Guilty as Sin Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Judith Cutler

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  A Selection of Recent Titles by Judith Cutler

  The Lina Townend Series

  DRAWING THE LINE

  SILVER GUILT *

  RING OF GUILT *

  GUILTY PLEASURES *

  GUILT TRIP *

  GUILT EDGED *

  GUILTY AS SIN *

  The Frances Harman Series

  LIFE SENTENCE

  COLD PURSUIT

  STILL WATERS

  BURYING THE PAST *

  DOUBLE FAULT *

  GREEN AND PLEASANT LAND *

  The Jodie Welsh Series

  DEATH IN ELYSIUM *

  * available from Severn House

  GUILTY AS SIN

  Judith Cutler

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2015 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by Judith Cutler.

  The right of Judith Cutler to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Cutler, Judith author.

  Guilty as sin. – (The Lina Townend series)

  1. Townend, Lina (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. Antique dealers–Fiction. 3. Aristocracy (Social

  class)–Fiction. 4. Detective and mystery stories.

  I. Title II. Series

  823.9’2-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7278-8536-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-639-8 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-705-9 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  For the clergy, churchwardens and congregation of All Saints’ Church, Kemble

  With great affection and gratitude

  ONE

  ‘Torquay isn’t so very far from Exeter, Lina,’ Griff said, his tone halfway between persuasion and wheedling. On the table between us he put a brochure, its cover featuring his and hers feet in dance shoes. ‘It would be nice to combine business with pleasure. Or the other way round. It’s a good time of year for the seaside, now the kids are safely penned in school. It would help Dee out, too. A couple have dropped out – at this late stage, for goodness’ sake.’

  Griff was my mentor and dearest friend, who’d rescued me almost literally from the gutter and made me his business partner. How could I deny him anything? In any case, now he’d recovered from his bypass operation there was no need to mollycoddle him. Not really. For a man of his age, bang in the middle of his seventies – for all he claimed to be ten years younger – he’d recovered well. But this current plan was crazy: combining a Saturday antique fair in the very uninspiring premises of Matford market, a location I’d vowed never to visit again, with a ballroom dance weekend twenty miles down the A380 at the famous seaside resort.

  ‘After all,’ he continued enthusiastically, ‘it’s scarcely worth going all the way to Devon from Kent for a one-day event. We’ll set up the Tripp and Townend stall on the Friday afternoon, nip off to the Mondiale for supper and dancing in the evening, and then return to Exeter on Saturday morning. Do a few deals. Pack up. Back to Torquay for the fancy-dress dance in the evening. Home on Sunday. Easy. And indeed peasy.’

  ‘Absolutely.’ Absolute idiocy, more like. Do both? More sensible, given the distance – a 500-mile round trip, give or take – to do neither. But he looked as hopeful as a dog expecting walkies. Picking up the brochure to suggest I was enthusiastic, I felt truly, miserably guilty. Of course I should feel enthusiastic. I must try harder for Griff’s sake.

  As part of his post-operative therapy, Griff had returned to one of his early loves, ballroom dancing, taking me along with him to the weekly classes held in the village hall. We were learning ballroom and Latin, really useful if ever I went clubbing. OK, enough irony. Clubs weren’t my favourite places anyway. But I wasn’t at all sure about the dance classes, to be honest; it’s one thing not enjoying activities a lot of people my age do, but quite another to find myself with a bunch of pensioners who might just have been younger in years than Griff but were almost all older in attitude. Many couples had been together forty years or more, a niggling reminder of my single state.

  I did have one nice mate my own age, Carwyn Morgan, a police officer recently promoted to detective sergeant. We were fond of each other and had occasional low-key dates. He worked long shifts; I worked long hours. And now Griff was better and wanted to go to antique fairs again, I had to chauffeur us to a lot of locations involving an overnight stay. Neither Carwyn nor I, then, had what the experts called a good work-life balance, and the relationship wasn’t going anywhere fast. I suspect Griff hoped that a stray thirty-year-old Prince Charming might be learning the rumba – the dance of love – and that, without missing a step, we might fall head over heels with each other. Griff, of course, had long ago found his own Prince Charming, in the form of a rich dilettante called Aidan, who was far too old to be a prince, and, to me at least, was rarely charming. To be honest, I wouldn’t have trusted either of the old ducks if a handsome young man had smiled winsomely at them.

  But there were no young men in the class, handsome or otherwise, to make my heart beat faster. And though Griff was a most wonderful dancer, better by far than any of the others, the idea of two evening dances bookending a stint in the least attractive premises I’ve ever sold china in didn’t appeal in the least.

