Page 52 of Marble Hall Murders

She turned back to me. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Susan Ryeland. I work for Causton Books. Can you tell him I’ve driven down from London?’

This was transmitted down the line. There was a silence and I thought he must have refused, but then she lowered the phone. ‘He’ll be down in a minute.’

‘That’s wonderful. Thank you, Brenda.’

While I waited, I glanced through the other souvenirs and read a few pages ofLittle Miracles, which still hit the bestseller charts every Easter. There was something a little depressing about the gifts on offer, but it was only as I was thumbing through the postcards that I realised what it was. Andreas was in Crete. Charles was in prison. Katie was in Suffolk. I realised I couldn’t buy anything because I had nobody to give anything to and that reminded me how much I’d made my work the centre of my life. It was a feeling that passed quickly enough. I had plenty of friends and none of them would have wanted any of this tat anyway, but it was still areminder of the extent to which I had been cut adrift by the events of the last few years and that there was a definite fragility about the way I was living.

Then a door over to one side opened and Frédéric Voltaire appeared.

Of course it wasn’t the French detective from Eliot’s novel, but there could be no doubt that this was where he had found his inspiration. The man who was approaching me had one eye covered by a patch and moved slowly, as if in pain. I knew that Frederick Turner was Eliot’s adoptive uncle and straight away I wondered what he had done to find himself in the novel, and hoped that this wasn’t going to be another case of old scores being settled.

‘This is the lady here, Mr Turner,’ Brenda cooed. ‘I hope you don’t mind me disturbing you on your day off.’

‘That’s all right, Brenda.’

‘Did you get any asparagus?’

‘No. I’m afraid they’re finished for the season.’ He turned to me and smiled. ‘Ms Ryeland?’

I tried to look past the injuries. The man who was standing in front of me looked to be in his late fifties, casually dressed in a paisley shirt tucked into baggy cords, with leather slippers on his feet. Unlike the character in the book, he was mixed-race, with African and white heritage. He was a handsome man despite the loss of his eye and the scarring on the side of his face. He had a quiet intelligence and a gentleness I found endearing. He spoke softly, as if afraid of giving offence.

‘Susan, please,’ I said.

‘I’m Frederick Turner.’

‘Thank you for coming down. I’m working with Eliot—’

‘Yes. I know who you are. Would you like a coffee? We have quite a good tea room here – the Little Parlour. The ladies make all their own cakes.’

We set off together, leaving the house and heading for the stables. Frederick walked with a limp. ‘You’ll have to forgive my appearance,’ he said. ‘I have an allotment at the back of the house and I’d just finished lifting the early potatoes and was about to jump into the shower when Brenda rang. We had a marvellous crop of asparagus this year, by the way, but sadly the season is all too short.’

‘You manage Marble Hall?’

‘Yes. I hope you enjoyed your visit. Isn’t it a marvellous place?’ He pointed to a line of casement windows on the second floor. ‘I have a suite of rooms up there. It’s funny to find myself back where I began, but I love living here and there’s absolutely no way I could do this job remotely. I’ve been here so long that probably one day I’ll be part of the guided tour. I might even come back and haunt the place!’ He smiled at his own joke.

The room was crowded, but we found a table and after I had declined both lemon drizzle cake and French fancies, he ordered tea and biscuits. The waitress was called Daphne and she fussed over him as if he was a schoolboy being given a special treat. In that respect, she was just like Brenda in the gift shop. Both were obviously fond of him, perhaps because of his injuries.

‘Who told you about me?’ I asked. I assumed it must have been Eliot. Nobody else in the Crace family knew I was working on the book.

‘I met Charles Clover a few times,’ he explained. ‘He camedown here when he was working on the last books written by Miriam Crace and we stayed in touch after he set up Cloverleaf. He often mentioned you. He spoke very highly of you.’

I wasn’t sure if this was a compliment or a rebuke. Frederick must have been aware of what had happened to Charles and his company, but he didn’t make any reference to it so I decided I wouldn’t either. ‘I’m freelance now’ was all I said.

‘I’d heard Eliot was writing a book. Is it set here at Marble Hall?’

I wasn’t sure how to answer that. I knew I’d struck lucky. Frederick Turner could give me a lot of the background details I needed about Miriam Crace, Marble Hall and the families who had lived here – but it might be difficult to draw information out of him if I said that Eliot was using the family as the template for a murder mystery set in the South of France in 1955. At the same time, he seemed like a nice enough man and I didn’t want to lie to him. ‘He’s writing a mystery story,’ I said, keeping things vague. ‘It’s a work of fiction, but it’s partly inspired by his childhood here.’

He smiled. ‘I always thought Eliot would become a writer. He was an odd little boy, always living in his imagination.’ He paused. ‘Am I in it?’

‘I’ve only read a few chapters. He won’t be delivering until later in the year.’ Both statements were true, but didn’t answer the question. ‘I understand you were adopted by Miriam Crace.’

‘That’s right.’ He paused while the waitress brought over one of those silver pots that make such a business dribblingout a measure of tea, and two gingerbread men on a plate, both based on characters from Miriam’s books, their names – Harry and Rose – written in icing sugar. ‘I first came to Marble Hall in 1961, when I was almost six years old.’

I did a quick calculation. He’d been born in 1955, which made him sixty-eight now, much older than I’d thought.

‘If Eliot’s writing a mystery novel, he should start with me. I never knew either of my parents. My mother died giving birth to me. We know very little about her. We think my father was an agricultural worker and she may have been a Traveller. Mary Turner was the name she gave at the Trowbridge Community Hospital, which is where I was born. Apparently, she said that she wanted me to be called Frederick if I was a boy, and it makes me sad to think she never found out that it happened. I ended up at the St Ambrose Orphanage and Children’s Home …’

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