The Tomb of the Honey Bee: A Posie Parker Mystery (The Posie Parker Mystery Series Book 2) Read online

  Lady Violet described how Alaric had run around like an idiot, ineffectually, dragging buckets of water from the swimming pool to stem the fires in the fields, but he had not managed to save even one beehive before the noxious and highly poisonous fumes had knocked him out and rendered him unconscious. He had woken up two days later in hospital, lucky to be alive but utterly bereft.

  ‘So he then spent a glum couple of days at Boynton Hall trying to clear up the fields, and I did what I could to help him. But it was pitiful. Alaric refused to talk to any of the others in the house. He was simmering with hatred. He didn’t come in to eat with us once in the Great Hall.’

  ‘No question then? This was deliberate sabotage too? Was there a police report?’

  ‘Oh yes!’ Lady Violet laughed scornfully. ‘But the police in the countryside are not much better than your lot here in town, it seems. Basically they decided it was carelessness, or an accident, or both.’

  ‘So they don’t suspect anyone for the crime?’

  Lady Violet shook her head, but Posie noticed a keen light burning in Violet’s beautiful grey eyes.

  ‘But you suspect someone, don’t you, Lady Violet? Who do you think committed these crimes against your brother?’

  ‘Take your pick. There are several unsavoury characters I can tell you about, all staying at Boynton Hall at present. I wouldn’t put these crimes past any of them. They certainly all have a motive for bumping Alaric off. As to which of them did these things, that’s what you need to find out.’

  Posie turned a new page and started a spider-diagram. Although, on closer inspection, she was surprised to see she had drawn a honey bee at the centre of the net.

  Lady Violet started to tick suspects off on her long, beautiful fingers:

  ‘First, my other brother, Lord Roderick – a first-class ape if ever you met one – always in the shadow of Alaric, always the black sheep of the family. About a month ago Alaric announced he was going to change his Will in favour of me, so that I would be able to support myself when he died. Roderick was to be entirely written out.’

  ‘Does Alaric own much? Enough to kill for?’

  ‘Not really. Not in his own right. But there is an old Family Trust which pays an income out to Alaric. He wasn’t allowed to give it up when he gave up all his other rights when he was twenty-one. But the important point is this: the person Alaric names as the main beneficiary of his Will gets the final Trust money. Therefore, if Alaric decides that Roderick is cut out of his Will, Roderick can’t get the money from the Trust either. It’s worth a great deal, almost Two Hundred Thousand Pounds, I believe.’

  Posie gasped and scribbled this down. ‘Good grief! What a lot of money! Certainly enough to make a difference to Roderick, anyhow. I have heard he lives…how shall I say, extravagantly?’

  Lady Violet nodded. ‘That’s true enough. Perhaps Roderick thought he would try and kill Alaric before he had a chance to change the Will?’

  ‘And has Alaric actually got around to changing his Will in your favour yet, do you know?’

  ‘I don’t know. I called his solicitors, but they won’t speak to me. They say it’s “confidential”.’

  ‘I might be able to help you there,’ Posie said, noting down the name and address of the firm of lawyers concerned, an ancient firm just ten minutes’ walk away, near the Grey’s Inn Road. ‘I can try and obtain that information. Any other suspects?’

  The girl nodded quickly and continued:

  ‘Lady Boynton, Roderick’s American wife. Plain old Eve Burns, as she was, before her marriage. A dreadful creature: has all the looks and personality of a cuttlefish.’

  ‘And her motive?’

  Lady Violet smiled ruefully.

  ‘To help Roderick, I guess. She’d do anything for Roderick, she adores him. And she hates Alaric, she’s jealous of his fame. Why, do you know, I’ve even seen her cutting up newspaper articles about Alaric before? She was scoring through his face with a razor blade when I entered the Library one day and crept up behind her! She pretended it was a coincidence and that she was just sharpening the blade on whatever was to hand, but I wasn’t fooled for a minute! She was cutting his face to shards! Also, it would be very much in her interest if this Trust money comes their way, and quickly, too. It’s no secret that Roderick only married Eve for her money…and there’s going to be no more of that!’

  ‘Oh? Why?’

