Dead as a Scone Read online

  “I like it!” Matthew Eaton said. “The museum should have acquired the collection decades ago.”

  “Without doubt!” Marjorie Halifax said. “And as for the ten-year loan—well, most people I know have twenty-five year mortgages to pay for their houses.”

  Nigel took another deep breath. “I must report, however, that one comment made by Mr. Bleasdale has me concerned. His suggestion that we find a ‘levelheaded antiquities appraiser’ set off alarm bells in my mind. We certainly don’t want any part of a scheme to defraud the Inland Revenue.”

  “Balderdash!” Iona Saxby said. “Not that Bleasdale is likely to do a fiddle with the valuations, but if he should, it is his problem—and the estate’s. The museum will not be at risk.”

  “I like it even more!” Matthew Eaton said. “It seems the perfect solution.”

  “Raising five or six million pounds a year will be difficult but doable,” Dorothy McAndrews said. “We are an inventive board.”

  “Inventive indeed!” echoed Sir Simon Clowes.

  “I am vastly encouraged,” said the Reverend William de Rudd. He aimed a warm smile at Nigel.

  Archibald Meicklejohn raised his hand. “I am encouraged, too. However, I am also frightened by the very notion of a smallish non-profit organization taking on such a heavy burden. Forty million pounds is a considerable sum of money—even these days. During my banking career, I have seen many overly optimistic organizations dragged to their doom by similar commitments. This is an option we must consider carefully.”

  “As we shall,” Nigel said. “I suggest that we recess for our tea break first and return refreshed to our deliberations.”

  And so at four o’clock, the trustees drank one kind of tea and ate store-bought biscuits.

  The simplified tea break came to a natural end at four thirty, when the trustees had finished grousing about the menu, visiting the loo, and chatting together in duos and trios away from the table. Lapsang and Souchong had retreated to opposite corners of the boardroom. And Cha-Cha, who did seem to enjoy spending time with Nigel, had curled up against his left foot. Nigel felt a twinge of regret that Flick would take Cha-Cha home tonight, especially since the owners of his flat—a two-bedroom apartment up on Lime Hill Road, near the Tunbridge Wells town centre—had not objected to small pets.

  Archibald spoke first after the break. “The more I think about the matter, Nigel, the more I am convinced that you and Dr. Adams must ultimately recommend whether to choose option two or option three.”

  “Sorry?” Nigel knew he was gawking at the chair of the trustees, but Archibald’s statement had come as a complete surprise.

  “I came to the very same conclusion,” Sir Simon said. “After all, as a graduate of INSEAD, you have superlative financial credentials. And as for Dr. Adams—well, she knows the collection better than any of us. I for one am fully prepared to rely on your sound judgment.”

  Matthew weighed in. “A grand suggestion, Archibald.” He turned to Nigel. “The director and the chief curator are our field generals, a perfect team to shepherd us through this crisis.”

  Nigel realized his mistake. By allowing the trustees time to think and chat among themselves, he had made it possible for Archibald to conjure up the idea of shifting responsibility to Flick and him.

  Blimey! I’ve been had.

  A “short-timer” acting director and a spanking new chief curator made ideal scapegoats. Should the tea museum be “dragged to its doom,” the fault would lie with their recommendation.

  I’m trapped. And so is Flick.

  He looked over at her, sitting rigid in her chair, her eyes darting around the room as if she were looking for an excuse to leave the meeting.

  You must have reached the same conclusion, Madame Curator. You know that your career is on the line, too.

  The trustees discussed option three as planned, but they carefully prefaced most of their comments with “assuming that Mr. Owen and Dr. Adams recommend acquiring the collection” or “if they recommend we commit to a ten-year loan.”

  The last item of business was a mock motion by Matthew Eaton. “I move that the acting director be instructed to restore our scones, cakes, preserves, conserves, and clotted cream at the next trustee meeting.” All the other trustees except Sir Simon shouted, “Second!”

  Archibald adjourned the meeting at five. Flick abruptly grabbed Cha-Cha’s lead and hurried out of the room.

  “What do you suppose prompted such a quick departure?”

  Nigel looked up at Iona Saxby grinning down at him.

