A Killer Wedding Read online

  A Killer Wedding

  A Charleton House Mystery

  Kate P Adams

  Copyright © Kate P Adams 2020

  The right of Kate P Adams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real people, alive or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Cover design by Dar Albert

  For Susan Stark,

  who ensured this woman had a room of her own in which to write fiction.

  Chapter 1

  Father Craig Mortimer sat with his head in his hands. His face was pale and his hair hadn’t seen a comb all morning. I placed a double espresso in front of him.

  ‘You’re an angel,’ was mumbled from somewhere near his chest.

  ‘You should know.’ My response resulted in a hiccup and chuckle combination, followed by a groan.

  ‘Don’t make me laugh, it hurts.’ He groaned again as the chair next to him was scraped back and a tall, gangly figure dropped into it. Mark, my friend and colleague who was normally the most well put-together man I knew, was slumped like the proverbial sack of potatoes and mirrored Craig as his head fell into his hands. Letting them sit in their own sickly silence, I made another espresso. I tried to repress the smile that was forming on my lips, but I can be as evil as the next person and failed.

  I pushed the thick black liquid under Mark’s nose. No response.

  ‘Good night, lads?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s Ma Greaves’s fault,’ was the response from under the mop of hair that covered Craig’s eyes.

  ‘Ma who?’ I’d never heard of her. I lived over the road from the Black Swan, the pub they’d spent the previous night in, and regularly crossed its threshold, but I’d yet to meet a Ma Greaves.

  ‘Ma Greaves. Her cook accidentally invented the Bakewell Pudding,’ he clarified, not particularly helpfully. I knew that the Bakewell Pudding, a famous Derbyshire delicacy, had been invented in the 1800s, which meant that Craig was either still drunk or he was winding me up.

  ‘Mark?’ I was talking to the top of his head and had yet to see his eyes. ‘Am I going to get any more sense out of you?’

  He raised his head slowly. His usually perky moustache was in need of some attention and I had to resist the urge to lean across the table and curl the ends back into their glorious handlebar position.

  ‘Ma Greaves,’ he replied, ‘is the name of a locally made raspberry and almond infused beer which, unfortunately, goes down as easily as a slice of the actual pudding.’

  I decided I was going to stick with the pudding, especially after witnessing the state of these two this morning. ‘But I thought there was still disagreement over who invented it.’

  ‘There is.’ Mark was a walking encyclopaedia of local knowledge, so the fact that he had opted not to elaborate on what I knew was a source of much contention in the area told me exactly how bad his hangover was. I felt like a mother desperately trying to get a coherent response out of her two teenage sons.

  Martin, one of my young café assistants, came over with a plate of fresh chocolate croissants. Mark’s obsession with them was well known amongst my staff. He placed them directly in front of the two lolling heads, smiled, raised his eyebrows at me and walked back to the kitchen. Good lad. As though they’d been hit by a dose of smelling salts, the two men raised their heads and signs of life could be seen in their eyes. I left them to devour the pastries and went to fetch them more coffee.

  The bonus of being a café manager is that I have access to as much coffee as I need, and on days like this I could provide my hungover friends with as much as they needed to revert back to their human forms. We were starting the day in the Library Café. It is my favourite of the three cafés that I manage at Charleton House, a historic stately home that makes Downton Abbey look like a reasonably well-cared-for bungalow. We welcome over half a million visitors a year and I have to ensure they enjoy as much tea and cake as they can consume.

  As I filled three mugs with coffee my two assistants for the day, Martin and Chelsea, beavered away in the background, filling fridges with freshly made sandwiches and displaying the trays of cakes that had been delivered from the large kitchen attached to the Garden Café, the most high end of our dining experiences. We also bake a range of pastries here in the more compact kitchen and I could hear Martin slotting more trays into the oven.

  Martin was a calm, level-headed young man who I enjoyed having around. Chelsea, on the other hand, had a good heart, but needed to be prompted into action every five minutes otherwise she’d become distracted by her nails, hair or mobile phone.

  ‘Chelsea,’ I called across the room, ‘put your phone away, please, we have half an hour until we open for visitors and the till hasn’t been set up.’

  ‘Bossy,’ Mark shouted at me and winked at Chelsea.

  ‘Don’t encourage her or I’ll return this coffee and send you to your office to actually get some work done.’ I swapped their empty espresso cups for the mugs. ‘Are you both going to be okay for tonight? You look like you need to take the weekend off.’

  Craig, the resident chaplain at Charleton House, was beginning to look less green and was the first to respond.

  ‘Nothing can be harder than delivering a Sunday service with a severe hangover; tonight’s pre-wedding dinner will be a doddle in comparison. Besides which, the wine can serve as hair of the dog if necessary.’

  I looked at Mark.

  ‘I’ll be fine. Once I get a bacon butty inside me and mainline a few more gallons of coffee, I’ll be delivering the best tour of my career by three o’clock this afternoon. By this evening, I’ll be the highlight of the dinner, even more so than the bride and groom.’