  Our shop receptionist and general angel, Mary, now officially and blissfully Mrs Paul Banner, encouraged me to see the brighter side of Torqua
y: ‘There’s a lovely department store down by the harbour. Expensive, but a lovely range of clothes – and despite what they say about Torquay being full of older people, this place definitely caters for the young.’

  And, assuming I got a chance to shop there, when would I ever wear the lovely new clothes? Not while I was restoring exquisite china in my workroom in Kent, or visiting my father, Lord Elham. Despite his title, Pa certainly wasn’t noble, not in his behaviour, in the past at least. He’d never made any attempt to provide for me, even though I’d had to spend most of my life in care after my mother died. Despite this, I was the only one of my siblings who’d ever bothered to come back into his life. I suppose that I’d taken him on as a restoration project, much like the work I did on china for Griff. Now I’d repaired some of the cracks, as it were.

  Pa lived in Bossingham Hall, a stately home just south of Canterbury. It was there I had to head now, so I put on some of my older jeans and a washed-out t-shirt. You see, Pa didn’t live in the posh part of the hall that the public paid the trustees to see. He lived behind the green baize door that had separated the family from the servants, the haves from the have-nots. He wasn’t quite a have-not, because he shared his accommodation with a filthy load of assorted china and bric-a-brac, some you couldn’t give away, some priceless, which he looked to me to sell whenever he needed a new supply of champagne. This was his favourite, indeed at one time his only tipple. When I came on the scene, in addition to confiscating all his beloved Pot Noodles, I’d sternly introduced green tea into his diet, along with such outré items as green vegetables and fresh fruit.

  You were supposed to approach his below-stairs area via a track so pot-holed he’d been blacklisted by every single delivery driver. To protect the Tripp and Townend van’s suspension, I’d taken to sailing up the impressive public drive, using the staff parking area – I’d only been told off twice so far – and walking through the gate marked STRICTLY PRIVATE. Pa didn’t like this; he preferred to have advance notice of visitors so that he could stow the tools of his forgery trade well away from suspicious eyes. That was another problem in my relationship with Carwyn: having a career criminal as a father. Carwyn had met and liked Pa, without knowing, of course, the full details of his erratic income – though I can’t imagine he hadn’t heard rumours: at least one of my police acquaintances was gunning for him. Pa approved of Carwyn, profession apart, and, like Griff, would have been delighted to see me respectably married to a decent man, tending children rather than priceless china.

  Today Pa greeted me – his fingers so clean I suspected he’d spent a long time scrubbing the ink from them – with a triumphant flourish of a piece of paper. ‘Got those trustee buggers! They’re going to pay for that track to be repaired!’ He stared at me. ‘Come on, that’s good news! You’re supposed to dance a little jig – quite a fancy jig, with all those dance classes under your belt,’ he added waspishly, jealous as always of what he thought might be fun time spent with Griff.

  ‘With a chassé reverse turn?’ I demonstrated. ‘Anyway, it’s really good news about that track. I don’t suppose they want you to pay anything towards the repairs, do they?’ I had to add.

  ‘Only ten per cent.’

  That might be quite a lot of cash, and to the best of my knowledge Pa simply didn’t have it to hand – unless he’d completed a really big forgery recently and conned someone spectacularly gullible. ‘I’d better find something exciting to sell for you, hadn’t I? The Chinese market’s flourishing at the moment. Let’s see what’s in your hoard …’

  When Griff had first taken me under his wing, I’d had to rely on a strange instinct I’ve never understood, let alone been able to explain. With no knowledge to base my judgements on, I’d simply know if something was worth having. It was as if I was a water diviner, with a twig twitching when I got near a spring. It wasn’t water I was after, of course. It was precious items. These days, thanks to Griff, I knew my stuff all right – but still this divvy’s nose of mine came in useful, sometimes disconcertingly so.

  It was the knowledge part of my brain that I’d used to organize Pa’s jumbled accumulation of tatty china and treen, mid-price collectibles and absolute works of art into some sort of order, so I could easily lay my hands on a pair of Guangxu enamelled fish bowls. When I’d first found them I’d literally had to unearth them – or is it dis-earth? Someone had filled them with potting compost and though the geraniums they’d grown were long since dead, the dried-up soil remained. Nearby was a sang de boeuf vase less than a foot high, its paleish neck running down to a tubby little body. It always made me smile to look at it. Now the cheque might make Pa smile even more.

  ‘Devon?’ he repeated, as we sat in his kitchen drinking green tea. Once it had been as filthy as a set for a Dickens movie; these days, afraid that if it was ever that gross again I’d stomp off in a huff, he kept it – almost – pristine. ‘Why Devon?’

