Murder at the Mill Read online

  The Mill had brought Ariadne strength, but like her children, all of whom had been born here, it was a labour of love, constantly needing repair and care and attention. And of course, Dom never lifted a finger around the house. The exquisite gardens, the welcoming, tastefully decorated rooms and the leak-free roof were all down to Ariadne. Sculpture was her passion, but in a very real sense the Mill had become her life’s work and greatest triumph.

  Everybody who knew Ariadne Wetherby marvelled at her patience, that gentle, softly spoken perseverance that made her such a good mother and wife and hostess, and the antithesis of her husband’s loud, charismatic, look-at-me persona. In the Wetherbys’ case at any rate, it seemed opposites really did attract.

  Slipping a row of brightly coloured wooden bangles onto her wrist, to cover the scar left by a long-removed tattoo (the things we do when we’re young!), Ariadne drifted down to the kitchen and began making coffee on the Aga. Outside, dawn was breaking over the kitchen garden. The grey-green leaves of the sage bushes glistened and glinted with frost. Gazing through the window, Ariadne was marvelling at how peaceful and magical it all was when Billy shuffled in. Silent and sullen as usual, he sat down at the table and began rolling a cigarette at lightning speed.

  ‘Morning, darling. Would you like some coffee?’

  Ariadne cringed at the nervousness in her own voice. Recently, talking to her second son had started to feel like sticking one’s head into a bear’s mouth. He’d really scared her yesterday, by the river. God knows what might have happened if their tenant – ‘our artist in residence’, as Dom called Iris – hadn’t turned up.

  ‘No,’ Billy growled. Pushing a mass of unruly black curls back from his face, he shoved the cigarette in his mouth and lit it, inhaling deeply and angrily. The flame tip flared red, lighting up a face that was clearly sleep-deprived. His skin looked sickly and wan, and the shadows under his eyes were almost black. Handsome despite all of this, he looked a lot older than his twenty-seven years.

  ‘It looks like it’s going to be a beautiful day,’ Ariadne ploughed on, determinedly cheerful.

  ‘I’m sure the TV people will be thrilled,’ Billy replied bitterly. Producers were coming up from London today, supposedly to scout out some possible locations for filming scenes from Grimshaw’s Goodbye, Dom’s televisual swansong, to be screened on New Year’s Day. Billy winced at the prospect of his father puffing out his chest like a smug cockerel while being fawned over by London media types, who all just adored Grimshaw and were soooo sad this was the end! ‘Can’t you write another one, Dom? Just one more?’

  ‘Do you want to come down to the chickens with me to get the eggs?’ asked Ariadne, trying vainly to change the subject. ‘Do you remember when you were little, we used to—’

  ‘No,’ Billy said, more loudly. ‘I don’t.’ Glancing up at his mother with loathing, he added, ‘Just stop it, would you?’

  Ariadne was hurt. ‘What do you mean? Stop what?’

  ‘For fuck’s sake!’ Billy yelled, pushing back his chair and getting up. ‘Stop. You’re not fooling anyone, you stupid bitch. Least of all me.’

  At that moment Dom appeared in the doorway. He’d been up since five, writing and planning for the TV crew’s arrival, but the smell of coffee had drawn him downstairs like a snake charmer’s song.

  ‘How dare you speak to your mother like that!’ He rounded furiously on Billy. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’

  Billy stood his ground, glaring back at his father.

  ‘I know who I am. I’m the fallen son, remember? The one you’re fattening the Christmas calf for. Because you’re so fucking happy I’m home.’

  Taking another deep drag of his cigarette, he blew smoke contemptuously into Dom’s face. Dom froze. For an awful moment Ariadne thought he was going to hit Billy. Not that Billy wouldn’t have deserved it. Still, she couldn’t bear the idea of such a beautiful morning being sullied with violence. In the end, however, Dom restrained himself. Billy elbowed past his father and stalked out into the garden, heading for the river.

  Dom looked at his shaken wife. ‘What was that all about?’

  Ariadne shrugged, tears welling in her eyes despite herself. She hadn’t told Dom about yesterday, and Billy’s earlier outburst towards her.

  ‘It was my fault. I asked him if he wanted to come and get the eggs…’

  Walking over, Dom pulled her to him.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault. None of this is your fault.’

