A Spoonful of Murder Read online

  A SPOONFUL OF MURDER

  J.M. Hall

  Copyright

  Published by AVON

  A Division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2022

  Copyright © J.M. Hall 2022

  Cover design and illustration by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2022

  J.M. Hall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

  Source ISBN: 9780008509613

  Ebook Edition © March 2022 ISBN: 9780008509620

  Version: 2022-01-17

  Dedication

  To Judith

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  About the Publisher

  CHAPTER ONE

  An old friend is met and unwanted cake is given.

  Quite simply, being involved in a murder was something they would never have set out to do. As Thelma said afterwards, everything that happened was (in the beginning at any rate) the sort of thing that was part and parcel of living in a small town. Something happened, then something else, and then something else on top of that. Pat going into the bank in Thirsk, not Ripon, Liz bumping into Paula that morning in Tesco.

  And the first of those events happened because it was on Thursdays when they had their ‘coffee o’clock’ sessions at the Thirsk Garden Centre café. Not a Wednesday because that was Thelma’s all-day stint at the charity shop and not a Friday because that was when Pat liked to go to the Farm Shop and Liz picked up her grandson from school. And, by unspoken agreement, neither a Monday or a Tuesday because those days were the beginning of the week and the feeling was that it was good to meet as the week was winding down. This feeling was one that harked back to their days teaching at St Barnabus’s Primary School when Friday morning break times were marked with a feeling of anticipation plus chocolate digestives. Days when life built up to the weekend; two welcome days away from powder paint and star jumps, sponge prints and cursive flicks.

  Since they’d all been retired (Pat two years, Thelma and Liz four), it had to be said the weekends had somewhat lost that special quality – that snatched, hallowed glow. Truth be told the days even held a certain … sameness – Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays – a sameness to be fought against with book groups and Keep Fit classes and stints in the charity shop. Fought against but not admitted to.

  Hence coffee o’clock every Thursday in the café at Thirsk Garden Centre (good parking, well away from the tourists).

  And if it hadn’t been a Thursday … if it hadn’t been the garden centre café … they wouldn’t have met Topsy and KellyAnne and, crucially, Thelma wouldn’t have come across Topsy crying in the toilets, which they all agreed was really the start of things.

  So: a Thursday morning in the Thirsk Garden Centre café, about eleven thirty. A dreary, dripping late February day when a wet winter at last seemed to be fading into an equally damp spring and the ‘Get Set For The Season!’ displays really had their work cut out to project an image of change and cheer. Half-hearted sleet smeared the café windows and everything everywhere seemed wet – sopping wet, dark and dripping. Great mirrored slabs of water lay in the flat fields round the town, roads and lanes were marked with flood warning signs and the café had a distinct smell of damp coats and cough sweets.

  The place was about two-thirds full with (as Pat invariably said) People of a Certain Age. Daughters taking their parents out for coffee, the odd silent married couple glumly demolishing a full English and, most commonly, friends like themselves: coffee, cake and catching up.

  Ensconced at their favourite table (the round one in the far corner, well away from the self-clear trolley and the Edinburgh Woollen Mill), they had so far that morning caught up with their various news: Pat’s youngest, Liam, and his first girlfriend – yes, a nice enough sounding girl, but apparently some sort of poet with one of those Celtic tattoos round her upper arm – and whether this may or may not derail Liam from his A levels and his chances of getting in to do Structural Engineering at Durham. (‘Bless,’ said Liz. ‘Never mind “Bless”,’ said Pat, ‘it’s grades he needs to focus on, not Celtic poets.’) Then there was Liz’s grandson Jacob who, despite being in the most sought-after school in Boroughbridge, with the most sought-after teacher in school (the five-star Mrs Bell), was industriously working his way through every scrap of special needs support going. Plus there were increasingly persistent episodes of what Liz termed ‘The Meltdowns’. The latest worrying news on this subject, related by Liz with her trademark frown, were worrying allusions from the school about the possibility of certain avenues Regrettably Being Explored.

  They were winding their session down, discussing the latest saga of the executive head of their old school and her new personalized number plates (which says everything there is to be said about the academy system, was Thelma’s dark comment) when Liz said brightly and suddenly, ‘It’s Topsy,’ almost as if discussion of their former workplace had somehow conjured their one-time colleague into existence.

  Thelma and Pat scanned the café. Thelma expected to see competent, if a trifle sombre, features – features that perfectly matched the no-nonsense handwriting in children’s reading records (Read with SOME fluency. PLEASE try and finish this book at home). Pat instinctively checked her bust, smoothed her wavy, hennaed hair, and adjusted her floaty bright scarf, rememberi
ng as clearly as if she’d just heard it, the grunt of disapproval in the back of the throat, which had accompanied so many of the things she had done in front of Topsy over the years: liberal use of glitter, impressions of the school secretary, overenthusiastic renditions of ‘We’re Going on a Bear Hunt’.

