A Cornish Christmas Murder Read online

  A Cornish Christmas Murder

  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: 9780008525354

  Ebook Edition © November 2021 ISBN: 9780008525347

  Version: 2021-11-11

  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

  Jodie’s tried and tested recipes #4

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you for reading…

  About the Author

  Also by Fiona Leitch

  One More Chapter...

  About the Publisher

  For Lucas, whose arrival was like all my Christmases at once

  Chapter One

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘Bloomin’ ’eck!’

  ‘Holy guacamole!’

  ‘Woof!’

  The exclamations of my companions as we drove through the wrought-iron gates and chugged painfully up the snow-covered driveway echoed my own thoughts. The house that was still some way ahead of us, framed by an avenue of bare, skeletal trees silhouetted blackly against a pale sky, was undoubtedly impressive.

  ‘Yeah, it’s all right, innit?’ I said calmly, as if I was used to working in great big, fancy country mansions. But, truth be told, I was hugely excited about this job. This one was going to be fun.

  The gears on the Gimpmobile, my ancient but well-loved (and inappropriately decorated) catering van, ground nastily as I shifted down to second, slowing down as we approached the front of the house. I assumed my employers for the day would not want my knackered old Transit parked there, where their guests would see it, but in this weather I wasn’t wholly convinced that, once parked, the van would start again. I leaned on the horn, hoping for a jaunty Toot! Toot! to alert the inhabitants that we’d arrived, and was rewarded with a sort of strangled whine that reminded me of the year I’d had to sit next to Colin ‘Thunderpants’ Dobson in Maths. The combination of the school’s hard plastic chairs and the weird diet that his mother fed him had resulted in many similar noises, and had left me unable to attempt any type of mathematical equation without my eyes involuntarily watering.

  As I’d hoped, the grand wooden door opened and Lily Swann, an old friend of mine from the same school (but with a better digestive system), rushed out, waving me on and pointing around the back of the house. The Gimpmobile groaned but made it around the corner of the house before I took pity on it and parked up, leaping out as soon as the engine was off.

  Mum climbed creakily out of the van on the passenger side, stopping to stretch and trapping my teenage daughter, Daisy, who was trying to follow her out.

  ‘Hurry up, Nana,’ said Daisy. ‘Germaine’s been crossing her paws since Launceston.’

  ‘She’s not the only one,’ muttered Mum, jigging about. ‘It’s the cold weather.’

  Our Pomeranian, Germaine, who we’d ‘temporarily’ inherited after her owner had died and who had wormed her way into the family for ever just by virtue of being more cute and floofsome than was strictly legal, couldn’t wait any longer and climbed over both of them before jumping down into the snow. She yelped; her little legs meant that her fluffy tummy was only inches away from the cold stuff. I’d bought her a cute little coat, not that I’m a sucker, or that I treat her like my baby or anything (ahem!), but that wouldn’t keep her feet warm. She trotted round to the back of the van, picking up her paws in a highly exaggerated fashion to avoid them being in contact with the ground for too long, and peed up one of the wheels. I could almost hear her sigh with satisfaction.

  I bent down to pick her up, then thought better of it at the sight of the snow under her paws, which was yellow and still steaming slightly. Instead I clicked on her lead as the fifth member of my ragtag band of helpers, Debbie, followed me out of the driver’s side of the van. It was a bit of a squeeze up front – the van’s passenger bench-seat was only really meant for two passengers, not three and a dog – but given how cold it was, the journey from our homes in the seaside town of Penstowan, across Bodmin Moor to Kingseat Abbey, had been more cosy than cramped.

  ‘Blooming heck, this is some house, innit?’ said Debbie, her Mancunian accent showing unaccustomed signs of awe. She had a dry sense of humour and was usually quite hard to impress, probably a result of her years as a nurse back in Manchester where she had, as she was proud of telling us, seen everything. She’d only been living in Cornwall for about three months, and as much as she didn’t really regret moving, I knew she still occasionally hankered after the shops and big-city lifestyle she’d left behind. If her husband Callum (Penstowan High School’s Class of 1996 Top Stud Muffin, although – bless him – that was kind of hard to believe when you saw him now) had found them a house like this down here, I don’t think she’d have given her home town a second thought.

  ‘Jodie!’ Lily had gone back indoors and reappeared at the rear door, which was a much less grand affair; what I assumed had once been the servants’ entrance. She wore a smart suit, trouser legs shoved hastily into a pair of wellies, with a pink puffer jacket slung incongruously over her shoulders. She stamped her feet against the packed snow and ice in the courtyard, trying to keep warm. ‘Thank you for doing this at such short notice. I wasn’t sure you’d get here in this weather.’ She stepped forward and we hugged.