  ‘Papa Burns is over from Texas right now. He said he wanted to pay a visit for the “English summer”, but what he really wanted to do was check on how Roderick has been spending Eve’s money. He’s none too pleased – I heard him shouting with Eve in the Library last week – he was telling her he’d be shelling out no more cash for their “indolent lifestyle” and that he didn’t want his money to go on maintaining an old dump like Boynton Hall!’

  Posie noted this down, nibbling the top of her pen.

  ‘Anyone else you suspect?’

  ‘Yes. The third person is Codlington, my brother Roderick’s Valet. He’s a nasty piece of work. Four weeks ago Alaric told me he had found out something suspicious about Codlington, but he didn’t elaborate on it. I think Codlington was stealing things from Roderick, but I’m not entirely sure. Alaric hinted that he wanted to fetch the police and make sure Codlington left Boynton Hall without a good character reference. That would have spelled the end for a man like Codlington. He’d never get a job as good as this one again.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not sure how it was resolved. Maybe you can find out?’

  Lady Violet continued: ‘The fourth person is a guest at the house. In fact, she’s our second cousin. Dame Ianthe Flowers. Do you know of her?’

  Posie nodded. Ianthe Flowers was a prolific and popular women’s fiction writer. She usually wrote crime mysteries set in impossibly dreamy settings. She was known to have made a great deal of money from her novels.

  ‘Ianthe has been staying with us for the last few months. She writes most days, keeps herself to herself up in her room. She said she wanted some inspiration for a new book, a murder mystery set in a vast country house. She was going to use Boynton Hall as the inspiration for the book.’

  Posie frowned. She had seen newspaper photos of Dame Ianthe, a cheerful-looking blonde woman in her mid-forties who looked as if she wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone plan a series of horrible destructive events against her own cousin.

  ‘I know what you’re thinking!’ trilled Lady Violet excitedly. ‘Ianthe is the last person to do this! Butter wouldn’t melt and all that! But you’re wrong! For weeks she’d been trailing around after Alaric like a little lost dog, mooning around the place. She even professed a passion for bees. Imagine! How embarrassing! She’s madly, crazily in love with him. And then Alaric dashed all her hopes: he told her he was still in love with someone else, a previous lover whom he couldn’t forget in a hurry. Ianthe went to pieces. She shut herself off in her room for days. That was about a month ago now. But you know what they say…’

  ‘“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned?” Is that what you mean?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  Posie pursed her lips, unconvinced. ‘And the final suspect? Is this by any chance the “lover he couldn’t forget in a hurry”?’

  Posie noted with interest that Violet almost squirmed beneath her gaze, and flushed a dark unbecoming beetroot colour.

  ‘No. Not exactly. It’s the husband of the lover Alaric couldn’t forget. Not a pretty situation, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Ah! I see! A case of the husband’s classic revenge? The “husband scorned”. Who is it?’

  ‘I know you’ll be discreet, of course you will. But maybe don’t write this down? The lover was Lady Cosima Catchpole. Her husband is Hugo Marchpane.’

  Posie caught her breath, trying not to look surprised or impressed. ‘You mean the war hero, Major Hugo Marchpane?’

  Hugo Marchpane was very famous, perhaps even more so than Alaric Boynton-Dale. A
flying ace, he had been badly injured in the Great War, but had since gone on to become a senior government advisor. There was even talk of him being knighted in his own right.

  ‘The very same,’ Lady Violet nodded. ‘In fact, he was Alaric’s best friend. They flew together in the war. Cosima and Hugo live across the meadows from us on the estate. Cosima broke poor Al’s heart last summer. He was crazy for her, but last year she decided it would be best to end their affair and save her marriage with Hugo. The trouble is, Hugo has only just found out, and he’s gone ballistic. There have been loads of ugly scenes, broken windows and such like. Hugo can’t believe it’s all over. He thinks Alaric and Cosima are still pulling the wool over his eyes, even now.’

  ‘Golly! How on earth did Major Marchpane find out about the affair, after all that time?’

  ‘He was tipped off. Got an anonymous telegram. I’m guessing Ianthe sent it. Major Marchpane asked Cosima straight up if it were true and she answered him honestly and admitted the whole affair. He went stark raving mad.’

  ‘When did he find out exactly?’

  ‘Just over a month ago, perhaps?’

