The Semi-Sweet Hereafter (17 page)

Twelve

On the day of Jeremy's funeral, Primrose was closed. All of Jeremy's restaurants were closed too at all of their locations throughout the United Kingdom. The services were to be held in Kent, where Jeremy was to be interred near his parents' home.

Phoebe had hoped that the location—more distant from London—might discourage all but the most fervent of Jeremy's fans from crowding in and disturbing his family and friends. I could see from news reports online and on television that her hopes had been dashed straightaway. Thousands swamped the small country church where Jeremy's mourners had gathered, turning the somber proceedings into a muddle of paparazzi and helicopters.

I felt sorry for Phoebe. For everyone who'd been close to Jeremy. But that didn't change my plans. I couldn't let it.

I switched off the TV and turned to Danny. “Let's go.”

He frowned. “Let's not and say we did.”

“We'll never get another chance like this one. Everyone is gone for the day—including most of my suspects—and I'm not expected at Primrose to work my chocolate magic or teach all the bakers the difference between beating, creaming, and stirring.”

In case you're curious, beating something incorporates air into the mixture. Creaming continues this process long enough to dissolve granular ingredients. Stirring, on the other hand, simply combines components. For instance, you'd beat egg whites for angel-food cakes (delicious with cocoa added!), cream butter and sugar for layer cakes (chocolate, for the win!), and stir wet ingredients into dry for pancakes (chocolate chip, maybe?).

There's a reason my consultation services are in demand, and it's not because baking—or working with chocolate—is easy. It's not. It requires patience, attention to detail, and a willingness to step outside your comfort zone in order to learn.

That's exactly what I planned to do today, while everyone was gone at Jeremy's funeral. I hadn't attended because I hadn't been invited. That wasn't surprising; I hadn't really known Jeremy—at least not while he'd been alive, I hadn't. Now that he was gone, I was beginning to get a good sense of who he'd been.

As far as I could tell, Jeremy had been boisterous and bold, softhearted and generous. He'd been brave enough to leave his rough old neighborhood and smart enough to thrive when he had. He'd been loving and sensual, hot-tempered and faithful, and when it came to finding justice for his murder, I couldn't let anything stop me. Not Satya Mishra. Not fear. Not propriety.

Not even Danny, who was currently giving me side-eye from his position on our guesthouse's sofa, surrounded by tottering stacks of Jeremy's hardbound published cookbooks. I'd been combing through them in my off-hours, looking for clues. So far, all I'd learned was that Jeremy
had
been sexy. For real. And that he'd included far too many people in his multiple cookery books—from publicans like the one who'd given me that personal dimpled pub glass to socialites to fishermen to teenage girls on Brighton Pier in summertime—for me to possibly narrow down any further suspects. Jeremy had left no stone unturned when it came to his culinary curiosity. Now I wanted to do the same for him.

The “no stone left unturned” part, I mean. Not the culinary curiosity part. What I'm saying is, I needed to investigate further. Impatiently, I looked out the window. “It's go time!”

My enthusiasm left my sometime partner in crime unmoved.

“We agreed it would be a good idea to sneak into Phoebe's town house and have a look around while she's gone, remember?” I reminded him. “That's where Jeremy lived—where he sometimes worked. Who knows? We might find something incriminating.”

I was hoping for a concrete link to one of my suspects—something that might hint at
why
someone had attacked Jeremy.

“We might find ourselves arrested.” Danny's lazy gaze met mine. “DC Mishra has been watching you. Don't be stupid.”

“The police are dealing with the crowds at Jeremy's funeral,” I argued. “This is Satya's perfect opportunity to watch all her suspects. She has access I don't have. Isn't that what happens on those TV crime shows? They always case the funeral.”

He gave me an engaging grin. “Look who's an expert now.”

I wasn't sure if he was flattering me or teasing me. With Danny, you never knew. You just had to give as good as you got.

“Fine.” I held out my hand. “Give me your . . . you know, lock-picking stuff, and I'll do this myself. You can stay here.”

