a manicure at the beauty salon in the exclusive country club close to Chester, which she and David had joined shortly after it had opened. David didn’t use the facilities very often; he preferred playing golf at the same club where his father and brother were members.
Now, what was she going to wear tonight? The Buckletons were members of an old Cheshire family and well-connected; they lived in a huge, draughty, rambling Victorian house just outside Chester. In addition to the couple’s being clients of David’s, Ann Buckleton was a local JP. Tiggy suspected that Ann Buckleton didn’t particularly approve of her and would have preferred Jenny’s company, but David was the firm’s senior partner and as such it was David whom they invited to dinner.
Jenny parked her car in the large municipal car park just outside the town. The town itself was old; the Romans had mined salt in the area and so had others both before and after them.
The town had literally been built on salt and now there was concern that parts of it could be subject to subsidence because of the now-disused and extensive salt workings on its outskirts.
To Jenny, Haslewich was everything that a small rural English town should be—a neat, compact and harmonious blending of buildings actually built in some cases on top of one another, absurd Georgian growths sprouting from Tudor roots, handsome stone structures jostling for space with others made from brick. Some of the more flamboyant stone ones sported their purloined masonry without any hint of shame or subtlety.
During the Civil War, so much damage had been done to the town’s surrounding stone wall by the attacking Roundhead troops that after the war the stone had been used, in some cases, to repair the homes of the townspeople, and the only part of the original wall that now remained was the section that ran between the town and the river. The local council was presently running a campaign to raise money to have it restored. So far, the townspeople appeared stoically determined to leave their wall as it was and in many ways Jenny didn’t blame them.
The antique shop was in a small, narrow alley just off the town square, a pretty, double-fronted Tudor building with an upper storey that overhung the alleyway.
Guy Cooke was rearranging some delicate Staffordshire figurines when she walked in. He looked up and saw her, immediately stopping what he was doing to come over and greet her with a warm smile.
He was at least fifteen years younger than Jonathon and physically completely different. Where Jon was tall and blond with long arms and legs, Guy was shorter, broader, his hair pitch-dark and his colouring just short of swarthy.
He had once told Jenny that there was supposed to be gypsy blood in his family somewhere, and looking at him Jenny could well believe it. They had been partners for seven years and friends for much longer. Guy’s family had lived in the town for generations and his parents had run a pub several doors away from the shop before they retired and moved. He had sisters, brothers, cousins, aunts and uncles all living within a stone’s throw of one another and all virtually united in their disapproval of Guy and what he was doing.
Guy had always been ‘arty’ as he had wryly described himself once to Jenny. Of course, his parents had tried their best to smother such an undesirable trait, which would have been bad enough in a daughter, but was totally unacceptable in a son….
The Cookes as a clan were notoriously macho; the thickset, dark-haired, very male men knew their place in life and what being a man and, more importantly, being a Cooke were all about.
Not so Guy. He had wanted something different out of life. He was something different.
‘I’m sorry I haven’t been much in evidence lately,’ Jenny apologised, shaking her head when Guy offered her a cup of tea.
‘Mmm. How are things going?’ he asked her.
‘All right—I think,’ Jenny said, laughing. ‘Tiggy and I were up at Queensmead this morning just checking on the final details—’
‘You mean you were checking on the final details,’ Guy corrected her.
Jenny frowned. It was no secret to her that Guy didn’t particularly like her sister-in-law, which was quite odd really when one thought about how he felt about anything that was beautiful, and Tiggy was certainly that.
Tiggy didn’t like him, either. In fact, she had, on occasion, been uncharacteristically vindictive about him, making waspish comments about the fact that he wasn’t married.
Jenny had started to laugh. She could think of few men who were more masculinely heterosexual than Guy—not that it made any difference what his sexual preference was—and the only reason he hadn’t married was because he hadn’t wanted to tie himself down to one woman. In his sexuality at least, he was very much a member of the Cooke clan who had, to a man, what was tacitly understood to be a weakness for the female sex.
‘What about this silver you wanted me to look at?’ she reminded him.
‘Oh, yes. I think it’s Queen Anne but you’re the silver expert. I’ve got it in the safe.’
It was over an hour before Jenny finally left the shop. Like Guy, she was convinced that the silver was genuine although, as she had pointed out to him, the lack of any identifying marks could mean that it might have been stolen at some point in time.
‘It’s too good not to have had proper markings,’ she had observed. ‘I suppose the best thing we can do is to check with the police.’
After she left the shop, she crossed the square. She just had enough time left to call on Ruth; her husband’s aunt lived in a narrow, elegant Georgian town house on Church Walk, which she rented from the church commissioners. To get to it, Jenny made a small detour through the churchyard itself, pausing as she walked past the Crighton family plot to stop and bend down towards a small single headstone carved with laughing, naughty-looking cherubs. The epitaph read:
‘HARRY CRIGHTON
JUNE 19TH 1965–JUNE 20TH 1965.’
He had lived such a heartbreakingly short time, this first child of hers, and a part of her still mourned for him and always would. Time had eased the piercing sharpness of her initial grief, but she could never forget him, nor would she want to. Before she stood up, she touched the headstone, stroking it, caressing it almost, as she said his name.
Ruth was waiting for her with the front door open as she walked up the path. ‘I saw you in the churchyard,’ she told Jenny. ‘He would have been thirty-one this year if he’d lived.’
‘I know.’ For a moment both women were quiet. If having Ben as a father-in-law weighed heavily at times in the negative balance sheet of her marriage to Jonathon, then having Ruth in the family certainly added balance to the positive side of the equation, Jenny acknowledged.
‘Have you got time for a cup of tea?’ Ruth asked her.
‘No,’ Jenny told her ruefully, ‘but I’d still love one.’
‘Come on in, then,’ Ruth invited her, and as Jenny followed her into the pretty sitting room at the front of the house, she paused to admire the huge profusion of flowers decorating the empty fireplace.
Ruth had a gift, not just for arranging flowers artistically, but for growing them, as well.
‘Pieter is coming with the flowers on the day of the party,’ she told Jenny, following the direction of her glance.
