Miss Riddell and the Heiress: An Amateur Female Sleuth Historical Cozy Mystery (Miss Riddell Cozy Mysteries Book 4) Read online

  Miss Riddell and the Heiress

  An Amateur Female Sleuth Historical Cozy Mystery

  P.C. James

  Contents

  1. Lithgow, Blue Mountains. NSW, Australia – 1977

  2. Sydney, NSW, Australia – November 1977

  3. 25 November 1944

  4. Pauline Decides to help

  5. Surprises Everywhere

  6. Pauline is Fired

  7. The Historical Society

  8. The Heiress Arrives

  9. Something is Wrong

  10. There Must be Something

  11. The Heiress Reaches Lancashire

  12. Confirming the Worst

  13. A Glimmer of Light

  14. Pauline’s Research Frustrated

  15. Now It’s real

  16. No Motive but a Suspect

  17. The Rock Star as Suspect

  18. The Game is Afoot

  19. It Feels Like Home

  20. New Year, New Resolution

  21. Alex and Pauline Investigate Separately

  22. Old Loyalties

  23. Alex Goes Walkabout

  24. Alex Knows Who It Is

  25. A Stakeout and Confrontation

  26. Alex Returns to London

  27. Danger is near

  28. Pauline Hunts Her Prey

  29. Hunter or Hunted?

  30. Aftermath

  31. A New Beginning?

  Polite Request

  Bonus Content

  More of My Books

  Newsletter

  Even More Information

  About the Author

  1

  Lithgow, Blue Mountains. NSW, Australia – 1977

  Pauline Riddell looked around the boardroom table at the assembled company as the chairman called the meeting to order before saying, “I don’t need to tell you why we’re here.”

  There was no response to this for everyone did indeed know why they were here. The forensic audit team sent from the head office in England was to present its findings today. Rumors of what those findings were had been circulating for days.

  “You’ll notice our finance director isn’t present,” the chairman continued. “The reason for that will become clear when you hear the report, but I will tell you right now that he was arrested this morning at Sydney Airport as he and his family were preparing to board an international flight.” He paused to give the board members time to grasp the full weight of his words before continuing, “The chief accountant is also being held by the police and being questioned as to how much he knew. It’s a sorry state of affairs and one I feel I should have seen but I didn’t. Consequently, I’ve tendered my resignation to the board of our head office; they, however, have asked me to stay on until a replacement can be found.”

  There was some murmuring and shuffling among the board members and, Pauline was pleased to see, some shamed faces among them. After all, what were a company’s board members for if not to ensure financial and other irregularities did not take place?

  The chairman continued, “Now, I think you’ve all met the audit team members, Mr. Entwhistle and Miss Riddell, so I’ll ask them to walk us through the report and its findings.”

  The two auditors began circulating the slim report around the table until everyone had a copy.

  “I shall talk to the general conclusions and recommendations,” Entwhistle said, “and Miss Riddell will take us through the research, analysis, and findings. Are there any questions before we begin?”

  There were none and the meeting began.

  Afterwards, as she and Entwhistle were packing to leave, Pauline took stock of her trip. They’d been in Australia three weeks but hadn’t seen anything other than offices and hotel rooms. In theory, they were both supposed to return to England tomorrow to write up their overseas trip report and be available for another assignment, but she decided she needed a break. She might never be in Australia again and she hadn’t even seen a kangaroo in the whole time she’d been here.

  “Colin,” she said, addressing her fellow auditor, “I’m staying on for a few days. I need a vacation.”

  “The boss won’t like it,” Entwhistle said.

  “I won’t be long,” Pauline replied. “A week’s holiday, that’s all. I want to see a wombat.”

  “What’s a wombat?”

  “Some kind of animal,” Pauline said. “I don’t know really.”

  “We have zoos full of animals, Pauline,” Entwhistle said. “You can see them at home.”

  “Tell him I’ll be at work a week on Monday without fail,” Pauline said.

  Entwhistle shook his head. “Not a chance,” he said. “You call and tell him while I’m still in the air over the Indian Ocean. I don’t want to be even close by when he hears that.”

  “He works himself, and us, too hard,” Pauline said. “It’s bad for his nerves and his temper.”

  “Tell him that too,” Entwhistle said. “You should be safe calling it in from here.”

  After dropping Entwhistle at Sydney Airport, Pauline jumped back into their rented car and headed out to explore some of Australia’s spectacular scenery and unique wildlife. Her plan was simple, tour the Blue Mountains and its surroundings and finish the week back in Sydney to see where modern Australia began.

  At the age of forty-four, and with many single vacations behind her, Pauline had no problem setting out on her own through the mountain trails that led to waterfalls or unusual rockfalls. Sometimes, however, she still couldn’t help feeling a companion would make the experience more enjoyable. After all, her own appreciation of the Three Sisters at Katoomba, or the Zig-Zag Railway nearby, were satisfying but not complete. Australia’s brightly colored birdlife alone would have been enough for hours of conversation.

