Mistletoe Mystery Read online

  Unless the people he conned were too ashamed to come forward. She had read about lonely women preyed upon by handsome young men, and divested of their cash and other belongings. But she had made it clear to Matt that she had no money. Perhaps he did not believe her, because she owned Bedlington Hall. She had been approached by a few property developers, interested in buying up the land. It would have made her life much easier, but having promised her godmother never to sell, she had refused them all. Did Matt hope to seduce her into selling up?

  There had to be more to it than that. He had latched on to her when she bumped into him on the steps of the auction house. When he had seen the Robespierre painting! Was that the reason? Could it be worth more than she thought? It was possible Matt thought there were other similar paintings in the house. She began to wonder if he and Sebastian were involved in some sort of scam, unknown to the respected auction house.

  In the cold, early morning light as dawn broke, all of that seemed more possible than him being so instantly attracted to her. Such things did not happen. At least not to her. She knew she had been stupid to invite a man she barely knew to stay at the house, but at the time she had been so eager to see him again she forgot to be her usual, sensible self.

  Now she wondered how to cool things. She could not be rude to him whilst he was staying, or just ask him to leave for no good reason – finding him on the stairs at night was hardly a hanging offence – but when the weekend was over, she would not see him again. The thought pierced her heart like a dagger. She realised it would hurt more if he did turn out to be a conman after she had succumbed to his charms. Better to break her own heart than let him do it.

  On the other hand, she did wonder if she were merely replaying her dates with Puck, and the way she deliberately sabotaged any chance of a relationship. The difference was that whilst she had liked Puck as a person, because he was handsome, funny and charming, there had not been the same connection she felt when she met Matt. With Matt there was a sense of inevitability, as if he had been waiting in the wings all along, ready to make his entrance.

  Philly often thought that fate sent her Puck so that Meg could be happy, and she liked that idea. She may fear a long-term relationship herself, but she loved seeing the two people she cared for most in the world happy together. What she had told Matt was true. They were her family and the only people she could truly trust not to hurt her.

  Perhaps, she thought idly, as she lay awake through to the dawn, she could introduce Matt to one of her other female friends. Puck’s sister, for example. He would most certainly fancy Rachel Jenson. She was a very beautiful young woman and she was due to visit Bedlington Hall that very weekend. Yes, that might solve things. So why did the thought of Matt falling instantly in love with Puck’s sister feel like a second dagger twisting in her heart?

  The problem occupied her mind until she got up out of bed at dawn, having given up any idea of sleeping, and crawled bleary eyed down to the kitchen to prepare breakfast.

  “Morning!” she said breezily when Matt arrived in the kitchen ten minutes later. “Did you sleep well?” Keep it calm and friendly, Philly, she told herself. She fiddled with the coffee maker, suddenly forgetting how to use it.

  “Yeah, great thanks. Once I got used to the sounds in the house.”

  “Yes, it does rather moan and murmur at night, doesn’t it? Would you like some coffee? Breakfast? I think we’ve got some real Shropshire bacon in the fridge. It’s delicious. With some scrambled eggs perhaps? And toast? Or would you just prefer cereal? Sit down and I’ll sort something out.” She could hear her voice waffling on, trying hard to fill what would otherwise be an awkward silence.

  “Could we start with a kiss?”

  Philly had not realised how close to her he was. He spun her around and before she could argue, covered her mouth with his. She wanted to protest. To tell him that she was far too busy for that, but the warmth of his arms around her and the feel of his lips on hers forestalled any argument. Why was she thinking of sending him away when he made her feel this way? Oh God, what if he did fall in love with Rachel Jenson? She pulled away abruptly.

  “I have important things to do,” she said, trying to sound far more light-hearted than she felt. “And you’re in my way, young man.”

  “What’s more important than kissing?”

  “Right at this moment I can’t think of anything, but I’m sure it will come to me.”

  “Are you okay, Philly?” Matt stroked her cheek. He also kept his arms around her, neither of which did anything for her equilibrium. She reached out and held onto the worktop, as if suddenly adrift on a very choppy sea.

  “Yes, of course, why?”

  “I don’t know. You seem a bit jumpy. Are you regretting inviting me down? Is that it? Because I could go and stay in a hotel. I know things have happened quickly…”

  “No, please don’t leave.”A few minutes before, she could have sworn she would be delighted if he just up and left. Her need for him to stay hit her like a lightning bolt. “I’m just … I’m not used to things happening this rapidly, and I need to get my breath back, that’s all.” It was a pity he had just kissed it all away. “Don’t you know I’m Ms Organised? And you’ve thrown my schedule right out of the window.”

  Matt smiled. “What schedule was that? Get married at twenty-eight, have a baby at thirty?”

  “Actually I was thinking of the present. Prepare breakfast. Eat said breakfast. Get the house ready for Rachel Jenson and the film crew. You’re very distracting, you know.”

  “I’m glad to hear it. The feeling is mutual, by the way.”

  “Go and sit down and I’ll bring your coffee. Do you want bacon?”

