A Legacy of Murder Read online

  A Legacy of Murder

  A Kate Hamilton Mystery

  CONNIE BERRY

  For Bob

  I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun.

  —Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice

  Acknowledgments

  My heartfelt thanks goes to the Suffolk Constabulary in Bury St. Edmunds for their help in understanding methods of policing in Suffolk—crime scene investigator Lisa Skelton; custody sergeant Sarah Bartley, who showed me all over the Custody Charge Station in Bury; and most especially DI Tamlyn Burgess, who took one of her rare days off to answer all my questions and more. Any errors are mine alone.

  As always, I’m grateful to Faith Black Ross, my editor at Crooked Lane Books, and Paula Munier, my agent at Talcott Notch Literary. Thanks are also due my critique partners, Lynn Denley-Bussard, Charlene D’Avanzo, and Judy Copek, for their advice and suggestions—and to all those who read and commented on the manuscript in its various stages. This book would not have been written without the encouragement of my family—my sons, Dave and John, and especially my husband, Bob, who listened to endless talk of bodies and clues, drove me down narrow lanes and over blind summits in the English countryside, and (in the name of research) followed me into more stately homes than I had the right to expect.

  Soli Deo gloria

  Chapter One

  Saturday, December 5th

  Long Barston, Suffolk, England

  I woke to the point of a sword in my thigh.

  “Ow.” I glared at the boy—a child of seven or eight—his face partially obscured by a plastic Saxon helmet. I hadn’t actually been sleeping. I’d been standing up, resting my eyes. And it wasn’t a real sword, but the plastic tip still hurt.

  “Surrender or I’ll run you through.”

  Fortunately, I’d raised two children of my own and knew how to play along. “Please.” I raised my hands in the air. “Can’t you just take me prisoner?”

  “I’m a Viking raider. We don’t take prisoners.”

  “If you’re a Viking, why are you wearing a Saxon helmet?”

  He grinned with pride. “Stole it.”

  I might have believed that, except I’d just seen his mother buying the set in the gift shop. Where was she, anyway?

  I huddled with the other members of the two-o’clock tour group, ten of us in all, in the shelter of the Dovecote, the gift shop and ticket office where I’d handed over my twelve pounds and received a round red sticker to wear—“clearly visible at all times.”

  Our tour guide was late.

  Another swipe of the boy’s sword threatened to sever the arm of an older woman in a beautifully cut woolen coat. She neatly disarmed the young tyrant. “I think ve put avay the lovely svard until after the tour.” The accent was Scandinavian—possibly Danish, I thought.

  “That’s mine,” the boy howled in protest. “Give it back.”

  The woman shook her head firmly.

  “Cow.” He stomped off in his Saxon helmet toward the fountain in the center of the courtyard.

  The boy’s mother approached us. “Sorry.” She reclaimed the sword and tucked it in the belt of her fake-fur-trimmed jacket. “Danny’s fascinated with weaponry.”

  So was Genghis Khan. I rubbed my thigh.

  “I hope he didn’t hurt you,” she said.

  “I’m fine.” I shivered in my puffy down jacket and imagined what Donald Preston would write in his Sunday column in the Jackson Falls Gazette. KATE HAMILTON, LOCAL ANTIQUE DEALER, WAS MAULED BY A PLASTIC SWORD YESTERDAY WHILE WAITING IN LINE FOR A TOUR OF FINCHLEY HALL, A STATELY HOME IN SUFFOLK, ENGLAND. Preston, an acquaintance from my college days and not one of my fans, was now managing editor of the Jackson Falls Gazette.

  Safe for the moment from little boys with pillaging on their minds, I tucked my freezing fingers in my pockets and surveyed my surroundings. Across the gravel courtyard, Finchley Hall glowed rose-red in the bright December sun. Irregular panes of glass set into tall banks of mullioned windows reflected the light like a patchwork quilt of mirrors. A forest of chimneys pointed toward an ice-blue sky. The house and courtyard were surrounded by brick walls laid in an eye-catching diagonal pattern. The bricks had been recently repointed, I noticed, contemplating the massive piles of cash required to keep a place like Finchley Hall from falling down. No wonder Lady Finchley-fforde opened her estate to paying guests every Saturday afternoon.