  The person they saw first was not Topsy but KellyAnne, Topsy’s only daughter, once a golden-haired princess, now somewhat older, somewhat larger, with her mother’s set sombre Yorkshire face but still the princess trappings (pink Chanel coat, Michael Kors handbag, the golden locks obviously done somewhere a sight more expensive than Curl Up and Di, the salon they all used). She was scanning the busyish room for an empty table. Thelma, who had a thing about old black and white films, was immediately put in mind of Bette Davis; she could almost see the think bubble forming above KellyAnne’s head with the words ‘what a dump’.

  And standing next to KellyAnne, a figure, arm being clutched like a child on a crossing, a stooped figure … an impression of bewilderment, a flushed face slightly shaking, looking belligerently around as if she was wondering where she was and just what was expected of her. Then the face suddenly clicked into focus and they both saw in it the once efficient if formidable features of their former nursery nurse, Topsy Joy. Her name had always reminded Pat (who had a habit of assigning people titles and names) of something out of a children’s picture book – ‘Topsy Joy at the Park’ … ‘Topsy Joy at the seaside’. Maybe that was why Topsy could be such a tartar to compensate for any wrong impression that might have been given by her name.

  When KellyAnne heard Liz and saw the three of them all sitting there, her face smoothed out into sudden sunny lines of relief, almost as if she had expected them to be there and had been looking for them.

  ‘Look who it is,’ she said, brightly giving Topsy a slight shake. ‘Mother, look who it is.’ She smiled radiantly across at them; something about her brightness, about the deliberate nature of her words to Topsy gave an impression of their being underlined in pink highlighter pen. The three exchanged surreptitious glances; that was not how one spoke to Topsy, not ever. But then Topsy didn’t seem aware of much at all; she scanned them vaguely as KellyAnne gently led her over.

  ‘Now then.’ Liz stood up. But Topsy took a step back from the slight smiling figure in the green cardigan, peering at the greying short hair, the frown lines, as if trying to bring to mind some buried memory. ‘Long time no see’, said Liz with less certainty.

  It had in fact been over eighteen months since they’d seen her at Gordon’s funeral, since they’d stood huddled together in Baldersby churchyard, Topsy’s face a set mask and KellyAnne somehow reduced to the dimensions of a shrunken child.

  ‘We’ve just come for a run out. Blow away the old cobwebs,’ said KellyAnne. ‘Haven’t we, Mother?’ There it was again, the warm, cheerful but deliberate tone and, they all noticed, with a definite weary edge. They all looked at Topsy who looked back like someone straining to complete a Sudoku and annoyed at the interruption.

  The moment was cheerfully blasted with a sudden burst of a gutsy-sounding ballad (which only Pat identified as Aretha Franklin). There was something almost feverish in the way KellyAnne scrabbled in the Michael Kors handbag and dived on the bright pink phone.

  ‘Ladies, I have got to take this,’ she said in grave, regretful tones that implied it was at least a minor member of the royal family calling. ‘I’ll not be two seconds.’

  KellyAnne was right; she wasn’t two seconds, she was in fact thirty-three and a half minutes. Thinking about it afterwards each of them felt she had somewhat foisted her mother on them. (Not that we minded. Poor love. She needed the break, Liz said later to Pat. Well she certainly got it, said Pat.) And yes, of course none of them minded, not really, but it was undeniably a rather fraught thirty-three minutes that followed.

  It wasn’t at all that they weren’t pleased to see Topsy, but equally it very much wasn’t as Liz kept saying brightly, ‘Just like old times.’ That Topsy was having difficulties was something apparent from the get-go. For a start the conversation was sticky – there was no other word for it – with comments and questions made to Topsy being met by puzzled silence. It felt a bit like talking to someone on a bad phone line; as if Topsy hadn’t heard or simply hadn’t understood perfectly clear remarks about their various children, their holidays, their various tussles with the new Aldi, stiff knees and leaky guttering.

  And then there were the comments Topsy made herself. About Gordon, her late husband, made in the present tense as if he was simply at the golf club as opposed to Baldersby churchyard. Mentions of KellyAnne as though she were still at school – and then other, more random comments about unsafe garden walls and people coming to the house, comments that didn’t quite make any sense. Pat showed a tendency to put Topsy right; experience, however, had taught both Liz (with Derek’s mother) and Thelma (with Auntie Irene) otherwise. Listening to Pat’s bright corrections, Thelma remembered Auntie Irene’s insistence that Uncle Bill (deceased) had just nipped down to the allotment and how her mother’s initially almost angry contradictions had over time morphed into a weary ‘Has he, Irene?’

