Page 43

Nova

As soon as she heard the heavy doors slam behind her, Nova felt the tears start to run down her cheeks. But along with them she felt something else: a lightness in her chest that she’d not felt for months. The wind blew, bringing with it the smell of sea air, and Nova pushed her hair out of her face and began to walk up the path, toward the road. Where she was going now or how she was going to get there, she had no idea. But for the first time since her dad died, that thought didn’t terrify her.

“Hey, Nova! Wait up!”

She looked back round to see the church door opening and her book club members hurrying out, along with an unfamiliar silver-haired man. Nova stopped and waited for them to reach her.

“Are you all right?” Arthur asked, his face strained with concern.

“I am, thank you. And thank you all for what you did in there today.”

“It looks like the police have arrested the criminal,” the silver-haired man said, nodding out of the church gate toward the road, where two police officers were talking to Lauren.

“I’m sorry, who are you?” Nova asked him.

“Oh, my apologies; I’m Richard Digby-Rice, Eve Watkins’s next-door neighbor. I hope you don’t mind me gate-crashing your wedding, but Phyllis invited me.”

As he said this, Nova glanced at Phyllis, whose face had gone uncharacteristically flushed.

“Phyllis, you were amazing in there,” Ash said. “I can’t believe you worked out that Lauren was in love with Craig.”

“I saw it in her eyes when she arrived at the church,” Phyllis said. “She was standing talking to me, but the only person she was looking at was Craig.”

“It turns out being a busybody is useful after all,” Arthur said, winking at her.

“Well, I suppose I can’t take all the credit. You were the one who gave me the idea that love could be the motive.”

“Didn’t I say that romance novels would have the answer?” Arthur chuckled. “In the end, everything always comes down to love.”

“But still, we have to give Miss Marple here credit for solving the mystery,” Ash said.

The older lady gave an embarrassed cough and turned to Nova. “I’m sorry for disrupting your wedding like that, only I thought you should know what was going on.”

“It’s okay, Phyllis. That whole thing was horrible, but I do feel…I don’t know: relief, maybe? And thanks to you, I’m no longer a police suspect.”

“Well, I’m very glad I could help clear your name,” Phyllis said, and then she frowned as she looked at Michael. “I’m just sorry we’re no closer to clearing yours.”

“I do wonder if Michael’s right and Eve tragically tripped and fell of her own accord,” Richard said. “With no other suspects, surely the police will decide it was an accident?”

“So perhaps her death was never a murder mystery after all,” Phyllis said. “Nor a romance.”

“Now will you and Arthur admit that not everything can be answered by Miss Marple or a romance novel?” Ash said, smiling at the pair. “Not everything comes down to greed and love.”

The others all laughed at this, and despite her life having spectacularly imploded moments earlier, Nova found herself laughing too. And then she saw Phyllis stop and frown.

“Greed and love,” the woman muttered to herself.

“Is everything okay?” Nova asked her.

Phyllis ignored her and turned to Michael. “Who knew about your father’s financial affairs, apart from you and Cynthia?”

“Phyllis, is now really the time for this?” Arthur said, glancing back toward the church doors, through which the wedding guests were starting to exit.

“We can leave in a moment, but I want to hear what Michael has to say first.”

Michael was looking confused, but he shrugged. “Eh, well apart from the bank, credit card companies and our family solicitor, I don’t think anyone knew. We were careful to keep Dad’s gambling debts a secret so Mum wouldn’t find out.”

Richard opened his mouth to say something, but Ash got there first.

“Cynthia might have told her lover! Is that what you’re thinking, Phyllis? That Cynthia’s lover might have killed Eve?”

“That’s an interesting theory,” Phyllis said, nodding approvingly at the teenager. “But I don’t think it was him; he doesn’t have a strong enough motive. Yet there is someone else with a strong motive; someone who had no idea about the debts and still thought Eve was a wealthy woman sitting on a decent inheritance.”

“Hang on, I’m the sole beneficiary of Mum’s will,” Michael said. “So I’m the only person who’d have a motive to kill her for the inheritance, and as previously discussed, I definitely didn’t do it.”

“Hypothetically speaking, there are other ways someone could have got their hands on your mum’s money. Someone could have convinced her to sell her house, for example, and give them the money?”

“Why on earth would Mum have done that?”

Phyllis smiled at Michael sadly. “As Arthur so frequently reminds us, people will do all sorts of crazy things for love.”

“Hang on, are you saying my mum was in love ?” Michael’s voice had risen with incredulity. “I’m sorry but that’s ridiculous. She adored my dad and was devastated when he died.”