  They were still hugging when Lorcan burst in, all smiles as usual in his favourite Scooby-Doo pyjamas and a pair of fur-lined wellington boots he’d taken to wearing as slippers. ‘Can I do the eggs, Mama? Can I?’

  Extracting herself from Dom’s embrace, Ariadne clasped Lorcan’s lovely, round, eager face, the antithesis of Billy’s, in both her hands, gazing at him lovingly.

  ‘Of course you can, darling,’ she said. ‘Let’s have some breakfast first and then we can go together.’

  ‘I’m heading out myself,’ said Dom, grabbing a slice of toast from the stack on top of the Aga on his way to the back door. ‘I’ve got a bunch of things to do this morning.’

  ‘Don’t you want a coffee first, darling?’ Ariadne asked.

  Dom shook his head. Not anymore. The truth was that Billy’s poisonous temper had woken him up far more effectively than any shot of caffeine could hope to.

  Awful, angry boy.

  * * *

  Billy Wetherby strode down the sloping lawn, scrunching up his eyes to protect them from the bright morning sun. Not that the blue sky or crisp air did much to lift Billy’s spirits.

  He was glad to be out of prison, although returning to the Mill had been hard in different ways. More like transferring to a larger, more luxurious jail than the euphoria of freedom. Besides, actual prison had not been so terrible, not like they made it out to be on TV. No one had threatened him or abused him inside. The worst thing was the boredom. That and the insomnia. Angry thoughts about Susan, the bitch who’d got him sent down in the first place, made it hard for Billy to switch off at night. Sometimes he had fantasies about hurting her. About getting his own back, being in control, punishing her the way that he had been punished. These fantasies were familiar, variations on the ones he’d had since his teens about his mother. And occasionally his father, too. And his blinkered, stupid older brother, Marcus, who couldn’t see the truth when it was right in front of him. Forced to spend his life surrounded by a family who had consistently failed him, because he was reliant on them for money and – even now – scraps of affection, Billy seethed with a lava-hot resentment. It burned a lot of people, but none as badly as Billy himself.

  Crossing the footbridge closest to the waterwheel, he spotted the first of the TV people arriving. The sleek silver Mercedes he knew belonged to Rachel Truebridge, a pretty girl and senior producer at ITV who’d worked with Billy’s father, Dom, on the last two Grimshaw adaptations. Rachel wasn’t as bad as some of them. She admired Dom – everyone loved Dom Wetherby – but she wasn’t as loathsomely sycophantic as the rest of them.

  ‘Oh, Dom, you’re a genius!’

  ‘I think this might be your best book yet.’

  ‘How do you do it?’

  ‘Where do you get your inspiration?’

  None of them knows the real Dom Wetherby, thought Billy. Not even a little bit. After ten, or in some cases almost twenty years of working together, not one person at ITV had ever got past the bullshit stage.

  Turning left towards the footpath, Billy was about to head into the village – the King’s Arms didn’t open till eleven, but he could hang out in the coffee shop until then, anything to avoid staying home watching his father getting his ego massaged – when he saw the lights go on suddenly in the kitchen at Mill Cottage. Iris Grey, the artist, was inside in her dressing gown making coffee. Her dark hair was pulled back in a messy bun with bits escaping, and she yawned and stretched out her slender arms like a just-awakened cat. Billy watched, enjoying t
he sensation that he was witnessing something private, something he wasn’t supposed to see.

  Iris was an attractive woman. Older, obviously, but poised, despite her penchant for flamboyant dressing, and … how would he put it? Delicate. Fragile. Billy appreciated vulnerability in a woman. It made him feel strong. Iris clearly hadn’t liked him when they met yesterday. Thanks to his bitch of a mother, she’d got the wrong impression. Perhaps now was the moment to rectify that. To show his parents’ attractive new tenant just how charming he could be.

  Making his way gingerly up the bank towards the cottage, Billy suddenly froze. Standing at the back door, knocking loudly, was his father, with a bunch of flowers clutched in his hand. ‘Anybody in?’

  His father had been in the kitchen moments ago. How had he got to Mill Cottage so fast? He must have been in one hell of a hurry. And what was he doing here?

  Slinking back into the shadows, Billy watched as Iris opened the door.