  Talking about St Barnabus’s was a bit better, though it was obvious Topsy hadn’t a clue the school had become an academy (or for that matter what an academy was), plus she seemed to be under the impression that Thelma had yet to retire even though she’d been the one to present her with the cafetiere at that final assembly.

  And then, aside from the difficulty of conversation, there was the fact they were now a good twenty-five minutes beyond their usual time. Liz (shooting covert but agonized glances at her watch) needed to pick up Jacob’s tea and also wanted to give the bedding plants section a quick once-over. Thelma was to cover Verna at the charity shop and Pat half had in her mind a session in Harrogate tempting herself in Country Casuals. The other half – more than half – was considering getting home early enough to give Liam’s bedroom a quick check to see if there was any evidence of shenanigans with the Celtic poet.

  And there was something else. Something that had turned coffee o’clock from its usual point of stability in the week into something rather cold and insecure. The illness that was undoubtedly creeping over Topsy was something they’d all seen at various times in grandparents, then parents, people at church, ex-colleagues and – increasingly now – the partners and the friends of contemporaries. Something they realized was one of the uncomfortable possibilities of growing old, and a possibility that they all now needed to face. If dementia could happen to Topsy, capable no-nonsense Topsy, who could scour her way through a pile of dirty paint palettes quicker than anyone in Blue Base, it could certainly happen to them.

  So all in all it was a relief when KellyAnne reappeared (Sorry, ladies!) with a sunny gust of self-absolving laughter that denied the thirty-three minutes and the bulging Edinburgh Woollen Mill carrier bag. The absence had obviously done her good; she seemed a lot happier, like the spring displays, shinier, smilier, brighter … She carried with her a tray, with more coffee for everyone, plus five great pink Baldersby Cherry Rascals.

  ‘This is a day for cake, ladies!’ she pronounced cheerily. ‘Cake, Mother!’ She put the tray down and gave Topsy a sudden tight hug from behind that brought tears to Thelma’s eyes. Whatever the future held for Topsy, it also held KellyAnne to help her through it.

  None of the three actually wanted the cake. Thelma was full of toastie, Pat suffering from her usual post-cake-calorie guilt; Liz stared in frank horror at hers. Plus, of course, the whole coffee and cake thing was awkward because it meant they all had to stay longer still. And even with KellyAnne’s brightly dominating presence, the conversation wasn’t really much easier than it had been. It wasn’t as though they’d ever really had that much to do with KellyAnne; throughout their years working alongside Topsy they’d been spectators to the story of her life: Muffin the pony, the private school, then another when the first didn’t work out owing to various ‘issues’ meaning that
exam grades were never what they could be. And then starting up as a beautician, funded by her parents, then working as part-owner of a stables, again funded by Gordon and Topsy. Then the married (and after meeting KellyAnne, rapidly divorced) vet from Richmond; that wedding with the string quartet and the ice sculpture. And the whole timeline liberally peppered with – as Pat put it – ‘designer this, that and the other’.

  As they sat there and the café filled up with the lunchtime rush, KellyAnne asked them all a lot of bright questions, which only really showed that she knew them about as well as they knew her (Liz had one son, not two daughters; Pat had never been much of a gardener; and where KellyAnne got the idea that Thelma followed rugby league was anyone’s guess). There were occasional interjections from Topsy, some that made sense, some that didn’t; each of these was treated in the same way by her daughter: a warm smile, a covering of her hand with hers and a significant grimace at the other three. Talking about KellyAnne was a bit more successful. She was between jobs now, the last lot having been ‘frankly taking the pee eye ess ess’, but was doing a bit of work for her friend Ness who ran a property business. No one liked to ask whether the vet from Richmond was still on the scene; but as if reading their minds she said, ‘Of course Stuart and I are no more,’ and smiled regretfully round at them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Thelma.

  KellyAnne shook her head with a philosophical shrug. ‘You know how it is when you love someone but you just love them too much to stay together without a lot of pain?’ she said.

  They all nodded though none of them actually did. Pat fleetingly wondered whether throwing Rod’s boxers across the room and snapping ‘We do have a dirty linen basket’ qualified. ‘Is there anyone else on the scene?’ she asked. KellyAnne smiled with a look that could only be described as coy.

  ‘You know how it is,’ she said. ‘You have to kiss one helluva lot of frogs before you find your prince.’

  ‘And of course he came to the house.’ Topsy spoke abruptly.