“I know this must be hard to hear, Michael. But if it’s any consolation, I know what it’s like to be heartbroken and lonely, and then for someone to come along who makes you feel special. Someone who smiles at you with kind eyes and makes you feel like a teenager again.”

Phyllis looked at Richard as she said this, and Nova glanced at the man, too, expecting to see him blush at Phyllis’s compliment. But her words seemed to have had the opposite effect, as his face had gone deathly pale. Why was he looking so—

“Oh my God, it was you!”

Richard’s eyes flicked between them all, but before he could do anything, Ash and Dan both jumped forward and grabbed him by the arms.

“Get off me!” Richard shouted, finding his voice. “This is outrageous!”

“I can’t believe it took me so long to see it,” Phyllis said. “I was blinded by my own silly vanity, too flattered by your attention to remember Miss Marple’s number one rule: always believe the worst in people. You did the same thing to Eve Watkins, didn’t you? Twinkled your blue eyes and flashed her that charming smile so she wouldn’t question your motives. All because she was, like me, a lonely older woman who you thought you could manipulate to get your hands on her money.”

“I’ve never heard such nonsense!” Richard said, struggling to get out of the boys’ grip.

“You must have spent months wooing Eve: being a good friend, a comforting ear and a shoulder to cry on. It all looked so innocent from the outside: as Michael himself said, you were a wonderful neighbor. But all the time, you were trying to make a grief-stricken woman fall in love with you.”

“Oh, you scoundrel,” Arthur said with a growl.

“On the way to Eve’s wake, you told me that Michael and Cynthia had been putting pressure on Eve to sell her house, but it was you who was putting pressure on her, wasn’t it? You were trying to convince Eve to sell the house and give you the money.”

“Oh my God, that’s why the solicitor told my mum about Dad’s debts!” Michael said with a gasp of realization. “Mum must have told him she was thinking of putting the house on the market, and the solicitor wrote back saying that the house was no longer hers to sell.”

“Richard must have overheard you and your mum arguing about the solicitor’s letter and discovered that instead of sitting on a small fortune, Eve was penniless,” Phyllis said. “And this made you furious, didn’t it, Richard? All that time and effort you’d put into making her fall for you had all been for nothing. And in a fit of rage, you went round and murdered her.”

“I didn’t mean to kill her!” Richard shouted, and his shoulders sagged. “After I heard Michael leave, I went round to ask her about the letter, but Eve was so upset she ended up screaming at me too. She started hitting me and I defended myself, but I never meant for her to fall.”

There was a moment of stunned silence as they all took in what he’d just said.

“Then why didn’t you go to the police and tell them what had happened?” Arthur asked.

“Because I knew how it would look. After my first wife died in a freak accident—”

“My God, it’s not the first time you’ve done this,” Michael said. “You absolute bastard!”

He lunged clumsily at Richard, his fist connecting with the man’s shoulder. Richard yelped and jerked backward, and in the moment of chaos, he managed to slip free from Ash and Dan and started to run toward the road. A second later, Dan set off after him at a sprint. He caught up with Richard at the gates, just as the police car containing Lauren was about to drive off.

“Perfect, the police can take the two criminals at once,” Phyllis said, and when Nova looked back, she saw a satisfied smile on the woman’s face.

“Are you okay?” Nova asked Michael, who was leaning on a gravestone looking like he might be about to pass out.

“I can’t believe Richard killed her. I encouraged Mum to spend time with him; I thought their friendship would be good for her. And all along he was a trickster trying to scam her.”

“It’s one of the oldest tricks in the book, I’m afraid,” Arthur said. “In one of Esi’s romance n—”

“Not now, Arthur,” Nova interrupted.

“Ah yes, you’re right, sorry,” he said with an embarrassed smile.

Behind them, Nova heard voices, and she turned round to see the congregation had all spilled out of the church, and in their midst, Craig’s family were glaring across at her.

“I should probably get out of here,” she said.

“Where will you go?” Arthur asked.

“I don’t know. Not to Craig’s parents’ house, that’s for sure.”

“You’re welcome to come and stay with me for a while, if you like?”

Nova smiled at him. “Thanks, but I really, really want to see Mum, so maybe I’ll head to the airport?”

“That sounds like a grand plan. I’m not sure Bessie will get us all the way to Heathrow, but I can give you a lift to the station if you like?”

“Arthur, in any of your romance novels, has a bride ever run away from her own wedding in a tractor?” Ash asked.

“Not that I can remember. But it feels very fitting, don’t you think? A unique getaway vehicle for a unique young woman.”

Nova laughed. “It sounds perfect. Now let’s get out of here!”