  “You don’t have to do everything alone, you know? You make the coffee, I’ll do the bacon and eggs.”

  “No, I can’t. You’re a guest.”

  “And you’re going to wear yourself to a frazzle, trying to get everything done. Where’s the refrigerator?”

  “It’s that big white thing next to the door. And it’s called a fridge.”

  “Really?” Matt grinned. “No wonder I didn’t recognise it. Make the coffee woman, and let me do the breakfast. Will Puck and Meg want anything?”

  “Not yet. They tend to sleep in a bit when we don’t have guests.”

  “So it’s just you and me…”

  “It seems like it.”

  Matt went to the fridge and took out the bacon and eggs. “How do you like your eggs? Over easy? Sunny side up?”

  “I have no idea what any of that means,” said Philly. “So just scramble them. When the coffee is done, I’ll make toast.”

  As they prepared breakfast, Philly had that feeling of inevitability again. They worked together well, and as if they had been eating breakfast together every day for years. Her anxieties of the night before began to disappear. Any chance of being alone also disappeared. Within a few minutes of smelling the bacon frying, Meg and Puck appeared.

  “That smells good,” said Puck.

  “It certainly does,” said Meg.

  “I’ll throw in some more,” said Matt. “As you can see, Philly has enslaved me already.”

  “Oy! You offered. He offered,” she said to Puck, as she buttered the toast.

  “Yeah, yeah, we know, Philly. Careful, Matt, she’s a bit keen with that whip.”

  “We still have the scars,” said Meg, pouring out a cup of coffee.

  “Did I mention I’d poisoned the coffee?” said Philly.

  “What? Again?” Meg went into her best ‘Lucy Crystal’ impression, pretending to choke after she sipped the coffee.

  Breakfast turned out to be just as lively an affair as dinner the night before. Once again Philly was impressed by just how easily Matt fit in with her friends. With her life in fact. He inhabited Bedlington Hall as if he were used to living in such a place. She supposed, if his family were rich, that he had an even better house somewhere.

  “I never though to ask, Matt. Do you liv
e in Britain? Or America?” she asked, as they ate.

  “A bit of both, depending on where the business needs me. I have an apartment at Canary Wharf, and another one in New York.”

  “Is that where you were born? You don’t sound like a New Yorker.”

  “You mean like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas? I was born in New England. My mom and dad still live there.”

  “Ever been married?” asked Meg. Philly was surprised, but secretly glad. It was something she wondered, but was afraid to ask.

  “No, never married. I was engaged once, but it fell through.”

  Philly could not help thinking that he made his engagement sound like a business deal. “What happened?” she asked before she could stop herself.

  “We weren’t suited.” Matt clamped his lips together, from which Philly got the idea that the conversation was well and truly over.

  “Oh.” She drank down the last bit of coffee from her cup. “Well, I suppose I ought to go and change out of my jim-jams and try to look presentable for the telly.”

  “Yeah, good luck with that,” said Puck.

  “What is it? Get on to Philly day?”

  “Yep. Especially now there are three of us to gang up on you.”

  “Hmm,” said Philly, with a wry grin. “I do hope you all enjoy sleeping out in the stables tonight.”

  “Oh please, Philly, not again,” said Meg, winking at Matt and Puck.

  “I didn’t realise you had stables,” said Matt. “Do you have horses too?”

  “No, I can’t afford to keep them,” said Philly. “In fact, I don’t think there have been horses there since the Hall was a school.”

  “I’d like to see them. In fact I’d like to see all the grounds. Maybe we could go for a walk after breakfast.”

  It was a bright winter morning, and the sky overhead was clear. Philly showed Matt around the grounds of Bedlington Hall as he requested. “I haven’t even had a chance to look all around the place since I inherited it,” she explained to him. “I know I’m going to have to get a landscape gardener eventually, but that will have to wait.”

  Parts of the garden were overgrown. There was a walled area, inside which were several greenhouses, but most of the glass had been smashed at some point. There were also what seemed to be vegetable plots in front of the greenhouses, but they too were overgrown.

  “Maybe we could grow our own veg,” she said to Matt. “It would cut down on costs.” He had been very quiet since they left the house. “Matt?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I’m sorry if our questions seemed a bit intrusive. About your ex, I mean. It’s just that we’re used to telling each other everything and we forget sometimes that others have different barriers. We didn’t mean to step over the mark.”

  “You didn’t. It’s just a subject I hate talking about.”

  “She must have hurt you badly.”

  “Hey, it’s a beautiful autumn morning and I’m with the most beautiful girl in the world. I don’t need or want to think about the past.”

  “Okay, I suppose that means I’ve done it again. Stepped over the mark, I mean.”

  “You didn’t. And you’ve every right to know about me. It’s just that there are some things I’m not ready to share yet.” Matt took her hand in his.

  “Fair enough. Let’s go and look down near the lake. If I remember rightly, there are some old follies down there .Temples and things.”

  “Things?”