  Signs of the holidays were everywhere. Strings of fairy lights circled the trunks of the copper beeches lining the long drive. Wreaths of holly and mistletoe adorned every door. I’d always dreamed of spending Christmas in England—snow falling softly outside, the yule log in the hearth, steaming cups of wassail. Is wassail served hot? I didn’t actually know. It was an image stuck in my head from an Ideals magazine I saw as a child.

  This was as close as I was ever likely to get to an English Christmas. Two weeks in December visiting my daughter, Christine, an intern at Finchley Hall; then back to the United States in time for Christmas Eve with my mother. My father was killed in an auto accident on Christmas Eve when I was in high school, and my mother and I mark the date together every year. This year it would be just the two of us. Christine would be staying in England. My son, Eric, was in Italy doing research for his thesis—something to do with spent fuel rods and boreholes.

  I pretend to know what that means.

  The tour was seventeen minutes late. I was about to inquire in the gift shop if we’d been forgotten when a strikingly beautiful young woman with a sleek black ponytail and skin the color of a caramel macchiato appeared with a purple clipboard in her hand. She wore a name badge on a lanyard and the same green quilted vest I’d seen on the saleswoman at the ticket counter.

  “Welcome to Finchley Hall. Sorry for the delay. My name’s Alexa Devereux. Call me Alex. I’ll be your tour guide today.” Her voice and the fluid grace of her movements spoke of palm trees and spice-scented breezes, but the name, Devereux, was solidly Norman and her accent posh boarding school. I pictured a romance between a British aristocrat and an island goddess in the South Pacific.

  “Sorry for the late start. Let’s get acquainted.” Alex consulted her clipboard before turning her unusual green-gold eyes on me. “Kate Hamilton, is it? Where are you from, Kate?”

  “Ohio. Near Cleveland.” Exotic.

  The others answered in turn. Besides the older couple, Danish as I’d thought, we had a pair of male university students on a hiking holiday, a trio of middle-aged Englishwomen from Cambridge, and of course Glenda and Danny—the mother and sword-wielding son. They lived in a nearby Suffolk village.

  “You’ve been to Finchley Hall before?” Alex asked the Danish couple.

  “I’m afraid not,” said the woman.

  “Oh, we have—several times,” said one of the middle-aged Englishwomen. “Lovely day out.”

  “You’re all very welcome. Follow me, please.” Alex’s ponytail swished as she turned on her booted heel and strode through the courtyard toward the fountain, where the small Saxon warrior appeared to be calculating the height of the retaining wall. “Our tour will begin at the lake,” she said. “Then we’ll circle back through the park and finish with the house and what you’ve all come to see”—she shot us a look over her shoulder—“the Finchley Cross.”

  The Finchley Cross, I’d learned in the gift shop, was Anglo-Saxon, a stunning gold-and-garnet pectoral brooch, buried the night of the Peasants’ Revolt in 1549. The cross, together with some fifteenth-century coins and several objects from the Finchley Hoard, unearthed on the estate in 1818, were kept on permanent display in the Hall library. A much larger exhibit, celebr
ating the two hundredth anniversary of the discovery of the Hoard, was planned for December nineteenth, the Saturday following the Eve of St. Æthelric, a local saint and patron of the village church. I would be there to see all those amazing objects, one of those strokes of good luck that happen when you’re least expecting them. At least I don’t expect them.

  I stifled a yawn. The airplane from Cleveland to London Heathrow had been jammed. I’d given up my aisle seat to a young woman with an infant—good as gold he was, the whole flight. But the switch had put me between a woman who dealt with her flying phobia by chatting and a man with a tiny bladder (window seat, naturally).

  Didn’t the guidebooks recommend fresh air and sunshine for jetlag? I lifted my face to the sky and breathed in the crisp air, infused with the herby scent of boxwood. I had exactly five hours to recover before dinner with Tom Mallory, the Englishman I’d met a month ago in Scotland and fallen in love with.

  Or not. It’s complicated.

  We’d reached the fountain. The lanky chaps in hiking gear had moved to the front of the pack, their interest fueled less, I suspected, by a love of history than by male hormones.