  Her first three weeks of the trip, spent entirely indoors studying files, accounts, and folders, were forgotten as she roamed through the dry landscape under a burning sun in a clear blue sky. She’d read Australia was the driest inhabited continent and she could believe it. This was winter and she hadn’t seen or heard even a drop of rain the whole time. Much of the vegetation she walked on was brown, crisp, and crackled underfoot. Only where thin streams meandered through the forest floor or poured over the plateau edge in rainbow-creating falls, was the land green. It was stunning to her senses. How it felt to those first settlers from rainy Britain two hundred years ago, she couldn’t imagine. Nor could she imagine what they felt when they saw the wildlife, which was totally alien to her and no doubt to their European upbringing. Lots of the local wildlife were gorgeous furry bundles: kangaroos, wallabies, and their related species. Others were just cute, like echidnas. But the fruit bats, snakes, and spiders were rather frightening. Fortunately, she rarely saw those on her walks.

  Too soon, her time was up, and she headed back down the narrow road through the mountains bound for Sydney and its city life. Her research into the city had told her to stay somewhere near The Rocks, the city’s starting point, where she would see the early buildings of the port and be well placed for all the sightseeing she wanted to do. She could walk to Circular Quay where ferries and tour boats took locals and sightseers to all the principal locations. She could even walk to the newest and most controversial of the attractions, the Sydney Opera House. She could also walk across Sydney’s famous Harbour Bridge, so well-known in her own north-eastern England, and admire the vast, sheltered bay that had attracted people for ce
nturies. A ferry would take her to Taronga Zoo where she hoped she could finally see the wombat, as none had made an appearance during any of her walkabouts through the, admittedly now too well-traveled, Blue Mountain trails.

  Her first days in Sydney were spent in the Opera House and the Natural History Museum, which had she visited it at the start might have had her flying straight home because the list of Australia’s poisonous creatures was seemingly never-ending. By comparison, her time wandering among the Botanical Gardens, with its flock of fruit bats hanging from the highest trees, was tame. Her time on the beach at Botany Bay, famous in the British folk songs she remembered, and Manly Beach, where the surfers and lifeguards were sadly not in evidence because it was winter, was instructive. The air and water were both warmer than her childhood summer days on a packed beach at Scarborough and yet the beaches were empty. It was hard for Pauline to appreciate that Australians actually thought these pleasant, sunny, warm days were cold. Her final morning she spent on the water, touring the bay from a Captain Cook Tours boat, and in the afternoon, she took the ferry across to the Zoo, which covered much of the slopes on the opposite side of the bay from the city.

  2

  Sydney, NSW, Australia – November 1977

  Walking around Taronga Zoo took longer than she’d expected. After an hour, with much of the zoo unexplored, she sat down at the cafeteria for a pot of tea and a lamington cake. She was hardly settled when she noticed a woman who was vaguely familiar hovering nearby. Pauline broke off a piece of her lamington cake and watched her approach. Now she was closer, Pauline remembered the woman had been on the same morning Captain Cook Cruise around the harbor and bay with her and even then, she’d seemed to take a special interest in Pauline. Pauline wracked her brain to make a connection between the woman and the many new people she’d met since arriving in Australia only four weeks earlier. She couldn’t think of anyone she’d met that resembled the woman, who was still circling closer looking unable to decide whether to speak or leave.

  She was dressed for a vacation and that alone set her apart from the other Australians all around who were in ‘winter’ clothes, this being the depths of Sydney’s winter season. Pauline was in her spring clothes; for to a northern Englishwoman, an Australian winter was more like a summer’s day. But this mysterious and conflicted stranger was also in her summery clothes of a flower-printed dress and bare legs, though with a light, fawn coat over her arm.

  Pauline took a sip of tea and continued nibbling her cake while she waited for the woman to make up her mind. Lamington cake, a sponge cube rolled in chocolate and shredded coconut, Pauline finally decided, was interesting, but in the end, just sponge cake. In Pauline’s mind, pastries were always better than cakes. The zoo café was busy with families enjoying snacks in the bright sunshine and under the clear blue sky that hadn’t changed since she’d arrived in Australia. Those crowds, however, made it hard for Pauline to always keep the woman in sight.

  She could see the woman was attractive, but somewhat unusually, wore no jewelry to enhance her face, neck, or arms. Her honey-blonde hair was fashionably cut but not in the hideous modern styles that came from watching too much television or movies. Pauline guessed she was about thirty, though her manner was almost that of a socially awkward teenager. Her hovering wasn’t threatening but even if it had been, Pauline wouldn’t have been concerned. They were evenly matched in height and weight and Pauline, when the dangers of her forays into crime solving had become too apparent, had taken lessons in self defense. She saw herself very much in the mold of Mrs. Emma Peel in that silly television show, The Avengers, which had been so popular in the Sixties. Though she fully recognized and disapproved of the nonsense it showed, she’d gone ahead and taken lessons. While she knew even a trained woman like herself couldn’t win a fight against a violent, aggressive man, let alone the kind of supposedly trained agents Mrs. Peel was always besting in fights, it was enough to know that the element of surprise early in a fight could turn out in her favor.

