“Put a stop to me?” Harriett frowned and wondered if he meant the flowers. Her mind struggled to comprehend what was happening, but her nerves were frayed and she began to shake with fear.
“Everyone in town knows that the tea room is the place to gossip. You are in the thick of it practically all day, every day.” Mr Bentwhistle sighed and leaned his hips against the coffin in a casual pose that belied the tension in his eyes as he dispassionately scoured her from head to toe.
“I am working though. I don’t have the time to exchange gossip,” Harriett protested. She felt slightly outraged that he thought that she had nothing better to do with her day than trade tit-bits of snide remarks about anyone’s private life. She had heard enough of just how spiteful women could be. She had no intention of ever becoming one of them, or allowing life to become so mundane and boring that she would consider herself with nothing better to do than sit and trade scandal.
“You know so much about every one of us. I am sure that most of the harridans in your tea rooms would be horrified if they knew what was being said about them. But, you know, don’t you, Harriett, bits of gossip about everyone?”
Harriett went cold inside. “So you thought that you could threaten me into silence during the séance?”
“It wasn’t a threat, my dear.” Mr Bentwhistle’s voice was deadly. “I had to warn you that you were in danger because I wanted to see what you would do. I know you gossip and have no doubt pieced together the scandal you have heard
. Unfortunately, if you haven’t already, you will soon, and I am not prepared to sit back and allow you to spread your gossip to others. I have spent far too long building up my trade to allow you to ruin it.”
“Why? What would I be likely to hear?” Her eyes locked with Alan’s for a moment. The soulless depths of his dark eyes horrified her. She shook her head and waited. His ramblings made not even the slightest bit of sense to her and she wondered if he was slightly unhinged.
Her thoughts immediately turned to Mark, and she frantically tried to think of a way to send word to him. She knew that it was a good couple of hours yet before he was due to collect her from the tea shop. She cursed herself for her own stupidity. Although Babette had left her at the gate to the churchyard, Harriett knew now that her aunt should have stayed inside with her. Mark had warned her several times not to go anywhere alone. Now, she was by herself, there was nobody who would be able to hear her scream. Unfortunately, Alan was standing directly next to the coffin and blocking the only exit. She briefly contemplated hefting her skirts high so she could race over the pews, but knew that he would easily catch her. He had direct access to the pews, and longer legs than hers. She wouldn’t even get to the second pew before her caught up with her.
That left only one available escape route: the doorway behind her. The room didn’t have a door and access to the outside, but it did have a window she could smash and escape through. Hopefully, by the time Alan got out of the church and around to the window, she would be long gone, or at least out onto the main road where she could scream at the top of her lungs for help. The church was located just at the end of the main street, set back off the road a little to provide for a churchyard, yet close enough to the village to have a reasonable amount of passing traffic. There would be someone who would be able to come to her aid. If only she could get there. Screaming now, surrounded by thick stone walls, would get her nowhere.
“I have no idea what you are talking about. I don’t gossip, never have and never will do. I see what the gossips do and the damage that it does to others. What on earth makes you think that I would stoop so low as to join them?”
“Oh, I am not saying that you would join them, but you do listen, don’t you Harriett? You are in that tea shop, day after day, from early morning until late evening. You hear everything that everyone says. You have heard about the recent spate of thefts. You no doubt have my disgruntled customers moaning about my service.”
Harriett shook her head. She kept her expression blank, but immediately thought about Minerva Bobbington’s death, and Hugo Montague’s sudden collapse. Had Hugo had tea with Alan? The two men were friends. Alan’s funeral parlour was directly across the road. He could have easily scurried across the road to have tea with his friend, and nobody would think anything of it.
“You killed Hugo.”
Alan nodded slowly.
“What had Hugo ever done to you? He considered you a friend. Hugo was a helpless soul.”
Alan snorted derisively and curled his lip in arrogant contempt. “He was a relentless gossip, child. You know that. Everyone went round to his haberdashery to take tea and gossip. The only difference between him and you is that you give people cakes with their tea, he gave them gossip. He had been speaking to Minerva. She had been telling everyone and anyone who would listen about her aunt’s missing jewels that disappeared from the corpse the day before she was buried. The number of times that stupid woman came back to my parlour demanding that I check again to see if I had them.”
