A Brush with Death Read online

  A Brush with Death

  A Nosey Parker Cozy Mystery

  Fiona Leitch

  One More Chapter

  a division of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

  1 London Bridge Street

  London SE1 9GF

  www.harpercollins.co.uk

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  First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2021

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  Copyright © Fiona Leitch 2021

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  Cover design by Lucy Bennett © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021

  Cover images © Shutterstock.com

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  Fiona Leitch asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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  A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

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  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

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  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

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  Source ISBN: 9780008436582

  Ebook Edition © February 2021 ISBN: 9780008436575

  Version: 2021-01-25

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Epilogue

  Jodie’s tried and tested recipes #2

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for reading…

  You will also love…

  About the Author

  Also by Fiona Leitch

  One More Chapter...

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  ‘Whatever you do, don’t call it a fete.’

  Mum, Daisy, and I stood outside the town hall. It was a warm, early evening towards the end of the summer season and Penstowan was still busy, but it wouldn’t be for much longer. Hence the need for an annual event that would bring people to the town and hopefully entice holidaymakers to stay at least one more week.

  The Penstowan Fete – oops! – had been going since, well, forever. For as long as I could remember anyway, and for years before that. It had been one of the highlights of my childhood, with the funfair and the cake stalls, the daft games (hook-a-duck, anyone?) and the coconut shy. I’d actually won a coconut once. It had been towards the end of the day and they’d run out of prizes (badly stuffed Snoopy toys and plastic tat), so I’d ended up with this exotic but undeniably brown and hairy treasure. I’d taken it home and given it expectantly to my mum, thinking she’d be able to crack it open and inside it would be like a Bounty bar or something, but she’d just looked at it in bemusement and it had been left to sit in the fruit bowl for about three months until she got sick of dusting it and threw it out. And then of course there were the goldfish. Oh so many goldfish, swimming around in plastic bags, all tipped unceremoniously into Mum’s big glass mixing bowl because we didn’t have a fish tank. They never lived long enough for us to make the trip to the pet shop in Barnstaple to buy one, so they’d be flushed down the toilet and the cycle would repeat the next year.

  But changes were afoot. The town council had voted unanimously to ‘show those holiday-home-owning emmets down south what’s what’, by putting on their own week-long arts festival to rival the popular one held further along the Cornish coast in St Ives, haunt of artists and wealthy second-home owners from upcountry, culminating in a grand closing gala day. There would still be a coconut shy, and ill-fated goldfish would no doubt be making an appearance on gala day, but it was,in no shape or form a fete. Got that? And here I was, about to cater the opening night party.

  At least, I hoped I was. The last time I’d tried to cater an event – my oldest friend Tony Penhaligon’s wedding – celebrations had been interrupted by the appearance of a dead body. They hadn’t even had an invitation. And no, before you say it, it was nothing to do with my cooking. Rude!

  The town hall was a grand old building, with big arched windows, leaded panes, and gothic stonework decorating the facade. Made from the local grey stone, the top floor was half-timbered in the Tudor style, and it even had a (very small) crenellated tower to one side. The town council met here occasionally, but the business end of local government all took place in the municipal building down the road, a late Sixties/early Seventies glass and concrete carbuncle. Nowadays the town hall was used for weddings – the registry office was here – and grand civic occasions. Like this one.

  Behind us, looking not quite as magnificent, sat my trusty van, the Gimpmobile – so-called because I’d bought it off a bloke whose shop selling kinky underwear and, ahem … marital aids had closed down. The van’s past life was gone but not entirely forgotten, as when I’d bought it the side panel had had a somewhat graphic decal on the side. A decal that could still be seen, like the Ghost of Perversions Past, beneath the new paintwork if you caught it at the right (or wrong, depending on your point of view) angle. Daisy had nicknamed it the Gimpmobile and the name (like the pervy picture) had stuck.

  ‘Come on then,’ I said. ‘Let’s unload everything.’

  So we unloaded everything – boxes of smoked salmon, blinis, cocktail sausages, vol-au-vents, all very Seventies dinner party – and took it through to the kitchen. I’d cooked everything at home, so it was really just a case of assembling hors d’oeuvres, sticking cocktail sticks in things, and getting ready to amuse guests’ bouches. When everything was either warming in the oven, resting on the side, or cooling in the fridge, I went to move the van before it could offend the great and the good of the town who were coming tonight, not to mention the guests of honour. As I backed the Gimpmobile into a space round the back of the hall I was feeling quietly confident that everything was under control, but one look at my mum’s face when I got back to the kitchen immediately made me nervous.

  ‘What?’ I asked, not sure that I wanted to know.

