A Death in C Minor Read online




  © 2012 by Rebecca Yount

  ISBN #: 978-1-4675-1499-6

  For David

  The Golden Thread That Binds My Life

  For every evil under the sun

  There be a remedy or there be none.

  If there be one, seek till you find it.

  If there be none, never mind it!

  -- Mother Goose

  Chapter 1

  Essex, England, 2000

  "God, what I wouldn't give for a cigarette."

  American expatriate Jessica Beaumont sat at the kitchen table in her rented Essex cottage peeling a nicotine patch from her upper arm. After tugging it free, she replaced it with a fresh patch, then reached over to stroke a dozing, portly calico cat sleeping in the chair next to her.

  "What's worse, Boodles? Smoking or gluttony?" she asked the purring feline. "'Guess they both can end up killing you. Damn, why does everything fun have to be so bad for our health!"

  Jessica Eleanor Beaumont was a celebrated American concert pianist who had recently fled her star-crossed life in America. Her husband, a high-ranking administrator with the World Bank in Washington, D.C., had left her for his Swedish secretary more than a year earlier. Then the bottom dropped out.

  On the way home from school one afternoon, her ten-year-old son, Boyd, was killed by a hit and run driver who was being pursued by police during a high-speed chase on the D.C. streets. Soon after, Jess broke down completely, fleeing an important concert at Alice Tully Hall in New York in June. The classical music mavens proclaimed she would "never perform in the Big Apple again," having let down her loyal following. Then came a suicide attempt, which had fortuitously failed. After that, the 33-year-old Beaumont decided enough was enough, and rented a sprawling, but completely restored, 17th-century thatched roof cottage in the Essex village of Kenwick. The owners of the place, Clif and Penny Stanhope, were in Cambridge, Massachusetts for a year, where Clif, an economics professor at Cambridge University, was on a faculty exchange at Harvard.

  All in all, Kenwick turned out to be a good choice. The roomy, well-appointed cottage came complete with a seven-foot ebony Yamaha grand piano which Penny Stanhope had inherited from her aunt. Although Penny herself rarely played the instrument, she had it tuned to perfection for Jess before her arrival.

  The cottage was surrounded by a stunning four-acre English garden that looked as if it might actually harbor elves and fairies. Beyond the Stanhope's property stretched miles of prime Essex pastureland as far as the eye could see. No condos or shopping malls here, thank you very much.

  After being in Kenwick for scarcely a month, Jess' spirits had gradually revived. For the first time in many weeks, she began to believe that she could actually walk among the living again and put the pain of the past behind her. Jess even contemplated kick-starting her concert career in England. No hurry, though. Wounds heal slowly and in their own time. But they do eventually heal.

  Having completed her nicotine patch operation, Jess rose from the table and stretched. Looking out to the garden beyond the kitchen windows, she saw that the thermometer on the wall registered 12.8 centigrade -- 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Not too bad for early September, when ferocious rainstorms often whipped down from the North Sea, slashing across the flat farmlands like Mongol hordes.

  But it didn't matter if the rains came. With the kitchen Aga oven going full blast 24/7, Jess was toasty. The cast iron behemoth warmed not only the kitchen and adjacent rooms, but the upper level bedrooms as well. She loved nothing more than to soak up its fuzzy warmth in the early morning while sipping her fresh-brewed coffee, lavishing attention on Boodles, the Stanhopes' cat, and watching nature's unpredictable elements transform the demeanor of the garden.

  Leisure time: something Jess had rarely experienced since she was discovered, at age eight, to be a musical prodigy.

  Picking up her coffee cup, she strolled down the long hallway to the front parlor where the piano was located. Boodles tagged closely behind her, her considerable girth causing the parquet floor to creak.

  "Good lord, cat! I've got to put you on the Atkins diet," Jess declared, entering the parlor.

  Setting her cup safely on the floor away from her feet, Jess sat at the piano and softly played a chord – C E-flat G: the key of C minor. The tragic key. The key of mourning. The key of Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata -- the "pathetically sad" sonata -- the piece Jess was practicing when she was interrupted by the phone call that informed her that Boyd had been killed by a hit and run driver. From that day forward, Jess swore she would never play the Pathetique again until she made peace with her son's senseless, untimely death.

