together again.”
With all those lovely pounds and pence as glue. “She must have been young when you and Sarah met.”
“She was fifteen, still at school.”
I did the math. That meant Sophie was in her mid-thirties. How did she arrange to have the face and body of a teenager?
“Thanks for your help with Lucy today,” he said.
“No problem. Can you meet us at Hapthorn Lodge tomorrow?”
“I can’t, Kate. I’m sorry. PC Weldon will stand in for me.”
I heard a female voice but couldn’t make out the words.
“I have to go.” It sounded like Tom had cupped his hand over the phone. “Sophie’s had too much to drink. Not that I blame her. I’m going to get her home and into bed.”
Right. When I didn’t respond, he said, “Look, I’ll call you in forty-five minutes. Will you still be up?”
Oh, I would be now.
I deserved a medal that night. I really did.
Okay, I stomped around the room for a while. Men can be so naïve. And women can be so devious—some women anyway. Liz’s plot to make Tom forget about me and fall in love with Sophie was transparent, but Tom couldn’t see it.
Or is he enjoying it?
Liz’s words circled through my brain: It’s almost like having Sarah back with us.
To keep myself from obsessing over Tom and Sophie’s intimate dinner—courtesy of Liz’s convenient headache—I threw myself into computer work. Ivor had several auctions going, and I’d have to pack and ship any items that sold. Each had a reserve—an amount below which he wasn’t prepared to sell—but they were reasonable sums, and I was sure something would be snapped up. At least I hoped so. Ivor needed the money more than ever.
The warm, damp air in my room felt claustrophobic. I cracked my window, smelling the mineral scent of rain mixed with wet thatch.
It wasn’t Tom’s fault the lovely Sophie was the spitting image of his dead wife. It wasn’t his fault she’d married a jerk who’d left her for an even younger model. It wasn’t his fault she’d turned up on his doorstep. Whose fault it was, I felt pretty sure I knew.
Tom called a little after ten.
“I’m sorry, Kate. This thing with Sophie is a real mess.”
“I’m sorry, too.” A medal and a ribbon for valor.
“It’s come at a bad time for me. Drugs are pouring into Suffolk. The Yard has agents at all the ports. We’ve followed every lead, but nothing pans out.”
“Ships? Trucks? Automobiles?”
“All of the above, probably. We don’t have a tenth of the manpower it would take to put up road blocks—not to speak of the disruption it would cause motorists. We need an inside track.” I heard him sigh. “To tell the truth, I’m worn out.”
“And now you’ve got a murder on your hands as well. Which reminds me—have you had any luck tracing Wallace Villiers’s Australian relatives?”
“His sister died fourteen years ago. She left a son and a daughter, both living in Australia. We asked the police there to interview them, find out if they’ve made any recent trips to the UK.”
“How about the Liu family? You were going to interview them again.”
“We did that. Henry and his wife emigrated from Hong Kong shortly after the Chinese government takeover in 1997. He’d owned a restaurant in Kowloon, so it was natural to open one here. His son and daughter-in-law arrived recently to join them—not surprising, given the recent unrest in Hong Kong. James taught history at Hong Kong University. Penny worked in the administrative offices. Everything checks out except for the time line the night of the murder.”
“Briony Peacock seemed pretty sure of her facts.”
“Henry admitted he might have been confused about the time. He was under pressure—customers demanding food—and then he found the body.”
“Could his wife add anything?”
“She speaks almost no English. All we understood was ‘Whatever he say.’”
“What about the son? Why wasn’t he helping his wife in the tent?”
“He says he was helping—until they had a row over the way he was frying the shrimp rolls or something. He got angry, stalked off, and the
