LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER SIX

      Trudy felt her jaw fall open as she looked at the house on the outskirts of Hampton Poyle, a pretty little village set deep in farming country. Large, built of Cotswold stone and uncompromisingly square in the Georgian manner, it stood in manicured grounds, looking effortlessly elegant and substantial.

      ‘How the other half lives, eh?’ Rodney Broadstairs said from the front passenger seat of the Panda car. Behind the wheel, Sergeant O’Grady smiled grimly.

      ‘Better watch your Ps and Qs here, sonny,’ he advised him flatly. ‘Right, I dare say the son of the house is out on his bleeding horse, but he’s promised his father he’ll be back by ten. Rod, you stick with him like glue – especially come twelve o’clock. Trudy, I want you to make your way to the kitchen and talk to the staff. Pick up on any gossip you can about the family. We’re not just interested in who wrote the letters – there has to be a reason Sir Marcus and this family were targeted, and we need to find out what that is. Got it?’

      ‘Yes, Sarge,’ Trudy said happily.

      Finally, she was being allowed to get hands-on in a real case!

      Jonathan McGillicuddy drove through the large village of Kidlington and parked his van under the bare branches of a large beech tree. The grounds he was currently working in belonged to a Victorian pile overlooking the Oxford canal, but the new owners were currently in Barbados, wintering in their villa there. Having only recently purchased the house, they had left him detailed plans for the changes they wanted made in the large garden, which included grubbing up the old orchard and creating a large pond there instead.

      He began unloading the van, carrying a large pickaxe and several different types of saws through an overgrown herb garden towards the rear of the property and then into the orchard at the far perimeter. As he walked, he hummed the latest Ricky Valance song softly under his breath.

      Having nobody living up at the house was a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he didn’t have his clients looking over his shoulder every moment of the day to make sure he wasn’t slacking, or to keep changing their minds about what they wanted done. But it also meant he couldn’t just pop in to use their downstairs loo, or scrounge in the kitchen on a cold day for a warming cup of tea or bowl of soup.

      He glanced at his watch as he unloaded the last of his gear by the first of several gnarled and mostly disease-ridden apple trees, so old even their topmost branches bent down far enough to almost touch the ground.

      It was just gone nine.

      The young lad he sometimes hired as casual labour to help him out with the heavy work, Robby Dix, had another job on today, but Jonathan didn’t really mind. He quite liked working alone.

      As Jonathan set to work sawing off a tree limb, the figure that had noted his movements back in Cowley moved stealthily around the outskirts of the walled kitchen garden. And from the dark depths of the arched opening in one side of it, carefully peered out into the old orchard.

      It was a damp day, the grass was long and wet, and the beginnings of a vague fog were forming. Although the house had neighbours on either side, the gardens were large and empty, and even the street outside was silent. No one was out and about on such a damp and dreary day – not even a dog walker.

      Which was a definite bonus.

      The figure withdrew and retreated to the even darker shadow cast by an old yew tree, which had been planted in one particularly obscure corner of the grounds. The patient voyeur now had less than three hours to wait. Not that he needed to actually wait until noon. It hardly mattered, after all, did it? He smiled grimly. But if a thing was worth doing, it was worth doing well.

      Trudy ate her final morsel of Dundee cake and smiled at the cook. ‘Lovely, Mrs Rogers, but I couldn’t eat another bite.’ She smiled, patting her flat stomach. She’d spent the last two hours, as Sergeant O’Grady had wanted, chatting to the staff and making friends with the housemaids, Milly and Phyllis (‘call me Phil’). Both girls were only a year or so older than her, and far more interested in grilling her about what it was like to be a police officer than in gossiping about the family. Nevertheless, Trudy had persisted, and now thought she probably knew as much about Sir Marcus Deering and how his household was run as the man himself.

      She knew, for instance, that Lady Deering had a bit of a gambling habit she was very careful to keep from her husband. She knew that the son, Anthony, was the apple of both his parents’ eyes, and could do no wrong in their opinion; but both Milly and Phil said they had to keep an eye on him, otherwise he’d take advantage, if they let him. A good-looking man, apparently, but he tended to think his wealth and charm entitled him to take liberties.

      Trudy had smiled and said she’d found most men to be the same.

      This had led on to talk about Sir Marcus himself, who tended to be more pompous than promiscuous. ‘He’s so full of himself sometimes,’ Milly had complained.

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