“Hilarious,” said Simone.
“I’m staying in Rowan Thorp, at the Stag and Hound while I look for somewhere to rent; this job is liable to take a couple of months at least. But I visited my sister in Tunbridge Wells yesterday.”
Star could not seem to wipe the smile off her face and was painfully aware of the side-eye she was getting from Maggie and Simone.
“Well, we better start sifting through all this mess,” said Maggie, looking around at the cluttered shelves.
“Oh, this isn’t mess,” said Duncan enthusiastically. “This is history. Do you happen to have your father’s ledger to hand?”
“Ah, slight problem there,” Simone interjected. “Our father thought it would be amusing to hide it.”
“But as soon as we find it, it’s yours,” Star added.
She’d always been a believer in coincidence. The world turned on it: one random event colliding with another to create a perfect storm. Could these be the first rumblings of her own perfect storm?
8
Duncan was keen to begin work right away. After stashing his briefcase in the drawer of a Queen Anne sideboard beneath the wall of clocks, he began moving slowly along the aisles, picking up seemingly random items and jotting notes down in his notebook before replacing the objects exactly where he had found them.
The North sisters’ approach to the shop’s contents was less exacting. Boxes were rifled through, jugs and vases upturned, drawers ransacked as the quest to find thirty-two Monopoly houses began in earnest. It felt like an overwhelming task.
“This is the proverbial needle in a haystack.” Maggie had her hands clasped on top of her head, seeds of defeatism already germinating.
“A wooden house in a junkyard,” Star agreed.
“Thirty-two of them,” added Simone. “That’s practically a housing estate.”
“Would you like some help?” Duncan asked, glancing up from a black bangle, which he advised was a Whitby jet Victorian mourning bracelet.
“No, you’re all right, you stick with your antique hunting, see if you can find us something worth cold hard cash in this hellhole,” Simone replied.
Duncan looked pleased; it was clear that all he wanted to do was get down and dirty with Augustus’s novelties and curios.
The shop was well and truly living up to its name. All day long the bell above the door jangled as a stream of helpful—nosy—villagers came in bearing gifts of cakes, biscuits, thermoses of tea and coffee, and advice. With the place having been undisturbed for five years, it was understandable that its opening should incite curiosity.
“I can smell the dust,” said Betty as she laid a tray boasting four takeaway coffees onto the fold-down door of a 1950s cocktail cabinet. Maggie held her hands up to show that her fingers were black with the stuff, and Betty screwed her nose up in distaste. “Monopoly houses, you say?”
“Yes.” Star peeped through a gap in an aisle. She had cobwebs in her hair. “Thirty-two of them. Any ideas?”
Betty put her hands on her round hips and surveyed the shop. “Instrument cases,” she returned with certainty. “Your father was a musical man, and I’ll eat my apron if he hasn’t hidden at least one of them in with an instrument.”
“Bloody hell, Betty, I think you might be onto something there.” Simone was clearly awed. “Right, change of plan. Let’s be focused in our ransacking. Concentrate on anything that looks like a music case.”
Betty left with a satisfied air; no doubt she would have a waiting audience in the café keen to hear about the task Augustus had set upon his daughters.
Once the sisters had homed in on specific targets, the search began to feel less chaotic. Suddenly battered and peeling instrument cases of all kinds were falling into relief among the jumble. In just twenty minutes, they unearthed a saxophone, a modest lute collection, panpipes, bongos, a French horn, a zither, a piano accordion, and a glockenspiel.
“I’ve got one!” Maggie shouted, plucking a tiny red wooden house from the blue silk lining of a lute case.
“Woo-hoo!” Star threw herself at Maggie as though she’d just scored a goal at Anfield Stadium. “Betty was right! Well done, Maggie-Moo!”
“One down, thirty-one to go,” said Simone.
“Don’t you see?” Star asked, one arm still draped around Maggie’s neck. “Betty was right. It isn’t random. This means that Dad hid the houses in places of significance to him, things that meant something to him, like the lute.”
Simone nodded. “Okay, okay, we can work with this. We just need to think about the things that were important to him. What did he like? What were his hobbies?” As she spoke, she clicked open the clasp on a zither case. Her mouth lifted into a smile. “Found another one.” She raised the small green house to show them.
“Good work!” Maggie wove along the crowded aisle and high-fived her.
“Oh, yay, well done!” Star called across, but stayed where she was.
It was obvious that she was holding back, and her evident hesitancy pulled at something in Simone’s chest. Would she have welcomed a hug from Star? Absolutely not. But did she feel a twinge of sadness that her sister was too wary to even try? Yes, it appeared that she did.
“Right, we’re on a roll now. What else did Dad like?” asked Maggie.
The rest of the instrument cases bore no fruit, but they remained buoyed by the fact that they’d cracked Augustus’s methodology.
“Traveling?” Simone began.
“Bric-a-brac,” Maggie said, and then checked herself as she took in their surroundings. “Although that’s not going to narrow it down much.”
“Sex!” trilled Star, just as Miss Eliza Radley—formidable spinster and techno-wizard of the Rowan Thorp chapter of the Women’s Institute—walked in. She’d been a teacher back in the day and had taught many of the residents in the village. Despite having retired thirty years ago, she was still universally addressed as Miss Radley.
“Gracious!” squeaked the tiny, wizened woman. She took a moment to clean her steamed-up pince-nez attached to a delicate gold chain and adjusted them back onto her nose. “Looks like I’ve arrived in the nick of time. What about sex?”
“We’re trying to think of things that our dad liked.” Simone had a feeling that by now Betty would have informed most of the high street of their quest. She was right. Miss Radley nodded her instant understanding.
“I see. Yes. Augustus certainly did like sex. He was very good at it too. Cunnilingus was his specialty.”
At the back of the shop, they heard the sound of coffee being spat out violently and Duncan choking. Star clapped her hands to her mouth to hold in her laugh, but Maggie was unable to stop a guffaw escaping her.
“That’s a touch more information than we would have liked, but thanks for the input, Miss Radley.” Simone managed to keep a straight face. “Not sure there’s too much pertaining to oral sex in the shop, though. And if there is, I’m not sure any of us are mentally equipped to tackle it right now.”
“No. I understand. Young people are strangely frightened by the sexuality of their elders. Odd when you think about it; after all, we were doing it first—copiously.”