That moved him. With unfair muscular grace, my security expert rose from the sofa. He stretched, flashing an expanse of perfectly taut midsection as his shirt rode up. I followed the view down to the waistband of his low-slung jeans—where things started to get interesting—then deliberately looked away.

I didn't need trouble. I had enough to deal with already.

“I don't carry that stuff anymore,” Danny told me. “Bump keys and torsion wrenches aren't popular with customs agents.”

“Pshaw. You're not scared of those guys.”

“Besides, I've gone legit, remember?” His eyes dared me to challenge him on that familiar claim. “If it weren't for you, I wouldn't have done anything remotely shady for years now.”

I wanted to be indignant, but I couldn't. Danny
had
come to my aid lately, under some legally shaky circumstances. I'd needed him. He'd delivered. But that didn't mean he was unscrupulous. Far from it. My sometime bodyguard was merely loyal. To me.

I didn't want to take advantage of that, but . . . “How else am I supposed to get in there?” I gestured toward the Wrights' town house, across the grass and up the walk from us. “I'm up to my eyeballs in suspects, but I don't have any real evidence.”

“What makes you think you'll find any in there?”

“Intuition. Optimism.” I pinwheeled my arm. “Desperation?”

He looked away, predictably unconvinced. Danny deals in facts, not feelings. That's why he doesn't like gambling. He knows the odds are against him, so he'd rather not get involved.

Or maybe he just doesn't want to feel that momentary burst of hopefulness as the cards are dealt or the wheels spin. I do, on the other hand. I love feeling that I've risked something and won. Maybe that's why I didn't mind the risks involved in trying to find Jeremy's killer. In the end, it would all be worthwhile.

So, I hoped, would sneaking into the Wrights' town house.

“You're not going to give up, are you?” Danny asked.

I grinned. “Did you just meet me?”

“Point made.” He looked through the window at the garden. As expected, everything looked calm. “Let's get this over with.”

* * *

Getting inside the town house was the easy part. Finding anything useful once we'd sneaked in was another story.

Until Danny and I entered via the back-terrace door that day, I hadn't seen much more than the kitchen. Thanks to Phoebe's ongoing baking tutorials, I'd seen a lot of that. Not surprisingly, the rest of the place was just as well-appointed, full of expensive-looking (but sedate) furniture, tasteful fabric-covered walls, acres of painted moldings and trim, plentiful antiques, and framed original artwork. I might have guessed that Phoebe would have traditional taste in furnishings.

In short, it looked exactly the way you'd expect an old Georgian town house in Chelsea to look, right down to the wall sconces, gleaming hardwood floors, and hand-tufted rugs.

We made short work of examining the place, starting with the salon (“living room,” to you and me) and continuing down the corridor to the formal dining room, butler's pantry, and what must have been Jeremy's office. Its oak-paneled walls were full of Jeremy's framed cookbook covers, photos of him and Phoebe with other celebrities, and a variety of awards and honors. Jeremy's laptop computer was on the desk where he'd left it, right next to a reproduction Rodin sculpture. A plastic bottle of Hambleton & Hart “vitality water” stood nearby, half full, as though Jeremy might wander in at any moment and finish it.

Unexpectedly moved by those remnants of Jeremy's life, I paused. Behind me, Danny flipped through an old-fashioned filing cabinet, methodically searching for anything that seemed out of place. He knew how to look without anyone detecting. I mostly scanned the rooms we were in, trying to spot incongruities.

That bottle of specialty water was one. I knew Phoebe had had Amelja in for her routine cleaning sessions since Jeremy's death. Maybe the housekeeper was supposed to overlook this room?

If so, why? I turned to Danny. “Hey, if you got rich tomorrow, would you hire someone to clean house for you?”

“Depends.” He examined a paper. “How big is the house?”

I glanced at the town house's ornate ceiling medallion, estimating. I was no realtor, but . . . “A few thousand square feet.”

“Nah. I wouldn't want a stranger going through my stuff.”

