‘I reported what happened to the police,’ he told her grimly.
‘There wasn’t any call to do that – it was just an oversight!’ she said indignantly. ‘And what’s more, I didn’t sell everything and I can’t be held responsible for any that were left.’
‘Alice – the woman you sold the café to – found them and has given them back to me. And here she is,’he added pleasantly.
Mrs M whirled around as fast as her bulk would let her and stared at me.
‘I sent you a letter through your solicitor, too,’ I said. ‘It concerned the small matter of every item of any value that was listed on the sales agreement when I bought the café having been removed before my arrival.’
I think she’d have tried to flee at that moment, if I hadn’t been standing in front of the only exit, but instead she rallied and brazened it out.
‘Now, that’s exactly what I’d come to see you about, only you were out,’ she said.
‘I caught her peering through the café window,’ Nile explained.
‘I came over from Spain yesterday and I’m staying with friends – the Vosses at the guesthouse – and Jim told me you’d got hold of the wrong end of the stick about the things I’d got rid of, so I thought I’d just pop round and explain.’
‘Right, explain away,’ I told her. ‘And we’d better go inside while you do it,’ I added, unlocking the door and ushering her in.
Nile brought up the rear – he obviouslywasn’t letting her go anywhere until he’d got his money.
She came in reluctantly and then stood looking round in surprise. ‘You wouldn’t think it was the same place! The Vosses told me aboutyour grand plans and that you stand to make a mint out of this upmarket teashop of yours, so you don’t seem to have done too badly out of our bargain. Had the place at a snip, you did.’
‘I haven’t opened yet, so who is to say how it will go?’ I said. ‘And when I arrived, it looked like an entirely different place from the one in the photographs you showed me before I bought it, too.’
‘They were the only ones I had and I didn’ttellyou it still looked like that.’
‘Perhaps not, but you did sign an agreement stating what equipment, furniture and fittings were included in the sale, and practically none of them were there.’
‘Ah, that’s where the misunderstanding came in,’ she said mendaciously. ‘I thought that was just a list of what was there at the time, but of course I threw out the old things when I started renovating. If you remember, I explained I’d only put the café on the market to see if anyone wanted to buy it and do it up themselves, before I spent any money on it.’
Shehadsaid something like that, but still, she knew she’d cheated me.
‘I left you all that lovely willow-pattern china too,’ she said, managing to sound aggrieved.
‘You can’t give that modern stuff away, these days,’ Nile put in. ‘It’s worthless.’
‘So you say,’ Mrs M told him rudely, then swung round to face me again. ‘I don’t think you’ve got a leg to stand on, dearie. And while I’m here, I’ll take away that old tea set of my mother’s that was in the cupboard with the willow pattern. I can’t think how I came to forget it.’
‘Nice try, but no deal,’ I said. ‘I’ve already told Jim Voss that I’m keeping it – and I know it wasn’t your mother’s, because Nell told me it was left in a will to the people who owned the Copper Kettle café, and she has photographs to prove it.’
Mrs M’s doughy face was suffused with a flush of fury. ‘You’re a liar, just making that up because you know it’s valuable!’
‘You know very well that you’re the liar, and I’m going to sell the tea set to make up for some of the equipment you cheated me out of.’
‘And if you pay me now for those antiques you sold, I won’t have you arrested for theft,’ Nile put in, and Mrs M made a gobbling noise.
‘Like you could, when it was all a little misunderstanding!’
‘Want to try me?’ he offered.
‘There’s no call to be like that about it. I’ll write you a cheque when I get back to the guesthouse.’
‘You’ll give it to me in cash before I let you out of my sight,’ he insisted, and told her how much she owed him.
The flush faded into a shocked pallor. ‘It can’t be that much!’
‘It certainly is – and think yourself lucky I deducted your commission.’