  She went on. “That was a rhetorical question, Nigel. You don’t have to answer it.”

  Nigel managed a feeble “Okay.”

  Iona kept talking. “I’d like a private word with you.” She sat down in the empty chair next to him. “You do realize that the full responsibility for making a good decision has been placed on your shoulders.”

  “Well, yes. It had occurred to me.”

  She touched his upper arm. “You seem to have very strong shoulders.”

  “Ah…” Nigel looked around. They were alone in the boardroom.

  “Does the name Augustus Hoskins ring a bell?” Iona said softly.

  Nigel nodded. “He is a museum development consultant.”

  “A legend in fund-raising and growth planning, who by a fortunate coincidence is also a friend of a friend of mine. I rang Hoskins’s office in London during our tea break. He has agreed to drive down to Tunbridge Wells tomorrow and meet with you. He’s expecting your call to arrange the details.” Iona tucked a folded piece of paper into his jacket’s breast pocket. “Have a heart-to-heart with him before you stick your neck out too far. You need good people in your corner at a time like this.”

  “Thank you, Iona.”

  She reached for his hand and gave it a gentle squeeze. “I find it a great shame that you can’t fully rely on your staff.”

  “My staff? But Polly is a wonderful assistant.” Nigel tried to tug his hand free; Iona held on tight.

  “I was speaking of Felicity Adams. She is your subordinate, is she not?”

  He hesitated a moment. “I suppose she is.”

  “Keep a close eye on her. She seems a loose cannon—an American bull in an English china shop.”

  “In what way, Iona?”

  “Dr. Adams can be dangerously unpredictable. Her bizarre performance at the last trustee meeting proves the point. So does her talk of teddy bears and exhibits for children when the very future of the museum is uncertain.”

  “I see.” He managed to liberate his hand.

  “Enough about business. Why don’t you join me for dinner this evening?” Iona fluttered her eyelashes.

  Nigel felt his stomach lurch. “I can’t this evening. A previous commitment. In…East Grinstead. Can’t be broken. Perhaps next time?”

  Iona ran her index finger along the knot of his necktie. “I will definitely hold you to your promise.”

  Nigel smiled as best he could.

  Who knows? I might be hit by a bus before the next trustees’ meeting.

  Flick tramped northeast on Eridge Road, mindful of the nearby cars, all but ignoring the gentle rain that pattered on her umbrella. Cha-Cha trotted jauntily alongside. Ten minutes past five in Tunbridge Wells translated to ten minutes past noon in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Dr. Cory Unger, her favorite forensic toxicology professor, almost certainly would be in his office. Cory was a workaholic who never ate lunch, never exercised, looked as skinny as a power pole, and probably would live to be one hundred. She needed to talk to him—immediately.

  Cha-Cha deftly avoided a puddle that Flick splashed through head-on. Adjusting to England’s celebrated damp climate had been easier than she had expected, probably because everyone else at the museum seemed to consider frequent rain a given. However, Flick did find the local weather forecasts amusing. The most common prediction was “a wet day with sunny intervals.”

  She stepped into another puddle, this one deep enough to
splatter her legs. She hardly noticed; her mind was focused on Alain Rousseau’s preserves and conserves. The instant Sir Simon had described them as cloyingly sweet, Flick understood how Elspeth Hawker had been poisoned. She immediately thought back to the afternoon Elspeth died. Nigel Owen had moved the tea trolley alongside the conference table and served each trustee an assortment of preserves in personal-sized jam pots. The exception had been Elspeth. She had received a single large jam pot filled with her beloved Danish lingonberry preserves. It seemed a perfect explanation—the only explanation. Barbiturates taste bitter, so hide a lethal dose in something chock full of sugar.

  Cha-Cha began to tug on his lead when they reached the southern entrance to the Pantiles. He seemed to remember the way to Flick’s apartment on the Lower Walk. Perhaps he also wanted to get out of the rain. A smattering of French caught her ear as a man and woman passed in the opposite direction. They were walking hand in hand. Probably a couple from France on their honeymoon. A stray dog trotted by, paused a moment to glance sideways at Cha-Cha, then hurried on.