  Posie chewed her pen top. The timing for each suspect worked. In each case, just over a month ago, some event had triggered a reaction which had necessitated action or actions against Alaric Boynton-Dale. Bad, dangerous actions. But how dangerous, exactly? And had someone managed to murder Alaric for real, or had he managed to escape the danger and flee? And if so, where was he now?

  ‘So now what?’ Posie said, closing her notebook. ‘What do you want me to do about it all? It sounds like a mare’s nest.’

  ‘I need you to find out what’s happened to Alaric. I need to know the truth,’ Lady Violet said simply. ‘I think you should come back with me to Boynton Hall in the Cotswolds. You can investigate further there. Say you’ll do it, please? I want somebody discreet to look into this.’

  ‘But surely this is a police matter, given the severity of what you are saying. Surely you can see that?’

  ‘I told you, the police are only interested when there’s a body lying dead in the gutter. Can’t you come with me now?’

  Posie laughed and shook her head. She had an enormous stack of clients on her books since the case of the Maharajah diamond earlier in the spring, and even now she could hear the rustle and polite scraping of chairs from the waiting room. She had a full day ahead, with appointments booked back-to-back throughout the afternoon.

  ‘Frightfully sorry, but I can’t come today, Lady Violet. But I can come tomorrow. As luck would have it I have booked the next two weeks off for a holiday. So I am happy to be at your disposal.’

  She winked at Lady Violet. ‘And yes, I will work for you for free. It just so happens that my holiday plans have been…er, cancelled. But please, don’t mention that this is a freebie to anyone, I do have a business to run. Shall I come to Boynton Hall in disguise? As an old school friend of yours, perhaps? Where did you go to school, just so I know? Roedean? Wycombe Abbey?’

  ‘The latter,’ Lady Violet said. ‘But don’t worry about a disguise. Come as yourself, as my guest. That will put the wind up the blighters! That’s what I want!’

  Posie shrugged. ‘If that is your instruction, so be it.’

  Lady Violet left after making arrangements to collect Posie the following day at the train station of Stowe-on-the-Middle-Wold. Just before her next client came into the room, Posie couldn’t resist unscrewing the top of one of the jars of Alaric’s honey. Hunting in her desk drawer for a clean spoon, she gave up and dug out a good spoonful with her scarlet-painted fingertip.

  And when she tasted it, she realised just why Alaric Boynton-Dale’s honey had won all those awards, why it was famed as the best in the land, why one jar alone was worth paying eighty-four pence for.

  The honey was perfect.

  ****

  Later that evening, having called Alaric’s solicitors and been sent away with a flea in her ear, Posie was clearing her desk ready for her holidays when Prudence Smythe popped her head around the door on her way home, eyes bulging with anticipation behind her thick tortoiseshell glasses.

  ‘So, what was Lady Violet like then? Do tell me! Was she like she is in all the magazines? Wasn’t she tall? And she didn’t look as sleek as I would expect, somehow…’

  Posie remembered the grease marks on Lady Violet’s linen-covered knees, the lack of any lipstick or hair pomade. And then instantly she felt ashamed of herself. Who cared about the glamour factor, really? This was a slice of real life, a real girl in real distress, going out of her mind with worry.

  ‘She was intriguing,’ Posie said carefully, telling the truth. ‘The whole case sounds intriguing.’

  Posie looked quickly around her familiar office, grateful for her own lot in life. She noted the purple evening shadows creeping slowly up the wall, Mr Minks licking himself all over in his snug basket, the string shopping bag in Prudence’s hand with its couple of unexciting items inside it for her tea.

  There was nothing at all precarious here.

  ****

  Two

  The 11.48 from Paddington the next day took an hour and a half to reach Oxford, where Posie had to pick up a connecting train to Stowe-on-the-Middle-Wold, and she spent most of that first journey lost in a none-too-rosy world of her own.

  It would be fair to say that this mystery had come along at a good time for Posie. While she had heaps of business on at the Grape Street Bureau, she needed a distraction, a pick-me-up. She needed to be shaken out of the wreckage of her car crash of a personal life. Not exactly a heartbreak, but an upsetting and gut-wrenching heartache had befallen her. And even now, she was not quite sure what to make of the whole thing.

  Only one month previously she had been eagerly looking forwards to the return of Len Irving, her unofficial business partner and almost-boyfriend.