  ‘Sorry to bother you so early.’ Dom Wetherby’s smooth, mellifluous voice carried on the still morning air. ‘I just wanted to apologise in advance for the disturbance. I’m afraid we’re going to have cameramen and sound guys traipsing all over the shop today. I brought these as a pre-emptive peace offering.’

  Billy watched his father hand over the flowers, smiling broadly. He saw Iris take them, returning the smile, charmed. All women were charmed by Dom.

  ‘How thoughtful of you. They’re lovely. Would you like to come in?’

  Billy’s chest tightened as he watched his father step into the kitchen, laughing and joking with the beautiful artist, helping himself to her coffee. Just like that Dom had infiltrated the scene and become one with it. He had inserted himself into Billy’s private moment and stolen it.

  Like a wounded fox, Billy turned and slunk away.

  * * *

  Ariadne rested one hand on the rabbit’s soft, warm body and the other on her cool slab of clay. Closing her eyes, she allowed herself to feel the animal’s slow, drugged breathing. It was an almost transcendental moment, a prayer before the sacred act of creation, the creature’s life force passing through Ariadne’s body in some mystical way and into the clay.

  Stepping back to the other side of her workbench, Ariadne began to sculpt, her eyes still fixed to the chloroformed creature as she attempted to capture its essence, moulding the soft clay with her fingers into a rabbit-like form, vague at first but quickly becoming more defined and detailed. Most sculptors preferred to work with dead animals, but Ariadne loved the calm slumber she could achieve with chloroform. It didn’t hurt the creatures at all, and it enabled her to combine stillness with life – the perfect still life – in a way she felt sure added a deeper dimension to her work.

  The only problem was timing. The local vet had told her that it wasn’t wise to keep small mammals deeply anaesthetised for more than forty minutes at a time, which meant Ariadne had to work swiftly and deftly, pushing all other thoughts out of her mind as she produced each piece. She enjoyed the discipline and the focus, turning each session in her sculpting shed on the edge of the woods into a sort of hands-on meditation.

  Irritatingly, she’d barely been working for ten minutes this morning when the interruptions started. First it was the revving engines. Then the relentlessly ringing mobile phones just outside the shed window. Finally, two of the producers, a man and a woman, had started arguing loudly about the set-up for a pivotal scene.

  ‘If he has the heart attack there, under those trees, the whole thing’s going to be in shadow,’ the man was saying. Ariadne recognised the voice as belonging to John Pilcher, a dreadful little man in her opinion, but evidently an up-and-comer at ITV. John wore his trousers too tight and frequently presaged his observations with ‘TBH’, a habit Dom found hilarious but that set Ariadne’s teeth on edge. ‘We want an open field with a clear skyline behind.’

  ‘The script clearly specifies woodland,’ a frustrated Rachel Truebridge shot back. Curious, Ariadne set down her clay and moved to the window so she could hear their conversation more clearly.

  ‘Viewers haven’t read the script, love,’ said John patronisingly. ‘Nobody cares.’

  ‘I care,’ insisted Rachel. She was wearing tight dark green jodhpurs tucked into boots and a chocolate-brown polo-neck sweater that clung to her gym-honed body in all the right places. Her honey-blonde hair had been tousled by the wind, and her cheeks were flushed, whether from cold or anger it was hard to tell. She was, Ariadne observed with her cool artist’s eye, a very beautiful young woman.

  ‘Yeah, well, as of next week what you care about won’t matter, will it?’ John Pilcher sneered viciously. ‘They’re moving you to children’s, aren’t they? That’s what I heard. CBeebies! Everyone knows Dom wants you out.’

  Rachel laughed, but it was a forced, strained, unnatural attempt. ‘You wish, John. This is my show, and we’re filming the heart attack right here, whether you like it or not.’

  Now it was John’s turn to laugh. ‘Oh dear, oh dear. Hell hath no fury, eh?’ he scoffed.

  ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ said Rachel, through clenched teeth.

  ‘Don’t I?’ her rival sneered. ‘How about I go and find Dom right now and ask him?’

  ‘Be my guest,’ Rachel snapped.

  Ariadne watched as Pilcher scuttled back towards the house like a malicious rat. Rachel Truebridge watched too, standing stock-still, apparently trying to calm herself down. Ariadne couldn’t see her face from this angle, but Rachel’s body language suggested she was distressed, possibly close to tears.