  “First a bit of background.” Alex turned to face us. “The Finchley estate was originally part of Clare Priory. With the dissolution of the monasteries, the land passed to Sir Oswyn Finchley, who built a timber-frame house here in 1542, burnt to the ground in the Peasants’ Revolt of 1549. The much grander house we see today was built in 1588 by his grandson, Sir Giles Finchley. The current resident is Lady Barbara Finchley-fforde, daughter of the Marquess of—”

  “Danny, no.” Glenda dashed toward the fountain, where her son had hiked one leg over the retaining wall. She dragged him back, her round face pink with embarrassment. “Sorry. He’s hyperactive.”

  “No problem,” Alex said, managing to convey with her tone that if Mum didn’t get her act together, it might very well be a problem. “Finchley Hall is famous for three things—its fine Tudor brickwork, the magnificent treasure trove discovered here in the early nineteenth century, and”—she paused dramatically—“for murder.”

  “Ooh, murder.” Danny danced in a circle, his wet shoe leaving damp patches on the gravel. “Were the bodies covered in blood and all those creepy-crawlies?”

  “Danny never misses an episode of Silent Witness,” Glenda whispered to me. “We think he’s going to be a forensic pathologist.”

  Or a serial killer.

  Alex soldiered on. “Finchley Hall has witnessed four murders, all under unusual circumstances.” She flashed us a mysterious smile, a practiced part of the spiel, no doubt. “Follow me as we delve into lost treasure and murder most foul.”

  We’d started moving again. Danny skipped along the path, kicking up stones.

  “You’re American,” Glenda told me. “Here on holiday?”

  “I’m visiting my daughter. She’s a student at Oxford, but she has an internship at Finchley Hall between terms.” I might have added that I was in England on a buying trip for my antique shop—also the truth—but that would lead to more questions, and I really wanted to hear what the tour guide was saying.

  “… addition of the estate offices in 1830.” Alex was describing the other buildings on the estate.

  One of them, a stable block, had been converted into housing for the interns. I’d lucked out. An intern had withdrawn at the last minute, and my daughter, Christine, had managed to co-opt the small private room and bath for me. That would save me a bundle—money I could better invest in antiques.

  “Your husband isn’t keen on old houses?” Glenda asked.

  “He was,” I said. “I’m a widow.” Even after three years the word still jarred, like something referring to little old ladies with tight perms. I braced myself for the usual you’re too young to be a widow.

  Fortunately, Alex interrupted. “Watch your step. The path is uneven.”

  We’d moved from the courtyard to a narrow flagged path bisecting a wide swath of lawn flanked by perennial borders. Hellebores and intrepid snowdrops pushed through glossy mounds of winterberry. I envied the English their temperate climate. My garden in Jackson Falls was currently hibernating under a blanket of lake-effect snow.

  Beyond the lawn, high walls of rose brick enclosed a garden. A maze of neat gravel paths divided islands of soil, laid out in geometric symmetry. Newly planted boxwood hedges defined a circular bed in the center of the garden. An elderly man in a peaked cap leaned on his shovel. Seeing us, he flicked the cigarette he’d been smoking and began to dig. A strong smell of manure wafted on the air.

  “Eww. That’s poo.” Danny held his nose and made fake gagging sounds.

  “The Elizabethan Garden is being prepared for early spring planting,” Alex said. “Restoration began last summer when the original diagrams were discovered in the estate archives. One of our long-term interns is directing the process as part of his doctoral thesis.”

  Leaving the garden area, we passed through an iron-studded door in the brick wall to a lovely park, acres of woods and shrubs planted over several centuries. We crossed a fishpond with a red wooden bridge built in the Chinese style and passed a miniature Greek temple—the Folly. From there the path sloped sharply downward to a small lake on the edge of a wood.

  A black-feathered bird swooped in to perch on the branches of a hawthorn.

  “We’ve arrived at Blackwater Lake.” Alex stopped near a large smooth boulder jutting from the soil. “So, who were these unfortunate victims of murder? Number one”—she held up her index finger—“Sir Oswyn Finchley, killed on the Eve of St. Æthelric in 1549. Local peasants protesting an increase in rents swarmed up from the village carrying torches. Realizing the danger, Sir Oswyn gathered his valuables in a large sack, which he entrusted to his servant, Tobias Thurtle, with instructions to bury it until the danger had passed. Unfortunately, one of the torches set the timber-frame structure alight. Badly burned, Sir Oswyn escaped to Blackwater Lake, where he succumbed to his injuries—right about where you’re standing, Kate. The Hoard was lost for nearly three hundred years.”