  I’d spoken to her on the phone and made most of the arrangements for today by email, but we hadn’t actually seen each other for several years. I’d moved to London to join the Metropolitan Police when I was nineteen, almost twenty. I had always made a point of looking up my old friends on my regular visits home, but Penstowan was the kind of place where people regularly moved away, and every time I came back there’d be fewer and fewer of the old gang. Lily was one of those who had moved, working overseas and raising her family away from Cornwall.

  After my dad had died seven years ago I’d toyed with the idea of coming back for good, but I’d only taken the leap earlier that year. I’d returned to set up my catering business and have a quiet life with Daisy, away from the dangers of my previous career and the irritation of having my useless ex-husband and Lifetime Holder of the ‘Crappest Dad in the Universe’ award, Richard (aka That Cheating Swine), living just round the corner. Lily had also only recently returned herself.

  Lily smiled as she stood back and looked me up and down. ‘Tony said you hadn’t changed a bit. You haven’t.’ Tony Penhaligon was my oldest friend in the whole world. He knew everyone in Penstowan and everything that they got up to, and he was almost as big a gossip as my mum. ‘Shirley, you’re looking well. Daisy, you were a baby the last time I saw you! And you must be Debbie? Come in, I’ll show you where the kitchen is and you can get warm before you unload everything.’

  We followed her inside, glad to get out of the cold. The snow that had started falling as we left Penstowan had stopped as we crossed the moors, but it was starting again now in earnest and I was already dreading the drive home. But that was hours away. Hopefully the weather would sort itself out. We didn’t normally get snow this close to Christmas, with the day itself usually being grey and miserable rather than white and pretty.

  ‘This place is amazing,’ I said.

  ‘A bit different to Singapore, though,’ Lily laughed.

  ‘Yeah, and a lot colder.’

  ‘You used to live in Singapore?’ Daisy’s eyes widened. We’d watched a programme on the telly about the world-famous botanical gardens in Singapore, and she was now obsessed with going there. I hadn’t told her, but I had this dream of saving up and taking her there for her eighteenth birthday. It was j
ust as well that was some years away.

  ‘Yes, we lived there for eight years. I worked in hotel management—’

  ‘Did you work in that amazing one with the swimming pool on the roof?’ Daisy had done her research. I wasn’t sure my budget would ever stretch to us staying in that particular hotel, though…

  ‘No, although I knew people that did, and I used to sneak in and use the pool,’ said Lily. ‘Have you heard of Raffles? I used to work there.’

  ‘Wow,’ said Debbie, impressed again. I made a mental note to tell Callum to start saving up so they could come to Singapore with us, although I doubted we’d be staying at Raffles either. ‘I’ve always wanted to stay there.’

  ‘How on earth did you end up back here?’ said Daisy, which could have sounded rude – I mean, the house we were standing in was hardly slumming it – but then, living and working in one of the most beautiful and historic hotels in the world was definitely not an easy thing to live up to.

  ‘It just felt like time to come home.’ Lily smiled at me. ‘You know how that feels.’

  The house was every bit as impressive on the inside as it was on the exterior, even in what would once have been the servants’ domain. The stone floors were polished and smooth with hundreds of years’ use, but still felt sturdy and reassuring underfoot. The walls were at least a foot thick; massive slabs of the local granite keeping the cold at bay. The windows were small and mean, and didn’t let in much light; but then this was the business end of the house, and I assumed the more ornate arched windows and carved stone lintels that I’d spotted as we’d slowly crawled past the main entrance would have been saved for the bits the aristocracy saw. At least it meant the draughts had trouble finding their way in.

  Lily slipped off her wellies and jacket, hanging them in a cupboard in the rear entrance lobby, then led us down a corridor towards a lime-washed hallway, with several doors leading off. She pointed to one.

  ‘There’s a toilet just there, if you need it—’ she started. Mum rushed off without a word. We all stopped and waited for her, Germaine taking the opportunity to sniff at Lily’s trouser pockets. You never knew where a doggy treat could be concealed, and she lived in constant hope.

  ‘Thanks for letting me bring the dog, by the way,’ I said. ‘She won’t be any trouble. All my usual dog-sitters have come with me.’ I gestured to Debbie and Daisy, who were both having a good gawk at the house.

  ‘That new bloke of yours not able to look after her?’ Lily said with a grin, and I knew that Tony really had been gossiping. He was such an old woman.