Bingo.
“I'd be willing to bet Jeremy wouldn't have, either.” He and Danny had come from similar hardscrabble backgrounds. They might have comparable attitudes about things. “That means this would be an excellent place to hide something.”

“No kidding, Sherlock. That's why we're here.”

“Of course, you'd have to know someone might guess that.”

Danny went back to searching in earnest. “Here we go.”

“Which means you purposely
wouldn't
hide anything in here.” I looked around, giving Jeremy's office close scrutiny anyway.

“Right. Except?”

“Except anyone with a reason to search would probably know that, which means you might be safe hiding something in here.”

Danny straightened with his hands on his hips. “I hate to bust up all your illusions, but most people don't think much beyond the first step, if that. Let's just stick to the plan.”

We did. I searched Jeremy's laptop for clues. The device conveniently recognized that it was in proximity to Jeremy's cell phone (in my bag) and unlocked itself without a password, but my search through his e-mails and files turned up nothing.

Danny and I ascended the baroque carved-oak staircase to the first floor (meaning “second floor” to us Yanks). As I stepped onto the upper landing, the floorboard creaked. I froze.

Behind me, Danny did too. We both strained to hear.

Which was silly. What were we listening for, exactly? No one was around. There was no reason to be on the lookout.

Except that's when we heard it. Very faintly.

The sound of pop music filtered from the master suite. It sounded muted, but it was definitely there. Was someone home?

I shook my head, trying to hear anything more. Nada.

“Phoebe must have left a radio on, that's all,” I muttered to Danny. “She can't be home, and no one else lives here.”

“We don't live here, either, but we're here.”

“It'll be fine,” I assured us both, then kept going.

Alarmed nonetheless, we searched through the other upstairs bedrooms swiftly. I turned up a risqué book, but nothing more.

“Shouldn't there at least be a safe?” I asked Danny.

But he was peering down the hallway toward the master suite, clearly concerned. “We should leave. I heard something.”

“Yeah, the radio, remember?” I marched straight toward the suite, fueled by the likelihood of finding something useful in the town house's most private spaces. “Just don't turn off the radio when we get in the bedroom, or we'll give ourselves away.” I tossed him a grin. “No matter how much you hate pop music.”

So far, our investigation wouldn't have survived a good police detective's scrutiny, much less one of those forensics evidence-gathering teams. We'd left fingerprints all over the place. But I couldn't see why that would matter. DC Mishra and her colleagues at the London Metropolitan Police Service had already done all the double-checking they planned to do here.

“Remember the other, smaller bedroom?” I reminded Danny as I strode down the long, artwork-decorated hallway. “It definitely looked as though someone had been sleeping in there.”

“My money's on guests. It's a guest room.”

“I think it was Jeremy. If he and Phoebe were having marital troubles, it's not a stretch to think that they'd use separate bedrooms.” It was still possible there was a third party in their marriage—someone Jeremy had been sleeping with. He did have a sexy reputation. To bolster my argument, I added, “The bed linens were all rumpled, as though that room was off-limits to housekeeping. That's exactly the way Jeremy would have wanted it if he'd been using that room as a crash pad.”

I'd been looking over my shoulder at Danny as I said it, which probably explained why I didn't see what Danny saw.

Specifically, what made him put on his “tough guy” face. He only used that expression when confronting problems. That meant there were problems, I saw as I swiveled to look—specifically (and funnily enough) problems of the housekeeping nature.

Phoebe's young Polish housekeeper, Amelja, stood in the doorway to the master suite. She'd been wearing earbuds. Music still blasted from them, which explained what we'd faintly heard earlier. Now they hung around her neck—right below, I couldn't help noticing, her quizzical and irked-looking face.

“He did want it that way,” Amelja informed me tartly.

Oh no. What were we supposed to do now? We'd been caught red-handed. As far as I'd been able to tell, Amelja was loyal to the Wrights. She would almost certainly tell her boss (aka Phoebe) that we'd been there, snooping all over the town house.