  Just as Pauline was thinking of leaving the small table, the woman came to a decision and approached her directly.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “Can I talk to you for a moment?”

  She spoke English with an Australian accent, Pauline noticed, not Australian English. Perhaps she was a newcomer who was just beginning to settle in.

  “Of course,” Pauline said, gesturing to the seat at the opposite side of the small table.

  “You don’t know me,” the woman said abruptly and stopped.

  “Well, we can correct that at once,” Pauline said. “I’m Pauline Riddell.” She held out her hand.

  The woman took Pauline’s hand and shook it. Her hand was soft but her handshake firm. Despite her initial suspicions, Pauline felt herself thawing.

  “Alexandra Wade,” she said, “but I prefer just plain Alex.” She stopped speaking abruptly again but this time it seemed less odd because she was settling herself in the chair Pauline had offered.

  Pauline decided to wait it out. The woman wanted to talk, that was clear, but she’d have to decide to do so in her own time. After all, Pauline was flying home tomorrow and couldn’t help anyone here. She mentally shook herself. No one here knew she was Miss Riddell, fighter for justice and righter of wrongs, as her journalist friend Poppy had once described her in a newspaper article. She smiled to herself. Poppy’s words from long ago and far away, while silly, did come to mind often, which was of course pride and therefore a failing she did her best to suppress.

  “You talked about Whalley to the people on the boat this morning,” Alexandra said at last.

  For a moment, Pauline had a mental block, then she remembered, “Oh, yes,” she said, “the British couple on the boat told me they were from Manchester before emigrating here. They asked me if I knew Manchester.”

  Alexandra nodded. “Then you said you lived in Whalley.”

  “I do now,” Pauline said. “I moved there some months ago. Why? Do you know it?”

  “I’ve never been there but I know of it,” Alex said. “My mum said we were descendants of a noble family from near there.” She paused, then continued. “Do you know a village called Ashton de Cheney?”

  “No,” Pauline said slowly, “but I’m not a local in the area. As I said, I only moved there a few months ago. Do you live in Sydney? It’s a beautiful city.”

  “No,” Alex said, “I was born and raised in Victoria. Wadeville. It’s a tiny place about a hundred miles inland from Melbourne.”

  “I’ve heard Melbourne is a beautiful city too,” Pauline said.

  “I wouldn’t know,” Alex said, “apart from the airport, I’ve never been there.”

  “Never?” Pauline asked.

  “We never got off the station much when I was a kid,” Alex said. “Then when Dad took off, and we lost the farm and had to move into town, Mum and I couldn’t afford to go anywhere.”

  “I’m sorry,” Pauline said. “Still, the country around there must be beautiful so you can’t have missed much growing up.”

  “It is pretty around the town,” Alex agreed. “Living there, you forget. It takes a stranger to remind you of things sometimes.”

  “That’s very true,” Pauline said. “Visitors came to where I grew up all the time and it was a long time before I could see the moors as they saw them.”

  “My difficulty is different.” Alex said. “The country I grew up in is beautiful but our poverty, after Dad left, makes me hate it.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Pauline said, though wondering what any of this had to do with her. “It must have been very hard.”

  Alex shook her head. “You don’t understand, I’m not explaining it well. It was a poverty of mind more than of the body, and it was made worse by my mother’s belief we were ‘quality’, as she called it, and we had to keep ourselves above our neighbors.”

  Pauline was beginning to think the woman wasn’t quite right in the head and considered how best to extricate herself fro
m this increasingly worrisome interview.

  “It is hard when you’re young not to have things others have,” Pauline said.

  “It wasn’t like that,” Alex said, almost angrily. “I didn’t care about material things. It was the lack of friends, the loneliness – the teasing and bullying at school – which drove me to leave school early and miss out on university.”

  Pauline frowned. Any moment, she was going to be asked to donate to something, she was sure of it.

  Seeing Pauline’s expression seemed to sober, Alex said, “You see, I lived all my life in a tiny village of fifty people and hadn’t a relative or friend in the whole place. My mother’s obsession with being ‘aristocracy’ kept us apart. People don’t like being told they’re below you on some idiotic social scale from a far-away country.”

  “I can see how that would cause friction,” Pauline agreed, and she could. Alex’s mother must have been deranged to give herself airs and graces in a land as egalitarian as Australia prided itself on being.

  “Friction doesn’t begin to describe it,” Alex said, her temper clearly rising again. “When I was a teenager, the other kids were always having crushes on each other, going out, falling out. Nobody wanted me. Mother would say ‘a pretty girl like you will soon get a good husband, not one of these local yokels’ but she didn’t have to run home from school to stop the yokels pawing her, not because they were attracted to me but because they wanted to hurt and humiliate me. Mother’s obsession was a nightmare I lived with until…” she stopped.