  A familiar tension crept back into Ariadne’s own chest.

  ‘Hell hath no fury…’

  Who had scorned Rachel Truebridge? she wondered. Not Dom? He wouldn’t be physically unfaithful, not at this stage in their lives. They were long past all that nonsense. But he’d always been a terrible flirt, and was more than capable of ruffling female feathers, even at fifty-nine. Please let him not have done something stupid. Not like last time.

  The rabbit had started to stir, its ears and nose twitching, as if in the midst of a dream. She had ten minutes left at most. Hurrying back to her work, Ariadne said a silent prayer that there wasn’t going to be any more drama at home today. The sooner they really did say goodbye to Grimshaw, the better.

  * * *

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I mean, I’m flattered obviously. It’s just…’

  Just what? thought Iris. Why am I even hesitating?

  It was a few days after the Grimshaw shoot, and Iris was sitting at her kitchen table opposite Ariadne Wetherby, who’d ‘dropped in’ for a cup of tea with her adorable son Lorcan and promptly offered Iris a commission. Would Iris consider painting Dom’s portrait, as a celebration of his retirement? He’d agreed to hang up his pen for good after the last Grimshaw aired, a date that was fast approaching.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, but I googled you,’ Ariadne confided in that soft, half-whisper voice of hers. ‘I see you’ve done all sorts of wonderful work. My eldest son, Marcus, told me your painting of a Moroccan boy was exhibited in the Tate last year. Is that true?’

  ‘Well, yes. For five minutes,’ Iris admitted coyly. It was the first she’d heard about this third, older son.

  ‘Nonsense. That’s an incredible achievement,’ Ariadne insisted. ‘Marcus said it was one of the most haunting portraits he’d ever seen.’

  ‘Well, that’s very kind of him. Is Marcus an artist?’ Iris asked.

  ‘No. Marcus is the sensible one, bless him. Two hopelessly artistic parents and our firstborn becomes a lawyer.’ Ariadne laughed, as if still not quite able to believe it. ‘He works for a big London firm. You’ll meet him at Christmas, and his wife, Jenna, and the children.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Iris, who felt she ought to say something, but hadn’t even thought about Christmas yet, or where she’d be, and certainly hadn’t counted on cosy nights at home with the Wetherbys. Everything was still so up in the air with her and Ian
, it was impossible to plan.

  ‘Marcus does appreciate art, though,’ Ariadne continued. ‘He sort of had to, growing up in this family. Oh, please say you’ll do Dom’s portrait. I know he’d love it more than anything. You can name your price.’

  Iris liked the idea of naming her price. Part of her liked the idea of painting Dom Wetherby, too. He’d already struck her as a complex character: charming, charismatic and warm on the one hand, yet oddly steely and determined beneath. It would be fascinating to see how all that complexity emerged on canvas.

  The problem wasn’t Dom. It was Iris.

  Painting somebody’s portrait was always an intense, intimate experience. In her current fragile emotional state, Iris wasn’t sure she was ready for that intensity. The whole purpose of renting Mill Cottage had been to de-stress, to paint rivers and trees, and eat apple crumble and fiddle about with her doll’s house without Ian glaring hatefully at her from across the room. Taking this commission might change all that.

  ‘How long would it take you to finish, do you think? If you agreed to paint him?’ Ariadne asked. ‘I’m vaguely thinking of throwing him a surprise retirement party, you see. It might be nice to unveil it then.’

  Dom Wetherby’s wife looked radiant as usual this afternoon in a floaty cream-coloured dress and long cashmere cardigan, like some sort of angel or medieval saint. The patron saint of motherhood, Iris thought, watching Ariadne smile beatifically at Lorcan, playing with the pieces of Iris’s ivory chess set. ‘He won’t break it,’ Ariadne said, catching Iris looking. ‘He knows to be careful.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not worried. He’s fine,’ said Iris, waving a hand. ‘It’s not valuable anyway.’

  Iris was fond of Lorcan. Although they’d never been formally introduced, the teenager always waved cheerfully to Iris when he saw her out painting. Despite his problems, Iris didn’t think she’d ever seen him looking glum. Unlike his brother Billy, the snarler.

  ‘It’s really hard to say how long a portrait might take,’ she told Ariadne, belatedly answering her question. ‘Some come more easily than others. I suppose about four months is typical.’