  ‘Because that’s where our dance teacher has decided to organise a weekend get-together,’ I said. ‘She could have chosen Harrogate or Malvern, but she chose Torquay.’

  ‘Hmph. You’re sure, Lina, that you’re not having it off again with that lounge-lizard of a dealer, Harvey Whatsisname? I really do not approve.’

  ‘Neither would I. So no, I’m not.’ I’d almost had an affair with Harvey Sanditon, a specialist in top-end china and porcelain, who was one of the sexiest and most gorgeous men I’d ever come across. I didn’t mind him being twenty years older than me, but then I discovered he had a wife and ended the relationship. As for Pa himself, when he’d had affairs, he’d never worried about age differences or indeed begetting so many children out of wedlock I sometimes thought he’d lost count (I hadn’t – it was over thirty). But where my sex life was concerned, he was an arch-Puritan.

  ‘And there’s that nasty little man who fancies you must be his granddaughter. Arthur Somethingorother. The toad lives down there, doesn’t he?’

  Arthur Habgood, owner of Devon Cottage Antiques. He’d been so annoyed by my refusal to take a DNA test to prove it that he’d actually made very serious – and untrue – allegations about me to the police. Charming.

  ‘Why go to Devon at all? Far too dangerous. You’d do much better to stay at home.’ He sounded as plaintive as Mr Woodhouse in the Jane Austen novel Griff had once read aloud to me.

  I couldn’t tell Pa that I agreed with him one hundred per cent: that would be disloyal to Griff. So, pointing out that Devon was quite a large county, with a correspondingly low risk of running into people you’d much rather not, I enthused about staying in a newly refurbished hotel and meeting people from our dance teacher’s other groups. Dee taught in a different village hall every night of the week, and apparently used these autumn dances as a chance to bring all her students together. There were so many of us she needed a hotel geared up for conferences – and one, of course, with a ballroom.

  Pa brightened considerably when I confided Griff’s hopes that Dee would find a young and hetero partner for me. ‘But what about young Carwyn?’ he asked doubtfully.

  ‘Wouldn’t you be happier if I wasn’t dating a cop? You know he wouldn’t – couldn’t – protect you if he found you and Titus Oates were up to your old tricks. Again. And don’t tell me how cunningly you hide the tools of your trade – you know that when the police are determined to track something down, they rarely fail.’

  ‘That was in the days when there were enough of them. You know we have to share our best detectives with Essex now? What use is that if there’s a crime?’ Pa sounded as self-righteous as if he was genuinely law-abiding.

  ‘I don’t think they all hang out in Essex – there are enough left over here to carry out a dawn raid if they wanted to. Couldn’t you and Titus turn your hands to something legal for a change?’

  ‘We might just be. Highly legal. Highly respectable.’ With an enigmatic smile he touched the side of his nose.

  For some reason I wasn’t reassured about his career choices any
more than he was by my travel plans. But that was all I could get out of him.

  In fact, he changed the subject sharply. ‘Are you sure Griff’s up to all this wandering about the countryside with you?’

  Of course, I didn’t want to drop Griff in it by pointing out the whole Devon trip was his idea, so I said blithely – and truthfully – ‘He wanders a great deal without me. He works out every week in a post-op cardio keep fit class and he’s joined the church choir. He’s even joined the church team that visits sick parishioners and offers them Communion.’

  ‘Church this, church that – I suppose all this God-bothering means the old bugger’s cramming for finals.’

  TWO

  Griff and I had a late supper that night, because in addition to dancing I’d started to go to a Pilates class that had just started in the village. I didn’t go for pleasure so much as necessity: all the restoration work was doing vicious things to my spine and I was afraid I’d end up looking like a question mark, so it made sense to take action now. I’d expected to find everyone lying on mats, but it seemed that mat classes only ran in the daytime, when of course I was working or, occasionally, keeping an eye on Pa. The evening session was in a studio with all sorts of equipment that looked as if it might have come from a dungeon run by the Spanish Inquisition. Three or four of us women shared the space, an incredibly muscled guy running the show (gay and in a partnership, before you ask).

  It made a nice change to have the company of people nearer my own age, and there was talk of us going out for a drink at some point. One woman had a baby to hustle back to, but Laura, Honey and I would linger in the changing area talking of this and that. They tended to talk more than I did; I’d had a far from conventional childhood and youth, and still found it hard to pick up the nuances and subtleties of my contemporaries’ chit chat, especially as we three really didn’t have much in common. On the other hand, parachute me into a gathering of fellow dealers and I could have talked till the cows came home – assuming they still did: our local ones seemed to live indoors these days.