  Tubby Boodles put her paws on the piano bench, begging for attention. Picking her up with some effort, Jess tightly hugged the calico feline as she would her lost son.

  "Sweet Boodles," she whispered, feeling the sadness well up in her all over again. Jess wiped away a tear. "Damn."

  She was brought back to planet earth by a loud rapping on the front door.

  "Hey, in there, you war-mongering, imperialist American! Open up this door. It's time to go to the pub."

  Laughing in spite of herself, Jess put Boodles down on the floor and went to the door, recognizing the voice of her neighbor, Gwen Thompson, who lived across the lane.

  "Well, it's about time," Gwen said, standing at the open door, arms akimbo.

  Gwen Thompson was one of those quintessential tough broads who was hard on the outside, but soft and chewy on the inside. In the month Jess had been in Kenwick, Gwen had already proven herself as an honest, sympathetic, and savvy friend.

  Smiling broadly, tall and handsome Troy Thompson stood next to his wife. They were an uncommonly attractive middle-aged couple. Petite and curvy, with salon-frosted short hair, Gwen was a well-preserved woman in her early fifties. Troy, a salesman with an international pharmaceutical company, was also youthful in appearance, sporting a perpetual tan kept intact by the couple's frequent holidays in Spain.

  Shortly after Jess moved into the Stanhope's cottage, Troy and Gwen had urged her on several occasions to go to the pub with them and meet the locals, known as "the fish and chips gang." Until now, Jess had demurred, and the Thompsons didn't press her, realizing that she would socialize with their friends when she was good and ready.

  Jess was comfortable with the Thompsons, frequently having drinks and dinner with them at "The Bothie," their cozy cottage across the lane, or reciprocating by having them over to "The Briars," as the Stanhopes' cottage was called. Troy and Gwen were easy-going, funny, interesting, and full of wild tales about their travels. Furthermore, they didn't expect Jess to talk about her recent tragic past. With the Thompsons, she never felt pressured to indulge in personal confessionals.

  "What took you so long to answer the door?" Gwen asked, adopting an inquisitor's tone of voice.

  "You know how arrogant we Americans are," Jess said, standing aside to let them in. "We hurry for no one."

  Troy peered into the parlor. "I thought I heard you playing the piano."

  "That was Boodles," Jess deadpanned. "She's quite gifted, you know, even without opposable thumbs."

  He laughed, revealing an abundant mouthful of blinding white teeth.

  "Get your coat, luv," Gwen commanded her. "We're walking to the pub. If you can't smoke, at least you can drink."

  "Walking? But I could drive us."

  The couple shared a look, then visibly shuddered.

  "We'll pass," Troy said. "Besides, it's not that far."

  "Hey, that's not fair! I've gotten much better at driving on the wrong side of the road and shifting gears backwards from the way we do it in America."

  Gwen grabbed Jess' jacket from the tree horse near the door, shoving it at her. "Walk!"
r />   "On the way back in the dark, we can talk about the poor devil down the road who was hacked to death with his own kitchen cleaver," Troy teased.

  This time, it was Jess who shuddered. "The Chandler fellow. That murder was never solved, right?"

  "Never," Gwen echoed. "And I guarantee if you bring it up at the pub with the fish and chips gang, they'll shut down like an Anglican church on a Monday morning."

  After giving Boodles a parting stroke, Jess slipped into her jacket.

  "Why? What do they know?"

  "Excellent question," Troy said, holding the front door open for the two ladies.

  "So the killer is still loose?"

  "Not to worry, Jess," he said. "It was Chandler they were after. Not any of us."

  Somehow that didn't reassure her. "But, from what I understand, the Cambridge police as well as Scotland Yard crawled all over this village for months and got nothing."

  Troy nodded. "Nothing. Well, there was that one inspector -- the Indian chap. What was his name, Gwen?"

  "Chandra?"