  “But vhy didn’t the servant dig it up?” asked the Danish woman.

  My question exactly.

  “No one knows.” Alex consulted her clipboard. “Perhaps Tobias Thurtle was killed that night as well. What we do know brings us to victim number two—Susannah Finchley, wife of Sir Oswyn’s great-great-grandson, the Marquess of Suffolk, murdered on the twelfth of October, 1638, while walking in the park. The perpetrator, a local beggar sometimes fed by the Hall cook, was taken up for the crime but found to be of unsound mind. The authorities assumed he was after the blood-red ruby ring Susannah was known to wear. You’ll find a portrait of Lady Susannah in the small parlor, wearing what is thought to be the very ring. Now, victim number three—”

  Danny scrambled up the boulder and leapt off with an ear- splitting whoop.

  Alex Devereux set her jaw. I couldn’t blame her. Danny was getting on everyone’s nerves.

  “—victim number three, Jim Thurtle, descendant of the servant who buried the Hoard, shot on the fifteenth of December, 1818.”

  Danny pulled at his mother’s arm. “Can I throw stones in the water, Mummy? Can I? Can I? Please, please?”

  I could almost hear the silent prayer rising from the group.

  Alex lifted one perfect eyebrow. “Okay, Mum?”

  “All right,” Glenda said uncertainly. “But stay where I can see you. And don’t get your shoes wet again.”

  “I promise.” Danny skipped off.

  Right. If Danny was anything like my son, he’d be wet to the knees in less than a minute. And in this weather, it wouldn’t take long for hypothermia to set in.

  Alex cleared her throat. “Back to our story. A Thurtle family legend claimed the location of the buried treasure had been marked by a cross of stone. No such cross was ever found—until Jim Thurtle discovered this.” She drew our attention to a crude Celtic cross etched into the boulder. “An image of the Finchley
Cross? Perhaps. As you can see, the main leg points in a southwesterly direction, toward the lake. Jim Thurtle took this as a clue, and after a night of digging, he located the treasure trove, still wrapped in its moldering sack. Unfortunately, he was spotted by the gamekeeper, who, believing he’d caught a poacher, fired a warning shot. Jim seized as much of the treasure as he could hold and made a dash toward the woods, where he tripped a spring-gun wire concealed in the tall grass. He died five days later, and the Hoard was returned to the Finchley family.”

  “Not the Crown?” I asked, remembering from my graduate school days that English kings, scorning the ancient Roman law of finders-keepers, claimed buried treasure for themselves.

  “Not when the rightful owners can be proved and still own the property. By 1818, the Lost Finchley Hoard was already a local legend.” Alex propped one foot against the boulder. “For victim number four we fast-forward to 1996—Catherine Kerr, a curator at the Museum of Suffolk History in Bury St. Edmunds. She’d come to Finchley Hall to arrange a special exhibit of the Hoard. Her body was found in Blackwater Lake by the gardener—the same man, as it happens, we passed earlier. The killer was never—”

  A shriek pierced the air.

  “Danny.” Glenda dashed toward the lake.

  Several of us followed.

  The little boy stood with a rock in each hand, his shoes submerged in the shallows along the lakeshore. His eyes were open wide. His mouth formed a perfect O. At his feet, wedged against a half-sunken log, was the body of a young woman wearing khaki riding pants and another of the green quilted vests. Long blonde hair fanned out around her head, wreathed with swirls of reddish pink. Sightless eyes stared toward the sky.

  Alex’s hand flew to her mouth. “It’s Tabitha.”

  A wave of nausea made me light-headed. Then I remembered the boy. “Get Danny away from here—now.”

  Glenda scooped him up and clambered toward the boulder.

  My eyes went to the bank, where a slip of mud and rocks led from the grassy verge, about a foot above the lake, into the water itself. Could Tabitha have slipped and fallen into the lake? I tried to see if she was wearing shoes, but a tangle of twigs and leaves shrouded her feet. What had she been doing so close to the edge?