  ‘Nathan’s working,’ I said, feeling a little warm glow in my tummy that DCI Nathan Withers, once of the Royal Merseyside Constabulary but now firmly ensconced in the Devon and Cornwall Police (and my heart), was indeed my ‘new bloke’. To say it had been love at first sight would be a massive lie – I had muscled in on his first big investigation down here, and in return he had threatened to arrest me at least three times – but once he’d realised that it was better to work with me than against me, because I wasn’t backing down, and I’d realised that what I’d mistaken for arrogance was actually him trying to find his place in a new town, it hadn’t taken long for it to develop. It was still early days for us as a couple – it was our two-month anniversary in five days, on Christmas Day – but I thought it was going well.

  ‘All right, Shirl?’ asked Debbie, as Mum rejoined us. ‘You can stop crossing your legs now.’

  ‘It’s the cold weather,’ said Mum. Germaine yapped in agreement.

  ‘Is there somewhere we can put down her bed, and some water?’ I asked. ‘For the dog, I mean, not Mum. Although…’

  ‘There’s the old butler’s pantry.’ Lily pointed to a doorway up ahead next to the kitchen. ‘We use it as a kind of mud room. That should do.’

  We reached the kitchen and went inside, me clutching tightly onto Germaine’s lead. Bringing a dog on a catering job was hardly ideal, and normally I’d have let Daisy stay at home and look after her with her best friend Jade, who lived a couple of doors down. Jade’s mum, Nancy, was always happy to keep an eye on Daisy and as for the dog, she felt almost as at home at their place as she did at ours. But they’d gone up country, visiting relatives for Christmas. I could usually ask Tony, seeing as he was the one who’d initially suggested we look after the dog, but he was away too, enjoying a summer Christmas with his sister in New Zealand. Lucky beggar. I knew from her photos on Facebook that it wasn’t always sunny at Christmas over there, but it sure as hell wouldn’t be snowing. But Tony had had a pretty tough year and I could hardly begrudge him the chance to escape for a bit.

  And then there was Nathan, my Nathan, who was stuck at work trying to solve a spate of burglaries that had hit Penstowan and the surrounding villages. Cornwall may be beautiful, but it can be a tough place to find work, and nothing brings poverty home to you like Christmas time. Theft always seemed to rise during the height of summer, when tourists came to enjoy our beaches and sometimes relaxed a little too much, leaving expensive phones, watches and wallets in unguarded backpacks on the sand while they went for a swim, and at Christmas, when the lure of other people’s presents became too much.

  I wasn’t sure what I’d been expecting in the kitchen – maybe an old-fashioned range, and a big scrubbed wooden table in the middle to work on – but it wasn’t what confronted me. It was love at first sight.

  ‘Wow,’ I breathed. Lily looked at me anxiously.

  ‘Is it OK? Trevor just had the whole thing refitted.’

  ‘It’s perfect,’ I said, running a hand along the stainless-steel worktop as I took in the two large ovens and the eight-burner gas hob, all of which gleamed. ‘This is a proper professional kitchen.’

  ‘I’m glad you like it.’ Lily smiled brightly. ‘This’ll be the first big event Trevor’s held since he bought the house. I told him the first thing he needed to make this a luxury hotel was a decent kitchen to cater for the guests with.’

  ‘So this Trevor fella, he’s your new beau, is he?’ asked Mum. Honestly, and they say I’m the nosy one.

  ‘Nana!’ Daisy rolled her eyes at Mum, who tried to look all Who, me?

  Lily blushed. ‘No, no, he’s my boss.’

  ‘Well-heeled, though? And I heard from your mum that you and Nick split up a couple of years back—’

  ‘Mum!’ I hissed. ‘Any more of that and I’ll be dropping you off at a nursing home on the way back to Penstowan.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ laughed Lily. ‘I remember how the village gossip thing goes. OK. Trevor is forty-eight, divorced, has three children and shares custody with his ex-wife, who’s actually really nice and they still get on. He was a property developer up in Yorkshire, residential stuff mostly, but he decided he’d had enough of flipping houses and wanted to settle down. He found this place and decided to turn it into a hotel. Have I missed anything out?’

  ‘How big’s his—’

  ‘Oh my God, Nana, will you just stop?’

  ‘—bank balance? How big’s his bank balance, is all I was going to say!’

  ‘How did you get the job?’ asked Debbie. I gave her a Don’t you bloomin’ start look, but she just shrugged.

  ‘I was part of the team who moved Raffles—’

  ‘Wait, what? You moved a whole hotel?’ Oh God, now I was questioning her.

  ‘Yes. They took the hotel down and rebuilt it in another part of the city, back in 2019,’ she said, like we should all have known that. Because I do like to keep abreast of developments in the overseas luxury hotel industry, obviously. ‘We rebuilt it and renovated it back to its former glory. So Trevor could see that I knew a thing or two about setting up a hotel from scratch, although the budget here’s a lot lower, of course.’