  Len had dutifully rushed off to the South of France in February, summoned by his dying father, interrupting both the start of their love affair and his prosperous and lucrative business as an undercover ‘shadower’ at the Grape Street Bureau. Since then Posie had heard from him only in sporadic dribs and drabs. In early May he had sent flowers, yellow mimosa, and he had written, promising to return to London very shortly. In fact, Len’s father seemed to have made a miraculous recovery and Posie had begun to expect Len’s imminent arrival with mixed feelings of relief and excitement.

  But then, nothing.

  The letters and the postcards from France had just stopped, had dried up entirely. Anxiously Posie had continued to write to the private boarding-house address which Len had given her. But she had heard nothing in return. At first she had feared something catastrophic or deadly had befallen Len, and in a panic she had booked herself two weeks of holiday so that she might travel down by train to the Cap d’Antibes, where Len’s father lived, and see for herself what the problem might be. She had tried to tamp down her feelings of rising panic.

  And then the niggling doubts had set in. Had something terrible really happened to Len or had Posie just been replaced in his affections by some new woman, a French femme fatale, perhaps? In which case the last thing she wanted to do was turn up, unannounced. Len was very good-looking, and the South of France was famously a romantic, glamorous, easy-going kind of place, and it was easy to imagine swarms of beautiful tanned women roaming like packs of hungry wolves up and down the seafront, looking for new, tasty prey.

  Or had Mr Irving Senior’s health simply taken another turn for the worse, and Len just didn’t have the time to answer her letters? And if that was the case she didn’t want to travel down to France and get in the way of a delicate situation.

  Or perhaps Len had simply changed his mind about their budding relationship? If so, he probably didn’t want to upset Posie with his change of heart, but he also wouldn’t want to upset the lucrative working arrangement they had come to at the Grape Street Bureau, which saw them take a 50/50 split of all profits.

  Whatever the case,
Posie had decided to stop writing altogether, to refrain from booking herself a train ticket and to take effective, closer-to-home action of a sensible, definite sort. She decided that all she wanted to know was if Len was still residing at the same boarding-house. At least then she would know he was well, and that he had received her letters.

  Posie had turned to the ever-dependable Inspector Richard Lovelace of New Scotland Yard, who, without asking any questions, had got in touch with a colleague of his, Inspector Leferb in Cannes, the nearest big town to the Cap d’Antibes, asking for his help.

  The telegram, when it had arrived for Posie the week previously, had brought a feeling of relief, but also a stinging sadness which refused to go away. It had read:

  INSPECTOR LEFERB HAS CONFIRMED LEN IRVING IS STILL RESIDING AT THE SAME BOARDING HOUSE ADDRESS IN CAP D’ANTIBES. NO PROBLEMS. HAPPY AS LARRY.

  LEN’S FATHER NICELY RECOVERED FROM ILLESS AND LOOKING SPRIGHTLY TOO. HOPE THAT HELPS?

  YOURS,

  R. LOVELACE.

  But Posie couldn’t help feeling that there was something Inspector Lovelace or Inspector Leferb was holding back.

  Now, as Posie waited on the sweltering tarmac of the Oxford Station platform, clutching a copy of The Lady and a greasy, paper-wrapped sandwich under her arm, she repeated to herself her current mantra: she would not humiliate herself by writing letters to a man who did not want to receive them, and if it ever came to it and Len returned to London with a perfectly good reason for his silence, she would listen to him and judge as she always did, on the strength of the case and the evidence of the facts.

  But she was well aware that she was deluding herself. Affairs of the heart were so much more difficult to manage than the mysteries which had become her bread-and-butter trade. For who really likes to be jilted in love? Posie was aware that her heart was as ripe for bruising as the next person’s, and that even prominent, famous people could apparently suffer heartache. Take for example the wealthy Dame Ianthe Flowers, whom Lady Violet had described so disparagingly the previous day, a woman hopelessly and uselessly in love with Alaric Boynton-Dale. Or even Alaric Boynton-Dale himself, hurt by the delectable Cosima Catchpole in her own giddy pursuit of happiness. Posie was grateful for the purpose this new case had given her, and she felt a sense of relief that she had not had to face a lonely two weeks of empty nothingness in dusty, sweltering London, in her small and airless South Kensington bedsit. After all, she had made no alternative plans for the holiday and most of her friends were either away from town for the summer or else already booked up.