  A fairly steep, unexpectedly long staircase led to Flick’s first-floor apartment. The building dated back to the mid– nineteenth century, an age of thick walls and high ceilings.

  She dashed up the steps and unlocked her front door. Whoever had refurbished the old pile had laid out the flats with Continental-style floor plans. A hallway led first past the parlor, then the kitchen, then the bedroom. The bathroom was at the far end of the hallway.

  Flick had deliberately chosen a small, one-bedroom apartment; it would be easy to furnish with a fifty-fifty mix of furniture shipped from the United States and rented in England. The telephone was in the bedroom, which also served as her home office.

  Flick switched her laptop computer on and waited impatiently for it to boot. With luck, she might find Cory Unger’s telephone number in the email program’s address book.

  “Bingo!” she murmured. She dialed the number in Michigan.

  “This is Professor Unger. Good afternoon.”

  “Actually, it’s almost evening over here in England, Cory,” she replied.

  “My, my! It’s our illustrious—and squeamish—expatriate food chemist. Find any suspicious tea stains lately?”

  “Funny you should ask that. I think I witnessed a murder last Wednesday. An old woman named Elspeth Hawker was poisoned while I gave a presentation on tea tasting.”

  The line went quiet. Flick could hear the professor breathing. He finally said, “You sound like you’re serious.”

  “I am serious. Do you have two minutes to talk?”

  The two minutes stretched into more than twenty as Flick described everything she had observed at the trustee meeting. She wrapped up by saying, “My theory is that her jam pot was chock full of a convenient barbiturate.”

  “Secobarbital sodium,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Assuming she was fed a barbiturate, secobarbital sodium—trade name Seconal—would be the compound of choice under the circumstances. It is highly soluble in water and works much more quickly than most other barbiturates. It rapidly produces drowsiness, sedation, and in the case of overdose, a coma that leads to death. Your old dear would have had to ingest at least two grams—although if I were the poisoner, I’d go for a minimum of three or four grams.”

  “That doesn’t sound like much.”

  “A teaspoon of salt weighs about six grams, a teaspoon of granulated sugar around four. Say secobarbital is in the same neighborhood. Three or four teaspoons of the drug mixed into a good-sized pot of lingonberry preserves should do the trick, if the victim ate enough of the stuff.”

  “It’s possible then?”

  “It’s possible,” Cory agreed.

  “Then let’s backtrack. What did you mean, ‘assuming she was fed a barbiturate’?”

  The line went quiet again. “Don’t take this the wrong way, Flick, but the British physicians I’ve met have been mighty good at what they do. The Brits don’t give knighthoods to feebleminded quacks. ”

  “So everyone assures me. However, I’m mighty good at what I do, too, and I’m certain of what I saw.”

  “In that case, have you also considered that other drugs can mimic a heart attack?”

  “Like digitalis and digitoxin?”

  “Two good choices. An overdose of a cardiac glycoside can stop a heart cold. And a lethal quantity of digitalis is only three times the usual medicinal dose.”

  “Elspeth Hawker simply fell asleep and died. She presented no other symptoms. If I remember your lectures, an overdose of digitalis or digitoxin will make you nauseous, even cause blurred vision.”

  Cory grunted.

  “I take that to mean I’m right.”

  He grunted again.

  “Only one thing still bothers me,” Flick said. “Can lingonberry preserves really mask the bitter taste of a barbiturate?”

  The professor laughed. “I can’t even tell you what a lingonberry looks like, Flick. I guess if you want a useful answer, you’ll have to run an experiment.”

  “You know, that’s not a bad idea.”

  “Whoa! It’s a terrible idea. Do I have to remind you that I was kidding?”

  “I won’t use secobarbital, Cory. I promise. I have a more benign substance in mind.”

  Flick said her good-byes, put down the phone, and went looking for Cha-Cha. She found him curled up in the middle of the sofa in the parlor.

  “You’re lucky that sofa is a rental,” she said.

  Cha-Cha raised his head and stared at her quizzically.

  “I don’t suppose you would like another walk in the rain? I have to find a jar of lingonberry preserves.”

  Cha-Cha lowered his head without further comment.