“You stole them and sold them on.” Harriett shook her head slowly while her mind raced in a hundred different directions. In spite of the fear, and the cold, she had stopped trembling and was now beyond being able to do anything except function on a most basic level. She was sucked into a desperate need to stay alive now, and couldn’t focus on anything apart from the horrifying details he relayed to her.
“Of course I did. My business has been struggling for years. I got dragged into the funeral business by my ridiculous father. I told him that we would not make much in the way of trade in Tipton Hollow, but he refused to relocate to Great Tipton. By the time he died we were damned near destitute. I got by and did the best I could, but that damned place has been gradually sucking me under for years. The banks are threatening to foreclose and I couldn’t charge customers any more. There is very little in the way of spare money around these days, you know that. I had to make extras where I could.”
“So you have been stealing from the dead, trading goods they cannot report as missing and making yourself profits far beyond your business.” Harriett was horrified. Stealing from the dead was about the most debased thing she had ever heard of. The depths to which he had sunk filled her with a new understanding of just how far this man would go to protect his means, including murder.
“What about my brooch though? I mean, I am not dead. You must have known I would report it missing.”
“Ha! That was pretty and just sitting in plain view on the dresser. Being ever the gentleman, I allowed Babette out of the room first. How the stool fell over God only knows, but it is of little consequence. With Babette on her way to check her room, I had the opportunity to swipe it and so I put it in my pocket with nobody being any wiser. I sold it for a good price too. With Hepplethwaite and Humphries in the house, and everyone questioning their honesty, it was easy to sit back as a respectable pillar of the community and allow all of the fools to point their fingers in the clairvoyant’s direction.”
Harriett had no intention of pointing out to Alan that the brooch was now in the possession of Great Tipton Constabulary. “But why do you think it is my fault? I haven’t had any influence in the subjects people talk about. I had no idea you had been doing this. Why involve me?”
“Because you gossiped with Hugo Montague!” Alan shouted. The booming echo of his voice rang hollowly in her ears and she instinctively flinched at the raw fury on the man’s face. He pointed one long finger at her. “You were going there on the afternoon you found him for a gossip and a cup of tea. You did it most days and don’t deny it. Do you really expect me to believe that you were sitting in Hugo’s shop discussing sewing patterns?” He snorted and pushed away from the coffin to stand upright.
Harriett instinctively took a step back. A shiver of cold air swept down her back and snapped her out of her daze as effectively as a bucket of iced water. She swallowed and stared at him. “There was no need to kill him,” she whispered accusingly. “He was an old man who got lonely. I didn’t discuss gossip with him. We always talked about ourselves, and the shops. Whoever Hugo gossiped with, it wasn’t me. I have no idea how many people you have stolen from, but if you didn’t want them talking about it then you shouldn’t have stolen from them in the first place.”
Her chin lifted and she straightened her shoulders. She had no intention of being cowed by this man; killer or not. She knew that whatever happened in the next few hours, Mark would get to the bottom of it. He would unearth Alan Bentwhistle as the thief and the killer, and ensure that he faced his day in a court of law. She could only hope that Mark wouldn’t need to add her murder onto the list of charges.
She swallowed the lump of bile that rose in her throat. For all of her life, she had wanted; dreamed of having someone like Mark in her life. He was handsome, intelligent, caring, and everything she could have hoped for in the person whom she would spend the rest of her life with. Now, cruel hands of fate were putting everything at risk. If she allowed Alan Bentwhistle to get the better of her, everything she had ever dreamed of would disappear in a cloud of dust. She couldn’t allow it to happen.
“I am going to promise you here and now, Alan, I will ensure that you meet with justice. Your crimes are beyond deplorable. On this, you seriously will not stop me repeating what I have learned today.” Her voice was soft and calm, and in stark contrast to the emotions that raged through her.
She didn’t stop to think and spun on her heel. Three steps and she slammed the door beh
ind her only to gasp in dismay to find that there was no lock. She grabbed the dresser and began to drag it across the doorway, ignoring the shouts, thumps and rattle of the knob. She heaved and shoved, pushed and grunted until it blocked the entrance. With hands that trembled, she swept a vase off the dresser, and threw it at the window. She clapped her hands over hear ears against the sound of glass exploding around the kitchen and, moments later, began to pick the worst of the shards from around the frame. The cuts to her hands were insignificant against the need to stay alive.