  "Chandra, that's him. He was on to Chandler's case like a bull terrier," Troy said. "But he was apparently temporarily assigned another case."

  "He was a cutie," Gwen added as an aside to Jess.

  Ego bruised, Troy shrugged dismissively.

  "Seriously, Jess, bring up the Chandler murder at the pub," Gwen repeated, "and see what happens."

  Jess firmly pulled the door shut, then locked it.

  "All right," she agreed, picking up the gauntlet. "I will."

  Chapter 2

  Detective Inspector Mick Chandra sat in his 18th floor office at New Scotland Yard ignoring a teetering pile of two dozen or so files of unsolved cases, most of them going back a year or more. With his sterling reputation as a dogged investigator, Chandra invariably was assigned the cases that had gone cold.

  The file occupying the top position on the pile was that of Peter Chandler, who had been murdered with his own kitchen cleaver over a year earlier in his home in the Village of Kenwick, Essex. Finding Chandler's murderer had eluded Scotland Yard's best efforts, as well as those of the Cambridge constabulary, the largest police force nearest Kenwick.

  As an act of last minute desperation, Mick had been brought on board briefly during the original investigation, only to be quickly reassigned to another murder case that had gone cold. Solving that one, he subsequently was assigned his own mini-department at the Yard, known tongue-in-cheek as "The Office of Unsolved Mysteries." Now the Chandler homicide case was his, and he relished the challenge of bringing it to closure.

  But this Monday morning, instead of obsessing over the case, Mick sat at his desk casually scanning Blackstone's Book of Magic and Illusion, attempting the feat of palming a 50 pence piece in his right hand. It was a Bank Holiday, so there was little chance of the Super or Commissioner paying him an unexpected visit. The few people who were at their Yard desks were single, unattached professionals like Mick. His recent divorce had made him more of a workaholic than ever.

  "Bollocks!" he hissed, as the coin clattered on the desk.

  Palming it again, he succeeded this time.

  "Persistence pays off," he muttered, slipping the coin back into his trousers pocket. That statement might well have been his mantra as a criminal investigator.

  Basking in his success, Mick laced his fingers behind his head and leaned back in his chair, sporting a satisfied grin. For the moment, the late Peter Chandler could wait.

  An Anglo Indian who had grown up on the mean streets of Liverpool, 34-year-old Detective Inspector Michael "Mick" Chandra was a 12-year veteran of the Metropolitan police force, having started out as a Bobbie on the Beat. After six years on the streets, he passed the dreaded inspector's exam and began his tenure at the CID, or Criminal Investigation Department. His effective cut-to-the-chase investigative approach quickly caught the attention of the Yard's Commissioner, who eventually permitted Mick to function as a department unto himself. Although short on staff and funds, his clearance record hovered at nearly 70 percent.

  Mick's only staffer was his partner, Hong Kong-born Detective Sergeant Elizabeth Chang, herself a highly competent police officer and the perfect colleague. The two had started out as Bobbies together, Elizabeth having been one of the first minority WPCs, or Women Police Constables, hired by the Met. By the time Mick made it into the CID, Elizabeth had been promoted to Detective Sergeant, and he insisted on bringing her along with him as his partner.

  At 6'1", with his muscular build, dusky complexion, onyx black eyes, high cheekbones, short-cropped black hair, and straight Kerala Indian nose, Mick was pure catnip to women. But his relationship with Elizabeth had always been strictly professional and mutually respectful. The 31-year-old Chang was bright, well-educated, and imaginative. Mick compared his partner to Velma, the brainy sleuth in "Scooby-Doo," an American cartoon that ran in the London Sunday Times. With her straight-cut black pageboy and bangs, thick pink-framed glasses, and no makeup, Elizabeth Chang was not the type of woman who invited flirtation. No matter, since she was all business.

  Still, the two police officers shared a special affinity since both had been subjected to the Yard's institutional racism. In a legendary British institution that claimed a mere ten percent minority of the mid-to-upper ranks, Mick and Elizabeth were rarities, having broken the barriers of the traditional white male bastion. Their reputations were impeccable, which made them all the more resented by some of their less tolerant colleagues.