  ‘Joanie just rang. She’s had a fall and she won’t be able to make it,’ said Mum. Joanie was a lovely but extremely elderly lady who served hot drinks and biscuits at the OAPs’ Wednesday coffee morning, and she had been drafted in to help serve the guests that night. If I’m honest, every time I saw her approaching with a tray of boiling hot drinks my instinct was to get as far away from her as possible so that I wasn’t in the splash zone when she dropped them, but to be fair, as wobbly and unsteady on her feet as she appeared to be, she’d never dropped her tray. Still, I was relieved that she wasn’t going be on duty this evening, even if it did put us one waitress down.

  ‘Poor Joanie,’ I said, trying to hide my relief. ‘Never mind, the others will manage .’

  ‘Yes … although of course Anthea had to cancel too.’

  Mum had introduced me to most of her elderly friends since Daisy and I had moved back to Penstowan, but I couldn’t remember half of them; after a while they all blurred into one homogenous lump of blow-dried hair and wide-fitting shoes. ‘Which one’s Anthea?’

  ‘You know the one. Her with the eyes.’

  Daisy snorted. ‘Oh, that one…’

  ‘That’s really going to leave us short-handed,’ I said, thoughtfully. I looked at Daisy, but she immediately guessed what I was thinking.

  ‘Oh no!’ she said, shaking her head vehemently. ‘I’m not doing it. I’m meeting up with Jade and going to the pictures, remember? I can’t, anyway. It’s illegal. I’m only twelve. You’re not allowed to employ me until I’m thirteen. And there’ll be alcohol. And—’

  ‘All right, all right!’ I said. ‘Sheesh. I wasn’t asking you to go up a chimney or anything.’

  ‘You’ll have to do it,’ said Mum. ‘Me and Janet can’t do it on our own. Certainly not for the money you’re paying us…’ she added under her breath.

  ‘I haven’t got the right clothes,’ I said, thinking, oh God, no, don’t make me do it…

  ‘Didn’t we bring Joanie’s uniform with us in the van?’ said Daisy innocently. I glared at her. After all I’d done for her…

  I am not a girly person. It’s probably one of the reasons joining the Metropolitan Police force (my previous occupation) had appealed to me. I’ve never gone in for skirts or dresses, not unless I’m go ing somewhere really fancy, and even then I’ll have a long debate with myself first about whether or not a smart pair of trousers wouldn’t actually be just as appropriate. Even as a child, frills and bows were not my thing; dungarees maybe, jeans definitely, blouses with pussy bow necklines, just … no. And yet here I was.

  I tugged at the stupid, shiny, silky, horrible blouse that only just met over my chest (Joanie’s was clearly not as voluptuous as mine, and it was also rather closer to ground level), and huffed as I yanked the pussy bow away from my throat where it was threatening to strangle me.

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake!’ Mum straightened the bow. ‘You’re like a stroppy teenager.’

  ‘Oi!’ said Daisy indignantly, and then she caught sight of what I was wearing. ‘Oh my days…’

  ‘Don’t say it,’ I said. ‘And I’m warning you, if this ends up on Facebook, last year’s school photo of you is going viral.’

  Daisy quickly shoved her phone back in her pocket and smiled. ‘Never even crossed my mind…’

  The guests were beginning to arrive. Most of the food by now was set out on the buffet table, which was covered in a long cloth, so I hid as much of my body as possible behind it and poured out glasses of champagne while Mum and her friend Janet handed them out. I began to relax; although I recognised most of the guests, they weren’t friends as such so I wasn’t too bothered about them seeing me in this ridiculous get-up. I fussed about with some of the trays of food, still reluctant to leave the shelter of the buffet table, but at the moment I didn’t really need to.

  ‘I always wanted to see you in your uniform, but I didn’t expect it to look like this…’

  I whirled around to see Tony standing behind me with a massive grin on his face. His eyes dropped down to the hideous bow and his grin got even larger.

  ‘What the— What are you wearing?’ he spluttered, failing to quash the massive guffaw that had burst from him. ‘That’s an interesting look for you…’

  I smiled sweetly. ‘Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. Let’s see if you still find it funny when I ram this cocktail sausage up your ar—’

  ‘Ah, Jodie!’

  I whirled around again – whirling in a tight pencil-skirt and unfamiliar heels is not a good idea – and came face to face with Maurice Holden, the mayor of Penstowan.