  Flick walked through the Pantiles, exited the northern end, and made for London Road—a thoroughfare sensible locals called the A26. She walked less than a half mile to where the road made a sharp left turn to the northwest and continued straight to the large Safeway superstore that seemed likely to stock lingonberry preserves. The store was crowded. Flick guessed that most of her fellow shoppers were professional folk who, like her, did their shopping in the evening.

  Vaccinium vitisidaea. Without trying to, Flick remembered the Latin name she had studied years earlier and other details, too. Lingonberry—a small, red, round berry with a tart, acidity taste. Also called the “mountain cranberry.” A staple on tables throughout Scandinavia.

  And apparently in southern England, too. Flick found three different brands of lingonberry preserves on the shelf but decided instead to buy a bottle of German-made lingonberry syrup sweetened with sugar.

  The perfect form of lingonberry for my experiment.

  On her walk home, Flick lingered a moment in front of the “Bath House” at the northern end of the Pantiles. It had been built in 1804 so that well-heeled visitors to Tunbridge Wells could soak in the mineral-rich waters. The original chalybeate, or iron-bearing, spring was still accessible down a short flight of steps in the Bath House’s ornate, colonnaded façade.

  Flick understood the chemistry of the water—how dissolved iron and manganese salts created its notorious metallic taste—but she enjoyed the local legend more than a cold scientific explanation. It seems that around the year 980, the devil quenched his burning nose in that very spring, thus imparting the metallic tang. Satan had foolishly tried to tempt Dunstan, the archbishop of Canterbury, by dressing up as a beautiful woman. The future saint spotted cloven hooves beneath the woman’s dress and clamped red-hot tongs on her nose. This happened in the Sussex village of Mayfield. The devil, suffering great pain, leapt all the way to Tunbridge Wells in search of an available source of cooling water.

  Flick had visited the spring during the previous summer and filled two-dozen small bottles to accompany the Christmas cards she would send to friends and family in the United States. They were lined up on the bottom shelf of her refrigerator like a platoon of toy soldiers. She could still remember t
he bitter taste the water had left in her mouth.

  Bitter like poison. A perfect standin for barbiturates in my experiment.

  Flick’s experiment was simplicity itself. She poured the contents of four small bottles of spring water into a tall glass, added a teaspoonful of lingonberry syrup, and tasted—then added more syrup and tasted again.

  The bitter, metallic taste slowly receded but never completely disappeared.

  Flick felt a nose poke her ankle. She looked down at Cha-Cha’s hopeful face.

  “Ah ha!” she said. “There’s nothing like the sound of food being prepared to catch a dog’s ear. Well, thank you for joining me in the kitchen, Cha-Cha. I appreciate your company. A second observer is always useful in scientific research.”

  She transferred a few spoonfuls of the water-and-syrup mix to a saucer, then set it down on the floor. The dog sniffed at the brew, took a tentative taste, then backed away in obvious annoyance.

  “Don’t look at me that way,” Flick said. “A true scientist is willing to suffer when necessary to advance the cause of science. It is not my fault that you, like all canines, have a remarkably sensitive nose and a surprisingly small supply of taste buds. That means you reacted mostly to the strange odor of the mineral water. Or maybe you don’t like lingonberries.”

  Flick gave Cha-Cha a doggy treat, instantly improving his disposition.

  “Your mistress, however, relied chiefly on her sense of taste to spot dangerous-to-eat foods, and as we get older, our sense of taste can fade.”

  Cha-Cha begged for another treat. Flick let him eat it out of her hand.

  “So let’s imagine Elspeth Hawker at the meeting last Wednesday, happily chatting with the other trustees, cheerfully spooning big dollops of lingonberry preserves on her scones. I’ll bet that she ignored the slight residual bitterness. She probably assumed that Alain Rousseau had changed his recipe or that he got hold of a batch of unripe lingonberries.”

  She reached down and stroked the dog’s plush back.

  “I’d say that our experiment is a success. We now know the method of murder. And Elspeth’s little black book provides the motive. Oh—that reminds me! I didn’t get a chance to tell you that I tracked down eighteen of the nineteen objects Elspeth identified as fakes. They are all on display in the Tea Antiquities Gallery. I’m not an expert on forgeries, but I’m pretty sure she was right. They don’t look quite right to me.”