  ‘That will be a challenge,’ grunted Craig. ‘Having spent quite a lot of time in their company over the last few months, I know the happy couple are capable of putting on quite a show.’ He opened his eyes wide in mock horror before disappearing momentarily behind his coffee mug.

  I wasn’t going to let him get away with that. Tonight was a dinner for the close family and friends of a couple who would be getting married in the Charleton House chapel tomorrow afternoon. The evening would be a stylish, low-key affair for fifteen people before the much larger event with 150 guests the next day. In theory, it would be a simple event, but over my twenty-year restaurant and catering career, I’ve learnt that assuming that anything would be simple is a shortcut to disaster.

  ‘Expand please, Father. I’m working tonight and would like to know if I should carry one of our well-polished bayonets along with my radio.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’ll be fine, I’m sure, but I’ve never seen such an argumentative couple. Every conversation I’ve had with them has resulted in them having a full-blown argument; it was incredibly awkward at times. I’d have to find a reason to slip out of the room and leave them to it, returning when things quietened down.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like a match made in heaven.’

  Mark had said exactly what I was thinking.

  ‘But that’s just it – for all the raised voices, they always came to an agreement. They always left with smiles on their faces, and on more than one occasion I saw them… well, making up against the side of their car.’

  ‘You don’t
mean… in the car park?’ If Craig meant what I thought he meant, I was horrified.

  ‘No, no, I didn’t mean… I meant kissing… a lot… without stopping to breathe. That’s all I meant.’

  I let out a sigh of relief.

  ‘I guess they’re just incredibly passionate people,’ Craig continued. ‘I never once felt like this was one of those couples who would spend a fortune on a big, grand wedding and then get divorced within a couple of years. They seem to genuinely love one another, and they are clearly well suited. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were fireworks tonight, but everyone will go home happy.’

  ‘Good to know.’ I looked over at Mark. ‘You can have some particularly spectacular and attention-grabbing stories up your sleeve to distract everybody should things get a bit heated.’

  Mark Boxer was a Charleton House tour guide and was used to adapting his tours and talks to cater for everyone, from gaggles of schoolchildren to visiting politicians and the occasional royalty. Tonight would be a breeze for him, if he could surface from the fog of his hangover.

  Mark was about to respond when the doors to the café flew open and a woman wearing what looked like a tea cosy on her head and a badly crocheted cardigan stormed in.

  ‘FATHER!’ she screeched. I watched Mark clutch his head, and Craig winced. ‘FATHER, we need you in the chapel NOW. If you don’t do something immediately then I swear your next service will be a funeral. I can no longer be held responsible for my actions.’ She glared at Craig, seemingly willing him to argue with her, spun on her heel and vanished.

  ‘Who, in the name of all that is holy, was that?’ Mark was still staring at the doors. ‘And should we start hanging up bulbs of garlic?’

  Craig giggled; it was an unusual sound coming from someone the size of an over-fed bear.

  ‘I shouldn’t laugh. She makes my life hell, but I do like your garlic suggestion. That is Harriet Smedley, my newest chapel volunteer. She’s quickly become the most active and most vocal of the group. I often wonder what I did in a past life to deserve her, but in my position it’s impossible to do anything other than trust in God and His mysterious ways. I’d better go and see what she wants; I’ve often felt that she’s capable of murder.’

  Chapter 2

  I left Mark with his head resting on one hand, the other scribbling away in a notebook. The first customers of the day had arrived, all of them house staff with a great thirst who had come to pick up their morning coffee and take it back to their offices. A lot of them would be after our famous barms, or butties depending where in the country you come from, served with bacon from one of the farms on the 40,000 acre Charleton estate. The bacon’s aroma had been known to tempt people from all over the house – no mean feat as this was a house with almost three hundred rooms across four floors.

  ‘Sophie, phone.’ Martin handed me the receiver and went back to serving customers. I stood in the corner of the kitchen and listened to Nick, my heart slowly sinking as he spoke. Nick was the supervisor of the third café I managed, the Stables Café, set within the stables courtyard outside the main house so visitors didn’t need to pay in order to reach it. It was a firm favourite of local dog walkers, cyclists and others who loved to spend their free time roaming the rolling hills of the estate, and did a roaring trade in simple hearty foods like sausage rolls and soups. Even in the colder months, it was a honeypot for people wrapped up in scarves, warming themselves with a hot chocolate at one of the tables outside.

  Nick had called to tell me he wouldn’t be in work tomorrow. He’d come down with the flu and wouldn’t be getting out of bed for a few days. Most weeks that would have been fine, but Tina, the supervisor of the Library Café and most definitely my ‘right-hand woman’, was on holiday in Cyprus. So, while I offered sympathy and told him to take all the time he needed, I cursed internally and tried to come up with solutions.

  I looked across at Martin as he efficiently served a line of customers, answered questions, made coffee and gave Chelsea an encouraging nudge when she got distracted. Martin covered some of Tina’s responsibilities in her absence, which allowed me to get on with my own work; I was reluctant to lose him from the Library Café, but it seemed I might have to.

  He didn’t know it yet, but Martin was about to save my bacon.