  Mayors on the telly are always big, fat, jolly men, like Alf Roberts on Coronation Street. They have firm handshakes, booming voices, and hearty laughs. They know their way around the one-trouser-leg-rolled-up, one-nipple-exposed secret handshake of the local Masonic lodge, and they’ve grown fat on a diet of civic receptions and official banquets. Our mayor was nothing like that. He was a tall man in his sixties and slim to the point of being frail; he stooped slightly, the heavy mayoral chains of his office weighing him down in a way that reminded me of Jacob Marley rattling his ghostly shackles. But he was always friendly and tireless in his enthusiasm for the town, where he’d lived for almost forty years with his ‘special friend’ (as the older generation of Penstowians euphemistically called him) Tim.

  I lowered the cocktail sausage I was still brandishing aggressively and smiled.

  ‘Hello, Maurice. Good turnout.’

  ‘Isn’t it? I’m terribly pleased. I was worried we’d have a load of tickets left over but the evening’s a sellout! Everyone wants to meet our guest of honour.’ He looked around. ‘I just hope he turns up…’

  Chapter Two

  The mayor needn’t have worried, because just as he finished speaking the heavy wooden double doors into the room opened, and our guest (or rather, guests) of honour stood on the threshold. Maurice rushed over to greet them, hand outstretched to shake, as all eyes turned to them.

  Our guests of honour were none other than the famous painter Duncan Stovall and his wife, manager, and biographer, Genevieve Lorre. He’d started his career with a bang, when not long after leaving art school he released the Penstowan pictures, a series of paintings that were kind of abstract, sort of landscapes, after a legendary month of debauchery down here with Genevieve and another artist friend. To say the paintings had become popular was an understatement. The pictures had exploded onto the art scene, managing the tricky task of appealing to the critics and his contemporaries, and the general public, who didn’t know much about art but knew what they liked. And they liked his paintings very much. The whole series – eight in total – had sold at the time (1990) for £6.5million, but one single picture had recently changed hands for that amount on its own. And as if that hadn’t been lucrative enough by itself, several of the pictures were so popular that mass-produced prints of them had flown off the shelves during the mid-Nineties. I even bought one from Ikea when I moved down to London, to remind me of home.

  Penstowan had briefly become a site of pilgrimage for art lovers, keen to see the place that had inspired such works of creative genius, but it obviously hadn’t moved them in the same way it had moved Duncan Stovall. The soaring tourist numbers had peaked in 1991–92, and then fairly quickly dropped back to normal levels.

  Ever since then, Stovall had released a dwindling number of paintings that still sold, but he never really recaptured that same spirit. The original Penstowan pictures were bright and colourful but they still managed to catch the mood of the sea, of the beach and the cliffs, even the sombre foggy mornings when the sea and the sky were the same lifeless grey. His later ones were nice enough but felt almost like a pastiche. Still, he’d made a very nice living out of it.

  Maurice greeted the pair effusively. Genevieve was a petite, slender woman, with that air of natural, artless elegance French women seem to have. I tugged at the stupid pussy bow around my neck, which was just one more reminder that I definitely didn’t have any French ancestry. She smiled warmly at Maurice, looking perfectly relaxed, which was more than could be said for her husband.

  Duncan Stovall did not look like a man who was about to spend the evening being wined, dined, and feted for his creative genius. His expression was closer to that of a man going for a prostate exam – as if the occasion were more to be endured than enjoyed. Perhaps he was just shy, introverted, like so many artists. If so then he was out of luck here. The people of Penstowan – particularly after a few pints – had never gone in for introspection, and I doubted they were going to start now.

  He was in his mid-fifties, tall and well built with short, thick black hair (the sort that had a tendency to go curly if you let it get too long, I reckoned), beginning to grey at the temples, and a neatly trimmed beard. He wore an old tweed jacket, open to reveal a black T-shirt underneath, and jeans; next to his glamorous wife and the always dapperly dressed mayor (who reminded me of Terence Stamp when he wasn’t being Jacob Marley) he was severely under-dressed. Maybe that was why he looked uncomfortable. As Genevieve spoke to Maurice he looked around the room, his piercing blue eyes stopping as his gaze reached me. I picked up two glasses of champagne and walked over to him.

  ‘Get me a whisky,’ he said gruffly. I looked at him, eyebrows raised, thinking, I don’t give a flying wotsit who you are, you don’t talk to me like that. He obviously guessed what I was thinking, because he smiled apologetically and said, ‘Sorry. I hate this kind of shindig, all these new people, and it makes me really uncomfortable. But that’s no excuse to forget my manners. Could I possibly have a whisky, please? My wife’s the champagne drinker, she’ll probably have both of those…’ He gestured to the glasses in my hand as his wife turned round. She took in my terrible outfit, and in the space of about two seconds managed to make me feel like something my dog Germaine had rolled in during one of our walks across the sheep field behind our house.