Devil Take The Hindmost

Chapter Eight

I spent the subsequent days in something of a deepening funk.

Sophie had gone AWOL, having packed a small duffel and her cello. Not that she needed my leave to leave, of course. She made that very obvious. At current count, she'd stretched the overnight bag into three, and I felt pretty glum.

With the Atkin's case on hold while we located Willy, the witness to the crime scene, I took the opportunity to find the house clearance guy, Weatherby. It had been trivial, really. I mean, the bloke placed ads in the local paper. It hardly required Poirot.

Consequently, I had been afforded rather too much time to contemplate and wallow in my various failures. It became more of a cataloguing. Unlike the majority for whom failure was a crushing blow, or those happy seminal few who by dint of money, breeding, or luck manage to fail upwards, it seemed I largely failed sideways. So typical of me to stumble into a middle way. In my upbringing, my career, and now in love.

Ty spent those days blissfully unconcerned by the delay on the Atkins case, and quite demonstrably not giving a shit about the business with the clock. We put in the hours working on his tree house, which by now took the form of a pretty solid platform the best part of eight metres off the ground. Ty himself took to sleeping up there, and I could often hear him whistling tunelessly from the branches in the cool night air like the world's smuggest owl while I attempted to drop off to sleep.

Tish developed the habit of calling me every day to see how I was getting along. I had grown to hate and long for those calls in equal measure.

The last such conversation veered in a direction that set hares running in my mind. I was halfway up the ladder to the tree house platform when my phone rang, vibrating in my pocket. The sensation caused me a slight wobble and I needed to redouble my grip on both the rungs and the load of timber I carried.

I returned her call when I made it up into the branches, the wind blowing loose leaves across the deck floor and buffeting the microphone.

"No luck!" she trilled like a privately educated songbird when I asked her if she had made a breakthrough. "I've tried all the auctioneers on my list, really I have." I could imagine the expressive cocking of a hip and the exaggerated toss of auburn curls.

"How about you?" she inquired; innocence personified.

I told her, again, the individuals assigned to me were all a bust, but there were one or two other things I was checking out. I kept my plans to confront Weatherby to myself. I also didn't feel the need to share another scheme that I had been mulling over since my first visit to the Wyntham estate.

"Gosh! You have some leads, then?" Tish exclaimed. "Well, I think it would be splendid to get together and discuss what our next moves should be."

"Sure," I mumbled in reply. That notion screamed terrible idea. And yet ...

"Super! I'll come over at seven tonight," the line died before I had the chance to object.

The farm? Sophie would lose her shit, I thought. But then, she wasn't here, so fuck it.

I sat on the edge of the wooden platform, my feet dangling in the air below, and observed Ty sawing more solid supports for his walls from a pallet of lumber.

The break-in at the Wyntham estate had been faked. Almost certainly by Molly. Possibly by Sylvia. Potentially both of them. They were offering a lot of money for the return of a valuable clock that someone in the house was complicit in the theft of.

Why?

Why steal the timepiece after Gloriana's death? Being the only living relative, Sylvia had already inherited it at that point. What was her motive to be involved?