  "I'm ready for you," Elizabeth's voice floated over Mick's intercom.

  "On my way, Sergeant."

  Picking up his coffee cup, Chandler's file, and a covered plastic food container, Mick made his way down the hallway to a small conference room.

  On entering the room, he saw that Elizabeth had mapped out the entire village of Kenwick with a broad felt-tipped pen on sheets of newsprint taped together, and had laid the plat over the conference table. This morning, the two of them intended to re-launch the Chandler murder investigation, as ordered by the Commissioner.

  "That's what I like -- high tech graphics," Mick ribbed his earnest partner, sitting down at the table.

  "You can laugh all you want, Mick, but it's important that we have a bird's eye view of Kenwick, from the top of the village starting at the church, and ending at the bottom where Peter Chandler's manor house is located. I'll do a computer simulation once you see what I'm trying to get at here."

  "Which is?"

  "Which is proving your theory that the murderer could have walked to Chandler's house."

  "Walked? From where?" he asked, giving her his usual hard time. Mick had the ability to pick at Elizabeth like a scab, which drove her to distraction.

  "That's what we're trying to establish!"

  He put his hand up defensively. "Okay, okay. You've got my attention," he surrendered, handing her the container.

  "What's this?"

  "My rhubarb crumble."

  Elizabeth sniffed it. "Ah, heaven! You know, Mick, you've become quite the domestic god since your divorce," she said, setting it aside for the moment.

  "Nigella Lawson has nothing on me."

  Mick inadvertently rested his coffee cup on the newsprint, eliciting a dirty look from his partner. Sheepishly, he removed the cup, balancing it on his knee instead.

  "All right, let's get down to business," she said, turning her attention to the plat. "Here's the main drag, Kenwick Road, running north and south. And here is Chandler's residence right off Monk's End, which runs east and west." She pointed to a day-glo pink square representing the manor house. "'With me so far?"

  "Yep."

  "Okay. Here's the church…"

  "And here's the steeple."

  If looks could kill, Mick would have been dead.

  "Are you going to work with me or not, Mick?"

  "Just joshing with you."

  Still glaring at her boss, Elizabeth pointed again to the plat.

  "Here's All Saints
' Church at the far northern perimeter of Kenwick Road. At the opposite end of the village sits Chandler's house, a good twenty-five minute walk from the church. And you believe the assailant walked to Chandler's house, so we need to establish from where."

  Mick nodded. "There were no discernable tire tracks around Chandler's residence, so my immediate thought was that the killer parked elsewhere in the village and walked to the manor house. Chandler probably knew his assailant, since there was no sign of forced entry. Unfortunately, I wasn't on the original investigation long enough to prove any of that."

  "Well, it's our baby now, Mick. Let's also not forget that Chandler was expecting someone that night, because there were two untouched glasses of Glenfiddich -- neat, I might add -- on the wine table in the living room."

  "All the more reason to think it was someone he knew," Mick agreed. "Clearly, he was caught completely unawares, attested to by the fact that he was attacked from behind."

  "And robbery couldn't have been a motive, since nothing was taken from the house except the cleaver, which was missing from the kitchen knife rack."

  "If the murder had been premeditated, the assailant would have brought a weapon."

  "True," Elizabeth said, waving her hand over a blank space adjacent to the manor house. "See this expansive farm field abutting the rear of Chandler's manor house?"

  "Sure. I walked that field, which actually extends all the way up to the church."

  "How long did that take?"

  "Umm… about twenty-five, twenty-six minutes."

  "Just as I thought!" Elizabeth declared triumphantly, writing "25 minutes from church to victim's house" at the top of the newsprint.

  "But after having thought about it, I now think the murderer walked from a closer location."

  "Such as?"

  "The cricket club on Monk's End, which is less than a half mile from Chandler's property, and well off the road. Again, I wasn't on the case long enough to test that theory."

  Elizabeth drew an "X" at the proximity of the cricket club. "Actually, that does make sense, Mick."