  “Yes, things! I don’t know what you call them. I did buy a book on architecture, to try to work out how to describe Bedlington in brochures. I got confused just by all the different types of columns, though I think the ones in the hallway are ironic.”

  “Ionic.”

  “Yeah, whatever.”

  “You really don’t know much about art and architecture, do you?” Matt seemed strangely puzzled.

  “Not a thing. Oh I can tell a Da Vinci when I see one. Maybe even a Pre-Raphaelite. But otherwise it’s not really my subject. I suppose you know loads, working for the family business.”

  “I know enough.”

  Philly did not know or understand why, but she sensed that once again Matt closed the shutters on her.

  The lake looked extraordinarily pretty with the winter sunshine upon it, surrounded by trees glowing russet and yellow in the sunlight; a pre-Raphaelite landscape come to life. As Philly had promised, various follies were dotted around the bank of the lake. Arbours hidden away amongst the trees so that one could sit in the shade but still have a full view of the house and lake; small temples dedicated to various gods, mostly of the female variety, such as Aphrodite and Diana. They had walked several hundred yards when Philly stopped suddenly.

  “It’s the tower,” she said. “The one from Robespierre’s painting.”

  Sure enough a stone tower, no more than seven feet in height stood at the side of the lake, with a path running from it to the water. Behind it was not the forest that Philly had seen in the picture, but a low hedge, with a gap in the centre.

  Philly let go of Matt’s hand and walked around the tower, looking for the right perspective. Finally she found it.

  “The artist, Robespierre, must have stood about here,” she said.

  Matt went to stand next to her. “Yeah, I guess he did.” He had that puzzled look on his face again. “So I guess the painting does belong to this house.”

  “What do you mean? Of course it belongs to this house. I found it in the attic.”

  “Sorry,” said Matt, “what I mean is that it was painted here, probably on commission. It wasn’t bought from a gallery.”

  Philly had the strong suspicion that it was not what he meant at all. She left him standing on the path and walked around to the back of the tower and found that it had an alcove with a stone seat built into it. Except that where all the other seats faced the lake, this one faced the house, looking through the gap in the hedge and across the lawns to the long Gothic façade of the house.

  Inside the alcove, the walls were scratched with graffiti; mostly the names of girls whom Philly assumed had attended the school. One piece of graffiti was a heart and written inside was a time and partial date, leaving out the year. Philly assumed it was a secret assignation between one of the girls and a boy she should not have been meeting. She scoured the walls and found there were several other hearts, all with a different time and date, usually a month or so apart. One heart was etched on the wall under the seat. She idly hoped that the young lovers had managed to run away together and get married.

  Turning to look at the house, Philly had a fantasy of a teenage girl, running across those lawns to meet her boyfriend. That was when it occurred to her. What if that teenage girl had been Dominique DuPont? What if all she had done was run away with the boy she loved? It did not explain why her family also seemed to disappear, but they might have been ashamed if she had run away with a lower class boy. Things were different in those days, and the lines between the classes were more pronounced.

  What if, Philly thought, having gorged herself on too many Hollywood movies, the boy had not been a boy at all? He might have been an older man who could pass for a teenage boy. He might even have been a spy of some sort. There were many problems in France in the sixties, as Philly well knew from reading The Day of the Jackal. The boy spy, an Algerian perhaps, might have killed the whole DuPont family then it was all hushed up by the government.

  She became so lost in her daydream, she almost forgot that she had left Matt alone. When she went back to him, he had moved nearer to the lake and had his back to her, looking into the distance. He was also talking into his mobile phone.

  “No,” he was saying firmly, “there’s no need to send anyone else yet. I need to look around a bit more. I think the answer is in the attic, but it’s locked…. I’m sure I can get the key... No, no … Let me play this out my way, and then I’ll be able to give you all you want.”

  Chapter Five

  “You’re very quiet,” said Ma
tt, as they walked back up to the house. Philly had made sure that he did not know she overheard his telephone conversation by slipping back behind the small tower and waiting for him to come looking for her.

  “I’m thinking more,” she said shortly. It was something her godmother used to say when she was in one of her rare bad moods.

  “Thinking about what? I hope it’s not me, because I’m not sure I like the look on your face.”

  Philly was not ready to tell him what she had heard. She wanted to find a way to catch him out properly. Then she could have him arrested for whatever it was he was up to. One thing of which she was certain, he would not get the key to the attic, no matter how much he thought himself capable of seducing her. Not that there was anything in the attic worth bothering about. It was a matter of principle.

  “There were loads of hearts with dates and time inside the small tower,” she said. “I was thinking about the romance that led to them. I wondered if it had anything to do with Dominic DuPont.” There, that was not exactly a lie. It was exactly what she had been thinking before she overheard the telephone conversation and realised that Matt was a sneak-thief.

  It all made sense now. His sudden attraction to her. She had known all along it was too good to be true. No doubt he saw the Robespierre painting, heard about Bedlington Hall and decided she must be richer than she said.

  “You think she ran off with this guy?”