  After I’d told Martin about his mini promotion, I packed him off to the Stables Café to learn the ropes in preparation for taking over the running of it. He carried with him a smile of pride stretching from ear to ear. My next couple of hours involved rescheduling some meetings, calling in another member of staff to support Chelsea, jiggling the rota and selling countless cups of tea.

  Once things had calmed down, I joined Mark who was sitting in the same place I’d left him two hours earlier.

  ‘You’re going to have fun this week. I bet you’re counting the days until Tina comes back now.’

  ‘How do you know…?’

  ‘I might look like the living dead, but I’ve been watching and listening. How do you think you’re going to pull it off?’

  I ignored his lack of an offer to help, not even an empty gesture made simply out of good manners, but I knew him better than that and wouldn’t be holding my breath. Plus I knew that he could burn frozen pizza and the one cake he’d made had been inedible. I would have laughed if he’d offered to assist.

  ‘It’ll be fine. I won’t have the time to do any baking, but I’m sure Ruth can fit in another hour or two a day once tomorrow’s wedding is out of the way.’

  Ruth Danforth was my pastry chef, and although I baked some of the less challenging cakes and biscuits, I wasn’t trained and I only really did it to help out, and because I enjoyed it. Ruth, on the other hand, was a baking genius. She worked part time for me and spent the rest of her week self-employed, making spectacular cakes for special occasions. Tomorrow’s wedding was a case in point and she’d been working long nights to get her latest creation finished in time. Fortunately she was married to Gregg, my head chef, so she had a very understanding partner.

  ‘I’m lucky it’s not the middle of the summer or I’d struggle, but at this time of year we can muddle through.’

  ‘Well, good luck. You can count on me to be cheering you on.’ Mark smiled and sat back in the chair, his arms folded.

  ‘Oh thanks. You’d better be nice to me or I’ll be putting an apron round your neck and you’ll be washing dishes for me before you can say, “Another cup of coffee, please”.’

  ‘Since when have I said please?’

  ‘Fair point. Look, while it’s quiet, and while you’re in the mood for being sweet and supportive, don’t you think we should go and check that Craig is alright and Harriet isn’t burying his, or someone else’s, body under the chapel floor?’

  Mark closed his notebook and gathered his belongings.

  ‘I’d love to, but I have to deliver a tour in half an hour so I’d better go and clean up. I’m afraid you’re on your own. But…’

  He left me hanging for a moment, then grinned.

  ‘Don’t forget your garlic.’

  I knew I had time to fit in a visit to see Craig before the lunchtime rush – once Chelsea returned from her break, and she was ten minutes late. Eventually she wandered back in, out of breath, stuffing her mobile phone in her coat pocket and attempting to tidy up the strands of hair that had escaped from her ponytail, but she only made things worse.

  ‘Sorry, I got chattin’ to someone and forgot the time, sorry.’

  I gave her the once over as she busied herself with a group of schoolchildren who all wanted chocolate chip cookies and were discussing what they’d do if they had as much money as the Duke and Duchess. Chelsea’s white shirt was no longer white and it was a size too tight, the gaps between the buttons showing off her bra. She also needed to give her shoes a good clean. I sighed, knowing that I couldn’t hand the issue over to Tina, told Chelsea where I was going and set off to see Craig.

  The chapel isn’t too far from the Library Café, but
even the short walk gives me an immense amount of pleasure and the feeling that I’m walking through history. The foundations of Charleton House had been laid in 1550 and the property had remained in the Fitzwilliam-Scott family ever since. Over the centuries it had become a glorious symbol of England’s history, wealth and art. The family had participated at the heart of British politics, fought in some of Europe’s most significant wars and socialised with celebrities. Alexander Fitzwilliam-Scott, the current Duke, is the 12th Duke of Ravensbury, and he and his wife Evelyn, the Duchess, welcome the tourists with open arms. They genuinely love sharing the house and its history with anyone who is interested, and it isn’t uncommon to see them walking through the grounds and chatting to awestruck visitors.

  Today I walked down a stone corridor and passed walls with bricks that dated back to the Tudors. I stepped into cloisters that remained much as they had been in the late 1500s, and then stood before a large wooden door from 1832. I didn’t need Dr Who’s Tardis; I just needed to walk 200 yards out of my office and look around. That’s not to say it’s always this easy. The building is vast and it could take years to be able to find your way around without ever getting lost. I’d long since learnt to leave for meetings ten minutes early to ensure that I could make multiple wrong turns, but still make it on time.

  I pushed open one of the enormous wooden doors and stepped into the cool air of the chapel. I’ve never been particularly religious, but even I felt like I’d walked into a space that demanded my respect. The chapel has witnessed the christening and marriage of almost every member of the Fitzwilliam-Scott family since it was built, and now anyone who could be considered part of the congregation could be married there.

  I watched as visitors slowly admired the space in reverent silence. Some sat on the pews that had been made from the wood of trees off the estate for a moment of quiet contemplation; others admired the alabaster altar or the stained-glass window that threw multi-coloured light across the marble floor. Gilded angels patiently watched the activity below, as did a member of staff who would tut if someone’s mobile phone rang, or quietly step in if it looked as if someone was going to take a photograph.